Fred Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture”, MondoGlobo Network, 2006/11/19 December 8, 2007
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: fred turner, stewart brand
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RU Sirius wrote …
Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism digs more deeply into how the seeds of a certain view of how the world works (cybernetics) was planted into the emerging 60s counterculture largely through the person of Stewart Brand, and how that seed has succeeded — and how it has continued to exfoliate in new and unexpected ways. [....]
What Turner does in From Counterculture to Cyberculture is trace an arc that starts with the very mainstream American interest in cybernetics (particularly within the military) and shows how that implicit interest in self-regulating systems leads directly into the hippie Bible, the “Whole Earth Catalog” and eventually brings forth a digital culture that distributes computing power to (many of) the people, and which takes on a sort-of mystical significance as an informational “global brain.” And then, towards the book’s conclusion, he raises some unpleasant memories, as Brand’s digital countercultural elite engages in quasi-meaningful socio-political intercourse with Newt Gingrich’s Progress and Freedom Foundation and other elements of the mid-90s “Republican Revolution.”
Alex Pang, AfterTV, 2006/03/16 December 8, 2007
Posted by daviding in Talk Audio Download.Tags: alex pang
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Andrew Keen wrote …
Alex Pang, Research Director, … a trained historian with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, has written a fascinating book about solar eclipse expeditions in Victorian England. So it was a treat to talk with Pang about technology and science in both 19th century England and in 21st century Silicon Valley.
