The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 123

of computers and their resonance with counter-cultural ideas
continued to be reflected in the Whole Earth Catalogs . In the first
catalogue computers occupied two pages. Ten years later they took
up twelve. In another Whole Earth Catalog was produced called

Signal 31 which was entirely devoted to information technology and
philosophy. This focus reflected the sense that much of the kind
of alternative thinking the Whole Earth represented was by now
best realized with such technology. In Signal the entire gamut of
complexity- and chaos-oriented theories are introduced alongside
the more traditional references to Cybernetics and whole systems.
This concentration on technology was accompanied by a political
shift. For Signal Stewart Brand had relinquished the editorial role
to Kevin Kelly, who, in his mid-thirties at the time, was younger than
the original group of Whole Earthers. Kelly and his even younger
team were far more in tune with the new technology-oriented
culture of

1988

s northern California. The meteoric success of Apple,
a computer company started by long-haired hobbyists, encouraged
the sense that personal computing was a counter-cultural produc-
tion, notwithstanding the technology's development in Cold War
laboratories. Apple was also felt to be a particularly Californian
success, mixing entrepreneurial capitalism and counter-culture
ethics without the sense of contradiction that such a combination
might evoke. In this Apple was exemplary of the changed political
climate in the

1980

1980 s. In response partly to the social and cultural

upheavals of the ' s, and also to the failure of the Fordist-Keynesian

policies pursued by many governments to cope with the complexi-
ties of contemporary globalized capitalism, many countries had
experienced a dramatic shift to the right in politics. In Britain
Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had, since her
election in

60

, implemented a series of radical measures intended
to scale down government and to free the market from restrictions.
Thatcher was highly influenced by neo-liberal economists Hayek
and Friedman, the latter an erstwhile Whole Earth favourite. She

1979