#technolibertarianism

[mandatoryrollercoaster]

Capitalism

Gotta love his optimism though.

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The urge to “hack” politics by bringing governance down to a manageable local level and by basing social integration on technologically facilitated forms of consciousness was one of the driving impulses behind the New Communalist movement. Now, however, the old hammer-and-saw wielding, do-it-yourself ethos of the back-to-the-landers had been fused to the craft ethic of computer programmers. Much as Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth colleagues had done at the Hacker’s Conference of 1984, Quittner and Dyson joined the cultural legitimacy of the counterculture to the technological and economic legitimacy of the computer industry. Married to a libertarian longing for the reduction of government, Dyson’s Internet became an idealized political sphere in the image of the forms of organization pursued by the Merry Pranksters, USCO, and many communes— forms in which authority was distributed, hierarchies were leveled, and citizens were linked by invisible energies. The Internet became both a metaphor for such a system and a means to bring it into being.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

[ash-greytree]

I have spent way too much time over the years arguing with techolibertarian/center-left dipshits about how bad certain aspects of social media are and why they need to be regulated and held accountable criminally and civilly rather than leaving it up to people to decide how to act/react.

I've also spent way too much time arguing with them in more recent years about why their preferred strategy of just getting privacy legislation and media literacy education legislation passed is not the panacea that they think it is, especially in the face of corporations who design their products to override peoples' regular judgment or existing media literacy.

From now on I am going to just focus on posting on my preferred social media haunts, be an active contributor to them, while said dipshits play pretend in their burning house and act like all it'll take are a couple bills on privacy and education to stop the harm from things such as the Hurricane Of Lies we face today.

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In the end, Newt Gingrich’s appearance on the cover of Wired signaled the high-water mark of the alliance between the techno-libertarians of the computer industry, the former counterculturalists of the San Francisco Bay area, and the social conservatives of the New Right. As the failure of the second “Cyberspace and the American Dream” conference suggested, the apparent similarity between Newt Gingrich’s Republican agenda and Esther Dyson’s vision of post-Internet politics hinged as much on shared rhetoric as on shared material interests. In the late 1990s, though, as the stock market began its final ascent toward its end-of-the-decade peaks and as investors clamored for shares in Internet stocks, that rhetoric reappeared. In 1997 Wired published two articles that together linked the cybernetic thought styles and countercultural social ideals of the Whole Earth world to millenarian claims for the emergence of a New Economy. Both articles would be developed into books, and both would be among the most widely cited documents to argue that thanks to the Internet, the laws of twentieth-century economics, not to mention the hierarchies of twentieth-century bureaucracy, had been left behind.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

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This frantic mingling of biological, digital, and frontier metaphors marked not only a collision of ideas, or even of historical thought-streams, but of communities of interest. Thrown together in Atlanta, the four authors of the “Magna Carta” had pooled the symbolic resources of the various communities they represented and created a contact language. Broadly speaking, this language served to facilitate collaboration across the groups it interconnected. Having agreed that computing was a “new frontier,” for instance, former hippies, young computer technologists, and government regulators could claim a common rhetorical ground on which to pursue their individual interests. In the “Magna Carta,” though, this contact language quickly came to serve a much narrower agenda. As Richard Moore has pointed out, the “Magna Carta” argued that digital technologies would enhance individual liberty, only to then confuse individual freedom with corporate deregulation. Cyberspace belonged to “the people,” argued Dyson, Toffler, Gilder, and Keyworth, and as such, should be governed by them. Yet, thanks to the rhetorical confusion of cyberspace and the marketplace and, particularly, of cyberspace with the computing and telecommunications industries, the notion of returning cyberspace to its owners took on an entirely new connotation. “The most pressing need,” explained Dyson and her colleagues, “is to revamp the policies and programs that are slowing the creation of cyberspace.... Indeed, if there is to be an ‘industrial policy for the knowledge age,’ it should focus on removing barriers to competition and massively deregulating the fast-growing telecommunications and computing industries.” What is more, it should allow “much greater collaboration between the cable industry and phone companies.” In a twist of logic reminiscent of George Gilder’s comments to Kevin Kelly on “nested hierarchies,” the document went on to argue that “obstructing such collaborations”—and, presumably, the near-monopolies that could result—“is socially elitist.” With a spectacular mix of hubris and hyperbole, the authors asserted that since digital technologies drove egalitarian empowerment, by definition, to restrain their technological development (and the empowerment of telecommunications and cable companies) would be to resist the forces of history, nature, technology, and American destiny all at once.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

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[B]y the end of the decade, computers, telecommunications, and the Internet in particular had seized the public imagination. In part, some have suggested, this came about naturally, as individual users encountered the Internet for the first time. As Nigel Thrift has shown, however, by the end of the 1990s an entire circuit of stock analysts, journalists, publicists, and pundits had also emerged. They spun out a series of self-reinforcing prognostications, and as they did, analysts and investors appeared to come to a consensus: computers were bringing about a New Economy and perhaps even a long economic boom. New, more entrepreneurial forms of corporate organization, rapid investment in high technology, and the ability to corral the intangible knowledge and skills of employees—all seemingly made possible by the suddenly ubiquitous computer and communication networks—were transforming America and perhaps even bringing an end to the business cycle itself. In 1999 even the exceptionally sober-minded chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, had come on board. With his inimitable diction, he explained to an audience of bankers in Chicago that “a perceptible quickening in the pace at which technological innovations are applied argues for the hypothesis that the recent acceleration in labor productivity is not just a cyclical phenomenon or a statistical aberration, but reflects, at least in part, a more deep-seated, still developing, shift in our economic landscape.” This vision of a New Economy was accompanied by an ongoing swing to the right in American corporate and political life. Although Bill Clinton, a centrist Democrat, occupied the White House from 1993 to 2001, the era witnessed an extension of Reagan-era calls for the rollback of government entitlements and the deregulation of industry; there was also an increase in the visibility of the Christian right. The elections of 1994 ushered in the first Republican majority in both houses of Congress for forty years. Led by Newt Gingrich, the House of Representatives in the mid-1990s pushed for the downsizing of government and widespread deregulation—especially in the telecommunications sector. Together with Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, and technology journalist and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Gingrich argued that America was about to enter a new era, one in which technology would do away with the need for bureaucratic oversight of both markets and politics. As Gingrich and others saw it, deregulation would free markets to become the engines of political and social change that they were meant to be. Thomas Frank has termed this vision “market populism,” and as he has indicated, in the 1990s it depended on a particular reading of the Internet. If the market was to be a deregulated mechanism of political as well as economic exchange, the recently privatized circuits of the Internet, with their free-flowing streams of commercial and noncommercial bits, made a perfect rhetorical prototype of the market-populist ideal. By the end of the decade, the libertarian, utopian, populist depiction of the Internet could be heard echoing in the halls of Congress, the board rooms of Fortune 500 corporations, the chat rooms of cyberspace, and the kitchens and living rooms of individual American investors. At its most extreme, Frank suggested, this ever-present ideology depended on a cybernetic understanding of information. By the end of the decade, he wrote, more than a few Americans agreed: “Life is in fact a computer. Everything we do can be understood as part of a giant calculating machine.... the ‘New Economy,’ the way of the microchip, is writ into the very DNA of existence.”

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

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Yet, for all its forward-looking verve, Wired’s vision of the digital future also carried with it a particular version of the countercultural past. In its pages, desktop computers and the Internet became tools for personal and collective liberation in a distinctly Whole Earth vein. “The ’60s generation had a lot of power, but they didn’t have a lot of tools,” explained Jane Metcalfe, cofounder and president of Wired, as well as Rossetto’s wife. “And in many respects their protests were unable to implement long-term and radical change in our society. We do have the tools. The growth of the Internet and the growing political voice of the people on the Internet is proof of that.” In the pages of Wired, the Internet, and digital communication generally, stood as a prototype of a newly decentralized, nonhierarchical society linked by invisible bits in a single harmonious network. The builders of computers and telecommunications networks, suggested Wired—men like John Malone of TV cable behemoth TCI, Frank Biondi and Ed Horowitz of Viacom, and Bill Gates of Microsoft—were working to construct the hightech infrastructure of a new and better world. So too were libertarian pundits and politicians. In the logic of Wired, they were simply social, as opposed to technical, engineers. Like their brethren in Silicon Valley, conservative author and media analyst George Gilder, futurist Alvin Toffler, and Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich were working to bring about individual liberation and government by contract and code. Together, Wired seemed to suggest, these two communities had set about to free America and the world from the rigid, oppressive corporate and government bureaucracies of the twentieth century.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)

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The idea that the material world could be thought of as an information system and modeled on computers emerged not with the Internet, but much earlier, in and around the government-sponsored research laboratories of World War II, and particularly around the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. These laboratories helped drive the development of computing in America. They also formed the foundations of the same military-industrial-academic complex against which Berkeley students marched in 1964. Somehow, by the 1990s, a metaphor born at the heart of the military research establishment had become an emblem of the sort of personal integrity, individualism, and collaborative sociability that so many had claimed the very same establishment was working to destroy.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006)