pdf
The Connector
John Brockman has had many careers. He has been a folk singer, an artist, an author, and an actor. In the mid-1980s he recognized the potential of the new sciences and brought together a group of up-and-coming software tycoons for dinner at a conference. This was the very first of now annual meetings of the Digerati, a cyber-elite recruited mainly from the computer industry and the natural sciences. The Third Culture is what Brockman calls those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual
With your annual Digerati dinners and Edge,your online community,you have one of the most interesting networks of our time.When did you start this?
I’ve been doing this in one way or another since 1965. That’s before I became a literary agent. If anything the agency was a spin-off to make a living.
When did you start thinking about networks?
At about the same time I started thinking about computers. That was in 1965. I was working in the avant-garde art world in New York and I was contacted by A.K. Solomon, head of the biophysics department at Har- vard. He asked if I could organize a group of artists to come to Cambridge and spend two or three days in the seminar atmosphere of the circle of scientists working on cybernetics with Norbert Wiener.
Why did they choose you?
I was part of a weekly dinner organized by the composer and philosopher John Cage. He invited six or eight young artists to sit down with him once a week and talk about ideas. He was then very interested in Zen and the ideas of McLuhan, Edward T. Hall, Norman O. Brown, and Wiener. So a group of us went up to Cambridge. There we found Walter Rosenblith, the sensory communications specialist, Anthony Oettinger, the mathematician, A.K. Solomon, the biophysicist, and Harold Edgerton from M.I.T., who was known for his stroboscopic photographs. It
was a world-class group.
Did scientists already have this fascination with computers?
None of them were computer scientists, because there was no such thing as computer science at that point. Even the next generation, people like Marvin Minksy, were topologists, mathematicians, physicists, etc. Computer science has only existed for the last 25 years.
But they worked with computers…
Yes, of course. They took us to a very large room. It was almost like a moat around another room, which was raised off the ground and surrounded by glass. Through the glass you could see technicians in white lab coats –and the computer. It was 1965, and I was 24. Talk about an imprinting experience. It was as if I had fallen in love with the computer.
Did the idea of a global network even vaguely exist back then?
John Cage used to say there’s one mind, the mind we all share. And he envisioned what he called a global utilities network, so all of us could tap into that mind. He had given me Wiener’s Cybernetics to read. I was absolutely fascinated by it. I recall going to California and sitting down with Stewart Brand. He was putting together the very first Whole Earth Catalog back then. Stewart and I sat in the corner for two days underlining the book together. I went on to write By the Late John Brockman, my first book, which was a book-length essay about the idea of cybernetics, its
importance, and how it affects humanistic views of the world. Stewart wrote a book called II Cybernetic Frontiers. He later coined the phrase “personal computer,” and in 1983 he founded the computer network, The Well. That really was the beginning of interactivity and the virtual community.
Who is now part of your network?
The primary group consists of what I call Third Culture intellectuals. These are people who I feel are inventing the world. And I use the world invention carefully. I don’t believe there’s an a priori universe out there waiting for new laws to be discovered. I think that certain people at certain times have expressed the words that become our reality. Take, for example, the names of the body. The names we use now weren’t the names used a thousand years ago. For example, the heart is a pump – everybody accepts this. But it wasn’t a pump in the 15th century. It wasn’t a pump before Sir Isaac Newton and mechanics. Now the brain is a computer. Well, try calling it that in the 1970s, during the time of the “Me Generation.” We create tools, such as pumps or computers, and we model ourselves by our use of them. The interesting thing about scientists and technologists who create these words is that more of them are alive today than probably ever lived throughout the history of the earth. Some five million people in America are involved in science. Wouldn’t it be interesting to identify who those people are, and to find out what they’re thinking? Edge celebrates these individuals. First it was a newsletter. And when the Internet came, it went online at www.edge.org.
Where does the term Third Culture come from?
C.P. Snow wrote an essay, The Two Cultures, about the split between science and the humanities. Later, he predicted a third culture in which the humanities people would learn science and effectively communicate it to the public. It never happened. What did happen was that scientists themselves started communicating to the public directly.
So this represents a new generation of intellectuals?
Quoting the physicist Paul Dirac, Snow made the point that the word intellectual had been hijacked by literary critics. Dirac asked why it was that nobody contacted Einstein or Heisenberg or people like himself when something happened in the world. “We’re not intellectuals anymore,” he discovered. So who were the intellectuals? They were book critics. Cambridge, Oxford, the New York intellectuals. But why would I ask for the opinion of a book critic on anything other than a book?
Has the situation changed very much since then?
Yes, of course. What’s happened is that scientists like Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett and Brian Greene have taken it upon themselves to tackle the big questions. They’re talking about things like the nature of life, global warming, immunological research, and nanotechnology. They are looking at questions that transcend boundaries and nationalities. They affect everybody on the planet. They’re not the internecine arguments of second culture intellectuals.
Aren’t these debates often too complex for even a well-educated public?
Increasing complexity is leading to an entirely new way of doing science, one in which all kinds of disciplines come together in various endeavors. You’ll find physicists working with biologists, with immunologists. They have to be able to talk each others’language. And the books reflect this. When Daniel Dennett wrote Consciousness Explained, thousands of people bought the book because they had to buy it. Here’s a philosopher writing about consciousness and covering disciplines such as philosophy, his own field, computer science, psychiatry, and engineering. At one point, I counted about a dozen different fields. Now, if he had written a paper he wouldn’t have been able to get it published in any of the specialist academic journals, because he wouldn’t have been writing about his own field. Instead he presented his scientific ideas in a tradebook written in a language devoid of the usual jargon. A physicist should be able to read something a biologist wrote and vice versa. They have to write in a way
that’s understandable to their intelligent colleagues. That’s the hallmark of these new books. They are not popularizations, not popular science. This is science being presented by the scientist for people outside his field, but still within the scientific community. So a lot of the best work now is being done in the books themselves.
You live in New York.Is that still the center of intellectual life?
It’s a market town and that’s why I’m there, because I’m in the market.
Has it changed that much?
Well, I remember in 1964, when I got out of the army and went back to Columbia, I thought it was so exciting. I found myself in the middle of the New York art world, and there were two different worlds then. The artists were turning me on to science, to the physicists. Rauschenberg told me to read McLuhan, Cage was reading Wiener. They were all reading physics, they were open and they were learning. The New York intelligentsia was a world of fiefdoms, of very powerful, important people. That was 35 years ago. Some of these people are still alive, they’re still arguing who was a Stalinist in 1937, and people read it. It’s astounding. And it’s irrelevant. You’ll find a lot of people in the humanities that do this arrogant titilation of their lack of knowledge of science. Especially in New York. But you’ll never find a scientist who’s proud that he doesn’t know Shakespeare. I have nothing whatsoever against literature, reading great books, even reading great reviews about great books and people having opinions. But it’s really a question of what questions are we asking ourselves today? That’s what brought about the World Question Center.
What is that?
James Lee Byars, a conceptual artist who spent much of the last 20 years of his life in Germany and Switzerland had this idea for the World Question Center to arrive at an axiology of the world’s knowledge. Rather than read the six million books in the Weidener Library at Harvard, identify the hundred brightest people in the world, lock them in a room together and have them ask each other the questions they’re asking themselves. He actually tried to do it.
Did he succeed?
He called the hundred smartest people in the world and almost everyone hung up on him. But I’ve been able to pull it off. I’m trying to find the brightest people in the world and ask them to question each other. Where do you find these brillant minds today?
The network ist distributed and it’s global. You find pockets all over the world. The Media Lab at MIT, Xerox Parc Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute. In 1959, 1960, I’d take my guitar to Club 47 in Cambridge and all the folk singers would be there. And the same crowd would be in Paris, in Berkeley. It was a world of networks back then. Third Culture is a new kind of network, one that runs on e-mail. So when Daniel Dennett published Consciousness Explained every chapter had been read by 40 or 50 people. But networks of this kind work because people get to see
each other face to face. If you don’t have personal contact, it doesn’t work.
So culture has become decentralized? Not culture with a capital C. Broadway theater, music, Hollywood movies are all centralized in New York and Los Angeles. But the Third Culture is a totally decentralized cultural landscape. Connected by networks.