How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology

How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons From the First Hackers’ Conference

By Fred Turner from the Department of Communication at Stanford University

In the mid-1990s, as the Internet and the World Wide Web went public, a utopian near consensus about their likely social impact seemed to bubble up out of nowhere. The Net would level social hierarchies, distribute and personalize work, and dematerialize communication, exclaimed pundits and CEOs alike. The protocols of the Net were said to embody new, egalitarian forms of political organization. They offered the technological underpinnings for peer-to-peer commerce, and with them, claimed many, an end to corporate power. And well above the human plains of financial and political haggling, suggested some, those same protocols might finally link the now-disembodied species in a single, harmonious electrosphere.

Individually, these predictions popped up across American culture – and ultimately, around the world – throughout the following decade. But where did they come from? And how did they suddenly seem to be everywhere at once?

I raise these questions not so much to try and answer them (oh, the pages that would take!) as to turn our collective attention backward. Over the last ten years, cyberculture scholars have examined myriad forms of social life emerging in and around the wires. Many have also turned a critical eye on the discourses of cyberspace and their ideological effects. Yet almost all have left these two tasks unconnected.

To see what I mean, consider the two dominant approaches to explaining the rise of digital libertarianism in America. In the first, scholars have pointed out that new technologies as diverse as telephones and airplanes have always generated utopian hopes (Agre 1998, 2001; Healy 1997; King 2000; Miller 1995; Sardar 1996; Sobchak 1996). “The basic conceit is always the same,” writes Langdon Winner (1997, p. 1001), “[N]ew technology will bring universal wealth, enhanced freedom, revitalized politics, satisfying community, and personal fulfillment.” In the second, critics have read techno-utopianism as the self-serving ideology of an emerging “virtual class” (Kroker and Weinstein 1994; Terranova 1996; Turner 1999; Borsook 2000; Barbrook and Cameron 1998). Some, like Barbrook and Cameron (1998), have focused on the ways in which versions of techno-utopian discourse have helped managed the structural and cultural contradictions of working in high-tech. Others, such as Kroker and Weinstein (1994), have asserted that a new, transnational class has emerged alongside networked computing machinery, and that its members have developed a techno-utopian ideology to support their class position.

Each of these perspectives has substantial analytical value. The first reminds us that the Internet and the Web were not the first “revolutionary” technologies and it invites us to compare our digital present to a steam-powered or newly electrified past. The second points to the ways that emergent social groups have turned networked computers into ideologically charged symbols and asks us to keep our eye on the ways that new media can be recruited into ongoing power struggles. Yet, despite their usefulness, neither of these perspectives explains just how digital technologies and utopian ideology came together. Instead, each reifies an analytical category – technology in the first case, class in the second – and then declares it a source of ideology. In the process, each walls off from discussion all of the social work that sociologists (Becker 1982; Berger and Luckman 1966), and particularly, sociologists of science and technology (Fleck 1979; Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987; Bijker and Law 1992; Latour 1991, 1993; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999), have shown goes into the construction of both ideology and technology.

To the extent that cyberculture scholars accept these walls, they tend to become readers of ideological texts. They might study the pages of Wired magazine and rail against its technophilic, macho prose, for instance, or search contemporary computer advertising for signs of virtual class self-promotion. This is useful work, but it leaves us critical amnesiacs: with it, we can articulate precisely where we are, culturally speaking, yet we can’t say how we got here. For that, we need a historical version of what Stuart Hall has called a theory of “articulation” (Hall and Grossberg, 1986, p.45; see also Slack, 1996). As Jonathan Sterne has pointed out, cultural studies scholars have long argued that “there are no necessary correspondences” between ideologies, practices, and social groups (Sterne, 1999, p. 263). Rather, those correspondences are established by relevant social groups in particular times and places. It is these highly local, time-bound processes we need to explore. In the case of cyberlibertarianism, for example, we need to go back into the past and identify the social work that has gone into aligning emerging digital technologies with libertarian political ideals. By uncovering this work, we can relocate contemporary cyberculture in its historical context. We can trace its emergence not simply to the rise of the Net or the Web, but to negotiations surrounding the integration of those technologies into ongoing social and cultural transformations. At the same time, we can help integrate the study of technological culture into the study of culture more broadly.

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