杏吧原创

NETWORKS and webs are much more than the communications medium of our day: they are becoming the dominant metaphor to describe subjects as diverse as neurology and philosophy. How inevitable then that someone should write the history of a network of people who helped turn the internet from a computer science project into a mass medium.

Books, however, are not a network-friendly format. One page follows another in determinedly linear and one-dimensional progression. The way out for Fred Turner, assistant professor in communications at Stanford University and author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, was to focus on a central character: Stewart Brand. And what a long strange trip it has been for Brand, a man whose enterprises over the past 40 years all look, according to Turner, like precursors to the World Wide Web.

鈥淔or Brand, personal computers would usher in an age of direct democracy鈥�

Back in 1967, the public saw computers as the outward symbol of the military-industrial centralisation of power, and hippies were heading for San Francisco with flowers in their hair. A year later, a faction Turner labels the 鈥渘ew communalists鈥� were heading for the hills, and Brand published a compendium of things he thought they would find useful there, called The Whole Earth Catalog. More political hippies, such as the Students for a Democratic Society, derided the book as an indulgence for what later generations would call 鈥測ogurt-weavers鈥�.

Brand moved on. In 1984 he helped initiate the first Hacker鈥檚 Conference, which worked to create an identity for hackers as anti-authoritarian people who make computers do interesting, not malicious, things. A year later he co-founded the Whole Earth 鈥楲ectronic Link, or WELL, an early and influential online discussion forum and social network. For him, personal computers would usher in an age of plenty, and of direct democracy.

Full of cyberhope, Brand co-founded the Global Business Network (GBN) in 1987, a consultancy Turner describes as aiming for social change by taking 鈥渁n understanding of the economy as a network into the boardroom鈥�. And from WELL in 1993 came Wired magazine.

For Turner, Wired was more an expression of a social network than of dispassionate journalism: after all, GBN members would interview and publicise their colleagues and clients without always declaring an interest. They were wooed, successfully, by leading Republican Newt Gingrich and by telecoms companies campaigning against government regulation. One of the magazine鈥檚 most embarrassing moments was to run a piece called 鈥淭he long boom鈥�, arguing that the 鈥渄otcom鈥� bubble need not burst 鈥� not long before it did.

Brand鈥檚 trajectory from arty 60s mayhem to the halls of Congress reflects, Turner argues, a realisation that 鈥渢he natural world and the social world really were all one system of information exchange鈥�. Brand and his friends had got the network bug big time.

Of course, there are other very different, more analytical approaches. For instance, McKenzie Wark of The New School in New York, proposed in his 2002 book A Hacker Manifesto that hackers were an emerging class, the producers of 鈥渉acks鈥�. He said, 脿 la Marx, that they were defined in relation to the class that is trying to monopolise 鈥渋ntellectual property鈥�.

Excluding other perspectives is a characteristic of Turner鈥檚 otherwise engaging, accessible account. Not only does it express an exclusively US world view 鈥� you鈥檇 never know the web was invented by a Belgian and an Englishman in Switzerland 鈥� but it is almost entirely Californian.

And what of that simple, Californian faith that just to connect people was to be 鈥減rogressive鈥�? Turner seems to have swallowed the network metaphor whole 鈥� at a time when many see it as so last century. The medium now is not the message: it鈥檚 time to address the content of communication.