Proceso Ejecutivo Social

In cyberpunk fiction, the cyborgian enhancement of the body is usually associated with empowerment, and achieving control (Bukatman, 1997). The history of the personal computer and the Internet is associated with a striving for personal

freedom and empowerment, as illustrated by the rebellious claim that “you have no sovereignty where we gather”. John Perry Barlow, an American poet and political activist, wrote this in 1996 (p.1), in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, addressing it to the governments of the industrial world. He claimed that

cyberspace could be seen as a governance-free space. The Internet was seen as a lawless country, a country to be explored and tamed, in a parallel strikingly similar to the mythology of the frontier spirit of the Wild West. Today we have a more mature stance towards the Internet – much of the frontier romanticism is gone, but the Internet can still be seen as a vehicle for freedom, exemplified by citizen

journalism and at least some aspects of social media. It is as if the Internet is the new café where revolutions are spawned. John Coate (1992) refers to the Internet as a Third Place, adapting Ray Oldenburg’s idea where the First Place is the home, the Second Place is at work, and the Third Place is a commons, a neutral space where people can meet and conversation is the primary activity. Wertheimer (1999) has also drawn parallels from the Internet to both the (seemingly) open and

democratic space of ancient Athens, the so called agora, as well as the European coffeehouses of the seventeenth century. However, it has been disputed whether the Internet is such a neutral space, and whether online communities are as free from hierarchies and judgments concerning gender, race and class, as initially anticipated (Borer, 2002; Kolko & Reid, 1998; Wertheimer, 1999). Power

hierarchies do break down online, but new ones seem to re-emerge just as easily (Jones, 1998; Klastrup, 2003a). Members of online communities do experiment with identity – especially in role-playing games – but more often we bring our actual class, gender, name and personality into the online environment (Baym, 1998; Cody et al, 1997; Danet, 1998; Joe, 1997; Jones, 1998), especially in social media environments such as Facebook and Twitter.

The early development of the personal computer involved a distinct anti- authoritarian and pro-decentralization stance, and some of the rhetoric was more or less directly targeted towards companies such as IBM and their mainframe

computers. In Apple’s 1984 commercial, introducing the Macintosh, director Ridley Scott metaphorically depicted IBM as the Big Brother of Orwell’s novel 1984. About ten years earlier the organization People’s Computer Company had started a computer café in Redwood City (situated between San Francisco and what would

later be known as Silicon Valley) where terminals could be booked for programing or for text-based games, and on the front of their newsletter they stated that “until now computers have been used against people, now it’s time for a People’s

Computer Company” (Markoff, 2005). The design and development of the personal computer had its roots in the revolutionary working prototype NLS developed by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute. The NLS was capable of combining different sorts of visual and text display, using mouse and keyboard as input devices, and of connecting with other computers (via leased telephone lines). The NLS was demonstrated on December 9th, 1968. During the demo “every significant aspect of today’s computing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half” (Markoff, 2005, p.148). The name of the department that Engelbart hade founded at Stanford – the Augmentation Research Center – reveal its connection to a strong movement towards using computer technology to augment the individual, a shift from technology and organization towards

democratizing processes. This shift was related to the development in general of the counterculture of the late 1960’s. Douglas Engelbart was one of the advocators of this development. As summarized by Markoff, “computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation” (ibid., p.xii). In both hacker culture and counterculture, there is a shared resistance against centralization and

commercialization (Flichy, 2007).

There are also suggestive associations between freedom, computers and drug use. Nusselder as well as Tatsumi point at the symbolic equivalence between drug use and computers (Nusselder, 2009; Tatsumi, 1986). Metaphorically, both drugs and computers have been associated with escapism, as a way to break out of reality and at least momentarily and illusionary achieve empowerment in order to fulfill different kinds of fantasies that give exaltation. Heuser points out that in Gibson’s description of cyberspace, he uses the term “consensual hallucination”. In

Neuromancer, Gibson’s anti-hero Case is addicted both to chemical drugs and cyberspace, exemplified by the following passage.

Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market…

There is a historical connection between drug liberalism and the personal computer via the people involved, as well as the intentions to augment the human mind. Myron Stolaroff is one example of a researcher that during the 1960s saw the same possibilities in LSD as others saw in the personal computer; the possibility to augment the human mind and its consciousness, both intellectually and creatively (Markoff, 2005). Timothy Leary, well-known drug evangelist, became enthusiastic over digital technology, proclaiming that the PC is the LSD of the 1980s. In 1995 Brand wrote an essay tellingly titled We Owe It All to the Hippies, where he puts

forward the idea that “counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution” (p.1). Counterculture, as well as emerging computer technology, found fertile ground during the 1960s in the city of San Francisco, a city characterized by an environment of freethinkers, stretching back to the gold rush and the 1860s.

The frontier mythology of the quite recent American settlements, and especially the conquering of the west coast, has been adopted as a metaphor for the building of cyberspace and the Internet (Gunnarsson, 2002; Lovén, 2010). William Gibson’s tendency to refer to hackers as cowboys is a way of relating to frontier romanticism (Borer, 2002; Godhe, 2010a; Lovén, 2010; Murray, 1997; Olsen, 1992). In the

rhetorical essay Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age from 1994, the authors Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler vividly claim that “cyberspace is the latest American frontier” and that “there are as yet no rules – just as there were no rules on the American continent in 1620” (p.5). Similar attitudes were frequently pronounced when the first multi-user virtual worlds started to appear, especially in the descriptions of Active Worlds (Schroeder, Huxor & Smith, 2001; Castronova, 2007). Ethnographers such as Andrew Hudson-Smith (2002) studied Active Worlds in order to “fully document the development of a virtual environment from beginning to end, as a plot of virgin virtual land” (p.1). These early virtual worlds seemed to satisfy a romantic longing for finding new land, building anew, and nostalgic dreaming of escaping authority and achieving freedom (Lovén, 2010; Olsen, 1992). It gave escapists and visionaries a new frontier to pursue while the space frontier gradually crumbled in the long slow death of the American space program. Bryant and Pollock (2010) point out how the dreams of both the space frontier and the digital frontier allude to a deep and spiritual yearning to escape the bonds of Earth and dirt. Nineteenth century frontier mythology instructed the mindsets of the early development of the Internet (Epperson, 1995; Schroeder, Huxor & Smith, 2001). Built into the concept of the frontier is the idea that this frontier needs to be explored and tamed (Heuser, 2003). Some of the early computer artists worked under the assumption that the “computer became a micro-universe, an ‘unimaginable new world’ ready for tireless exploration” (Taylor, 2004, p.158). But can virtuality really be explored? Is it

reasonable to conceive of our own artifacts as untamed virgin territory? Taylor (2004) describes how – in making computer art – the computer was

reconceptualized in the 1980s from a frontier world to a tool for personal expression. Baudrillard (2002) argues that in cyberspace we only “interacts with known elements, pre-existent sites, established codes” (p.179), and Csicsery-Ronay (1992) agrees that cyberspace “cannot be conquered for humanity because it is an aspect of humanity” (p.224). There is nothing truly unknown in the virtual.