Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
What were you most surprised to learn about Stewart, John?
  

    
<101> I answered the question about surprise in <22>. (It was his
diet) 
and the question of cybernetics being off point...it was Stewart's
fascination with Bateson and with von Foerster's Second Order
Cybernetics that pulled him away from Fuller in the early 1970s.
Also a little known fact that I discovered in John McCarthy's
archive at Stanford is that Wiener and his term cybernetics is a the
root of the term "artificial intelligence". In 1956, when McCarthy
was preparing for the Dartmouth summer study project, he was looking
for a way to differentiate his project from Wiener, whom he
considered a boor and bombastic to boot, and so he chose artificial
intelligence as an alternative. The term grew from an academic
quarrel!
  

    
One of Brand's earliest and one of the few failed ventures was his
attempt to catalyze a community event around "education innovations"
way back in the 1960s, way before the PC. Did he say anything to you
about the present situation of education innovation around PCs and
networks?
  

    
<103> Not specifically, but Stewart has remained relentlessly
optimistic both in public and in our conversations about the
iterative positive impact of technology. He believes deeply in
course correction. We talked a lot about the deleterious impact of
social media upon democracy (my view) and he continues to be
optimistic over the long run. In the biography I pointed out that in
1985 after the WELL launched, he was quoted in KQED Focus magazine
as saying that "when we communicate online we communicate like
angels" When I suggested that maybe that wasn't true he responded
that I misconstrued what he was saying. (this happened onstage at
the Long Now event for the biography and we haven't had a followup
conversation. It should be noted that after being early to seeing
the potential of Engelbart's NLS system it wasn't until something
like 1983 when he was given a Compac computer and a modem that
Stewart dived into the online world. Now that I think about it, most
of conversations looked backward, rather than forward. I was
interested in his memories of various events and his commentary on
the documents I was reading.
  

    
What access were you unable to get, John? What bits were you unable
to confirm and didn't get into the book for that reason?
  

    
John Markoff I'm going to be offline for a few days, so want to
thank you now for the time you've devoted to this conversation. It
feels  as if you've been unusually generous in indulging us, and
I've enjoyed this inkwell.vue quite a lot. 
  

    
<105> Stewart is the most open book I’ve ever run into as a
journalist. Nothing was off limits. So the threads that weren’t
pulled were all on me. I regret spending too much time with
documents and not enough time chasing some of the sources I would
have dearly loved to interview. Some I missed by starting too late —
Dick Raymond died in 2016, a year before I began my research - but
others I missed because I didn’t push hard enough. Paul Hawken put
me off a number of times and eventually I let him slide. The same
was true with Richard Baker. Both were vital during different parts
of Stewart’s life. In the case of Huey Johnson I had a relatively
cursory interview and meant to go back, but he died before I was
able to. On the other hand there were people I did get such as Paul
Krassner, who surprised me to know end. I had been an avid reader of
the Realist growing up and had a picture in my mind of Krassner as a
wild man. We had two long interviews and he was remarkably level
headed and a genuine gentleman!
  

    
<106> Hi Renshin, thanks for reading….  
  

    
We had an Inkwell discussion with Paul Krassner in 2002:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/168/Paul-Krassner-Investigativ
e-sati-page01.html>
  

    
Sorry I missed that.  I knew him slightly back in the day.  Quite an
interesting character.
  

    
The one time I met Paul Krassner -- we were both just waiting for a building
to open -- he was delightful.
  

    
John, belated thanks for your <35> in answer to my question of your
interview recordings and a podcast. You mention:

> The filmmakers got there first and used their outtakes to do an
eight part podcast on Stewart.

I can't find that. Who What Where is that?

And, again, huge thanks for the book and all this. (... and the
moderators.)
  

    
John I’m going to take a slight detour here so please bear with me.
I’ve been poking around the Turner book a little more and trying to
use it as a lens through which to better view your book and panorama
of events in the early Whole Earth days. I’m finding some
inconsistencies in his framing arguments and I wonder if you might
have the same impression? 

These are in reference to his extensive use of the “New
Communalists” descriptor. As far as I know this is purely his term
and usage, and I find myself questioning its utility and accuracy in
characterizing the transformations of that period. (I found Charles
Reich’s partitioning (Consciousness I, II, and II) a little closer
to the mark but still not particularly useful for present purposes.)
Mis-characterizations of the sixties renaissance continue to abound
and have become more distorted  with every passing decade. It wasn’t
just about communes as Turner is saying. There was so much more that
went into that variegated cultural and conceptual stew and I base
this observation on personal experience. In Turner’s case, it
appears that his work was done at one remove i.e. from rather dry
research as opposed to "being there". 

Let me try to zero in on Turner’s inconsistencies. In Chapter 1, he
states: “For...the new communalists, this dream entailed a rejection
of industrial-era technocratic bureaucracy”. Ok that seems clear and
accurate enough. I buy it. However, a few pages earlier, he makes a
completely contradictory statement that “...even as they set out for
their rural frontier, the communards of the back to the land
movement often embraced the collaborative social practices the
celebration of technology and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream
military industrial academic research.”  

These inconsistencies seem to appear throughout the book. I’m not
nitpicking here. It’s important to get this right because if the
fundamental assumptions are flawed, it ripples throughout the work
itself and its conclusions. I realize that this may not have fallen
into the scope of your own research, but I thought you might want to
weigh in as it gets to the heart of one key aspect of your
narrative.
  

    
This New Yorker article from 2018 quotes Stewart describing his own
political evolution. 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-lega
cy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog

It's consistent with John's description above and adds a detail or
two. 

Evidently, Stewart also regrets over-valorizing hackers: “Frankly,
most of the real engineering was done by people with narrow ties who
worked nine to five, often with federal money.”
  

    
Sorry that should read "and its panorama of events". Coffee!
  

    
<112> Hi Tom, Here is a pointer to the “We Are As Gods” Audible
podcast by Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado….    

https://www.audible.com/pd/We-Are-As-Gods-Podcast/B0BBPM7NP9
  

    
Did Brand get any traction in recent years with his Whole Earth
Discipline argument that nuclear energyis necessary for combatting
climate change? 
  

    
n response to Tom’s point in <113> about Fred Turner’s thesis we are
very much of the same mind. Turner and I were both at the Stanford
Library within weeks after Stewart had given his papers to Stanford.
I think at one point Fred thought about the idea of a biography
before heading in a more academic direction. His book began as a
doctoral dissertation, which is one of the reason’s it is so
jargon-laden. Dormouse — my argument about the relationship of
politics, culture and technology and the formation of Silicon Valley
came out a couple of years before from Counterculture to
Cyberculture, but ultimately I think Fred’s argument resonated more
with the Zeitgeist or whatever — I was unwilling to make a
categorical assertion about the impact of psychedelic drugs,
although clearly something was afoot.

Several years later when I ran across the argument being made at the
Santa Fe Institute — where Stewart served on the board for many
years — I think I found a clearer theory in their notion that
creativity happens on the edge of chaos, which was precisely the
world that surrounded the three computer science labs that were
located equidistant from Stanford between 1965 and 1975.

I think Tom is right about the contradictions in the New Communalist
argument, but I am more uncomfortable about the centrality and the
weight he places on the WELL as being some kind of a countercultural
fountainhead.  Once again I think there needs to be a better history
of the role and the impact that USENET played. It emerged out of the
ARPANET connections that drew together the nation’s computing
laboratories and it incubated a digital culture that had libertarian
tendencies.

I think at the deepest level it is important to reject all of the
simplistic explanations about a singular Silicon Valley ideology.
The more I look at the Valley’s history the more I have come to
believe that it was multiculturalism that was at the heart of the
Valley’s innovation culture. In the 1980s the Valley became a magnet
for the world’s best and brightest and they came here by the
hundreds of thousands. It was much more of a “let a thousand flowers
bloom than any particular ideology, counterculture or what-have-you.
  

    
<117>  Soon after An Ecopragmatist Manifesto appeared Stewart’s
argument on nuclear ran directly into Fukushima and that set him
back dramatically — as it did the entire pro-nuclear community. That
said, as climate change accelerates there is an active debate within
the environmental community over whether nuclear should be part of
the mix in getting across the chasm and away from fossil fuels.
        My personal guess is that if nuclear ends up playing a role in the
energy equation after 2030 it will probably be fusion rather than
fission. I’m quite intrigued by the rapid progress being made in
superconducting magnets. The press went wild about Livermore’s
inertial confinement announcement, but that is really just a
smokescreen for weapons’ development and stockpile stewardship. The
action is really in the dozen or more startups that are making
progress toward net energy production based on the magnetic
confinement of plasmas.
  

    
As I noted before, I agree that the WELL's role has been overly
magnified. However, I do know that it was a place where many people
learned lessons that they applied elsewhere.

Craig Newmark will tell you that he learned a lot about the role of
community from the WELL that he applied to Craig's List.

Of course EFF grew out of the WELL.

When Steve Case friended me when I was still on Facebook, I told him
that I know who he is, but why did he know me? He replied that he
lurked on the WELL before starting AOL.

I bet there are many more instances, but I do think it is
significant that EFF, Craigslist, and AOL all owe a debt to what
their founders learned on the WELL.
  

    
(I'm not as optimistic as John is about the prospects for fusion.
I'd bet on high-burnup molten salt breeder reactors, which can be
built without waiting for the major breakthroughs that fusion still
needs.)
  

    
> Of course EFF grew out of the WELL.

I also recall that there was a private conference on the WELL around
the formation of what became Wired Magazine, and many who were
associated with early Wired were here.

Re. influence: I always had the sense that many early bloggers were
influenced by Whole Earth Catalog - blog posts by many bloggers
(including myself) structurally resembled reviews in the catalog.
  

    
Stewart's and J. Baldwin's pithy style was perfect for online
writing. JB especially wrote what would have amounted to perfect
tweets.
  

    
I should add that the first time I heard the term "weblog" was when
<bruces>, <castle> and I were hosting the Mirrorshades conference
here on the WELL. <mirrorshades.old.> Bruce said he was going to use
the conference as his weblog. 
  

    
I'm one of the first members of the EFF and I don't think I really
knew about the WELL until I moved to the bay area.  I lived in Houston
when I joined, the SJG was local news for me.

Found this during packing for my move away from the bay area a few
years ago:
<https://www.flickr.com/photos/allartburns/8036144161/>

It was probably <mtrbike> who I knew from USENET that suggested I join
the well.  NASA asked employees to stop using our .gov email for
personal use and there weren't a lot of options at the time.