This is amazing. An editor of the 1990s magazine Mondo 2000 re-emerges to explore the early origins of the internet. And ultimately he concludes that "The only reason the means of communication that shapes our cultural and political zeitgeist isn’t completely locked down by powerful media corporations is the work that these politically ambiguous freaks have accomplished over the past 40 years."
R.U. Sirius (yes, that's a pseudonym) first talked to John Markoff (What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer) and now Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism). There's a 'partly-suppressed truth' about the early days, argues Sirius, who remembers a very clear consensus forming about the need for more personal empowerment. "Everybody was suspicious of state and corporate authority," he writes, "even those who owned corporations." In the early 1970s 10 million Americans participate in a largely-forgotten commune movement, which complemented the DIY ethic of the punk movement. Turner extensively studied the evolution of these ideas and concludes they lead to the internet communities of today - the online public spaces.
I've been wondering if the roots of blogs go much deeper than a backlash to the Iraq war - but it's nice to see an academic professor try to ground it in the history of American social movements. There's a 40-year arc that starts in the fear of the atom bomb and gets a boost with outsider thinkers and people-powered movements. But through it all is one grand belief: that an alternative set of tools and communication can re-build the world.
It's advocated explicitly by the creator of the Whole Earth catalog, who brings his belief to the Well in the 80s and later Wired magazine (possibly ultimately determining the way we came to think aobut the online world). Nothing changed with the arrival of the personal computer; what made things happen was the growing desire people had to change the way they interacted with their world. "The internet arrived in a cultural context that had already begun to change things," Turner says. "And the cultural context substantially shapes how we use the internet, and what we use it for."
There's a surprising detour to Newt Gingrich's abuse of a misunderstood sub-set of the ideas, along with the anarcho-capitalists of the 90s. But this interview ultimately raises an interesting idea. Our public life today isn't a spontaneous reaction to the the current state of the internet. It has its roots in the dreams of thousands of forgotten liberals -- people who cared, and shared, and advocated, and built. Through 40 years of America's hopes runs a secret history -- and each day brings new moments when those hopes can finally be fulfilled.