In his riveting account "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Fred Turner takes us through the rise of the digital utopian ideal that has become the framework from which we perceive technology and the Internet today. He traces the roots of this idealism to the communalism of the post-Vietnam counterculture movement (with focus on Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Network and the LSD movement legitimately (surprisingly enough) spawning in San Francisco as an offshoot of tests and experiments that were conducted in the Veteran's Hospital down the street in Menlo Park). The constituents of the Whole Earth Network appropriated technology and the Internet from their military-industrial-complex milieu and transmuted the metaphor of the "machine" from its Luddite associations into an enabler of a greater egalitarian network of transparency, access, and augmentation of the authentic self.I am barely in the early stages of the book, but one particular paragraph strikes me (hyperlinks to Wikipedia entries of the individuals added for context):
"Like the Net, my life is decentralized," wrote Dyson, reminding her readers of how much and where she traveled. "I live on the Net," she explained. "It's the medium I use to communicate with many of my friends and colleagues. I also depend on it professionally: It's the primary subject about which I write, talk, and consult, and the basis of most of the companies I invest in, both in the United States and in Eastern Europe." Likewise, Barlow reminds his readers, "I live at barlow@eff.org. That is where I live. That is my home. If you want to find me, that's the only place you're liable to be able to do it, unless you happen to be looking at me at that moment---physically...There really is no way to track me. I have not been in one place for more than 6 days since April." Metaphorically, Barlow and Dyson had become packets of information, shuttling from boardroom to conference to media outlet. Their sense of place had become dislocated and their sense of home, like their notion of a home on the Net, distributed."
(p.14, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture", Fred Turner, hyperlinks added and are not part of book)
I remember, when still in my teens (about ten years ago) and at that point in time still, in my ingenuousness, heralding the part of my week that was graced by the arrival of the latest edition of Newsweek and TIME back in La Malaisie as a temporal mecca of erudition, reading a glowing one-page in Newsweek about the rise of a new generation of "corporate gypsies"--armed with laptops (which were still clunking, unwieldy machines back then, and I had not yet seen one at that point in time) and mobile phones.
I'm just beginning to parse the paragraph in my head as I write this--what does it claim as implications?
1.That the Internet, in its distributedness, has allowed for the rise of such a distributed lifestyle
2. And yet in its distributedness, provides, in that paradoxical way, a singular rooted sense of home for that rootless, continually mobile part of society that Newsweek once called the "corporate gypsy" (and which we, today, broadly call a global citizen)
3. But to take it a stretch further, does the wide, far-flung distribution of the Internet then partially dissuade the need for actual physical distributedness? In other words, if we can vicariously live, experience, and communicate with worlds beyond our immediate physical contact through the distributedness of the Internet, amplified by technologies such as Google Earth, live web cams, Flickr, blogs, video, Photosynth (link to a phenomenal TED Talk here), will there perhaps be no longer any real need to be the literal corporate gypsy, physically jetsetting from one continent to another? Perhaps we are no longer metaphorically moving packets of information--instead we have, quite virtually, become packets of information trundling down the tubes in the many incarnations of our digital extensions (Facebook profile, web conference live feed, IM chat, live blog, etc.)
Speaking of the Internet providing a sense of home, the web-based communications startup GrandCentral has come to the forefront in the past few months since its acquisition by Google, but more saliently to this post, I had noticed them about a year ago through Project CARE. GrandCentral essentially allows you to own one phone number for all of eternity--which can then be directed to any or multiple physical phones that you own. With that comes a panoply of features, but more pointedly, GrandCentral partnered with the city of San Francisco and Oakland last year in a project that issues free phone numbers and voicemail boxes for the city's homeless. The one thing about not having a home or the wherewithal to acquire devices that can provide some semblance of contactable persistence (i.e. mobile phone) is that it completely obliterates the capacity for the homeless to pursue courses of action improving their chances of socioeconomic mobility. For instance, the homeless would be hardpressed to follow up on potential job applications if they are perennially nomadic, uncontactable with no home base or persistent touchpoint. By having a persistent phone number and a voice mailbox for life, they are essentially empowered with one of the basic hallmarks of (or perhaps even the right to, in this technological imperative age) a "home" in the digital age through which communication with friends, family, potential employers, and social workers is enabled.
--A heartening example of the true empowerment of technology, even in this often self-reinforcing resonant echo chamber that is Silicon Valley.
The Mission, San Francisco
