The Lit interview: John Markoff

What the dormouse said about suburban revolutions

By Matthew Shechmeister

WHY DO PEOPLE who can live anywhere choose to live in San Francisco?

Anyone can name 10 reasons, but there is one that may not make the list, even though it is the most important. Simply put, it feels like something is happening here. Something is happening, and we want to feel like we are part of it.

The magnetism of San Francisco means that a great many people who live here were not born in this city, or any other. That does not prevent a lot of suburban and small-town transplants from looking down their noses at the burbs. After all, the suburbs were designed to kill that crucial excitement, the reason we came here, the thing that makes us different. The burbs strangle even the least inkling of anything "happening."

According to the myth, the suburbs are at best socially inert. At worst, they are reactionary anti-cities with populations on the lookout for change and eager to arrest it. It's a myth told by urbanites who have invested heavily in their self-image. As John Markoff demonstrates in his recent book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, it is also a myth that, like all myths, is not true.

In his book, Markoff, a West Coast correspondent and senior tech writer for the New York Times, brings to life a Bay Area suburb that was at the center of two revolutionary trends. During the 1960s, the area around Stanford University was a major node in the emerging counterculture and at the same time was home to the computer scientists and visionaries whose efforts created personal computing.

Markoff portrays the early Stanford-area computer developers as voracious consumers of new ideas who were heavily influenced by the counterculture of the era, applying its democratic ideals to the nascent culture of computers. The narrative stretches from the upper echelons of the well-funded Stanford Research Institute to the peninsula-based Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyists whose members would go on to found pioneering personal computer companies, including Apple. Markoff's book revisits the peninsula and South Bay before Silicon Valley was born, providing us with an intimate portrait of the characters who created personal computing as we know it, noting with glee that even the grown-ups dropped acid.

The author himself grew up in Palo Alto when the counterculture was hitting fever pitch, graduating from high school in 1967. After college and a spell as a muckraker writing about the military-industrial complex, Markoff started covering computers for a fledgling trade publication and has continued writing about technology ever since. The title of his book, a line from Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," and the dreamy look he gets when you ask him about the '60s, remind you that he is as emotionally invested in the counterculture as the hackers and hippies in his book are.

And in case you were wondering exactly what the dormouse said, it was "feed your head!"

Bay Guardian: Explain the significance of "What the Dormouse Said" as your book's title.

John Markoff: My flip answer is that I couldn't find a good Grateful Dead lyric. But really, it got at the idea of mind expansion, which seems to run through a lot of the counterculture and the scientific culture that I was trying to write about.

BG: Do you think that the culture of the Bay Area prior to the '60s counterculture had anything to do with the fact that the computer industry ended up here, or was it merely the presence of Stanford that caused the personal computer industry to arise where it did?

JM: There was a confluence of things; it wasn't one simple answer. There was the frontier culture of California writ large. California was always more open to new ideas than the East Coast, which was more buttoned-down, more rigid, and more of a bureaucracy. There was that kind of a broad foundation. And then there were a set of things that happened. There was a semiconductor industry that produced the microprocessor at just the right time, and then there was this counterculture that emerged in the 1960s, half of which rejected technology, while the other half argued that you could take technology that might be construed as being Big Brother, and you could turn it around and you could use it for democratic and community ideals....

BG: You argue that it was not a coincidence that personal computing arose in the Bay Area at roughly the same time that the '60s counterculture was thriving here. How were the two movements related?

JM: My theory, the hypothesis I wanted to prove in the book, was that new technology does not happen in a vacuum. I am not a believer in the notion that history is driven by technology. I believe technology is shaped by culture.... There were reasons that people became interested in the idea of personal computing at the time that they did. There were things that were in the political counterculture and in the cultural counterculture that were alive on the mid-peninsula. All those things were about trying to expand human knowledge, and personal computing resonated very well with the tools that people wanted. That was the insight that Doug Engelbart [a Stanford researcher] had, the idea of building a machine that would augment the human mind. It was the same thread that ran through Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools, taking technology that had been bureaucratic and making it personal. The Whole Earth Catalog was tremendously influential on the people who were building the technology, people like Alan Kay [of Xerox PARC] and Steve Jobs, who gave a commencement address at Stanford this year. The entire bottom third of his address was a discussion of how influential t he Whole Earth Catalog was on him. I think Steve and Alan were both representative of people who were inspired by the ideas in the Whole Earth Catalog about technology.

BG: What do you think was the most direct influence of psychedelic drugs on personal computing?

JM: It was the sense that these were very much parallel tools. The psychedelic world, before psychedelics became an entertainment drug, were used during the first half of the '60s to explore the structure of human consciousness. Early on, Stewart Brand and other people who knew what was going on in the computer industry saw this as directly parallel. Brand wrote about it in Rolling Stone [his articles in the early 1970s were among the first to describe the computer culture around Stanford]. When Ken Kesey saw a Stanford computer research lab, he said, "This is the next thing after psychedelics." These were mind amplifiers and fantasy amplifiers. You got to some of the same places that you got with psychedelic drugs. I think that was the parallel.

BG: Do you think there is a direct link between the communal ethos of some of the '60s counterculture and the current open-source movement?

JM: I do. I end my book at Ricky's Hyatt House [a Palo Alto hotel] in 1975, when the Homebrew club "borrowed" a copy of Bill Gates's ALTAIR BASIC [an early programming language] and they handed it out. The Homebrew Computer Club was started directly in the open-source ethos: You can share ideas, and you can share information, and you can get tremendous leverage out of that, which is still at the heart of today's open-source movement.

The argument was that information should be freely shared because it was, in part, infinitely accessible. Either you can have the Chevy or I can have the Chevy, but everybody can have a copy of the same computer program and nothing is lost. Information, by its very nature, is a different kind of commodity. It resonates entirely with the idea of sharing as opposed to ownership.

BG: Do you locate the Homebrew Computer Club at the beginning of personal computing?

JM: To say that it was the only thing happening would be wrong, but it was one of the crucial agents. But there were more than 20 companies that came out of the Homebrew Computer Club in a very short period of time, and it became the center for the computer industry in the first five years. Really, it was the center until the IBM PC came along, in 1981. The Homebrew club was where all the people who were involved in this little industry would come to share ideas and make business contacts, so it played a really crucial role.

BG: Sharing ideas, working together, the hobbyist ethos – do you think those "open-source" ideas were what got the personal computer industry started?

JM: I'm really trying to just balance things because so much of the way we see Silicon Valley now is just about wealth and "the start-up." The start-up is always seen as an opportunity to make a lot of money. I'm trying to say that you've got to balance that against this pure passion for technology and for sharing. My argument is not that it's one or the other, but that they are a necessary part of a bigger picture. One doesn't exist without the other.

I wanted to readjust the scales to put open-source back in its context. I see it as part of this hacker passion for the technology that is really part of the equation of Silicon Valley that's not about capitalism, per se. Just when we thought communism had died, this economy of sharing has come back, in the digital world, in a very different form, not as a political-revolutionary movement, but as a real economic force in the world. I think that's kind of profound.

Matthew Shechmeister is a writer who lives in Menlo Park.

What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

By John Markoff. Viking, 336 pages, $25.95.