Link: http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2011/08/silicon-valley-computer
In Sofia Coppola's 2006 film of the life of Marie Antoinette, there is a scene where an entourage of palace jeunes filles
sweeps through a ball at which the set and costumes are period, but the
music and manners are straight out of a modern dance club. The
proposition seems to be that an elite few were able to put a toe into
the future to experience what is ordinary today.
Something like
that went on in the Silicon Valley I knew in the 1980s. The debates and
dilemmas that occupy a generation today appeared in miniature before
there was an internet. We took our anticipation of the internet deadly
seriously, to the point where it seemed already real. Thus I have
experienced the internet age twice.
Experiencing the internet in
reality is different - and even bizarre, because although it seemed
reasonable to expect the thing to come about, it is still uncanny that
the reasoning was right. It feels as though we got away with something
we shouldn't have done.
The internet arrived from two directions,
one top-down and the other bottom-up. Initially computers and computer
networking were both developed in military and government labs. The way
you experienced computation from the 1960s often reflected this point of
origin, with early computer companies such as IBM exuding a grey,
regimented stoniness in order to appear seductive to their patrons.
In
the 1970s, a small market emerged for hobbyist computers. You could
build your own little box with blinking lights that you could program by
flipping lines of switches on the front panel. That's all you could do
at first, but oh, the ecstasy to be able to touch your own computer, if
you had an inkling of where it all could lead.
A culture grew up
around these hobbyist machines centred in Silicon Valley, and spawned
the personal computer market - with Microsoft launching in 1975 and
Apple in 1976. The centre of gravity split: the stony grey opposite
delirious hippies and faux revolutionaries.
The turbulent
confluence between top-down and bottom-up continues to this day.
Internet start-ups sprout like garage bands. Most die, but a few explode
into national-scale empires, as in the case of Facebook. Dreary
top-down institutions such as wireless carriers maintain their lofty
entitlements, though occasionally they drain away, like the old music
business. I used to be partisan, favouring the bottom-up approach, but
now I appreciate the balance of tides, because all kinds of power should
be checked.
My first encounter with Silicon Valley was at the end
of my teens, which was also the end of the 1970s. The world seemed
carved into zones according to the degree of magic available. The
highest magic was found in nexuses of hippie exuberance such as the
beach town of Santa Cruz, California, where pearlescent rainbows covered
everything and even the most mediocre musicians could effortlessly
invent melodies superior to almost anything heard since. Young, creative
people with any sense of ambition tended to be drawn to these places
like weight to gravity, but by the time I arrived the magic was
receding.
The overwhelming explanation we held of our time and
place was that we had been born too late to experience the one true
orgasm of meaning, the 1960s. Young people who felt jilted by life
because of a slight error in timing found solace in a twisted calculus
of punk humour. An alternative to the Santa Cruz-type El Dorados of
bohemia were the zones of brazen, barren reality: remote and violent
desert towns, impoverished villages in Mexico, or tenements in New York
City.
The most deficient places - condemned by hippies and punks
alike - were the suburbs, the places of the conventional parent: an
artificial world ruled by Disney and McDonald's.
I did not arrive
at this suspect ontology naturally, having grown up in a way that was
both gritty and bohemian. My father and I couldn't afford a home at one
point, when I was 11, so we lived in tents on cheap land while building a
crazed, geometric, spaceship-like house in a rough corner of southern
New Mexico. I adapted to the flight from the suburbs because this seemed
the ticket into the social world of my peers in that era. I well
remember how my heart sank when I later realised that economic
circumstances left me no choice but to force my old jalopy over the
mountain pass that insulated dewy, arousing Santa Cruz from
soul-killing, blandifying Silicon Valley, which was situated in, of all
places, a suburb.
The mountain ridge that separates Silicon Valley
and the town of Palo Alto from the ocean keeps out the famed fog of
northern California in the summer. This has always made it an elite
getaway from San Francisco, but to me Silicon Valley's light looked
incomplete and made me feel remote and depressed - so close to the
ocean, but without its full light.
I despaired at the time that I
had failed to earn enough to be able to remain at the fulcrum of hippie
truth, but I was to learn, slowly, that I was moving from one
narcissistic category war to another. Instead of hippies v suburbs, I
enlisted in the turf war between nerds and - well, the opposite doesn't
have a name. A sort of muggle: the fool who doesn't realise that he
lives in a cocoon and serves only as a battery to power the action; a
person who fails to understand that the world is an information system,
and that life is programming.
Having moved from one kind of nonsense to another eventually helped me learn to be sceptical of both.
Palo
Alto was nicknamed "Shallow Alto" by the hippie hackers, who felt that
living there was a sell-out, a sign of failure. And yet, one by one, we
gave in and entered an alternate, infinitely better-funded elite club.
The place was much more than a suburb, naturally. A little more than a
century earlier, there had been a Native American culture there, but it
was murdered and erased, so little more can be said. Layers of mutually
indifferent histories were then overlaid on to this, awaiting the final
washout by Silicon Valley culture.
A trace of the Spanish colonial
period remained in the odd old adobe mansion; evidence of black
immigration from earlier in the 20th century lay in the shocking,
violent twin to Palo Alto, East Palo Alto; fruit orchards swept to the
horizon in some directions and utilitarian grids of simple wooden
buildings testified to the well-ordered conception of railroad towns and
military bases.
But the hackers would take over. What a strange society nerds make. In 1996 Oliver Sacks published a book called The Island of the Colour-blind,
about a place where so many people cannot see colour that it becomes
the norm. In the same way, the society of computer nerds is nerdy not in
comparison to a centre, but as a centre. Our nerdy world, which from an
outsider's perspective might seem slightly askew, even tilted a touch
into Asperger's syndrome, was and is our centre. The rest of the world
seemed hysterical, irrational and confused by the surface aesthetics of
things, somehow failing to grasp the numerical, causal, core truth
underpinning events and the problem-solving purpose of reality.
I
kept my concerns about the light of Palo Alto to myself and "passed",
which was, happily, not hard for me. Certain kinds of math and
programming come on strongest when you're young, and I could program the
hell out of a computer in those days. Then and now, technical
credibility is the ultimate membership card in Silicon Valley, and it is
one of the reasons I still love the place. The billionaire company
starters - and I won't name names because it's all of them - still get a
little insecure and feel a need to preen when they're around top
hackers.
The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and
the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was
a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of
the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy
cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie
crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty
clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey
cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets
where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts
part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a
distant planet. This was the new model of hippie nerd, supplanting the
ascetic fellow with the pocket protector.
There were precious few
girl nerds at the time. There was one who programmed a hit arcade game
called Centipede for the first video game company, Atari, and a few
others. There were, however, extraordinary female figures who served as
the impresarios of social networking before there was an internet. It
still seems wrong to name them, because it isn't clear if I would be
talking about their private lives or their public contributions: I don't
know how to draw a line.
These irresistible creatures would
sometimes date alpha nerds, but mostly brought the act of socialising
into a society where it probably would not have occurred otherwise. A
handful of them had an extraordinary, often unpaid degree of influence
over what research was done, which companies came to be, who worked at
them and what products were developed.
That they are usually
undescribed in histories of Silicon Valley is just another instance of
what a fiction history can be. The advent of social networking software
and oceans of digital memories of bits exchanged between people has only
shifted the type of fiction we accept, not the degree of infidelity.
In
retrospect, I cringe to think how naive and messianic the tech scene
became amid all the post-1960s idealism. The two poles of San Francisco
Bay Area 1960s culture - psychedelic hippies and leftist revolutionaries
- became the poles of early computer culture.
In 1974, the
philosopher Ted Nelson, the first person to propose and describe the
programming of something like the web, published a large-format book
composed of montages of nearly indecipherable small-print snippets flung
in all directions, called Computer Lib/Dream Machines. If you
turned the book one way, it was what Che Guevara would have been reading
in the jungle if he had been a computer nerd. Flip it upside down, and
you had a hippie-wow book with visions of crazy, far-out computation.
In fact, the very first description of the internet in any detail was probably E M Forster's The Machine Stops
from 1909, decades before computers existed: "People never touched one
another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine." It might
still be the most accurate description. How Forster did it remains a
mystery. Later, in the 1940s, the engineer Vannevar Bush wrote "As We
May Think", an essay imagining a utilitarian experience with a computer
and internet of the future. Bush's essay is often cited as a point of
origin, and he even delved a little into how it might work, using such
pre-digital components as microfilm.
But Ted Nelson was the first
person, to my knowledge, to describe how you could implement new kinds
of media in digital form, share them and collaborate. Ted was working so
early - from 1960 onwards - that he couldn't invoke basic notions such
as storing images, and not just text, because computer graphics had not
been described yet. (The computer scientist Ivan Sutherland saw to that
shortly.)
Ted was a talker, a character, a Kerouac. He was more
writer than hacker, and didn't always fit into the nerd milieu. Thin,
lanky, with a sharp chin and always a smile, he looked good. He came
from Hollywood parents and was determined to be an outsider because, in
the ethics of the times, only the outsiders were "where it's at". He
succeeded tragically, in that he is not as well known as he ought to be,
and it's a great shame he was not better able to influence digital
architecture directly. He lives today on a houseboat in Sausalito,
California, one of the other luminous, numinous nodes of Bay Area
geo-mythology.
The hippest thing in the late 1970s and early 1980s
was to form a commune, or even a cult. I remember one around the
Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco which fashioned itself as
the Free Print Shop. Members printed lovely posters for "movement"
events in the spectral, inebriated, neo-Victorian visual style of the
time. (How strange it was to hear someone recommended as "part of the
movement". This honorary title meant nothing beyond aesthetic sympathy,
but there was an infantile gravity to the word "movement", as though our
conspiracies were consequential. They never were, except when computers
were involved, in which case they were more consequential than almost
any others in history.)
The Free Print Shop made money doing odd
jobs, it included women and it enacted a formal process for members to
request sex with one another through intermediaries. This was the sort
of thing that seemed the way of the future and beckoned to computer
nerds: an algorithm leading reliably to sex! I remember how reverently
dignitaries from the Free Print Shop were welcomed at a meeting of the
Homebrew Club at Stanford and other such venues where computer hobbyists
shared their creations.
Ted had a band of followers or
collaborators; it would have been uncool to specify what they were. They
sometimes lived in a house here or there, or vagabonded about. They
broke up and reconciled repeatedly, and were perpetually on the verge of
presenting the ultimate software project, Xanadu, in some formulation
that would have been remembered as the first implementation of the
internet. Xanadu was a manifesto that never quite manifested.
If
my tone has not been consistently reverent, please know that I am not
cynical when it comes to my praise of Ted Nelson's ideas. As the first
person on the scene, he benefited from an uncluttered view. Our huge
collective task in finding the best future for the internet will
probably turn out to be like finding our way back to where Ted was at
the start.
In his conception, each person would be a free agent in
a universal online market. Instead of separate stores of the kind run
by Apple or Amazon, there would be one universal store, and everyone
would be a first-class citizen, both buyer and seller. You wouldn't have
to keep separate passwords or accounts for different online stores.
That's a pain, and it guarantees that there can't be too many stores,
thereby re-creating the kind of centralisation that shouldn't be
inherited from physical reality.
This is an example of how
thinking in terms of a network can strain intuition. It might seem as
though having only one store would reduce diversity, yet it would
increase it. When culture is privatised, as has happened recently
online, you end up with a few giant players - the Googles and Amazons.
It's better to put up with the rancour and pain of a single community,
of some form of democracy, than to live in a world overseen by a few
forces you hope will be benevolent. The stress of accommodation opens
cracks from which brilliance emerges.
Ah, there it is - my
idealism, still in your face after all these years. Silicon Valley
remains idealistic, if sometimes narcissistic. We refer to uprisings in
the Middle East as "Facebook revolutions" as if it's all about us. And
yet, look. We code and scheme through the night, and then genuinely
change the whole world within a few short years, over and over again.
What other bunch of oddballs can say that?
Much has changed.
Silicon Valley now belongs to the world. In a typical nerd cabal you
will find recently arrived Indians, Chinese, Brits, Israelis and
Russians. What is strangest in the recent waves of young arrivals in
Silicon Valley is that they tend no longer to be downtrodden geniuses
rejected in the playing of social status games, but sterling alpha
males. Legions of perfect specimens seem to have grown up in manicured
childhoods, nothing scrappy about them. When children started to be
raised perfectly in the 1990s, chauffeured from one play date to the
next, I wondered what world they would want as adults. Socialism?
Facebook and similar designs seem to me continuations of the artificial
order we gave children during the boom years.
Now we are entering a
period of diminishing middle classes and economic dimming. What will
Silicon make of this? Poorly conceived computer networks played central
roles in many of our more recent troubles, particularly the 2008
financial crisis. Such tactics as high-frequency trading just pluck
money out of the system using pure computation and without giving
anything back.
Can we adjust the world, make it happier, merely by
reprogramming computers? Perhaps. We continue to twiddle with human
patterns from our weird suburb. Maybe, if we are able to echo the
ancient idealism of those early days, we will do some good as the
software grows.
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