From Satori to Silicon Valley
by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.
A Taste for Industrial Light and Magic
But now, if we were to fix upon this one aspect of the counter
culture -- its mystic tendencies and principled funkiness -- we
would not be doing justice to the deep ambiguity of the movement.
We would be overlooking the allegiance it maintained, for all
its vigorous dissent, to a certain irrepressible Yankee ingenuity,
a certain world-beating American fascination with making and doing.
For along one important line of descent, it is within this same
population of rebels and drop-outs that we can find the inventors
and entrepreneurs who helped lay the foundations of the California
computer industry. The connections between these two seemingly
contradictory aspects of the movement are fascinating to draw
out and ponder -- especially since both wings of the counter culture
came to be more fully unfolded here in the San Francisco Bay Area
than any place else. This is where the Zen-Taoist impulse arose
and found (for example, in the San Francisco Zen Center) its most
studied expression in America; this is where the mendicant-communitarian
lifestyle, both urban and rural, found its main public examples;
this is where the new ecological sensibility first announced its
presence and first organized its political energies. And this
is where the inspired young hackers who would revolutionize Silicon
Valley gathered in their greatest numbers.
The truth is, if one probes just beneath the surface of the
bucolic hippie image, one finds a puzzling infatuation with certain
forms of outrè technology reaching well back into the early
sixties. I first became aware of its presence when I realized
that the countercultural students I knew during that period were
almost exclusively, if not maniacally, readers of science fiction.
They were reading more of the genre than the publishers could
provide. Side by side with the appeal of folk music and primitive
ways, handicrafts and organic husbandry, there was a childlike,
Oh Wow! confabulation with the space-ships and miraculous mechanisms
that would make Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the television
series Star Trek cult favorites, and which would eventually
produce the adult audience for (and the producers of) Star
Wars in the later seventies and eighties. The same eyes that
were scanning the tribal past for its wonders and amazements were
also on the look-out for the imagined marvels of what George Lucas
would one day call "Industrial Light and Magic."
Similarly, if we turn back to The Whole Earth Catalog,
we can find the same hybrid taste. Alongside the rustic skills
and tools, we discover high industrial techniques and instruments:
stereo systems, cameras, cinematography, and, of course, computers.
On one page the "Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front"
(Wendell Berry's plea for family-scaled organic agriculture);
on the next, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. I recall how this juxtaposition
jarred when I first noticed it. But then I thought again and tried
to restrain my doubts. There was, after all, something charming
about the blithe eclecticism of this worldview. Granted that a
catalog is by its very nature a mélange. But this catalog
clearly meant to project a consistent vision. It seemed to be
saying that all human ingenuity deserved to be celebrated from
the stone axe and American Indian medicine to modem electronics.
Clearly, in so saying, the Catalog spoke for an audience
that wanted to see things that way. Or rather, the Catalog
found the voices that could do that job. And of all the voices
to which it gave a forum, none was to become more prominent than
Buckminster Fuller, the man who informed a generation that it
was already on board a spaceship called Planet Earth, and who
presumed to write its "operating manual."
Now, as of the sixties, Buckminster Fuller already
had a long career behind him. The baby boom generation may have
embedded the Young Demographic in our media, but the counter culture
always made a generous place for wise old souls, whether voices
of the past like Black Elk and Henry David Thoreau or seasoned
mentors like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman. Fuller's prefabricated
Dymaxion House of the late twenties (also called "the four
dimensional living machine") dates back to the grandparents
of the countercultural generation. From that point forward, his
life story went through many ups and downs; but there can be no
question that the sixties (when Fuller was in his seventies) were
his zenith. Not only did he make the front cover of Time
magazine (in 1964), but he became one of the prophetical voices
of the American counter culture, starting with a prolonged campus
residency at San Jose State College that brought him to the Bay
Area in early 1966. Thanks to that appearance and subsequently
to the prominence Stewart Brand gave him in The Whole Earth
Catalog, Fuller was launched on the final and most spectacular
phase of his career. On the first page of the Catalog,
the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under
the inscription: "the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated
this catalog." From that point forward, Fuller became the
necessary presence at New Age conferences, symposia, and workshops,
a sort of peripatetic global wizard who might tie his awe-inspired
audience down for four or five hours at a stretch while he recited
the history of the universe.
What was it that made this odd figure so remarkably influential
in countercultural circles? In part, it may have been his grandfatherly
persona, which appealed to young people in search of wise elders
and finding so few. In part, too, it might have had to do with
his maverick image, that of the outcast genius scorned by the
schools and the professionals, and so becoming the senior drop-out
who could speak to junior drop-outs. But one must add his unique
talent for self-advertisement, his capacity, by way of grandiloquent
obfuscation, to make much out of little ideas and little inventions
that could be sensationally clothed in cosmic pretensions. If
Fuller was half Tom Swift, he was also half P. T. Barnum. And
just as Barnum could turn a not very special midget or an overaged
elephant into wonders of the world, so Fuller was able to parley
a few modest pieces of eccentric engineering into achievements
of supposedly epoch-making genius -- at least in the eyes of an
audience that was in the market for technological astonishments.
Above all, it was Fuller's worldview that caught the
temper of the time and the movement. While impishly dissenting
in tone, he was up-beat in spirit: hopeful, sassy, inspirational
almost to the point of euphoria. Fuller was, as one biographer
calls him, a "raging optimist." I must confess that,
though I shared a few platforms with Fuller and did my best to
appreciate his books, I never came across anything he said that
managed to be, at one and the same time, original, true, significant,
and understandable. Worse still, I was never able to distinguish
his optimism from plain egomania; I would not have been surprised
to hear him announce that he had invented a better tree. Yet,
again and again, I saw him send audiences away glowing with hope
and resolution. That peculiar magic made Fuller and his Bay Area
disciples the major spokesmen for a philosophy of postindustrial
life that has done much to shape the style and expectations of
the computer industry, especially as it has grown up in Silicon
Valley over the past ten years.
Contents
Some Afterthoughts in the Year 2000
From Satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.