SALON

R.U. Sirius

Thursday, Oct 19, 2000 7:00 PM UTC

Steal this millennium!

Yippie Stew Albert sits down with R.U. Sirius to plan the revolution and remember Abbie Hoffman.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Steal this millennium!

Abbie Hoffman passionately wanted a popular film made about his life. He even playfully titled his 1981 autobiography “Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture.” Two decades later, the Abbie biopic “Steal This Movie” has come and gone, a relative nonevent. While the flick will live on in cable and video, some may claim that the film’s popular failure proves the prankster, lefty countercultural politics that Abbie lived by irrelevant to the present moment.

To examine the relevance, or lack thereof, of yippieness in the year 2000, I sought out one of Abbie’s closest friends and yippie compatriots, Stew Albert.

Albert was the vaguely serious one among the lunatics who made up the initial yippie front guard, a cast of characters that included widely known countercultural players such as Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Anita Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner and eventually John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And he was instrumental in pushing the yippies toward the extreme leftist politics that followed the summer of 1968, negotiating a “Yippie-Panther Pact” with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. A slightly mellowed Albert now lives in Portland, Ore., with his wife, fellow yippie graduate Judy Gumbo, where they both remain active in leftist environmental politics.

I was one of their youthful followers. In 1968, Abbie’s first book, “Revolution for the Hell of It,” exploded in my adolescent brain — more Molotov cocktail or acid tab than tome. My many months of trying to connect the Marx of my political education to the Kesey of my pleasures were at an end. None of that mattered much anymore. What mattered was how alive we young people were. We would reject the straitjacketed bourgeois workaday life, screwing, tripping and dancing our way to total revolution.

This celebratory existential politics has cast a long shadow over my life and work, to both good and ill effect. Some have even called my latest project — a political party and presidential write-in campaign under the banner of “The Revolution” — Hoffman-esque, but I wouldn’t claim that degree of courage or originality.

Albert has courage and originality in spades, and our conversation ranged from the Hoffman biopic to technophobia to share-ins on Rodeo Drive.

“Steal This Movie” isn’t particularly artful, but I can’t imagine any young person not familiar with the amazing stream of political pranks and punch lines Abbie pulled off in the late ’60s and early ’70s finding these dramatic reenactments anything but inspiring.

I have some objections, however, to the film’s honesty. Abbie’s portrayed as a militant liberal. It doesn’t really communicate that crazy sense of total revolution that was so palpable at that time. For instance, they show him leading a shout of “Hell no, we won’t go!” after the conspiracy trial, when, in reality, he was talking “Off the pig, pick up the gun” at that time. I mean, I don’t want to do David Horowitz’s work for him, but on the other hand the whacked-out reality of that time might have made it a more complex and exciting movie. Then again, I suppose I could just go see “Cecil B. DeMented” again.

Well, the movie was definitely made by radicals, not liberals. They work in the Hollywood movie industry and usually have to turn out a liberal product. But with the Abbie film, they pushed their limits.

Abbie had a political evolution. When I first met him, he was something of an anarchistic “flower child” with a great talent for performance art. In “Revolution for the Hell of It,” Abbie describes himself as a political goof-off and me as a Marxist-Leninist. Not true, but close. Over time, Abbie became more leftist and less flower child. The film catches some of this. As Abbie tells his lawyer, “Flower children have grown thorns.”

In terms of the ultramilitant rhetoric, Abbie initially resisted the “Panther-Yippie Pact.” That was something that Jerry Rubin and I cooked up with Eldridge Cleaver. At first Abbie thought the alliance would stop us from being yippies and turn us into imitation Panthers. But after he met Bobby Seale, he became much more pro-Panther.

In retrospect, what do you think of the whole ultraradical “pick up the gun” period, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and all that? At the time, it all seemed very romantic. That history still holds a lot of fascination, but it also seems pretty unproductive and wrong. And now the Panthers are frequently portrayed as having been thugs and gangsters.

It’s true, the Panthers are widely described these days as thugs and gangsters — mostly by white writers. But in their home base of Oakland, Calif., among black people of a certain age, the Panthers are still considered folk heroes.

I was involved with the Panthers between 1967 and ’72. They certainly engaged in some bandit-style behavior, but anyone who was remotely close to them knows that the outlaw stuff was all on behalf of supporting revolutionary politics. Later on, the balance changed and it seems the Panthers became more of a criminal gang using politics as a cover.

Why did this happen? It has a lot to do with Huey Newton. There was a massive FBI campaign against him — to drive him crazy and push him over the paranoid edge. I’ve seen the FBI memos. But there was also something about Huey that made him vulnerable to this assault. I remember once going to a movie with him in New York — it was about black pimps and revolutionaries. Huey liked the film, but he objected to the fact that the pimps were shown living much more comfortably than the revolutionaries. “This will attract black people to the pimps. Revolutionaries need to live well to be respected.” And he was talking about some very high living. I came away thinking that Huey was losing faith in the best part of himself — and in the people he was trying to lead. It seems that Huey did eventually become a pimp, and he destroyed himself and his organization along the way. He had so much courage and brilliance. What a tragedy!

It’s clearly impossible for any film or work of art to get across the energy of 1968-71. It seems bizarre now that as a high school student in 1969, I actually believed that there was going to be this total revolution, political, cultural — you know, “Why should I worry about my grades?”

The essence of that time wasn’t the demonstrations, riots or rock festivals. It was the day-to-day fact of hanging out with lots of “freaks.” I lived near a college campus. You could go there any time, day or night, and find a tripped-out, high-energy human circus. People were getting high, circulating petitions, flirting, dancing and defacing government property. I remember a spontaneous meeting of nearly 1,000 people planning an antiwar action. People were happy to get together, in large groups, all the time, in a very intense way. You didn’t have to go out to the desert over Labor Day weekend to find it.

And then, late in 1971, it just sort of stopped. The campus became morguelike. What happened?

Part of why our fantastic hot energy cooled off was a lack of standards. We thought anything wild was revolutionary — anything crazy would make the world a better place. We celebrated excessive behavior. It was all part of positive social transformation. Drugs, guns, bombs … and then unreal ideologies: If it didn’t reflect middle-class life it was per se good.

I think back to the mid-’60s Berkeley, Calif., and the Vietnam Day Committee, which was dreamed into existence by Jerry Rubin. The VDC led enormous marches and teach-ins against the Vietnam War, and its Berkeley office became a major cultural political center. The movement was riding high and wide then — it was delicious in its styles, personalities, tastes and morality. We were a peculiar blend of fun-loving hedonists and severe moralists. I was having the best time in my life, but the seeds of our decline were already present. I think the story of Angel makes the point.

The VDC office was inhabited by strange figures. Rubin complained that the weirdos kept sane people away. But a lot of work got done despite the circus atmosphere. Most of the odd characters were willing to lick envelopes and earn their night sleeping on the office floor. But not Angel the psychedelic ranger. He was too busy.

Drug ingestion wasn’t permitted in the office, but many tripping acidheads sat on the old sofas and stared at blank walls. “What are you seeing, Angel?” I asked out of curiosity. “The seventh bardo,” he responded. “I’m almost there.” Angel was very handsome and surfer-muscular. Even when he passed into complete oblivion, Angel looked like a Greek statue of idealized masculinity. Or maybe he looked like a decadent model for a 1936 Nazi Olympics poster.

“What about the other six bardos?” I asked.

“They are only in your head.”

Angel held the Berkeley record on acid tripping. He never came down. “I take acid first thing in the morning, every morning, until I see God’s white light,” he said.

Angel’s father was a career Trotskyist from a working-class background, a friendly, open sort of guy who was involved in the VDC. But he never mentioned his acidic son, except in mumbled words and painful expressions. In Berkeley, the generational war could be waged on unique turf.

For some reason, Angel liked me. He once showed up at the VDC table when I was in an intense debate with an ROTC officer over the winnability and morality of the Vietnam War. Angel entered our discussion by looking deeply into the officer’s unsuspecting eyes. The old soldier withered under the intense enemy assault and quickly fled. “I hypnotized him,” he said. “I took over his mind. He’ll join the VDC now. He’s one of us.”

I became concerned when Angel doubled his already unmeasurable acid dose. I was worried that he might come flying out the window. One Berkeley acidhead had already passed on to another realm, thinking he was a bird or a plane.

“A lot of pioneers get killed, man, but it’s worth it.”

One day Angel announced that he was going to levitate himself outside of Robbie’s greasy cafeteria. An extensive debate broke out over his claim. Some thought the proposed levitation might take place; many argued that we should at least maintain an open mind.

A crowd showed up at the appointed time in front of Robbie’s on Telegraph Avenue near the Berkeley campus. There was a tone of nervous expectation. Maybe Angel might float over Telegraph Avenue? He never showed up. He forgot. Angel never remembered anything. It wasn’t that there were so many Angels. It was that the rest of us never realized that they needed to be helped, not turned into heroes.

Can 1960s-style energy be cultivated again? I suspect the idolatrous worship of the world market global economy, with its utter lack of democracy or compassion or humanistic culture, may chew itself up and produce its opposite, a rebellion on behalf of human nature and self-determination. It’s already started. Young people are again taking frightening chances in police-infested and sadistic streets.

The great thing about the movement against corporate globalism is that it’s a global movement. That’s why the left suddenly has a presence again in America. Progressive politics took a terrible wrong turn when it starting thinking globally but acting locally. In a media culture, that was pretty much quitting.

But the movement also worries me some. For one thing, just as I celebrated the dissolution of boundaries as an acidhead in the ’70s, I celebrated the coming dissolution of boundaries, including the waning power of nation-states as wrought by information technology, as a cyber-counterculturalist in the early ’90s.

There are lots of hellish devils in the details of globalization, in the specific rules conjured up by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization and so forth. But there’s also a lot to be said for a global culture. And just to play devil’s advocate, a lot of globalism’s advocates sincerely think they’re making a better and hipper world, filled with happy middle-class tech stock owners, listening to multiculti pop music while watching “Ally McBeal” and drinking Frappuccinos.

I used to argue with Abbie that he was too much of a media global-village freak. But I learned from him that Marshall McLuhan was right. Abbie drew from this insight and tried to work out a practical political strategy of influencing and transforming the village. His basic approach was to develop entertaining tactics that were irresistible to the media — tactics that made for good visuals, headlines and quotes. And so we threw money at stock exchange brokers in New York, and I ran for sheriff of Alameda County in California and challenged my opponent to a duel, and on and on. All of these stunts were fun for those who engaged in them, and for most who viewed them through the media lens. And they all satirized the political/economic system. We received much greater attention than any comparable bunch of extreme radicals.

The tactics also had their shortcomings, like media dependency and addiction. After a while our imperative tended to be developing stunts rather than counterinstitutions. It didn’t start out that way. Abbie started the Free Store in New York circa 1967, and I helped found the Free University in Berkeley in 1965 and People’s Park, also in Berkeley, in the summer of 1969. Schools, parks and stores represented our effort at not just being against the system, but trying to lay the foundations for a much better way of life. But we eventually tended to put all our efforts into the stunts, and after a while this became predictable and repetitious. Repetition is deadly to the rebel impulse, and modern day anti-corporate globalists are already getting repetitious — the same puppets, the same kind of disruption … beware!

And I agree it’s very important to say we’re not against globalism. I’m for a popular participatory and democratic globalism — maybe a soulfully socialistic globalism and not the top-down corporate variety.

I also worry about the rampant technophobia. The yippies used to say, “Let the machines do it” in advocating post-scarcity anarchy and an end to wage slavery. Most of today’s young anarchists are saying, “Don’t let the machines do it.” It’s pretty much their central tenet. Ted Kaczynski is even something of a hero.

Technophobia is the movement’s new brain disease. How many people want to sit around in Barney Rubble’s cave?

So how do you make political change in fragmented times? You mention the idea of a soulful socialism. These days, I’m just as interested in the Libertarians and civil-liberties-positive Democratic centrists as I am in the left. What was glorious about the early yippie idea was that it was refreshingly contemporary, more McLuhan than Marx. America was just beginning a transition from industrialism to the media communications era, and we needed, and still need, a liberating politics appropriate to that situation. I think we’re still working on it. And ideologies and philosophies of the past — from socialism to libertarianism and even to anarchism — are worth sampling from, but only in the service of a truly novel mix. I think Abbie got that way back in 1967-68, and then maybe lost it.

And I’m as interested in the apolitical people as the activists. American culture is radically anti-authoritarian — it’s vulgar, sexy and wild. People don’t know how to politically defend their enjoyment of hip-hop, porn, marijuana and “South Park,” but they vote against Joe Lieberman and William Bennett every night with their remotes and their credit cards.

A couple of weeks back I spoke at a benefit showing [for the American Civil Liberties Union] of “Steal This Movie” in Missoula, Mont. Maybe 600 showed up for the event. Afterward I went for a drink, and a bunch of very friendly people came with me. We introduced ourselves, and lo and behold three of them were National Rifle Association [types]. They actually came to see a film about Abbie Hoffman and were in a good enough mood to stick around and have a drink or two with me afterward. It does set one to thinking.

Indeed, at a time when Arianna Huffington is the most yippie-esque figure in the political landscape, reality is truly up for grabs.

So what about the Abbie strategy updated to more sophisticated times? Abbie wanted to politicize the hippies. Let’s take a much more pervasive irreverence that now infuses the entire culture and use it in a broad, anti-authoritarian movement. And if you really take on authoritarianism, you wind up taking on excesses in corporate power, as well as the state. In fact, people are already more concerned with privacy issues related to big business than they are with civil liberties.

How do you organize people when they are so fragmented in their causes and desires? What are the common values that bring people out into the streets — face to face with meaner-than-ever cops? Underneath all the differences, I think, they are all seeking a new community — a community of support, protest and rebellion. We need to start having common events that celebrate these values. In 1969, People’s Park was fantastic because it demonstrated and celebrated the value of community labor in a common cause: hundreds of people, hippies to fraternity boys, working together to create a park for the people. We need events like that today — where everybody can grab a shovel and dig in. What would be the People’s Park of today?

We all hate greed. Let’s have a large communal event that celebrates the value of sharing — a “share-in,” maybe a massive free flea market — and get some famous rich people to give something of theirs away. And everyone rich and poor will be giving stuff away, and getting things they need. Do it big! Maybe in a place famous for greed, like Rodeo Drive. And get worldwide media attention.

One place where that spirit of “free” sharing still has a foothold is on the Net. The open-source movement behind Linux, and the whole Napster — and more consciously, Gnutella — technology, form a kind of virtual community based on sharing, and there are deep countercultural roots particularly within the Linux community.

The post-scarcity anarchism that inspired the early yippie idea was premature. It’s now implicit and imminent in the economics of the Information Age and, ultimately, in biotechnology and nanotechnology. When you start dealing with self-replicating production systems, the laws of supply and demand are essentially made obsolete. It’s been said repeatedly, but the basic law of information bears repeating, since its relevance only increases over time: If I give you a physical object, I no longer have it. But if I give you a piece of information, I still have it. And you can pass it around on through infinity, and I will still have that piece of information.

Now that the globe is networked and media digitized, I can post a piece of media, and in an instant everybody has access to it. With nanotechnology, it will likely become possible that I could share the codes that will self-build a physical piece of wealth, just as we now share information and media. So nanotechnology takes the economics of information into the world of real physical wealth, maybe in our lifetime.

We can argue about how to protect and inspire artists, inventors and investors in the present. But the thing that nobody is dealing with is how the whole Napster situation might be modeling a post-scarcity economy for a near future where getting paid simply doesn’t matter that much — a gift economy. Abbie would have loved that.

Tuesday, Feb 15, 2000 5:00 PM UTC

Gore's hay day

The leader of the classic hippie-haven the Farm is running for president just like his old friend Al Gore -- whom he's not so happy with these days.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

In the late 1960s, Stephen Gaskin made a name for himself teaching a weekly class on the meaning of the psychedelic experience in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District. At the start of the 70s, he led a hippie exodus to Tennessee, where he created “The Farm,” just about the only successful hippie commune still standing. He’s written several books about pot and psychedelia, including the “Amazing Dope Tales.”

He says he also had a friendly and mutually supportive relationship with a fellow Tennesseean named Al Gore. (Gore could not be reached for comment on the extent of his friendship with Gaskin.)

Now, Gaskin is seeking the Green Party’s nomination as its presidential candidate. So far, he’s entered that party’s primaries in New York and New Mexico and has formed Georgians for Gaskin. He claims that while “a lot of Greens are just going to go for [Ralph Nader] automatically, there is also a bunch who are ready for me to challenge.” Given the recent claims of former friend John Warnecke that Gore was an epic stoner in the early 1970s (which Gore denies), could Gaskin’s candidacy provoke a media critical mass, forcing Gore to confront his past as a countercultural dilettante?

Gaskin laughs at the suggestion, but then Gaskin laughs every few minutes anyway over our breakfast at the Fairmount Hotel, during his recent visit to San Francisco. It’s the deep laugh of a man who has made his peace with the marijuana gods pretty much on a daily basis for more than three decades running. But Gaskin’s turning on isn’t about self-indulgence. He brings an impressive record of public service to the table that includes his work as founder of Plenty International, an overseas relief and development company that helped rebuild 1,200 houses in Guatemala and clinics in Lesotho and southern Mexico. His Jefferson Award-winning South Bronx Ambulance project in New York City adapted the police slogan, “If you’re in trouble, try calling a hippie,” and stripped it of its ironic intent.

The man even did his time in the military. He’s folksy, plain-spoken and fearless — the kind of guy who can sit down with his redneck neighbors and tell ‘em just why he’s against guns, and for gays and feminists, and walk away unscarred. “I get along with my gun-loving neighbors. At first, they thought we didn’t have guns ’cause we were cowards. And then they found out that we didn’t have guns ’cause we was courageous and they respected that.”

Given half a chance, these qualities could allow him to find a constituency out there in the Heartland. Still, Gaskin recognizes that it’s the Gore connection, and not his down-home honesty or his seven-point program that’s likely to get the media attention needed to launch his campaign. He’s willing to play along, but only to a degree.

It’s an article of hippie faith that Al Gore used to hang out at “The Farm” and smoke pot. Will you comment on that?

Well, he came around a bit, first as a reporter for the Tennessean. He did a story on us in ’72. It was very fair and positive. And we stayed friends. He was supportive of my wife, Ina May’s work as a midwife. Tipper read all our books. As far as dope, I can honestly say I never toked up with Al. I don’t know if that was his fault or mine. I’m glad though. I’d rather rag on him for being a Republicrat who can’t say “non-profit health insurance” to save his life.

Have you been following the John Warnecke claims about Gore’s prodigious dope smoking in the ’70s? Is it your impression that it’s accurate?

I am not in a position to give evidence and I will not do hearsay, but I believe Warnecke’s story.

When you first met Gore, did you think he was really straight and stiff, like his current public image?

No, not that straight. I mean, he was a reporter. He wasn’t a hippie. But from the first time I met him, I was really impressed. Without any prompting from me, he said, “What you people are trying to do here is get to the clear state.” So he was hip on that level. And Tipper was about halfway into the local rock ‘n’ roll community. She was fond of the Farm Band.

Would you say that you were close friends?

We’d see them once in awhile. We’d go to some of his speaking gigs. We really liked him. And when he was going to run for Congress, our attitude was “Hey, cool. We’ll have a friend in Congress.” We liked him as a congressman and we liked him as a senator. I watched him closely in the Senate. He’s a really good student. He studied arms control and helped write the SALT treaty. Paul Nitze said, “Al knows that stuff better than Sam Nunn does.

And then once the treaty was done, he dropped all that stuff like a hot rocket and turned right to the environment. Our lawyer on the Farm, Albert Bates, had written a book on the environment called Climate In Crisis. And he got Al Gore to write an introduction to his book. Al’s smart, and he was right there with us on a lot of issues.

That’s all his good stuff. The other stuff is watching him make the compromises he had to make to stay in the game. If someone getting into politics wants to be president, they can’t put any barriers between them and that thing they want. So if you want to be governor, you can’t really say that you’re against capital punishment if the state has that law already. People will get worried because you take an oath to uphold the laws. He got where he started making the compromises to stay in the game. And I held those compromises as IOU’s that I could cash in later. (He laughs.) But he put himself over his credit limit with me when he cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the Gulf War. One of the consequences from that gesture, as far as I am concerned, is the 50,000 babies who died from bombing the Baghdad water supply, which I believe is a war crime, by the Geneva Convention. And all we did was make Kuwait safe for feudalism.

Are you able to talk to him still?

Not since the inauguration in ’92.

Do you consider Gore a hypocrite on marijuana policy? Is that motivating your candidacy?

I am angry with him for being a hypocrite about pot, but breaking the tie to get us in the Gulf War was worse. I understood that he couldn’t start off saying, “I’m gonna legalize it” before he starts to run. Although, that’s what I’m going to try to do. But he called it a “false experience.” What does that mean? Obviously, he’s afraid of the religious right. He’s even refused to comment on Kansas or evolution. “Senator Science” didn’t rise up to defend evolution.

So he talks up the “War on Drugs.” He acts like he’s completely against getting high. And he knows, and Bill knows, and Susan Molinari knows, and all those guys know just as well as you and I do that it doesn’t make you unfit for public office. And in the context of drugs, it’s not a very big deal. Right? You’re lucky if you find anything that is a big deal. You search to find something.

But he’s running from the religious right. He’s not gonna cross them. He’s running as a Christian. But he’s a little vulnerable in the sense that he’s pretty serious about Buddhism. He’s read all the books. I’ve had a couple of deep conversations with him. He really knows that stuff. Now he likes to say, “I’m a man of family and faith.” It’s a way of saying it so that nobody knows that any of his faith is anything different than what theirs might be.

Continue Reading Close
Thursday, Dec 10, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

What does technology want?

What does technology want? By R.U. Sirius. Kevin Kelly talks about his 'New Rules for the New Economy' -- and why managing technology is like raising kids.

By
  • more

    • All Share Services

Harking at least back to his days as editor of the Whole Earth Review, Kevin Kelly has had a fascination with how human technologies and organizations function in a biological manner. His seminal 1995 book, “Out Of Control,” was a fascinating exploration of this terrain. Since Kelly is also the founding and ongoing executive editor of Wired, response to “Out of Control” quickly turned political: Critics, connecting the book with the libertarian tendencies they found in the magazine, read it as advocating a kind of mercilessly Darwinian free enterprise.

Kelly’s latest book, “New Rules for the New Economy” (Viking Penguin, 164 pages), will only serve to bolster that perception. Formatted as a business advice manual along the lines of Tom Peters’ “Thriving on Chaos,” “New Rules” doesn’t stop to shed a tear for those left behind as it excitedly delineates the shift from old industrial rules to a dangerous world of “constant flux” and networked, process-oriented business activity — a marketplace that is truly out of control.

The book, which developed out of a Wired article, propounds a kind of businessperson’s anarchism, with rules like “Follow The Free,” “Let Go at the Top” and “No Harmony, All Flux” — and recommendations like intentionally disrupting smooth operations to get innovation, giving away free product and decentralizing control. But while the reader of “New Rules” has to presume that Kelly is advocating this “new economy” as a sort of ideal, his stance emerges a little differently in this interview with Salon.

While I wouldn’t take issue with most of your points in “New Rules” about the ways network capitalism functions, I question whether this is a new economy, or simply a mutation of the same old one. The same technologies in a different political, historic and economic situation would have some similar impacts, but some different ones. You imply that a certain biological inevitability has taken us to this point. Aren’t these “rules” largely an accident of history and the psychology of consumer capitalism that’s been passed down to us from the Industrial Age?

I certainly agree that our heavily “businessized” society is a product of contingency. And yes, if history had played out differently, our culture would be different. Technology and values are in a push-pull dance, one shaping the other. Where I diverge from the obvious is my assertion that at this moment in time, our values worldwide are so fragmented, pluralistic and shriveled that they’re overwhelmed by global technology — and that technology, therefore, is the most powerful force of change in our culture. It certainly doesn’t have to be this way; indeed I would rather it not. But I don’t see any evidence to the contrary — other than some decent folk wishing it were otherwise. So I feel very safe in saying that for the horizon of my book — 30 years or so into the future — technology will shape our economy.

You’re taking a surprisingly critical view of the “shriveled” culture you’re pitching to. You did include a critique at the very end of the book, giving it basically three paragraphs. It’s like 140 pages of exhilaration, and then a little pin-prick of deflation. Would you agree with Arthur Kroker that digital culture is bipolar, constantly mood-swinging between exhilaration and exhaustion, “wired” and “tired”?

Yes, I think it does oscillate wildly. My own observation is that we have a love-hate relationship with technology, just as we have with nature. In one breath we bow down before the natural world for its beauty, power and sustenance, for without an untainted natural world we’re dead. But in the next breath we erect walls, sterile barriers, vaccines, and hack living things back so they won’t conquer us.

It’s clear life would overrun us quickly if we didn’t push back. As technology accrues some of the power and complexity of life, we are beginning to treat it with the same two minds: We’re intoxicated by technology’s emerging beauty, power and ability to feed our creativity, but in the next moment, it’s obvious that unless we hack technology back it will overtake us. I actually share these two minds.

But of the two perspectives, I find the latter more fascinating because of our ignorance. We already know what pushing technology back is like because we’d done little else for hundreds of years. But we have no serious inkling of what technology wants. As technology becomes more animated and autonomous, I think we should be asking ourselves where it wants to go, what its biases are and how far it can govern itself. We need to know this at the very least in order to push back expertly and with appropriate force — otherwise we push in blindness.

Both “Out of Control” and “New Rules” are explorations of the internal dynamics of technological systems to see what kind of worlds they create on their own. I am inclined to give them some room and see what it is that they can do, even with the knowledge that we can’t easily undo them. It’s sort of like raising kids.

You just said, “We already know what pushing technology back is like.” What’s the evidence for that? It seems to me that both industrialism and the Information Age have been pretty much pedal to the metal.

Sure, economic and technological development has been full steam ahead for a century or longer, but two things are different now. One is that, previously, the presence of technology in our awareness was tiny and could be manipulated. Alan Kay defines technology as anything that was invented after you were born. For most people, for most of the time previous, there was little technology in their lives, little that had been invented after they were born. It wasn’t until this last generation where we saw technology (new ideas made concrete) saturate our lives.

And secondly, the penetration rates of technology earlier were glacial. It took almost 100 years for the invention of the telephone to reach the penetration that cable TV reached in 25 years. So, people’s lives pushed it away more then. Now we are speeding acceptance up by beginning to push back less.

Earlier, technology was marginal as a cultural engine. It could be easily pushed around. There was much more of a social habit of saying “no” to new things, or at least “wait.” And what was being questioned was pretty solitary and inert; it could be easily cowed. The kind of technologies we’re making now — networked technologies — are far more robust, far more dynamic, far more insidious, far more self-sufficient, far more pervasive and far more likely to exert their own dynamics on the situation. So refusing them in the same way won’t work.

Can the surface of this planet — and our small, soft, easily distressed bodies — survive allowing technology to run its course?

Technologies are extensions of our soft, easily distressed bodies. Can the biological planet survive us and our extensions? Absolutely. Network technology eases the pain on the earth. I know this statement is controversial, and I’m reluctant to introduce it without discussion, but discussion of this requires far too much complexity and room than what we can go into here. Indeed, it is worthy of a book. But it wasn’t the topic of this book. What this book is about is how technology is shaping our economy. More than anything else, pervasive networking technology (which does more with less material) is determining how money flows and wealth is created. If one can understand the logic of networks, one will have a good grasp of how the network economy works.

Must networked technological evolution lead to a culture of connections and relationships that reduce the participants to consumers and “prosumers” (consumers who participate in the production process) defined by their preferences and credit ratings. Or could you be viewing the digital world through a backwards telescope, missing a much wilder (and more popular) party in which commerce occupies a much smaller attention space?

Is it possible that I’m overemphasizing the role of commerce in people’s lives, or their future lives? I don’t think so. The really big story of the last two decades has been how economic values have penetrated all aspects of our lives; how money has almost replaced sex; how even the poorest are caught up in the language of riches. And I don’t see this suddenly terminating. Rather it seems to me that this economic obsession has not yet peaked, to put it mildly.

Although I can imagine alternatives, I was around too many hippie communes to believe that this economic fixation can be put aside quickly. Would it be a wilder party if we were not so addicted to this money rush? Probably. Do I see it happening? No.

What I am trying to say in my book is, here is the kind of technology we are now in the process of inserting into every village on earth. Let’s ask what kind of an economy it — the technology — is biased toward. And my answer is: one that ends up building on relationships, trust and human attention — but with a very commercial orientation. Is it possible to make it all that but minus the commercialism? I’d say it was possible, but highly unlikely, judging on how people behave around the world.

With all this talk of new economic strategy, didn’t Wired, the magazine, finally succeed by using the industrial model — tightening the focus and cutting its fringe projects loose to drift off on their own?

Did Wired use the new rules of the new economy? Yes and no. Magazines in general obey many of the new rules because they operate on the postal network. Anyone can send anyone else in the world a message or thing, without permission, without going through a centralized hub, without a lot of capital. It makes starting a zine pretty easy. This has made magazines very decentralized and Internet-like.

We see all the kinds of net effects from magazines that we will with online stuff. Lots of niches, increasing returns and “follow the free.” Most magazines “give away” their issues. Sometimes, as in controlled circulation magazines, they actually give them away, and other times they behave as if they are giving them away — the cost of printing and distributing copies is not covered by the price subscribers pay. So Wired, like most magazines, “gave away” its issues and made its money on advertising.

We were among the first magazines to put author e-mail addresses on articles. This we did deliberately to promote peer-to-peer communication, another rule I discuss in the book. Why should readers have to write to the magazine if they wanted to reach the author, and have their correspondence intercepted by the editors, rather than write the author directly? We also pioneered online subscriptions (as did a few other magazines). Here I felt we never went far enough.

I tried unsuccessfully from Day 1 to have Wired adopt the policy that the magazine should be like an ISP service: We should only accept subscriptions with credit cards, and we should send subscribers the magazine until they tell us not to (this is now the way Europeans subscribe), and subscribers should start and maintain their own subs — changing their address themselves when they moved. This would eliminate the bane of magazines, that endless pathetic wasteful parade of junk mail renewal notices. But here I failed to make a dent, and Wired ran a very old-economy, direct-mail model.

We also set up our expansions in a very decentralized, network way. We didn’t want to be a large vertical organization, so a new project was organized as essentially a separate company. We thought a company should not be larger than about 100 people, and our goal was to spin off projects as separate and sometimes competing companies as they grew beyond 100 people, just to keep things nimble and fast. This is what we did with Hardwired books and what is now called Wired Digital. There were some new economy inefficiencies, as I preach — we did overlapping work, there were redundancies, we competed against each other. But it worked.

The larger Wired holding company was broken up recently not because this decentralization wasn’t working, but [because of] very complex and horribly disastrous board infighting between the founders and the venture capitalists. That part was certainly very old economy.

We have a very generous “work wherever/whenever you can” philosophy, which I think works. In the end, I’d give Wired passing marks, but not a stellar grade for playing by the new rules. It is important to note that I wrote the book, and not Wired — and that while I had some influence on Wired, I wasn’t running the company.

Continue Reading Close

Recommendations