Local technology-industry culture shaped the methods of neighboring activist movements

Evidence

Fred Turner argues that Burning Man provides a cultural infrastructure for new media labor, modeling commons-based peer production, gift economies, community participation, and the potential of “vocational ecstasy”: self-fulfillment through creative work and radical self-expression. Turner links the social structure of Burning Man to Google’s company culture, which emphasizes collaboration, a relatively flat corporate hierarchy, and the pursuit of individual passion projects through “20 percent time.” He maintains that for Bay Area technologists, Burning Man represents a week where the idealistic principles of new media production are brought to life, cementing the rich social networks that flexible labor models make necessary, and “work[ing] through the contradictions” of locating these ideals in a corporate setting. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 139 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Much the same can be said of the local community. We should avoid the romanticised view of community which has often surfaced in social analysis when traditional cultures are compared to the modern. I mean here to stress the importance of localised relations organised in terms of place, where place has not yet become transformed by distanciated time-space relations. In the large majority of pre-modern settings, including most cities, the local milieu is the site of clusters of interweaving social relations, the low spatial span of which provides for their solidity in time. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 247 (#complicates, via linked claim)

While the Californian Ideology is still widespread in Silicon Valley, the Bay Area’s strong countercultural influence has also, and in equal measure, shaped the contemporary technology scene. Web 2.0 ideology is the child of both Silicon Valley entrepreneurial capitalism and activist subcultures like independent publishing, anti-globalization activism, Burning Man, cyberdelic rave culture, and free and open-source software. These countercultural movements can be hard to detangle. Many anti-corporate activists believed that the consolidation of media companies during the Reagan and Clinton eras created a homogenized, profit-led mass media, resulting in toothless journalism that lacked the muscle to check corporate or government power. During the early web era, dot-com workers built personal homepages in their free time to provide an alternative to mainstream entertainment. In the Web 2.0 age, blogs and Twitter facilitated “citizen journalism,” a bottom-up form of media that was thought to be able to compensate for the shortcomings of mainstream media. Web 2.0 situated itself in allegiance with the countercultural critique of mainstream media, but positioned social technology, rather than protest or political participation, as the solution. The preexisting affinity between West Coast anti-establishment activism and the homebrew ethos of technology culture created a fertile environment for these ideologies to intermingle. This combination of radical activism and business culture created a strain of idealistic techno-determinism that, rather than rejecting mainstream capitalism, embraces it. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 55 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Activist technology and institutional structure are mutually constitutive, not separable — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 104; Web 2.0 ideology fuses Silicon Valley capitalism with countercultural activism while embracing capitalism — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 55; Burning Man models the ideals and labor structures of tech culture — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 139 (+3 more)

Related

• Burning Man models the ideals and labor structures of tech culture (similarity 0.82)
• Burning Man supplies Silicon Valley with an ideal of non-commodified collaborative labor. (similarity 0.82)
• Local technology culture shaped Seattle’s activist organizational choices (similarity 0.81)
• Web 2.0 ideology fuses Silicon Valley capitalism with countercultural activism while embracing capitalism (similarity 0.81)
• Web-scale independent production exceeds 1970s countercultural reach but needs existential reframing (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Burning Man models the ideals and labor structures of tech culture #exemplifies (0.75) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 139
• Web 2.0 ideology fuses Silicon Valley capitalism with countercultural activism while embracing capitalism #exemplifies (0.72) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 55
• Local place-based relations gave pre-modern communities solidity #complicates (0.72) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 247