loving in Sollfrank & Dockray 2013


™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 ava


loving in Stalder 2018


he 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


e 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


ety*, 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.
[87](#c1-note-0087a){#c1-note-0087}  Richard Brautigan, "All Watched
Over by Machines of Loving Grace," in *All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace*, by Brautigan (San Francisco: The Communication Company,
1967).

[88](#c1-note-0088a){#c1-note-0088}  David D. Clark, "A Cloudy Crystal
Ball: Visions of the Future," *Internet Engineering Taskforce* (July
1992), online.

[89](#c1-note-0089a){#c1-note-0089}  Castells, *The Rise of the Network
Society*.

[90](#c1-note-0090a){#c1-note-0090}  Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to
Hobbyists," *Ho


ll 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
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
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,

 

Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.