Turn on, tune in, log on
The PC and the Internet sprang from pot-smoking, acid-dropping California dreamers

Reviewed by Ian Garrick Mason
Sunday, April 24, 2005

What the Dormouse Said
How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
By John Markoff
VIKING; 310 PAGES; $25.95

In the world of high technology, a visionary is a person whose obsessively held hunch happens to come true. For everyone else, fate holds either obscurity, or, for an unlucky few, habitual derision, as with Digital Equipment Corp. founder Ken Olsen, who has been unfairly held up as an example of technological cluelessness ever since he told a convention in 1977 that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”

A similar fate was courted by Xerox Corp. when it elected not to commercialize the Alto, a prototype personal computer invented at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973, almost a decade before companies like Apple, Radio Shack and IBM entered the PC market. In contrast, PARC itself would go down in business history as a nexus of farsighted West Coast researchers who were ignored by their buttoned-down East Coast masters.

John Markoff, a San Francisco technology writer for the New York Times, extends this visionary-centered narrative even deeper into the history of personal computing and the Internet. “What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry” is an enthusiastic argument in favor of the idea that it was the uniquely Californian scene that brought forth the technologies we depend on so much today — that the PC and the Internet sprang as much from a cultural environment of back-to-nature independence, personal freedom and psychedelic drugs as they did from engineering diagrams.

Based on the evidence Markoff presents, there is much to this. The most recent ancestors of modern PCs were the kit-based computers beloved by hobbyists in the mid-1970s (a favorite model was the Altair 8800), and one of the centers of the hobby movement was Menlo Park’s own Homebrew Computer Club, founded in 1975 by peace activist Fred Moore. Homebrewers swapped software and components and advised each other on how to build computers from the ground up — a do-it-yourself ethos with close links both to the Whole Earth Catalog phenomenon and to the ideas of radical educator Ivan Illich, who believed that technology should be limited to the human scale.

Homebrew was in turn an outgrowth of the storefront-based People’s Computer Co. (PCC), which played a vanguard role in selling hands-on computing time and training to anyone who walked in off the street. PCC was one expression of the era’s general reaction against corporate power, which in the world of computing was symbolized by the “glass house”: the room in which the central computer was kept, attended by its priesthood of operators. For frustrated scientists and hackers, the notion of having a computer dedicated to an individual was immensely attractive. As Ted Nelson declared in his influential 1974 manifesto, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” computing should be available to all, “without necessary [sic] complication or human servility being required.”

Surprisingly, many of the basic technologies behind personal computing were products of artificial-intelligence research. Douglas Engelbart, an electrical engineer at Stanford Research Institute, believed that computers should be used to augment a person’s existing powers of reasoning, rather than to replace or supersede them. By focusing on subjects such as knowledge-worker productivity and work-group collaboration, Engelbart’s team invented important tools for interactivity: text editors, cursors and the mouse.

Markoff emphasizes the link between Engelbart’s quest to technologically augment the human mind and another engineer’s attempt to do so pharmacologically. A senior designer at recording equipment manufacturer Ampex, Myron Stolaroff, established the International Foundation for Advanced Study in order to measure the effects of LSD on creativity. Drugs, in fact, are an ever-present backdrop in Markoff’s book: Pot is smoked freely in Engelbart’s lab (causing his researchers increasingly to be seen as “stoned goofballs” by the other scientists at SRI), and brilliant programmers and writers drop acid with near abandon. The author even recounts how Apple founder Steve Jobs once told him that “taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.”

The implication throughout is that drugs were somehow one of the necessary conditions for the development of innovative PC technologies. Yet nowhere is that implication turned into a clear assertion — the closest thing is a comment by highly inventive programmer (and occasional LSD user) Dan Ingalls: “Well, where do you think these ideas came from?!” But Ingalls was joking, and elsewhere there is little evidence that drug use actually improved the ability of researchers to come up with ideas. Engelbart himself took LSD as part of Stolaroff’s program and found its results disappointing. The only product he invented while under its influence was a “tinkle toy,” a floating waterwheel for toilet training that spins when urinated on.

The tendency to make too much of things is a major flaw in Markoff’s book. After conflating today’s trend toward “open source” software with the very different debate over content “sharing” (known by its opponents as intellectual property theft), he reduces both to a black-and-white battle between “information propertarians” and “information libertarians”: “a fault line that today has become the bitterest conflict facing the world’s economy.”

He romanticizes both the era — “how unlike the cynical, selfish nineties” — and his subjects, even to the point of paradox: Researchers at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab “shared a passionate belief in an unbounded future, coupled with a slightly dark and sardonic worldview that only people with a truly deep understanding of the way things work could have. ” And his profiles are so uniformly of the brilliant-misfit-leaves-East-Coast- culture-to-find-freedom-in-San-Francisco kind that after what seems like two dozen such sketches, one dreads meeting a new character.

Ironically, it’s the ever-splintering counterculture that lends some much needed balance to the book. Diligently following each radical thread, Markoff shows how the military funding behind SRI’s computer science programs led increasingly militant protesters to oppose the very research that would ultimately produce the PC.

Yet when one of the labs is occupied by activists, a student saves the mainframe from destruction by convincing his fellows that the machine is “politically neutral.”

Not a visionary statement, perhaps, but a refreshingly grounded one.

Ian Garrick Mason is a Toronto writer and reviewer.

SpaceWar

Schwarzenegger praises Minuteman

Friday, April 29, 2005 Posted: 11:21 AM EDT (1521 GMT)

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who outraged some Mexican-American groups last week by calling for a closed border, praised the civilian volunteer Minuteman Project for its patrols to spot illegal immigrants.

“Look, they’ve cut down the crossing of illegal immigrants by a huge percentage,” Schwarzenegger told KFI-AM’s “The John & Ken Show” on Thursday.

The Republican governor accused the federal government of failing to control the border and said it encouraged illicit crossers by giving them access to water.

“The whole system is set up to really invite people to come in here illegally, and that has to stop,” he said.

The Minuteman Project involves hundreds of volunteers, some armed, who have been patrolling the Mexico-Arizona border since April 1 to document and report illegal crossings.

Chris Simcox, a Minuteman organizer, welcomed Schwarzenegger’s support. “It’s gratifying to see that elected officials are responding to the will of the people,” he said.

There are plans to expand the patrols to California in June, a move Schwarzenegger “does not oppose,” said Margita Thompson, his press secretary.

President Bush has denounced the volunteers as vigilantes.

Nativo V. Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association, called Schwarzenegger’s comments Thursday “nothing short of base racism.”

“Those of immigrant stock should have no illusions about what his real sentiments and feelings are toward them,” he said.

Schwarzenegger’s press secretary called the issue a matter of national security.

“It’s not racist to ask the federal government to enforce its laws,” Thompson said.

Schwarzenegger’s comments came a week after he faced criticism for telling a gathering of newspaper publishers that the United States needed to “close the borders.” He apologized the next day, blaming faulty English and saying he really meant the borders should be secured.

The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, half of whom come from Mexico. California is home to 2.4 million, far more than any other state.

Broke Open
April 06, 2005

I’ve finished book number 13 in my year-long quest to read nearly a book a week. This one, you’ll be pleased to hear, had a profound impact on my perception of self. It’s been a long time, almost 20 years, since I could say that about a book. I’m speaking of Breaking Open The Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into The Heart Of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Oh, great, you think. Now Pollack is going to start babbling about drugs. Exactly. But first, let me praise the book.

The book concerns Daniel Pinchbeck’s “spiritual journey,” his gradual transformation from New York hipster intellectual to transcendent psychedelic guru. Yet somehow it still isn’t annoying. That’s because, much to my great surprise, Breaking Open The Head is a lucid, funny, and deeply weird work of literary journalism, one of the best examples of nonfiction prose that I’ve read in years. It’s as though John McPhee, instead of writing about oranges, decided to drink yage instead. I really believe that, while on a DMT trip, Pinchbeck had an encounter with a white-mohawked lizard being at an intercelestial bar. That’s a sign of gifted writing.

I found the book so convincing, I went on a drug trip myself. A couple of years ago, I ordered some herbs from a website that sells “marijuana alternatives”. One of those herbs was a sizable bag of >salvia divinorum, a visionary plant that Pinchbeck talks about often in his book. I tried salvia once after I bought it, smoking a small bowl at, pathetically, a Flaming Lips show, but no visions emerged. I didn’t even get a headache. This time, I decided, I’d be a little more systematic.

One midnight last week, I took a pinch of salvia from my bag. I rolled it into a ball and stuck it under my tongue. It tasted bitter, but not much worse than, say, collard greens. I gave it a chew, and then placed it under my tongue for another 30 seconds. I repeated this process a few times until I’d created a slightly acrid green brew in my mouth. I sloshed it around, and kept chewing. By degrees, I felt nauseated, but my stomach held. After 20 minutes, I spit the whole megilla into the toilet, put on some trippy music, lay down on my guest bed, and closed my eyes.

Almost immediately, I had visions. Great, thick green vines, ancient beyond measure, stretched out into infinite space. A being that looked like an Aztec God flew above them, spewing fire. I saw my head splitting open. Red goo poured out and melded into what appeared to be the cosmos. I had another vision, of me dancing with my son, that was a bit more pleasant. A large hole opened in the universe. I flew toward it. A beautiful woman in a white robe took my hand and guided me through. I opened my eyes, and the trip was over. Ten minutes had passed. I fell asleep, waking to my wife shaking me and telling me that it was time to go get my cholesterol tested. Cognitive dissonance had triumphed again.

The next night, I repeated the dose, and saw the woman again, but the main result was the sensation that my body was stretching out beyond its boundaries, getting sucked into infinite space. From reading Pinchbeck’s book, this seems like a pretty common starting point for psychedelic exploration. The strange thing is that all other salvia users describe seeing the same woman. A shaman in the book describes her as the “salvia spirit”.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a supremely secular, unspiritual person. I wouldn’t report seeing a mystical spirit, let alone positively, unless I felt that I really had. In that way, I feel like I’m following Pinchbeck’s path, a little, though I’m not nearly as lost or alienated as he describes himself in the book. Last night, I did a third salvia chew. Nothing came of it, and around 1 AM, I fell asleep. Approximately two hours later, I snapped awake, aware that the room had become flooded with otherworldly light. Then it was dark, but, with my eyes open, I could distinctly see a stone warrior standing in the middle of the room. Then I closed my eyes, and saw the woman again. I seem to recall begging her to show me the secrets of the universe. The sensation of travelling through space returned, and then I fell asleep. This morning, when I woke up, I wrote my next Bad Sex column for Nerve.

I guess I say that last thing because I’m not crazy. I’ve just had a few plant-induced visions, and feel both confused and enlightened. The world has an odd twinge that it didn’t before.

The New York Times >Growing Up Denatured
By BRADFORD McKEE
April 28, 2005 New York Times

WERE it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

“My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games,” said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, “that’s more the norm than the exception.”

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children’s indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem “nature-deficit disorder.” He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children’s fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

“I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing,” Mr. Louv (pronounced “loov”) said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. “It’s society’s whole attitude that nature isn’t important anymore,” said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

“We have mobile couch potatoes,” Dr. Shifrin said. “The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?”

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. “It’s absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break,” said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children – 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. “It is stronger than we are.”

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. “And if there weren’t enough kids, you’d close right field,” he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But “there’s this magnet pulling them into the house.” It is the Nintendo GameCube. “I have to throw them outside.”

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

“As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary,” Ms. Herzog said. “The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them.”

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

“Who’s going to pay for that research?” Mr. Louv asked. “What toy can we sell for natural play?”

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book “Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection” (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv’s book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

“When you look for the hard data, it’s hard to find,” Dr. Kellert said. “And people talk about children’s contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way.”

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it’s hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. “We’ve been conditioned to live in fear,” he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family’s home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. “It’s more my wife than me” who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons’ school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

“We’re in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent” in the past, Mr. Figler said. “You’re always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous.”

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents’ nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

“We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play,” Dr. Broughton said. “The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven’t gone a day where I don’t see a kid who’s too fat.”

Mr. Louv refers to parents’ abduction fears as “the bogeyman syndrome.” But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who “criminalize” outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood’s residents’ association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

“If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal,” Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. “The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days,” he said. “There’s a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning.”

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a “lockdown,” she called it. “That doesn’t allow active play on the school grounds” during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. “It’s not getting any easier.”

Rock-a-billy artist Hasil Adkins dies
April 27, 2005 11:47 AM

MADISON, W.Va.
Rock-a-billy artist Hasil Adkins, a one-man band whose screaming vocals and freestyle approach to rhythm landed a cult following, has died.

He was 67.

Adkins’ body was found yesterday at his Madison home, where he lived alone. The cause of death has not been determined but it does not appear suspicious.

Guitar, harmonica, drums, foot-rhythm instruments — Adkins played them all.

Known to his fans as The Haze, Adkins struggled for decades to get noticed. In a 2002 interview, he said he mailed out thousands of tapes and records over a 30-year period while fishing for a record deal.

Adkins was the original star of Norton Records, a label built around the primal recordings he produced beginning in the Eisenhower era.

Adkins claimed to have written more than seven-thousand songs. He first emerged in the 1950s, only to disappear again. European fans kept the rock-a-billy rage alive, and when the Cramps did an early 1980s remake of “She Said,” Adkins’ records suddenly became hot again.

His other hits included “Poultry in Motion,” “Chicken Walk,” “The Hunch,” “Chocolate Milk Honeymoon,” and “Boo Boo The Cat.”

False alarm sends Bush to underground shelter – Apr 27, 2005