Dawn of the new everythi.., p.26
Dawn of the New Everything, page 26
Ricochet la Femme
Guess who was living in the Mondo house? The woman I met back in Cambridge, who I told you I would marry.
Only a few years after our first meeting at MIT, I had become well known. I was the answer to Jeopardy questions on TV and appeared on magazine covers. Suddenly in the game.
She whispered, “You will bring about a revolution in the story of mankind. You will change communication, love, and art. I will be at your side.”
We got married. Probably the worst mistake of my life.
I have special trouble reconstructing dialogue with her because I just wince too much. What was I doing?
There’s a stratum of self-important men and women who make each other feel like the importance is a real thing. When I became famous, in the late 1980s in Silicon Valley, I saw and felt what the maelstrom of sex and power is like; a hidden world of titans jousting, whales and giant squid. Young women would spend hours prettying themselves up to make powerful men feel mythic, generally in exchange for crumbs.
Later on I got to know a few women who played this game, this time as a friend instead of a combatant. They were often accomplished, perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, but even so, they sometimes found the gravity of ancient clichés to be inescapable. One I knew clung to a certain Donald Trump for a while. “He makes me feel safe, like he will protect me.” He treated her terribly and dumped her crudely.
But this is about my life, and the truth is that I had moments later in the 1980s when I got pretty full of myself. I was asking for it.
The feeling of combining romance with self-importance is so powerful that it realigns reality, even in the perception of people around you. Like Steve Jobs’s famous “reality distortion field.”
This wasn’t lust, exactly, but something more powerful; a deep human business, ancient, like discovering a hidden sexual organ that communicates with the great men of history and brings you into their immortal communion. Inner demons of vanity congeal into a seductive monster that envelops you and intones, “The great scientists and conquerors, the ones we remember, you will join their ranks.”
It’s so dumb that I can hardly stand to talk about it, but I hope that pointing to a giant sinkhole might just break the spell for someone else. I wonder what could have broken the spell for me at the time.
I lived with her in the Mondo house for a while. She got into a gargantuan tiff with one of the prima Mondo editors, Queen Mu, who took up most of the refrigerator with samples of what she said was tarantula venom. I can’t remember what that substance was supposed to do to you. Said my wife, “If women ran the world, there would be a lot fewer wars, but many more poisonings.”
We moved out to a nearby faux Greek Temple, garlanded, resplendent, that had been built by Isadora Duncan’s circle.6 Those days were like living in a Maxfield Parrish7 painting. A pageant of variegated exotica. Then we lived briefly in a dramatic, expensive house overlooking San Francisco; a movie scene, a shrine to significance.
She wanted to get married, but she talked about it as though it was a prize, a touchdown, a royal flush. I don’t think of her in retrospect as an antagonist, but more as a victim who fell into a deep trough carved out by trauma and tradition. A comically exaggerated gold digger personality, an archetype from central casting, emerged in her; a mirror image, I suppose, of the stupid vanity monster that emerged in me. Her demons dragged my demons to the courthouse one day, and while it might have looked like happiness, I actually wept in shame and fury throughout the ceremony. Both she and I had lost battles with horrid, inherited pseudodesires, not really our own.
Was the marriage entirely bullshit? Not quite.
Limerence can exist apart from lust. It can be made of narcissism, ambition, phantom limbs of childhood unlived. The texture of life became so intense; saturated colors, fragrances so sweet as to knock you out. I remember those feelings like a theory now, a structure, a placeholder for luminous curiosities that will never return.
What was most remarkable about my weird little first marriage was that by going through the experience of self-immolating infatuation without really being attracted to the person in question, I felt a pure form. To put it in nerd terms, I felt the exposed power of romance as if it were computation, the genetic engineering that formed us and creates the future of life. Limerence might be a transient vapor, but there is something there: an entanglement with life writ large, the billions of years of it, the great structure in which you are a tiny bud, or the makings of mulch for the next bud.
But every little bud really does steer the billion-year blossoming a little. Romance might make us into helpless fools, but we are also creating; we are artists of the universe. I felt that. Maybe the whole horrible experience was worth it.
Dark Lineage
There was a fresh literary scene related to VR in the 1980s called cyberpunk. It was, in my view, a continuation of E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” Dark stuff, usually; cautionary tales.
Characters typically manipulated and deceived one another, or wallowed in existential malaise. Vernor Vinge wrote a novel called True Names and a little later came Neuromancer by William Gibson.
I adored Neuromancer, but I had the ridiculous idea that I was called upon to brighten the cyberpunk movement. It’ll be a murky mess, trying to reconstruct old dialogue between me and Bill, but here goes:
“It’ll attract people even though it ought to repel them,” I’d say. Bill was game to talk about it. He still sounded like he was from Tennessee. Canada would eventually smooth out his accent a bit.
“It’s not like you calculate a book, Jaron. It comes out. When I was a kid, I was blown away by Naked Lunch, and I try to imagine a kid reading Neuromancer and being blown away.”
“Neuromancer is definitely blowing away young versions of you, no question. But couldn’t you try to come up with a more positive future, something to aspire to, since what you’re doing is making all this stuff seductive, but it’s a bummer?”
“I could try, Jaron, but this is what comes out.”
“I just worry that darkness never seems to serve as a warning when it comes to computer stuff in science fiction. The dark stuff just comes off as cool and people want it.”
“My job isn’t to fix humanity. You can give it a try; you’re actually building things.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“If I had it to do over again, I’d probably try; to have a VR startup instead of writing novels.”
“You’re welcome to come and work.”
“Um…”
At the time I had no idea how hard it was to write a passable book, much less a good one. I wish I’d let Bill alone.
Other great cyberpunk writers appeared. Bruce Sterling came across like a young Hemingway with a Texas drawl. Neil Stephenson was our Apollonian scholar.
If you pay attention, you’ll find cameos of me in early cyberpunk novels. My head might float by.
Flattering Mirror
Fiction about VR has mostly been quite dark ever since cyberpunk. The Matrix movies; Inception. Meanwhile, norms for tech journalism became hell-bent on positivity.
VR engaged a new generation of journalists, like Steven Levy, Howard Rheingold, Luc Sante, and Mondo 2000’s Ken Goffman, aka R. U. Sirius. I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow.
Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired.
Kevin thinks that objects we perceive to exist in software really exist. I do not. He believes in AI, and that a noosphere not only exists, but might have gained a kind of self-determination now that computers are networked. I do not. Kevin thinks technology is a superbeing that wants things. He perceives grace in that superbeing. I was delighted to provide a blurb for his book What Technology Wants, stating that it was the best presentation of a philosophy I didn’t share.
Kevin remembers that we all came upon our ideas just now, let’s say three minutes ago. We shouldn’t treat our ideas about computation as hallowed. He has a sense of humor and an open mind.
John Perry Barlow claims to have a perfect memory of meeting me at a hacker retreat, but I can prove I wasn’t there. It’s weird, because he’s supposed to be the one with crystal-clear memory of everything, and I’m supposed to be the one living in a fog.
Barlow and I got close fast; we have a lot in common. He had been a rancher in Wyoming and found fancy city life to be as much of a put-on as I did. We loved reading and writing, which was more of a novelty than it should have been in the tech scene. Barlow worked in the music business, so we had friends in common from that world.
He was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which was more than a band in those days. It was a lifestyle for its fans. So Barlow was revered and lived an elevated life.
We had different approaches to socializing. Barlow lived as if he was always on camera; always holding court in one way or another, always careful to make each utterance memorable. A ladies’ man, always strategizing.8
I refused to participate in Barlow’s scenes. I’d only see him one-on-one or with another person or two who were true friends and not hangers-on. With those ground rules in place, Barlow and I grew close, and I came to love the guy.
Barlow initially wrote about VR as a gonzo journalist. It was fun. Later, he entered into a magnifying resonance with ideologues for one of the putative digital utopias.
That development was difficult for me.
Virtual reality had been dubbed cyberspace in Neuromancer; remember, the rule was that everyone had to come up with their own term for it.
Barlow took Bill Gibson’s term and recast it as the name for what he perceived to be the reality of bits.
Later, in the mid-nineties, Barlow would pen a declaration of independence for cyberspace. It was to be a new Wild West, but infinite, and forever beyond the reach of governments, a libertarian paradise.
I thought Barlow’s redefining of cyberspace was a mistake, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. There was plenty of room for all our ideas. I didn’t want to reenact the “splitism” about ideas that made Marxists ridiculous. But Barlow was an organizer. He eventually put me in a position where I had to choose.
19. How We Settled into a Seed for the Future
Virtual Rights, but Not Virtual Economic Rights
In 1990, I was invited to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District to consider cofounding a new organization to fight for cyber rights. Chuck, VPL’s prime hacker, and I went up and met Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and Barlow. The three of them eventually moved forward, founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But I held back. (Chuck was too busy coding to pay any of us much mind.)
I didn’t say why at the time; wasn’t ready to state my doubts to these sweet friends. I support most of the cases the EFF takes on, but not the underlying philosophy.
The EFF was to support “privacy,” such as the right to use secure encryption, but not the ability to prevent others from copying one’s information if it can be gotten at all.
The early example was music. The new utopia was to be one in which music that had previously only been legally copied with the payment of a royalty would now be copied “for free.”
I felt that you can’t have privacy without also forging a new form of private property in the information space. That’s what private property is for.
There has to be space around a person for a person to be a person. If everything you share at all is suddenly commoditized by whoever has the biggest, baddest network computer, then you’re doomed to be a spied-upon information serf. The promotion of abstract rights without economic rights would be nothing but a cruel trick we’d play on those who would be left behind.
I argued that making music “free” would just result in no one being able to make a living when automation would eventually advance. If the only value left is information (once robots come to be perceived as doing all the work) and information is to be “free,” then ordinary people will become valueless, from an economic point of view.
Of course, that perception of robots doing work would be a lie, because robots don’t actually do anything on their own, or even exist apart from people. My sensibility about robots and artificial intelligence is so important to my story that I will convey it in two different ways. Later in this chapter I’ll recall the way I used to argue about the topic, while some of my current thinking appears in appendix 3.
The key point is that digital idealism took a turn for the absurd around 1990. We started to organize our digital systems around bits instead of people, who were the only agents that made bits mean a thing.
The Easy Road to World Domination
An online framework called the World Wide Web appeared in the early 1990s and quickly gained traction. When a design starts to win in a digital network, it tends to keep on winning. Even when the WWW was only a tiny nascent undertaking, it soon became clear that it would swamp us all.
Part of the reason was a lowering of standards, at least from my point of view. The WWW introduced one little change in network design that made it the perfect vehicle for the “cyberspace” way of thinking.
Earlier designs for networked information had required that records of provenance be maintained. Any information accessed online could be traced to its origin. If there was a link between one thing and another thing on a network, the link went both ways. For example, if one person could download a file, the other person, from whom the file was downloaded, could be notified of who was doing the downloading.1 Therefore, everything that was downloaded was contextualized, artists could be paid, scammers could be identified, and so on.
Previous designs were centered on people, not data. There was never a need to copy information because one could always go back to the source, associated with a person. Indeed, copying was considered a crime against efficiency.
Tim Berners-Lee chose to offer a different approach with the World Wide Web, one that was much easier to adopt in the short term, though we’ve paid dearly in the long term. To get started, one simply linked to online information, and the link went in only one direction. No one could tell if information had been copied. Artists wouldn’t be paid. Context would be lost. Scammers could hide.
But Tim’s approach was profoundly easy to get into. With almost no overhead or maintenance or responsibility to anyone else, anyone could post a website, made instantly substantial by assemblages of material from yet other people.
The World Wide Web went viral, to use the contemporary term. That’s not the way we talked at the time. Terms like “viral” and “disruptive” still sounded negative and destructive. We hadn’t yet hypnotized ourselves into Möbius-Orwellian tech talk. Now we describe what we are doing accurately, but we pretend we’re being ironic, so that we can feel better about ourselves. Shall we call it “Notwellian?”
I remember looking at the first Web pages with people at Xerox PARC, and with Ted Nelson. “Unbelievable that someone would launch a design with only one-way links.” That was the universal appraisal; it was cheating. But there was undeniable action there on the nascent Web, more than anywhere else.
We techies collectively acquiesced; we succumbed to the decision to make online networks artificially mysterious by leaving out the reverse links. Maybe we feared that a knowable ’Net would not be commensurate with our capacity for wonder, as it was put long ago, so instead we chose a murky, unknowable ’Net.
By not having two-way links, there was no way to know comprehensively what pointed at what; thus an entirely human-made artifact took on a trackless quality, as if it were a wilderness. The Wild West reborn! But it was only artificially so.
We felt guilty using the Web at first. It must be hard for people who have grown up with the Web to appreciate that feeling.
Much later on, companies like Google and Facebook would make hundreds of billions of dollars for the service of partially mapping what should have been mapped from the start.
This is in no way a criticism of Tim Berners-Lee. I continue to admire and respect him. He didn’t have a plan for world domination; only a plan to support physicists at a lab.
Despite the feeling of guilt, the rise of the Web also felt miraculous. I used to wax rhapsodic about it in my lectures. The first time in history that millions of people had cooperated to do something not because of coercion, profit motive, or any influence other than the sense that the project was worthy. Well, actually in retrospect, there was and remains an excess of vanity as motive, but even so; what a remarkable moment to support a touch of optimism about our species! If we could fill the Web out of thin air, maybe we could solve our big problems.
I still feel that sense of miracle, but what made it float was vacuousness. The long-term price we have paid has been too high.
Microgravity
In the early days of the popularization of the Internet, there was a debate about whether to make online digital experiences seem casual and weightless or whether to make them feel serious, with costs and consequences. For instance, early luminaries including Esther Dyson and Marvin Minsky advocated micropostage for email. If people had to pay for email, even if only a tiny fraction of a penny, big-time spammers would be discouraged. Meanwhile email would be appreciated for what it is, a big human project that costs a lot.
The critics of email postage won that debate. They argued that even the slightest amount of postage would disadvantage people who were too poor even to have a bank account, and they had a point. But beyond that, there was a massive desire to create the illusion of weightlessness on the Internet.
