Cyborganic and Social Change: The Power and Limits of Community(Chapter 7 PDF)
The story of Cyborganic is a story about the productive power of community, in particular, of intentional communities mobilized in conscious projects of self-creation. But it is also a story of constraints and limitations on this power vis-à-vis larger social structures and cultural forces. In this chapter, I situate Cyborganic in the history of utopian experiments and exemplary communities in the United States. Within this history, Langdon Winner (1986) identifies and critiques a dominant cultural narrative of social transformation through technology. Identifying this narrative in Cyborganic and the wider community of Net geeks and Web heads of which it was a part shows it is neither as new nor as revolutionary as commonly conceived. More significantly, it shows up the structural limitations of community as a social form and demonstration models of the good life as a tactic for realizing social change. While Cyborganic's project was innovative in imaging and building new, influential forms of techno-sociality, in terms of constituting social subjects, it was politics by other means, argument by example, by technology. It was also supremely bourgeois and bohemian in creating a new style of life, rooted in a calling and countercultural status identity. It was a project for life in a social order dominated by work.
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