Silicon Alley 100
#64 - Year 2000Founder of the futurist online salon the Edge Foundation, literary agent John Brockman is perhaps cyberspace's greatest networker. A former regular at Warhol's Factory, he first gained fame as an avant-garde film producer. In the late 1960s he resurfaced as a new-age ad man, developing a successful campaign for Scott Tissue (which included a female model adorned in sanitary napkins) and the promotional vehicle for the Monkees' film HEAD, featuring posters of his face all over Manhattan. Today, in addition to representing the country's best-known science writers, Brockman has created the online community for the world's intellectual and scientific elite.
Although his invitation-only e-mail list is his most clout-driven commodity (Bill Gates, cognitive-science philosopher Daniel Dennett, and David Bunnell of Upside all receive the digital newsletter), Brockman's most lucrative asset is, by far, his army of brainy scribes. In addition to controlling the business interests of Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker, the high-profile lit man also represents empirical heavyweights Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Elegant Universe author Brian Greene, who has become the most recognizable science writer since Stephen Hawking.
In other networking ventures, Brockman's annual "Billionaire's Digerati Dinner" has become a hugely popular event. February's extravaganza in Monterey, California, drew the likes of Inside's Kurt Andersen (see #31), Sun's Bill Joy, and Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold. Conspicuously absent, though, were Steve Case and Jeff Bezos, both of whom have made appearances in the past.
Most recently, Brockman released the second installment of The World Question Center. First posited in 1997, the query asked which invention mattered most over the past two millennia. (Brockman anthologized the answers in the January 2000 book The Greatest Inventions of the Last 200 Years, which he also edited.) The most recent survey, released earlier this year: What is today's most important unreported story? Responses already tallied include "The End of the Nation-State" and "The Gradual Growth of a Prosperous Middle Class in China and in India."
Stay tuned for more high-profile intellectual discourse.
UPS: David Gelernter manifesto; staggering $2 million for science author Brian Greene's next book. DOWNS: Dealing with the dinosaurs of the publishing industry BOTTOM LINE: The epicenter of science, technology, and literature PREDICTION: RightsCenter.com gets bought; Edge.org the TV show
Copyright © 2000 by the Silicon Alley Reporter. Reproduced with permission.