A hálózatok diadala
The Triumph of the Network Mode

Summary/Abstract: In the mid-1990s, as the Internet swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. The Internet was about to flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people. But only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically? This article traces the history of an extraordinarily influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists and entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting. But instead of building a brave new world, their tactics have become important features of an increasingly networked mode of living, working, and deploying social and cultural power.

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