Dave Young Trimester1-Draft
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Extract from current draft. May contain bugs, and syntax errors. Will be fixed in next version.
Draft v0.2
The role of cybernetic theory in post-war American society can not be understated: from its early military experiments and its adoption as an information-control system in government and institutions, and as a management system for business, it altered the way society could be understood by those in positions of power. It could also be argued that cybernetic theory was both partially a cause of and solution to the countercultural revolution in the 1960s. The Californian hippies were revolting against the rigid systems born out of the Cold War nuclear anxiety that held society in stasis: in order to disrupt the hierarchies and inequalities, they saw that the mechanistic system itself had to be disrupted.
One of the great iconic images from computing history is the photograph of the founders of Microsoft in 1978. Appearing more like a 70s folk band than the beginnings of a corporate giant, the countercultural roots of the company are self-evident in the bohemian dress of Bill Gates and his fellow team mates. The image illustrates a collision of two seemingly oppositional ideologies: that of the 1960s-70s countercultural revolution that opposed the mega-corporations and dreamt of creating a new utopian society; and our contemporary imagining of Microsoft as one of the biggest companies in the world, symbol of liberal capitalism, and certainly one of the most influential producers of computer software. While it is perhaps difficult to imagine how these two contrasting worldviews could be closely related, the link between the anti-establishment artisans and multi-millionaire computer industry becomes less surprising considering that California was the base for both the hippie movement that emanated out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury District in the late 60s, and American's principal research district for new computer technologies, Silicon Valley.
Despite their clashes in approach, what the early tech-entrepreneurs and the hippie artisans of San Francisco shared was a preoccupation with the control structures being implemented into post-war American society, and moreso, how it could be liberated from them. Many of the counterculture imagined opportunities to create new non-hierarchical social systems governed by the objectivity of the machine, while others saw the logical conclusion of the computer society to be the mechanisation of its people as articulated in Mario Savio's infamous “bodies upon the gears speech” at the University of California in 1964: “There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” (Savio, as quoted by Turner, 2008: 11)
As indicated by Savio's speech, the counterculture as a whole was not explicitly pro-technology – or at least did not foresee technology as being the grand answer to the ills of society. In Fred Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, he describes the various countercultural sub-movements who all had their own agendas with relation to social change. While the New Left went about trying to achieve change through political means, the New Communalists, opposed the political system and saw the “key to social change as being the mind.” (Turner, 2008: 36) Through the creation of autonomous communities that experimented with non-hierarchical systems, they attempted to “rediscover what they imagined to be the pre-industrial forms of intimacy and egalitarian rule.” (ibid.: 37)
The common aim that drove the counterculture as whole was to re-manage the control systems that they felt were having a negative impact on the way American society was developing. For the New Communalists, this meant that instead of using Wiener's cybernetic theories to efficiently manage humans as a mechanical resource – as was being done in the factories and mega-offices of corporate America, they could instead be used to create distributed networks and non-hierarchical systems that would encourage their ideals of collaborative knowledge and egalitarian communication networks. Being temporally positioned during a period of intense innovation, the synergy between ideology, socio-political circumstances, and technological possibilities led them to believe that computers would act as a great social equaliser, and lead to a new utopian way of living.
This way of thinking became known as the 'Californian Ideology', coined by Andy Cameron in his 1995 essay of the same title. Cameron describes the Californian technologists as “advocates of an impeccably libertarian form of politics – they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” (1995: Px) Born out of a heady mix of homebrew computer developers, anti-corporate attitudes, and the belief in social and environmentally-conscientious way of doing business, the Californian Ideology seemed to be a logical development of the various countercultural sub-movements. This utopian worldview doesn't remain entirely without criticism in Cameron's essay. Summarising the Californian Ideology as an “amalgamation of opposites”, he wonders will the technologically-augmented society subscribe to the New Right or the New Left's vision of a utopia: “As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answer this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticising either of them.” The fact that the New Communalists had promoted an egalitarian society within communes that largely consisted of middle-class white Americans echoes some of the issues within the Californian Ideology.
Draft
An iconic image from computing history: nine men and two women, all looking decidedly bohemian in appearance and with a hippie fashion sense that easily dates the photograph in the 1970s. Looking at the image, you could be forgiven for assuming that they are a since-forgotten pop band from the era of flower-power and the Californian commune experiments. The photograph is often reproduced as a corporate motivational poster with the caption “Would you invest in these people?”, and in smaller writing underneath, the punchline: “Microsoft, 1978.” The juxtaposition of the caption and the image collides two opposing ideologies: that of the 'square' Wall Street capitalist investor, and the free-love liberal hippies from San Francisco that built the some of the most influential technology companies in the world. This link between the counterculture and today's multi-millionaire technology companies becomes less surprising considering that San Francisco was the base for the countercultural revolution and the nearby Silicon Valley, housing tech-giants such as Xerox, Microsoft and Apple, being the principal research center for computer technologies around the same time.
It wasn't only the hippie aesthetic that found its way onto the campuses of the new tech-startups: the ideology of the 1960s counterculture - and by extension the theorists and writers that inspired it – found their way into company philosophies. Positioned at a time of rapid technological advancements and with an eclectic mix of the inspirational sources such as the beat poets, Marshall McLuhan, and cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, a loose movement of non-conformist and technologically-minded innovators formed in California, unified by the belief that their efforts to break away from the world of consumerism and corporations and focus on the creation of utopian social structures could be achieved through the development of new computer technologies. This way of thinking became known as the 'Californian Ideology', coined by Andy Cameron in his 1995 essay of the same title, where he describes the ideologues as “advocates of an impeccably libertarian form of politics – they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.” This utopian worldview doesn't remain entirely without criticism in Cameron's essay. Summarising the Californian Ideology as an “amalgamation of opposites”, he wonders will the technologically-augmented society subscribe to the New Right or the New Left's vision of a utopia: “As a hybrid faith, the Californian Ideology happily answer this conundrum by believing in both visions at the same time – and by not criticising either of them.” He goes further, by arguing that the foundation of Jeffersonian Democracy which the Californian Ideology is built on, is an inherently flawed imagining of democracy – i.e. the white plantation owner's democratic freedom to own humans as property. While obviously not insinuating that the Californian entrepreneurs advocated the ownership of slaves, Cameron does reveal a hypocrisy in their anti-establishment attitude that becomes more obvious with the commercialisation of the internet.