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If philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.

—Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (108)

In this paper, I consider the life practice of an American computer programmer of distinction, Charles Moore, the inventor of the programming language and system, Forth. Forth was evolved by Moore for his own use, as a weapon in his career-long struggle to ward off, rather than manage or reduce, complexity. Along the way, to his own surprise, his work attracted collaborators and inspired the formation of technical and ethical Forth communities of interest. Moore, however, does not seem to be much of a joiner; and the most interesting byproduct of his labors may have been to create a permanent, external alternative to a global communitarianism that from the outset has been hegemonized by the Pentagon-based founders and funders of the Internet, the personal workstation, and the modern human-computer interface.

The American quest for community in a confederation of possessive individualists persists across so many changes in society that it cannot be reduced to mere ideology. During the heyday of the now-vanishing era of Pentagon Capitalism, the quest was renewed [End Page 109] and redefined by a group of organic intellectuals associated with some of the most advanced perspectives on the development of computer technology.

Under the leadership of J.C.R. Licklider at ARPA (the Pentagon’s Advance Research Projects Agency, where Licklider was the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO)), this group transformed the American weak vision of a polity comprised of geographically-based, quasi-voluntary associations of individuals into one of a radically deterritorialized universe of communities of interest. The emerging technological complement of this vision was a society of intra- and internetworked personal workstations. Individual users would be reterritorialized on their machines via the mediation of intimate interfaces, but also of local-area networks. They would, however, be deterritorialized by means of the open integration of all such intranets, and even all bounded internets, into what John S. Quarterman, following William Gibson, called The Matrix (1990), the net of all possible nets.

The matrix is indefinitely extensible. With its support, individual users might still escape entrapment within local area intranets, passing through gateways into community associations beyond all categories of de- or reterritorialization. And, although frontierism has since been reintroduced into the discourse of nets by John Perry Barlow and others, the dynamic of this reconstituted American communitarianism promises to unrelocate it beyond all frontiers, electronic or final, and hence beyond the limits of the American Century itself. In actually engineering, therefore, a radical separation of communities of interest from those of place, these intellectuals have produced a totalization of human-machine coevolution beyond which we now find it difficult to think.

Of course, this “counterculture” that appeared within the higher interstices of Pentagon Capitalism clearly had something in common with the oppositional countercultures of the ‘60s and ‘70s. At the same time, it decisively parted company with the often-archaicizing communalism of the latter, whose own visions of an anti-futuristic future were later crystallized by, among others, Ursula K. LeGuin, in her novel, Always Coming Home.We should look for some apparently more challenging alternatives within the context of digital technology itself.

Alluquère Rosanne Stone, in her book Desire and Technology at the Close of the Digital Age (1996), calls our attention to a group of radical technological communitarians who had tasted the power of Chuck Moore’s Forth. In the late 1970s, working in Northern California, they created a Forth-based bulletin board service called “CommuniTree.” [End Page 110]

What they designed was not simply a more sophisticated search protocol, but a wholly...