An Interview with John Markoff
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Koman: And you make the point in the book that at each stage of major change, the prior generation was disdainful of this new thing.
Markoff: Right. That's the other thing. People tend to grow up in paradigms and it's very hard to see outside of your paradigm. John McCarthy (inventor of the term "artificial intelligence," author of LISP, creator of timeshare computing, and founder of SAIL) was the classic example of that. And in fact when I talked at Xerox PARC, Les Earnest (manager of SAIL) was there and he went after me on this whole notion of how much in opposition personal computer culture was to the mainframe culture. Larry Tesler defended me, so they had this little debate. But most people get locked into paradigms and don't see the next big thing.
Koman: Let me jump ahead to this piece you just did, Web Content by and for the Masses, where you talk about the explosion of the "sharing web." What's your sociological explanation of why this is happening now?
Markoff: The same sort of social forces are afoot that led to the original free software movement. The internet in its current iteration makes it so much easier to express those values and put them in the form of code, to borrow from Lessig. So you're getting these architectures that are designed to facilitate sharing. I think the sharing culture is there and now you have this infrastructure that just allows it to bloom.
Koman: So I want to go back to the early '60s and focus on Doug Engelbart. But how does Engelbart come into being? We have this very buttoned-down, glass-room, giant-computer-run-by-the-priesthood culture. And long before the counterculture had bloomed, Doug Engelbart is this visionary of something really different.
Markoff: What was really interesting about Doug's vision was that it was very parallel to things that were happening in Silicon Valley. In many ways he was the harbinger of a whole set of philosophies and values that all seemed to arrive right around Stanford at the same time. I think it probably has something to do with California being a frontier and coupling it with the technology and the kind of searching people were doing coming out of the '50s, writ large. Doug came about this notion of augmentation, that you could use machines to augment the power of the human mind and that you could build these small teams that could work efficiently with the aid of technology.
And that augmentation idea shared so much in common with all the cultural experimentation that was synonymous with California in the '60s and '70s, ranging from est to psychedelic drugs with the idea of mind expansion, whatever that meant. I mean, augmentation and mind expansion are very similar concepts, it's just different approaches.
Doug was very taken with psychedelics--he thought that might be one vehicle. He wasn't locked into information technology. He played with all kinds of things, including organizational models ...
Koman: I wanted to ask you about that. It seems from your book that he attended a couple of psycho-acid experimentations but you don't present him as someone particularly taken with the drug experience as a route to technical creativity.
Markoff: No, it was one of many things that he explored. That's why I don't focus too tightly on that. My interpretation of the impact of LSD is sociological, not psychological. I don't think you take drugs and get creative and I tried to argue that, although some people have said because I mentioned LSD that's what I meant. But that's not what I was trying to say. If anything I think the impact LSD had that led to creativity was part of a social milieu that was chaotic. And I think that creativity does come out of chaos; you get broken out of your humdrum daily existence and that leads to creative insights, or forces you to do creative things, or maybe creativity comes out of those communities.
If you looked at the organization that he built, he was tremendously counterculture. He was experimenting with workplace culture, and all of the people that worked for him were touched in some way, like he was, by the counterculture of the times.
