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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
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When I say coming to you from the Stanford campus,
I mean Stanford, California in the Golden State
on the western edge of this battered Republic of ours
that goes by the name of the United States of America.
Land of the free, home of the brave has stated
in the stand-up, kneel-down anthem they sing
at our football games.
It would be nice if the first thing that came
to people's minds when you mentioned Stanford University,
were entitled opinions.
But we're not there yet friends, we're not quite there yet.
For now, the first thing that comes to mind is Silicon Valley
and the great Cambrian explosion of computer technology
and digital gadgetry.
Those of you who follow the show on a regular basis know
that I don't drink the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.
My allegiance is to the three-dimensional world, not the sorcery
of the cell phone or laptop screens.
But let's give credit where credit is due.
If you're not listening to this show on KZSU's live radio broadcast,
then you're probably listening to it thanks to computer technologies
that were created in Silicon Valley.
Many of them incubated on the Stanford campus home
of entitled opinions.
We've devoted a few shows to Silicon Valley related topics over the years.
But today we're going to plunge much deeper into the history and ideas
that lie at the core of our cyber culture.
And when I say history and ideas, I mean exactly that.
Some people believe ideas are super structural outgrowth of the material conditions
that shape the course of history.
Others believe ideas are generative and matricial
that they determine that it erections and forms that history takes.
I for one tend toward idealism in the sense that I believe ideas,
not always, but often are the incubators of history.
I'm not sure where my guess stands on this issue,
yet I've read enough of his work to know that in addition to being a renowned scholar
of media and technology, he is also, and perhaps even first and foremost,
a historian of ideas.
He is always on the lookout for the ideas that sponsored the techno digital
multimedia architectural forms of contemporary culture.
Fred Turner is a professor in the Department of Communications here at Stanford.
In fact, he currently chairs that department.
He is well known for his seminal book from Counter-Culture to Cyber Culture,
Stuart Brand, the whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism,
which came out in 2006 with the University of Chicago Press.
In 2013, he followed up that book with what he calls its prequel,
the Democratic surround, multimedia and American liberalism from World War II
to the psychedelic 60s.
In both works, Fred Turner seeks to uncover some of the main ideas that led to the rise
of cyber culture and the multimedia platforms of what he calls the democratic surround.
Today, we're going to talk about the ways these phenomena intersect with and arose
from a distinctive set of underlying ideas whose history he reconstructs
in these two major books.
Fred Turner, welcome to entitled opinions.
We're delighted you could join us today.
Hi, Robert.
I'm thrilled to be here.
Now, before you received your PhD and became a professor here at Stanford and also at Harvard,
I gather, you worked as a journalist for about a decade.
And in the 1990s, you even published a book that goes of combat about how we view the Vietnam
War in America.
And I'm guessing that these years that you spent as a freelance journalist had a lasting influence
on how you approached the topics you deal with in your two most recent books.
Am I right about that?
You are.
You know, it's interesting.
The struggle when you're a journalist, I think, is to bring ideas alive very much in terms
of the lives of people in the stories and among your readers.
I'll never forget the first time I brought in an essay to my editor at the Boston Phoenix,
which was an all-weekly embossed and she started laughing.
And I said, why are you laughing?
He said, well, you've brought me a thumb sucker.
And a thumb sucker in her idiom was a story that started not with a person,
but with an idea.
And so a lot of what I learned as a journalist and what I've tried to implement as a scholar is figuring
out how patterns of ideas and the lives of individuals and small groups intersect.
I kind of follow William Collins Williams.
I don't think there are any ideas except inside things or inside the social worlds that carry
and move and build things.
No ideas in our minds.
You don't mean that?
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I suppose there are ideas in our minds.
But, you know, as a historian, those things are very hard to track.
You know, one of the great fallacies in media studies is trying to figure out what people think
of media when they encounter it.
It's extraordinarily difficult to get inside people's heads.
On the other hand, people leave all kinds of traces of what was in their heads,
in their writings, in the things that they build and the media that they design.
And it's those traces that I try to find and follow and interconnect.
Right.
So on that, those two poles that I mentioned between those, those who might feel that it's essentially
the material, the infrastructure conditions that really determine what we think
and what our ideas are.
And the idealist tradition I alluded to mostly associated with Hegel is the great champion
of that where ideas are what are opening up the paths of the future.
And that it somehow begins there.
And then history is just a kind of rendering it real and concrete.
I would describe myself as a qualified idealist on your scale.
You know, I do think that ideas matter enormously.
And I don't think they just come from encounters with the material world.
What I've been interested in for a long time is in this sort of little odd
for Silicon Valley, someone working here.
I'm actually less interested in change than I am in continuity.
I'm interested in how things come together, hold together for a period of time.
And then for reasons that are not always obvious at the start, begin to change and change wholesale.
You know, each of the books I've done has been a book that studies a period of about 30 years
at the beginning of which everyone agrees that something is true.
And at the end of which something has changed, such that people no longer see it the same way.
So ideas flow through communities, they flow through things, they shape and determine.
But they aren't the only things that are working.
And I'm always struck by the residue of earlier ideas.
I'm struck by how people will live their lives and die.
And yet the work that they did is a generation will live on in our buildings.
In our stories, in our architecture.
And we who try to have new ideas have those in terms set in part by the forms left by earlier communities.
And that's kind of what I want to get at.
I want to get at the ways in which the lives of earlier groups shape the possibilities of our own.
Well, you're preaching to the choir here.
I wrote a book on the relations that the living maintained with the dead and the way in which legacy
are offering themselves up for retrieval, creative retrieval and repurgation into the future.
And this kind of dynamic between continuity and rupture or rupture and continuity and rupture.
So I think I know exactly what you're talking about from maybe different parts of the cultural horizon.
But today we're here to talk about the work that you're at least as far as I know your best known for,
which is being the premier historian of Silicon Valley in some ways and of cyber culture.
But before we talk about that very important book, your book on counterculture to cyber culture,
is there anything about your book on Vietnam that you would like to mention?
Well, I think there are two things about the Vietnam book that might be of interest.
The first is that it's a book that takes up the idea of cultural trauma,
the idea that a culture can be broken by an experience like a war.
And it tries to trace that idea through the lives of a group of veterans that worked for a long time with a group of traumatized combat vets
and through films and try to make a connection between individual lives and collective experience.
And I don't know that the book was entirely successful, but that effort to connect individual lives and collective experience
really animates the counterculture book when it comes.
The other thing that comes from the '60s, the Vietnam book that sets up the counterculture book is important to know ahead
is that when I wrote the Vietnam book, computers were the emblem of the Cold War military state.
So, as I finished that book, I was just sort of amazed.
I moved to California to go to graduate school, so wait, a little bit more context.
I was a journalist for 10 years and toward the end of that time I was writing books.
I was teaching part time.
I had books with footnotes and it became clear that I would be coming a professor,
but I wasn't getting paid like one.
And if I wanted to have a real job, I would need to go back for a PhD.
So, I was 35, I had a family, I lived in Boston, and we moved to San Diego where I went to graduate school and
communication.
And when I got to San Diego in 1996, there was this wired magazine in front of me.
And it was just, it was all psychedelic colors and big picture of the whole earth on the front
and daisies and all the psychonography that I recognized from the counterculture of the '60s.
And it included writers inside like Stuart Brand who were major countercultural figures.
And I knew the counterculture from my Vietnam book, but it was completely opposite what I thought
I was supposed to be seeing because when I finished the Vietnam book, which was right before I came to school,
I really had seen computers as everything that was wrong with America in the war.
And I thought hippies were against technology, hippies were against computers especially.
So the question that began to fire me up was, how did these countercultural ideals and people
get associated with this device and turn it into a device for liberation when it had so clearly been
imagined as a device for repression during the Vietnam era?
Is that because there was not mass access to computers and that computers were so big with
mainframes and that they had a central control and an exert of them like the military or the government?
I think the central control piece is really important.
Yeah, I think that's really important.
The free speech movement in Berkeley in 1964 had a lot of causes, but it's approximate
trigger. The thing that got people marching in the street was the fact that student records were
being computerized. Now, you think about what that means to us today, our computers are
convenience. No one would even think about it. But for the students at Berkeley at the time,
the notion was that somehow the man, the system, the single power, was absorbing their bodies and
their life force into this ethereal disembodied, highly technicist realm of the computer.
They weren't entirely wrong.
Maybe not in the long haul. No, they weren't, but they would march with with computer cards hung
around their necks that said FSM or, you know, the famous phrase in the 60s, "I am a human being,
do not fold spindle or mutilate," came from the print on the IBM punch cards that said,
"Do not fold spindle or mutilate." But the idea that we would be turned into data in that period
was like being turned into fodder for a war. It was horrifying. It was being dehumanized.
So how do we get from that to wired? And that is the topic essentially of counterculture to
cyberculture, correct? At least one of the main... Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. That was the puzzle
I was trying to sort out. And since some of our listeners will not know the thesis or the kind of
themes and arguments that you make in that book, could you just summarize how we go from
counterculture to cyberculture? Absolutely. Let me tell it backwards,
backwards historically. So, and sort of this sort of how I worked it out. So, I got to wire magazine in 1996
more or less and I start thumbing through it and I see that there are a series of people in there
who I know and recognize from the 1960s. People like Stuart Brand who was the founder of the
Holor's catalog, one of the most important countercultural documents of the era started in '68.
I'll say much more about that in a moment. Howard Rangold had been an editor in Holor's products,
Kevin Kelly, another figure very closely associated with the group.
And so, I did what a journalist would do. I started following them back through time and I saw that
before there was wired, there was something called the Global Business Network, which is a consulting
firm that brought a lot of these folks together. And before the Global Business Network, there was
something called the Whole Earth Electronic Link and wait a minute, what was that? That was an early
virtual community. Then back through that, I found Coevolution quarterly and ultimately the
Holor's catalog. And what I began to see, and this is sort of a journalist dream, was that there was
an interlinked network of people who had been working together more or less without interruption
from the early '60s all the way to the early '90s for 30 years. And that was incredible. And so,
that gave me the perfect vehicle to follow, to understand how the ideals of the early '60s
morphed and became the ideals of the early '90s. And the other thing that happened,
then this was really important, was that I got over my training about the counterculture. When I
started this project, like almost anyone else my age, I had been reading the histories of the '60s
written by people who lived through the '60s and had a stake in them. And they wrote those histories
to say, "We do our politics and our culture at the same time. It's the same project. We march against
the war in the morning, in the evening we drop acid, we have free love. It's all political,
it's all cultural all the time." And as soon as I started actually interviewing people and reading
there are memoirs and things, they're writing and things. I found that on the contrary, there were at least
two very distinct countercultures in the '60s. One, the new left, based primarily out here in Berkeley,
was doing politics in order to change politics. They believed in marches, they believed in parties,
they believed in leaders and hierarchies, very traditional kind of left politics. The other
was based in San Francisco and eschewed politics. Really didn't want anything to do with politics.
They thought politics was the problem. And these were folks like Ken Keezy, the famous acid head,
Stuart Brand, who founded the whole catalogue, and a whole slew of people who gather in the
Hay-Dashbury and then later migrate onto communes. Those folks see politics as the problem and they want
to find a way to build a new kind of world, a new kind of community centered around shared
consciousness, shared mindset. How are they going to get there? Well, they're going to find and
repurpose tools created by mainstream industrial society. One of those tools is most famously
LSD created by mainstream society introduced to California by the CIA. Another would be
stereos. It's funny, we have loud stereos today and we don't think anything of them. But in the
early '60s, an amplifier so big that you could stand next to it and feel your body vibrate was a
deeply emotional, transformative, even experience. Why do you think I started with that song?
It's just incredible. And so I began to see that there were these really two distinct wings and it's
really the second wing, the consciousness wing, who ended up calling the new communalists
who feed into the tech world. And I call them the new communalists because they were the leaders of
the largest wave of commune building in American history. Between 1966 and 1973, as many as a
million Americans headed onto communal lands or intercomunes in cities. And that's simply an incredible
migration. Those folks, by and large, did not want to do politics to change politics. They want to
leave politics behind, build communities of like-minded folks, and inside those communities,
take LSD, build alternative housing, create tools that would transform their minds such that they
could be in touch with one another, almost through invisible vibes, invisible signals. And they
would just no longer need to do that messy negotiating that was politics. And the communes, they lasted a
while, but they ended up being a rather failed experiment. Yeah, they were disaster. And they started
also reproducing the hierarchies that they were expecting to be free of and so forth. And then I
gather following your arguments here maybe taking some big leaps, but someone likes to work brand.
And after the '70s, then becomes enchanted with the possibilities of interconnection via
a computer, internet, and that kind of stuff. Absolutely. So I found this sort of terrifying
passage in Wired in the early '90s where Newt Gingrich, who now advises Donald Trump and
what's of course a right wing congressman in his own time, said, you know, those 60s folks, you know,
I wasn't down with free love and the drug use, but those guys, they believed in business and
technology as ways to make change. And I love that. And that's why Newt Gingrich was profiled in
Wired magazine. And that's the place where the new communalist wing of the counterculture meets
the tech world. So Stuart Brand and his world build the whole of catalog in order to showcase
tools that people can take back to the land and transform their minds with. But the coming revolution
kind of falls apart by 1973, most of all the comments are gone, and they were pretty troubled places
before they went. When we get to the early '80s, Brand and other folks around him are sort of mystified.
And this is wonderful conference that takes place, and I think it's '84, early '84, where they say
they get together, keysy, brand and others, and they say, what happened to our revolution? We thought
we thought we could make it happen. It's a very sad kind of transcript. And then within a year,
Stuart Brand has been introduced to hackers, and he's been introduced to Stephen Levy's book called
Hackers, and he's holding the first hackers conference in San Francisco. And the first hackers
conference features, computer programmers, and wholeers catalog folks, and they begin to do what
sociologists call legitimacy exchange. They begin to tell stories to each other about who they are.
And suddenly, the hackers are saying, you know, I'm actually kind of a hippie. And the hippies are
saying, you know, I'm actually kind of a tech guy. And the next thing you know, the reporters who are
there, who've been invited, are reporting out to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and
everywhere else, that the tech world is kind of a new counterculture. And suddenly, we've entered
this new space where Brand and others come to believe in the '80s that, okay, it didn't work on the
commune, but the fundamental intuition, the technology and business, as opposed to governance
and politics, is the right way to make change going forward. That makes sense. And that idea, of course,
fuels and legitimate libertarian boom, not to mention a mass manufacturing boom in small scale
computers, which folks associated with the wholeers catalog managed to get renamed personal
computers, tools of personal transformation. They begin to imagine cyberspace as what they call an
electronic frontier. They begin to imagine that we can build communities through computers that
connect us through consciousness in the way that the communes were always meant to, but failed to do.
And we're going to call these communities virtual communities. Can you say something about the
whole earth catalog and its important historical importance? Because I didn't know about its
importance until a few years ago, to tell you the truth. But I'm realizing that it was really
fundamental to people like Steve Jobs and others. Yeah, the whole earth catalogs is a funny document.
When I first started studying it, I was sort of the only one of my friends who knew what it was,
and I was sitting in a back room inside another back room inside another back room at MIT,
flipping through this dusty catalog, and people thought I had lost my mind.
It was extraordinarily influential. It sold more than a million copies. It won the National Book Award.
It was published twice a year between 1968 and 1972. And it started when Stuart Brand and his
then wife Lois got in a pickup truck and drove out to the communes that were sort of forming.
This is 1967 or so in the Bay Area and in the West and tried to figure out what people needed in
the way of tools if they were headed back to the land. They then put together a book of tools,
but they didn't make it so that you could buy the tools through the catalog. What they did was they
recommended the tools and told you how to get them. They created this sort of model interface that
would go on to shape how people thought about laptop design, that's Alan Kaye, or how Steve Jobs thought
about his work of very influential. But it was also this funny combination of tool-centered,
transformative ideology, which is very much in keeping with where the computer were,
will go in another 20 years. And at the same time, it was a mapping device. Because remember,
this is 1968, 1969. If you're interested in communes, you have no idea where they are.
It's only snail mail and telephones and long distance calls are expensive. So unless you have
friends who are in the scene, you can't get there unless you buy the catalog. Because if you buy the
catalog, you see the places that people are writing in from. You get their addresses. You find out
what communes they're on and you go there. And so the whole Earth catalog became a map of the new
communalist movement. And in part for that reason, it became just a signal device. I think the last
thing to say about the catalog is simply that in its pages, you could see brought together things that
we would never today associate or show the historians of the 60s, 70s, 80s wouldn't have associated
before. You will see on the one hand, tools such as a giant Hewlett-Packard calculator or the
books of Norbert Wiener, who is a military contractor and a cybernetist. And you'll see them next
to, or a few pages down from, macrome kits, and pseudo-native American clothing that's designed to help
you get your body closer to the land in what's imagined to be in a sort of racist way.
You know, a more natural, native way of being. And so these things are together in the catalog
as they are now, I think, in Silicon Valley. In 2005, I think is the year that Steve Jobs gave the
commencement address here. And he mentioned in that, I remember mentioning the whole Earth catalog.
And your book came out a year later, right? It did, yeah. But you knew about this way before Steve Jobs
kind of announced how important it was to get it. Yeah, yeah, I got lucky that way. Yeah,
I did, I did know from that. And it's probably just for having been out here. You know, when I was
19 for a summer, I was a security guard at Apple, and I guarded the Lisa project, which is right
before the Mac. And I had occasion in that space to just see some of the kinds of folks who would
later appear in my book and just sort of be part of that world. So it always made sense to me.
But yeah, Steve is an interesting case. Jobs is an interesting case, precisely because he has
taken the counter cultural story of his own life and marketed it so hard. He did, yeah, he has claimed that
there was something in the air here in the Bay Area. And that even though he wasn't technically
of that generation of the 60s, he was a little bit young for that, he, you know, it's after life
was, was very present in his high school. Yeah, going up, where was it? San Carlos, I mean,
Los Altar, and what. And is the Bay Area, is location really, is there a spirit of place that permeates
something? And is there a reason why the Bay Area is still the vanguard of? Oh, yeah, very much.
I think the first thing to say is that the Bay Area is 3,000 miles west of New York, Massachusetts,
and Washington. And you know, like all things California, it's almost, you know, it's almost as though,
well, like all things California, it's a place to which people migrate. And this has been the
object of migration forever and ever. Ironically, the Bay Area is also very densely packed because
of the fact that it's a peninsula, there are mountains on either on one side and water on another.
And that packing in coupled with a long history of military contracting in the area means that
there's a high density of scientists, a low density of non-adventurous folks, and everybody's kind of
packed up together. The other thing that I think is very important here is you see a collision of
sort of technical expertise and a counter-cultural ethos. The counter-cultural ethos is about how
I'm going to come to this place and transform myself as a person. I can be anything I want to be.
I can just be who I want to be. I can live as I want to live. That freedom that's felt at a
personal level intersects with a really high density of resources brought by military industrial
contracting. And Steve Jobs' life is a perfect example of this as is Steve Wozniak's, as is the founding of
Apple. So famously, Jobs and Wozniak, especially Wozniak, were involved with something called the
Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrew Computer Club, I've read through all their newsletters,
the newsletters read like hippie manuals, beautiful hand drawing, hand drawn pictures of engineers
with long hair and big beards, and it's sort of like the commune with the machine together, it feels
great. And then you get pictures of the actual meetings that they had, and then you start tracing
where people who attended the meetings actually worked. And you realize, oh, I'm looking at engineers
from Lockheed and all these other military contractors who are basically bringing the leftover gear
to this club in the evening, and this club that has this kind of counter-cultural feel,
but is in fact just like almost any other hobbyist club in a military industrial town.
And that's when I began to really see that collision coming together. Now, I want to say that I
think Jobs has taken advantage of that collision because I think he's an expert marketer
and retailed it to us in ways that have very little bearing on how Apple as a firm actually runs.
In 1984, that famous ad for the Mac, when they said, the Mac is the reason 1984 won't be 1984.
Is that the Super Bowl ad? No. Super Bowl ad. A tall,
life blonde woman runs with a big hammer down through these sort of automaton like people who are
all watching Big Brother on the screen, and she smashes the screen and of course everyone thinks
Microsoft and it's Apple and we're all about freedom again and it's just wonderful.
But Apple has always been probably the single most secretive
non-military company as far as its own code goes. You don't crack Apple. Apple's not an open-source
company. The actual organizational politics of Apple are old-school hierarchical.
Well, exactly, especially in the way in which Jobs ran it when he was at that dictatorial
power over everyone under him. So that is Bay Area. That is cyber-counter culture,
cyber-culture coming together. It's a '60s going into the '80s and '90s.
Now, your new book on the Democratic surround is, I think it's more East Coast-based.
And am I right about that? At least, so you call it a prequel. You call it a prequel because you're
going back to the '30s and '40s and '50s in order to tell the story not just now about
Silicon Valley, but about multimedia, the way in which multimedia have permeated our society.
Some very important ideas on the part of, well, if I get you right, two different groups.
And maybe you can tell who those groups are, but that the provenance of those ideas is not
strictly local, but it's coming also from Germany with the Bauhaus and other anthropologists, sociologists,
and psychologists. So in what way is the Democratic, in what way is it a prequel and what exactly
does Democratic surround mean? Yeah, my publisher would like to know too.
Yeah, I made one of the great mistakes in titling that book because it's a concept that you can't
really know. You don't know what it means until you actually read the book, which of course,
a terrible way to sell a book. No, I don't think so. Oh, it's just funny.
So, so what happened was this, when I was doing the counterculture book, I had been told that the
counterculture was a radical break from the '40s, '50s, '60s. I thought that there was a sort of
black and white, contained Cold War world, and then suddenly everything was technical or hippies,
which turned out not to be true because as I read through people's diaries, as I talked to
different people from the '60s, I saw that they were reading people from the '40s. They're
reading the anthropologist Margaret Mead. They were reading the psychologist Eric from
who wrote The Art of Loving, and it's an incredible group of people they were reading.
And so I just, I wanted to get onto another book and so I just started reading what they had been
reading. And I started reading my way into the '40s and '50s and I began to see a much more radical
period than I ever knew about. And I began to see a very direct protest against mass media,
mass culture that really was much more colorful in its own time and also much more influential on the
'60s than we remember. And also very directly political. Yes, very directly political in a way that
we had kind of melted away by some parts of the '60s. Absolutely right. Because at that point,
I think there was a much more paranoia about the capacity of media to, well, to evolve into fascism.
Yeah, I think that's where we have to start. I think we have to start in the late 1930s.
The late 1930s was a time when fascism had become real in Italy and Germany. And Americans were
baffled. The American intellectuals, journalists, leaders were baffled because Germany in particular,
even more than France, had been the home of what we imagined, high European culture to be.
You know, in the '30s, we're still a fairly second world country. We're in the middle of a big
depression. We don't have a national highway system yet. Our artists go to Europe to learn how to
be artists and then come back, maybe. So we're not at the forefront of anything cultural at that
period. And we're baffled by the way that Germany seems to have gone for fascism and had that happen.
And at the same time, we're facing a fascist threat here at home. Most Americans don't know that
in 1939, 20,000 Americans rallied four fascism in Madison Square Garden under a banner that said,
"Stop Jewish domination of Christian America." You know, even after Hitler went into Poland in 1939,
a thousand Americans, Don Sudo-Nazi uniforms, and marched down East 86th Street carrying
swastika flags and American flags next to one another, crowds gathered and watched quietly. They were
not booed. That's after Hitler goes into Poland. You undoubtedly know Humphrey Bogart's movies,
and I bet if I asked you to list them, you'd miss one. And it's one I didn't even know about
until I caught it in the middle of the night. And it was actually nearly a bestseller in 1937,
and it was called the Black Legion. And in the Black Legion, Humphrey Bogart is a black
shirted American fascist who kills his Polish neighbor because he believes the Polish neighbor has
stolen his job. And so we were at a moment when we felt this authoritarianism rising, and people tried
to explain it in different ways. You know, today we might try to explain it as a response to
economic troubles and the depression. At the time, people explained it as a phenomenon driven by
mass media. They argued that cinema, newspapers, radio, all tended to centralize our attention in
the direction of a particular leader, and they tended to get around our reason, our ability to
intercept their ideas, and take our unconscious and stir it up, and stir our longings for control and
for leadership and to submit to power toward the leaders who were in power at the time. And this
extended to American leaders too. I was shocked to see in the Saturday evening post and other
mainstream magazines Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, referred to as the fourth fascist after
Toh-Joh, Mussolini and Hitler, because people feared that he was using radio to mess with our minds
and centralize the state in Washington. And this media you call single source media? Single source media,
correct? Which is technically what that is. Sure. Like a broadcast media. So for example, with
radio, just like we're doing right now, we sit in one place and we broadcast literally the same
text to everyone who hears it. And it's not interactive. They can't speak back in real time.
Movies are another very good example. Made in Hollywood and then distributed to cinemas, and everyone
literally looks at the screen at the same time. There's a single point of attention to which we all
orient ourselves. And mass rallies would be this.
Mass rallies would be very much the same kind of thing. Yeah, I don't deal much with rallies in the
book per se, but yes, it's very much the same thing. And people at the time saw radio essentially
as an electronic version of a mass rally. Not everyone did, but many did. And so this group of
psychologists and theorists anthropologists felt that democracy or that every culture and
nation had a certain kind of personality. And that media had to was either an expression of it and
also an enabler of a personality. And then they started getting concerned with what can we do with
media that will fortify and shore up the democratic personality versus a fascist personality.
Is that correct? That's absolutely right. Yeah. And I don't remember what the
days that the committee for national morale.
National morale. It has a wonderfully creepy feeling now, but it wasn't creepy in its time.
The committee for national morale was 60 of America's leading intellectuals. They gather in New York,
and they fear that mass media literally make us mass people. They make us fascists. They mess
with our personalities in ways that turn us authoritarian. And so their mission is to figure out a way
to help unify Americans and to design media that will help do that in a way that's democratic.
So they get together and they ask, what is it about it? What is it that makes a personality
democratic? And they come up with some key features. One is a democratic personality is individual.
They're unique. They're one of a kind. Another is they become one of a kind by selecting the
experiences around them and knitting them into a single personality that is their own. And yet they do
this in the presence of others. And doing this in the presence of others allows them to be
simultaneously individual and collective, free, yet organized. And that's the challenge they're trying
to make. How are we going to fight the Germans without turning into Nazis? Now, there are people in
Roosevelt's circle at this time who say, you know, gerbils is doing an excellent job with German
propaganda. We ought to try the same thing and you know, we'll worry about our people later. But fortunately,
the committee for National Morauds is very influential and speaks to Roosevelt's influence. It's very
influential. Yeah, it's book to Roosevelt. Council Roosevelt directly wrote white papers that were
widely circulated. Its members wrote very popular books. Yeah, it was a very influential
influential organization. They begin to imagine literally surrounding people with images and sounds
and letting them choose the images and sounds that are most meaningful to them. And they even
go so far as to design a fantasy museum, which isn't built, but it's a great fantasy. It's a museum of
the American experience and they want to have it built at the Museum of Modern Art. And inside
they're going to have statues that talk to you. They're going to have sounds and smells coming
from all directions. They're going to let you feel what it means to be an American. It's completely
ridiculous. They were really great social scientists. They were lousy media people. But lucky for
them, at that very moment, there's a whole group of Bauhaus refugees coming from Germany, who are
artists and designers who desperately need work. Bauhaus being the avant-garde, German, art and design
community form starts in 1924, or actually starts a little earlier, but starts is lively through the
20s and is eventually shut down by the Nazis for being two cosmopolitan essentially. So people
like Walter Gropius, the architect or Herbert Beyer, come to the United States. And when they come,
they have whole theory and practice of multimedia design. They do it in photography. They do
collage in photography. They do multimedia theater. They have ways of hanging images and objects in
museum displays. So they're over your head and under your feet. And for them, that had a whole
different politics in Europe. It was very much a left politics. They were going to build or help
people become new men to resist the pressures of industrial Europe. When they got to the United States,
they needed work. And they were more than happy to say, "Hey, this is how we're going to get a
democratic person." And they began building these environments. The first one, probably 1942,
it's an exhibition called Road to Victory. And it's literally a road that runs across a floor in
the Museum of Modern Art, and people are surrounded by pictures, photographs of things American.
And people are astonished. They say, "This is just exactly what fascism is and because fascism
molds men's minds. This is an environment in which we can choose who we want to be,
and we want to be Americans." And that model, that model of surrounding people with images,
among which they select those which are most meaningful to them, becomes what I call the democratic
surround.
Right. Well, was it any more successful and strictly from a point of view of media than were the
national committee or the committee for National Morale? Because it sounds like a great idea
experimental, but how much actual effect did it have on the populace of America?
Yeah, it's very hard to say. The records are thin and, again, it's very difficult,
I think, to get inside people's heads. The reports about the road to victory were interesting for
me because I would have thought that the thing people would see most were the propaganda pictures
in the show. So there were pictures of things like Toh-Joh, the Japanese leader, giggling,
Pearl Harbor, this kind of thing, which I would have thought would have been very inflammatory
and people would have been upset about. But what people actually talked about in the newspapers and
in the small notes that were left in the museum archives was how amazing it was to have images all
around them. They said that was actually the most meaningful piece for them. So, again, this is one of
those things like an amplifier in the '60s that from our own time looks like a very small innovation,
like, so this is a big deal, pictures over my head, pictures under my feet. But for the people at the
time who were used to just seeing images at eye level one at a time in museums, this surround
environment was itself perceived as a major innovation and deeply American. It did go on to have an enormous
influence on the arts and on American propaganda efforts over the next 20 years. So, I don't know
if it was effective, but certainly people at the time thought it was. But that surround, leaving
aside the democratic surround, that surround then goes on to have a new life in the post-war
capitalist economy and world that we live in where it seems directed more towards the consumer
than towards the citizen and the consciousness of the citizen. Now, it's part of the lived experience
of being in the mall or being somehow in the marketplace. Which doesn't mean that it's necessarily
a failed story. It just means that it got morphed into a more market-oriented media phenomenon than one
that was speaking directly to our responsibilities as to be individuals in a democracy.
This is one of the most painful parts of this story for me. It's a little bit like the
communes were in the '60s book. They were places where people had the very best of intentions,
but ended up producing something that did quite a lot of harm. And that's true for the
the surround as well. So, in the '40s, the people involved with the committee for the national
morale, especially Margaret Mead, were rapidly anti-racist. They also were very aggressively and
openly pro-sexual diversity, pro-sexual choice diversity in a way that we don't even know existed
in the '40s. I mean, I was always told that the world was closeted until stonewall.
No, even 30s were quite radical when you know about that.
Sure were. I had no idea. I was really just shocked and they were wild. So, the surround was
meant to encourage that politics. You were supposed to particularly see people who were
unlike yourself. And this idea still alive as late as 1955 in the family of man exhibition,
which is still the most widely-exciestion in all of photography. It's catalog is never been out of
print. The show has never stopped traveling. It's mounted permanently now in Luxembourg.
You know, that was a show where in the central atrium, Edward Steik and the photographer hung a series
of images of traditional Japanese families, traditional Italian families, traditional Russian families,
all these folks have been folks that we've been fighting. Imagine what it was like 10 years after
World War II to walk into a museum and see an image of a traditional Japanese family, 10 feet tall,
over your head in a dominating position. How are you supposed to feel about that? Well, what Steik
thought was that you were supposed to feel empathetic and you were supposed to grow inside yourself
and begin to realize that even after this war, we were all in one world and they were people like you.
That vision disappears and it disappears through the fear of the Soviet Union and the fear that
the Soviet Union is building a kind of people's communism against which we need to find something.
And what we find is something called the People's Capitalism. There's an advertising guy named
Theodore Ripley who gets together with a guy named Potter who's a professor at Yale and at the
the behest of the government, they develop a campaign called the People's Capitalism. And they use this
campaign and the the the democratic surround form in the campaign to to begin to push this idea of choice
away from choice to be individual and to identify with those who are unlike yourself and to maximize
individual freedom and toward consumer choice. Consumer choice begins to become the expression of
politics. So by the time we get to 1959 and we have the American National Exposition in Moscow,
we have government officials watching the geodesic dome, watching the multimedia, watching the
family of Manshow that's mounted there, but they're also keeping track of all the products that
are on display, all the corporations in America go and display there. And they want to know,
what does the Soviets really want to own? And I think we see that fusion today, the consumption part,
and the political part. And I think we've become tremendously confused by that fusion. We imagine that
what we buy, what we wear is a political statement. And we imagine that speaking on Facebook is
an act of politics, you know, I'm sorry, that's not politics, that's talk.
Correct, because there's a sphere for the political and then there's a sphere for the economic
and perhaps for Labour. I'm being a bit Hannah Arentian. Go there. Go there. Right there with you.
Okay, good, but because the question I would that's in my mind now is about what she called
totalitarianism and propaganda and the use of media, you know, to impose propaganda,
where, for example, I'm told in North Korea, there's so much constant bombardment from
radio and images and so forth. Hannah Arent says that the first thing that totalitarian government
tried to do is to interrupt the process of thinking. And that thinking is something that takes place
between me and myself, she says, and that you have to have a certain kind of silence in order to
hear yourself thinking and that this deliberate invasion of solitude, that kind of everyday solitude of
being left alone, and to always have something reverberating inside your head so that you can't actually
do the prosaic business of putting thoughts together, that this is what totalitarian propaganda
amounts to. Now we don't have that certainly not as as as um you know, an objective, but our
democratic surround is so saturated with images and voices and and now even more you know with Twitter
and all the chatter and I think that one of the perhaps unintended effects is that it is a war on
thinking and that's surround I think you have to find a balance between having it be benevolent enough
that it allows for a margin of thought as opposed to becoming so overbearing that the citizen
just becomes a mindless consumer. Yeah I very much agree I think this is one of those unintended
consequences. You know during the 40s when the surround was being designed and deployed as a propaganda
tool its designers were borrowing Bauhaus ideas were very careful to always leave space between
photographs to always leave space between sounds when John Cage made made his soundscapes he left a
lot of space in between the sounds he was very much part of this movement and for those folks it
was precisely the space between that made this a democratic as distinct from a propaganda
stick to a totalitarian project the totalitarian model was one of which we leave you no space and I
would argue that the chief proponent of the totalitarian model in American culture in this period was
actually Walt Disney Walt Disney was was in addition to being authoritarian politically he was
someone who thought that he should design media environments that utterly overwhelmed the viewer
and then left them swaying in unison rather than thinking independently he actually designed
an environment like this that was displayed in Moscow in 1959 and yeah he tested it and the test was
are people swaying together that's really astonishing and it's very we've been hard for us it's revealing
yeah yeah it's a it's a horrifying thing I think that's an important distinction between surrounding
and immersing surrounding I would see is a generally benevolent resource provision for political
action if we surround people with the resources they need to make decisions so much the better
the other you know immersion is a way to drown someone so that's a different preserving
the relation between the individual and the collective correct as opposed to the drowning in the
collective yeah and preserving what you were talking about earlier with with Hannah Arendt
preserving the distinction between me and myself in that silent space between the image between the
sound that's where I can hear myself and it's very different than the kind of ecstatic immersion
that we might experience to say rock concert right right all the rock concerts do have their
liberatory effects I think well so this is this is one of the things that I've been trying to puzzle
out I don't know how I feel about this you know the ecstasy of the rock concert was seen during the
60s as a route toward political liberation and you know ironically the ecstatic salute of the
furer was seen as a route to liberation in in Germany of the 30s and 40s yeah there's no doubt
you mentioned swaying earlier yeah and that swaying and and and the rock concert plus the the
rallies I think it all goes back to what nature identified as Dionysian is exactly yeah which is
precisely the the dissolution of the principle of individuation which associates with Apollo
the loss of self and this melding into a communal kind of sway and song and dance which
then often ends very badly with the orgistic rights of dismemberment and so forth so yeah that
that kind of Dionysian we all are nostalgic for a Dionysian ecstatic relation to to ourselves to others
and the and the earth but as Nietzsche said it requires an Apollonian counterpart and
correlative in order to keep them in in this kind of necessary dynamic tension so that one
one doesn't completely over bear on the other yeah I love the idea of a dynamic tension and
you know today we might might think about some of the dreams of the people who built the
democratic surround as as creepy and you know they very clearly built environments in which they
experts selected the materials with which to surround people and people might have felt free in
those spaces but they were free within spaces that have been very much determined for them and
we might find that a little bit creepy yeah but I will say that I find that in some ways less
domineering than I find the occasional Dionysian experience to which I've been exposed so I spent
a lot of work at Burning Man for example yes I love yeah and that's a pretty Dionysian place
and it's a Dionysian place in which the ecstatic impulses to dance naked in the desert and build
giant fire bonfires and celebrate the body and all its manifestations meshes very nicely with
high ticket prices the transportation system and the politics of personal display that also
animate Facebook so you know I don't want to say about that right well Fred we were approaching
you know the end of our hour but we have enough time for me to ask you at least one or two more
questions yeah one has to do with this notion that you know by maximizing the channels of
communication we can enhance democratic individuality as opposed to what you were talking about earlier
as a single source medium which was highly under suspicion as having fashistic possibilities but now
with the Twitter for example and you wrote you had an interview where you've written something on
on Donald Trump's use of Twitter as a medium and then this idea that the original paranoia of
people like Margaret Mead and others that you would have a centralized you know collected
authoritarian use of the media versus the dispersed disseminated use of it you say that someone like Trump
very brilliantly uses the dispersion of the democratic surround very much to his own
potentially fashistic objectives yeah without without question and I do think that the
Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian in the mold of the Vladimir Putin and yeah so it's a tremendously
sad story because the great fear of single source media was that people charismatic leaders like Adolf
Hitler could transmit their charisma somehow through the wires and because of the power of the wires
and the centralized force of the messaging they could transform us into followers and so the
notion that has run through 30, 40, 50 years of media theory is that what you need to do is
decentralize ownership, decentralize media technologies give everybody a microphone and suddenly we
will enter a free space and that turns out not to be the case it turns out that charisma still plays
and the genius of Trump is that he uses his charisma in a very sort of intimate realm he writes
I think he writes like a teenage girl I have a teenage daughter he writes like her sometimes
you know he will he'll say things that sound like they're sort of a teenage mean girl playbook
it's very personal he speaks in a personal idiom and yet somehow he manages to summon up the emblem
of kind of right politics inside his body he becomes the embodied voice of grievance and that's what
Adolf Hitler was yeah and he speaks that grievance now into Twitter which is a hyper-personalized
media but which then gets amplified by a whole series of other media which interact now in this
ecosystem that is at once decentralized and yet ironically because it is decentralized tends to be
an ever larger megaphone for the very charismatic forces that decentralization was originally meant to
combat and gives the illusion that you're he's speaking directly from his inner core of personhood
right and therefore an intimate and intimate relation and authentic relations this is one of the
great the great horrors you know the whole purpose of much of the new left and the new
communalists was to take and resuscitate the authentic individual deep inside and to parade that
individual on the streets to go to go to to go to dances to go to parties to go to festivals to go to
marches and be authentically you in the public space and to claim political power on that account
well Donald Trump is being authentically Donald Trump and he's claimed power on that account
well I promise our listeners are a great show on the history and ideas that have got us where
we are in terms of this the these aspects of culture that are associated with the internet and
and counter culture and other things and we certainly got that and I think that the kind of history
of ideas because it is I see you being basically a kind of intellectual historian of a
bank of a very particular moment in our history which is very important one as well so you've
more than delivered on that score for a turn I'd like to thank you for coming on and remind our
listeners we've been speaking with professor Fred Turner from the Department of Communications
the chairman of the Department of Communications here at Stanford and I am Robert Harrison for
entitled opinions and we'll be with you next week take care Fred thank you for coming on again
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