Compiled from: Counterculture and the Tech Revolution (2006), authored by R. U. Sirius, who was a co-founder and editor of Mondo 2000 magazine.
Looking back, when people were asking me to explain Mondo 2000, I often told them that in the mid-1980s, we were producing a psychedelic counterculture magazine called “High Frontiers,” and we were shocked—just shocked—by the friendly treatment we received from the Silicon Valley elite. Suddenly, we found ourselves at a party where some of the early major software and hardware designers mingled with NASA scientists, quantum physicists, hippies, leftist radicals, artists, liberals, and a variety of smart people.
I was a bit disingenuous when I made these comments. “High Frontiers” had a technological/scientific bias largely because we were influenced by the “Leary-Wilson paradigm.” So we were travelers of technological progress. Over the years, I have also taken a keen interest in the work of Stewart Brand.
The connection between the creators of the contemporary global economic engine and the countercultural attitudes popular among young people in the 1960s and 70s is an inevitable result of finding ourselves immersed in a cultural environment that spread from the 1980s into the 1990s. Everyone was “experienced.” Everyone was skeptical of the authority of the state and corporations—even those who owned corporations. People would casually reminisce about times spent with Leary, the Grateful Dead, Ken Kesey, and Abbie Hoffman. You can imagine.
But these future designers were not inclined to wave their foundations of “sex, drugs, and questioning authority” in public. After all, most of them were seeking venture capital, selling toys and tools to the average consumer of the Reagan-Bush era. Few attempted to tell the public, “Oh, by the way. All this stuff? This is how counterculture plans to change the world now.”
While there has been much implicit and even explicit discussion about these connections over the years, it wasn’t until John Markoff published What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry in 2005 that anyone really tried to trace these connections.
Markoff’s narrative primarily revolves around Douglas Engelbart and Stewart Brand. One is psychedelic counterculture, the other is the anti-war movement; then there’s the dawn of computer technology, where both intersect. Engelbart stood in stark contrast to the mainstream of computer science at the time, as he began to believe that computers could enhance and extend human cognitive abilities. Meanwhile, another group in Palo Alto was experimenting with LSD as a tool for enhancing and extending human cognitive abilities. Then, with the arrival of the entire anti-war, anti-establishment movement of the 1960s, and the development of “people’s” computer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, all these trends became increasingly intertwined.
The story of What the Dormouse Said mainly takes place in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, and is primarily about how connections were made. In this sense, it is both a story based on physical proximity in space and time, and a story about the evolution of cultural concepts related to the term “counterculture.”
Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism delves deeper into how the seeds of a certain view of how the world operates (cybernetics) were largely implanted into the emerging counterculture of the 1960s by Stewart Brand, and how these seeds were successful—and how they continue to peel away in new and unexpected ways. While Markoff’s book uncovers some of the repressed truths—that computer culture is deeply rooted in psychedelic counterculture—Turner’s book covers a broader scope and poses challenges to the ideological assumptions that underpin our countercultural technological culture. Both books are great reads, but Turner’s is more challenging and ultimately more valuable.
What Turner does in From Counterculture to Cyberculture is trace an arc that begins with America’s mainstream interest in cybernetics (especially in the military) in the 1940s and 50s, and shows how the potential interest in self-regulating systems directly led to the hippie bible—The Whole Earth Catalog—and ultimately produced a digital culture that allocates computing power to (many) people and has some mystical significance as an information “global brain.” Then, at the end of the book, he brings up some uncomfortable memories as Brand’s digital countercultural elite engaged in almost meaningful socio-political interactions with Newt Gingrich’s Progress and Freedom Foundation and other elements of the mid-1990s “Republican Revolution.”
While I welcome Turner’s critical perspective, I must honestly say that, although I feel a distaste for the Gingrich coalition and many corporate statements, those statements at least stem from Brand’s digital elite family to some extent—but I believe Brand’s strategy was fundamentally correct. Turner suggests that valuable social change is more likely to occur through political action rather than through the invention and distribution of tools, nor through the whole systems approach implicit in the movement. But I believe that the internet has clearly been more successful in changing lives than 40 years of leftist opposition activism. For example, the means of dissemination that shape the spirit of our cultural and political era have not been shackled by powerful media companies, the only reason being the work that these politically ambiguous freaks have accomplished over the past 40 years. In other words, without the networks established by those hippies who did not oppose collaborating with DARPA and big corporations, today’s opposition radicalism would be much more obscure and hidden. The world is a complex place.
In some ways, Turner’s critique of the networked counterculture is similar to Thomas Frank’s critique of urban hipster counterculture in his influential book The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Essentially, it portrays hippiedom as a phenomenon that easily transforms into a seductive, appealing, corporate-serving libertine. Frank argues that American businesses were shackled by the conservatism of the 1950s and needed a broader, more experimental, and more individualized consumer base, driven by the frequent changes of fashion and who wanted more varieties of products. Thus, while hippie culture inherited an implicit critique of consumerism from the beats, it actually sparked consumer capitalism, as the business world amplified the rebellious messages of 1960s youth counterculture through advertising and mainstream media, encouraging consumers to “join the rebellion” and “live for today.”
Frank and Turner’s books raise interesting questions that challenge most people’s usual assumptions about counterculture. But in response to these critiques, one might pose an interesting question, “So what?” In my own book, Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (co-authored with Dan Joy), I argue that counterculturalism refers to the continually emerging individuals and groups who transcend certain taboos of a specific tribe, religion, or era, breaking boundaries of thought and behavior in ways that yield greater creativity, greater enjoyment of life, intellectual freedom, spiritual heresy, sexual freedom, and so on. In this context, one might ask whether counterculture should necessarily be judged by its effectiveness in opposing capitalism or the excesses of capitalism. Perhaps so, but the complex arguments can go either way, or more accurately, neither way, as any resistance of counterculture is unlikely to follow a straight line—it is unlikely to reliably stand on one side or the other.
These thoughts may not directly relate to Turner’s concerns: a group of elite white people have decided how to change the world. On the other hand, one might also ask how much direct influence the digital elite of the past decade still has. The “ruling class” of the digital age is a moving target; all those kids using Google, YouTube, social networks, etc., do not know John Brockman and John Barlow, but many of them certainly know Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank. Meanwhile, corporate digital power brokers seem quite pleased to have a new Democratic House Speaker as an ally. This may be the coolest thing that Stewart Brand and his partners helped to inspire. In the 21st century, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Below, I interview Fred Turner.
RU SIRIUS: Can you comment on the differences between your book and John Markoff’s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said?
FRED TURNER: The two books have different ambitions. John’s book focuses primarily on the late 1960s and early 70s and draws a series of relatively interesting connections between the social world of Doug Engelbart’s lab and the social world involving Stewart Brand in Menlo Park. It’s a concise and interesting story.
I think my book is more ambitious in scale and scope. It starts in the 1940s and goes through the 1990s, and it offers a different perspective. For John, counterculture and psychedelics are essentially the same thing.
In my view, that’s not the case. What I’m most proud of is that this book shows how a particular faction of counterculture that Brand talks about directly grew out of Cold War and WWII research culture. This is not entirely a counterculture. I think that’s a historical mistake, and I hope this book clarifies that.
Also, I think John would argue that psychedelic experiences shaped the design of personal computers. I think that’s clearly wrong. Rather, in the 1940s and 50s, the design of computing machines and other information machines shaped the values of thought we came to associate with them, and when LSD came along, some of the terms people were reading had already been set by the techno-culture of the 40s and 50s, the same techno-culture that ultimately brought us computing machines. To me, this counterculture did not end in the 60s. It gradually faded and was reborn in a way closely related to the libertarian movements of the 1990s; these movements could be said to be fundamentally not countercultural. I think this book tries to explain how and why that happened.
RU SIRIUS: LSD is in some sense a tool for understanding the same things that cybernetic theorists understood, because in some sense both are about pattern recognition. Fortunately, you see Norbert Wiener’s actual work in cybernetics influencing Stewart Brand, as “network” is a prefix that is often misused.
FRED TURNER: In the 1940s and 50s, pattern recognition was really about saving the world. We tend to forget that in the 40s and 50s; the advent of the atomic bomb and the experience of WWII made it absolutely necessary to enhance our consciousness and really expand our ability to monitor the world to prevent nuclear war.
If we could discover patterns of invasion, we could prevent our own destruction. If you look at Brand’s diaries from the late 50s, you’ll find he was very concerned that the Soviets would invade and occupy Palo Alto. That fear was very strong. What I think he has been trying to do for over 30 years is to save the world by making patterns very visible. This is a mission directly sourced from the Cold War.
Brand discovered cybernetics in an interesting way. In the 1960s, he was in the New York art scene and began to associate with a group of artists called UsCo—the Us Company. This was the avant-garde of New York in the 60s—people around John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg—all of whom were reading cybernetics. They were reading Norbert Wiener’s work. So Brand did too. As far as I know, Brand was the one who brought cybernetics back into the countercultural circles of the San Francisco Bay Area.
RU SIRIUS: Brand found Buckminster Fuller through Wiener, another systems thinker.
FRED TURNER: Brand had a series of very powerful intellectual inspirations. Fuller would be one, Kesey would be another. For Brand, Fuller exemplified two things. He was a model of systems thinking and a model of the knowledge entrepreneur. Fuller moved from one university to another, from one place to another, weaving communities together. That’s what Brand learned to do. He learned that by observing Fuller.
RU SIRIUS: In a sense, Fuller was one of the first “cyberronin.” “Cyberronin” is a type of tech entrepreneur who wanders around, and later in the 90s, John Brockman and Wired magazine lauded this type of person.
FRED TURNER: Absolutely. I think Fuller, Kesey, and Brand are P.T. Barnums. They don’t ride horses, they don’t ride elephants, they don’t swing on trapezes. Yet they built the circus ring; they brought in the performers; they learned the language and style of the circus. They told the audience what the circus meant. Brand has always been a spokesperson for a series of very important circuses.
RU SIRIUS: So, entering the hippie era, Brand was at one point a member of the “Merry Pranksters”; he did The Whole Earth Catalog, but he was never really a hippie. Generally speaking, most hippies were not systems thinkers. “Hey man, save some for me, I’m going to Woodstock” is not systems thinking. Brand began his unique journey. However, this through-line takes Brand from the avant-garde traveling fest to “the Whole Earth,” then to the Global Business Network, and then to the creation of Wired. Can you describe what these memes or through-lines are?
FRED TURNER: There’s a misunderstanding about the counterculture of the 60s that has plagued many Americans, including many historians. We tend to think of counterculture as a series of anti-war protests; drug use and partying. But we don’t tend to distinguish between two very important groups at the time: the New Left and what I call the New Communalists. Brand was in conversation with the New Communalists. Although now largely forgotten, there was the largest wave of communal activity in American history from 1966 to 1973.
Between 1966 and 1973, it is conservatively estimated that 10 million Americans participated in communes. Brand communicated with this group by promoting small-scale technologies like psychedelics, stereo sound, books, and Volkswagens; these were tools for building new alternative communities.
The New Left wanted to change the world through politics, thereby changing politics. They formed Students for a Democratic Society. They protested. Brand and his team ignored all of that. Brand said what we need to do is go out and build these communities, and my job is to create a directory of tools that people can use to access the technologies they can use to build communities. So the core idea from the 60s to the 90s was that we could build small-scale technological and consciousness communities around these technologies. So we no longer needed politics itself. This idea re-emerged in the 80s with the rise of personal computers, which are the ultimate small-scale technology. It gave us the concept of virtual communities, a distributed community around small-scale technologies. It ultimately had a very direct influence on Newt Gingrich’s beliefs in the 1990s.
RU SIRIUS: Okay. You’re jumping into some of the conflicts between network libertarians and the Republican right of the mid-90s. At the same time, you’re drawing a line toward open source. Going back to “the Whole Earth,” the idea was to get tools and tools. In a sense, Brand laid the groundwork for everything that computer culture represented in the late 60s.
FRED TURNER: I think there’s a confusion that is currently troubling our understanding of the internet. We tend to think that the arrival of the internet changed everything. My personal feeling is that the cultural context in which the internet exists has begun to change. The cultural context largely determines how we use the internet and what we use it for. That said; open source originated in the New Communalist movement—in some ways through Richard Stallman—largely stemming from New Left radicalism. For example, wanting to change the rules of copyright is a very novel leftist perspective.
RU SIRIUS: I also think the influence of punk has been overlooked throughout this whole thing. Stylistically, Brand is worlds apart from punk culture. But there’s a direct and important connection between “the Whole Earth” and punk culture, which is DIY—do it yourself; building your own institutions, anyone can pick up tools and use them.
FRED TURNER: Absolutely. Brand briefly embraced punk in the late 70s in his magazine Co-Evolution Quarterly. He received a lot of intimidating letters from readers.
RU SIRIUS: The New Communalist movement almost completely failed. The idea of abandoning urban and suburban environments to create one’s own world failed. Even from an ecological or environmental standpoint, the prevailing view now is urban density. The attitude toward tools has persisted, but the idea of going back home is almost useless.
FRED TURNER: The idea of going back home didn’t work. But I think something deeper didn’t work, and it still lingers today, even though it underlies much of what we do. The idea of building a community around a shared style is a very bohemian idea. It runs through various bohemian worlds. If you can get the right technology, you can build a unified community; that concept drove many rural community efforts. They thought they could build a new community by changing the technological regime; by studying 19th-century technologies; making their own butter; sewing their own clothes—they would be able to establish a new community. They found that if you didn’t engage in politics—explicitly, directly, through parties, through organizations—if you didn’t pay attention to and articulate what was really happening with material power, the community would fail.
So I think there’s a fantasy that has lingered on the internet, and it has at least troubled us for a decade. The idea is that if we use the right tools and communicate effectively, we can establish intimate relationships with others and build that kind of community that doesn’t exist in the outside world for the rest of our lives. I think that’s a huge failure and a fantasy.
RU SIRIUS: To some extent, I agree with that because I think it doesn’t take into account the efforts of people like Stewart Brand and punk to create a vibrant culture before the internet came along. So several generations have grown up with this idea, “Yes, I can do it myself. I don’t need to wait for Eric Clapton or Timothy Leary to tell me what to do. I’m not just a consumer. I can do my own thing.” I’ve argued to some that without the emergence of punk counterculture, this so-called “long tail effect” wouldn’t have happened so quickly; it created an attitude that you don’t have to be a professional to have something to say. I usually get dismissed by tech people.
FRED TURNER: I think tech experts and economists tend to think it all revolves around barriers to entry—people have things they want to do, and if you lower the barriers to achieving those goals by changing technology, those things become possible.
RU SIRIUS: I think that ultimately happens. If you create a cultural environment for it, it happens faster.
FRED TURNER: You can see that from the geographical distribution of the things we’re talking about. There’s a reason Silicon Valley is in California and not Montana. One is density, and the other is culture.
RU SIRIUS: Strangely, the ideas from the so-called “New Communalism,” that is, ideas about groupthink and shared tools, were ultimately absorbed not only by libertarians but also by Republican rightists.
FRED TURNER: Newt Gingrich has always rejected drug culture. He just hates it.
RU SIRIUS: He once wrote that drug use should either be legalized or drug users should be sentenced to death.
FRED TURNER: (sarcastically) Charming man. I don’t know. He certainly loathes drug culture, but he has embraced many of the ideas that circulate in that world. We forget that part of the reason for the failure of community during that period was that it wasn’t entirely idealistic and selfless. People wanted to build communities around themselves. Brand invested the most in the art world in the early 60s—the Us Company—there was a sign on the door that said “Just Us.” It was the idea of a cooperative collective elite. This was very effective for those wanting to take control of their lives and the corners of the world. From counterculture to libertarianism in the 90s, one viewpoint that runs through three or four decades is that we can collectively form an elite.
RU SIRIUS: It’s fine if a group of thirty white people gathers to create a project that adds value to the world. But when that project says, “We’re rebuilding the whole world,” others will stand up and say, “Hey, wait a minute.”
FRED TURNER: Right. When it provides a guiding logic for Wall Street types or Washington Republicans, that’s when it becomes truly frightening. When Whole Earth Review editor Kevin Kelly wrote New Rules for the New Economy, that book became the bible of the internet bubble and also the bible for those in Washington and New York who were behaving extraordinarily greedily.
RU SIRIUS: There’s an appealing side to this anarcho-capitalism—“Throw away the rulebook! Go with the flow!”
FRED TURNER: But in the world of anarcho-capitalism, there’s another thing that lingers, even though you and I might like some parts of it. There’s a notion that making the right friends is enough for politics.
RU SIRIUS: You wouldn’t think about those who are excluded. But there has been significant progress in distributing tools and caring for those who are excluded.
FRED TURNER: I think the idea that distributing tools and granting access is enough to achieve social change is a brand new communalist idea, but it doesn’t work. Because success requires cultural and social conditions, social capital.
RU SIRIUS: The 60s saw different types of politics. One was oppositional, the other was cooperative. Stewart Brand is a countercultural figure who mixed it with corporations and the military from the beginning. He shared information with the Pentagon and brought a variety of people into that think tank—from hippies and environmentalists to builders. And the distinction between his branch of counterculture and the broader, more radical counterculture is still reflected today in the differences between anti-corporate counterculturalists and the more compromising networked counterculture.
I think Brand is more sophisticated than pure opposition. But his approach has many problems. For example, if you question America’s military policy, then you might want to question how much you want to help them.
FRED TURNER: One of the things that emerged in the New Communalist movement and troubles many of today’s tech cultural works is the shift in rhetoric from political language to scientific language. So now we have the language of learning, the language of emergence, the language of self-organization. Brand and his team—groups like the Global Business Network and the Santa Fe Institute—are creating a politically neutral language for gathering various networks that might be contentious. So suddenly, if I’m an anti-military player and there’s a general in there, I think, “Well, he’s a member of our learning organization. We’ll learn together.” This basically offsets any chances I might have to oppose him.
RU SIRIUS: One of the expressions is the concept of bioeconomics—economics modeled by biology. Rather than oppose that view, I oppose its conclusions. I think “therefore” is premature. But our behavior is deeply rooted in biology...
FRED TURNER: The biological models in social science have a terrible history. We tend to forget that social Darwinists called for eugenics to eliminate those who were evolutionarily abnormal. The problems with bioeconomics are different. I don’t mind the metaphor moving from biology to other fields as long as they are considered metaphors. What I particularly care about is the fusion of two metaphors in bioeconomics, one scientific and one market-based.
RU SIRIUS: But it’s not entirely a metaphor. We can’t ignore biology.
FRED TURNER: Of course. Some things work at the species level in one way or another, and that can be proven through science and biology, which is great. But in bioeconomics, there’s a habit of taking species-level learning, species-level principles, and translating them into smaller social worlds and thinking those are the principles driving those worlds. I think that’s a nasty habit.
RU SIRIUS: This is an abstract habit, and so is that of leftist political radicals. In Brand’s interactions with corporate elites, how do you think he taught them to see things?
FRED TURNER: That’s not quite right. Brand has a theory of power that comes from cybernetics. It says I can’t direct you to do anything. I can’t do it hierarchically. All I can do is create a forum where you might meet some people, and then I can see the bubbles that emerge from that forum. I would say, Brand gathers people around specific issues, chooses the venue for activities, and then observes what happens.
RU SIRIUS: He established connections with Kevin Kelly at Co-Evolution Quarterly. This collaboration runs through their involvement in the Wired project and the Long Now Foundation.
FRED TURNER: Kevin Kelly has his own sensibility, which is largely a sensibility of “global” communalism, but filtered through a reborn spirituality. It’s important to remember that Kevin Kelly is an evangelical religious person, and there’s a messianic quality to his work.
RU SIRIUS: Wired magazine publisher Louis Rossetto seems more like a messiah.
FRED TURNER: I’m just guessing, but I think it’s more a matter of temperament.
RU SIRIUS: Let’s end with the idea of how this line extends from cybernetics to Wired magazine.
FRED TURNER: I think Wired is a small technology magazine—in this case, digital technology—that is seen as changing the world by allowing us to ultimately communicate with one another and build consciousness communities. These consciousness communities will change the world. That idea first emerged in the research fields of WWII and the Cold War, was adopted and culturally legitimized by Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth” team in the 1960s, and traveled with them into the 1980s, into The Well, into the Global Business Network, into the pages of Wired, and ultimately into our public life today.