One finds oneself on a given day — as the semiretired do — talking about the old days. In this case, the days of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and — more explicitly — his follow-up Co-Evolution Quarterly.
Rattling on with a colleague, we both in our own ways recalled a time when the counterculture had some sway over technology. And that seemed to support the notion of a hopeful future. It seemed to ride on Brand’s vision.
Looking back, many long-time observers of technology recall a period when industry was driven by a more idealistic, almost countercultural vision The Co-Evolution Quarterly was as focused as a quarterly could be on demystifying a modernizing world, and gleefully carrying forward the Whole Earth’s tool-based approach to social change.
Key topics were technology and climate. It also ran rebel R. Crumb’s more potent ecological comic takes.
Why Co-evolution? It said to me that we are all in this together, although we have different paths — that different disciplines can progress best if in deep communications with each other. It said that technology — wrapped as it was in Defense and depersonalization — could have positive impact.
Whatever the ethos was at some midway point between hippies and yuppies, it was naturally seen differently by different viewers. But Co-Evolution’s idea of technology seems a long way away from the increasingly darker shadow technology cast today.
Some in its leadership seem to feel they sit on a trove of magic — the browsing data of users pecking at keyboards or phone screens — that they must protect from competitors by all means necessary.
Wouldn’t Andy Grove re-title “Only the Paranoid Survive” — if he could?
This week, an article in The New York Times put a spotlight on Paulina Borsook, a writer whose 2000 book, Cyberselfish, dared to challenge the leaders of Silicon Valley. One should count her thesis along with those of Shoshona Zuboff, Jaron Lanier, and a few others.
Her early critique feels profoundly relevant as the tech industry’s cultural dominance comes under increasing scrutiny.
In its day, Borsook’s book Cyberselfish was not widely recognized. As the fates had it, her career was somewhat sidetracked, and no further books followed. But today resonating tellingly is her early sense that the greater good was giving way to merit measured by more money than the other guy, under the guise of technology’s demands.
By my measure, her critique of the Siliconists was pertinent particularly regarding regulation. Anyone interviewing the parade of tech evangelists could sense that arrogance, but I must admit that I saw their dismissal of society’s larger interests as expedient but not full-fledged hate. But Borsook saw that they held governments, and in turn, rules and regulations, unto loathing.
What I noticed here was her calling out of John Perry Barlow, a co-evolution fellow traveler and, like Brand, part of the WELL Community movement that generally expounded a future cyberspace.
NYT here quotes Barlow’s Independence of Cyberspace.
“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather,” the declaration stated. “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Certainly, fighting words. But, it’s only as one must expect when evangelists shift into Manifesto Mode.
Still, it sounds like a tune that would fit in an iPhone playlist today for Ellison, Musk, or Zuckerberg.
The song of the Tech Bro’s has been trapped to view ever in amber in Vice President J.D. Vance’s dramatic dissing of European leaders in February. It also seethes in between the lines in this week’s release of a National Security Strategy.
I come from the afterdays of WW II, when many of the rich seemed humbled by and beholden to working people who fought in the big one. It called for a useful modicum of respect.
Today, those we now call Tech Bros don’t have that touch of class, seem intent on getting richer than is possible, or at least not getting a dollar poorer. That’s painted with a broad brush — there must be some light glimmer among some of them.
The tech bros concerns seem firmly embedded there as the US leadership proclaims: Not only do we want our freedom, we want you to bow to it.-JV