Fred Turner
Bio
Fred Turner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He's the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (Anchor/Doubleday, 1996; 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. His writing has appeared in publications ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Nature.
Abstract
| Dreaming the End of Bureaucracy: Network Theory and the Legacy of the Counterculture Over the last few years, scholars and pundits alike have argued that new media technologies are driving the blurring of the playground and the factory, and with it, the democratization of civic and commercial participation. This talk challenges that account. While not denying the power of information technologies today, it demonstrates that the ideals underlying contemporary fusions of work and play first appeared decades ago, in response to then-ubiquitous critiques of bureaucracy. According to critics ranging from C. Wright Mills to Lewis Mumford, bureaucracies tended to produce psychological fragmentation and social partition. How, they wondered, could work be re-organized so as to allow individuals to bring their whole selves into the labor process and to integrate their labors into everyday life? This talk briefly traces two historically sequential answers to that question: first, the rise of New Communalism in the 1960s, and second, the rise of peer production today. It notes that each movement has sought to restore a psychological and social wholeness that critics have long thought bureaucracy destroys. Yet, it also shows how these searches for an egalitarian social world have at times corroded the cultural and political scaffolding on which such a world depends. The talk concludes then, by pointing to the forgotten virtues of bureaucracy and with them, to new principles for a sustained critique of the networked production emerging around us. |