<html>
<body>
Hi All,<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Thanks
Trebor and all for such a thoughtful engagement with the book. I want to
offer a couple of clarifications and maybe a provocation or too and see
how they sound. <br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>First,
yes, I do think the influence of the anti-war movement on the winding
down of that war was less than many think it was now. At the same time, I
think the anti-war movement was enormously important morally and
socially and that it transformed American culture in other ways and
continues to. I've addressed some of this at length in my first book,
Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>I also
want to be sure that it's clear that I'm not anti-activist. On the
contrary -- it's partly because I want activism to be effective, and to
understand the ways in which it really has and hasn't changed things,
that I study the things I do.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>That said,
let me clear up one other misconception of my views. I don't think
activists -- in the '60s or now -- face a binary choice of working inside
the system or outside it. What I do think a lot of my research has shown
is that large institutions can concentrate, preserve and deploy material
power in ways that are very hard to combat with voices alone. At Kent
State, the state had the guns; the anti-war marchers didn't. When the
National Guard shot at the demonstrators, they went a long way toward
quieting the anti-war movement. Today, despite all sorts of protests, the
IMF is still able to deploy resources with a power unlike anything a
distributed network of activists have so far been able to muster. And
part of their ability to do that is simply because they are not a
distributed network. They are a bureaucracy -- organized by rules and
regulations, able to outlive their individual members, and able to claim
financial and other material resources on that account. Do protestors
have to join the IMF to beat them? Of course not. Will protestors be able
to substantially alter the course of IMF policy only by
<i>demonstrating</i> -- that is, displaying, even en masse -- their
dissatisfaction with the institution? I doubt it. In this respect, it's
worth taking a page from the environmental movement. I don't believe that
activists need to fight from within (on the contrary: I think that very
idea is a canard left over from the '60s, about which more in a minute).
I do think they need to form organizations that can persists in time,
collect and deploy material resources effectively, and most important of
all, reach out to people who might otherwise not be natural members of
social movements and enlist them in making change.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>So, about
the inside/outside problem. One of the most pernicious legacies of the
1960s in my view is the notion that object of our protests, the enemies
of our freedom, are hierarchy and bureaucracy, and that the alternative,
the site and source of freedom, is the expressive social network. This
view is full of problems on its face -- bureaucracies for instance were
formed in order to create rule-based systems of social inclusion that
could replace the far more exclusive use of cultural and social capital
within feudalism; the notion that self-expression alone is a force equal
to the material power deployed against it is romantic in the extreme; the
sense that simply by virtue of being networks social networks are in fact
open and inclusive is likewise overdone. Each of these are points it took
me 350 pages to make and properly support -- I humbly urge folks looking
for a substantial case to visit my book. But for the purposes of our
discussion, a brief summary: in the 1960s, the counterculture was not in
fact a unified youth movement. While the New Left did politics to change
politics, marching, forming SDS and other groups, engaging with
institutions, the New Communalists (whom Brand founded the Whole Earth
Catalog to serve) turned away from politics and toward technology, shared
consciousness and communication. They believed that these things would be
sufficient to form an alternative social world, one that could be brought
into being on backwoods communes, and that once that world existed, it
would set an example that the straight world could and would follow.
<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>Well, it
didn't work out that way. Most communes collapsed very early, and
depended on subsidies from their wealthy, college-aged, largely white
membership until they did. In the place of rules and regulations, many
found themselves governed by charisma, hustle, and those who could muster
the most cool. In other words, they didn't do away with politics; rather,
they drove it out of sight, away from the realm of rules that could be
challenged and into the cultural sphere, the realm of personality and
attitude, in which it couldn't. Challenge Kesey on the bus? Uncool. Call
out a long-haired bully at Drop City? Uncool. Challenge the largely male,
heterosexual dominance of many rural communes? Nope.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>This hope
for alternative and improved communities built around small-scale
technologies, communication and social networks dominates much discussion
of the web today. And in some ways, it has been very empowering. The
barriers to entry to participation in dialogues have never been lower.
But there are still barriers. In lieu of bureaucracy, many systems work,
as communes did, on the basis of interpersonal connections and cultural
affinity. Many still do a very bad job of reaching out to people unlike
themselves -- which I take to be one of the best tests of an effective
social movement and as an effective way to distinguish one from a
technologically enabled salon. When social practice is organized around
performance -- of style, of personality, of communication -- rather than
the search for and pressing of levers for material social change, my
sense is that personality and charisma, social and cultural capital, tend
to dominate and to exclude. And even where they don't, communicative
communities, detached from persistent and organized means for claiming
and deploying material resources, remain insufficient for making social
-- as opposed to cultural or symbolic or intellectual -- change.
<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>One last
thought: My book has often been misread as arguing that the hippies
brought us contemporary cyberculture. In fact, what I argue is that a
technology-based mode of networked sociability emerged during World War
II at the epicenter of military research culture, and especially at MIT.
The New Communalist wing of the counterculture embraced that style and
over the next thirty years translated it not only into a story about how
computers would liberate us (by making all of us part of the network
society born in small arenas during the war) but also into a very
powerful way of influencing key American institutions (such as the
Pentagon and major corporations). As I try to show in the book, we may
imagine that by participating in communication networks we are de facto
opposing the centers of power in our world. But networks, technology, and
communication are at the heart of power today, as they were fifty years
ago. Now however, they carry with them the cultural legitimacy of
bohemian cool. In this sense, contemporary styles of communicative
activism often look to me like celebrations, rather than critiques, of
the contemporary organization of power. The work of some groups --
Critical Art Ensemble, for instance -- notwithstanding, it's been a long
time since I've seen truly dangerous art.<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>I'm still
looking though. <br><br>
Best,<br>
Fred<br><br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><br><br>
<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab><br><br>
At 07:26 AM 5/10/2007, Trebor Scholz wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Thanks very much to Fred Turner
for joining this forum. I highly<br>
recommend his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture.<br><br>
Fred Turner argues that the political influence of cultural
resistance<br>
in the 60s and 70s is vastly overestimated. Friends of mine who
claim<br>
that they stopped the Vietnam War with the San Francisco Summer of
Love<br>
and ten years of persistent demonstrations against the Vietnam war
would<br>
not be too pleased. Fred would be frank, he'd simply disagree. <br><br>
He is also cautious with his beliefs in the power of information;<br>
revealing the facts and mobilizing affect may not change much at
all,<br>
he'd say. He has been there- he was a journalist for ten years.
That's<br>
tough stuff to swallow for artists with political intent. As it is,
it<br>
needs a whole lot of faith to believe in art as anything beyond the<br>
market. So, what does he suggest? <br><br>
Fred learned to respect the power of mighty brick and mortar<br>
institutions and suggests to link (social) networks to these power<br>
centers that are often wrongly portrayed as villains, he says. His<br>
argument is grounded in his research of the Back to the Land
Movement,<br>
the communitarians who distrusted everybody over 30. Their attitude,
in<br>
fact, did not change much at all, Fred argues.<br><br>
I agree that the times for binary oppositions are over and that
hybrid<br>
interventions are the most hopeful sites for social change today. <br>
Fist raising rhetoric is not helpful. Simplistic activism is not<br>
helpful. It makes people feel radical, it gives us a rush, it sounds<br>
cool but it shuts down the other side and it does not convince many<br>
people. I don't think that faux radicality moves us ahead. <br><br>
Changing things from the inside, however, is an old and definitely<br>
dangerous, tactic with many historical precedents; many agents who<br>
worked for the Stasi motivated their actions exactly like that. For<br>
Fred, the powerhouses of real social change are hegemonic
institution<br>
and the only actual chance for networks to not kid themselves in
their<br>
aspirations for building alternatives is to infiltrate those<br>
institutions. Did I get that right, Fred?<br><br>
If so, how do you make sense of the social networks-- mailing lists
and<br>
BBS's of the 90s-- that were the intellectual back bone and
inspiration<br>
of social movements like those in Seattle, Genoa, ...? What about<br>
February 2003 with its ten million Iraq war demonstrators,
coordinated<br>
through the Internet? Sure, the WTO is still around and even ten
million<br>
demonstrators did not stop the war. Does not your argument give up
on<br>
cultural resistance as part of a multiplicity of contributions to
social<br>
change? <br>
<br>
Trebor<br><br>
Trebor Scholz<br>
<a href="http://collectivate.net/journalisms/" eudora="autourl">
http://collectivate.net/journalisms/</a> </blockquote><br><br>
___________________________________________________________________<br>
Fred Turner<br>
Assistant Professor<br>
Director of Undergraduate Studies<br>
Dept. of Communication<br>
Building 120<br>
Stanford University<br>
Stanford, CA 94305-2050<br>
O) 650-723-0706<br>
Fax) 650-725-2472<br>
<a href="http://fredturner.stanford.edu/" eudora="autourl">
http://fredturner.stanford.edu</a></body>
</html>