Artificial Frontier

In the middle of March 2020, when Washington and Maryland instituted what was promised to be a two-week lockdown, my wife and I left for a stay with her family in the country. We weren’t the only ones. Maybe some ancestral memory of Decameron days pushed people out of the city, the sense that the air will be clearer out beyond, that you can outrun the pathogen; maybe it was just the oppressive awareness that Washington, a city built to be a ruin, is a bad place to be during an international disaster. At any rate, we left.

I brought books. Being and Time, the Rule, C.D. Buck’s grammar of Oscan and Umbrian, and Rudolf Helm’s Teubner Golden Ass—an edition since superseded by Zimmerman’s, with good reason. I had bought the Apuleius at Raven Books in Cambridge while still in college; I decided with a period of slowed or stopped social life ahead of me, it was time to get to know Augustine’s favorite book.

As I flipped through the slim blue octavo, something that looked like a business card fell out of the middle of Book VIII. I picked it up and read, royal blue on ivory,

YOU LOSE. 

you lose interplanetary assoc.

earth sector

I turned it over.

THE SYSTEM DOES NOT WORK. 

you lose interplanetary assoc.

earth sector

It was a Saturday after the nervy optimism of the initial two weeks had passed. The real unemployment number was sniffing and growling at twenty-five percent, and quiet desperation underwrote every headline. (Do you want to see true fear? Look at those pictures of Steve Mnuchin beseeching Congress to send a restless and idle people money. Those are the eyes of a man who knows rope and lampposts are plentiful in this country.) The ailing startup I had been nursing for twelve hours a day had begun to make the death rattle—“How much of a pay cut can you take this month?”—and my wife was in the family way. In short, things large and small seemed to be going poorly. This calling card from—whom? what?—falling out of an occult and neoplatonic text seemed portentous—probably not in a good way.

Some research identified a single soul on Facebook who claimed “you lose interplanetary assoc.” as his employer; I found a copy of the YOU LOSE interplanetary text in an archived copy of a late Sixties Seattle-area underground magazine, Helix.

Helix was founded by hippies, with whom you are probably familiar from television and movies and maybe your parents’ jokes when you listen to American Beauty in your room. Hippies, like gnomes, can be identified by their eccentric grooming habits and affinity for eating seeds. And, like gnomes, hippies are growing scarce, are scarier than you might expect when you do find them, and are behind more elements of modern life than many people realize.

In Being and Time, Heidegger sets himself the task of the destruction of the history of ontology. The deepest primordial, Being, has been obscured by centuries of fuzzy thought—accelerated since Descartes, but ongoing unabated more or less since Aristotle. Heidegger has his own axes to grind and falls into several of his own traps, but the tool of destroying history is a useful one; who will destroy the history of the latter half of the twentieth century? How came it to be that natural family planning, the i-Phone, and organic farming burst forth from the same hot tight dark bundle?

John Markoff, formerly technology reporter at the New York Times for nearly three decades, seems on paper like a good candidate. He has made himself a specialist in the confluence of Sixties counterculture and Silicon Valley tech culture; his book What the Dormouse Said, covering the birth of computer culture to the introduction of the Windows P.C., was met with modestly positive reviews. His latest effort, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, takes as its point of departure a man rather than a scene—the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the godfather of New Urbanism, erstwhile advisor to Governor Moonbeam, a guru for two generations of futurists, an early theorist of the Internet, the man whose current occupations are building a clock that will run for ten thousand years and using dark genetic arts to revive the woolly mammoth.

Like nearly everyone under the age of fifty, I became aware of Brand via someone quoting Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford graduation speech. The Apple boss highlighted Brand’s signature project, the Catalog: a directory that sought to give any reader access to the tools he would need to do anything. “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” he had quoted approvingly from the book’s epilogue. A sort of pre-digital Google, he called it. Something I filed away in my head for later.

After the pandemic had become normal and I had a new job, a new house, and a new baby, I acquired a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog in a Taco Bell parking lot across the street from Andrews Air Force Base. “Norm,” the Craigs-list seller, had the air of an engineer—T-shirt tucked into cargo shorts, messy mustache, sensible Japanese S.U.V. He took cash and scolded me for letting the wind ruffle the pages of the Catalog while I fumbled my wallet out.

The Catalog—1971’s “Last,” intended to be the end of the project—is a handsome item, about the size of an atlas. On the first page, a statement of PURPOSE: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to a point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.” After six months of pandemic response, I smiled at “gross defects”—but “We are as gods”? Sinister at best. 

But the contents don’t disappoint. Reviews for peyote manuals and raw wood for pipe-making and boat-building cement, for machine-prototyping kits and knives and wine-making supplies, for cameras and Mennonite clothes and mechanical calculators. Reviews for books about macramé, urban design, what to do if you’re busted for drugs. Contributions from Wendell Berry on organic farming, Walter Carlos on synthesizers, Ken Kesey on whatever Ken Kesey is thinking about. And, on each page, one or two of the reviews in Brand’s light, humorous prose—a unifying spirit, a genius of the catalogue.

Markoff was given free rein of Brand’s personal papers and interviewed the man himself extensively; the product is an impressive chronicle of who met whom where and when, a verbal network chart of characters passing through the Bay Area in the middle of the last century. Berry and Kesey, but also Buckminster Fuller, Ram Dass, Paul Ehrlich, Jerry Garcia, Steve Wozniak—they’re all here, set mosaic-like into a detailed chronology of Acid Tests and Indian congresses and camping trips. We read about the paint jobs on Brand’s car and the steaks he fries on vacation; we read about flame wars on early internet forums and the models of computer used for typesetting the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly.

But what does this exercise in research come to? A biography becomes more than itself when it either uses the life of the subject as a torch to illuminate something beyond or tries to find something beyond in the subject itself—“what kind of man is this?” Markoff shows a marked lack of interest in telling either sort of story. The external question—what happened between roughly 1957 and 1963 such that two groups of engineers, mathematicians, and philosophers centered around Stanford and Harvard apparently independently began experimenting with L.S.D., and the participants in those experiments dictated mainstream culture by 1980? The internal question—what kind of man is Brand? Logging, Indians, buckskin and psychedelics, space colonies, megafauna—is Brand not an avatar of the basic anxiety or bereavement of the modern American, the loss of the frontier and the constant effort to create new frontiers to tame? Markoff is sympathetic to Brand, but in a deep way basically uninterested in him. 

I don’t know whether Markoff’s glassy-eyed incuriosity is merely a symptom of a life spent in professional journalism—long on facts, short on truth or critical thought—or there is something more sinister at work. Markoff shares a literary agent with Brand—John Brockman—and his book appears in a late flowering of “Brand Studies,” alongside a documentary film We Are As Gods. It seems as if there is an effort to cement a legacy afoot.

Indulge paranoia for a moment. The son of a wealthy family who attended Phillips Exeter and then Stanford, where he joined Army R.O.T.C. and then spent two years on active duty, an avowed anticommunist who became a “photography expert” and mysteriously avoided any kind of retribution for apparently failing to meet his Army Reserve duties, who just happened to be in one of the first groups of Stanford L.S.D. experiments, a fellow who managed to be near the center of the Acid Test scene without becoming a fully recognized Prankster, who traveled around keeping an eye on various radical American Indian political movements, who helmed the beating heart of counterculture know-how but strenuously avoided politics, who refused to criticize the Vietnam War at the height of anti-war sentiment, whose first wife was a cleared Navy research mathematician, who went on to do surveying work for the State of California, who happened again to be near the early wells of civilian computer work without himself participating, who was denounced by Ken Kesey as a power worshiper and by the socialists of Sweden as a C.I.A. plant—isn’t there something a little odd here? Doesn’t this demand some explanation?

There is a creepy void in Whole Earth, a dark shape spotted out the corner of your eye. The account is crowded with trivia—descriptions of buildings and food—while significant items are barely recorded. “Finally, prompted by an unusual mixed message from the I Ching one night, he took the ‘medicine’—L.S.D.” What is the message? And why do we never get an explanation for Brand’s recurring and apparently serious use of the I Ching? Not necessarily disqualifying for history’s movers; Nicias and Caesar were both addicted to soothsayers, it is reported. But neither fancied himself a technology expert or a futurist. What gives?

While a few references to libertarianism are scattered through the text, it is mentioned only once—two-thirds of the way through the book—that Brand considered himself a political conservative. Doesn’t the biographer have a duty to report what that meant—the content of the conservatism, the self-image that went with it? A vacation at his family’s lake house in early middle age is noted as a negative experience that is a turning point; we are not graced with the events of the weekend. Is Markoff hiding something from us? Is Brand hiding something from Markoff?

“Something was afoot in Northern California at the beginning of the 1960s that would be instrumental in both the creation of the sixties counterculture and, in the 1970s, the formation of Silicon Valley.” So Markoff writes. Is 1960 so long ago that the something is already irrecoverable?

Maybe it is. Tolkien and natural birth, once the totems of the ardent youth who would become the New Left, are now the province of blue-blazered Catholic Republicans who have picked up black leatherette missals and left their parents’ liturgical guitars hanging. They oppose abortion but, perhaps equivocally, support the bomb, without apparently realizing that both are the irreplaceable pillars of wickedness on which the current world system rests. (Do you really think we can ban abortion and keep living as we did?) The health food shop of yore, with its strange unsanitary barrels of grains and powders and its hideous drop ceiling and evasive, even rude management, has been replaced by a bright, gleaming, corporate Whole Foods, where you can buy powders in bright packages under the benevolent invisible eye of Mr. Amazon. (Who, by the way, is the biggest sponsor of Brand’s clock project.) Maybe explaining how the hippies were the only true reactionary movement to spring from this nation’s soil, rather than as-yet-formless proto-Democrats, is too much. Maybe there is too much history to destroy. 

Or maybe not. Markoff doesn’t try. Which is not to dismiss the merits of Whole Earth entirely. As an object in the mind, it is almost perfect: just like the Internet, whose invention is so central to the events enumerated, this book is a machine for grinding truth down into a collection of names and phone numbers. Story is pulped into a mere collection of facts and reconstituted into a literary Chicken McNugget. Whole Earth is just dross, another penumbration of a particularly obscure sort. Whoever comes along to destroy history, to find out what really happened, won’t have to think hard before spray painting its walls with white X’s for the wrecking ball.

As I wrote this review, pandemic over, wife again in the family way, I returned to my copy of the Catalog. It is a collection of oracles for the future past. One anonymous contribution (in the Community section, on the page marked “Dope”) from a Subud devotee describes his time in the drug commune scene grimly: “Additionally, there is/are/will be little children, of whom I see several around whenever I go home at the close of the day. I have seen them in their numbers all about me through the turning years, little and snotty, trailing after mummy in the orgiastic revel, after dad who’s dealing grass in the Haight, dancing their little scared dances with the big folk at the Fillmore, neglected in the corner with diaper full of shit.” Another artificial frontier—and frontiers are always hard on children. Especially social frontiers.

Not the scene for the writer, who had his own family at the time of writing. “Anyway, _____ has an extremely regulated life, lots of regularity, regular naps, regular meals of regular food, regular old mommy and daddy and big brother and is he ever groovy  . . .  he laughs so much it makes me cry, you know. At any rate, this can’t go on forever. Perhaps one day I will do some more stuff, maybe theater, if such exists that doesn’t subtract me from my real life, which is my family. But then maybe simple anonymity, a quietus from the everlasting pressure to be an innovator, among the first, at the source, the root, the avant garde. Maybe that’s all over, and all that’s ahead is that quiet and regularity that digs so much. That wouldn’t be so bad.”

It wouldn’t, would it. 

I tried to email Helix’s surviving editor to ask about YOU LOSE/THE SYSTEM DOES NoT WORK; Gmail told me the message was undeliverable. The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it. And so we beat on, boats against the current—but Fitzgerald was wrong. We are borne ceaselessly into the future.