Untitled - socium.ge

20 Manuel CastellsThus, while the movements of the 1960s, and the diverse cultural-politicalexpressions that they induced in the 1970s, took place in the ideological andpolitical vacuum related to the crisis of industrialism and of Keynesian capitalism,they were not a response to the crisis; nor were they the harbingers ofthe new policies and strategies that eventually restarted the engines of capitalismin its new incarnation. However, the values, ideas, and projects that theyinvented or rediscovered were essential materials in the reconstitution of society,as I will argue below.There was a third component of the process of multidimensional transformationthat took place in the 1970s. This was the revolution in information andcommunication technologies that led to the constitution of informationalism asa new technological paradigm, as presented earlier in this chapter. I will addthree comments concerning the relationship between this technological revolutionand the processes of capitalist restructuring and cultural social movementsthat, together, constituted the crucible from which the network societyoriginated.The first refers to the independence of the origins of this technologicalrevolution from both the other two processes. The invention of the microprocessor,the personal computer, the digital switch, the Internet, and recombinantDNA were not a response to business demands or the needs ofcapitalism. Military funding and sponsorship was essential, as technologicalsuperiority was seen, appropriately, as the means to win the Cold War withoutactual fighting between the superpowers. But even this dependence on themilitary was generic to the whole process of technological innovation, notspecific to some of the critical technologies that were developed.Miniaturization and advanced telecommunications were essential for missilebasedwarfare, and they were deliberately targeted by companies underdefense contracts. But computer networking, and therefore the Internet, was abyproduct of experimentation by computer scientists for their own scientificcuriosity, as the Internet did not have military applications until everybodybegan to use it in the 1990s. The personal computer was a serendipitous inventionof the computer counter-culture, and the best software development wasbased on open source, and so was produced outside the corporate world, in theuniversities and in freelance ventures.The whys and wherefores of this technological revolution have been chroniclednumerous times, and their presentation is beyond the scope of this chapter.But it was an autonomous process of research, innovation, and applicationwhich developed not as a response to the crisis of industrial capitalism but asthe work of a community of practice that emerged at the unlikely crossroadsof military-sponsored, big science and university-based, counter-culturalnetworks (Castells, 2001).The second comment is that, while the three processes were independent in