Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Gary Wolf: And what is that portrait? Where is that portrait coming from? There’s a lot of easy targets all around them. And it’s also them. And this is where the beauty really of Suck is.

  Louis Rossetto: They basically discovered what the web was about.

  The Sucksters (writing in Suck): The magic formula for cheap content? It’s called point-of-view, baby.

  Louis Rossetto: Suck was the first blog. It was like a phase change.

  The Sucksters (writing in Suck): Opinions are like assholes, sure: just make sure yours smells sweeter.

  Howard Rheingold: The beginnings of internet meme culture came from Suck.

  Louis Rossetto: And we were amazed that this was happening under our own noses—and we didn’t even know it!

  Culture Hacking

  The cyberunderground goes mainstream

  The decade between the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 to the twin IPOs of Netscape and Pixar in 1995 was a lean one when measured by Silicon Valley’s now-favorite metric—business success. Yet when seen through a cultural lens, the decade is profoundly rich and kaleidoscopically colorful. The Well kicked it off by emulsifying what had been an uneven and partial mix of Silicon Valley’s technical culture and the San Francisco counterculture. Then the underground magazine Mondo 2000 gave the new scene a voice and a name: the cyberculture. Wild “cyber-” parties, salons, and happenings held the scene together until the midnineties, when the web and Wired took it mainstream. What was once a subculture specific to Silicon Valley and San Francisco became the basis for a new global internet culture.

  Fred Davis: Mondo’s circulation list was relatively small, but if you looked at it, there were a lot of America’s great thinkers, writers, painters, and designers.

  R. U. Sirius: Timothy Leary was an enthusiast for what we were doing right from the beginning and we were enthusiasts for him.

  Fred Davis: Alison Kennedy was basically using up her trust fund to subsidize the magazine as a vanity publication, I guess you’d say.

  R. U. Sirius: And at the time Jaron Lanier was courting someone who’d become his wife, and she lived with Alison. So we learned about his virtual reality project pretty early, before a lot of other people had heard about it.

  Michael Naimark: You can’t have something called virtual reality without it being a circus. At the time it seemed totally obvious that Tim was going to join the circus—and he slipped in like a hand to a glove.

  Louis Rossetto: He was in his cybervisionary stage.

  Dan Kottke: Tim was promoting anything and everything related to new technology. Remember S.M.I2.L.E? Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension?

  Jaron Lanier: If you talk to Tim about it, and he’s no longer with us, he said that actually this plan was set in motion years earlier by William Burroughs, who told him that the computer people would eventually remake the world. And it was really important to connect with them as soon as it started to happen. And so Tim felt that he had sort of marching orders from Burroughs from way back.

  Fred Davis: William Burroughs’s dad was the Burroughs of Burroughs Computer. That was a big company back then.

  R. U. Sirius: Leary was very much a futurist—him and William Burroughs, who was always a sort of futurist. He was the only futurist of the Beats, really. And also, Stewart Brand.

  Fred Davis: Leary was into mind expansion. There was a chemical way of mind expansion. And now, there was an electronic–digital way of mind expansion.

  Mitch Altman: Virtual reality is the ultimate psychedelic toy, right?

  R. U. Sirius: Tim told us that he thought Jaron was like the smartest person in the world at that time. And Jaron thought Timothy Leary was the smartest person in the world at that time, which he probably doesn’t remember.

  Jaron Lanier: Tim’s nickname for me was “the control group,” since I was the only person he knew in the scene who hadn’t taken LSD. I used to get a lot of flak for being the straight man in the scene, because I didn’t take drugs and everybody took drugs.

  R. U. Sirius: In those days it was very much a psychedelic drug scene but it was a very intellectual, psychedelic, drug scene.

  Jaron Lanier: We forget that in those days the drug culture was huge, dominant, and the technical culture was this little tiny, tiny, tiny bubble.

  Jamie Zawinski: I would characterize it as more the art culture than the drug culture, but obviously there’s like a 90 percent overlap between those two.

  Fred Davis: Mondo was throwing fantastically wild parties at Alison’s house that were completely full of hallucinogens: people doing mushrooms or they were doing acid or they were doing ecstasy.

  Michael Mikel: Once in a while somebody would come in and bring in some drugs that had just been made—not even illegal yet!

  Fred Davis: And the lightweights like me were just smoking pot.

  Michael Mikel: So it was a pretty wild scene over there.

  R. U. Sirius: We had this mansion in Berkeley and there’d be an awful lot of people, even early on, coming to these parties. I remember one that looked like a small rock festival. Every space on the back lawn was taken up and almost everybody there smoked DMT. That was kind of the thing in the mideighties. DMT is just the wildest carnival ride of the psyche that one can possibly imagine. It’s like having a million universes mainlined into your spinal column for three minutes. It’s amazingly incomprehensible but at the same time sort of—refreshing.

  Mark Pauline: They would just have these huge, unbelievable parties. Hundreds of people at these parties and just all these people doing work in 3-D graphics, virtual reality, smart drugs. All the scientists and weirdos and artists all together. And all these gazillionaire tech people at the time in the eighties would be showing up at these things.

  Michael Mikel: The things that were discussed and talked about were fascinating. I was connected to a guy there who was deeply involved in the idea of time travel. We had some deep discussions. We even did some experiments—mental experiments—about the subject. There was this whole scene in this great old house in Berkeley. Almost every weekend there was some kind of gathering there. That was the Mondo house.

  Fred Davis: It was an exciting, heavy party time when the people who were inventing the future wanted to get together and talk. The tech nerds and the cyberpunks or whatever wanted to get together and talk about this shit. We were immersed in it. It was changing our lives right before our eyes. There was kind of a party circuit back then. Mondo was throwing parties. I was throwing parties. There was the Anon Salon. Survival Research Laboratories did their thing at a bunch of different parties.

  R. U. Sirius: SRL was this insane performance art thing.

  Jamie Zawinski: SRL was a very underground art troupe who built robots that they put on performances with where the robots tore themselves and other things apart.

  R. U. Sirius: They were building these sort of Frankensteinian monsters and setting them loose to brush up against each other.

  Fred Davis: These weren’t little wimpy robots that you wound up and walked around on your desk or something. These were fucking mean fighting machines: Fighting robots! Warring robots! Flame-throwing robots! That was, again, part of the sci-fi culture–hack, technohack, counterculture rage-against-the-machine thing.

  Jamie Zawinski: There was a dystopian sci-fi feel to a lot of this stuff. Obviously we were reading the same books.

  R. U. Sirius: Now, you have the commercialized version of this: Robot Wars and all that sort of stuff. SRL was real.

  Max Kelly: The SRL guys had a studio down in Bayview, which at the time was not the place to be. We’d regularly find cars on fire, and people would run up and try to carjack you all the time. The thing was you could do whatever you wanted down there and no one would give a shit. And these crazy white guys are sticking a rocket engine—a V2 rocket engine—out the side of their garage and turning it on. Test firing! A V2 rocket engine! Okay, it might have been a V1, but it was definitely an old Nazi rocket engin
e.

  Dan Kottke: It was a jet engine, running on kerosene. They had it on a sled, and they would fire it up. And it was very, very loud and exciting. I used to go to those SRL events. They were always fun, they were always word-of-mouth, they were always illegal.

  Jamie Zawinski: It was incredibly illegal. They were not safe environments. Hearing damage was a real issue.

  Gary Wolf: It was superhallucinatory. It was frightening. There are almost no words for it.

  R. U. Sirius: Oh my God! They would take it out onto the street…

  Mark Pauline: You mean Illusions of Shameless Abundance? That was one of my favorite shows!

  Gary Wolf: That show scared the shit out of me: I’m breaking out in a sweat right now thinking about it! It was so far beyond…

  Mark Pauline: In 1989 I had a bigger crew than usual: forty or fifty people, plus I had gotten a grant from the Fleishhacker Foundation, so I had their name to throw around, so I was able to talk the people who ran this parking lot South of Market into renting me the space.

  Jane Metcalfe: South Park was full of winos and drug addicts and homeless people. They had oil drums filled with garbage that they burned. It was a really sketchy neighborhood.

  Louis Rossetto: All of South of Market was like that.

  Mark Pauline: There’s this beautiful part under the freeway between Third and Fourth Street and between Bryant and Harrison. There the freeways are very high—fifty feet—and it’s almost like a cathedral under there. It’s just this huge open space that’s basically a block long and a half a block wide. It’s very flat and it’s open so it’s just a fantastic location for a show.

  Jamie Zawinski: You’d go down to an abandoned parking lot where these guys were going to build some giant flame-throwing robots that would tear each other apart. They’re not selling you a ticket. This is not Disneyland.

  R. U. Sirius: It was really dangerous stuff.

  Jamie Zawinski: There was going to be a giant robot spitting flame and if you’re in the way you’re going to catch on fire. And then everyone’s going to run, you know?

  Mark Pauline: I picked all sorts of machines that I thought would be good for the theme. One of the things I did was locate a tree chipper that was in some other city’s maintenance yard and remove it back to San Francisco and set it up so it was remote-controlled. I put a bigger fan in it, too, so it had more blowing going on. But you know the V8 engine had the ability to chop up four-by-fours, big boards, trees, whatever you want to put in there. So I made the hopper bigger for it and we collected, oh, probably four or five tons of rotten food from the produce market and from other places. We made a huge cornucopia filled with rotten food and had all sorts of other kind of like passive dumping systems built around the freeway. So if you bumped against them they would load the hopper full of rotten food. And we set it up with a long chute so it could project the stuff it chopped further than a regular one. It really smelled pretty bad. It was like all kinds of horrible stuff in there. It was shooting chopped-up rotten food all over the audience. That was one of the things going on.

  Gary Wolf: Then they lit that tower of pianos on fire!

  Mark Pauline: There were pianos, about twenty-five pianos stacked against a part of the freeway, and at one point the pianos caught on fire and the Highway Patrol shut the freeway down because the flames got high enough that they were coming over the top of the freeway, fifty feet above us. So it was pretty out of control. We also had a huge flamethrower that was making forty- or fifty-foot flames down underneath there also. All this stuff was happening at once, and huge huge fires, smoke and just a lot of chaos, a lot of explosions and just a lot of crazy stuff. There was too much chaos to really pay close attention. I just know that the fire was melting things in the control booth from a hundred feet away! It happened because there was a ceiling. There is a phenomenon that happens with infrared radiation called “flame focusing” where if there’s something on top and on the bottom the infrared can’t radiate up or down, so the flame felt much more concentrated than it would have if it was outdoors. That also damaged the freeway pretty badly, but fortunately the earthquake came a couple months later and so Caltrans just said, “Don’t worry about it. We don’t even want to admit that you did this. So we’re just going to let it slide.” So they never charged us to fix it because of that earthquake, which was lucky. But the interesting thing about it was nobody ever told us to stop. The police never said a word afterward. The fire department never said a word. The highway patrol never came down and said, “Hey, we had to stop the freeway because of your fucking fire. What the fuck?”

  Fred Davis: That punk attitude was a San Francisco attitude: The punks were raging against the machine in the best way they knew how.

  Mark Pauline: I always have considered myself a comedian. So it was all about trying to find the entertainment value and the humor in all these things that just really were faceless and humorless like industrialization, commercialization, high technology, military weapons systems. I always have tried to look at those things and find the other side of it. What about this is entertaining? I would try to mine those things.

  Fred Davis: SRL was another type of rage against the machine, which is what the phone phreakers were doing.

  Mark Pauline: I had an Oki 900 that was cracked. We used to call everywhere in the world all the time. We used to call friends in Europe. We would rack up hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free calls.

  Fred Davis: And desktop publishing was a rage against the publishing machine and whatever.

  Mark Pauline: Jane and Louis were the only rich people, wealthy people, who ever helped SRL out ever.

  R. U. Sirius: We all felt connected. Mark Pauline was doing his mechanical thing but he would come into all the virtual reality parties. There were all kinds of virtual reality parties. There were all kinds.

  Kevin Kelly: Cyberthon was in ’90. I was inspired by Stewart Brand to see what you could do with a happening. And once I intersected with Jaron I became aware there was a bunch of VR stuff happening: There was Fakespace, there was the NASA folks, the folks at Autodesk.

  Jaron Lanier: Oh. There were a zillion things like that. And Kevin and Stewart and Barlow and a variety of other sort of vaguely psychedelic-era intellectuals were always putting together weird events and happenings.

  Kevin Kelly: And so my idea was to bring together all the current demos and prototypes for VR and let anybody who wanted to try them try them. All at once. That would be cool.

  Jaron Lanier: There’d be like this incredible pressure: “You have to open it up and give everybody demos!” Well, how many people? “Oh, there’s only going to be two thousand.” All right, we’ll give ten people demos. And they are like, “No. We have to have at least…” It was just constant pressure and arguments. I mostly remember being beleaguered by that scene.

  Howard Rheingold: Cyberthon happened because the Whole Earth Review wanted to have an event around virtual reality. There was no money, and we wanted to have all this stuff happening that would take two or three days. And Kevin, who is a genius at this stuff, said, “Well, why don’t you just have it around the clock for twenty-four hours?”

  Kevin Kelly: We ran it from noon Saturday to noon Sunday. We sold tickets on The Well; we announced it in the magazine. We tried to have as many interesting people come as well. So Bruce Sterling was there, William Gibson, Tim Leary, Robin Williams, Jaron Lanier was there, John Perry Barlow. And of course all the VR people. And I thought the interesting thing would be in the middle of the night. People were tired and it was kind of crazy and dreamy. That was part of the happening aspect of it.

  R. U. Sirius: There were all these rooms with all this tech stuff being presented. Everybody had their VR stuff there. It was very lively. It went on all night.

  Kevin Kelly: There was no music. There weren’t any crazy antics. People didn’t trash anything. The Hells Angels did not show up. There were no drugs. It was trippy enough.

&nb
sp; R. U. Sirius: I smoked DMT with Wavy Gravy out by the side of a van. I gave William Gibson some vasopressin—it’s a smart drug similar to cocaine. You just squirt liquid vasopressin up your nose. Cocaine releases vasopressin in the brain. It doesn’t have quite the same powerful effect for some reason. Gibson liked it, but now he swears that he remembers not getting off.

  Fred Davis: I think William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had a lot to do with the whole virtual reality thing. A lot of these cyberculture people were sci-fi enthusiasts, and books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash were the cultural icons. You had to read Snow Crash because if you didn’t, you weren’t up to speed on what the real thinkers were thinking about the future of tech. The future is people logging into these VR worlds and getting caught in them, that’s what Snow Crash was about. We still talk about that today. Snow Crash became the iconic cyberculture book. It described virtual reality in a more elegant way than what Jaron was doing.

  Chris Caen: The parties were thrown out of a collective frustration that we couldn’t make Snow Crash happen, and I joke that no book has cost the VCs more money than Snow Crash. Because at the time we were trying to jam these virtual worlds down a 9600-baud modem to a Pentium 60 processor, Pentium 90 if you’re lucky, and we just didn’t have the horsepower to do it, but damn, we were trying.

  David Levitt: Plus there was a whole rave culture growing up partly out of this, which left us scratching our heads.

  R. U. Sirius: It was a very rapid, almost unbelievable adoption of the rave culture by the San Francisco counterculture. That kind of surprised me a little bit. You wouldn’t think people who were either growing up with the Dead Kennedys or growing up with the Grateful Dead would immediately rush out by the thousands and fill large clubs to dance to this music with no voice and no center of attention.

  Brian Behlendorf: Raves were pretty obscure in March of ’92, which was when I started the SF Raves list. It seemed to be a gathering point, or a concept that a lot of young, creative, future-minded people seemed to be attracted to.