Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture

8: Dot-com Politics

Dot-com Politics The exponential growth in the number of internet users in the 1990s fueled a gold rush in “dot-com” stocks, up until the tech crash of 2000. This boom was paralleled by an explosion in technotopian rhetoric, as dreams of technologically driven social transformation conveniently meshed with get-rich-quick fantasies. A bevy of new magazines, bursting to overflow with dot-com advertising, arose to spread the cybertopian gospel, including Red Herring, Industry Standard, Fast Company , Upside, and Business 2.0. The bible of this cybertopianism was undoubtedly Wired magazine, which both reported on the technology industry and attempted to place the boom in a broader social context. To better understand the ideology of the dot-com boom, this chapter will take a closer look at the cyber-libertarian politics of Wired during the Silicon Valley gold rush. Wired as first conceived was an odd amalgam, a high-tech business magazine with a cyberpunk edge. The magazine was founded in 1993 by veterans of the Whole Earth Review, the bible of the West Coast–based, left-wing “appropriate technology” movement. By the 1990s, these exbohemians , including Louis Rosetto, Stuart Brand, and Howard Rheingold , had embraced Silicon Valley–style capitalism as a force of positive social change, grafting 1960s-style utopian rhetoric onto their business coverage.1 Wired quickly established itself as cyberspace’s paper of record. It veered from sections like “Deductible Junkets,” which listed upcoming computer-industry conventions, to “Idées Fortes,” which published manifestos from hackers, phone phreaks, and other cybercultural fringe dwellers. Unlike many of its imitators, Wired remains in publication today, having been sold by its original founders to the Condé Nast magazine empire in 1998. However, since the dot-com crash, it’s become a much more conventional —and chastened—business-and-culture magazine. My discus8 171 sion will focus on the Wired of the boom years. Many of the ideological conflicts of the dot-com era, however, remain with us today. The Hacker Mystique The ambiguous figure of the hacker was central to the mythology of Wired. The term hacker can mean several different things, depending on its context of use. While hacker is a term of honor for many computer users, it is also used disparagingly by some, to identify programmers as “nerdy social outcasts.”2 Like “queer” and “nigger,” hacker is today a term worn as a subcultural badge of pride by many computer programmers and users. Who gets to count as a true hacker, however, is a subject of much contestation. Steven Levy’s 1984 history of computing, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, is about the “original hackers,” the young programmers and designers who rebelled against the bureaucracy and hierarchy of 1950s-style mainframe computing, leading what Levy calls “The Computing Revolution”—the development of small, (relatively) cheap, (relatively) easy-to-use computers accessible to the general public. Levy defines hackers as “those computer programmers and designers who regard computing as the most important thing in the world.”3 Levy is most interested in how these experimenters’ enthusiasm and creativity inspired them to break all the supposed rules of computing, opening up a new, more “empowering” way to use computers. Levy identifies the original hackers as the undergraduate members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) in the 1950s, who began experimenting with MIT’s powerful PDP-10 miniframe computer and developed a new way to work with computers—not simply designing programs offline and feeding them to the computer on punch cards, but interacting with the computer, exploiting the computer’s ability to give quick feedback to develop sophisticated games and simulations. Levy traces the etymology of the term “hacker” from the term a “hack,” which “had long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that MIT students would regularly devise, such as covering the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting foil.” Among the TMRC members, a “hack” came to mean any project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in the mere involvement. . . . 172 | Dot-com Politics As the TMRC people used the word, there was serious respect implied. While someone might call a clever connection between relays a “mere hack,” it would be understood that, to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity...