Fred Turner: The Politics of Design in the American Counterculture

Seeing the return of 1960s words: "virtual community" "personal computer" "virtual frontier" - what can we learn from the geodesic dome and the Whole Earth Catalog

what was the counterculture and why does it matter now?

• image: Berkeley Free Speech Movement activists wearing Hollerith cards with the words strike


• not wanting to be "part of the machine"


• not wanting to be coded, put on cards


• what disappears in that story?


• The counterculture wasn't anti-tech, it was anti-BIG-tech


• two wings of the counterculture


• 1) new left: politics in order to change gov't - doing politics to change politics; struggle


• 2) the new communalists: step away from gov't and build new communities around communication, leading to a new society; consciousness - founding communes


• new communalists: technocentric visions informing techno beliefs today


• both: anti-mass culture, anti-bureaucracy


• Ken Kesey invited to speak at Berkeley, and tells them not to march - to go home and live differently


• 6000 communes established; NYT estimates more than 10 million living communally


• Q: where is women's movement? 2nd wave kicks in during 1970s


• new communalists are quite conservative - new settlements replicate suburban order


• children of the 1950s caught between nuclear holocaust and consumer cornucopia

the dream of comprehensive design

• turned to Buckminister Fuller, a 1930s technocrat


• story of death of Fuller's daughter


• Fuller's comprehensive designer can resolve the two: "harvesting the potentials of the realm," redistributing them as necessary, "valving" them into everyday life


• worked at the edges of big organizations


• surveyed information and goods they produce


• tracked world system as a whole


• redistributed goods as necessary


• you save the world by saving yourself


• quote from Fuller's Ideas and Integrities, 1963

two exemplary designs: the dome and the catalog

• two designs to change the world that blossomed in the 1960s


• change the world by changing the consciousness of the people in it


• geodesic dome - military shelter during Cold War along defense early-warning line


• light, but stable in the wind


• Drop City circa 1965 - domes made from the tops of automobiles


• orienting towards shared consciousness


• design as site of governance that shapes minds to work together


• whole earth catalog mapped tools for transformation


• selling Norbert Wiener books to people trying to farm the desert ?!


• buckskin clothing?!


• what is the logic of all these choices together?: changing your life, changing the world


• this is the prototype of virtual community technology


• you could not order goods from the catalog - they listed things and places to get them


• they created categories through which people understood their activities, and which painted a picture of the back-to-the land movement


• a map of an emerging commune world - a map of sources, pointers


• legacy: the fusion of information-making and community-building


• making consciousness the basis of community - redistributing resources to creative elites

why the communes crumbled, and what that might teach us about the politics of

• by 1973 all but the most rigidly structured communes had disappeared


• why?


• design and communication were not sufficient


• when the money ran out, things got difficult


• gurus and factions emerged


• without explicit protocols, and with an emphasis on "likeness" and "cool"


• the cost in the desert got very high

"comprehensive design" in a different era

• power of info technology


• to prototype new social forms


• to enable individuals to take concerted action


• shift the locus of political action from the state to the community


• but also


• to enable the corporation above the state - ie, Paul Hawken


• strengthen the hands of those already endowed


• to make the distribution of resources harder to debate - when you base membership around cultural qualities, you privilege those qualities (ie, no people of color worked for whole earth catalog)

• in their hype for technologically-enable communities of consciousness - we celebrate the communities that look like us, and not those who don't


• the legacy is beautiful, and risky - a terrible form of social narcissism to try to choose a way of life for everyone

Q: tensions btw new communities and new left?
A: lots of animosity - Gitlin vs Brand - there were some people in the computing world who tried to cross back and forth - like Lee Felsenstein

Q: imaginary Native American?
A: yes, lots of it. but an imagined idea of the nomadic self. But also note image of cowboy - kind of forerunner of the image of the free lancer. Note, though, that these nomads were well-funded, well-educated.

Q: was the tension really so extreme?
A: for those at the edges, for others there was some drifting.

Q: comment on Lev Manovich's work on movements in mass visual culture?
A: Bowker's essay on legitimacy exchange. large-scale information display projects (as in 1940s) have a knack of making it possible for designer and viewers to imagine themselves as masters of the world - pleasure of information domination - also take techniques of leading organizations for mapping - make them pleasurable and give the designers the legitimacy of those organization - nervous of embrace of artist-scientist because of that legitimacy exchange

Q: take on women's movement?
A: was tracing masculinist worlds - communes were also incredibly socially conservative (with the Cockettes as a notable example) - the women who were in those communes left them and formed alternatives
[what about Adrienne Rich?]
Q: bifurcated and "went stealth"
A: computer as carrier of meanings

Q: well, depends on what you study -- more women in ecology movement and communism - women and gay issues alive in 1960s, and intersecting with technologies - pamphlets, passing things out, cooking... you get farther if you include that stuff

feminist science fiction

Fuller - modernist 1930s technocrat - the idea of encasing

Q: Free and open source software?
A: legacies

• computer emphasis on identity and performance of self as a very 1960s phenomenon


• references to Giddens: now the self is the "pre-eminent brand"


• consumer electronics as a source of identity


• do groups have a language for discussing the distribution of resources? or do they hang together? is it an honest language? like picking up business cards at Burning Man


• celebrate the New Left's attention to the people as a whole, not to build bubble communities like Fuller - a world we can all live in