Dear Gillian
The ‘Cybernetic culture research unit’ impresses many due to its foresight and more or less poignant prediction of what the internet would become. The CCRU was a ‘thought exercise’ that is thoroughly bourgeois in nature – as it arises not from the Communist left – but the mainstream of the UK academia (in this case – Warwick University). Therefore, entrapped by its own logic – whatever these intellectuals produce – it cannot begin anywhere but firmly within the bourgeois intellectual milieu, and whatever the intended consequences, the results cannot ‘transcend’ the bourgeois intellectual system.
At most, I would grant it a ‘Trotskyite’ edge – but that’s about it on that front. If you look carefully, I suspect that in the immediate ‘void’ left by the demise of the USSR – these academics seem to ‘imagine’ an intensification of bourgeois spirituality fuelled (ironically) by popularism. In other words, bourgeois new age nonsense coupled with very ‘exact’ and ‘precise’ professional intellection. Much of the site is dedicated to all kinds of bourgeois experimentation with bourgeois spirituality – with a definite anti-Christian ethos. They seem to make much of ‘Lovecraft’ – a thorough ‘racist’ with a talent for ‘making-up’ mystical bullshit. The fact that this group did in fact ‘predict’ much of ‘how’ the internet would develop – does not excuse their class identification – or from being subjected to a ruthless proletariat critique.
SANGHA KOMMUNE (SSR) 