Source: Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Quotes
Inequality but also personal liberty
Digital networks, which depend on all sorts of logical and electronic hierarchies to function, had become the emblems of the theoretically “level playing field” of the ideal free market. At the same time, the “nested hierarchies” of the machines served as sym- bolic stand-ins for local tycoons. The material power of tycoons had been virtualized; in Gilder’s account, to control information was to control the world. This sort of statement could make sense only if one assumed, in keeping with the universal rhetoric of cybernetics and its social Darwinist cousin, bionomics, that the biological and social worlds were no more than information and that humans were, in the words of Norbert Wiener, not “stuff that abides but patterns which perpetuate themselves.” And it was a very short step from the notion that the control of information makes one an industrial tycoon to the notion that the tycoons of the information industries should naturally control other systems. In his interview with Kelly, Gilder had set up an array of rhetorical mirrors. Biological, economic, and digital systems reflected one another; each should ideally be decentralized, deregulated, and ruled by a series of information tycoons; each of the tycoons in turn should be the master of his own local, temporary, nested hierarchy.
Corporate deregulation
the “Magna Carta” argued that digital technologies would enhance individual liberty, only to then confuse individual freedom with corporate deregulation. Cyberspace belonged to “the people,” argued Dyson, Toffler, Gilder, and Keyworth, and as such, should be governed by them. Yet, thanks to the rhetorical confusion of cyberspace and the marketplace and, particularly, of cyberspace with the computing and telecommunications industries, the notion of returning cyberspace to its owners took on an entirely new connotation. since digital technologies drove egalitarian empowerment, by definition, to restrain their technological development (and the empowerment of telecommunications and cable companies) would be to resist the forces of history, nature, technology and American destiny all at once
- Newt Gingrich & the New Right
Telecommunications Act of 1996:
technologies—particularly communication technologies and the Internet—were seen as models of open markets and an open political sphere and at the same time as tools with which to bring them about. In that sense, the act treated the interests of the marketplace and those of the public as if they were fundamentally synonymous
Newt Gingrich & the New Right
To settle the “bioelectronic frontier” he seemed to imply, was a divine mission, not unlike the settling of America some two hundred years earlier. And if that was true, then the Republicans themselves represented the vanguard of a new kind of society—one that would be more technologically savvy, but also more religious and more conservative.