by Nick Webb
What a wonderful change. So many investors in the UK have almost no idea what the Internet even is. Thomas Hoegh understands it intensely and knows that the old rules no longer apply, that the medium will belong to those who can think the most radically and creatively. I couldn’t be more pleased to have him on board.
The balance of the company moved to smaller offices—though, if anything, even more fashionable—in Maiden Lane, in London’s Covent Garden, where the Earth Edition of the guide was relaunched. All through 1999 they experimented with various business models—banner ads, tie-ins with mobile phone companies, new forms of sponsorship and so on—and lived on their wits in the meantime. After one false start, the site began to grow. As it expanded, the importance of peer review and the rigorous sifting of the entries grew correspondingly, and Mark Moxon was appointed as the full-time editor. Eventually a workable structure emerged for a truly original and useful website service. Alas, the company was still chronically short of cash and Robbie started preparing for a private placement using Bear Stearns, the international trading and brokerage company, which put a potential value on H2G2 of over $20 million.
By now Douglas himself was largely absent, either in California working on the movie, or on the lecture circuit. But he visited as often as he could both in the flesh and on-line. It says a lot for the soundness of their friendship that Douglas and Robbie never seriously fell out. Even when Douglas had moved to Santa Barbara, he remained in close touch with Robbie. Douglas’s self-imposed exile in California must have been a boon for Pacific Bell.
“Douglas was always there for the company,” Robbie recalls. “Even when the consequences were painful I could always rely on his support.”
All through 1999 H2G2 lived frugally, while slowly establishing the on-line business and preparing the business for a private sale. Due diligence had been done on the accounts. All the cupboard doors had been opened. They were, as Robbie says, “all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
Then, at the beginning of April 2000 (the “tech wreck” as it was known), the world of finance jolted awake like some sleepwalker on the edge of a roof whom nobody had wanted to wake up in case of an accident. The day of reckoning had arrived. Technology stocks fell through the floor. The TDV directors struggled on preparing for a placement until August 2000, but then Bear Stearns told Robbie that there was no point in taking the company out to the market. They were, as Robbie said, “now holed below the water line.”
Robbie and his fellow directors paid themselves nothing for as long as they could manage. Jim Lynn said he didn’t care if H2G2 made money because developing it was “just so wonderful.” Their remaining money melted away like butter on a hot rock, and negotiations began with the BBC, always possessive about what it considered to be one of its brands, to buy the company. This deal was finally executed in January 2001 and Robbie stayed on for a while to oversee the transition. Some of the staff were made redundant, but many were re-employed by the BBC.
TDV/H2G2 consumed about six years of Douglas’s life; apart from writing it was the longest he had devoted to any venture in his adult life. It was a brave experiment, years ahead of its time, with some bold and imaginative thinking from Douglas and his colleagues. Some very smart people worked desperately hard to create something fresh and extraordinary, and one day it might be seen as a prototype of a new kind of on-line company—one in which the customers and their relationship with the organization are in a sense the enterprise itself.
Meanwhile, H2G2, rehoused in the BBC, the world’s most famous media brand, and free from immediate financial pressures, is starting to bloom. At the time of writing H2G2 has about 5,000 articles available and over 60,000 entries, and it is growing steadily. The community now has more than 200,000 registered users. Internet communities can be savage, forever “flaming” and slagging off each other. But the H2G2 membership has not had that problem for it seems to attract decent, above averagely bright and imaginative people.
In Douglas’s honour the operating system running H2G2 has been named DNA by the BBC. It has found the right home.
Finally Douglas’s vision for a real on-line Guide is coming true.
FOURTEEN
Turtles All the Way Down
There is one peculiar model of the universe that has turtles all the way down, but we have gods all the way up. It really isn’t a very good answer, but a bottom-up solution, on the other hand, which rests on the incredibly powerful tautology of anything that happens, happens, clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that needs no other explanation whatsoever.
DOUGLAS ADAMS, SPEECH AT THE DIGITAL BIOTA II CONFERENCE
We inhabit a world in which we tend to put labels on each other and expect that we will then march through life wearing them like permanent sandwich boards. Douglas’s category was Comic SF writer with philosophical bent, and that’s true as far as it goes. But he was also an important thinker. He wasn’t a scientist; he was a well-read and supremely intelligent generalist whose unearthly imagination was much in demand.
Don Epstein, an energetic and sophisticated New Yorker, is the president of GTN, the Greater Talent Network, one of the leading lecture agencies in the United States. If you want to hear President Clinton’s talk about geopolitics after your corporate dinner, it can be arranged; Don is the man to contact.
America is a big market. Perhaps in the middle of a vast landmass, where you could be more than fifteen hundred miles from the sea in all directions, you have a hunger to hear about the world at large. The college-educated public in the States is also huge, and many American corporations are global in their scope. America is a culture with a passion for the new. Fashionable ideas, in self-help or business for example, sweep over the land where they are consumed voraciously—and sometimes discarded the next season.* 204 The lecture circuit reflects that volatility. Maybe the local TV is just too arse-numbingly boring. Whatever the manifold reasons, lecturing on a catholic variety of subjects is a well-established business in the USA, rather giving the lie to snotty European slanders about American parochialism. Colleges, companies, chambers of commerce, clubs and societies will pay good money to hear talks from articulate people if they have fame, opinions, charisma or an interesting idea to flog.
Don had read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and enjoyed it, and he and his colleagues kept their sensitive professional antennae attuned to the strange appetites of the public. He knew that Douglas enjoyed a popular profile with the student audience rather like that of the saintly Kurt Vonnegut. Don had first been contacted by Ed Victor in 1989, but it wasn’t until 1992 that he and Douglas met when Douglas was in New York and they had dinner together. Don and Douglas soon struck up a business arrangement. Eventually their mutual affection meant that Douglas became a friend as well as a client.
Douglas, Don says, had a tremendous following in the colleges and universities. His was quite an intellectual market, not hugely mainstream, but “very keen, well informed and receptive. Quite bohemian too.” Douglas, back to his first love of performance, made incredible speeches—witty, stimulating, occasionally a little over people’s heads, but that did not matter. It is better to emerge from an after dinner speech with the IQ challenged than to endure the speaker, the booze and the caterer’s bleached chicken in a conspiracy of torpor.
“Douglas was quite easy and low-maintenance,” Don reports, “always a pleasure to manage and always about responding to emails quickly.” One cannot help thinking, as admin was not Douglas’s strongest suit, that he must have been poised waiting for offers to lecture. Not only did he love doing it, but it was a guilt-free flight from his keyboard.
There is more to the lecture circuit than just turning up, giving a speech and promptly doing a runner. Often there’s a reception, or dinner, a little drinks party to meet the faculty, questions after the talk, and a trip to the bar to discuss evolution, sex and football with the students . . . in short, a whole host of informal obligations that the speaker can
skimp on or discharge with grace. Douglas was always “on” as actors say. He liked meeting new people and was charming to everybody, from the driver who picked him up from the airport to the receptionist who wanted him to autograph a book for her son. He loved it; he was performing to an audience which had paid to hear him specifically, and he was earning his keep. When he had an auditorium laughing, and hanging on his every word, it was a high.
In the early nineties Douglas’s lectures were mainly in colleges and universities, but from 1996 the technology market took off. Every programmer in Silicon Valley knew the name of Douglas Adams, and the desire to get him to talk to corporate America often came from the rank and file, the infantry in the IT wars, rather than the top. But he was such an amusing and interesting speaker that his fame spread, and meeting-planners in high-tech companies were soon competing to book him. His fees grew correspondingly, and eventually GTN could charge up to $20,000, plus expenses, per lecture to the big players in the IT world. (Prime Ministers and Presidents—the undeserving famous—are paid at a much higher rate, but Douglas’s income from this source was substantial and helped sustain him through the decade.)
Don tells a story of Douglas’s celebrity in the techie world. In 2000 Douglas was speaking at Sun Microsystems in San Francisco when Don had to get hold of him urgently. Unfortunately it was 10 p.m. in California and Sun’s main switchboard was closed. Douglas was somewhere in San Francisco, a city not lacking in restaurants, his most likely location. The only number available was Sun’s technical support line which at that time was connected to a team in Kuala Lumpur, the burgeoning capital of Malaysia.
“I’m trying to track down Douglas Adams somewhere in San Francisco,” Don explained. “He’s been talking to you guys, and I really need to get hold of him.”
“If you’re talking about the Douglas Adams,” said the helpful tech support person in Kuala Lumpur, “I’ll find him for you.” Mobilizing some underground network of techies and fans, he did—in less than thirty minutes.
The range of institutions that wanted Douglas was quite broad. Universities, from small colleges to Stanford and M.I.T., remained faithful fans. Once he gave a talk to Architecture and Interiors magazine. Telecoms, science-based and software companies were all fascinated to hear him speak about the future of technology.
His approach was interesting for it was not led—as is often the case—by where the developments in hardware seemed to be heading. Douglas pretty much took it for granted that Moore’s Law, about the doubling of capacity in the speed and memory of computers every eighteen months, would continue to run until some fundamental quantum-scale limit was reached, and he was sure that human ingenuity would still find a way of increasing efficiency. Instead his approach was intuitive. Smart technology will not necessarily be useful just because it has been developed. It is social rather than technical innovation that will bring about change. You have to understand, Douglas argued, where we’ve been in order to see where we might be going, because the past gives us some idea about what we actually want this stuff to do. We have to think beyond tweaking our existing gadgets and instead imagine self-organizing systems, akin to life itself, that could do almost anything we want of them. The question is: do we know what we want? It is the human spirit—infinitely adaptable yet resolutely the same—and not the hardware that is the key.
As an outstanding generalist, Douglas also spoke at scientific conferences on a non-commercial basis. He did not see that creativity in science was of a different order or nature to artistic creativity. There is always that eureka moment when you’ve thought of the perfect image or realized that the world works in a particular way. Douglas knew a lot of scientists, and understood that scientific method does not consist of collecting an ocean of data to see if some pattern emerges. To devise the experiment for collecting the data in the first place, you need a theory about what you might find. Art and science both involve intuition and a feel for the subject. Experimental method is to test your intuition against observation. It is only then that scientific procedure kicks in to ensure that the relevant variables have been isolated, the result can be replicated and—pace Popper—if necessary tested for falsifiability.
For instance, Douglas was a fan of Steve Grand, the brilliant programmer who devised the artificial life computer game, Creatures. In his astonishing book, Creation,* 205 Steve Grand urges the readers to try and liberate their imaginations by not seeing the world in the discrete categories given to us by language and our sensory apparatus (a chicken and egg conjunction best not contemplated here). Instead he suggests we try to perceive the continuity between things as if they were not separate objects at all but part of a continuous surface. Steve Grand cites Douglas as possessing “a tremendous feel for such concepts”* 206 and Douglas in turn gave him an enthusiastic quote for his book: “A giant leap forward into a new and unknown world . . . awe-inspiring.”
So Douglas was flattered when he was asked to moderate a high-powered conference of neo-Darwinists (The Digital Planet, 1998) in Germany. He was also thrilled to be asked to chair the debate at the second Digital Biota conference that took place at Magdalene College,* 207 Cambridge, on 10–13 September 1998. The first had been held in Banff in Canada the year before, and had raised so many questions that the organizers soon realized the conferences represent a life-long commitment.
At Digital Biota II Steve Grand gave the opening address, followed by Professor Richard Dawkins. Cybernetic specialists, evangelists of A-life (artificial life), cutting-edge programmers, professors of cognitive science, innovative technologists (including TDV’s own Richard Harris), computer science academics—there was a remarkable concentration of brain-power drawn from the computing and natural sciences. Their aim was nothing if not ambitious. They would consider how best to go about fusing biology with machine to create the first “radically new kind of life on this planet in nearly four billion years.”* 208 In the process they would speculate about new, partly organic adaptable technologies of the future and try to design some kind of roadmap showing how to get there. The thinking involved is not easy, but it is exhilarating. Somehow you have to step outside yourself as a living entity and consider yourself as a system. It’s akin to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and it requires knowledge of many disciplines and a flexible mind.
Far from being outgunned by the specialists, Douglas was in his element. Life is something you know when you see it, but it’s fearsomely tricky to define. It seems too complicated to be the result of the mechanical process whereby sexual recombination, mutation and the elimination of duff variations by their relative lack of reproductive success could have produced things as beautiful and as disparate as orchids and whales. However, computer modelling shows us how astonishing complexity can arise from a feedback loop and the iteration of simple rules. Indeed, computer programs that emulate aspects of evolution by introducing variation and passing the most successful algorithms on to the next generation are now very powerful tools in their own right, and—were it not incipiently anthropomorphic—we would have to call them creative.* 209 These simulations are particularly illuminating, said Douglas, because there are not many ways available to us of analysing the property of being alive. If you take a cat apart to see how it works, he pointed out, you very quickly have a non-working cat.
“What survives, survives” is the most fertile tautology in evolution. Douglas saw that it was not just our physical form that has been shaped by evolution. It’s difficult to see things other than the way we do “because we are evolved beings who evolved in a particular landscape with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully.” Trying to think outside that bone-deep evolutionary conditioning, encoded in our very cells, requires an exceptional imagination. Douglas’s speech in Cambridge was remarkable, and as a tribute to him it has been posted on the Internet at www.biota.org/people/douglasadams. Do read it. It’s a bit migraine-inducing, but truly an effort
of genius.
In the eighteenth century Douglas might have been a great scientist along the lines of the “natural philosopher” interested in everything. The esteem of the men and women who were doing science for real meant a great deal to him. Once he was attending a lecture at the famous NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field in the heart of Silicon Valley when the speaker was told that Douglas was in the audience. The proceedings were stopped, and an auditorium full of scientists gave Douglas a spontaneous round of applause. He was embarrassed but ecstatic. This was recognition from an audience that he rated infinitely more highly than he did the British literary critics turning up their noses at SF. His relationship with NASA Ames was so close that they have subtitled their monthly scholarly journal on astrobiology Life, the Universe and Everything, with an explicit thank you to Douglas for his permission to do so. (As if he would refuse—he must have been delighted beyond measure.)
Douglas continued to give lectures right up until his untimely death. Don Epstein was talking to him the day before he died about updating his potted bio for a commencement speech at the University of Santa Barbara. In many ways lecturing was his perfect job. It combined performance art, a chance to show off his high intelligence, his gift for the explanatory analogy, lots of stimulation, decent pay, and, almost certainly, restaurants and travel.