Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
For the next two weeks, we'll be discussing Lee Felsenstein’s new
book _Me and My Big Ideas:  Counterculture, Social Media, and the
Future_, self-published in 2024 by FelsenSigns <www.FelsenSigns.com>
 
Lee is a veteran of the Well (the third user account) and has been
an innovative engineer in the development of the computer revolution
and an influential observer of the societal dynamics that propelled
and resulted from it.

His book is less a personal memoir than a history of the
intersection of technology, sociopolitical reform, and computer
assisted communications, from the Free Speech Movement through the
evolution of social media as we know it today.
  

    
Welcome to Inkwell, Lee! Given your long experience here on the Well
and in the development of the digital domain, I expect this will be
a penetrating discussion. 

To get this conversation started, perhaps you can tell us what
prompted you to write this remarkable account?
  

    
Hi, I'm <slf>, and I joined the Well in 1985. Currently I'm a
digital nomad and I'm coming to you from Costa Rica. I was happy to
read about <lee>'s history. I had no idea! Looking forward to the
discussion (even though <axon> just stole my question. :)
  

    
The day I joined the WELL was also the first day I went to work
there, at the beginning of 1986, as the Marketing Director.  I
Stayed in that job until the end of 1991.  a few years later I
co-founded and managed the SF Gate website owned by the San
Francisco Chronicle.
 
Lee's book brought back a ton of memories for me, since I grew up
near Berkeley and my grandfather was a Cal Professor.  I was a
freshman in high school during the Free Speech Movement, but I
followed it closely on the news and in conversations with my liberal
parents and their friends, and my friends at school.  Later I got
more than a few whiff of tear gas at anti-war demonstrations and at
the People's Park protests.

The first WELL hosts meeting I went to took place at Community
Memory in Berkeley.  I was glad with this book to real the full
story of this .

And the book describes in more detail than I had seen of the
Homebrew Computer Club.

I feel like I owe my career to these seminal, historic projects, and
in a sense to Lee himself.
  

    
Lee, welcome to Inkwell, looking forward to our discussion over the
next couple of weeks! 

You were engaged with what came to be called the counterculture of
the 60s, and you were active in what was becoming Silicon Valley. 
What was it like to be part of the emerging counterculture - how
were you engaging at the time? And how did the California/Silicon
Valley counterculture compare with the broader sense of culture
change at the time?
  

    
Lee, you talk at several points about being autistic and about being
depressed. Looking at the way these conditions are recognized and
acknowledged and treated today, how do you think your life would
have been different?
  

    
<slf> I believe I always qualify any self-reference to autism with a
modifier like "marginally" - I took an on-line test and scored only
2 out of 50 "true" answers to the question of "am I autistic?" So
I'm very far into the deep infrared of that spectrum.

Steve Silberman, writing in "Neurotribes" made me 1/3 of his chapter
"Empires of the Air" on techno-nerds (Hugo Gernsback, Prof. John
McCarthy, and me), diagnosing me as "an undiagnosed autistic" on the
basis of a telephone interview. I protested this to him in a phone
call and he agreed to correct his in a later edition that  has never
happened. In the meantime I have appeared in two books labeled as
unquestionably autistic based only upon Steve's statement, so I
guess I have been added to the Autistic Hall of Fame, for what it's
worth.

My maternal grandfather, William T. Price (1883 - 1920) would
clearly have qualified for membership in that august body, based
upon family lore (an obituary noted that "...he lectured in short
pants", and his interactions with his fiancee prior to their wedding
clearly indicate an inability to empathize or deal with others'
interactions on an emotional plane). I have observed how autisitc
type behavior has tracked down his lineage - a cousin has received a
medical diagnosis.
From my discussions with him and observation of other family members
I reach my conclusion that I am the recipient of a marginal dose of
autism, though I had previously written it off to normal
psychological quirks.

As to how my life would have been different otherwise, I consider
this tinge to be "my edge" in moving beyond a nice, mellow,
well-balanced Norman Rockwell path through the years to one of an
adventurer, as I was dubbed at age 20 by a very conventional uncle
of mine.

My depressive episode was a surprise at the time (1967 - 1971) and
gained me four years of out-in-the-world experience before
completing my bachelor's degree, along with a first-hand encounter
with my mind through talking therapy. If one is seeking a
kick-in-the-ass event it would definitely qualify. Some of my most
significant understandings took place during that particular
peregrination.

 
  

    
<jonl> In the 1950s we didn't have "counterculture" - it was
"bohemianism" and pretty reserved in its cultural presentation. If
my father had an ideology, it was about how many things and people
were "phony" (I never pressed him for a definition - not my place as
a child). 

I was given to understand that being an "intellectual" was a Good
Thing, and there were books around the house  - I recall Lewis
Mumford as one author's name but couldn't even begin to read it.
Another, titled "A History of Aesthetics" I investigated thinking it
was about anaesthetics, but was soon disappointed. The general
culture came in for a lot of criticism, which I began to explore
through books after receiving a copy of "Brave New World" for my
16th birthday. 

There was a spate of books in paperback I bought and read in the
early 1960's - I list them in the book - informing me about the
wiles of advertisers (the Hidden Persuaders), the machinations in
Southeast Asia setting up a war there (A Nation of Sheep), and
fiction like "Seven Days in May" (in which I found "control of
information" as the key to a military coup d'etat in the US) and
Catch-22 which satirized most aspects of standard American culture
through a World War II metaphor. 

None of this was at the instigation of my parents, but I knew they
would approve. Of course, I couldn't discuss my growing political
and social awareness with them, or hardly anything else. I was a
teenager and my father was a narcissist to boot.

One book that I studied assiduously was "The True Bohemia", about
the Beat culture in the SF Bay area - it mentioned the importance of
the University of California at Berkeley as a hub for Bohemian
culture. I was in the process of applying for college admission at
the time, and this put UCB high on my list.

I entrained for Berkeley on Sept. 9, 1963, arriving four days later
to be received by an uncle and aunt, who drove me to Berkeley the
next day, found me a room and bought me a bicycle, and there I was. 

I quickly found the radical student underground - about 200 people
who were available to protest most anything, and when Madam Ngo Dinh
Nhu (sister of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US puppet premiere of South
Vietnam) made a publicized visit to SF in October I was on the
picket line at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, along with Allen Ginsburg
- I had made it!

I never investigated the coffehouses of North Beach (or of
Berkeley), taking refuge from human sociuety in intense study, but
the Berkeley student underground was the closest thing to a society
to which I attached myself.

Then came the Free Speech Movement which changed everything. What we
have cme to call the counterculture blossomed profusely in its
successful aftermath. That experience has directed my life ever
since, as I explain in the book. 

When in 1967 I spent a summer working ion Silicon Valley (I had
worked locally under the Co-operative Work-Study Program in
Engineering which occupied all of my would-be vacation time) I began
to explore the small Menlo Park-based counterculture centered around
Kepler's books, even making a friend. It was years behind Berkeley
but I could comfortably step into it based upon my Berkeley
experience. 

No, I did not find myself dropping acid with Ken Kesey or any of the
engineering PhDs mentioned in Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said", I
was mostly a spectator, but it set me up so that when I dropped out
and went to work in Redwood City I could serve as the Berkeley
Barb's reporter in and around Stanford in 1968 (a busy year). 

Referring back to your original question, I "engaged" with both
countercultures as a reporter for the Berkeley Barb, where I
exercised my newly-developed ability to write as an observer. I
participated in antiwar demonstrations and actions like Stop the
Draft Week in 1967 (again - described in detail in the book) and
much more refined demonstrations at Stanford in 1968. 

In 1969 and 1970 I was a part of the Berkeley Tribe - a breakaway
paper from the Barb where I interacted with counterculturalists
while maintaining my shirt-and-tie working culture at Ampex. This
created the question I got from one of the more immersed Tribe
members - "Lee - how do you move between two worlds?" My response
was "Don't you know there's only one world?"

So basically, I retained my own culte

I wouldn't say that I 
  

    
<jonl> - if you can, please graft this onto my response #7 starting
at the word "culte". If you can't I'll just leave this as response
#8 and the reader can mentally append it. The vestigial phrase "I
wouldn't say that I" should be deleted, or ignored.

------

Continuation of text from response #7:

culture as I moved through my world. I never "became a hippie" or
member of "Woodstock Nation" like some about me. I adopted a nom de
plume of "Barb Military Editor" as a joke in 1967 and kept it for
articles In which I tried to talk sense into some jerks who were by
then holding forth in dangerous ignorance on guerilla warfare,
weapons, and explosives. 

I tell the story about how, in 1969 when I had published an essay
titled "Rapping on Tapping" about wiretapping and accompanied it
with the schematic diagram for a simple one-transistor oscillator
that would bedevil any tapper who simply recorded audio intercepted
on the phone line without reference to whether the phone was on or
off hook, I was accosted in the Barb office by Doc Stanley, an
accomplished bullshitter ("raconteur" in polite society").

"Did you see the circuit by Felsenstein?" he asked me (I was in my 
work outfit that evening). That insert had been printed using a
false name and source, but as part of my article. 

"I AM Felsenstein", I replied, next asking Stanley how he knew I had
been responsible for the circuit. "It could only have been you", Doc
replied. "There's only one Skorzeny", referring to the German James
Bond type who had performed the feat of rescuing Mussolini from
mountaintop captivity after his overthrow. 

I don't like the association, and Doc was a bullshitter, but it set
me back and made me wonder about who or what I was becoming.
Certainly not a stereotypical anything.
  

    
Going back for a moment to your response in <6>, you mention that
"some of my most
significant understandings took place during that particular
peregrination," referring to your depression and the encounter with
your own mind via talking therapy. Can you say more about those
significant understandings?
  

    
Hi folks, I joined The WELL in December 1987 using a 1200 baud modem on my
new Macintosh SE. I recall that <tex> called me to leave a message saying
that I had apparently signed up twice and he was keeping one of the two
attempts. I had also joined PeaceNet and CompuServe that same week, but
within a couple months I had dropped them and have been on The WELL ever
since.

The major thing that impressed me about The WELL was that there were actual
people having real relationships. It was a major thing that The WELL had
monthly in-person gatherings at 27 Gate Five Road in those days. Started by
<nana> and perpetuated by <tex>.

In those days I was working in construction/architecture - having moved to
California in early 1987 to apprentice with architect Christopher
Alexander, who I had learned about via the book A Pattern Language which I
learned about from "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" in 1980. I also learned
of The WELL from the Whole Earth Review magazine.

In early 1988 I was thinkig about attending the monthly WELL Office Party
and equivicated an <bandy> urged me to attaned because I was one of the few
people on The WELL who worked in the physical realm.

By 1991 I was a licensed General Contractor but had very little work
(recession) and a job opened at The WELL doing Customer Support - I landed
that job and eventually became the manager of the Customer Support team
of about 6 people, which as half the company. This was a time when we
needed to explain on the telephone and with in-person classes to people
what a modem was, and then what "The Internet" is.

The support team was the "human interface to The WELL."

I left in early 1994 but continues to use The SWELL to this day. This
was a turbulent and very dynamic period in The WELL's evolution and in
the evolution of computer mediated communications. The WELL connected to
the Internet on New Years' Eve 1991/92 and it was very clear to many of
us that this Internet thing was a world changer. It was not clear HOW
or WHAT that change would be.

Lee:

Reading your book and having talked with you about some of these things
in person I am wondering about your current observations on how the
evolution of social networks is occurring in the ecosystem of information
technologies currently? "social media" "large language models" vastly
widespread access to networks, etc.
  

    
We interrupt the conversation briefly for this public service
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This conversation is publicly accessible, meaning anyone can read
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For non-members, here's a short link for easy access:
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Big-Id-page01.html>.

Either link will open the first page of the public conversation. If
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Feel free to share either link via social media, email, etc.

If you're not a member of the WELL, you can't post a response
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If you'd like to participate in more discussions like this, consider
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range of topics---an excellent alternative to the fast-paced,
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This conversation will continue for at least two weeks, through
Febrary 11, although the conversation will remain active, and users
can continue the discussion for as long as there is interest, and
access the discussion to review.
  

    
<lee>, I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I'm wondering
what you think today's counterculture will be and how technology can
play a role, especially since so much of technology seems to be
going along with the current administration, if not actively helping
it.
  

    
<slf> Technology itself does not express politics outside of how it
is programmed, and programing is the most malleable aspect of a
technological system.

The programming and the business management of the system determine
the degree to which it is "going along with the current
administration". Algorithms to control the presentation of content
to users are the manifestations of the "politics" of the system,
since politics is determined by control of information flow (it's in
the book). 

It's quite feasible to design a system so that it is impossible for
one voice to reach the whole body of users -- such a system would be
shunned by practitioners of hierarchical politics. Since the
advertising income available to such a system would be small
(eyeballs! eyeballs!) it would have quite low income.

Now, if the system were owned and run by the community and survived
on fee-for-service (which could be quite small if the usership were
large enough) it would be a success politically while being deemed a
failure under the economic rules for "success". 

I would expect the counterculture of the moment would find the
second type of system much more attractive than the first.
  

    
<matisse> 
I am not observing and analyzing existing social media systems - I'm
designing the next version of what I know about. See my section
headed "The Error of Critique-ism" in ch. 25 (which is itself an
example of such error).

For my take on AI with its LLM's see "Artificial Stupidity" (ch.
31). It will find it's place in handling stupid information for
stupid purposes (this accounts for a great deal of information
traffic -- just not the type I want to foster).
  

    
Could you discuss how the personal computer as we know it today came
to be, from your perspective as someone who had a significant role
in building the first portable computer, the Osborne 1?
  

    
Hi Lee,
I joined the Well in 1997 after assiduously avoiding it for years in
favour of the Berkeley Mac Users Groups BBS. 

 I've been involved with digital media projects all of my career -
Macworld Online, MSNBC, D2C fan communities for two of the world's
biggest record labels, web 2.0 posterchild Last.fm and most recently
BBC Sounds.

One of my favourite of your aphorisms is "If work is to become play,
then tools must become toys."

What is the role of playfulness in the design the design of digital
communities?  And if it is important, how we encourage more of it in
the next generation of social media systems?
  

    
Hi Lee! I really enjoyed the book, and learning so much about your
early days. I joined the WELL in June 1986, part of the Deadhead
invasion, and am still there to this day. I was the first person in
my company back in the early 80's to get a PC (IBM PC-XT). The
origins have always fascinated me.

75% of my social life, both online and f2f, comes from the WELL
(including my husband) - even though I am 3000 miles away from those
office parties.

Like tex said above, I feel like I owe my personal AND professional
lives to these seminal, historic projects, and in a sense to Lee
himself.

I have no particular questions yet, just enjoying the conversation.
  

    
The agora is a thread that runs through the whole book and is
central to your work.  Are you currently trying to create or design
something that could fulfill that?   
  

    
<slf> (#12):

Unfortunately, I never kept a journal in which I logged my musings
of the day,so I have to be fairly general in discussing the
development of my ideas. I tried to do this in the book as best I
could, which was not particularly detailed. 

he best answer I can give would be to examine my conclusions at the
start of the depression (fall of 1967 - more specifically the few
weeks after the Oct. 14 Stop the Draft week, which I count as a
traumatic (or certainly dramatic) event that got the ball rolling. 

I should also note that, having completed my three six-month work
periods (and a summer of working in Silicon Valley during which I 
finally discovered myself unshackled by academic responsibilities
and challenged by the concept of "living a life" rather than simply
performing like a rat in a maze), I can look back and sense the fear
I finally felt that I was not equipped to meet such a challenge.

During that summer I tried to develop some ideas about equipping the
underground press with the means to transmit the digital paper tapes
turned out by the Friden Justowriter typesetting machines so that a
network of papers could syndicate articles. I discuss this in
Chapter 28 under the heading "Early, Futile Efforts at Networking" -
my electronic skills were not yet up to the necessary level and I
was re-inventing already existing technology like shift registers
(parallel - to-serial converters) and modems.

Between then and my epiphany of 1970 ("a network of computers!") I
experienced growth in my technical skills, came up against the
limits of my depressive condition with my futile mimeographed
"Berkeley Network Bulletin" (and its potential as a distribution
system for materials that could not be sent through the mails among
collective households), and simply watched from my vantage point in
the Berkeley Barb the evolution of the "counterculture". 

Of great significance in this process was my growing realization
that the Barb and its fellow underground papers were structurally
unsuited to be focal points for the kind of real communities that
would allow society to advance while creating alternatives to
consumer culture. 

By the end of 1969 and the first turnover of the Berkeley Tribe
staff I was edging toward the door and had to confront the question
of "what now?" wile I did my best to leave the Tribe in a position
to get along without me. I co-signed for the van they bought and had
to ransom it out of the repo mens' hands when the staff stopped
paying the loan in 1971). 

In August of 1971 I flew to Atlanta to participate in the second May
Day conference where I encountered the "cultural radicalism" that
had steadily developed. I saw first hand how juvenile Dionysian
posturing involving sexual politics had diverted and diluted the
effectiveness of a group that had carried out a reasonably effective
protest the year before in Washington DC. 

At that confab I typed up and mimeographed an idea piece about how
we needed to form networks of co-operating communities and apply
"professional standards of organization" in the network's operation.
I cannot recall the title of this piece but it has appeared archived
on line somewhere, but no one on that very youthful group knew what
to make of it.

As I describe in the book I began my therapy in the new year of
1970, and by the fall of 1971 had made enough progress to reduce the
tendency to resolve my frustrations by falling asleep, so I
progressed with my plan to re-enroll at UC Berkeley and redeem my
academic disaster with my bachelor's degree. 

It was also the time when I "turned myself in" to Resource One as
their windfall engineer who brought them the possibility of
supporting the operation of the SDS-940 computer. That I had visions
of community development through networking on a shared computer was
a small price to pay for my heart and soul (as they were at that
time). 

My path through and out of school then was planned to end with my
moving into Project One to become an appendage of the computer, and
I had the opportunity to fling myself bodily into that role and
discover the ways in which that did not work for me. More personal
growth ensued within an environment where many others like me were
making similar discoveries. 

I mark the "end point" (which was not digital but more like an
exponential analog decay curve crossing an arbitrary limit) at 1974
when I had already been levered out of Project One by Efrem and his
household and had to recover from my institutionalized mindset (this
is briefly described in the book but in slightly more detail
involved about a month of domesticity - establishing a rhythm of
life that was centered around my own life and not that of a
computer).

At that time I experienced a "breakthrough" in my therapy in which I
sat up in a session and proclaimed "I'm going to go and buy a lot of
nice clothes", followed by my doing just that (not "a lot" - but
definitely a much fancier outfit than the janitor's garbs in which I
was draping myself when not buttoned up for work in my suit).

I had gone through a set of significant changes and experienced the
failure of many of my set ways and ideas. The world had moved along
and I had jumped on board instead of withdrawing from it to
diversions like drugs. I was not the same person at the end who had
entered at the beginning. There was much personal growth along with
intellectual growth, and I found a path I could travel on my own
terms. 

I can see that the development of my ideas and my own
self-development cannot be separated, and is not a simple matter to
separate into component parts. Sorry about that, but it is what it
was.
  

    
> I encountered the "cultural radicalism" that
> had steadily developed. I saw first hand how juvenile Dionysian
> posturing involving sexual politics had diverted and diluted the
> effectiveness of a group that had carried out a reasonably
effective
> protest the year before in Washington DC.

Can you say more about this?  What were the juvenile Dionysian
posturing and sexual politics you refer to here?
  

    
What led you to self-publish the book? Are you looking to publish it
conventionally at some point?
  

    
<tex>: 
I most certainly am designing something to provide the function of
the agora - Community Memory Version 4, or CMV4.

In the book you'll see a description of the basic processes that
take place within an agora, according to my conceptualization. They
include;

1. Performance
2. Lurking
3. Nucleation
4. Budding
5. Calving

To which I'll add:
6. Exit

I don't want to rewrite that chapter here, so I'll just refer to
these stages. 

The function I want to support most within the agora is
conversation. Not dialogue" because that's between two parties (note
the "di-" prefix). 

Lurking is the default mode - it is a listening mode in which one
can read others' entries without being detected. The initial space
is a public area dedicated to "all call", where anyone can "perform"
to attract attention and gather an audience. 

Such a space will need to be subdivided into smaller spaces which
will limit the area within which performers will be heard - lurkers
can always choose to see all activity but will need to select a
smaller space with the aid of people who serve as "referents" in
exchange for micropayments (every user has a credit balance
account). 

The use of people for the reference function is intended to prevent
the development of algorithms (need I provide more motivation?).

If a lurker wishes, he or she can make a comment on a discussion in
progress, in which case they enter a "nucleation" mode by joining
the conversation. The "nucleus"  is the group engaged in active
discussion and a participant may choose to leave the nucleus and
return to lurker status at any time.

Budding is the process wherein a new nucleus is generated forming a
"side discussion". If the members choose they can "calve" their
nucleus off to form a new stand-alone nucleus which is capable of
relocating itself to another space within the agora.

Conversations can terminate gradually by having all members return
to lurker status or they can "exit" as a group (or subgroup) and
leave the system altogether -- I expect to provide external private
rooms within which to continue conversations in a non-public
environment.

The public nature of the discussions in the agora is essential.
Referents will need to be able to lurk as their major activity,
since they will collectively be the memory of the system in terms of
what topics are being discussed and by whom.

There will also be journalists who provide reportage and commentary
on what they see. The system will have to provide tools for
supervision of both referents and journalists, to ensure that they
do not take advantage of their position and/or spread
misinformation. I envision a network of peers backed up by a more
formal complaint and adjudication process. 

In the public space uses will be able to "hang out a shingle"
announcing services available commercially. Users will at all times
be able to create links to other content available to be followed by
any user. 

Every comment and link entered will have an expiration (or "fade")
date at which it will begin to self-destruct. This date may be
increased by interested users in exchange for micropayments -
obviously anyone hanging a shingle will need to renew it (and if
they lose interest it will fade without intervention).

I'm working on an interesting UI based on the metaphor of the book -
reading can be done off the page to a new page through a "thumb
index" function, and the viewed page will appear to "turn" to reveal
the new space. scrolling back along a line will cause the page turn
to be reversed and you will end up on an earlier page or will simply
scroll continuously backwards to the initiation point of the
comment. 

Links will be indicated through color tags or alphanumeric tags when
the palate of colors runs out. I want to provide for a user space
where a number of conversations can be viewed as a group and
cross-linked by participants. In the book I inveigh against the
"papyrus scroll" metaphor such as we're using here.

My archetypal terminal will be a smart phone - the system will be
hosted by the phone carrier (this solves the problem of identity and
billing) and provides a version of locality, as the servers will be
local and access to data from remote servers will incur a time and
cost penalty (cost here is primarily used as a metering mechanism
and to make the view of the system "fade out" with distance.
Overcoming this distance penalty will require somewhat larger
payments and probably access time costs (slower access, which will
encourage clustering of information within the local server space).

Once I (and whomever I can recruit to join me in the development
process) get the specification nailed down we will start to build a
prototype for demonstration purposes. I want to get it working and
distributed by open source. There will have to be some form of
management of the network well enough designed to offer "dynamic
stability" in which perturbations in operation die out with time - I
expect that this development process will take time..

The system will have to be "Elon proofed" to prevent takeover by a
single party with significant resources - I want the result of
monopolization to be to leave the predator with an empty shell as
the users go elsewhere. The system will have to coexist with others
- I don't want to be creating or rewarding hegemony of this design.

It's clear that there will have to be a lot of discussion as the
development proceeds, and we can use early implementations for that
purpose (eat one's own dog food). I'll have to create a discussion
group fairly soon, as I will need to gather a group to complete the
development (milestones TBD).
  

    
comment #22 was in response to #18.
  

    
What about visual and audio media? Do you include that in the spec? 
FB drives me crazy with their lousy interface that they keep
changing for the worse, but one thing they do very well is handle
photos and video.  I think this is a key part of their strength.  
  

    
And ..

Do you envision particpants having to self-identify their status as lurker
etc. or that sort of status change inherent: if you post you cease being a
lurker, etc. (I am concerned about a system that tries to make its user
constantly make self-concious category choices for themselves, which
engineers tend to like but but most people do not like.)

Also: I think planning to have a system hosted by the carriers isn a
sure-fire losing approach: both because it will be almost impossible to get
them to do it without massive capital backing and because if they did do it
it plays into the fragmentation based on carrier, instead of the agora
system having its own interests at its center.