User:Silviolorusso/research-method/annotation-turner1

Annotation of “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” by Fred Turner

In the chapter “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor”, Fred Turner investigates the ways in which the computational metaphor shifts from being a symbol of alienation and containment for the individual man – as for Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement during the 60's – to a common ground for emancipation and equality – as for John Barlow in the 90's with his Declaration of Indipendence of the Cyberspace.

In first place, Turner shows how Second World War research laboratories constituted in prestigious universities -such as the MIT- represented at the same time the first concretization of a highly rationalized and beaurcoractized system, but also areas in which personal initiative, entrepreneurship, interdisciplinarity and collaborative practices took place. For the first time scientists and academics from very different disciplinary fields worked together for a common aim. This ambivalence charachterized one of the most famous laboratories, the Radiation Lab, where in 1940 Norbert Wiener and Julien Bigelow developed the “predictor”, a machine whose function was to predict the future movements of an airplane, considering its current position and trajectory.

The underlying assumption that made this machine possible was the fact that both the pilot and the anti-aircraft weapon corrected their behavior according to the feedbacks they received. After the war the idea of a system that regulates itself in response to feedbacks was generalized in order to interpret the whole society and the environment as a network of informations and messages. In this view mechanical devices were merely considered with the same categories of living beings and viceversa. At that time this vision didn't have a negative acception because it allowed to conceive the world as a distributed system and to get rid of a centralized control: self-regulated systems did not need a top-down hierarchy but a circular flow of information that would mantain a constant balance.

During the late 50's this “network utopia” was obscured by an increasing anxiety provoked by the vague menace of Communism and of an atomic war. The new current claimed that centralized power, as the one of military-industrial-academic complex of the war research labs, was depriving man of his/her personality, making him/her a passive machine without purpose.

These ideas were enthusiastically shared by college students, who then gathered in protest movements. According to Turner, two main branches could be identified: the New Left, that was against institutions and aimed to fight them through political activism; and what was generally defined as the “counterculture”. To the ones adhering to the latter, the way to emancipate themselves wasn't to focus on political issues but rather on subjectivity, developing new forms of collective social structures. The counterculture celebrated transcendence and misticism against the hyper-rationalization that was causing the alienation in society. Within these two -sometimes overlapping but still distinct- currents, Turner identifies a third fringe, which he calls the new Communalists. They rejeced the bureaucratization that characterized control and power, but at the same time they proposed to change the way in which the self was conceived in relation to the others. Paradoxically, this approach opened up the door to a free and wide sharing of knowledge that defined the research laboratories during and after WW2.

Turner F, “The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor” in From Counterculture to Cyberculture