Posts Tagged ‘BBS’
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star”*…
Last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author John Markoff was asked to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on the heels of the murder in San Francisco of tech exec Bob Lee. The paper rejected his piece, leaving Markoff to “suspect that they were looking for more of a ‘drugs, sex and rock & roll’ analysis, which isn’t what they got. My 2005 book What the Dormouse Said is occasionally cited by people making the argument that there is some kind of causal relationship between psychedelic drugs and creativity. I have never believed that to be the case and I’ve always been more interested in sociological than psychological assessments of psychedelics.”
Happily for us, he has shared it on Medium…
The head-spinning speed with which the murder of software creator Bob Lee went from being a story about rampant crime in San Francisco to a sex and drugs tale of Silicon Valley excess says a great deal about the way the world now perceives the nation’s technology heartland.
Lee, who had gone from being a Google software engineer to become the creator of the mobile finance program Cash App, and who had more recently became the chief product officer for a crypto-currency company, is now alleged to have been stabbed to death by the brother of a wealthy socialite with whom Lee is thought to have had an affair.
On the surface it would seem to evoke something more out of a Hollywood soap opera than the world’s technology center. But the Valley is more complex than cases like Bob Lee, or dark takes on the evils of technology, suggest.
Silicon Valley has always been built around a paradox represented by the built-in tension between the open-source spirit of a hacker counterculture and the naked capitalist ambitions of Sand Hill Road, where the offices of its venture capitalists are concentrated.
Stewart Brand, who authored the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park, Ca., at the same moment the high-tech region was forming in the 1960s, expressed the paradox most clearly at the first meeting of the Hackers Conference in 1984. In responding to Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder, who was describing the danger of technology companies hoarding information, what the audience heard Brand say, was “information wants to be free.” Indeed, a decade later that became the rallying cry of the dot-com era, a period in which technology start-ups thrived on disrupting traditional commerce and railing against regulation.
But that is not what Brand said. He actually stated: “Information sort of wants to be expensive because its so valuable, the right information at the right point changes your life. On the other hand information almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.”
Brand had been influenced by social scientist Gregory Bateson who proposed the idea of “the double bind” to describe situations in which even when you win, you lose. Understanding that paradox, which was lost in translation, might have saved the Valley from some of the excess that has taken it into the dark territory it has found itself in recently.
From its inception, the very nature of Silicon Valley was about its ability to simultaneously allow diverse cultures to thrive. During the 1960s and 1970s, while Silicon Valley was being formed, you could easily drive from Walker’s Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, where crewcut hard-drinking computer chip designers gathered, to a very different long-haired scene in just up the road in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which surrounded Stanford Research Institute, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the three labs that pioneered the technologies that would become the modern personal computer and the Internet.
The paradox is perhaps best expressed in the formation of Apple Computer — a company that grew out of the separate interests of its two founders. One, Steve Wozniak was simply interested in building a computer to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group founded by a convicted draft resister and a software engineer that would ultimately birth several dozen start-up PC hardware and software companies including Apple. Wozniak would combine his hacker’s instincts for sharing with Steve Jobs, who had the insight to realize that there would be a market for these machines…
…
… Silicon Valley engineers believed they were just one good idea away from becoming the next Jobs or Wozniak.
That deeply entrenched culture of risk-taking — and frequent failure — originally exemplified by the Gold Rush, today remains an integral part of the California and by extension Silicon Valley, Dream.
In recent weeks, much has been made of Lee’s partying life style, which included claims of recreational drug use and attendance at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, which began on a San Francisco Beach and is based on various anti-capitalist principles such as gifting, decommodification and radical inclusion. The festival, which grew out of the counterculture, has come to embrace a very different technology culture where attendees including Google founders, Sergay Brin and Larry Page and former CEO Eric Schmitt as well as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg often arrive by corporate jet. Certainly! Here’s an alternative rewrite for clarity: It has gained a reputation for surpassing the confines of a traditional California scene by integrating technology, art, drugs, and rock & roll, creating a unique and boundary-pushing experience.
Experimentation with psychedelic drugs has been a continuous theme for a subculture in Silicon Valley, going back to the 1960s when group that included engineers from Ampex and Stanford, created a research project to explore the relationship between LSD and creativity.
Yet despite this fascination originally with psychedelics and more recently in the idea of “microdosing” small amounts of LSD, the science has never been clear…
It is more likely that an alternative proposed by a group of social scientists at the Santa Fe Institute offers a more cogent explanation. Creativity, they argued, takes place at the edge of chaos. And that certainly describes the early Silicon Valley which emerged in the midst of a tumultuous time on the San Francisco mid-peninsula during the Sixties…
Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
###
As we cultivate creative contradictions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup computer bulletin board system, or BBS– the foundation of what would eventually become the world wide web, countless online messaging systems, and, arguably, Twitter.
It was several decades before the hardware or the network caught up to Christensen and Suess’ imaginations, but all the basic seeds of today’s online communities were in place when the two launched the first bulletin board…
“Bulletin Board Goes Electronic“
“The idea of a ‘virtual reality’ such as the Metaverse is by now widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a number of different ways”*…
Technology frequently produces surprises that nobody predicts. However, the biggest developments are often anticipated decades in advance. In 1945 Vannevar Bush described what he-called the “Memex”, a single device that would store all books, records and communications, and mechanically link them together by association. This concept was then used to formulate the idea of “hypertext” (a term coined two decades later), which in turn guided the development of the World Wide Web (developed another two decades later). The “Streaming Wars” have only just begun, yet the first streaming video took place more than 25 years ago. What’s more, many of the attributes of this so-called war have been hypothesized for decades, such as virtually infinite supplies of content, on-demand playback, interactivity, dynamic and personalized ads, and the value of converging content with distribution.
In this sense, the rough outlines of future solutions are often understood and, in a sense, agreed upon well in advance of the technical capacity to produce them. Still, it’s often impossible to predict how they’ll fall into place, which features matter more or less, what sort of governance models or competitive dynamics will drive them, or what new experiences will be produced…
Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of those in the technology community have imagined a future state of, if not quasi-successor to, the Internet – called the “Metaverse”. And it would revolutionize not just the infrastructure layer of the digital world, but also much of the physical one, as well as all the services and platforms atop them, how they work, and what they sell. Although the full vision for the Metaverse remains hard to define, seemingly fantastical, and decades away, the pieces have started to feel very real. And as always with this sort of change, its arc is as long and unpredictable as its end state is lucrative.
To this end, the Metaverse has become the newest macro-goal for many of the world’s tech giants…
Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew) peers ahead: “The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite.”
[image above: source]
* “The idea of a ‘virtual reality’ such as the Metaverse is by now widespread in the computer-graphics community and is being implemented in a number of different ways. The particular vision of the Metaverse as expressed in this novel originated from idle discussion between me and Jaime (Captain Bandwidth) Taaffe — which does not imply that blame for any of the unrealistic or tawdry aspects of the Metaverse should be placed on anyone but me. The words ‘avatar’ (in the sense used here) and ‘Metaverse’ are my inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as ‘virtual reality’) were simply too awkward to use. […] after the first publication of Snow Crash, I learned that the term ‘avatar’ has actually been in use for a number of years as part of a virtual reality system called ‘Habitat’ […] in addition to avatars, Habitat includes many of the basic features of the Metaverse as described in this book”… – Neal Stephenson, Author’s acknowledgments, Snow Crash, Bantam, 2003 (reissue)
###
As we visualize the virtual, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that the first computer bulletin board system went on-line. Created in Chicago by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) had been built in 30 days.
You must be logged in to post a comment.