The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 128

congenial to those critical of the depredations wrought by Western
modernity and industrialization (unsurprisingly there is a good deal
of Native American literature in the Whole Earth Catalogs ). Whether
intended by those researching it or not, complexity theory resonates
with such holistic and mystical ideas about ecology. This found
independent expression in the work of Fritjof Capra, the physicist
and New Age mystic. In The Tao of Physics 33 he attempted to con-
flate developments in physics with Eastern mysticism. In The
Turning Point 34 he proposed a shift away from Newtonian models
of science towards holism and deep ecology. His topic The

We b of Li f e 35 drew heavily on the work of Bateson, Kauffman, Valera
and Maturana and other proponents of autopoesis, systems theory
and complexity, to develop similar ideas and to draw mystical
conclusions. Thus the emergence of complexity theory in the late
'

1996

s brought together a number of elements that had
been anticipated in earlier instantiations of the counter-culture,
including neo-liberal economics, Cybernetics, ecology, mysticism
and technology. It should be no surprise therefore that one of the
long-term trustees of Santa Fe Institute is Stewart Brand.
Such developments enabled, through a kind of sophistry or
sleight of hand, a process in which 'nature', new technology and
the capitalist economy are conflated to produce a new kind of capi-
talist techno-nature. This derives, in part at least, from the work
of economist Michael Rothschild, whose

70 s and ' 80

work Bionomics:
Economy as Ecosystem 36 proposed a biological model for the under-
standing of economic systems. Highly congenial to neo-liberal
thinking, Rothschild's ideas have been promulgated by bodies such
as the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank. It has
also found a ready reception in Silicon Valley and other centres of
high tech production, and found its way into the writings of Kevin
Kelly, Nicholas Negroponte, George Gilder and others involved with
Wired . Gilder started out as a right-wing sociologist and political
theorist, writing controversial studies of race and poverty. Later he

1990