Scrubbing off the Day-Glo

There’s this “bundle of beliefs” which I’ve been trying to untangle recently. I’ve mostly seen it among folks in the orbit of Silicon Valley, but it is definitely not exclusive to them, and it would be a mistake to scope it to a physical location. It has been appropriated and moulded by a whole set of connected social movements, over the years, and versions of it are mainstream.

After pulling on some threads, it seems to me that at the core of this bundle sits the belief that the world is nothing more than a complex and interconnected ecosystem of disembodied (or soon to be disembodied) actors who deal primarily in information, constrained by systems of incentive.

This often comes intertwined with strong visions of harmonious shared consciousness yet complete self-sufficiency, from which naturally flows a strong distrust of authority, and a hard to articulate passivity.

This is all very rarely made fully explicit, so it can be slippery. You can glimpse it in ideas which appear to be somewhat extreme yet plausible extrapolations of current trends. Ambitions of a fully remote, distributed, and freelance workforce, for example, or visions of a vibrant VR metaverse, or even hopes of brain/computer symbiosis.

It also occasionally shows up in the form of obvious-sounding solutions to widely recognised problems, which look like the result of sincere exploration of possible fixes, but only if we ignore the ways the search space was narrowed by unquestioned assumptions about the nature of the world. Systematic incentive re-design as the only way to mend science and academia, for example, or wanting to replace rigid and broken bureaucracies with a fully decentralised, automated, and completely trustless alternative.

I’ve started wondering where this cultural context comes from, and how it subtly shapes our views (yours truly included). Are we constraining the potential futures we consider, requiring they pass an intricate and sometimes incoherent filter?

Seeing the world as a globally connected ecosystem is not new, even if we’re strict about our definitions and exclude ideas of Karma or ideas from early Greek philosophy. Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos (an attempt at re-unifying science and culture into a single whole) dates to the early 19th century, for example.

But it wasn’t until the first half of the 20th century and the birth of Cybernetics that a holistic model adopted computational metaphors and information flow as universal building blocks.

It started off as an insight mathematician Norbert Wiener had while working on anti-aircraft guns during the Second World War: in order to correctly predict where the turret should aim based only on radar data, Wiener and his collaborators had to find a way to build a mathematical model of 4 interdependent parts: the plane, the turret, the pilot, and the gunner. But, in his words:

Since our understanding of the mechanical elements of gun pointing appeared to us to be far ahead of our psychological understanding, we chose to find a mechanical analogue of the gun pointer and the airplane pilot.

By successfully modelling humans as just another mechanical sub-system ingesting and interpreting information, reacting to the actions of other components of the whole, Wiener had found a universal vocabulary with which to describe all systems, laying the groundwork for a theory which could eventually be applied to every part of an organisation or society. The most minute organic element and the largest machine could be imagined as part of a single whole, constantly ingesting, interpreting, and reacting to information.

This idea was extended and formalised over the course of the Macy Conferences, a series of interdisciplinary meetings between 1941 and 1960. Cybernetics became a vision of deep human machine symbiosis, where coordination wasn’t the responsibility of some commanding officer, but was instead the result of complex, probabilistic interactions of humans, machines, and events around them.

Arriving for the most part post atomic bomb, Wiener’s theories (especially his 1950s popularisation “The Human Use of Human Beings”) became enmeshed in a world grappling with a renewed danger of a sudden apocalypse. The Cold War motivated a fear of huge and opaque bureaucracies, where unaccountable lunatics (or worse, a faulty computer) might inadvertently trigger the end of the world.

The generation coming of age during the Cold War began wondering, in the words of Fred Turner:

How [they could] keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had build and used them[.] And how [they could] assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world.

These pressures, accentuated by the illegibility of governing institutions, produced both a sense that political action was futile, and an urgent hope for radical change.

Cybernetics (and to a lesser extent Systems Theory), then, got appropriated by the counterculture who saw in it a deeply meaningful vision of a world where their fears and worries — information — naturally and directly impacted the behaviours of leaders, and the direction of the world.

“[…] the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony” (p. 5, From Counterculture to Cyberculture)

By building and growing new and better communities from scratch according to this vision, they hoped the structures enabling and benefiting from the madness and the violence of politics would naturally die out, eroded away, without the need for a confrontation within the existing system.

To be ideologically consistent, these environments should be self-organising, self-regulating, and decentralised. By taking the view of the whole first, it became natural to see parts as disembodied, interchangeable nodes which would use and react to the information flowing to them, none having direct control over any other. Each node should be able to view all parts of the whole, producing a unified consciousness.

Ken Kesey’s famous and deeply influential Merry Pranksters, and the more than ten thousand communes which were created in the late 60s and early 70s, organised themselves accordingly: there were to be no rules, no hierarchy. Action could only be emergent, and the group should not get in the way, instead mirroring, enabling, amplifying:

Kesey starts talking in the old soft Oregon drawl and everybody is quiet.

“Here’s what I hope will happen on this trip,” he says.

“What I hope will continue to happen, because it’s already starting to happen. All of us are beginning to do our thing, and we’re going to keep doing it, right out front, and none of us are going to deny what other people are doing.”

“Bullshit,” says Jane Burton.

This brings Kesey up short for a moment, but he just rolls with it.

“That’s Jane,” he says, “And she’s doing her thing. Bullshit. That’s her thing and she’s doing it.”

“None of us is going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody’s thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that’s what he’s going to do on this trip, kick asses. He’s going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to get pissed off about. He can just say, ‘I’m sorry I kicked you in the ass, but I’m not sorry I’m an ass-kicker. That’s what I do, I kick people in the ass.’ Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there’s not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we’re going to wail with on this whole trip.”

(p. 70, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

These ideas were also merged with theories of societal organisation coming from thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, a systems theorist and occasional mystic who saw the world as the reflection of a system of intangible patterns. From this belief, Fuller developed the ideal of the Comprehensive Designer, an enlightened individual who had acquired knowledge of these hidden rules and who could, if presented with enough information, perfectly distribute resources and direct society.

The counterculture embraced psychedelics and media as instruments of this broad vision, perhaps most fully developed by the Pranksters. Under LSD, the true patterns of information which governed the world seemed visible. Combining drugs with art, performance, and shared experiences, they hoped to irrevocably shift where individual consciousness ended and where the group’s began, the next step towards a more harmonious world ruled by invisible flows of information, without confrontation.

For the Pranksters, this meant that while there was an expectation of group activity, the direction it took could only be legitimate when it got defined through a bubbling consensus, or, failing that, through tools which temporarily usurped power from influential individuals, even if random.

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 would spin the spinner, and whoever it pointed to would have full power over the group for the next 30 minutes. Another tool they used was the I Ching [a Chinese Divination text]. 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.
[…]
Kesey and the Pranksters did everything they could to deny the fact of concentrated power in their midst. In a pattern that would become familiar around the digital technologies of the 1990s, they reassigned it, at least temporarily and at least symbolically, to devices.

(p. 65, From Counterculture to Cyberculture)

As these dynamics developed and deepened, the vocabulary of the culture turned towards casting life as a performance. People’s desires, their plans, world views, hopes and dreams, became their ‘fantasy’, situations became ‘movies’. This merging of the real and the imagined, treating everything as made up (perhaps as a way for the few who imagined being in on the secret structure of the world to see themselves as directors — backstage, somehow) made conflict unserious, something to be disarmed by staying removed from the dynamic of escalation and breaking expectations.

But it also deeply impacted individuals’ sense of agency. Making something happen began to be about imagining it happening, creating the pre-conditions for it coming true.

Well, it worked with the Hell’s Angels. They put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS, and sure enough the Angels came, […] and they became part of Prankster movie, in the rich ripe cheese Angel flesh. So they put up the sign THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES and maybe the Beatles will come.

It’s a matter of imagining them in the movie, The Beatles. It is like an experiment in everything the Pranksters have learned up to now. We can’t make the Beatles come out here to our place. We can’t cause them to do it in the usual sense. But we can imagine them into the movie and work them into the great flow of causal connection and then it will happen on its own accord. The sign starts the movie going. THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE BEATLES, and our movie becomes their movie.

(p. 177/178, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)

Like the denial of differing levels of power and influence within the group, this too relied on obfuscation: the Angels came because Ken Kesey knew them and explicitly invited them. The Beatles never did show up. The lines between wishful thinking and true cause were dissolving.

As the memes produced by the Pranksters and other key counterculturists travelled and spread, this rift between the imagined, internal world, and reality grew worse. While recent arrivals to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love went on deep spiritual journeys they saw as world-shifting, external observers could only see passivity, and festering, ignored community politics.

This pattern of failure repeated itself within many of the communes emerging in the 1970s. Though predicated on equality, on shared consciousness, and on enabling individuals to act unencumbered by backwards and deprecated norms, the reality of group dynamics and material needs often bit back:

When they tried to live these ideals, however, the communards discovered that embracing systems of consciousness and information as sources of social structure actually amplified their exposure to the social and material pressures they had hoped to escape. When the members of communes such as Drop City freed themselves from the formal structures of government, for example, they quickly suffered from an inability to attend to their own material needs and to form common cause with their neighbours.
[…]
In the absence of formal rule structures, many communes saw questions of leadership and power become questions of charisma. As a result, many suffered from the rise of hostile factions, and some from the appearance of nearly dictatorial gurus.
[…]
By the same cultural logic, individual communes routinely ignored the local communities among whom they settled. Drawing on notions of shared consciousness and supported by documents such as the Whole Earth Catalog, they imagined themselves as members of a geographically dispersed elite bound together by means of invisible signals. […] by articulating their class identity in terms of consciousness and information networks, many found themselves unable to recognize their own dependence on others.

(p. 256/257, From Counterculture to Cyberculture)

While the Merry Pranksters eventually disbanded, and most of the communes failed, the ideology which both helped to establish and incubate survived.

Thanks to ex-communalists now back in the relative mainstream of San Francisco, and to people like ex-Prankster Stewart Brand (who continued to produce content and create networks and spaces influenced by his experiences during the late 60s and early 70s) the idea of holistic ecosystems, shared consciousness creating harmony, and coordination without hierarchy found a new home within the budding personal computing community.

Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which he developed as a tool by and for communalists was particularly influential. The redistribution of profits generated by the Catalog after the publication of its last issue notably seeded both the Homebrew Computer Club and the People’s Computer Company.

Early experiments with personal computers, especially early networked computing and online communities, offered failed communalists a new and seemingly more fertile environment within which past ideals could be tried again.

Online forums like The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), created by Brand but mostly run by Matthew McClure and Cliff Figallo (both veterans of The Farm, an ex-commune), became an important networking hub for the Bay Area tech community of the early 80s, connecting them with members of an ageing counterculture. More importantly, it helped translate key principles of community governance from the physical world of the communes to the online world.

The web, after all, looked like the epitome of the information-first, interconnected society the counterculture had wanted to create, in theory, at least. As a tool, it came agonisingly close to enabling the shared consciousness which they had imagined would create global harmony. And as the platforms and forums scaled to previously unimaginable sizes, governance predicated on individual responsibility and environment design instead of top down control became the most promising option.

This culture stuck to the tools, even though the origins of the core memes was now mostly forgotten. Decentralisation, distrust of hierarchy, the sense that Online was a frontier and an alternative to the mainstream, and utopian visions of a disembodied, peer-to-peer future all became the ideology of personal computing, and subsequently of the internet.

As WELL member John Perry Barlow put it in his 1996 A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

As this happened, the ways in which these principles had failed the communalists also fell out of view. In fact, as the Internet scaled, the value of the insights which Cybernetics had inspired grew.

Building on the internet became all about emergence, out of necessity. The ideals of the counterculture had found an environment within which they were evolutionarily fit.

Their usefulness, combined with the web rapidly outgrowing its spiritual home, hid the fact that these were beliefs with baggage. The idea that action is all about creating the pre-conditions necessary for emergence, that the agent of change’s responsibility is to be the best version possible of Buckminster Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer, always external to the system they create, and that everything which stands in the way of perfect disembodiment (like trust, concentrated and discretionary power, tacit knowledge, illegibility) should be regarded with suspicion and disassembled --- we should not forget that all of these are cultural artefacts.

As the culture of Silicon Valley has come to be the culture of technology and of startups in the western world, which problems have these ideas made to look unsurmountable, which solutions appear taboo?

It’s important to note that the ideological backdrop provided by the counterculture of the 60s and 70s has proved incredibly valuable, on net. I doubt social networking, search, and many of the underlying structures of the internet would have developed like they did without this ideological and cultural background. They helped us think about scale, helped shape a useful optimism about the Internet, and many of the freedom-enhancing pieces of legislation (like the liberalisation of cryptography, and Article 230) could not have happened in a vacuum.

Even the purest descendant of the counterculture, Crypto, if nothing else, has provided a unique environment where a generation equally interested and capable in engineering, mechanism design, economics, and community management on the internet can develop and experiment. There are very few versions of the future where this isn’t beneficial.

But the model that our world is fundamentally an interconnected mesh of disembodied actors reacting to the ebbs and flows of information, constrained only by systems of incentives — like all models — is most dangerous if we forget that it is only ever an imperfect map of the territory. Like Vitalik Buterin recently explained in his 2020 retrospective, we will need tools and principles which don’t ignore the real complexities and messiness of human coordination and culture.

It’s especially important to remember that while some of our clearest visions of the future feel like natural and obvious consequences of our technology, said technology was first shaped by evidently non-neutral ideological beliefs. We’re not obliged to follow the directions set by previous generations.

We should consider whether the solutions to our problems involve things which we consider taboo, which feel risky and prone to abuse. Solutions which will never scale, never be made systematic, or which will always require considerable human trust, individual judgement, and discretionary power.

We might, on the other side of this soul searching, decide that our future requires reshaping our world to better fit countercultural ideals, as is implicitly the stereotypical goal of semi-utopian transhumanists or Crypto’s dogmatic factions. Or we might instead discover new ways forward, unconstrained by the lies we’ve forgotten we tell.