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loving in Sollfrank & Dockray 2013

ng a scan finds its way in. [34:02] And it’s only
through really good scans that you can manage to sort of eliminate a lot of
that, a lot of the traces of that labour. But I know that, in the entire
history of Aaaaarg, the files will always show the labour of the person who is
trying to get something 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 indexing the
whole content of a book, and doing searches, and creating ways of visually
displaying books and relationships between books, and between parts of books,
and this kind of things, and also making lists, and making lists with other
people – all of these maybe provide new ways of reading w

loving in Stalder 2018

were looking for new areas of
activity; and countercultural activists were longing for new forms of
peaceful coexistence.[^86^](#c1-note-0086){#c1-note-0086a} They all
rejected the bureaucratic model, and the counterculture provided them
with the central catchword for their alternative vision: community.
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:

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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}
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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 amusing fantasy and not as a potential threat against
which something had to be done. And there were also reasons to believe
that, ultimately, the new communities would be free from the coercive
nature that []{#Page_51 type="pagebreak" title="51"}had traditionally
characterized the downside of comm

this method is known as a
"distributed denial of service attack" (DDOS).

[80](#c1-note-0080a){#c1-note-0080}  Max Weber, *Economy and Society: An
Outline of Interpretive Sociology*, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 26--8.

[81](#c1-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" title="183"}

[84](#c1-note-0084a){#c1-note-0084}  Claus Pias, "The Age of
Cybernetics," in Pias (ed.), *Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences
1946--1953* (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2016), pp. 11--27.

[85](#c1-note-0085a){#c1-note-0085}  Norbert Wiener, one of the
cofounders of cybernetics, explained this

on, I communicate a message to him, and
although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of
communication does not differ from that of a message of fact.
Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of
any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood
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.

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