Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I don't think John was present when we discussed The Nation review
of his book when it first appeared, but I still want to charge that
review with literary malpractice. As John notes, Harris reviewed
Stewart the person, not the book that John wrote. I've always
thought that reviewers should measure the book against its own
stated or implicit goals. Actually, a lot of people think that.  

Harris implied that he alone detected Stewart's shortcomings, and
that John was was trying (and failing) to make Stewart look good. In
fact, everything Harris charged Stewart with came directly from the
bio. Harris not only didn't measure the book against its own goals,
but he misled the magazine's readers about what those goals were. 

In short, whoever read that review knew less about the book than
someone who never read the review in the first place. I don't take
any pleasure in faulting The Nation, but that was a bad show. As the
number of reputable outlets that review books continues to decline,
it's crappy that a very significant piece of work would be
vandalized in this way. 

I didn't know about Harris's background or forthcoming book, so
thanks of that info, John. 
  

    
We had a lot to say about the review in The Nation over in the Books
Conference when it first came out. I was amazed to see a review be
about the subject and not about the book, and found it to be more of
a hatchet job than a review
  

    
I've noticed that the New Yorker often uses the publication of a
book as an excuse for a kind of mashup of review and deep dive into
the subject.  But  I don't think that's what Harris was doing. I
think he was grinding an axe.
  

    
<77> I grew up reading the Nation and once upon a time (in the
1970s) I wrote for it. I actually let my subscription lapse after
they did an earlier hit piece about Tsutomu Shimomura and me. Kevin
Mitnick was a Robin Hood in their eyes and I was the big bad New
York Times. Sigh.
  

    
Thanks John. I didn’t mean to sound overly pejorative with the “part
chameleon” comment. I think Stewart was one of those rare
individuals with more interests and ideas than time to fulfill them.
I’m actually quite familiar with that mindset and way of negotiating
personal experience having some of those traits myself. It can at
times be more of a curse than a blessing but certainly makes life
interesting. In this sense, I am sympathetic.  Much less so, of
course, in terms of the pivot from the core values of the
environmental and consciousness movement.

By the way, let me note that you and I have something in common as
the two technology writers who first broke the news to the world
about the advent of the public Internet. My own piece of this was
detailed in my book Digital Mythologies which I believe is still
represented here in <inkwell>. My version, of course, appeared in
the trade magazine Telecommunciations where I was an editor. Vint
Cerf was on our advisory board and called me at home one Sunday
afternoon to alert me to this development -- which at the time went
right over my head. After some extensive research, the significance
hit me like a freight train. My name was probably not on the faxed
copy of the article I sent to the Times, so you still might not make
that connection. Let’s just say we tag teamed it.
  

    
In terms of your question to me about Brand’s politics, I wouldn’t
want to hazard a guess. Eclectic is a word that springs to mind but
I don’t think there’s a party for that yet. If pressed, to be
candid, I find the political environment of the Silicon Valley
somewhat perplexing, mixing as it does liberalism with a heavy dash
of militarism and surveillance that I personally associate more with
conservatives. My off the cuff take is that this odd and somewhat
paradoxical admixture applied to some extent to Brand as well. 

To explore this further, I guess it would be important to trace the
enantiodromia-like political transformation that took place from the
somewhat faux-leftist original Whole Earth paradigm in a line of
succession/progession to the watershed event of Wired embracing Newt
Gingrich and, of course, Nixon speechwriter George Gilder. I find
this coziness with the right highly significant but the extent to
which it reflected Brand’s own political thought progression is
something I’m still looking into. But I suspect strong parallels. 
  

    
Another thing that struck me about your book was that less time and
coverage was devoted to the role of the triumvirate: Brand,
Rheingold, and Kelly. As you probably know, Fred Turner’s book dealt
extensively with the very intellectually rigorous and
paradigm-changing work that Howard and Kevin Kelly did to further
Brand’s vision. In this sense, they did the heavy lifting. Although
I had and still have profound disagreements with their
pre-Transhumanist views of the world (and I continue to write about
this from time to time), it has to be acknowledged that they’re both
fascinating and deeply intelligent thinkers in the evolution of
discourse related to the Web/Internet and its profound social
implications. 

Please understand that I’m expressing this not as a critique of your
book per se because at over 400 pages, it appears that you chose to
focus more exclusively on Stewart’s own direct personal experience.
Certainly legitimate. Rather, speaking only as a reader, I was a
little disappointed not to see more about their roles, especially as
I found your book somewhat more readable than Turner’s.  

Nevertheless, I’m sure you would acknowledge that in the 90’s and
beyond, it was really the three of them (not necessarily in the same
time frame) acting together that was the real force majeure in
shaping much of the Internet ethos. It might be a bit superficial to
compare this synergistic mind meld to something like the
Lennon/McCartney collaboration with the sum being greater than the
parts, but I do have that sense and wonder if perhaps you do as
well. I haven’t had a lot of contact with either on a personal
level. I met Howard once to have coffee in Mill Valley and of course
we emailed and spoke with Kevin on the phone when he published an
article of mine in the Whole Earth Review. But I think I’m quite
familiar with their body of work as my own book was fully intended
to be a critique of theirs.
  

    
My role was really tiny in comparison with Kevin's. He and Stewart
were great partners and continue to be. I had and have a great
relationship with Kevin. I never had any dispute with Stewart. We
just didn't have the same affinity that Kevin and I had. Our offices
were feet apart, but we didn't interact. (I always thought that this
was one of Stewart's virtues: he didn't believe the general should
be micromanaging lieutenants.)

I do have one Stewart story: I saw him coming out of his office one
day and he was sporting a new, large, Swiss army knife. I asked him
about it and he gave a short talk about each blade. I especially
remember: "You could cut your way out of a car trunk with this one."
  

    
BTW, maybe I missed it, but I think one of my questions got lost in
the flow: Considering all that has gone before, and that he is in
his 80s, why do you think Stewart thinks it so important to write a
book now on maintenance? I see a certain symmetry with "How
Buildings Learn," but I wonder how you see this in the arc of his
story, John.
  

    
Once in the late 80s J. Baldwin and I were speculating at the Whole
Earth Review office on what all of the objects were in the many
little pouches attached to Stewart's belt belt. JB said, "I think
one contains some fishing line in case you get stranded in the
outback."
  

    
<80> That is a great bit of history Tom. I came to the story by way
of Brian Reid at DEC. He told me the web would be a great way for
mid career computer scientists to re invent their careers by quickly
reaching their audience. In my case it was an example of getting it
all right and all wrong at the same time. My lede was: “Think of it
as a map to the buried treasures of the Internet.”  When I wrote
treasure, I was thinking information, not actually money….&#128563;
  

    
Given Stewart's proclivity for moving on, what is he most excited
about now (and forgive me if it's already been discussed and just
missed it)?
  

    
<82> Agree on not focusing on the “triumvirate” in the biography. I
followed Stewart and I think when he left running CQ, he checked out
intellectually and emotionally more than people realize. In his mind
he never went back and he let it run itself.  

The longer conversation that we should have is over Fred’s argument
on the roots of the digital libertarian — or whatever you want to
call it Internet culture or what have you — that he attributes to
the WELL.  I will probably get jumped on for saying this (but I was
there). I have always argued that the WELL was much more of a
sideshow than Fred asserted. There was a digital culture with
libertarian overtones emerging, but it was happening before the WELL
and was far more diffuse geographically. If I was to look for the
real roots of Internet culture I would not point at either the WELL
or at Wired. Instead I found all of this alive and well in USENET as
well as in Compuserve, the Source and Prodigy going back into the
late 1970s. 

Or look at something like 8BBS, a thriving system in Bernard Klatt’s
home on El Camino Real in Santa Clara that was the first bulletin
board bust in 81 or 82. That culture was alive and well in the
hobbyist community a half a decade earlier and not particularly tied
to Silicon Valley even at that point.

I’m sure I will get a lot of pushback on this, but I think the WELL
had an out of scale reputation, not because it was early or
particularly distinct, but instead because Stewart made a brilliant
marketing move in letting all of the technology writers hang out
there for free. We were all there and we all wrote about it.
  

    
In "The Modem World," Kevin Driscoll writes a history of BBS
evolution and acknowledges that the BBS world had significant
influence on the evolution of the Internet. (The WELL was a
prominent early BBS, perhaps the largest and most active of its
time.)

We had an <inkwell.vue> discussion with Kevin. See
<inkwell.vue.520>, or for those who are not members of the WELL,
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/520/Kevin-Driscoll-The-Modem-W
orld-A-page01.html>.
  

    
No pushback from me. But the beauty of the Well is that it's still-living
history, e.g. this very conversation.
  

    
No question about the writers on the WELL and what that did. 

On its true contribution, I don't think the WELL did much that was
original.  I think what we did that had actual influence was plumb
the depths of what was possible in using the online medium to build
relationships - of all kinds.  Maybe others got there in some ways
before we did, and I guess it is thanks to the writers - like you! -
but we showed people that there was no limit to what people could do
with each other when the online medium is the chief means of
congregating.  This inspired people which is what Steve Case noted
about it to me in a conversation in the 90s.  Many other have
conveyed this to me over the years.

This is a minor side note, but since the WELL has come up, and for
the record, I am mentioned on page 309 it describes me advocating
for a federation of local WELLs. That was someone's idea for
expansion, but not mine. I wanted to focus on making the WELL
platform more multi-media as well as focus less on being an ISP.
  

    
Agree about WELL's oversized reputation in the context of BBSs,
Usenet, even PLATO, but I do think that what the WELL publicity
offered was a model of what life online could be.
  

    
The WELL was very much a bridge between USENET and computer
professionals who used it, and the general public.  The WELL was the
easiest way to tap into USENET if you didn't have access at a
university or a corporation. And the WELL allowed certain Unix pros
to have shell accounts where they honed their chops by making
utilities for WELL users to enjoy.  This was a unique merging of
cultures at the time.
  

    
<87> When I began research in late 2016 Stewart had been thinking
about an autobiography or a memoir, but decided he didn’t have the
energy for the project, and so Kevin Kelly rang me and suggested I
work on a biography. Sometime after our interviews I think in 2019
(I may be off on this) Stewart became fascinated with the
role/importance that maintenance plays in maintaining the fabric of
civilization. (This all came after we had stopped having weekly
conversations and it was more than a decade after I put a stake the
ground to try to separate biography from journalism.) I think a
prototype chapter is now public and there is an audio version of it.
He is deeply into the project and basically putting off all kinds of
invitations and distractions in order to stay focus. He is having a
great time doing the research which echoes his time spent on “How
Buildings Learn.”  To mind there is a great deal of continuity in
this going back at least as far as his early conversation with Danny
Hillis about the clock. When Danny sent out his first email
proposing the idea, Stewart was the only one to responded — he
argued that a clock project needed a library. There is also the
great story about the Oxford University forest that had been planted
centuries before to replace the oak beams in a building. It all
places maintenance at the foundation of a functioning civilization….
  

    
That was also an attempt to answer Howard’s question <84> on why
Stewart is so caught up with the importance of maintenance. His Pace
Layer work, which describes a hierarchy of slow to fast change from
geological to fashion is also a part of this perspective. The
library is a source of continuity, and of course the secret of the
clock project will rely far more on maintenance than the initial
$100 million or so Jeff Bezos put in to its construction…..
  

    
<93>. John’s point on the WELL being bridge is super important. As a
young reporter in probably the late 70s I learned about Human-Nets,
which I found fascinating because it was a window into a world where
I could learn about what the designer’s of computing technologies
were thinking about their impact. I was desperate to get access and
ultimately managed to do it: The ARPAnet tip at NASA-AMES was not
password protected, so if you had a modem you could get to the
ARPAnet. Then you just had to make your way to the MIT-AI machine
where accounts were freely available. Once I had an account I could
read and post to HUMAN-NETS — my own little proto-WELL!
  

    
I am very much looking forward to Stewart's book about maintenance. 
I was an auto mechanic and interstate truck driver before I worked
at the WELL, when I lived communally in big households I was always
the guy who maintained the vehicles and appliances and I live now on
a couple of acres on the Mendocino coast which requires constant
creative maintenance.  Even when working at offices I was always
going around tightening screws and cleaning out filters.  Never lost
the habit.
  

    
From <94>:

> It all places maintenance at the foundation of a functioning
> civilization....

And highlights a through-line that goes all the way back to Bateson and
the original meaning of 'Cybernetics.'  As Stewart wrote (in 1974):

> Cybernetics is the science of communication and control. It has
> little to do with machines unless you want to pursue that special
> case. It has mostly to do with life, with maintaining circuit.
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^
Naturally, decades of short-term conversations have come to be dominated
by the attention-grabbing events surrounding "that special case." So
much so that 'Cybernetics' and the "Cyber" idiom have come to refer to a
mere subset of the original. Perhaps, language and thinking itself, are
in need of some skillful maintenance.
  

    
More public awareness of the need for maintenance would be a great
thing. A couple of years ago I read several magazine articles about
the (very large) projected cost of bringing deferred maintenance of
infrastructure up to date. We read about visible issues - the
proportion of bridges that are in danger of falling down - and about
high-profile ones like Chris Christie vetoing the replacement of
train tunnels under the Hudson and the positive story of the work to
fix the Croton Aqueduct. The little stuff that adds up to the great
majority of the needed work is ignored until it breaks (Oroville
Dam, anyone?). The prospective need to maintain buildings and
infrastructure doesn't seem to be part of the calculation when we
decide whether to build new things.
  

    
(slip) I don't think that usage regarding cybernetics is directly
relevant here.