## Metadata - Author: [[Fred Turner]] - Full Title: From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Category: #books ## Highlights - Following Shannon, Wiener viewed information as pattern within noise and therefore as a modelof material and social order. In Wiener's own words, disorganization and randomness, whether in the realm of information or in the realm of politics, was something "which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil. "42 Information systems, in part simply by virtue of being systems, exemplified organization. What is more, because of their feedback mechanisms, Wiener believed they sought to maintain order within themselves. ([Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=382)) - Cybernetic systems as Wiener saw them were self-regulating and complete in and of themselves, at least in theory. They had only to process information by means of their constituent parts and respond to the feedback offered, and order would emerge. Embedded in Wiener's theory of society as an information system was a deep longing for and even a model of an egalitarian, democratic social order. To the readers of Cybernetics, computers may have threatened automation from above, but they also offered metaphors for the democratic creation of order from below. ([Location 387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=387)) - Wiener did not create the discipline of cybernetics out of thin air; rather, he pulled its analytical terms together by bridging multiple, if formerly segregated, scientific communities. Wiener borrowed the word homeostasis from the field of physiology and applied it to social systems; he picked up the word feedbackfrom control engineering; and from the study of human behavior, he drew the concepts of learning, memory, flexibility, and purpose.45 ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=396)) - For many in the counterculture, though by no means all, the work of expanding consciousness and increasing interpersonal intimacy was not an end in itself; it was a means by which to build alternative, egalitarian communities. Although historians and pundits alike remain fascinated with the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the era, few today recall that in 1967 many of the hippies who made San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood the epicenter of the famed "Summer of Love" left the city early that fall and, together with thousands of others, helped launch the largest wave of communalization in American history. In the two centuries before 1965, historians and sociologists have estimated that Americans established between five hundred and seven hundred communes.70 Between 1965 and 1972, they have estimated that somewhere between several thousand and several tens of thousands of communes were created, with most appearing between 1967 and 1970.71 Judson Jerome, perhaps the most rigorous surveyor of the movement, has estimated that in the early 1970s, some 750,000 people lived in a total of more than ten thousand communes nationwide.72 ([Location 512](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=512)) - The New Left may have sought to build a new world, but it did so using the traditional techniques of agonistic politics. If elements within the New Left began to experience forms of solidarity like those they helped to build into the world outside the movement, they did so as an after-effect of their own organizing. Within the New Left, true community and the end of alienation were usually thought to be the result of political activity, rather than a form of politics in their own right.The reverse was true among the New Communalists. For the proto-hippies, artists, and mystics who began coming together in Manhattan and San Francisco after World War II, political activism was at best beside thepoint and at worst part of the problem. Like the founders of the New Left, these early counterculturalists wanted to challenge the social order of the cold war and, by doing so, bring about a new, less violent, and more psychologically authentic world. Unlike many in the New Left, however, most retained a deep distrust not only of traditional politicians, but of any and all formal chains of command. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=560)) - In late 1967 the San Francisco-based underground newspaper the Seed published a poem that gives a feel for the attitude toward politics that would soon inform the New Communalist movement:Beware of leaders, heroes, organizers.Watch that stuff. Beware of structure freaks.They do not understand.We know the system doesn't work because we're living in its ruins. We know that leaders don't work out because they have all led us only to the present, the good leaders equally with the bad.... What the system calls organization-linear organizationis a systematic cage, arbitrarily limiting the possible. It's never worked before. It always produced the present.fl1 ([Location 566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=566)) - In 1969 Theodore Roszak spoke for many when he argued that the central problem underlying the rationalized bureaucracy of the cold war was not political structure, but the "myth of objective consciousness." This state of mind, wrote Roszak, emerged among the experts who dominated rationalized organizations, and it was conducive to alienation, hierarchy, and a mechanistic view of social life. Its emblems were the clock and the computer, its apogee "the scientific world view, with its entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness." Against this mode, Roszak and others proposed a return to transcendence and a simultaneous transformation of the individual self and its relations with others: "This ... is the primary project of our counter culture: to proclaim a new heaven and a new earth so vast, so marvelous that the inordinate claims of technical expertise must of necessity withdraw in the presence of such splendor to subordinate and marginal status in the lives of men. To create and broadcast such a consciousness of life entails nothing less than the willingness to open ourselves to the visionary imagination on its own terms."82 ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=570)) - Like Norbert Wiener two decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information. These circuits presented the possibility of a stable social order based not on the psychologically distressing chains of command that characterized military and corporate life, but on the ebb and flow of communication. ([Location 601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=601)) - In the summer of 1967, a long-haired poet named Richard Brautigan transformed this vision into blank verse. Walking through the streets of Haight-Ashbury, he handed his fellow pedestrians a broadsheet on which he had printed the following poem:All Watched Over by Machines of Loving GraceI like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmonylike pure water touching clear sky.I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.I ([Location 603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=603)) - alongside his teaching and his work on poetry, McLuhan developed a fascination with technology and its role in psychological and cultural change. Most critics trace this interest to his reading of the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis.21 But McLuhan also drew extensively on the work of Norbert Wiener. As ([Location 788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=788)) - The Gutenberg Galaxy asserted that mankind was leaving a typographic age and entering an electronic one. With its sequential orientation, its segmented letters and words, McLuhan claimed, the technology of type had tended to create a world of "lineal specialism and separation of functions." That is, he held type responsible in large part for the development of rationalization, bureaucracy, and industrial life. By contrast, he said, electronic technologies had begun to break down the barriers of bureaucracy, as well as those of time and space, and so had brought human beings to the brink of a new age. ([Location 799](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=799)) - Not long after he started working with the Warm Springs Indians, Brand read a book that seemed to confirm his inkling that Indians might hold the key to a nonhierarchical world, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=894)) - The novel, he wrote in his journal, gave him "the answer to my dilemma between revolution against the Combine and preservation of things like old Indian ways. No dilemma. They're identical. As Kesey writes it, the battle of McMurphy versus Big Nurse is identical with [Warm Springs] Indians versus Dalles Dam [on Oregon's Columbia River] or me versus the Army."35 ([Location 898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=898)) - On October 15, 1965, Kesey was invited to speak at a rally against the Vietnam War in Berkeley. Organizers expected a fiery speech and a joining of the New Left and the growing counterculture. But rather than orate, Kesey simply stood up and announced to the audience, "You know, you're not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching.... That's what they do."46 He then pulled out his harmonica and played "Home on the Range." In keeping with psychedelic visions of transpersonal harmony (and with cybernetic and Romantic visions of a world linked by invisible currents of energy and information), Kesey rejected as fundamentally false the dynamics of confrontation called for by the moment and by the logic of the cold war more generally. He simply stood up and demanded that the audience not confront their enemies, but instead turn away from them and come together elsewhere.After some confusion, the audience ignored him and continued their march. But in retrospect, Kesey's action marked a key moment in the public emergence of a New Communalist style of social action. For the Free Speech and antiwar movements, to attempt to change society meant to pursue claims on the existing political structure. In both cases, demonstrators asked for changes in policies-the policies of a university in the first case and of a nation in the second. Kesey sought nothing from established politicians, other than to be left alone. Having rejected agonistic politics, he asked demonstrators to turn away from the centers of established political power and look inward, toward each other. In place of politics, he offered the experience of togetherness; in place of a rigid, violent society, he presented the possibility of a leveled, playful community. ([Location 961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=961)) - It was Kesey's earnings from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that had paid for the bus trip in 1964, and it was Kesey who was paying most if not all of the group's expenses (which Wolfe estimated at a hefty twenty thousand dollars per year). But neither Kesey nor anyone else would acknowledge this power explicitly. ([Location 974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=974)) - Rather than identify the power to lead with Kesey himself, Kesey and the Pranksters turned to various devices to distribute and, ostensibly, level that power. One of the devices was a simple spinner. The Pranksters regularly played a game in which a number of them would sit in a circle. Someone would spin the spinner, and whoever it pointed to would then have full power over the group for the next thirty minutes. Another tool they used was the I Ching. When important decisions loomed, Kesey and others-like hippies everywhere in the coming years-would throw a set of coins, find a correlated bit of text in the book, and use it as the basis for taking action.The spinner and the I Ching did serve to take power out of the hands of designated leaders. If the former turned group members into followers, it did so only temporarily, and only with the members' consent. If the latter threw up an obscure ancient fortune, it also demanded that one work out its meaning on one's own. In both cases, the individual remained empowered. But within the context of the Pranksters, these devices also served an ideological function. That is, they not only distributed some power among group members and decision-making devices, but they also diverted attention from the very real and centralized leadership Kesey was exerting. Having walked away from what they believed were the excesses of the traditional party… ([Location 978](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=978)) - In myth, if not always in fact, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters became San Francisco's wizards, and as they did, they made visible to mainstream Americans the possibility of living a mobile, tribal life, a world in which the role-playing and psychological fragmentation common to the institutions of technocracy dissolved in a whirlwind of drugs, music, and travel and left standing only a more authentic, and seemingly childlike, self. ([Location 1010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1010)) - One afternoon, probably in March in 1966, dropping a little bit of LSD, I went up onto the roof and sat shivering in a blanket sort of looking and thinking.... And so I'm watching the buildings, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller's notion that people think of the earth's resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat. I'm looking at San Francisco from 300 feet and 200 micrograms up and thinking that I can see from here that the earth is curved. I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see earth as round.There were no public photographs of the whole earth at that time, despite the fact that we were in the space program for about ten years. I started scheming within the trip. How can I make this photograph happen? Because I have now persuaded myself that it will change everything if we have this photograph looking at the earth from space.'The next week, Brand printed up a batch of buttons that read "Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth yet?" and started selling them at Berkeley's Sather Gate. ([Location 1030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1030)) - At one level, Brand's migrations throughoutthe 1960s represented a personal quest to find an alternative to the gray adult world he so feared in 1957. At another, though, they marked his emergence as an intellectual and cultural broker and, more broadly, the increasing importance of mobility and networking as an American cultural style. As he migrated from Stanford to the art worlds of Manhattan and the psychedelic bohemias of San Francisco, Brand became a key link between very different countercultural, academic, and technological communities. When he founded the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, he gathered those communities into a single textual space. ([Location 1068](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1068)) - That space in turn became a network forum-a place where members of these communities came together, exchanged ideas and legitimacy, and in the process synthesized new intellectual frameworks and new social networks. By coining the term network forum I aim to bridge two important ideas in science and technology studies: Peter Galison's notion of the "trading zone" and Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer's "boundary object." Network forums function like a trading zone in that they are sites where representatives of multiple disciplines come together to work and, as they do, establish contact languages for purposes of collaboration. Yet, for Galison, as for the anthropologists on whom he draws, trading zones are physical sites such as laboratories. In a 1989 study of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Star and Griesemer suggested that a media artifact could serve some of the same collaborative ends. Like Galison, they showed that scientific work required collaboration by members of a wide variety of subdisciplines. Those individuals, they argued, found ways to collaborate and yet retain their individual allegiances to their fields of origin in part through the creation and circulation of "boundary objects"-that is, "objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each." For Star and Griesemer, these objects included indexed repositories of collected objects, maps, diagrams, standardized forms, and objects with commonly agreed-upon boundaries but with content that could be viewed differently by different members.6 ([Location 1072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1072)) - A comprehensive survey of the Whole Earth Catalog's contents and contributors from its founding in 1968 through 1971 reveals that it featured contributions from four somewhat overlapping social groups: the world of university-, government-, and industry-based science and technology; the New York and San Francisco art scenes; the Bay area psychedelic community; and the communes that sprang up across America in the late 1960s. When these groups met in its pages, the Catalog became the single most visible publication in which the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion,… ([Location 1087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1087)) - Together, they came to argue that technologies should be small-scale, should support the development of individual consciousness, and therefore should be both informational and personal. Readers who wrote in also celebrated entrepreneurial work and heterarchical forms of social organization, promoted disembodied community as an achievable ideal, and suggested that techno-social systems could serve as sites of ecstatic communion.Over time, both these beliefs and the networks of readers and contributors who developed them, along with the… ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1093)) - Brand later argued that to the extent that the Whole Earth Catalog reflected a particular "theory of civilization," it was a… ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1096)) - In the late 1960s and early 1970s, intentional communities tended to be organized along one of two lines: either free-flowing anarchy or rigid, usually religious, social order.9 Both types of communities, however, embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness and, with it, the nature of community. They also celebrated the imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw… ([Location 1108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1108)) - "There is no political structure in Drop City. Things work out; the cosmic forces mesh with people in a strange complex intuitive interaction. ... When things are done the… ([Location 1113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1113)) - many communes, including New Buffalo, did not so much leave suburban gender relations behind as recreate them within a frontier fantasy. One man who lived at New Buffalo could have been speaking for many at other communes when he told Hedgepeth, "A girl just becomes so ... so womanly when she's doing something like baking her own bread in a wood stove. I can't explain it. It just turns me on."20 ([Location 1149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1149)) - William Hedgepeth recalled watching a long-time Hispanic resident tell some new, white arrivals, "You see the scenery. We see a battleground." ([Location 1158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1158)) - A Chicano member of New Mexico's Reality Construction Company commune told a visiting reporter, "Every time a white hippie comes in and buys a Chicano's land to escape the fuckin' city, he sends that Chicano to the city to go through what he's trying to escape from, can you dig it? What can you do with that bread out here, man? Nothing. Then when that money's gone, see, the Chicano has to stay in the city, cause now he ain't got no land to come back to. He's stuck, and the hippie's free. That's why they don't dig the fuckin' hippies, man."24 ([Location 1161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1161)) - "If [the commune dwellers] were going to go back to basics, they needed to know where the basics were. And I didn't either. But I set in motion a thing by which by purveying the stuff, and being a node of a network of people purveying it to each other.... I would get to learn whatever that network was learning. So it's being paid to get an education kind of thing. And it was designed as a system. I knew about systems. I had studied cybernetics."26 ([Location 1176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1176)) - We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory-as via government, big business, formal education, church-has [sic] succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing-power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. ([Location 1229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1229)) - The front cover of many editions of the Whole Earth Catalog featured an image of the earth seen from space. Simply by picking up the Catalog, the reader became a visionary of a sort. This vision, though, had been made possible by the cameras of NASA and, more generally, by the fact that he was a member of the most technologically advanced generation on earth. In the Whole Earth Catalog, cold war technocracy itself had granted its opponents the power to see the world in which they lived as a single whole. ([Location 1240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1240)) - "Walking to the bathhouse today, holding my new twenty-ounce hammer, I suddenly understood the Whole Earth Catalogue meaning of `tool.' I always thought tools were objects, things: screw drivers, wrenches, axes, hoes. Now I realize that tools are a process: using the… ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1247)) - The process would accomplish tasks but also would transform the individual into a capable, creative person. Within this process, artifacts such as calculators and books could clearly be of assistance, but so could other people. In addition to providing information on how to order material goods, the Catalog and, to an even greater extent, the Supplement, each told readers how to reach out to one another.… ([Location 1250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1250)) - Throughout the 1960s, Brand had visited communities ranging from rural Native American reservations to downtown Manhattan art lofts to the Stanford Research Institute. In bringing together the array of tools and ideas he had encountered among these groups, he relied on the principle ofjuxtapo- sition to provide a sense of excitement and, paradoxically, coherence, for the reader. "How you get energy is, you take polarities and slap them next to one another," he explained in 1970. "If you get into cybernetics and your head is just a minute ago full of organic gardening and ecology, then cybernetics starts to come alive for you in a different way." But this juxtaposition was never ideologically… ([Location 1257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1257)) - Within the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, each of these communities offers a set of tools, practices, and symbolic resources that can be taken up by members of the other-as ideas, if one simply reads the Catalog; as artifacts, if one buys the products on display; as practices, if one puts them to use. Moreover, the categories "Communications" and "Nomadics" do not merely rub shoulders; they make possible the exchange of legitimacy across conceptual and community boundaries. Equipped with a backpack and a book on cybernetics, the neotribal New… ([Location 1270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1270)) - the Long Hunter is simultaneously to survey the landscape as a whole and acquire the specialized knowledge of nomads and entrepreneurs. He is to reject middle-class consumer culture (the feminized "Mother country"), though not the process of consumption. Mobile, flexible, masculine, he is to consume knowledge and information and carry it with him on his migrations.In short, despite the talk of cowboys and Indians, he is to become a member of an information-oriented, entrepreneurial elite. Like a Prankster playing the "Humanoid Radio" game, he is to be able to channel both the electrical currents running through his calculators and radios and the mystical currents of "The Way." He is also to inhabit what Buckminster Fuller called an "outlaw area," a place to experiment outside the strictures of everyday law.39 ([Location 1311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1311)) - In the January 1970 edition of the Supplement, Brand printed portions of an article by physicist Freeman Dyson, father of 1990s dot-com guru Esther Dyson, that made this connection clear. Space, wrote Dyson, would always be big enough to provide a home for "rebels and outlaws." There they could "experiment undisturbed with the creation of radically new types of human beings, surpassing us in mental capacities as we surpass the apes."40 ([Location 1317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1317)) - In Buckminster Fuller's "outlaw area," and in Dyson's social-Darwinist vision of space, we can glimpse the first intimations of the libertarian "cyberspace" of the early 1990s. ([Location 1319](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1319)) - As it links communes such as Drop City and the Lama Foundation to centers of high technology such as SRI and groups devoted to techno-social exploration, such as USCO and the Pranksters, the Catalog also facilitates the blending of their symbolic repertoires. Out of this blending, there emerged the image of a new kind of person, one who moved from task to task pursuing information and using technical tools in an experimental manner for the advancement of himself or herself and society. ([Location 1322](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1322)) - As he had seen Ken Kesey do with the Merry Pranksters, Brand downplayed his own power within the system. Apart from the "Purpose" section at the start of each Catalog, his editorial comments and reviews tended to be brief, modest, and casual. They projected a take-it-or-leave-it tone and a sense that their author saw his readers as equals. Brand took the process farther by publishing the full financial accounts of the Whole Earth Catalog in every issue after the first. ([Location 1349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1349)) - As a theory of management, Brand's cybernetic notion of organization-as-organism allowed him to turn away from the agonistic jockeying for power that he imagined characterized life in the hierarchical organizations of the 1950s and toward a process that he called "Transcendental planning." This method of management, he explained, involved a recognition of one's individual interests and one's interests in the collective good. "You are you, and you are working in your self-interest because that's life, and you are also the event, or the thing you're working on, that's kind of big-S Self," wrote Brand. "And you can identify both ways and then try to accommodate both of those selves."47 ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1354)) - Brand paid everyone who worked on the Catalog the same hourly wage. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1359)) - the rhetoric of transcendental management masked the material distinctions between Brand's own interests and his place at the Catalog, and those of the people he worked with. At the end of the day, Brand made all key editorial decisions on the Catalog and determined what to do with the profits it generated. ([Location 1359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1359)) - In the "whole systems" context of the Catalog, as on many communes, to be educated meant to be conscious of the energy flowing through the natural world and of the fact that the material world was nothing more than a patterning of that energy. This was the essential insight of the Trips Festival, too, and of the LSD and multimedia experiences as interpreted by the Pranksters and USCO: we are all one. ([Location 1384](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1384)) - Even as they opened windows onto the universal order of things, the items in the Catalog promised to be "personal" technologies as well. First,within the New Communalist context, they aimed to transform the consciousness of an individual user. Second, they tended to be small-scale and to engage readers in practices in which no more than a few people could take part at any one time. Books had to be read alone or to small groups. Only two or three people could share in the paddling of a canoe. Even the largest devices depicted in the Catalog, school buses and geodesic domes, could hold only tens of people at a time. In listing after listing, the Catalog took items designed or built by industrial engineers working in a mass-production context and offered them as tools for individuals and small groups. Third, the Catalog emphasized that its products belonged to the do-it-yourself tradition of frontier elites: the cowboys and Indians of American myth, and now the commune keepers of the New Communalist movement. They were not simply tools to do a job; they were mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of American individualism. ([Location 1387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1387)) - The "tools" of the Whole Earth Catalog also linked multiple networks and institutions. ([Location 1395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1395)) - As he fixed a Volkswagen, for instance, the Whole Earth reader could perform the role of the amateur engineer, managing a technological "system" from above, and, once the car was running, perform the role of traveling hippie nomad. The user of the I Ching likewise could throw his coins and find himself imitating the ancient Chinese and the Merry Pranksters, and, in his attempt to read the I Ching's sayings as clues to a set of otherwise invisible probabilities, he could also act in concert with the probabilistic outlook of information theory. ([Location 1398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1398)) - Among the most prominent of the linking items were geodesic domes. By the late 1960s, these emblems of America's cold war inventiveness and will to survive a nuclear attack had been transformed into symbols of a holistic way of life. ([Location 1404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1404)) - If white-collar man was a "square," domes and their users were well rounded. If the ministrations of hierarchically organized governments and corporations had thrown the earth's energies out of balance, the dome's ferociously efficient management of surface tension modeled a world restored to energetic homeostasis. Although domes could be quite large, they could never become the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan or Chicago. They could never dominate a landscape, nor could they be broken up into cubicles. Instead, they could channel the energies of physics into creating glorious "whole" spaces. In their ability to distribute structural tension evenly across a wide area and in their refusal to concentrate it in pillars and pinnacles, Fuller's domes modeled the sorts of collaborative, distributed power arrangements that characterized the New Communalist ideal. They also modeled a holistic state of mind. Domebook One, for instance, recounts the history of one Swami Kryananda and his search for the proper structure within which to meditate. After trying rectilinear buildings and conventional domes, he concluded that "a geodesic dome is by far the best. It is truly an extension of the mind and resembles ... our seventh chakra located at the top of our heads."so ([Location 1411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1411)) - The dome was also an extension of cold war industrial engineering. The Cowboy Nomads of the communes may have lit out for new frontiers, but they did it carrying materials developed within middle-class consumer culture and its military-industrial complex. Lightweight aluminum tubing,plastic sheeting, even the blueprint for the dome itself-all had first been created or put to use in the sorts of industrial and military institutions the back-to-the-landers were fleeing. At one level, this pattern serves as an example of appropriation. As Kesey and the Pranksters had taken a bus away from schools and used it to "educate" mainstream Americans, or as the members of USCO had transformed the oscilloscopes of industry into tools for the production of mystical multimedia theater, the builders of domes were appropriating a cold war military shelter and redeploying it in a communal context… ([Location 1418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1418)) - Domes, then, like backpacks and calculators and many of the other "tools" carried by the Catalog, became terms in a contact language of sorts that was evolving for communication between the world of high technology and the tribes of the New Communalist movement. Domes embodied the counterculture's critique of hierarchical politics and the celebration of distributed "energy" common to the mythos of LSD and multimedia theater, but also the… ([Location 1427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1427)) - the dome was a socio-technical hybrid not unlike Wiener's anti-aircraft predictor; it was a material device that not only performed some function but also represented an emerging social system. In the case of Wiener's predictor, that system had brought together soldiers and engineers, the military and industry. In this case, the dome brought to life a system in which representatives of science and the counterculture could congratulate one another for being so forward-thinking. Like other "tools" in the Catalog, the domes… ([Location 1432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1432)) - In March 1969 dome magnate Steve Baer and his colleague Berry Hickman brought together 150 "World thinkers" and "drop outs from specialization" at an abandoned tile factory in the dry hills of New Mexico.51 As Brand pointed out in that month's Supplement, the factory was strategically located halfway between the nuclear test site at Alamogordo and a Mescalero Apache Indian reservation. Like its location, the gathering, called "Alloy," was to blend the global perspectives demanded by the nuclear age with the neotribal ethos of the communes. Over the course ofthree days, conferees gathered in a large white dome and conversed on a series of themes not far from the categories of the Whole Earth Catalog: materials, structure, energy, man, magic, evolution, and consciousness. "If I had to point at one thing that contains what the Catalog is about," wrote Brand soon after the fact, "it was Alloy."52What the Alloy… ([Location 1439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1439)) - "Evolution is any dynamically self-organizing system," intoned one anonymous commentator. "The process improves… ([Location 1451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1451)) - But what kind of world would this new elite build? To the extent that the Whole Earth Catalog serves as a guide, it would be masculine, entrepreneurial, well-educated, and white. It would celebrate systems theory and the power of technology to foster social change. And it would turn away from questions of gender,… ([Location 1459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004BKJVYG&location=1459))