Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

The Publisher's Weekly review cited on amazon.com said that he hoped you
had started on the sequal. Whether or not you have, do you have a sense
about what the roots of the present means for the future?  Have we reached
relative maturity in the computer industry or do you see seeds of a next
generation of revolutionary digital technology? Do you think, as some do,
that the next revolution is likely to be even more distruptive:
biological technology such genetic enginerring>
  

    
I am certain we will eventully have biomemetic gel-pack computing systems.
  

    
What acid meant to me: there's a lot more possibility out there than I
ever thought!

Of course, I didn't take it in the direction of technical invention. I
went in the direction of social invention. Sure, two couples could get
married. Sure, busloads of doper hippies could settle in the midst of
the Bible Belt.

Acid crushed the establishment mindset, or at least destroyed the
walls that surrounded and protected it. It created a lot of mavericks
from conformists. And it scared the bejeezus out of a bunch of people,
too.
  

    
My experience (some years later, starting around 1978 or so) was that the
patterns in the universe were every bit as complex and interrelated and
infinitely rich as I could opssibly imagine, maybe more so.

For me, acid showed that there is always more to reality than we can
conciously process, but it's there none-the-less.
  

    

I have to wonder if the meaning of LSD in the context of overall culture 
change -- sweeping culture-shifts from the free speech movement, to 
the post-bohemian psychedelic revolution and the related changes in 
music and literature, to the resistance to the war on campus -- is at 
least as important than direct experience of other realities.  But perhaps
the two things were inseperable.      
  

    
Psychedelics may have given some the nudge they needed to reframe the 
context for war and understand its futility, but I think there were other 
drivers that would have made war protest inevitable even without 
rearragement of the psychic furniture... e.g. news coverage that showed 
the reality of war, and the draft, which meant that theoretically any 
male of a certain age could be conscripted and shipped to the front 
lines.
  

    
Arethere aspects of computer hardware/software/theory that we can ascribe to a
pschedelic influence?
  

    
i think jon is right.

as for matisse's question--a good one, but i'd bet probably not. 
happy to hear otherwise.

the serious work of scaling and connection-making (in, say, complexity
studies) being done right now is in the acid-free '00s, and the ideas
as hunches predated the 60s and 70s.  there was just no scientific way
of showing those hunches to be more than that.
  

    

(Jon, I think you misread me above. I'm not saying that getting high 
stopped the war in Viet Nam, I'm saying instead that some of the strong 
counterculture trends of that time -- the demands for free music and other 
kinds of communal cooperative boundary-changing just for example -- that 
are sometimes attributed to sixties drugs influences took place in a 
context where these political and social trends were inseperable from the
inflences of drugs alone.  This was true whether at Stanford or in 
the backwoods someplace making solar collectors and reviving bluegrass 
music.)
  

    
I think the key influence is noted in the title of the book. The idea
that computers could be used to help people think, communicate,
imagine, design, solve problems -- Engelbart's "augmentation" -- was
not the way the computer industry or computer science was aiming until
the 1960s. And Markoff makes the case that the psychedelic and PC
revolutions intersected culturally and geographically. John -- you also
make the case that Silicon Valley, specifically a short radius around
Kepler's bookstore, is where this happened. Where you there in the
1960s? Can you say more about that particular locus? And about
Matisse's question?
  

    
This is such a breath of fresh air...thank you for your book and
getting this out into the open...


For myself, being a child of the '60's in Seattle, for the most part
of the 'revolution' and at Stanford for the first Earth Day, yada, yada
there was a progression of my conscious development that encompassed
drugs, spirituality, music, culture, politics, blah, blah...all at the
same time...

Not too surprising as I was at college and that is what is supposed to
happen...but, and it's hard to recapture all of it (if you can
remember the '60's, you were'nt there), several big arcs were ocurring
all at once...the war (that thing we were all reacting/responding to in
a variety of complex and not alway coherent ways) and all of the new
people and ideas that were showing up on stage at major campuses around
the country. All of the sudden there were Weatherman, zeitgeist
freaks, commies, pinkoes, spies and god knows what all coming out of
the woodwork as we took over the campuses, ROTC buildings, radio
stations, etc and tried to interface with authorities - legitimate and
otherwise.  Just about the time we thought we had it loosely organized
and worked out for a transition back to some kind of normalcy, the
Black Panthers' showed up and demanded their cut of the revolutionary
pie, and Herbert Marcuse declared the zeitgeist was in Seattle...very
strange daze, those, and very dicey as to which way the wind was going
to blow...I digress..

My point in all of this was that two big things were happening to many
of us while our consciousness was being raised (changed?
whatever)...our media input was radically changed - we had the Rolling
Stone, Whole Earth Catalog and Co-Evolution Quarterly and a host of
underground mags and periodicals to give us the "news" and we had the
"Muse-ick" - that acid/drug driven cosmic news (or at least some of us
heard it that way) and all the concerts and festivals with which to
connect and all the street fairs, with hippies on parade...well you get
the idea, there was a lot of ambience.

I was a business major that week, with a stack of punch cards that
reached the ceiling, just to make one stupid accounting procedure
work...while my brain was able to conceptualize the whole enchilada of
what I wanted these stupid machines to do....frustrated that I, and my
friends, could already 'see it' and talk about it and communicate on
what we thought was a high intellectual plain...but we could not get
these machines to adapt or keep up....switched majors immediately and
have been patiently waiting to be able to talk to these things - thank
Gopod for Ray Kurtzwile, Scansoft and Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 and
8.

That was the flavor of my relationship with computer technology at the
time and some of where I was coming for --- leaving aside the whole
'purple haze' aspect of my perceived reality(ies)...

Your book comes in right on target for me...thanks...Here we are
almost 40 years later and still have not quite gotten to where I and my
friends wanted to be back then, but it's a whole lot closer and a
whole lot more developed than we thought and the "shared potential" of
it all is pretty exciting...
  

    
i want to say more than i said in my posting above, which may sound as
if i think the 60s and 70s weren't special--sloppy prose and i
apologize.   

they were very special.  many things converged that had been
freefloating around.  it was a cultural skunkworks that brought them
into actuality (the folks in john's book), and the impulse (and
accomplishments) of that cultural skunkworks echoes thirty and forty
years later. 

what i wonder these days is who's harboring a similar cultural
skunkworks.  india?  china?  is it here and i just can't see it under
the '00 red-state/blue-state inanity?
  

    

Did we lose the subject of this topic?  I've not seen a post by John for a
bit too long for my taste.
  

    
sigh. you guys are amazing. It has been a rather full week. I made a
presentation at PARC, where the audience was definitely more
interesting than the speaker -- many people showed up including,
Engelbart, Tesler, Taylor, Goldberg, Allison, Tesler, Lampson. etc.
etc. As Saffo noted -- it was a little like discussing the finer points
of Catholic theology in front of an audience of popes....

On the specific question posed by Matisse - my interests are
sociological rather than psychological. That said there are some minor
parallels to Kerry Mullis (who conceived of PCR while he was in an
"acid fugue state" driving up to Mendocino). Two examples, one minor,
one not. Tim Mott had smoked dope before he thought of the double-click
UI concept. Dan Ingalls, who invented bit-blt, which is the key idea
underlying the modern GUI, would only say generally that he would get
in the mood for programming while smoking dope.

On the other hand, two well known techies who were instrumental at
PARC were hiking/tripping in Foothills Park behind Stanford one day
when one of them realized that he had come upon the solution to the
natural language understanding problem. They sat down in the grass to
discuss the issue and the other one noticed some purple snakes crawling
around them. Thus distracted, the natural language solution was
lost...  8)  (this story wasn't in the book)

As for me, I grew up in Palo Alto in the sixties and in the seventies
I was part of the non-Stalinist power structure research part of the
Left. I stayed an activist until the late seventies when I looked
around and realized there was no Movement any longer and it was time to
get a job....

Two things that were very influential for me, were seeing the Galaxy
Game, the version of Space War that was installed in the Stanford
tressider union coffee house in 1971, and seeing an Alto at PARC in
1979
  

    
John, thanks for those examples, which are interesting.
Perhaps a sociological version of my question would be:

Are there things in modern computing that we can see arose from the
psychedelic Weltanschauung, that is from the participants world-view, as
opposed to simply who happend to meet and work with each other?

Or another aspect of the question: Compare the fact that these people
met each other, though the happenstance of the poltics, drigs, etc. or was
(is?) there something inherent in the world-view of these activities that also
had a noticeable impact?
  

    
>Engelbart, Tesler, Taylor, Goldberg, Allison, Tesler, Lampson

Writing a book like this certainly gives a lift to your lifetime potential 
interesting conversations quotient, it seems!  How cool. 

Is there more -- perhaps on a tangent you discovered -- that needs to 
be told, by you or others?
  

    
There is nothing that I found that is as clearcut as Kerry Mullis
inventing PCR, however I think there was a convergence around Stanford
of technology and the counterculture. The worldview was articulated
most clearly by Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and it was the people at
that intersection who were the first people to see that computing was
becoming a medium and not a calculation tool. That set the MidPeninsula
apart from what was happening on Route 128.

In response to Gail: If I could do this over I think I would have
framed it as a biography of Engelbart. He merits it. A good biography
of Doug and his life and times is still needed. Howard Rheingold did
some and I've done some more, but we've both just scratched the
surface, I believe in chronicling the impact of Doug's Augmentation
Reseaarch Center. (for example, the Augment project created an online
journal that created a corpus of all of the activities of the project.
It has been given to the Stanford Library special collection. I believe
it runs to more than 300 or 400 linear feet!
  

    
Kary Mullis.
  

    
John, are you aware of any more recent connections between biochemical
augmentation and feats of creative prowess, whether technical or
otherwise?  I'm not familiar enough with what's out there to name
molecules, but I gather there's a variety of new compounds in circulation,
some legal some not, that are reputed to produce effects such as enhancing
mental clarity, and, drug-free workplace policies notwithstanding, I
expect that Silicon Valley is right in the thick of whatever is happening
along these lines.

Also, are you aware of any examples where institution of drug-free
workplace policies resulted in the exit of enough of a company's best
people to result in that company's decline as a force to be contended with 
in the market.
  

    
Also, we've moved a long way from the beginning's of 'acid awareness'
to sophisticated research in the neurological/biochemical sciences as
well as modeling mind/brain....any comments in regards to where we are
today in these respects and computing.  I know there is a lot being
done to actualize a neurological net, not sure how though, and not that
up on current tech....my hunch is that this is all pretty much drug
free.

One big difference seems to be the quality of research assistants at
grad schools today...they are all about healthy bodies/healthy minds
and I should imagine would shun pyschotropics with the exception of the
mental clarity types of drugs...ginseng extracts, etc.

Am I about right, or are there other things going on...

The other trend is that research is mostly happening at the corporate
level not the grad school level, with the exception of the Big Three,
MIT, Stanford and CalTech...corporate heads tend to be more targeted
toward the possible VC at the end of the rainbow since their research
belongs to the company and is pretty much locked up in the original
signups.
  

    

I read the Steve Jobs commencement address from Stanford, which someone will
have a link to I hope, and noted his Whole Earth Catalog citation there.

When I think about my own understanding of the 'net and specifically the
Web, I realize that I had gone from thinking that this was the Peace
Dividend we used to think about in terms of payoff from the end of the Cold
War, to thinking that the counterculture was also part of the birth of 
this global 'lectronic village.  That's a significant shift.  It makes 
sense.  Thank you for laying out this side of the story, John.
  

    
(written in the mid 60s before I moved to SF
and rewritten in SF)

Tuning Up in California for Whatever Happens

Everything becomes as meaningful
as it is now possible for you to see.

Love everyday, man 
Like a holy day,
a holy holiday of obligation 
to yourself, your garden, and this,
your garden universe.

Everyone who can
plays a song in a park
everyone who dares
plays a song around town
making it shine most all the time
while the drones hum inside
half listening for their birthday tune.

Though you blow it, man,
we'll sail through flashing,
we'll flow out singing dancing
while a flesh backed rainbow
this side of paradise
hails all nations to sun prance naked
for the free can do no evil
and love sweet love can be no crime.

On the third after the last school day
the angels sing tweedely tweet
what our parents feared true is awful:
this is the end, my friend,
of all your plans the end
year one of all our dreams, year one

Katy O'Gin
  

    
echoing #46, that's it exactly...helped smooth out some synaptical
gaps for me.
  

    
I think there may have been an aspect of politics as well as
psychedelics that influenced the growth of the counterculture; we were
discovering that our government had systematically lied to us. Combine
that with elevated states of consciousness and you get a powerful force
for change. I think it led to a questioning of authority that, in
turn, led to more open-minded exploration of many things, including the
possibilities inherent in 0's and 1's.

I spent several years hanging out in the general vicinity of Kepler's
(1964-1969), and there was a definite feeling of community combined
with respect for one another. Lots of little communes, lots of jargon
like "Do your own thing." The Midpeninsula Free University really did
help foster a freedom of thinking that was transformational.
  

    
Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford...

 Video
    http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/videos/51.html

 Transcript
    http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html