Cyberculture in the large:World house

This essay describes a gesture of thought and politics—almost ahistorically called “cyberculture”—that appeared in the early 1960s and extended its reach into the politics and poetry that followed. To reread this gesture, I explain, brings new terms of legibility to this later work, from Marshall McLuhan to W.S. Merwin and Philip José Farmer to Shulamith Firestone and Martin Luther King Jr. It may also enable a point of resistance to advancing technological orders of global capitalism. This is our chance—“our” meaning all of humanity, not only a few who are exceptionally fortunate—to. . . do our human work, to live human lives, to devote ourselves. . . to poetry and politics. —Alice Mary Hilton, The Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution (1964).