Somehow, by the 1990s, a metaphor born at the heart of the military research establishment had become an emblem of the sort of personal integrity, individualism, and collaborative sociability that so many had claimed the very same establishment was working to destroy.
The computational metaphor of the 1990s embraced other contradictions too. For the marchers of the Free Speech movement, disembodiment—that is, the transformation of the self into data on an IBM card—marked the height of dehumanization. For Kelly, Dyson, and Barlow, however, it marked the route to new forms of equality and communion. Somehow, somewhere, disembodiment had come to be seen as a route to a more holistic life. Likewise, for the students who turned toward Mario Savio, the link between computers and commerce represented a threat. As Savio’s speech suggested, the students of the Free Speech Movement were afraid not only of becoming victims of a social machine, but also of becoming fuel for the engines of economic production. In the 1990s, the computer once again served as a metaphor for the organization of production and labor, but this time that link promised to liberate both individuals and society. How was it that the informational economy came to be seen not as an oppressive force, but as a site of political and cultural change? (p. 16)
Turner, however, writes about the 1990s when there was justification toward viewing digitality as something new and different. Today, even with new applications continually promising us a better and easier life-style, few of us truly expect an apocalyptic change to usher us into a new era. In the days of the Free Speech Movement, IBM was, as Mario Savio suggested, part of the machine:In later iterations, at least for a while, it came to represent something surprisingly liberating. But the permanent revolution is very hard to pull off.