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Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver,

and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. Why do people think about technology

and computers the way that they do? That is the puzzle that Fred Turner answers in his classic book

from counter-culture to cyberculture, Stuart Brand, the whole earth network, and the rise of digital

utopianism. Turner writes, quote, for the marchers of the free speech movement as for so many other

Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralised

bureaucracy, and the rationalisation of social life, and ultimately of the Vietnam War.

Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counter-culture,

computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the counter-cultural dream of empowered

individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion. We have come to take all these

meanings, at least until recently, as inevitable products of computer and information technology,

as though the ideology was imminent to the technology in some inherent way. But like so many things,

it only seemed inevitable in retrospect. So where does the techno utopian ideology that has long

animated our techno dystopic world come from? The idea that the internet is a community, that the

...