From Satori to Silicon Valley
By Theodore Roszak
The Times They Keep A-Changin'
When this essay was first written for the Alvin Fine Memorial Lecture at San Francisco State University in April 1985, I was not fully aware of how much the times had already changed since I wrote The Making of a Counter Culture in 1969. But I soon learned. A few weeks before the lecture, a student in the Public Affairs Office at San Francisco State called me to arrange some campus publicity. He had a question.
"Where's Satori?"
"What?" I asked.
"Your lecture is called 'From Satori to Silicon Valley,' " he explained. "I know where Silicon Valley is. But where's Satori?"
"The Zen state of enlightenment ... you never heard of that?"
"Oh. I never took any courses in Oriental religion "
I started to explain the term, spelling out its once obvious connection with the counter culture of the sixties.
"Counter culture," he interrupted. "That's ... hippies. All like that."
Suddenly I felt one hundred years old.
I often feel that way these days. I teach students now who have no clear idea what a sit-in or a teach-in was, who no longer remember the Days of Rage or the Summer of Love, Vietnam or Watergate. Woodstock for them is only a picture in their textbooks, the Chicago Seven (or was it Eight?) are an unknown quantity.
Only to be expected. After all, when I was making my way through college, what did I know about Sacco and Vanzetti ... the Memorial Day Massacre ... the Moscow Trials ... ? Time passes. Social memory is a shifting cloud. The young, awkwardly segueing into citizenhood, leave ancestral traumas and triumphs behind. Which is as it should be. One hopes they will go on to better things of their own.
Will they? There is no guarantee, but knowing a little history might help. And having some idea of where satori is can't hurt.
But do bear in mind as you read, that this essay dates back to 1985. Rather than revise to take account of all that has happened in the world of high tech since then, I have made only minor changes of style. That might seem to risk leaving a lot uncovered. But the main issue under discussion in this essay, the convoluted interplay between Technophiles and Reversionaries within the counter culture of the sixties and seventies, remains a significant history lesson for those interested in the greater meaning of computers in our culture. As for other social and technological developments since the advent of the first Macintosh, much of this is covered in my book The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, available in a second edition from the University of California Press as of 1995.
Rather than revise the original essay, I have added a few afterthoughts in two new sections at the end. "Nerds, Zombies, and the Flight from Mortality" deals in greater depth with what I now see as the Gnostic undercurrent of Technophilia. The final section, "Down Among the Cyberpunks," faces up to the fact that neither Technophiles nor Reversionaries achieved the utopian vista they had in view. Instead, another force has won the day. That leaves us to look for hope in odd places, perhaps among the uneasy dreams of digital outlaws.
The Gathering of the Tribes
In these days of instant nostalgia, current events pass from journalism into folklore before they have had a decent chance to become history. This is certainly true of the period we call "the sixties." The American counter culture that flourished during that period -- from the late fifties to the mid-seventies -- has already been assigned a canonical image in television dramatizations and the history texts now being used in our high schools and colleges. It surfaces there in the latter chapters, where the narrative, having swept like a stormy surf across the story of Vietnam and Watergate, begins to ebb sullenly away toward the Carter and Reagan years. The usual depiction is that of high-spirited young people, ungroomed, unkempt, and uncouth, disporting themselves in the open air -- a park, a field, a forest. Their straggly hair streams free or is banded back Indian style. Their clothes are patched, befringed, and beaded -- a motley of backwoods dishevelment and barbaric splendor. Often they are loaded with backpacks, bedrolls, stash bags that lend the aura of transiency: people on the road far from home, ready to crash anywhere for the night -- in the woods, under the stairs, in the back of the van. Mendicant citizens of the world, pausing to sing or play as they make their way to Berkeley or Boulder, Cambridge or Katmandu, North Beach or the North Woods. Sometimes, more soberly, they flourish signs: "Make Love not War," "End the Bombing Now," "Give Peace a Chance."
Were there ever such people -- really? Yes and no. Every social movement leaves behind recollections at once insightful and misleading. The study of history would be lost without them. The stereotypic Abolitionist, Robber Baron, Progressive Reformer, New Dealer is as good a place as any to begin understanding the past, but each of these inherited images needs critical adjusting. Also remember that stereotypes in their own right tell us much about social hopes, fantasies, and fears. And each has its history.
For some years now (since about half way through the seventies) I have had the oppressive sense of an embarrassed reluctance on all sides to recall the role that was once played in our society by the people whom the media named beatniks, hippies, flower children. When their period in history is mentioned, many hasten to attach a snide disclaimer, a wised-up dismissal. We peer back in time through decades of fickle journalism, national self-doubt, and social backlash, wondering if the dissenting politics of the sixties might simply have been another media fiction. Certainly in recent years, the only flesh and blood examples of the countercultural image I have come across have been the barely surviving casualties of the era that still haunt downtown Berkeley, panhandling for spare change. Their sad squalor is evidence of nothing braver or more inspiring than being bummed out and overaged.
Yet, with a little effort and some candor, I can remember the happier originals of these faded caricatures as they once enlivened the streets of the Haight-Ashbury and Telegraph Avenue. In its time, their persona of ragged independence -- or some reasonable facsimile thereof -- was a proud and prominent emblem of cultural disaffiliation blossoming in the streets of every major city, on the campus of every minor college and high school. It was a stance that claimed to have broken irrevocably with the urban-industrial culture that ruled the world then, and more so now. The style purported to be "natural," "organic," a principled rejection of well-behaved, antiseptic, upwardly mobile middle-class habits in favor of a return to folk origins and lost traditions. A bit of the Bohemian rebel, a bit of the noble savage. Those who assumed the full dissenting identity of the time spoke of themselves as "freaks" and assembled in hastily improvised and ephemeral "tribes" where simple and funky living was the rule. At the Morning Star Ranch in Marin, the residents called their way of life "voluntary primitivism," a design for living that transcended both excessive affluence and minimal hygiene.
For some, the search for a postindustrial alternative led out of the cities to rural communes, few of which were destined to survive. But even in the cities, one could find "collectives" where the ethos was that of urban cave-dwellers, camping out indoors. In Berkeley in the late sixties, when my wife and I were looking for a house to rent, we had occasion to inspect a number of these domestic experiments -- or what was left in their wake after the resident tribe had decamped without paying the rent. Musty houses in a state of advanced disrepair where the inhabitants had once pitched tents in the living room or spent the night in sleeping bags. In the kitchens, pantries were filled with stale brown rice and active vermin; in the refrigerators, one might find several months' supply of spoiled groceries and well-sprouted soy cakes. In these quarters, one sensed that organic foods were a sort of talisman, sufficiently potent in their very presence to repeal the germ theory of disease. Also there were the signs of many animals once in residence and still haunting the premises -- unleashed, unhousebroken, very likely unfed. In the Haight-Ashbury and the East Bay, there was a cult of the "organic dog" -- the larger, the less washed and tamed, the better. For a period, there were neighborhoods in Berkeley and San Francisco that took on the look and the fragrance of barnyards or hunting camps.
The people who lived through these episodes, once at war with the parental generation of their day, have themselves become the parents of the students I now teach. They did not vanish in a puff of smoke but have lived on as part of the eighty-million strong baby boom generation to find jobs, raise families, run for office, play the market. Some of them, mainly women, now show up in my classes as "older students," often returning to take up the education they dropped out of twenty-some years ago. Now in their forties or fifties with easily another thirty years of longevity ahead of them, these aging boomers sometimes seek me out during office hours to lament how difficult it is for them to raise their kids in this era of crack cocaine and AIDS. Dare they be as permissive as their parents once were when Dr. Spock was the domestic gospel? Looking back, they, like me, are left with many questions, not least of all how we got from the heady idealism of the counter culture to Reaganomics and the Moral Majority, Nine Inch Nails and the dot.com feeding frenzy.
I'm not sure I know. But I have these thoughts about the line of descent that led from satori to Silicon Valley.
Organic Commonwealth and Buddhist Anarchy
Perhaps the high water mark of this symbolic effort to rusticate western civilization was the brief and turbulent episode in Berkeley remembered as "People's Park." What the Human Be-In in San Francisco of 1967 had been for one day, what the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in early 1969 had been for a weekend, People's Park was meant to be for keeps. The event might be seen as the culmination of the direct action social philosophy proclaimed by the Haight-Ashbury Diggers. After issuing a series of broadsides in late 1966 that called for an urban anarchist order of life, the Diggers had begun a daily come-one, come-all free food project under the slogan "it's free because it's yours." The food was either stolen or scrounged from merchants around the city (most of it days-old and unsalable if still edible) and served up for the growing population of young, underfed street people. But history's first Diggers -- those of seventeenth century England -- had not been panhandlers; they had been would-be revolutionaries. Dispossessed farmers and artisans, they had occupied the land, proclaimed it the "common treasure" of the people, and begun tilling it. (Not much land, actually; there were only a few dozen Diggers. Nor did the occupation last long; only a few months before they were driven off, condemned as madmen rather than criminals.)
People's Park in Berkeley 1969 revived that original Digger ideal. A piece of the city's turf had been liberated by some shaggy squatters (and their dogs) from Governor Reagan and the University Regents. Promptly, the word went out for the tribes to pitch their tents, cultivate their gardens, warm their bones by the campfire, and create the Organic Commonwealth. In People's Park, the aboriginals -- their history dated back all of several days at most -- called themselves "sod brothers" and set about planting crops that never sprouted, and which few would have stayed put long enough to harvest. In any case, the Governor and the Regents quashed the experiment before it had the chance to fail, leaving it as another emblematic gesture along the way. The history of the period is mainly a collection of such emblems and symbols, evocative but ephemeral.
There were those, however, who took the stalking of the wild asparagus more seriously and put a deal of inventive thought and practical energy into the skills of postindustrial survival. There was, for example, the Portola Institute in Menlo Park, which dates from 1966. From it, along a number of routes, one can trace the origins of several ingenious projects in the Bay Area whose aim was to scale down, democratize, and humanize our hypertrophic technological society. These included the Briarpatch Network, the Farallones Institute, the Integral Urban House, the Simple Living Project.
On the national scene, the most visible of these efforts was The Whole Earth Catalog of 1968, a landmark publication of the period. The Catalog was an exuberant compendium of resourceful possibilities for laid back, but self-reliant living: wood-burning stoves, home remedies, mail-order moccasins, durable tools. I can recall a meeting I attended on the San Francisco peninsula where the first rather ratty looking edition of the Catalog (the print order was about 1000) was handed around the circle hot off the press. It was closely scrutinized with a mixture of wide-eyed wonder and honest glee. For, yes, here were the tools and skills of the alternative folk economy-to-come, tribal technology ready to be ordered and put to work. When the cities collapsed (as they were certain to do) and all the supply lines froze up (which might be any day now), these would be the means of cunning survival. Right there for all to see was a blueprint of the world's best tipi. There was even a book available for a modest price that showed how to deliver your own baby in a log cabin.
How many who read the Catalog ever ordered its goods or used its advice? I suspect that, for many, it was more the banner of a cause than the real tool it was meant to be. But even if one discounts most of these gestures as impractical whimsy, they stand as a provocative assertion of justified discontent which reached out, however unsteadily, toward organic values that our industrial culture has left far behind. That assertion, so I believe, represented much that was best in America's abbreviated countercultural episode. Somewhere in that longing for an earthier texture of life, there lay the saving sensibility that might have disciplined our runaway industrialism and given it a human face. Certainly we have had no stronger an appetite for social and economic alternatives, no livelier a discussion of major issues facing our high industrial system than we experienced during this brief, superheated interval. What is a sane standard of production and consumption? What is the true wealth of nations? What is the meaning of work, of leisure, of community, of masculinity and femininity, of freedom and fulfillment? What is the relationship of economy to environment? How do we create an economics of permanence? What are the values of a planetary culture? I cannot recall the last time I heard a discussion of such great questions that was animated with the energies of possibility.
If the wishful paradigm that sparked discussion of issues like these was a somewhat romanticized neo-primitivism, that may be of less intellectual importance than the quality of the ideas that soon found currency within this unlikely public of dissenting and dropped-out middle class youth. For these included the humanly-scaled economics (sometimes quaintly called the "Buddhist economics") of E. F Schumacher, the communitarian philosophy of Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin, the feminist insurgency of the women's movement, the convivial social theories of Ivan Illych, the ecological poetics of Gary Snyder, the manifold insights of the humanistic and human potential psychologies. Like so many tributaries, these currents of thought at last flowed into the environmental movement of the early seventies, which survives as the most durable offshoot of countercultural protest.
Permeating all these issues was a peculiarly west coast American reading of Zen-Taoist nature mysticism, a reborn sense of allegiance to the Earth and its rhythms which centered especially in the postwar Bay Area. The positive side of youthful disaffiliation during the sixties was the discovery of a new postindustrial standard of wealth and well-being that borrowed heavily upon oriental philosophy. I have met academic specialists who insist that Alan Watts, who did so much to popularize Zen, did not grasp the authentic meaning of satori. So it would be hazardous to say how many members of the untutored counter culture achieved a studied knowledge of this elusive tradition. But many had at least acquired from these exotic sources an awareness of values that commanded no respect in the mainstream of our frenzied industrial economy: a trust in the organism and the spontaneous patterns of nature, a sense of right livelihood, a taste for pleasures of the senses and splendors of the mind that money cannot buy nor machines produce. Learnedness may not always have been there, but longing was. And sometimes timely intuition supplies what scholarship cannot provide. If the raggle-taggle youth of the sixties had any guiding star before them, I think it was the hobo Taoist saints and shabby Zen masters, civilization's original anarchist philosophers, wise fools who taught the art of living lightly on the Earth. Young and raw as the counter culture may have been, there were those in its ranks who recognized the relevance of that tradition to the needs of a society sunk over its eyes in an obsessive struggle to conquer nature, to obliterate all traditional wisdom in the name of "progress," to transform the entire planet into an industrial artifact. They perceived the nuclear death-wish that lies at the core of that Promethean obsession and, accordingly, they proposed a more becoming human alternative.
One of the earliest and strongest statements of the ideal can be found in Gary Snyder's terse manifesto "Buddhist Anarchism." It appears in The Journal for the Protection of All Beings, another landmark publication of the era, this one issued by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1961.
Modern America has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated, and hatred which has no outlet except against oneself or the persons one is supposed to love. The conditions of the cold war have turned all modem societies, Soviet included, into hopeless brainstainers, creating populations of "preta" -- hungry ghosts -- with giant appetites and throats no bigger than needles. The soil, and forests, and all animal life are being wrecked to feed these cancerous mechanisms.
The disaffiliation and acceptance of poverty by practicing Buddhists becomes a positive force. The traditional harmlessness and refusal to take life in any form has nation-shaking implications. The practice of meditation, for which one needs "only the ground beneath one's feet" wipes out mountains of junk being pumped into the mind by, "communications" and supermarket universities. The belief in a serene and generous fulfillment of natural desires . . . destroys arbitrary frustration-creating customs and points the way to a kind of community that would amaze moralists and eliminate armies of men who are fighters because they cannot be lovers.
A Taste for Industrial Light and Magic
But now, if we were to fix upon this one aspect of the counter culture -- its mystic tendencies and principled funkiness -- we would not be doing justice to the deep ambiguity of the movement. We would be overlooking the allegiance it maintained, for all its vigorous dissent, to a certain irrepressible Yankee ingenuity, a certain world-beating American fascination with making and doing. For along one important line of descent, it is within this same population of rebels and drop-outs that we can find the inventors and entrepreneurs who helped lay the foundations of the California computer industry. The connections between these two seemingly contradictory aspects of the movement are fascinating to draw out and ponder -- especially since both wings of the counter culture came to be more fully unfolded here in the San Francisco Bay Area than any place else. This is where the Zen-Taoist impulse arose and found (for example, in the San Francisco Zen Center) its most studied expression in America; this is where the mendicant-communitarian lifestyle, both urban and rural, found its main public examples; this is where the new ecological sensibility first announced its presence and first organized its political energies. And this is where the inspired young hackers who would revolutionize Silicon Valley gathered in their greatest numbers.
The truth is, if one probes just beneath the surface of the bucolic hippie image, one finds a puzzling infatuation with certain forms of outrè technology reaching well back into the early sixties. I first became aware of its presence when I realized that the countercultural students I knew during that period were almost exclusively, if not maniacally, readers of science fiction. They were reading more of the genre than the publishers could provide. Side by side with the appeal of folk music and primitive ways, handicrafts and organic husbandry, there was a childlike, Oh Wow! confabulation with the space-ships and miraculous mechanisms that would make Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the television series Star Trek cult favorites, and which would eventually produce the adult audience for (and the producers of) Star Wars in the later seventies and eighties. The same eyes that were scanning the tribal past for its wonders and amazements were also on the look-out for the imagined marvels of what George Lucas would one day call "Industrial Light and Magic."
Similarly, if we turn back to The Whole Earth Catalog, we can find the same hybrid taste. Alongside the rustic skills and tools, we discover high industrial techniques and instruments: stereo systems, cameras, cinematography, and, of course, computers. On one page the "Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (Wendell Berry's plea for family-scaled organic agriculture); on the next, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. I recall how this juxtaposition jarred when I first noticed it. But then I thought again and tried to restrain my doubts. There was, after all, something charming about the blithe eclecticism of this worldview. Granted that a catalog is by its very nature a mélange. But this catalog clearly meant to project a consistent vision. It seemed to be saying that all human ingenuity deserved to be celebrated from the stone axe and American Indian medicine to modem electronics. Clearly, in so saying, the Catalog spoke for an audience that wanted to see things that way. Or rather, the Catalog found the voices that could do that job. And of all the voices to which it gave a forum, none was to become more prominent than Buckminster Fuller, the man who informed a generation that it was already on board a spaceship called Planet Earth, and who presumed to write its "operating manual."
Now, as of the sixties, Buckminster Fuller already had a long career behind him. The baby boom generation may have embedded the Young Demographic in our media, but the counter culture always made a generous place for wise old souls, whether voices of the past like Black Elk and Henry David Thoreau or seasoned mentors like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman. Fuller's prefabricated Dymaxion House of the late twenties (also called "the four dimensional living machine") dates back to the grandparents of the countercultural generation. From that point forward, his life story went through many ups and downs; but there can be no question that the sixties (when Fuller was in his seventies) were his zenith. Not only did he make the front cover of Time magazine (in 1964), but he became one of the prophetical voices of the American counter culture, starting with a prolonged campus residency at San Jose State College that brought him to the Bay Area in early 1966. Thanks to that appearance and subsequently to the prominence Stewart Brand gave him in The Whole Earth Catalog, Fuller was launched on the final and most spectacular phase of his career. On the first page of the Catalog, the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under the inscription: "the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog." From that point forward, Fuller became the necessary presence at New Age conferences, symposia, and workshops, a sort of peripatetic global wizard who might tie his awe-inspired audience down for four or five hours at a stretch while he recited the history of the universe.
What was it that made this odd figure so remarkably influential in countercultural circles? In part, it may have been his grandfatherly persona, which appealed to young people in search of wise elders and finding so few. In part, too, it might have had to do with his maverick image, that of the outcast genius scorned by the schools and the professionals, and so becoming the senior drop-out who could speak to junior drop-outs. But one must add his unique talent for self-advertisement, his capacity, by way of grandiloquent obfuscation, to make much out of little ideas and little inventions that could be sensationally clothed in cosmic pretensions. If Fuller was half Tom Swift, he was also half P. T. Barnum. And just as Barnum could turn a not very special midget or an overaged elephant into wonders of the world, so Fuller was able to parley a few modest pieces of eccentric engineering into achievements of supposedly epoch-making genius -- at least in the eyes of an audience that was in the market for technological astonishments.
Above all, it was Fuller's worldview that caught the temper of the time and the movement. While impishly dissenting in tone, he was up-beat in spirit: hopeful, sassy, inspirational almost to the point of euphoria. Fuller was, as one biographer calls him, a "raging optimist." I must confess that, though I shared a few platforms with Fuller and did my best to appreciate his books, I never came across anything he said that managed to be, at one and the same time, original, true, significant, and understandable. Worse still, I was never able to distinguish his optimism from plain egomania; I would not have been surprised to hear him announce that he had invented a better tree. Yet, again and again, I saw him send audiences away glowing with hope and resolution. That peculiar magic made Fuller and his Bay Area disciples the major spokesmen for a philosophy of postindustrial life that has done much to shape the style and expectations of the computer industry, especially as it has grown up in Silicon Valley over the past ten years.
Reversionaries and Technophiles
I should explain how I am using the term "postindustrial" here. I mean it in the sense that would supposedly place us permanently beyond the chronic the instability of
boom and bust, the waste of life and resources, the injustice and brutality. In its postindustrial phase, our society would not simply have matured but transcended, reaching that point where our technological genius would at last have freed us from the tyranny of getting and spending, compulsive productivity and frantic consumption, mass manipulation and military necessity, so that we might live a fully human life. "Postindustrial" indicates a stage of moral, not economic, growth.
That utopian goal has been with us since the first appearance of the Dark Satanic Mills. But in the western world, the vision of our postindustrial future has been polarized between two very different scenarios: that of the "Reversionaries" and that of the "Technophiles."
For the Reversionaries, who trace back to John Ruskin, William Morris, Prince Kropotkin, and the Romantic artists generally, industrialism is the extreme state of a cultural disease that must be cured before it kills us. It is a stage of pathological overdevelopment in the history of human economy from which a healthy technology -- usually seen as some form of communitarian handicrafts -- will have to be salvaged once the industrial system has reached the point of terminal inhumanity. The Reversionaries are what Paul Goodman would have called "neolithic conservatives." They look forward to the day when the factories and heavy machinery will be left to molder, and we will have the chance to return to the world of the village, the farm, the hunting camp, the tribe. This would lead us to a life close to the soil and the elements that needs only simple and communal pleasures to find fulfillment. This is the route that, for example, Stephen Gaskin chose for himself and his followers when they left the Experimental College at San Francisco State University in 1971.
Through the middle and later sixties, Gaskin, a former assistant to San Francisco State Professor S. I. Hayakawa, had been teaching a "Monday Night Class" in the student-financed and controlled Experimental College. When the class began to draw some several hundred students, it moved for a brief period to Glide Memorial Church in downtown San Francisco and identified itself as a "religion," with Gaskin as its guru. Finally in late 1971, Gaskin organized a mass exodus via bus caravan that made its way to a 1700 acre farm in Tennessee. The philosophy of the settlement was simple living and "guaranteed good karma." Some have identified Gaskin's following of reconstructed urbanites as "voluntary peasants." Gaskin puts it this way:
What we are really into is making a living in a clean way. I guess farming is about the cleanest way to make a living. It's just you and the dirt and God. And the dirt -- you can't make friends with an acre of ground and get it to give you an "A" like in college or something. If you make friends with it, you have to put work into it, and then it'll come back and feed you, it'll really do it. But you can't snow it or anything like that -- it's going to be real with you. (Resurgence, No. 59, Nov.-Dec., 1976, London, p. 12.)
The result of Gaskin's philosophy in application was to be one of the few long-term communitarian ventures to come out of the sixties. By dint of hard work, fraternal sharing, and minimal consumption, The Farm managed to prosper into the 1980's on a regimen of soybeans and natural childbirth.
Over against this stratagem of radical withdrawal and reversion, we have the technophiliac vision of our industrial destiny, a modem current of thought that flows back to Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and H. G. Wells. For these utopian industrialists, as for Buckminster Fuller after them, the cure for our industrial ills will not be found in things past, but in Things To Come. Indeed, it will be found at the climax of the industrial process. What is required, therefore, is not squeamish reversion, but brave perseverance. We must adapt resourcefully to industrialism as a necessary stage of social evolution, monitoring the process with a cunning eye for its life-saving potentialities. As we approach the crisis that threatens calamity, we must grasp these opportunities as they emerge and use them to redeem the system from within. The way out of our dilemma is to tunnel fearlessly through until we reach daylight.
One recognizes at once the familiar Marxist pattern of history in this vision. As against the utopian visionaries who would abscond from industrial society, Marx insisted that the logic of history had to be worked through in its proper phases: from feudalism to capitalism, from capitalism to socialism, from socialism to communism. But one also notices that in Fuller's foreshortened version of the philosophy, we are dealing with the views of a technician, not a political economist. In sharp contrast to Marx, Fuller was a sociological illiterate. There is simply no political context to his thought. Instead, where Marx deals in class conflict and political power, Fuller offers us . . . inventions. That is what the industrial system produces. Its inventions are simply to be appropriated by clever engineers like Fuller and used to save the human race. The inventions make possible things the capitalist owners cannot envision. But mavericks like Fuller, purporting to stand outside the system, recognize these possibilities and hasten to take advantage of them. As Fuller put it:
The individual can take initiative without anybody's permission. Only individuals can . . . look for the principles manifest in their experience that others may be overlooking because they are too preoccupied with how to please some boss or with how to earn money. . . .The individual is the only one who could think in a cosmically adequate manner. (Robert Snyder, Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1970, p. 38)
Thus, these "individuals" outsmart and outflank the high and the mighty, who, one is left to conclude, simply surrender to their superior insight.
What is an example of such a clever gambit? Well, Fuller was a man of one example, the invention he always fell back on to prove every point: the geodesic dome, on which he held the patent. Had not advanced engineering and industrial technology made this stupendous invention possible? And was not the whole history of the world going to be transformed by the dome? QED.
There was a cult of the geodesic dome during the sixties. It began with the popular dome books of San Francisco architect Lloyd Kahn, who was converted to domesmanship by Fuller when the inventor came to the San Francisco Bay Area. Thanks to Kahn's books and The Whole Earth Catalog, the hope sprang up that communities of domes might blossom overnight outside major cities -- like barbarian encampments embodying the new postindustrial culture. (As far as I'm aware, the closest approach to that goal was Drop City near Trinidad Colorado, a "weed patch commune" whose several funky structures were rigged up out of salvaged junk from the nearest city dump.) The dome quickly became more than an architectural eccentricity; it came to symbolize a new, worldwide style of shelters which combined the values of simplicity, economy, durability, communalism, and whose tetrahedron units had (so Fuller insisted) tapped the deep geometrical logic of the cosmos.
Fuller's followers were quick to take his claims for the dome at full value. As one of the founders of Drop City pronounced:
To live in a dome is -- psychologically -- to be in closer harmony with natural structure. Macrocosm and microcosm are recreated, both the celestial sphere and molecular and crystalline forms. Cubical buildings are structurally weak and uneconomic. Corners constrict the mind. Domes break into new dimensions. They help to open man's perception and expand his approaches to creativity. The dichotomy between utilitarian and aesthetic, between artist and layman is broken down. (Bill Voyd, "Drop City," in Theodore Roszak, ed. Sources, New York, Harper & Row, 1972, p. 276)
Another dome missionary proclaimed:
Soon domed cities will spread across the world, anywhere land is cheap -- on the deserts, in the swamps, on mountains, tundra, ice caps. The tribes are moving, building completely free and open waystations, each a warm and beautiful conscious environment. We are winning. (Hugh Gardner, Children of Prosperity, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1978, p.37)
Now there were a number of problems with domes. Most of them, even those built in the deserts, the swamps, the mountains, had to have their struts and shafts and connectors, their plywood and fiberglass, shipped in from some distant industrial metropolis. And none of them were all that much cheaper or easier to build than a Quonset hut or a Butler barn. And most of them leaked, unless they were shielded by a vast and fragile plastic skin, again imported from the metropolis. And none could be insulated unless they were sprayed or coated with an industrial chemical. And none of them in style or structural substance ever bore any respectful relationship to their locality. Indeed, the dome was designed by its maker to be placeless, meant to be plunked down anywhere from the Arctic to the tropics as an assertion of the global industrial dominance. But none of this seemed to matter to the dome enthusiasts; by virtue of Fuller's intoxicating rhetoric and boundless optimism, the dome was seen as an icon of our social salvation.
Fuller was not alone in extrapolating the technophiliac vision of postindustrial history There were others, each of whom became, at some point, a countercultural favorite. There was Marshall McLuhan, who saw the electronic media as the secret of building a new "global village" that was somehow cozy, participative, and yet at the same time technologically sophisticated. There was Paolo Soleri, who believed that the solution to the ecological crisis of the modem world was the building of megastructural "arcologies" -- beehive cities in which the urban billions could be compacted into totally artificial environments. There was Gerard O'Neill, who barnstormed the country whipping up enthusiasm for one of the zaniest schemes of all: the launching of self-contained space colonies for the millions. For a few years, O'Neill became a special fascination of Stewart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog (later The Co-Evolution Quarterly). In each of these cases, one sees the same assumption brought into play: the industrial process, pushed to its limit, generates its own best medicine. Out of the advanced research of the electronics, plastics, chemical, and aerospace industries, there emerge solutions to all our political and environmental problems.
Machines of Loving Grace
Industrialism redeemed, technology triumphant: this is the familiar scenario of technophiliac utopianism. But now we come upon something new -- and puzzling. For there were those in the ranks of the counter culture who sought to work an odd variation on the futuristic theme. They insisted they could have it both ways: the best of high tech, the best of the Haight-Ashbury lifestyle . . . together. The technophiliac route forward would lead to a reversionary future. When H. G. Wells envisioned Things To Come, he saw a gleamingly sterile urban world run by a benevolent technocratic elite. But for many in the counter culture, the result of high industrial technology would be something like a tribal democracy where the citizenry might still be dressed in buckskin and go berry-picking in the woods: the artificial environment made more artificial would somehow become more . . . natural. Thus, the odd mix of rustic savvy and advanced technology displayed in the pages of The Whole Earth Catalog was not confusion but synthesis. The motto of the philosophy might almost have been "Forward .to the Neolithic!"
At times, this synthesis seemed to stem from nothing more than some very slippery metaphors. For example, McLuhan's conception of the urbanized mass media, pressed to its extreme, becomes a "village." For O'Neill, the space rocket and satellite, developed on a gargantuan scale, return us to a "frontier": the high frontier, which, its enthusiasts seemed to think, would be something like the world of the log cabin and wood-burning stove. The fans who organized the L-5 Society to promote O'Neill's ideas liked to imagine vistas of homesteads and organic gardens inside their orbiting steel canisters, plus no end of weightless fun and games, sky-diving and wind-surfing in zero gravity. Even Soleri's human ant-heaps were seen as a way of preserving the wilderness in its pristine condition -- though one can only shudder at the prospect of the tens of thousands of arcological tenants lined up at every elevator shaft in the structure, waiting to get to the picnic grounds.
I can offer a striking personal example of this strange amalgamation of reversionary and technophiliac values in action. Somewhere in the mid-seventies, one of the New Age religious groups -- it was Yogi Bhajan's 3HO (the Holy, Healthy, Happy Organization, a transplanted Indian Sikh group) -- invited me to participate in a "planetary symposium" that would be held simultaneously in three major cities. (Buckminster Fuller would, of course, be the keynote speaker.) The themes of the event would be such staple countercultural values as economic simplicity ("small is beautiful"), ecological sanity, spiritual fulfillment, participative democracy. It would be a sort of planet-sized Woodstock. But how would it all be held together, I asked. The answer was: by continuous, day-and-night telecommunications coverage broadcast via satellite and projected on giant video screens in each city. The global village would at last have been realized. Yielding to my usual Luddite instincts, I suggested that such means might conflict with the desired end. My doubts were met with blank incomprehension, but they only deepened when the entire event was finally delegated to a production crew from Walt Disney enterprises. As it turned out, the cost of the technology finally overwhelmed the modest budget available, reduced the symposium to a fiasco, and bankrupted its organizers.
The personal computer might be seen as another example of this wishful alliance of the reversionary and technophiliac visions. Once again, we have the same mix of homespun and high tech. After all, in its early days, home computer invention and manufacturing did resemble a sort of primitive cottage industry. The work could be done out of attics and garages with simple means and lots of brains. The people pioneering the enterprise were cut from the mold of the Bucky Fuller maverick: talented drop-outs going their own way and clearly outflanking the lumbering giants of the industry, beating them to the punch with a people's computer.
For that matter, even before the personal computer had matured into a marketable commodity, there were idealistic young hackers who wanted to rescue the computer from the corporations for radical political uses. The earliest effort of this kind in the United States was Resource One, the creation of a group of Berkeley computer folk who had come together during the Cambodian crisis of Spring 1970. Distressed at the near monopoly of computer power by the government and the major corporations, this small band of disgruntled computer professionals set about building a people's information service. By 1971 they had managed to acquire a retired XDS-940 timeshare computer from the Transamerica Corporation and had quartered it in the Project One warehouse-community on Howard Street, south of Market in San Francisco, where they hoped it might be used by political activists to compile mailing lists, coordinate voter surveys, and serve as an all-purpose social-economic database. Resource One was never a great success, perhaps in part because, by the time it got under way, many radical hackers had transferred their hopes to the new generation of compact, more affordable desktop computers, which seemed to be a more practical way to democratize access to information -- as if information were what radical social change most requires..
But before its demise, Resource One had transmuted into a form of computer street politics; it had become the project called Community Memory. Community Memory's aim was to locate free computer terminals in public places -- like the Mission branch library in San Francisco or Leopold's Record Store in Berkeley -- where they could be used as a totally open, unexpurgated people's electronic bulletin board. This effort was launched by a parent company called Loving Grace Cybernetics. Its title was taken from a poem by Richard Brautigan that captures perfectly the much-prized synthesis of reversionary and technophiliac values.
I like to think
(and the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms
i like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace
Throughout the later seventies, many of the inventors and entrepreneurs-to-be of the rising personal computer industry were meeting along the San Francisco peninsula in funky town meetings where high-level technical problems and solutions could be swapped like backwoods lore over the cracker barrel of the general store. They adopted friendly, folksy names for their early efforts like the Itty Bitty Machine Company (an alternative IBM), or Kentucky Fried Computers, or the Homebrew Computer Club. Stephen Wozniak was one of the regulars at Homebrew, and when he looked around for a name to give his brainchild, he came up with a quaintly soft, organic identity that significantly changed the hard-edged image of high tech: the Apple. One story has it that the name was chosen by Steven Jobs in honor of the fruitarian diet he had brought back from his journey to the mystic East. The name also carried with it an echo of the Beatles spirit. And, in an effort to keep that spirit alive, Apple made the last heroic attempt to stage a big, outdoor rock gathering: the US Festivals of 1982 and 1983, on which Wozniak spent $20 million of his own money.
For the surviving remnants of the counter culture in the late seventies, it was digital data, rather than domes, arcologies, or space colonies, that would bring us to the postindustrial promised land. The personal computer would give the millions access to the databases of the world, which -- so the argument went -- was what they needed in order to become a self-reliant citizenry. The home computer terminal became the centerpiece of a sort of electronic populism. Computerized networks and bulletin boards would keep the tribes in touch, exchanging the vital data that the power elite was denying them. Clever hackers would penetrate the classified databanks that guarded corporate secrets and the mysteries of state. Who would have predicted it? By way of IBM's video terminals, AT&T's phone lines, Pentagon space shots, and Westinghouse communications satellites, a worldwide, underground community of computer-literate rebels would arise, armed with information and ready to overthrow the technocratic centers of authority. They might even outlast the total collapse of the high industrial system that had invented their technology. Surely one of the zaniest expressions of the guerrilla hacker worldview was that of Lee Felsenstein, a founder of the Homebrew Computer Club and of Community Memory, later the designer of the Osborne portable computer. Felsenstein's technological style -- emphasizing simplicity and resourceful recycling -- arose from an apocalyptic vision of the industrial future that might have come straight out of A Canticle for Liebowitz. He worked from the view "that the industrial infrastructure might be snatched away at any time, and the people should be able to scrounge parts to keep their machines going in the rubble of the devastated society; ideally, the machine's design would be clear enough to allow users to figure out where to put those parts." As Felsenstein once put it, "I've got to design so you can put it together out of garbage cans."
It is important to appreciate the political idealism that underlay the home computer in its early days, and to recognize its link with tendencies that were part of the counter culture from the beginning. It is quite as important to recognize that the reversionary-technophiliac synthesis it symbolizes is as naive as it is idealistic. So much so that one feels the need of probing deeper to discover the secret of its strange cogency. For how could anyone believe something so unlikely?
The Short Cut to Satori
If we delve a bit deeper into the origins of the counter culture -- back to the late fifties and early sixties -- we find what may be the most significant connection between the reversionary and technophiliac wings of the movement. In the beginning, there was the music -- always the major carrier of the movement: folk, then rock and roll, then rock in all its permutations. Early on, the music, as it was performed in concert and in the new clubs of the period, took on a special mode of presentation. Its power came from electronic amplification; it borrowed from the apparatus. As grungy as the rock audience may have been, it wanted its music explosively amplified and expertly modulated; it wanted to hear the beat through its pores. Acoustic was not enough; the music needed machines. In this form, with nothing added, rock was supposedly sufficient to produce mind blowing results. "By itself," the San Francisco psychedelic philosopher Chester Anderson proclaimed
without the aid of strobe lights, day-glo paints, and other subimaginative copouts, rock engages the entire sensorium, appealing to the intelligence with no interference from the intellect. . . . Rock is a tribal phenomenon and constitutes what may be called a twentieth century magic. . . . Rock is creating the social rituals of the future. (San Francisco Oracle, No. 6, 1967)
But soon enough, the audience wanted even more. It wanted ecstasies for the eye as well as the ear. Hence the light shows that began in San Francisco and, in the course of the middle sixties, rapidly became an adjunct of rock performances across the country.
The first light shows performed in the United States were developed as a fine art at San Francisco State College in the early fifties. In 1952, Professor Seymour Locks staged a highly ambitious three projector show with live music to inaugurate the school's new Creative Arts Building, where a national conference of art educators was being hosted. Locks, together with other members of the San Francisco State Art Department, went on to pioneer a sizeable repertory of liquid projection and colored light techniques through the later fifties. By the start of the next decade, the new art form was being reworked by many hands, but nowhere more daringly than in the San Francisco rock clubs. There the light shows, augmented by strobe lights and phosphorescent colors, were more than an aesthetic medium; they had been seized upon at once as a way of reproducing and/or occasioning psychedelic experience. They were the visual signature of dope. And from the very outset, the premier dope of the era, LSD, was itself a technology, a laboratory product, the result of advanced research at the Swiss pharmaceutical house of Sandoz and Company.
In the early postwar period, LSD and other laboratory hallucinogens belonged to a small, elite public, made up primarily of top-dollar psychiatrists and their high-society clientele. At that time, before LSD had acquired a criminal aura and had been outlawed, mainstream publications like Time and Life were prepared to publicize its many therapeutic benefits. But by the early sixties, the hallucinogens had found another, less respectable public; they were being touted among the beat poets and dropped-out kids in the streets of Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village as the salvation of our troubled culture. Soon Timothy Leary was proselytizing for dope across America; in the Bay Area, as of 1966, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters were blithely dosing whole audiences on this mysterious elixir (or promising to do so) at the Acid Tests and at the Trips Festival.
The assumption underlying these mass distribution efforts was blunt and simple: dope saves your soul. Like the Catholic sacraments, it takes effect ex opere operato -- by its very ministration. Once this promise crossed wires with the growing interest in oriental mysticism, the psychedelics had been launched as a cultural force. It seemed clear that the research laboratories of the western world -- including those of the giant pharmaceutical corporations -- had presented the world with a substitute for the age-old spiritual disciplines of the East. Instead of a lifetime of structured contemplation, a few drops of home brewed acid on a vitamin pill would do the trick. It was the short cut to satori.
"Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry" ran the slogan of the DuPont Company. And thousands of acid heads were ready to agree. They had heard the music; they had seen the colored lights; they had sampled the dope. Nothing did more to tilt the counter culture toward a naive Technophilia than this seductive trio of delights. If the high tech of the western world could offer so great a spiritual treasure, then why not more?
Here, I suspect, is the reason why Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, and the other technophiliac utopians struck such a responsive chord among the countercultural young. Acid and rock had prepared an audience for their message, and prepared it in an especially persuasive way that undercut the cerebral levels. For the psychedelics are a powerful, even a shattering experience. Combined with the music and the lights in a total assault upon the senses, they can indeed make anything seem possible. They induce a sense of grandeur and a euphoria that may make the grimmest political realities seem like paper tigers. At the same time, the experience connects -- or so its proselytizers always insisted -- with primordial mystical powers of the mind that still flourish, or might still flourish, in exotic quarters of the globe among native practitioners and traditional peoples like Carlos Casteneda's legendary Don Juan. This experience, purchased out of the laboratories of our industrial culture, somehow allies its disciples with the ancient, the primitive, the tribal. Its proper use is among huddled comrades, gathered in a sacramental hush in park or field, on the beach, in the wilderness, or the enfolding darkness of an urban den. Here, then, we find the same striking blend of the sophisticated-scientific and the natural-communal that Buckminster Fuller claimed for the geometry of the geodesic dome, and that the Silicon Valley hackers would eventually claim for the personal computer. "This generation absolutely swallowed computers whole, just like dope," Stewart Brand observed in a February 1985 interview in San Francisco Focus Magazine. There may be more literal truth to the metaphor than he intended.
The Light That Failed?
With the benefit of hindsight, one can easily see the pathos of the reversionary-technophiliac synthesis -- though I think more than a little of it still survives among the computer enthusiasts. The reversionary and the technophiliac choices with which our society confronts us do not so readily combine; indeed, I suspect there is an insurmountable hostility between the large scale technology on which the computer industry is based and the traditional values that the counter culture wished to salvage. The military-industrial complex battens off the gigantism of advanced technology; it is not the ally of communal or organic values. Nor are the corporate leaders of the industrial world so easily outsmarted and outflanked as the Fullerite Technophiles always wanted to believe. Moneyed elites are no slouches when it comes to defending their interests. They can outspend their opposition; they can outwait and outwit their enemies by hiring the brains they need as well as the brute power.
It is sad in the extreme to know, as we now do, that before Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary brought the gospel of LSD to the streets, the CIA had long since undertaken an exhaustive run of experiments with the hallucinogens using human beings as guinea pigs to explore the possibilities of mind control. Similarly, it now seems abundantly clear that long before the personal computer has the chance to restore democratic values, the major corporations and the security agencies of the world will have used the technology to usher in a new era of advanced surveillance and control. As for the space rocket and satellite, we can be sure that by the time the L-5 Society has raised the funds for its first modest colony, the military will already be encamped on the high frontier armed with unheard of genocidal weaponry.
It was an attractive hope that the high technology of our society might be wrested from the grip of benighted forces and used to restore us to an idyllic natural state. And for a brief moment -- while the music swelled, and the lights flashed, and the dope cast its spell -- it looked like the road forward to many bright spirits. But ultimately -- and really in very short order -- the synthesis crumbled, and the technophiliac values of the counter culture won out. They are, after all, the values of the mainstream and the commanding heights, forces that have proved far more tenacious than most members of the counter culture guessed.
Does this mean that the reversionary wing of the movement was simply a light that failed? In one sense, obviously yes. The urban-industrial dominance is more tightly locked to the planet than ever; the search for viable alternatives has gone into a deep eclipse. But a light that fails is still better than unchallenged darkness. For besides winning, there is also being right. And on another level where the historical clock measures out its story in millennia not minutes, the Reversionaries may be regarded as prophetical voices that, though largely unheeded, spoke truth to power. Not all that the Reversionaries stood for was born from a naive infatuation with simple cultures and native peoples. Besides looking back with fondness, they also looked forward. As Allen Ginsberg did when he spoke of the Beat poets as the world's Distant Early Warning System. And what he saw ahead made the neo-primitivism of the sixties more a matter of desperate animal survival than charming nostalgia: the death -- slow or sudden, by fire or blight -- of a civilization grown tragically estranged from the mothering Earth, our imperial cities turning feral, crumbling beneath the weight of their own arrogance, the lordly power of our machines humbled, the wildness reclaiming its planetary preeminence, perhaps not gently. The bad end of a Faustian bargain that was signed when the first pyramid was raised.
A Vision Both Bright and Dark
The San Francisco poet Lew Welch captured the dark side of the Reversionary vision, in his rhapsodic manifesto Final City/Tap City.
Dome of foul air full of radio squeaks and TV signals,
foulness flowing into the very waters that made them come
to be.
Inside millions of terrified Beings scurry about through
senseless mazes of tunnels and lanes. The noise is
unendurable. Every sense is insulted. Everybody rushing
about on some incomprehensible errand someone forced him
to do at pain of death.
. . . Designed to protect everyone inside from everything
outside, . . . gradually there was no "outside." Lots of
danger, in.
Now these things, Cities, kept getting bigger and bigger and
faster and faster, the people getting more and more crazed.
. . . Leads to Final City, Tap City, any one of a dozen ways.
. . .You don't even have to figure the Atom Bomb.
City is so Human. It may well be our tragic flaw, seeing City
as our Mindless Evolution, irreversible, Man's way of
changing, not Biological?
We face great holocausts, terrible catastrophes, all American
cities burned from within, and without.
Mercifully, the poet allows his vision to brighten before it passes, confident that the Earth forgives and restores. So let us hope.
However, our beautiful Planet will germinate, underneath this
thin skin of City the green will come back to crack these
sidewalks. The stinking air will blow away at last, the bays
flow clean.
. . . In the meantime, stay healthy, there are hundreds of
miles to walk and work. Keep your mind. We will need it. .
. .Learn the berries, the nuts, the fruit, the small animals
and plants. Learn water.
For there must be good men and women in the mountains,
and on the beaches, in all the neglected beautiful places, that
one day we come back to ghostly cities and set them right,
at last.
. . . In all that rubble, think of the beautiful trinkets we can
wave above our heads as we dance! (
San Francisco
Oracle, No. 12, 1967)
I confess to being baffled by those who think that vision -- both the dark and the bright of it -- has somehow lost its place on the political agenda.
Nerds, Zombies, and the Flight from Mortality
As I originally understood Technophilia, it seemed like still another variation on the sort of Tom Swift-H. G. Wells vision that dominated nineteenth century futuristic brain-storming. The western world's love affair with machines can be traced back to the Strasbourg clock of the late middle ages. From that point forward, one can find a steady line of artisans and tinkerers who saw an ever-more promising destiny for the ingenious clockwork mechanisms that were the distant forerunners of the computer. By the time of the European Enlightenment, these inspired engineers had converted ranking intellectuals and revolutionaries like Voltaire and Ben Franklin to their vision. God Himself had come to be seen as a grand cosmic watchmaker. Linked to the power of stream or electricity, machinery would bring salvation. The heavenly city would be a gleaming technological metropolis jammed with factories, rapid transport, and speed-of-light communications.
What this projection left out of account is the peculiar relationship that has grown up between biology and technology in our time. It may be that the most consequential contribution of the computer is the model it provided in the 1950s for DNA. Once the genetic basis of life came to be seen as a sort of biocomputer, a cultural alliance was built between the new biology and computer science that allowed speculation to pass in both directions. After all, if DNA is a form of data-processing, then the computer, which is essentially a data-processing instrument, might be seen as an emerging life-form, if not an evolving organism -- a possibility some will see as already near at hand in the new designs for DNA-RNA computer chips. Hence, our habit of tracking computers by way of "generations," as if they were linked by a living, genealogical progression. Admit that much and one is not far from seeing the computer as a companion, or possibly rival species in the history of life on Earth.
Robert Jastrow of NASA was among the first to predict the advent of disembodied intelligence. He looks forward to the day when we shall become "a race of immortals" based upon computerized mentality. One day, he tells us,
a bold scientist will be able to tap the contents of his mind and transfer them into the metallic lattices of a computer. Because mind is the essence of being, it can be said that this scientist has entered the computer and that he now dwells in it. At last the human brain, ensconced in a computer has been liberated from the weakness of the mortal flesh. ... It is in control of its own destiny. The machine is its body; it is the machine's mind. ... It seems to me that this must be the mature form of intelligent life in the universe. Housed in indestructible lattices of silicon and no longer constrained in the span of its years by the life and death cycle of a biological organism, such a kind of life could live forever. (Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984, pp. 166-67)
Jastrow's prediction reveals a kind of high tech Manicheanism that has long been an underlying theme of modern science: the hope of liberating pure reason from the physical facts of life -- and incidentally from the messy bodily intimacies of sex. Note the assumption: "mind is the essence of being." Delete the body and identity remains intact.
At the birth of modern western philosophy, Pythagoras and Plato seized upon mathematics as the purest expression of deathless being. Two thousand years later, at the beginning of the modern era, Descartes echoed that same desire to rise above the flesh when he separated calculating mind from corruptible matter and made mathematics the official language of science. As an essentially computational machine, the computer has inherited the flight from mortality as a subliminal goal that continues to cast its spell over many of the brightest minds in the world of high tech. In Jastrow's formulation, we have the Cartesian dictum "Cogito, ergo sum," pressed to its literal and logical extreme. "I" become nothing other or more than my cogitating brain. If, therefore, that brain can be simulated in silicon, "I" survive. Paul Slouka has this same strange alliance of the ascetic and the mathematical in view when he characterizes high tech as "an attack on reality as human beings have always known it." Cyberspace, he believes, is getting crowded with scenarios uploading consciousness into electronic networks. Behind these high tech fantasies he sees "a fear and loathing of the natural world, of physical experience in its entirety." (Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, New York, Basic Books, 1995)
The astrophysicist Frank Tipler has pressed these possibilities even further. In his book The Physics of Immortality, he sets out to reinvent the scientific equivalent of the Christian resurrection. "The dead," he tells us, "will be resurrected when the computer capacity of the universe is so large that the amount of capacity required to store all possible human speculations is an insignificant fraction of the entire capacity." Following the Catholic evolutionary philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Tipler refers to this as "the Omega Point," the grand climax of cosmic history. Humanity would then dominate the entire universe; we would have progressed "from Earth-womb into the cosmos at large." (Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology and the Resurrection of the Dead, New York, Doubleday, 1994)
Long before that far horizon is reached, Tipler is certain that we will be able to simulate the body in all its most refined details -- and improve upon it. It would then be unnecessary to preserve the carnal original; it might be cast aside in favor of its robotic equivalent. Such an "emulated person," Tipler argues, "would observe herself to be as real, and as having a body as solid as the body we currently observe ourselves to have." The simulated body would, however, have one very special quality: it would be deathless. Tipler sees the same great dividend in this that Jastrow finds in putting his brain in a box. In that form, disembodied minds of the future might be loaded aboard a spacecraft and fired off into the universe to explore the galaxies far, far away -- needing no air, food, water, or exercise for the journey. Even boredom need not be a problem; a disincarnate intelligence need only be placed in a comatose state for the thousands of years it may take to arrive at a destination light-years away.
In the pages of Wired magazine, silicon immortality is among the constant themes of the rising cyberpunk intelligentsia. This may in fact be the emotional subtext for the advanced claims of artificial intelligence. Interviewed in Wired, Chris Langton, one of the founders of artificial life research, puts it this way: "There are these other forms of life, artificial ones, that want to come into existence. And they are using me as a vehicle for reproduction and for implementation." Vernor Vinge, looking further into the future, tells us "if we ever succeed in making machines as smart as humans, then it's only a small leap to imagine that we would soon thereafter make -- or cause to be made-- machines that are even smarter than any human. And that's it. That's the end of the human race within the animal kingdom." (Wired June 1995, p. 161)
Jaron Lanier, creator of virtual reality and a maverick member of the computer community, believes these fantasies are among the major attractions of cyberspace. Many hackers, he tells us, "nurture hopes of being able to live forever by backing themselves on to a computer tape." Lanier has also characterized these ambitions as the beginning of a new "zombie culture" dominated by ex-humans who "are ready to leave all that behind and imagine living on a disk in which they only interact with other minds and environmental elements that also exist solely as software." This, Lanier believes, is what accounts for that curious new psychological category we call "nerdiness." Intellectually, the nerd is one who searches for ways to digitalize away all distinctions of quality, feeling, and affect. Emotionally, the nerd is given over to an alien blandness that wants to shelter from human intimacy and physicality.
Nanotechnology [Lanier speculates] might be used to create a supercomputer that will quickly figure out how to make nanomachines that can repair the human body and make old age an anachronism. ... Or, perhaps most tellingly, the contents of our brains will be read into durable computers, so that our minds will continue after our bodies cease to function. (Jaron Lanier, "Agents of Alienation," Journal of Consciousness Studies, volume 2, no. 1, 1995, pp. 76-81)
Is this ancient Gnostic hunger to transcend the flesh, perhaps, the emotional subtext that underlies the otherwise bafflingly euphoric response we now see offered to every computerized gadget and frivolous Web site that comes along? These days, when I hear smart people growing ecstatic over "access to information" that comes down to another way to order a pizza, look up baseball scores, or bid on collectibles, rather as if they cannot imagine life was worth living before the dot.coms came along, I find it hard to take such trivial fascinations at face value. Surely they know that 99.9 percent of human culture was created without the aid of a mouse. They must be aware that all the famous figures featured in Apple's "Think Different" campaign are distinguished by nothing so much as the fact that none of them ever used a computer. Is there, then, a darker motive behind these seemingly silly on-line obsessions -- an age-old pursuit of life beyond the body?
Lanier believes that is what accounts for the curious new psychological category we call "nerdiness." Intellectually, the nerd is one who searches for ways to digitalize away all distinctions of quality, feeling, and affect. Emotionally, the nerd is given over to an alien blandness that wants to shelter from human intimacy and physicality. Why should anyone have such an insistent desire to erase the barrier between the human and the mechanical, even in one's own personality? Because once we believe we are beyond that barrier, we are beyond death. Machines do not die.
Down Among the Cyberpunks
Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages, where you couldn't see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. ... By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the hologram inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. (William Gibson, from Neuromancer)
It now seems clear that neither the Technophiles nor the Reversionaries will win out in their cultural debate. A third force that has no idealistic dimension at all, no vision either dark or bright, has won the day. The corporados, for whom the computer is simply a commodity to be sold for profit, have picked up all the marbles. And what sort of world are they building for us? It is the cyberpunk landscape that William Gibson surveys in his novels, the vista that produced the sad punk rock culture of the eighties.
I know there are cyberpunks who bristle when they are associated with Punk Rock. "Cyberpunks aren't about PUNK MUSIC," insists one highly upper case contributor to alt.cyberpunk.movement. "Cyberpunks are about FREEDOM OF INFORMATION because INFORMATION IS POWER and by god -- POWER TO THE PEOPLE." But in fact there is a significant overlap of sensibility between the groups.
The shared word "punk" serves in both movements to express an identity born of victimization. Both Punk Rock and cyberpunk express a spirit of resistance; both are made up of those who see themselves as marginal insurgents in a culture gone wrong. Cyberpunk takes its cue from science fiction literature rather than Rock music, but the literature is every bit as dismal and despairing as the music. Like the hyperamplified howls of anger and anguish that blare from the stage at a Death Metal concert, it reminds us that, besides the yea-saying techies at Wired who see an endless frontier of technological wonders and amazements ahead, there are the grunts, the malcontents, the delinquents of the high tech workforce, the hacker proletariat working out of coffin-sized cubicles with their phone calls and e-mail monitored to insure quality service. Their view of the future runs to alarm if not desperation. Leave them out, and the picture is incomplete.
William Gibson's jack-hammer abrasiveness suits the harsh realities of that world, a vista of gargantuan corporations and monolithic institutions where embattled anti-heroes can survive only as outlaws plotting clever ways to sabotage a system they cannot own or control. Gibson's cyber cowboys are marginalized bottom-dogs so sunk in narcotic fantasies and hallucinatory worlds that they have no Reality Principle to cling to. They inhabit a fictive zone where nothing is certain and everything can be manipulated. Anybody you meet might be a hologram. Not even their minds are their own. What the powers of modern technology have finally brought them is ecological doom in an empire of unlivable cities dominated by the high rise towers and emblazoned logos of the reigning corporate elite.
Gibson's cities are the private property of ruthless American-Japanese-German-French multinational companies. "Sprawls," as he calls the urban eyesores of the future (BAMA sprawls from Boston to Atlanta), are as squalid as any factory town of the nineteenth century -- yet they brim with advanced technology. Nobody draws a breath or dreams a dream without the use of "derms," or "entertainment modules," or "simstim" implants. In the sprawls, an underclass of demoralized billions struggles to survive in conditions of hopeless moral degradation. For them, the media have become, at best, forms of sad mind-blowing escape or, at worst, techniques of psychological control. People have themselves been re-engineered from their DNA up; they have been transformed into cyborgs equipped with internal processors and microbiotic spare parts. It is a world where nothing is real, nothing is human, nothing is gentle, beautiful, or noble. The only love Gibson's cowboys find might be a few drug-laced hours with a company whore in an over-night sleeping coffin.
A young man logs in to alt.cyberspace.rebels to utter a word of anguish. His entry may fall short of literary elegance, but he is giving a voice to the cyberpunk vision of things to come:
LOOK at us and look out there we are living in the world dominated by corporate marketing machine. These guys eat up just every opponent out there Nothing is existed beyond corporate world. These guys are GOD. These guys have the real consciousness. These guys eat you and me. These guys slowly take over our existence and body and mind. We have no power to fight against these fascist gigantic monster ever created by human race.
There is a literary genealogy behind cyberpunk fiction. It traces back to early anti-Utopias like E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1905), the novel and film version of Metropolis (1920s), and Huxley's Brave New World (1933). All these works saw the bright promise of science and industry being swallowed up by fanatical social engineering and profiteering interests. At that early stage, the future depicted in these works was, on the surface at least, clean and elegant. Cyberpunk redesigned anti-Utopia by adding just the right touch of corporate philistinism and ecological disintegration. The films Alien (1979) and Outland (1981) helped embed images of futurist noir in the public perception. They show industrial life under the control of interstellar corporations reverting to the grubby drudgery of early Manchester. The cavernous and clanking space stations have lost their luster; they are lightless, dank, and dripping. Everything is built cheap and chronically malfunctions; underpaid technicians sweat, scowl, and grumble; cutthroats skulk along the garbage-strewn air-shafts and docking bays. The style for Alien has been called "the used future" -- the future as it will look if it is owned by the same forces that own the world today.
It is a new and jarring insight -- a hell of a different kind. In earlier anti-Utopias -- Zamyatin's We, Orwell's 1984 -- it was universally assumed that only the central state could ever be powerful enough to rule the world. The dehumanized future would be the product of collective planning. But there is another possibility. What if corporate elites, with their insatiable appetite for profit, shape our high tech destiny? Then we will have regimentation, but without the least concern among these selfish, competitive giants for cleaning up the mess or preserving order. Under the hegemony of triumphant market forces, pleasure gardens for the rich may survive under heavy guard, but the rest of the world will become a garbage dump. Marge Piercy has also anticipated such a world in her novel Woman at the Edge of Time, where all the women are corporate whores and all the men are paramilitary cyborgs.
It was, above all, the 1982 movie Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, based on the Philip K. Dick novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") that most effectively exposed the decadent underbelly of corporate high tech. Both the film and the novel have since acquired a mythic stature on the Internet; there are several highly active Blade Runner Web sites. Blade Runner envisions a future where quasi-human replicants -- patented products of the Tyrrell Corporation, one of the industrial giants that rule the future -- have more humanity to them than "real" human beings. The tale, played out in the thronging, smog-shrouded streets of a decaying megacity, is a study in the ultimate criminality of corporate power. The fact that younger people are learning these facts of life from science fiction rather than sociology should not undercut the validity of the lesson.
A snatch of lyrics from a Death Metal group whose performances usually end with punch outs and riots in the mosh pit.
Power, rage unbound because been pounded by the streets.
Cyanide blood burns down the skyline.
Hatred is purity.
The bullet connects at last.
Let freedom ring with a shot-gun blast.
Words written by twenty-somethings for an audience of teen-somethings. Not teens who have suffered through a holocaust or the horrors of ethnic cleansing or thermonuclear war, but kids from suburban homes probably living off the fat of NASDAQ. The performance, with its super-amplification and programmed light show, is supremely high tech. But the audience is wearing tee-shirts with slogans like "Get Up and Kill" or "Hail, Satan."
It isn't easy to take young people seriously when they immerse themselves in a nihilism they have not earned and cannot fully understand. Yet, as presumptuous as the cyberpunk vision may be, it is, I think, an expression of the life impulse, still there, still struggling to make its way forward. If that impulse is left uneducated and given no creative means of expression, it will finish where it began -- as a howl of indiscriminate rage that drifts toward the madness or suicide with which the young too much confabulate. Either that, or it will become mere show business -- a marketable act, tolerable because it has no target and no strategy.
The cyberpunk vision is so extreme that it is tempting to dismiss it and hope that it will simply be outgrown. But the first thing that one must say is how true that vision is. It has a great deal more history and culture behind it than our younger generation may realize. That in itself is a healing lesson, for it brings perspective. William Blake saw the smoking mills of his day as dark and Satanic. Were he around today, he would very likely see high tech as sleek and Satanic. He would surely recognize the same inhumanity and sacrilege at work in the most ingenious of Silicon Valley's achievements. He would also see the genius, for he celebrated the inventor's skill as much as the artist's. Only a conflicted loyalty stays in touch with the truth in both directions.
I suspect much of the angst and bitterness the young reflect in their on-line messages to one another stems from their sense of isolation, which also imbues their words with an annoyingly self-congratulatory sense of originality. Misguided science, the abuse of wealth and power, technology in the wrong hands ... these are issues that connect to the countercultural movement of the sixties and back at least as far as the Romantic artists. What the cyberpunks have done is to press those issues to new, histrionic extremes -- as if to warn us that, like Hollywood's indestructible Alien, this thing is still here. William Blake called the thing "Urizen, a shadow of horror," Allen Ginsberg named it "Moloch" -- a suitably ancient name that reminds us how old the horror is.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their
skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! ...
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!
Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
The current younger generation, by and large, knows little of the old counter culture that took Ginsberg to be one of its bards. But some of them are having bad dreams about Moloch. With a prophetical clarity beyond their years, they see the monster now as the alien, the cyborg, the android, caricatures of humanity that cannot love or understand us. They see it as the Tyrrell Corporation, as the X-Files' cigarette-smoking assassin, as Darth Vader in any number of his sword and sorcery/science fiction variations.
The first step in an effective post-industrial education is to make common cause with the dread and disgust of the young. But we must also recognize that their despair is a measure of their immaturity. The nihilistic hysteria that fills their music and literature simply tells us that they cannot make their way home alone. They need the competence of elders to find their way out of the bad dream we are in together. Left to their own devices, they come up with clichèd despair. Robert Bly, speaking with a poet's wisdom, believes there will be no growing up in what he calls "the sibling society" unless children find their way beyond the machines and the systems and back into the sustaining natural world to learn from the trees, the stars, the beasts.
Lewis Mumford, the teacher who taught me the most through my college years about the use and misuse of technology gave Moloch another name, perhaps the best choice of all. He called it "Anti-Life." Anti-Life was the psychic distortion that Mumford believed was at work behind megatechnics, seeking to replace all things organic with mechanical substitutes. The inventions of Anti-Life might be as modern as the next Intel chip, but Mumford believed they traced back to the divine kings of the River Valley civilizations with their compulsive appetite for imperious power over man and nature. His vision of our destiny under the dominance of Anti-Life was grave in the extreme, and more deeply-studied than any cyberpunk fantasy. But he knew that the true measure of wisdom is hope, and hope is what the competence of elders brings to the dilemmas of the young.
On the terms imposed by technocratic society, [Mumford observed] there is no hope for mankind except by "going with" its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence. But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out. (The Pentagon of Power, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1970, p. 435)