Fred Turner is the author of a wonderful book about the history of the American political and social counterculture of the sixties, and how it merged with digital utopianism, i.e. From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

In a recent discussion at the IDC mailing list, he contributed the following thoughts, which are well worth pondering.

My first reaction is this: yes Fred, you are probably right about the reasons for the failure of the strategies of the sixties, and about the vast superiority of institutions to marshall resources. But I also wonder, have we not entered a different stage now, in which at least the possiblity must be considered, of distributed networks marshalling not less, but actually more resources than many existing institutions. That the asymmetric competition may actually be won by the side of distribution?

For example, here’s what John Robb recently wrote at the Global Guerilla blog:

“Historically, information warfare was restricted to elites (government, media, parties, etc.). The onrush of Jihadi videos, political pro-war/anti-war blogs, and narcocorrido videos have categorically demonstrated that this state of affairs has changed. We now live in a world where infowarfare is accomplished by individual practitioners through an open source framework. Over time, the gap between those in the open source framework and the elites will widen in the favor of the former — we have only scratched the surface of where this empowering technology can go. While the new media infowar will be chaotic (as much as against each other as for or against the state), the bulk of the momentum will be with those that represent revisionist forces. Namely, those groups that want to change the status quo.”

Fred Turner on the Importance of Institutions:

“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 demonstrating — 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”