Chapter 16
Countering Power on Campuses and through Computers in the San Francisco Bay Area
Where civil disobedience signifies people have a moral obligation to act when they see government injustice, dissent appears as a more subtle act of protest against diverse forms of power. Understood as expressing disagreement or opposition to prevailing policies or practices, dissent means ‘going against the grain’ (Young, 2015, p. 3). Playing a pivotal role in shaping the early days of the American Republic, it has been one of the defining characteristics of the nation and its patriotism:
Every decade since the earliest days of colonization Americans have protested for just about every cause imaginable, and every time they did, defenders of the status quo denounced the protestors as unpatriotic and in more recent times as un-American. But protest is one of the consummate expressions of ‘Americanness’. It is patriotic in the deepest sense. [Young, 2015, p. 3]
Oscillating between patriotism and un-Americanness, dissent encompasses a wide range of activities conducted by a minority group attempting to challenge the opinions and rules of a majority. Historian Ralph F. Young describes it as a complex form of resistance as it consists of ‘speaking out and protesting against what is (whatever that is is)’, and comes from ‘all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social’ (Young, 2015, p. 3).
The chapter focuses on the political, cultural and social aspects of dissent in the context of the counterculture and cyberculture movements that flourished in California, and more particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1950s and following decades. What shapes has dissent taken in the last decades, since the Sixties Movement (Gitlin, 1989)? How has this form of protest moved from public spaces to online territories?
The Sixties counterculture was defined by Theodore Roszak as a social and cultural movement characterised by a rejection of mainstream values and a critique of the dominant technocratic society (Roszak, 1969, p. 14). He argued that this new culture represented a rebellion against the dehumanising effects of modern industrial civilisation, advocating for alternative forms of living, spirituality, and consciousness. Roszak also emphasised the role of young people in this mobilisation, viewing them as the vanguard of a broader societal shift towards greater authenticity, ecological awareness, and humanistic values (Roszak, 1969, pp. 40–41).
By expressing their opposition outside the established frameworks, members of the counterculture called into question the tacit contract passed between civil society and the US government, perceived as a guarantee for social peace. Doing so, they became part of dissent (and sometimes civil disobedience), resisting mass culture, expressing their disagreements in artistic, political and social forms, while still being controlled by laws and strong federal institutions.
As described by Divina Frau-Meigs, in order to remain free and authentic, devoid of artifices and risks that would be generated by an information power placed in the sole hands of the federal state, the American public space has to guarantee the freedom of expression of its citizens, as enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution in 1791. In a ‘Protestant inversion, which gives supremacy to the individual over society’ (Frau-Meigs, 2001, p. 14), dissenters from the counterculture thus appear as defenders of personal freedom of expression as a constitutional right, and therefore of the American public space.
Both as individuals and as parts of larger groups, counterculturalists turned to art, literature, music… (Beat Generation, bands from San Francisco Sound) and politics, protesting on the streets for social justice, racial equality and sexual liberation (Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Stop the Draft Week), resisting mainstream America from its margins, while simultaneously using its codes to disseminate its own ideas and ideals throughout the country (Roszak, 1969; Miller, 1991; Cohen, 2014).
The chapter argues it was these same countercultural ideals, emerging in the 1950s, that inspired emerging offline and online communities of computer hobbyists and hackers (Homebrew Computer Club, Usenet alt. groups) that saw technology and personal computers as tools of personal and democratic empowerment, through hacking and the ability to discuss censored topics online on virtual forums and communities (Markoff, 2005; Turner, 2006). From the historical Barbary Coast to the Electronic Frontier, this chapter analyses the evolution of dissent, from the streets to the screens, and highlights how the technological revolution that started in the 1970s partly resulted from the counterculture that emerged during the previous decades.
The method used to conduct this analysis combines theoretical and qualitative studies through an immersive research process led in the San Francisco Bay Area, as a visiting PhD researcher at the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and as a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. The chapter adopts a multidisciplinary approach conjoining American studies, history and media studies. It is also based on interviews conducted with pioneers from the counterculture and cyberculture spheres, City Lights co-founder and Beat Generation publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti among them, as well as hackers. The research process also involved participant observation during talks, seminars and events – such as the fiftieth anniversary of the Free Speech Movement on the UC Berkeley campus.
This chapter thus discusses protest and dissent as core values of American democracy (Frau-Meigs, 2001; Kempf, 2015) that keep getting reinvented, through different case studies: the Beat Generation, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (for the street and counterculture segment of this discussion) and the Hackers Conference and the Whole Earth ’Ltronic Link (WELL) virtual community for the screen and technological dissent part. It also delves into the ideals and ethics advocated for by these dissenters who have challenged cultural and social norms, first offline and then online.
The first instance of dissent to be discussed is in arts and literature, through the example of the authors of the Beat Generation and their San Francisco publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti considered San Francisco as a ‘small provincial capital’ when he arrived in the city on 1 January 1951, after a stay in Paris where he studied literature at the Sorbonne (Momméja, 2021, p. 22). The European influence had mostly crystallised in the North Beach district, home to the local Italian and French communities, and adjacent to Chinatown. During an interview conducted in that same neighbourhood in 2017, the New York State native described himself as belonging to the ‘bohemian’ group, a generation that preceded the one that would come to be known as the ‘Beat’:
I was never a Beat poet. When I arrived in San Francisco on January 1st, 1951, I was still wearing my French béret ’cause that’s what bohemians wore. I was from an older generation than the Beats, I was from the bohemian generation. It was definitely a generation before the Beats, the Beats didn’t show up in San Francisco until the mid-1950s. [Ferlinghetti, in Momméja, 2021, p. 22]
It was because he sensed the emergence of this bohemian movement that Ferlinghetti decided to settle in San Francisco, rather than New York: ‘I grew up in New York but I wasn’t happy in New York, there was no opening’ (Ferlinghetti, in Momméja, 2021, p. 22). This openness was present in California, and particularly in San Francisco, which already appeared to be a fertile territory from an intellectual and creative point of view, drawing inspiration from the European cultures that composed it, to forge its own creative identity. Ferlinghetti met Peter Martin, who edited City Lights Magazine, and in 1953, the two men decided to join forces to establish a bookshop and a paperback publishing house, a format that was not widely used at the time. City Lights, Booksellers & Publishers thus opened its doors in the heart of North Beach, on the historical Barbary Coast, inspired by the name of Martin’s literary magazine, which echoed the title of Charlie Chaplin’s movie, and soon became a space where a new generation of poets could flourish in a literary and cultural effervescence, notably that of the Beat Generation, during a period seen as a San Francisco Renaissance, which turned into a real ferment for dissent for the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Beat movement formed on the East Coast in the mid-1940s, around writers and poets who considered post-World-War-II American society and culture as too puritanical and standardised (Waldman, 1996). During his interview in 2017, Ferlinghetti, then aged ninety-eight, particularly insisted on the fact that while he did not belong to the Beat Generation, he served as a platform for them through City Lights, at a time when no publishing house wanted to publish authors like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. At the confluence of the libertarian and anarchist movements, City Lights appears as an epicentre, a node at the intersection of various political, social and literary networks, while its geographical position on Columbus Avenue also places it at the centre of the surrounding Chinese (Chinatown) and Italian (North Beach) communities.
The bohemian, then Beat, then hippie movement gave San Francisco the creative impetus for a development that continues to this day, in both artistic and technological forms. On the margins of capitalism and outside the homogeneous American way of life of the 1950s, San Francisco’s bohemian movement freed itself from the weight of post-war culture to invent a new, free way of life. Sociologist Richard Florida demonstrates that the presence of a bohemian class in a given place creates an environment that, then, attracts the arrival or birth of other groups of individuals and talents: ‘high human capital individuals’ (Florida, 2002, p. 55). In the case of San Francisco, these artists and intellectuals would in turn attract – or generate – a new wave, more or less directly, namely that of technology industries, thus demonstrating the essential role of the city in the 1950s in understanding and envisioning the local innovations of the following decades and witnessing the beginnings of Silicon Valley.
The hedonist and libertarian authors of the Beat Generation lived and described ways of life going against the tide of mainstream society, invoking liberation in terms of the themes addressed in their writings (whether sexuality, alcohol or drugs), but also in terms of the form of these very texts, that detached themselves from established literary rules, like the parchment scroll (the original scroll) of nearly forty metres Kerouac used to write the entirety of On the Road, published in 1957. The Beat writing was intended to be free, systematic, spontaneous, echoing and inspired by that of the Surrealists and Dadaists.
The expression of their libertarian spirit culminated in October 1955 at the Six Gallery Poetry Reading which gathered the likes of Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Jack Kerouac (though the latter did not read) and where Allen Ginsberg recited his poem ‘Howl’. That night became emblematic for reuniting both the Beats from the East Coast with the poets of the West Coast and because of Ginsberg’s subversive poem (McClure, 1994, p. 13). Indeed, ‘Howl’ paved the way for the liberation of dissent voices to speak out against the oppression of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Cold War America. The subversive nature of the three-part poem turned Ginsberg and his fellow Beats into outlaws, cultural pioneers publicly pushing back the frontiers of censorship in a country that metaphorically took on the name ‘Moloch’, a deity from the Hebrew Bible whose cult is linked to the sacrifice of children by fire. To the audience of the Six Gallery Reading, ‘Moloch’ appeared as a soulless demonic being, described by Ginsberg through an apocalyptic lexical field, an acerbic and explicit critique of government policy and its capitalist, destructive and warlike identity. As recalled by McClure, who co-organised the event with Ginsberg:
In all of our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before—we had gone beyond a point of no return—and we were ready for it, for a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the gray, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellective void—to the land without poetry—to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision. […] Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power-support bases. [McClure, 1994, pp. 13–15]
Beyond subversion and dissent, the event is also determinant in the history of censorship in publishing. Indeed, Ferlinghetti attended the Six Gallery Reading and that night, decided to print ‘Howl’ through City Lights, months after Ginsberg had already given him the manuscript (Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg, 2015, pp. 1–2). Following the publication of the poem in 1956, it comes with little surprise Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao, co-owner and manager of the bookstore from 1954 to 1975, faced a trial for obscenity. If the charges were dropped shortly afterward, the lawsuit remained central for Ferlinghetti and his publishing house, not only because it demonstrated the strength of the McCarthyist power of the period, but also the power of words and poetic language. Furthermore, it placed City Lights, and in this respect San Francisco, as the epicentre of an avant-garde, subversive and free movement. One that was to inspire some members of the following generation to embrace a countercultural way of life, born in opposition to mainstream mass society.
‘The only reason all this ever had to be a counter culture was because the culture it opposed – that of reductionist science, ecocidal industrialism, and corporate regimentation – was too small a vision of life to lift the spirit’ (Roszak, 1995, p. xxxiv). Following in the footsteps of the Beat movement of the 1950s, a new form of counterculture emerged in the early 1960s. In his seminal work, The Making of a Counter Culture, published in 1969, Theodore Roszak describes the birth of a movement that claimed to be countercultural, in opposition to a dominant mainstream culture synonymous with ‘technocracy’, corporations and industrialisation, which failed to inspire a large proportion of its youth, who had grown up in the midst of the Cold War.
For Roszak, as for many critics of the period such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Herbert Marcuse and Lewis Mumford, the dominant minority consisted of a new generation of technocrats and bureaucrats who had developed innovative technologies enabling them to direct the masses by making them participate passively in national production. Through The Making of a Counter Culture, Roszak describes the rejection of American technocratic society by a young generation, raised in a middle class with prosperous comfort, a ‘new class’, ‘using their well-trained wits not to bolster the system in which they were meant to find their fortunes but to shake it to its foundations’ (Roszak, 1995, p. xiv). If most members of the baby boomers’ group did not embrace the countercultural ideals and ended up joining the ‘technocratic elite’, Roszak insists those who chose to experience a different way of life and became part of the Sixties Movement, ‘hippies’ or activists, came to shape the era (Roszak, 1995, p. xiv).
It is in that context that the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964 must be understood, but also, within the Civil Rights one. Indeed, among the young activists of the UC Berkeley movement, many students participated in the fight for civil rights in the south of the country, as the Freedom Rides, started in 1961 (Cohen, 2014). During the 1964 ‘Freedom Summer Project’, they helped register African-American populations on electoral lists, mostly in Mississippi, following the call of Bob Moses, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student organisation advocating for civil rights (Gitlin, 1989; Cohen, 2014). As noted by historian Robert Cohen:
Having rooted themselves in local black communities since 1961, these civil rights workers conducted voter registration campaigns that proved extremely dangerous because they challenged Mississippi’s tradition of black disenfranchisement that dated back to the nineteenth century, antagonizing violent white supremacists. [Cohen, 2014, p. 49]
‘I know why one should take part and I can’t stand to be safe while others are involved, but… we might die – I might die!’ (Savio, in Cohen, 2014, p. 53). After facing the violence of racial segregation and literally risking their lives in the South, students at the University of California, Berkeley, who took part in Freedom Summer and returned to school in September 1964, carried along a thirst for racial and social justice in the country. Meanwhile, the UC Berkeley administration continued to enforce a 1935 directive that forbade political organisations from promoting their cause, holding meetings, or seeking donations on campus. Student activists thus found themselves at the University’s south entrance, setting up their booths on Bancroft and Telegraph avenues. Cohen describes the importance of such an area: ‘This free speech area […] was considered holy ground. It was the place closest to school where they could exercise their First Amendment rights and gather an audience’ (Cohen, 2014, p. 76).
However, in mid-September 1964, the administration, led by President Clark Kerr, in total disregard of the ongoing struggles and students’ constitutional right to freedom of expression, decided to ban gatherings in this free zone. Doing so, the University closed the door on campus activism, ‘they didn’t realize the emotional depth of commitment of the students to the civil rights movement’ (Savio, in Cohen, 2014, p. 77), a commitment that would then turn into protest as Clark Kerr’s omnipotence inevitably set the mechanisms of civil disobedience in motion.
Through the FSM, the University of Berkeley appeared as a cold authoritarian entity, one that the activist students wanted to stop thanks to their physical non-violent involvement, as exemplified through the speech of one of its main figures, Mario Savio, in December 1964:
[…] that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. [Savio, in Cohen, 2014, p. 327]
The Berkeley students’ fight for freedom of speech did not only echo the dissent spirit embodied by Beat poets, it was also an extension of the civil rights movement. As part of the ‘Protestant inversion’, inherent to the founding of the country, the American individual was intended to be superior to society, and appeared as ‘the salt of the democratic earth’ (Frau-Meigs, 2001, p. 14) who had to confront central power whenever the latter threatened personal freedoms, and in this case, freedom of expression, therefore entering into resistance, or dissidence.
However, beyond an individual struggle, the Freedom Summer activists’ enterprise was a collective one, for the common good of the country and the equality of its citizens. Their entry into civil disobedience appeared to be the only possible way of guaranteeing the survival of their egalitarian ideals and countering the power of a centralised state, here represented by the UC Berkeley administration as a technocratic and bureaucratic machine using International Business Machines (IBM) punch cards to gather students’ information, one recalling Ginsberg’s ‘Moloch’. By demanding political neutrality, the administration turned its back on ‘progress and change’ and, as a central power, chose to reject the social revolution underway and sought to remain ‘static, constraining, conservative of the established order, suspicious of innovation’ (Frau-Meigs, 2001, p. 14).
The victory of the Free Speech Movement was that of direct action and civil disobedience, finally recognised by the Berkeley administration, which, by granting free zones of ‘open discussion’ and respecting the constitutional rights of its students, implicitly acknowledged its wrongs. Though their stakes and modes of action were different, the positioning of the FSM activists, in a country that was itself losing its bearings and just beginning to emerge from racial segregation and forge a new identity, placed them in the same dissent category as members of the Beat Generation and of the counterculture movement that expanded over the rest of the decade.
Somehow, that same spirit of dissent was at the centre of the first Hackers Conference organised in November 1984, with the announced goal to share information. A total of one hundred and fifty hackers – then understood as computer ‘hobbyists’ – met at the Yosemite Institute, a former military camp in the Marin Headlands, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, on the other side of the Bay. The setting was surprisingly rustic for a conference dealing with technology: for a fee of ninety dollars, the one hundred and fifty hackers spend three days and two nights in a dormitory on site, meals provided, and were offered a bonus book, Hackers, that had just been published by Steven Levy and a conference T-shirt (Momméja, 2021, p. 264).
Between do-it-yourself and dissent, access to technological tools, free sharing of information, and creation of user-friendly and interactive computers, the hackers attending the conference turned the very same cold military technology the FSM activists fought against into what Ivan Illich called ‘convivial tools’, tools that could be modulated, adapted to their users, with the ideal goal they would liberate society (Illich, 1973, p. 11). Such a techno-utopian vision was embodied in Steven Levy’s vision of the ‘hacker ethic’, as described in his 1984 book:
This hacker culture certainly comes into opposition to that of the entrepreneur capitalist culture (embodied at the time by Bill Gates, Microsoft founder) but also the Protestant one, as described by German sociologist Max Weber in 1905 in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. With The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen draws such a parallel and describes a hacker ethic opposed to the Protestant work ethic promoted by the founding fathers of the nation. Indeed, where the hacker does not count the time spent in front of his or her screen, coding or playing video games (‘This free relation to time has always been typical of hackers, who appreciate an individualistic rhythm of life’), the hard-working Protestant must respond to Benjamin Franklin’s injunction of ‘time is money’ (Himanen, 2001, p. 20).
Indeed, in 1748, while still a printer in Philadelphia and already involved in political life, Franklin published his ‘Advice to a Young Tradesman’, in which he urged people to work hard and make their hard-earned money bear fruit: ‘Remember that Time is Money. […] Remember that Credit is Money. […] that Money is of a prolific generating Nature. Money can beget Money, and its Offspring can beget more, and so on’ (Franklin, 1748).
Weber later described Franklin’s thinking as part of the ‘Protestant ethic’, a revival of religious values, giving way to a new form of capitalism, emancipated from religion and benefiting from an ethic based on work: a ‘philosophy of avarice [which] appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end to itself’ (Weber, 2001, p. 17). Therefore, gain as an end in itself characterises this ethic, defined as a maxim for the conduct of life, a moral injunction that Protestants must follow through a life of paid labour, an ascetic lifestyle with no deviations whatsoever: ‘the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life’ (Weber, 2001, p. 18).
Refusing to play by the Protestant rules regarding time, or money, hackers confirm their identity as dissenters, willing to redefine capitalism. They are far from concerned with time optimisation, or with ‘supersession’ or ‘compression’ of time (Castells, 1996, p. 437). The hacker ethic, and the hacker himself, attending the 1984 Hackers Conference, offer America an alternative to that of the founding fathers, emancipated from religion, hedonistic yet creative, innovative in an unexplored field that is becoming a new frontier. Stewart Brand, who organised the conference and was already fascinated by the ‘computer bums’ he met in 1972, working on artificial intelligence and computers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, reflected on the role of these new pioneers he gathered:
I think hackers—dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution. No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forced corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy. [Brand, 1985, p. 44]
Unwilling saviours of the American economy, having imposed their vision of the ‘counter-computer’, hackers thus appear as explorers who are the true founding fathers of a new frontier under construction, reinventing the values and social norms of the information age.
Such a spirit was at the origins of cyberspace, where sharing information online, freely, was central and became a catalyst for community building. In 1985, epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who was part of the World Health Organization team tasked with eradicating smallpox, imagined transposing his friend Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog online to recreate the community-building spirit linked to the publication. Successfully published by Brand from 1968 to 1971, the catalog, which won the National Book Award in 1971, offered an incredible list and evaluation of tools and do-it-yourself opportunities to its readers. Among them were ‘new communalists’, who left cities and the mainstream American way of life to live in remote rural countercultural communes of the West, attempting to be autonomous in the wilderness, while the tools promoted in Brand’s catalog helped them in that quest (Turner, 2006, pp. 4–5).
Inspired by the catalog’s community spirit, Brilliant and Brand founded the Whole Earth ’Ltronic Link (WELL) in 1985 as a way to create an online group of like-minded people, free to express themselves on various topics. Considered one of the first virtual communities, the WELL rapidly became a hub for the San Francisco intellectual, countercultural and technological spheres that encountered a virtual social place to gather and freely share common interests, ideas and information (Rheingold, 1993). As an electronic alternative to the offline world, the WELL appears in line with the hacker ethic, in partial opposition to Protestant capitalist values. Indeed, the online conference founders insisted the platform should be free or low-cost, but it should also generate a profit in order to survive and form an autonomous community which designs the system that enables its members to communicate.
For Howard Rheingold, an early member of the community, Brand and Brilliant’s goal was to create ‘a vehicle for social change’, ‘a cultural experiment’ to facilitate communication between intellectuals in the San Francisco Bay Area (Rheingold, 1993, p. 41). Before the internet, the WELL offered its members access to a bulletin board system (BBS), a tool that allowed them to exchange electronic messages, once their terminals were connected to a modem. In 1993, 60,000 electronic bulletin board systems were in operation in the United States, each capable of handling several dozens, if not hundreds, of participants, fourteen years after their launch in California (Rheingold, 1993, p. 9).
Inspired by the ideals of the 1960s counterculture and the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL has offered an online home to its members in exchange of a monthly access fee (currently $15). Rheingold joined the community a few months after its founding, in the spring of 1985. The immersive testimony he offers in his 1993 book is ‘about the potential importance of cyberspace to political liberties and the ways virtual communities are likely to change our experience of the real world, as individuals and communities’ (Rheingold, 1993, p. 4). Indeed, the WELL appears as a cyber home where social connections were reversed for the first time in human history: members first met on the platform before sometimes having face-to-face interactions in the offline world. Any member has been free to create a discussion topic to which other users can contribute as they wish, instantly or at a later date. With 700 members in its first year, the WELL soon grew to 3000 users three years later. Now over forty years old, the WELL reached a peak in the mid-1990s with 5000 members and is now grappling with a diminished community of participants.
Unlike Big-Tech social network platforms such as Facebook, and on a different scale, the WELL has been an engine for creating links between individuals whose sense of community has been fortified by the various social experiments conducted during the previous decades in the Bay Area and beyond. While some of the members have been part of the Free Speech Movement, such as computer engineer Lee Felsenstein, the freedom of speech indirectly inherited from the Berkeley protests has allowed members to discuss a wide range of topics, organised in ‘conferences’, each moderated by a host member, from ‘Science and Technology’ to ‘Music’, ‘News and Society’, or more private matters such as ‘Health’ and ‘Parenting’, where, early on, members were able to discuss personal topics that would have been censored in the public sphere (Momméja, 2021, p. 279).
Rheingold even describes the platform as a ‘subversive’ community: indeed, the WELL emerged from 1960s-counterculture communal ideals which partly endured through the links created between members and the topics discussed on the platform. One of the most probing examples of this historical connection can still be found in conferences such as ‘Songs of the Dead’ where fans of the Grateful Dead, an emblematic band of the 1960s San Francisco Sound, gather to discuss their musical passion, or ‘Mindfulness’ where members talk about yoga, meditation and Eastern spirituality which were at the centre of the counterculture (Momméja, 2021, p. 279). During a 1989 WELL party organised in the Bay Area and recorded on video, Rheingold confirms the users’ desire to continue experimenting with new ways of living communally, now online, influenced by the counterculture movement:
There are people who still believe it’s worth experimenting, we’re trying to find new kinds of communities, new things to do with the world, try to move it forward… And this is a place where we can connect with one another and make real plans and do things. And that kind of connectivity is really, in itself, subversive. [Rheingold, in WELL Party, 1989]
As a new form of dissent on the electronic frontier, the WELL’s subversive character mostly lies in its members’ common experience of the counterculture, reinforcing the community spirit of what could have been a simple discussion space. Beyond the opportunity to share information, the WELL has provided access to a database that is inclusive for its members, but exclusive for those who cannot afford to pay monthly fees, or hourly access in its early days. As noted by Mathieu O’Neil, ‘the non-programming early Internet was strongly imbued with a logic of distinction: possessors of exclusive email addresses such as the WELL […] or research universities, were viewed in a better light on Usenet than users with commercial accounts’ (O’Neil, 2009, p. 64). Belonging to the WELL community thus becomes synonymous with being part of an intellectual and journalistic gathering, conferring a ‘cultural capital’ (O’Neil, 2009, p. 64), a special status to its members who can use the platform email address and messaging system to correspond with non-members. Therefore, the WELL can be understood as an ‘online tribal project’ (O’Neil, 2009, p. 64) whose interest lies in the intellectual qualities of its members, attracting a public eager for knowledge and information free sharing, empowered by the technological tool that is their personal computer.
In many ways, the WELL has followed the sharing logic of Brand’s 1960s and 1970s Whole Earth Catalog readers and 1980s hackers, with a participatory community open to all, which in some ways echoes the community formed by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Although politics and social changes have not been the conversational driving force behind the platform, the WELL, through its counterculture communal spirit, distinguishes itself from the Protestant capitalist ethic described by Weber, and offers a glimpse of a group of individuals who, like Rheingold, have spent countless hours behind their respective screens with the purpose of being part of a group of open discussion, forming a community. From the authors of the Beat Generation to the members of the first ‘virtual community’, a term coined by Rheingold in 1987, dissent in the San Francisco Bay Area has taken many different forms and stakes, evolving from the streets of North Beach to the screens designed in Silicon Valley.
Where the 1970s saw the rise of technological utopianism, as embodied by publications such as Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, more recent technological creations – such as social networks – suggest that tech utopia, which emerged from the 1950s and 1960s counterculture dissent, can easily be transformed into dystopia. As noted earlier, dissent ‘comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories’ (Young, 2015, p. 3). And because of this very diversity regarding its origins and acceptances, the right to dissent can be used to justify all types of free speech – as exemplified by Donald Trump’s tweets in January 2021, encouraging his supporters’ assault on the US Capitol (Momméja, 2021, p. 327). Inherently, dissent thus raises several questions, notably around freedom of speech and the risks the wide spreading of fake news represent to our democracies in the information age. Therefore, from its guarantee to discuss censored topics in art and life, to envision novel subversive ways of life, and to protest authority and form free communities, dissent appears as a core value of American democracy, a complex one that keeps getting reinvented, offline and online, on the streets, and on the screens.
Julie Momméja
Keywords: dissent, free speech, counterculture, cyberculture, technology, San Francisco
Where civil disobedience suggests a moral obligation to act when an injustice is witnessed, dissent appears as a more subtle form of protest. As defined by historian Ralph F. Young in Dissent: The History of an American Idea (2015), it implies ‘speaking out and protesting against what is (whatever that is is), most often by a minority group unhappy with majority opinion and rule. However, […] it comes from all political perspectives and in a variety of categories: mostly religious, political, economic, and cultural/social’. The paper focuses on these very political, cultural and social aspects in the context of the countercultural and technological movements that emerged in California, and more particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1950s and following decades. From the historical Barbary Coast to the Electronic Frontier, it analyses the evolution of dissent, from the streets to the screens, and the technological revolution that started in the 1970s, partly inspired by the counterculture. Based on theoretical studies, interviews and research conducted on the counterculture and cyberculture movements in the San Francisco Bay Area, the paper discusses protest and dissent as core values of American democracy that keep getting reinvented, challenging cultural and social norms, offline and online.