Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed

Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed.

Political tract favoring fairly traditional political reform on the level of State/Province and Nation-State as opposed to "Think globally, act locally"—and from a totalizing counter-cultural analysis. Relevant here because the argument emphatically includes—in the last of ten chapters, just before the conclusion—a critique of classics from the 1960s onward on issues of technology and "the human/machine interface." The Table of Contents has chapter 10 titled "Spaceship Earth," with subsections summarized as "The Critical Mass ride. The rule of technique. Small is beautiful, and appropriate technology. Cyberlibertarianism and spam. Paper or plastic? Slow food. Shallow and deep ecology. Matrix redux. Shallow environmentalism and negative externalities." Among works and ideas criticized: Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969), Charles Reich's The Greening Of America; How The Youth Revolution Is Trying To Make America Livable (1970), Jacques Ellul on technique, Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Knopf, 1992), Langdon Winner writing in Newsday (23 Nov. 1997) on "technomania," Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man on "relying upon the very instrucment of repression—technology—for the emancipation of society" (RS 294), Ernst Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973; London: Abacus, 1974), Ursula Franklin's The Real World of Technology (1990; Toronto: Anansi, 1999), Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969; New York: Pocket, 1970)—and hacking as a kind of "culture jamming" as espoused by Timothy Leary, Andrew Ross, John Perry Barlow, Esther Dyson et al., et al. (sic). See in this Category citations for J. Ellul, H. Marcuse, T. Roszak. CAUTION: Heath and Potter don't supply original publication dates when they cite reprints, and they err in crediting T. Roszak with coining "the term 'technocracy'" (344 n.).