Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  Many did exactly that. They turned their backs, said “fuck it!” and moved out of the cities to rural America: upstate New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, western Massachusetts. They blended eastern spirituality, romantic notions of self-sufficiency, and the cybernetic ideas of Norbert Wiener. Many tended to see politics and social hierarchical structures as fundamental enemies to human harmony, and they sought to build communities free of top-down control. They did not want to reform or engage with what they saw as a corrupt old system, so they fled to the countryside and founded communes, hoping to create from scratch a new world based on a better set of ideals. They saw themselves as a new generation of pioneers settling the American frontier.

  Stanford University historian Fred Turner called this wing of the counterculture the “New Communalists” and wrote a book that traced the cultural origins of this movement and the pivotal role that Stewart Brand and cybernetic ideology came to play in it. “If mainstream America had become a culture of conflict, with riots at home and war abroad, the commune world would be one of harmony. If the American state deployed massive weapons systems in order to destroy faraway peoples, the New Communalists would deploy small-scale technologies—ranging from axes and hoes to amplifiers, strobe lights, slide projectors, and LSD—to bring people together and allow them to experience their common humanity,” he wrote in From Counterculture to Cyberculture.16

  The commune kids were moving to the wilderness and striking out on their own. For that they needed more than just ideas. They needed tools and the most cutting-edge survival gear they could get. Brand saw opportunity. After taking an extended tour of the communes with his wife, Lious, he cashed in a part of his inheritance to launch a consumer and lifestyle guide marketed to that world. He called it the Whole Earth Catalog. It highlighted tools, featured discussions about science and technology, gave farming and building tips, ran letters and articles from commune members all across the country, and suggested books and literature, mixing pop libertarian titles like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged with Wiener’s Cybernetics.17 “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” was how Steve Jobs, a young fan of the magazine, later described it. “It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”18

  The mail-order L.L. Bean catalogue was what inspired Brand to create the Whole Earth Catalog. But it was not just about commerce. Like other New Communalists, Brand was enamored with cybernetics ideas—the notion that all life on earth was one big, harmonious interlocking information machine appealed to his sensibilities. He saw his fellow New Communalists as the start of a new society that fit into a larger global ecosystem. He wanted the Whole Earth Catalog to be the connective tissue that held all these isolated communes together, a kind of print magazine–based information network that everyone read and contributed to and that bound them into one collective organism.19

  The Whole Earth Catalog was a huge success, and not just with the hippies. In 1971, a special issue of the magazine topped best-seller book lists and won a National Book Award. Yet, despite the cultural and financial success, Brand faced an identity crisis. By the time Whole Earth won the National Book Award, the commune movement it served and celebrated lay in ruins.

  Years later, filmmaker Adam Curtis interviewed former members of communes in his BBC documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. He discovered that the cybernetic structures that these groups imposed on themselves, rules that were supposed to flatten and equalize power relations among members and lead to a harmonious new society, produced the opposite result and, ultimately, ripped many of the communities apart.20

  “We were trying to create a society based on understanding eco-systems, a society based on interrelationships and balance—a man machine biological system working in combination,” recalled Randall Gibson, a member of the Synergia commune in New Mexico that ran on a cybernetic notion he called eco-technics.21 The community had strict rules against collective action or organization. Members had to resolve problems and conflicts through “connection sessions,” where two people carried out one-on-one discussions in full view of the commune but could not solicit support or backing from anyone else. “The idea of eco-technics is simply that you are part of the system in which there would be less, if not no hierarchy at all,” Gibson said. Ultimately, these connection sessions descended into something darker: exercises in shaming, bullying, and control, where dominant members took advantage of weaker and meeker members. “In practice these would be 20-and 30-minute hazing sessions and were usually met by silence with the rest of one’s peers.”22

  Other communes went through similar transformations, morphing from upbeat youthful experiments into repressive environments and, often, straight-up personality cults. “There was fear actually because the people who were more dominating—there was anger. There was constantly a background of fear in the house—like a virus running in the background. Like spyware. You know it’s there but you don’t know how to get rid of it,” said Molly Hollenback, a member of a commune called The Family in Taos, New Mexico.23 Formed by students from UC Berkeley in 1967, The Family quickly transformed into a rigid hierarchy, with men addressed with titles like “sir” and “Lord,” and women forced to wear skirts and assigned conservative gender-based work: cooking, child care, and washing. A founding member who called himself Lord Byron presided over the group and reserved the right to have sex with any woman in the commune.24

  Most communes lasted only a few years, and some less than that. “What tore them all apart was the very thing that they were supposed to have banished: power,” explained Adam Curtis. “Strong personality came to dominate the weaker members of the group, but the rules of a self-organizing system refused to allow any organized opposition to this oppression.” In the end, what were supposed to be experiments in freedom and new utopian societies simply replicated and magnified the structural inequality of the outside world that people brought with them.

  But Stewart Brand did not admit defeat, nor did he try to understand why the cybernetic-libertarian ideology underpinning the experiment failed so spectacularly. He simply transferred the utopian ideas of the mythical commune into something that had long fascinated him: the rapidly growing computer industry.

  Rebranding Stewart Brand

  On the surface, the worlds of ARPA and military computer research and the drugged-out hippie commune scene of the 1960s could not be more different. Indeed, they seemed to occupy different solar systems. One had uniforms, stuffy suits, pocket protectors, thoughts of war, punch cards, and rigid hierarchies. The other had long hair, free love, drugs, far-out music, hostility to authority, and a scrappy and ragged existence.

  But the differences were superficial. On a deeper level, the two scenes operated on the same cybernetic wavelength and overlapped on multiple fronts. J. C. R Licklider, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and other ARPA and military engineers were deploying cybernetic ideas to build computer networks, while dreaming of building prediction technology to run the world and manage political strife out of existence. The hippies were doing the same with their cybernetic communes. Except, where ARPA and the military were industrial and global, communes were small-scale, boutique.

  There were direct connections as well. Take the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a major ARPA contractor working on everything from counterinsurgency and chemical warfare to running an important ARPANET node and research center. Several SRI staffers were close friends of Stewart Brand and active contributors to the Whole Earth Catalog.25 Brand frequently hung around at SRI and even consulted for the institute on a 1968 demonstration of the interactive computer technology Douglas Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center had developed under an ARPA contract.26 The event featured real-time video conferencing and collaborative document editing carried over the ARPANET, which was then only two months old.27 And then there was Engelbart himself. The engineer and interactive computing guru was a favorite of Licklider’s and received millions in ARPA fund
ing. At the same time, he experimented with LSD and dosed other computer engineers with acid to see whether it made them more efficient and creative. He also went on a tour of various communes and was highly supportive of the movement’s attempt to create new forms of decentralized societies.28

  The feeling was mutual. The Bay Area hippie counterculture scene lived and breathed the cybernetic ideas pumped out by America’s military-industrial complex. Richard Brautigan, a shaggy-haired writer with a droopy mustache who lived in San Francisco, composed an ode to the coming cybernetic utopia that demonstrates the spiritual closeness of these two seemingly contradictory worlds. Published in 1967 and titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the poem describes a world in which computers merge with nature to create a kind of altruistic god-like being that would take care of us all—a world “where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony / like pure water / touching clear sky.”29 Brautigan handed his poem out on Height Street, the epicenter of the counterculture movement. Naturally, Brand was a fan of Brautigan and published his work in the Whole Earth Catalog. “Richard could not code. I’m not sure he knew any computers personally,” Brand would later recall. You didn’t need to be a programmer to believe.

  There was deep sympathy and close ties between the two worlds, and Stewart Brand took it further. In the early 1980s, after the commune dream collapsed, he cashed in his counterculture cred and turned the utopian ideals of the New Communalists into a marketing vehicle for the sprouting consumer computer industry. He was instrumental to the cause. Like an experienced midwife, he guided the birth of this industry’s growing sense of self-importance and cultural relevance. He was shrewd. He understood that the Bay Area sat atop a major economic and cultural fault line. The tectonic plates were shifting and trembling and sending off shockwaves. The whole place felt overdue for a monster quake that would restructure society in a major way, spawning new industries, new businesses, a new politics, and a radically new culture. He really believed it, and he helped a new class of computer entrepreneurs see themselves as he saw them—as counterculture rebels and heroes. He then helped them sell that image to the rest of the world.

  In this new role, Brand was still a utopian idealist, but he was also an entrepreneur. “I’m a small-business man who is hit with the same kind of problems that face any small entrepreneur,” he told Newsweek magazine.30 Over the coming years, as personal computers gained traction, he gathered around himself a crew of journalists, marketing types, industry insiders, and other hippies-turned-entrepreneurs. Together, they replicated the marketing and aesthetics that Brand had used during his Whole Earth Catalog days and sold computers the same way he once sold communes and psychedelics: as liberation technologies and tools of personal empowerment. This group would spin this mythology through the 1980s and 1990s, helping obfuscate the military origins of computer and networking technologies by dressing them up in the language of 1960s acid-dropping counterculture. In this rebranded world, computers were the new communes: a digital frontier where the creation of a better world was still possible.

  In the parlance of today’s Silicon Valley, Brand “pivoted.” He transformed the Whole Earth Catalog into the Whole Earth Software Catalog and Whole Earth Review—magazines billed as “tools and ideas for the computer age.” He also launched the Good Business Network, a corporate consulting company that applied his counterculture public relations strategies to problems faced by clients such as Shell Oil, Morgan Stanley, Bechtel, and DARPA.31 He also organized an influential computer conference that brought together leading computer engineers and journalists.32 It was called, simply, “Hackers’ Conference” and was held in Marin County in 1984. About 150 of the country’s top computer geniuses attended, including Apple’s Steve Wozniak. Brand cleverly stage-managed the event to give the group maximum cultural cachet. To hear him and other believers tell it, the event was the “Woodstock of the computer elite!” Newspaper accounts regaled readers with tales of strange nerds with fantastical visions of the future. “Giving a computer self-hood. The greatest hack is artificial consciousness,” one attendee told a Washington Post reporter. “My vision of hacking is a fuzzy little intelligent creature growing inside each machine,” quipped another.33

  A PBS film crew was on site to shoot a documentary and capture Brand’s role in bringing these hackers together. He was not the young man who launched Whole Earth Catalog two decades earlier. His face showed his age and he sported a shiny, bald pate, but he still had the fire in him. He wore a black-and-white plaid shirt under a sheepskin vest and waxed lyrical about the rebellious nature of those gathered there in Marin.34 “They are shy, sweet, incredibly brilliant and I think more effective in pushing the culture around in good ways than almost any group I can think of.” Off camera, he took to the pages of his Whole Earth Review to further expound on the rebel nature of computer programmers. “I think hackers—innovative, irreverent computer programmers—are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution,” he wrote in an introduction to a photo spread of the 1984 Hackers’ Conference. “No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded.… High tech is now something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them, and that’s a hot item in the world.” He added, “The quietest of the ’60s sub- subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power.”35

  The Hackers’ Conference was a big moment in the cultural history of Silicon Valley. It helped introduce computer programmers to the public in a totally different way. These were no longer engineers working for big corporations and military contractors but “hackers”—geniuses and rebels bucking the system. Although Brand was an important figure driving this change of perception, he was not operating in isolation but represented a bigger cultural sea change.

  The year 1984 was a big and symbolic one for the computer industry beyond Brand’s Hackers’ Conference. That year, William Gibson published Neuromancer, a science fiction novel about a drug-addled hacker battling his way through a dangerous virtual reality cybernetic world run by frightening corporations and their god-like supercomputers. It was a world of no rules, no laws, only power and cleverness. Gibson meant it to be a metaphor for the growth of unrestrained corporate power at a time when poverty and inequality spiked under President Ronald Reagan—a science fiction experiment of what would happen if this trend ran to its natural conclusion. Neuromancer coined the term cyberspace. It also launched the cyberpunk movement, which responded to Gibson’s political critique in a cardinally different manner: it cheered the coming of this cyber dystopia. Computers and hackers were countercultural rebels taking on power. They were cool.

  That same year, Apple Computer released its “1984” ad for the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, who had just wowed audiences with the dystopian hit Blade Runner, and aired during the Super Bowl, Apple’s message could not have been more clear: forget what you know about IBM or corporate mainframes or military computer systems. With Apple at the helm, personal computers are the opposite of what they used to be: they are not about domination and control but about individual rebellion and empowerment. “In a striking departure from the direct, buy-this-product approach of most American corporations, Apple Computer introduced its new line of personal computers with the provocative claim that Macintosh would help save the world from the lockstep society of George Orwell’s novel,” reported the New York Times.36 Interestingly, the paper pointed out that the “1984” ad had grown out of another campaign that the company had abandoned but that had explicitly talked about the ability to misuse computers. A draft of that campaign read: “True enough, there are monster computers lurking in big business and big government that know everything from what motels you’ve stayed at to how much money you have in the bank. But at Apple we’re trying to balance the scales by giving individuals the kind of computer power once reserved for corporations.”

>   Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs was a huge Stewart Brand fan.37 He was just a kid in the late 1960s when the magazine and commune culture were at their peak of popularity and power, but he read the Whole Earth Catalog and absorbed its culture into his own worldview. So it wasn’t surprising that the original Apple ad campaign that hinted at computers as corporate and government monsters was left in the Dumpster while Brand’s view of personal computers as a technology of freedom prevailed.

  Stewart Brand offered a powerful vision that was planted deep in the American psyche. His push to rebrand military computer technology as liberation coincided with a less visible force: the gradual privatization of the ARPANET and the creation of a global commercial Internet.

  The Man Who Privatized the Internet

  It was sometime in 1986 when Stephen Wolff walked into the offices of the National Science Foundation on Wilson Boulevard in Washington, DC, across the Potomac River from the White House and just around the corner from the Pentagon.

  Like most people involved in the early Internet, Wolff was a military man. Tall and skinny, with a calm, reassuring voice, he spent the 1970s working on the ARPANET at the US Army Ballistic Research Lab at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a chunk of lush marshland and forest jutting into the Chesapeake Bay about thirty-five miles north of Baltimore. Aberdeen, now closed, enjoyed a long and storied history. It was established during World War I and tasked with developing and testing field artillery and heavy weapons: cannons, air defense guns, ammunition, trench mortars, and bombs. Norbert Wiener served there as a precomputer human calculator, working out ballistic trajectories for the massive guns being developed. During World War II, it was the birthplace of America’s first fully digital and electronic computer, the ENIAC. In the 1960s, Aberdeen was connected to something a bit spookier: a series of “limited war laboratory” experiments in which the US Army Chemical Corps deployed mind-bending drugs—including LSD and the nightmare super-hallucinogen known as BZ, which could put a person into a hallucinatory coma lasting days—as chemical weapons.38