Compiled from: "That Deep Romantic Chasm": Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Computer Culture (1999)
Introduction#
One step in constructing a viable alternative to the neoliberal paradigm in communication policy is to understand why neoliberalism is so popular. It is important to counter the neoclassical economists' response to this issue—"it's rational"—by pointing out the many contradictions, irrationalities, and failures of neoclassically-based policies. However, like most or all successful political movements, the power of neoliberalism seems to be more than just a matter of academic debate. Moreover, while part of neoliberalism's success can be explained by the corporate interests it serves, this is not always the case. As Robert Horwitz (1989) and others have pointed out, some forms of market-oriented policies have been developed in response to opposition from industry. In any case, the broad political legitimacy of reforms representing corporate interests needs to be explained. Therefore, the question remains: Why is the current quasi-religious faith in the market as a solution to all problems so appealing to many? What makes it seem rational, forward-looking, and even a bit exciting?
This article argues that the answer lies not only in economic or technical logic but also in cultural logic. It primarily discusses the careers and styles of two key figures in the development of today's "net culture"—Stewart Brand and Theodor Nelson—and explores some political elements within computer culture. On one hand, this article confirms and elaborates on points made by others, particularly the arguments put forth by Barbrook and Cameron in The Californian Ideology (1996) and Frank (1997) in The Conquest of Cool, that computer culture can be understood as a very contradictory but politically powerful fusion of 1960s countercultural attitudes and a revived political libertarianism. I believe that exploring the history and structure of this fusion helps explain the success of neoliberalism and how it remains unfinished.
On the other hand, this article elaborates on the "structure of feeling" of this fusion. The phrase "that deep romantic chasm" in the title is taken from Kubla Khan, and I use it not only to echo one of the original visions of the World Wide Web—Theodor Nelson's Xanadu project—but also to indicate that an important component of net libertarianism is more rooted in a romantic notion of individualism, based on ideas of expression, exploration, and idealization of the individual, rather than the calculated, pleasure-maximizing utilitarianism of conservative economic theory. From this romantic individualism, whether from its striking and popular characteristics or from its key role in technological and social innovation, there are positive lessons to be drawn. However, as the word "chasm" suggests, this romantic individualism is limited: it ultimately rests on a pathological and illusory vision of isolation and escape from the historical and social context, which is particularly evident in the expressive style of net culture, especially the obsession with interaction through computer screens, as well as some policy directions advocated by the culture, particularly those involving intellectual property.
Why Computer Culture Matters#
Like many, it is easy to view computer culture as a youth subculture whose values and principles have little impact outside the video game market. However, while computer culture is certainly not at the center of today's power structures, it can be understood as having a complex relationship with hegemonic groups in the Gramscian sense. Members of this culture like to point out how the corporate and governmental worlds have repeatedly misunderstood or slowly grasped the developments led by computer culture, such as microcomputers, networks, user-friendly interfaces, multimedia, and the Internet. Thus, it is evident that netizens are sources of innovation, inventors, and pioneers who effectively correct corporate shortsightedness. Furthermore, among policymakers, the products of computer culture and the culture itself are often typical examples of market-driven operations. The new computer culture has become a political icon or signifier: in many decisions today, the rapid global spread of microcomputers and the Internet is a paradigm of market advantage. Nowadays, computer culture itself has spawned numerous proponents of market policies.
A comprehensive consideration of the impact of computer culture on industrial and political decision-making is far beyond the scope of this article. However, as an illustration of its influence, it seems that computer culture has played a significant role in one of the more pressing communication policy issues of our time: the hasty privatization of the Internet. In the early 1990s, the explosive growth of the Internet surprised and confused mainstream corporations; for the past decade, they had been investing in proprietary commercial online services like Prodigy, yet suddenly, a sophisticated system emerged that they could neither control nor comprehend. One can explain its success through the Internet's nonprofit origins and nonproprietary organizing principles; the principles of open collaboration were somewhat incorporated into the design of the Internet and encouraged its rapid global spread, reflecting the shared and collective ethics of research universities that promoted the Internet in the 1980s. In contrast, around the time Mosaic (the "killer app" of the Internet) emerged, magazines like Wired, the liberal Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and similar organizations of computer counterculture provided us with another explanation: the triumph of the Internet was not a victory for nonprofit principles, nor for the collaboration of government and the private sector, but rather a victory for a romantic entrepreneurial spirit of the market, a kind of "frontier." As this explanation permeated decision-making circles and ultimately became the "common sense" of the time, any potential policy lessons that could have been learned from the Internet's nonprofit origins were completely overlooked. Since the early 1990s, the only question has been how to fully commercialize the system, rather than whether to do so.
The Roots of Cybernetics and Computer Culture's Counterculture#
Many of the main supporters of computer culture became politically aware during the protests against the Vietnam War, and the style and attitudes of this culture have clear roots in the 1960s. For example, Stewart Brand created and edited the countercultural magazine Whole Earth Catalog, and his Coevolution Quarterly was invited to be edited by the Black Panthers in 1974. However, Coevolution Quarterly ultimately evolved into a directory of computer software, and today Brand is referred to as a technology booster, a peer of the editorial staff of Wired, and not long ago, Newt Gingrich even graced the cover of Wired. As a group, Brand and his associates have become significant proponents of contemporary economic conservatism.
The term cybernetics was coined by Norbert Wiener in the late 1940s, arising from a series of interactions among intellectuals such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. As far as I know, Bateson was never particularly interested in computers; he later developed a set of ideas about systems theory, ecology, and human thought, and formed a particularly effective style of popular writing to express these ideas. In the 1970s, Stewart Brand revered Bateson as a master, especially in Coevolution Quarterly. Then, in the early 1980s, Coevolution Quarterly evolved into the Whole Earth Software Review, with articles on solar energy replaced by reviews of the latest computer software, and the nonprofit egalitarian principles of coevolution (e.g., all employees receiving the same salary) replaced by a for-profit unequal wage structure; several key figures in this transformation of the 1980s, such as Art Kleiner and Kevin Kelly, later became founders and contributors to Wired. Throughout this dynamic forty-year period, the term "cybernetics" remained unchanged.
Gregory Bateson (and Stewart Brand's interpretation of him) plays an enlightening role in all of this. Bateson's writings from the late 1960s, most famously Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), were written in a highly accessible and engaging manner, avoiding academic jargon and references; this style is a fashionable, charming voice of a British amateur. For example, highly abstract ideas about systems theory were placed in a conversation between a six-year-old girl and her father. Thus, college students and cultured hippies across the nation, even some precocious high school students, could curl up on the sofa with a book by Bateson and understand it without the guidance of a professor. Bateson is **anti-Derrida.
In the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand added a nonlinear, engaging presentation to this easily understandable yet thought-provoking style, mixing descriptions of non-flush toilets with political pamphlets, novels, and subversive news—this is where most Americans ultimately learned how astronauts go to the bathroom. On one hand, this style expresses Bateson's systems theory of "everything is related." But the catalog was also made for browsing. Of course, the catalog's readability and chaotic style share some commonalities with the style of consumer culture; reading the Whole Earth Catalog in the early 1970s might have been as enjoyable as reading the Sears catalog in the 1890s. However, the Whole Earth Catalog differs from other consumer cultures in many important ways: it is informative, deliberately lacking in glamour, not for the consumption of products for leisure activities, but—at least in its own view—for understanding and constructing everyday life. For an entire generation of readers, I believe that today, to some extent, this kind of writing remains a breath of fresh air; its frankness and thoughtfulness serve as an antidote to the easy, polished, arrogant, and anti-intellectual tone of much popular media, and its readability contrasts with the jargon and mystique that permeate our academic, governmental, and corporate bureaucracies.
Until the mid-1970s, one of the hallmarks of these bureaucracies was the computer: in most cultures, large computers seemed to be the mysterious and technically unfriendly exemplars of our modern institutions. It was precisely in the fusion of the computer technology community with the characteristics of countercultural practices and beliefs that this view of computers began to change. Some origins of the transformation of the computer's role may be familiar to many, as they have been mythologized in the media: both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs started from the computer enthusiast community, and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did a lot of work in inventing or first implementing windows, mice, networks, and graphical interfaces, all of which now adorn our desktops. However, few (outside of computer culture) are familiar with Theodor Nelson, who coined the term hypertext and claimed to have invented the concept of linking electronic texts, which led to the popularization of the World Wide Web and the Internet.
Nelson clearly played a pioneering role in fostering a knowledge environment that made subsequent industrial developments possible; his influence on the microcomputer revolution and the astonishing success of the Internet can be said to be far greater than that of any computer manager on the mailing list of technology journalists. Nelson's seminal work is a book titled Computer Lib, first published in 1974. It represents a disruptive shift in style, format, and countercultural tradition from the Whole Earth Catalog into the world of computers. We cannot determine how widely Computer Lib was read, but it seems that most attendees of the now-legendary West Coast Computer Faire and similar events were at least aware of Nelson and his work, and Nelson himself happily reported on visits to Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s. (I know of at least one computer professional who told me, "Computer Lib changed my life"; Nelson claims to have encountered at least fifty such people.) Nelson also frequently published articles in scientific and computer magazines and served as an editor for one of the earliest popular computer magazines, Creative Computing.
Computer Lib is filled with concepts and methods of computer use that were uncommon at the time but later became commonplace. User-friendly interfaces, small personal computers, mice, graphical interfaces, and non-computational uses of computers, such as word processing, email, multimedia, and hypertext, are all carefully explained and advocated. He even anticipated contemporary buzzwords: eighteen years before "surfing the net" swept through the culture, Nelson wrote: "If computers are the wave of the future, displays are the surfboards." Nelson articulated grand concepts about the liberating potential of computers, which have now become standard topics among netizens, claiming that "knowledge, understanding, and freedom can all be advanced by the promotion and deployment of computer display consoles (with the right programs behind them)."
The style of Computer Lib is consistent with that of Bateson and the Whole Earth Catalog. This book criticizes and mocks the mystical terminology that people commonly used to describe computers at the time. Nelson quipped, "I believe in calling a spade a spade—not a personalized earth-moving equipment module." This language is deliberately humorous and non-Latin: computers are described as "wind-up crossword puzzles." Furthermore, there is sympathy for countercultural politics and anti-establishment sentiments: Nelson boasts of having attended Woodstock, linking his criticisms of the computer industry to feminist critiques of the medical profession in Our Bodies Ourselves, inserting a solemn ode to degrowth economics, and placing a raised fist in the style of black power on the cover. The book's hand-drawn graphics, cut-and-paste style, and self-publishing origins—Nelson boasted of avoiding mainstream publishers—all indicate an anti-establishment sentiment (albeit an under-theorized one).
"That Deep Romantic Chasm": Xanadu and Nelson's Dream of Perfect Intellectual Property#
How did all this countercultural anti-establishment sentiment applied to computers transform into a breeding ground for neoliberalism? Nelson almost thought of it retrospectively when he raised the question of funding for a universally accessible hypertext computer system in a brief article: could it be done? I don't know... my hypothesis is that the way to achieve this is not through large corporations (because all these corporations see are other corporations); not through the government (hypertext is not committee-oriented but individualistic—funding can only be obtained through tedious, obscure pompizzazz); but through the backdoor of the private enterprise system. I think the spirit of McDonald's and kandy kolor hot rod accessories might attract us here. In line with the Marxist counterculture popular in the early 1970s, Nelson thus viewed both corporations and government as equally suspect. However, his allusion to Tom Wolfe is quite revealing: his solution is not Marxism but libertarianism in the free market, imagining that the free market could exist without the support of institutional structures like government and corporations.
Nelson's confidence in the market is by no means unique in the computer community. In the mid-1970s, a young Bill Gates also tried to persuade other computer enthusiasts, such as early computer magazines, to stop sharing software and start paying each other. However, Gates clearly had a straightforward business model. No matter how reasonable his views seemed to many, they did not have the customs of counterculture.
In contrast, Nelson's vision is rooted in a form of romantic rather than utilitarian individualism. He does not imagine himself as a pragmatic, selfish businessman. He never mentions the market, profitability, or business incentives. His work shows a passion for exploration and experimentation, along with a disdain for traditional business practices and superficial economic self-interest. In any case, according to most accounts, the business ventures he initiated or participated in were failures.
The romantic nature of Nelson's individualism is most evident in the hypertext system he proposed, Xanadu, which inspired the World Wide Web; aptly, it is named after the exotic "pleasure palace" in Kubla Khan, written by Coleridge while under the influence of opium. Xanadu is described in Computer Lib, and from that point on, it has been Nelson's lifelong work; as of this writing, after a significant failure in an attempt to develop the system under corporate auspices, a small team in Australia seems to bring hope to the project.
Nelson stated that Xanadu should be a computer-based "connected literature" system, easily accessible worldwide, just like today's World Wide Web. However, there is an important distinction: "This system," Nelson said, "must guarantee that the owner of any information will be paid their chosen royalties on any portions of their documents, no matter how small, whenever they are most used." Thus, Nelson has always opposed the view put forth by Richard Stallman and others that computer software should be freely distributed. On the surface, his argument is a generalization of the common sense of American intellectual property law (which is highly questionable): "Copyright," he said, "makes publishing and better computer software possible."
However, crucially, Nelson's desire to uphold the intellectual property system seems not to be about fostering an industry but rather a vision of fairness: "You publish something, anyone can use it, and you always automatically receive royalties. Fair." This vision is of an isolated, "free" individual who can communicate without the intervention of publishers, libraries, or educational institutions. Moreover, this economic fairness is part of intellectual fairness: "You can create new published documents out of old ones indefinitely, making whatever changes seem appropriate—without damaging the originals. This means a whole new pluralistic publishing form. If anything which is already published can be included in anything newly published, any new viewpoint can be fairly presented." With Xanadu, everyone's contributions to the system are perfectly protected and rewarded: the computer system itself is seen as a means to prevent the possibility of unauthorized theft of ideas, as every "citation" is preserved by an immutable link that not only allows readers to immediately find the source of knowledge but also ensures direct payment for each "use." This is a vision of a mathematically perfect property system, with Lockean abstractions realized through computer technology.
By standard measures, Nelson's career has remained on the fringes of the commercial and educational computing communities, which have been deeply influenced by his ideas. Given this, his vision is somewhat bittersweet: it is the vision of an outsider who has never been fully secure or well rewarded by institutions—never treated "fairly"—imagining a utopia where those "unfair" institutions are completely replaced by a community of free individuals working at computing consoles. It is a utopia without arbitrary power like the IBM monopoly, nor any arbitrary authority based on flattery or empty rhetoric; a utopia without lifetime journal editors who can block the publication of an article, nor shortsighted corporate executives who can arbitrarily discard their beloved projects to cut costs. These people also cannot claim the ideas of their subordinates as their own.
According to most accounts (though Nelson does not say), Xanadu itself is a failure; it is the mother of all vaporware. Nelson's writings over the past quarter-century are filled with prophecies about the imminent completion and release of the system, none of which have materialized; to this day, Nelson insists that a viable working system is just around the corner. Wired published an article titled "A Hacker Tragedy," chronicling the long history of Xanadu, portraying this effort as a Don Quixote-like, fundamentally unrealistic endeavor driven more by neurosis than by programming ability or vision. While I am not in a position to assess the details of the software (in any case, it remains primarily proprietary), I would bet that part of the reason for this effort's impossibility may be Nelson's view of property. Such a perfect system demands logarithmic growth in computing resources (each modification record, each reading generates royalties for each author, a complete record accessible to everyone in the system for all such transactions), which may be its technical Waterloo; in traditional economic terms, this system may drown in its own "transaction costs."
The tragic impossibility of Xanadu may be related to the dream that inspired it: a dream of a community unburdened by the complex burdens of history and institutions, a dream of individual creativity unbound by social contexts. Of course, what is missing from Nelson's worldview is an understanding of the decisive characteristics of historical, political, and social complexity; in fact, his dream is precisely to overcome the authoritarian hierarchies and chaotic interconnectedness of our imperfect world, not by struggling against this interconnectedness but by escaping it into the computer screen. This is why, in the countless computer utopias we have seen over the past fifteen years, no one "changes diapers." In Nelson's imagination of cyberspace, as in the imaginations of many others, people eat, grow food, age, or get sick, or build roads, houses, and factories, all without any particular feeling. The body is often absent, or even undervalued: in net culture, real human bodies are often arrogantly regarded as merely "meat," and the real world is described as "meatspace."
The entire transaction cost issue in neoclassical economic theory is itself an effort to consider economic "externalities"; all these messy political and social issues do not fit the traditional economic model of isolated individuals competing in the market. In Nelson's computer utopia, as in most such visions, even the most direct "externalities" are absent: the expensive educational system and government funding for science and defense provide the environment for all experiments, speculations, and thoughts oriented toward computing, like those of Nelson. The vast majority of computer experts are well-educated, middle-class white males who work in comfortable research campuses at universities and companies, a fact that is deliberately overlooked. The social conditions that formed the background for the computer culture and its achievements in the 1970s and 1980s—patriarchy, class relations, and the widespread availability of higher education through government programs like the GI Bill in the 1950s and 1960s—are ignored. It is often said that Bill Gates learned computers in high school, later dropped out of Harvard, and founded Microsoft. This story is seen as a typical example of entrepreneurial courage, as if Gates were a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, independent of social support; the vast differences in social forces between a young man from a wealthy family dropping out of Harvard and a young man dropping out of a downtown high school, or a woman from a college dropout's family, disappear from the scene of computer libertarianism. The expensive computer that Gates learned on in high school is viewed as a natural fact rather than a product of a well-funded school system, which increasingly serves only the privileged.
The Law as Computer Code: The Fantasy of Escaping History into the Computer Screen#
Stewart Brand's 1987 publication, a celebratory work about the MIT Media Lab, illustrates well how the libertarianism of computer counterculture ultimately merged with today's conservative movement. Brand opens with a dedication, giving this book to "the drafters and defenders of the First Amendment," describing the amendment as "elegant code by witty programmers." In short, here is a typical metaphor of computer culture: a witty, clever image that breaks tradition, along with a stunningly naive denial of history and social processes. For as any legal historian and most lawyers know, no matter the merits of the First Amendment, it does not operate like computer code at all. It has never functioned automatically and mechanically like a computer program. Its contemporary significance in American law is only half a century old; for example, in the nineteenth century, it was often interpreted as discouraging censorship at the federal level, while censorship was entirely legal at the local and state levels. No matter who operates a computer, a computer program executes in the same way every time; in contrast, legal principles have different interpretations based on their social and historical contexts. The current strong interpretation of the First Amendment in the United States is a political achievement, the result of complex social and ideological struggles, rather than the result of stuffing the Bill of Rights into a neutral legal machine.
However, the fantasy that the law does indeed operate in this way is a key commonality between the current rising tide of conservatism and different strands of computer culture. The fundamental distinction between law and politics is at the core of libertarian beliefs; this theory posits that law supports a system of individual freedom in a neutral and mechanical way, while government intervenes in these rights arbitrarily and subjectively. The clever, elegant legal code written by witty legal programmers allows us to become selfish, independent, free individuals in the market, while the government forces us to become an oppressive collective. This is why conservatives imagine that there is no contradiction between their frequent calls for law and order and their criticisms of government interference in our lives. In summary, the fantasy that law operates like computer code reinforces a denial of historical, social structures, and political struggles, which is at the core of market libertarian beliefs, at least in its more naive forms. The shift in thinking from the social libertarianism of the 1960s counterculture to technology-based economic libertarianism ultimately lends credibility to the neoliberalism that dominates today, thus relying on the metaphorical fusion of law and computers, in which each is imagined to function similarly.
When Theodor Nelson defends his insistence on copyright protection, his belief in a non-historical formalism of law becomes clear: I have heard... arguments like "copyright means getting lawyers involved." This seems to be a regression. Law is always involved; it is the law's "clean arrangement" that keeps lawyers out... If these rights are clear, they are less likely to be trampled upon, and if trampled, it won't take much time to resolve the issue. Believe it or not, lawyers like (the law) "clean arrangements." As the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law." Most people familiar with the historical details of intellectual property law may be somewhat skeptical of the idea that intellectual property can be transformed into such a "clean arrangement." Intellectual property is based on some vague concepts, such as "originality" and the distinction between concepts and their expressions, which is a well-known, constantly changing, and vague area of law filled with complex qualifications like fair use, copyright collectives, and compulsory licensing. Intellectual property is a typical form of property, as a famous article on property law states, "crystals turn to mud." Of course, with Xanadu, Nelson promised to solve all these ambiguities through a technical means. But historical experience and a bit of common sense would suggest that as technology becomes increasingly complex, the fit between technology and intellectual property becomes increasingly vague. The Internet, especially the World Wide Web, while they do embody Nelson's utopian fantasies, have blurred rather than clarified the boundaries of authorship and intellectual property, which are at the core of his vision; it is easier than ever to plagiarize someone else's work without attribution, and the uncertainties in the field of intellectual property are one of today's major legal and policy issues.
When Congress added the Communications Decency Act, which prohibited pornography, to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the formalist view of law and its naive passionate attachment became very evident, as the computer culture erupted in strong libertarian discontent over the Communications Decency Act. For example, computer expert Brock Meeks angrily ranted on the Internet, often repeating the question, "What part of the law don't you understand?"—as if no one could read the amendment and come to a different interpretation. (In fact, for 150 years, this country's trained legal scholars have had entirely different interpretations of the First Amendment, which seems to have escaped Meeks' awareness.) Similarly, John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an indignant "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace," as if the Communications Decency Act were the last straw that sparked the world's people to rebel against their governments. Given that the First Amendment is a favorite topic among journalists, the debate over the Communications Decency Act became the main focus of media coverage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the only controversial part of the bill.
In fact, the Communications Decency Act occupies less than a page of the nearly 100-page bill, and many understood it from the outset to be unenforceable and unconstitutional. In contrast, most of the bill is quite typical corporate welfare, providing various benefits to corporate interests while establishing some basic rules of conduct to provide stability and protection for the entire industry during periods of organizational and technological change, shielding it from brutal competition. The key progressive parts of the bill have significant implications for promoting openness and public debate (the goals of free speech law), arguably establishing a universal service fund for schools and libraries. However, all of this was achieved through the manipulation of sophisticated political elites, and even the issue of universal service did not spark any widespread public debate, even on the Internet. In retrospect, the strong opposition of computer culture to the Communications Decency Act, rather than promoting the cause of freedom, likely diverted attention from the more significant, long-term, and freedom-restricting corporate provisions of the 1996 bill. One of the most enduring legacies of computer libertarianism may be to have ensured the smooth passage of the bill by diverting attention from its core.
Conclusion#
Computer culture and its legacy hold significant value. It is important that individuals like Theodor Nelson have a more accurate view of the future of computers than most of the decision-makers controlling the electronic industry; computer culture has evolved. Its success helps maintain respect for the disruption of tradition. While I believe that Wired's primary influence is conservative and optimistic, it is interesting that during its most popular years, corporate managers across the country were flipping through this magazine, which often contained comments like, "One of the dirty secrets of capitalism is that the harder you work, the less you get paid."
The most important lesson from the computer counterculture is that the tremendous success of the Internet, microcomputers, user-friendliness, open systems, and multimedia demonstrates a widespread desire for connection and cooperation in an environment devoid of private and public hierarchies, which often dominate our lives. Unlike the standard conservative market fable, in which we are told that if we commit to selfish, profit-driven motives, everything will be fine, computer utopians like Theodor Nelson and Stewart Brand celebrate unrestricted communication and the joy of connecting with others, joys that are aesthetically and intellectually creative and cannot be reduced to the rational economic man's planned self-interest. Nelson's view of computers has always been that computers are interconnected and creatively used in free ways; computers are tools for social interaction, not just for increasing the efficiency of profit-oriented enterprises, but tools for controlling people and machines. Theodor Nelson may be an outsider, but he expresses a genuine resentment and dissatisfaction with managers and bureaucracies, which are among the many features of modern life.
As a political model, the romantic libertarianism offered by computer culture as an option is both powerful and flawed. Admittedly, in the hands of politicians like George Gilder, this model may simply be a rhetorical trick used to defend broader conservative social policies. However, the cases of Theodor Nelson or Stewart Brand indicate that this model is quite persuasive for many. In a distorted way, it expresses a genuine dissatisfaction with existing power structures and a genuine yearning for forms of social life that are less hierarchical and freer than those provided by the currently dominant welfare/war state.
Any insights, styles, and discontent used for political progress that arise from computer culture must reveal their hidden historical and social components. One drawback of the accessible writing style in computer culture is that it obscures the knowledge heritage and context; you must read Gregory Bateson very carefully to notice his borrowings from Freud and social anthropology theory. It needs to be made clear that the delightful anarchy of the Internet is not merely the result of a lack of control but is built on the support of nonprofit research universities and their expensive yet fragile culture of open knowledge exploration. The hollow nature of corporate managerialism, which both Theodor Nelson and Dilbert cleverly critique, needs to be placed in the historical context of modern corporate organizational forms and their legal institutional supports, such as corporate personhood.
More abstractly, I believe there is a need to develop another compelling form of individualism. Nelson's dream of freedom through the computer screen has, in practice, turned into a desire for isolation, a freedom from relationships with others, through fantasies like legal neutrality or the "technical fixes" of computers themselves. This aligns with the traditional conservative notion of freedom as purely negative, as freedom from rather than freedom to. Like traditional conservative notions of freedom, it too easily supports the imagined corporate hierarchies that would be overturned. For a certain class of people (mostly white, mostly male, mostly educated, and middle-class), playing with computers is, in fact, like escaping to another world, escaping to a kind of freedom. I believe that the obsession with computers indicates a fear of politics, a fear of interconnectedness, and a distorted desire to escape the unpredictability and uncertainty of relationships with others that comes from social biology. Given the limitations of contemporary life, this obsession may be understandable; but it is a superficial and ultimately illusory freedom. In the long run, any successful leftist politics must address the genuine discontent and desires that make computers seem like a freedom, like an escape, but it must do so in a way that transcends them, directing them toward a more likely outcome: a mature freedom.