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loving in Sollfrank & Dockray 2013

ing up to share it with other people. It’s not a
frictionless easy activity, there is work that’s involved in it. [34:31] And I
find some of the scans were quite beautiful in that way, even when they
weren’t necessarily so good to read.
[34:41] There’s actually, if we go to scale… Again, I have way more books that
I could possibly read, physical books. And I’m going to continue buying more,
acquiring more through my entire life, I’m sure of it. And I think that’s just
part of loving books and loving to read, you have more than you can possibly
deal with. [35:11] And I think, on a level of scale, maybe, with the Internet
we find ourselves, in orders of magnitude, [with] more than we could possibly
deal with. But in a way, it’s the same kind of anxiety, and the limits are
more or less the same. [35:29] But then there are maybe even new opportunities
for new ways of reading that weren’t available before. I could flip through a
book in a certain way, but maybe now with the possibility of i

loving in Stalder 2018

nity.
Though rather difficult to define, it was a powerful and positive term
that somehow promised the opposite of bureaucracy: humanity,
cooperation, horizontality, mutual trust, and consensus. Now, however,
humanity was expected to be reconfigured as a community in cooperation
with and inseparable from machines. And what was yearned for had become
a liberating symbiosis of man and machine, an idea that the author
Richard Brautigan was quick to mock in his poem "All Watched Over by
Machines of Loving Grace" from 1967:

::: {.poem}
::: {.lineGroup}
I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.[^87^](#c1-note-0087){#c1-note-0087a}
:::
:::

Here, Brautigan is ridiculing both the impatience (*the sooner the
better!*) and the naïve optimism (*harmony, clear sky*) of the
countercultural activists. Primarily, he regarded the underlying vision
as an innocent but

note-0081a){#c1-note-0081}  Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, *Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered*, 8th edn (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2014).

[82](#c1-note-0082a){#c1-note-0082}  Fred Turner, *From Counterculture
to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Movement and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism* (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.
21. In this regard, see also the documentary films *Das Netz* by Lutz
Dammbeck (2003) and *All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace* by
Adam Curtis (2011).

[83](#c1-note-0083a){#c1-note-0083}  It was possible to understand
cybernetics as a language of free markets or also as one of centralized
planned economies. See Slava Gerovitch, *From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A
History of Soviet Cybernetics* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). The
great interest of Soviet scientists in cybernetics rendered the term
rather suspicious in the West, where it was disassociated from
artificial intelligence.[]{#Page_183 type="pagebreak" t

nderstood
and has been obeyed." Norbert Wiener, *The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society*, 2nd edn (London: Free Association Books,
1989), p. 16.

[86](#c1-note-0086a){#c1-note-0086}  Though presented here as distinct,
these interests could in fact be held by one and the same person. In
*From Counterculture to Cyberculture*, for instance, Turner discusses

countercultural entrepreneurs.

reet

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or
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otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

P. 51, Brautigan, Richard: From "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving
Grace" by Richard Brautigan. Copyright © 1967 by Richard Brautigan,
renewed 1995 by Ianthe Brautigan Swenson. Reprinted with the permission
of the Estate of Richard Brautigan; all rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1959-0

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1960-6 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stalder, Felix, author.

Title: The digital condition / Felix Stalder.

Other titles: Kultur der Digitalitae

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