When I was sixteen, I read a book called Fierce Dancing: Adventures in the Underground. It was written by CJ Stone, a columnist for the Big Issue, and it was about the free party and road protest movement in Britain. Although I was a bit too young to have ever been to a proper free party, to join convoys of crusties on the way to an unsuspecting field in the heart of the British countryside and dance straight for twenty hours, I’d been to the odd local rave. Around Brighton, where I grew up, sound systems could set up in a forgotten pocket of the South Downs for a few brief hours before being disturbed by a police force now empowered by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 to shut us down. We had a lot of fun.

Fierce Dancing filled in the blanks, it told the stories of the alternative cultures – pagans, new age travellers, punks and drop-outs – that had coalesced around this scene and contributed to its vibrancy. It told tales of women who gardened vegetable plots in no knickers, tepee valleys in the depths of Wales, and how to make poppy tea. It was, in that most adolescent sense, a revelation. And to an adolescent growing up in the consumerist nineties, seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and seventeen years into the rule of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party where alternative ideas about how to live seemed only to exist to sell ice cream and health drinks, it was also an escape. I’d often wondered what had happened to all the hippies. My favourite film at that time was Easy Rider. The legacy of the counterculture was celebrated in books and on TV, but, outside of the odd rave, the world around me seemed to contain little of the freedom, the rebellion and the exuberance that the sixties had supposedly promised.

For Stone, I suspect Fierce Dancing was a kind of eulogy. I suspect, from the way he speaks about them, that he didn’t expect the communities he was recording to survive much longer. The book itself is now out of print. I spoke to its publisher at a drinks party recently, who told me that it had sold around 25,000 copies. That figure is, apparently, “not bad for a zeitgeist book”.

Barefoot into Cyberspace, the book you’re about to read, is a zeitgeist book, too. At least, that’s what I intended it to be. At the end of 2009 I set out to record for posterity characters that, since I left adolescence and Brighton behind, had played key roles in the digital counterculture I eventually settled in to and that I suspected was about to disappear. These characters weren’t the “rip, mix, burn”, iPad-wielding social media consultants and purveyors of gadget-prop so often associated with the web. They were hackers and geeks, command-line cowboys, info-terrorists and civil libertarians. They had seen in the rise of many-to-many communications technology an opportunity to free modern society from corrupt institutions, to develop new ways of organising away from the imperative of industrial capitalism, and to seize agency and power from the jaws of the consumerist beast.

For the time that I travelled with them, I believed these things, too. I believed in them enough to abandon my career as a journalist and run an organisation called the Open Rights Group (ORG) which, as well as fighting to protect basic civil liberties online, campaigns against any kind of regulation that could prejudice the liberating aspects of the ’net. I don’t run ORG anymore, which is probably a good thing given how sceptical I became that its mission could succeed. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the techno-Utopians were onto something. I simply feared that the institutions of the old world they thought they could topple – be they corporations, media or politicians – had a lot of fight left in them.

But if Barefoot into Cyberspace was intended to be a eulogy, I hadn’t figured on WikiLeaks. Almost from the moment I started collecting material for this book, their story began to trespass on mine. By the end of the year – 2010 – in which the majority of this book was written, the culture I’d been a part of for almost a decade was headline news all over the world. It’s too early to tell what effect that will have on the techno-Utopian dream. All I can say is that it transformed this project from an exercise in cultural anthropology into something more like an adventure story. As a result, I had more fun writing this book than I could have imagined when I started it. I hope you enjoy reading it just as much.

Becky Hogge, June 2011

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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Barefoot into Cyberspace

ADVENTURES IN SEARCH OF TECHNO-UTOPIA

Contents

Prologue: Fierce Dancing

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