I’m done reading Fred Turner’s book from Counterculture to Cyberculture and towards the end I think he really knocked it out of the commune with a great summation. Before I begin quoting him; I must say how fascinating it was to see the fusion of the Counterculture (communalists) with technology and the libertarianism of the New Right led by Gingrich and the people behind the founding of Wired magazine. A lot of this combined to eventually deregulate the telecommunications industry with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which in my opinion was horrible.

It seems the reason that the communalists of the Whole Earth Catalog era and the Libertarians of the New Right got together was because of their shared dislike for bureaucracy and the communalists mission to form some sort of networked communal culture. A sort of “back to the land” naturalness if you will. The communalists obviously saw their utopia coming into being with the Internet; since it failed to come true with their communes. Gingrich’s vision was sort of neoliberal and small government, but he loved technology. Of course he also aimed to mix religious and social conservatism into the equation. Actually, I can’t help but taste a bit of neoliberalism/market fundamentalism throughout the whole nineties Internet economic bubble.

But here is where Turner really got down to it:

The rhetoric of peer-to-peer informationalism, however, much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the digital generation depend. Behind the fantasy of unimpeded information flow likes the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass-faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak. These tasks also continue to be the province of those who lack social and financial resources.

In the mid-1980′s, for instance, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that 25 percent of the overall Silicon Valley workforce-approximately two hundred thousands workers-consisted of illegal aliens, many if not most of whom worked in manufacturing. In recent years, both manufacturing and recycling have migrated overseas. And once again, women and the poor find themselves disproportionately engaged in high-risk work. Unprotected by American laws, factory hands in China and elsewhere labor eighteen hours a day at wages that often hover around thirty cents per hour building new computers. In China, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, workers earn similar wages breaking apart computers with their bare hands to salvage the parts within.

In the 1990′s, all of this work was invisible to those who promoted the Internet and the network mode of production as evidence of a new stage in human evolution. Like the communards of the 1960′, the techno-utopians of the 1990′s denied their dependence on any but themselves. At the same time, they developed a way of thinking and talking about digital technologies from within which it was almost impossible to challenge their own elite status.

I also found it interesting that on the communes in the sixties that work was divided between the sexes. Men were free in the sense of running the commune while women still did all the child rearing, cooking, and cleaning. All the talk of “freedom” and being anti-establishment was really an illusion.

I also find it ironic that the same people who feared that they would turn into fodder for the bureaucratic military-industrial-university-complex were elitist themselves. Oh, and I can’t believe that a magazine that I still like to read in Wired had or still has a libertarian bent.