//lst: fred turner on iDC

"Trebor and I have talked for a long time now about the links between American countercultural ideals and the contemporary blurring of work, play, sociability and exploitation. In my last book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, I tried to get at some of the cultural roots of these new fusions. What stood out most to me in the 1960s was the deep critique of bureaucracy: in the two decades after World War II Americans of all sorts of political persuasions feared that working in large, rule-governed organizations would fracture the individual psyche. To become a psychologically whole person, one had to find ways to break down the walls of the organization, link minds and bodies with the like-minded, and make the work of living the work one did *for* one's living. In the 1960s, these ideas dominated the thinking of those whom I've called the New Communalists -- a generation of mostly young, college-educated or college-bound folks who formed the largest wave of communal activity in American history. Today of course, these ideas underpin all kinds of new modes of digitally enabled production and sociability. And they do so very concretely. Here in Silicon Valley for instance, the Burning Man festival, held annually in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, encodes many of those values and at the same time, provides a ritual structure with which to celebrate dominant modes of engineering practice at firms like Google (for a paper on this theme go to http://fredturner.stanford.edu). "


[https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-June/003510.html, 12.6.2009]