Fighting “the Man’s Technology”: Visions of Technology in the Underground Press of the American Counterculture (1964-1974)

• In Event: Civic Tech and the Politics of Technology

Abstract

This paper explores how the American social movements of the 1960s and 1970s talked about the technology of their time. Through an analysis of a sample of underground newspapers, it highlights how the American counterculture thought of technology in a prevalently negative way. It identifies three negative discourses: technology of war, technology of capitalism, technology of repression. These three views are effectively condensed into the famous expression attributed to Huey P. Newton: “the spirit of the people is greater than the Man’s technology”, whose meaning and diffusion is traced throughout the sample. Two, more marginal, views – technology for abundance and technology for revolution – are also analyzed. I then argue that these diverging visions of technology are also different visions of social change. The paper thus contributes to the debate on the relationship between social movements and technologies by historicizing it and emphasizing the symbolic role that technology is invested with.

Author

• Elisabetta Ferrari, University of Pennsylvania