Part 1 of 2
II. CYBERNETICS: CHAOS ENGINEERING
1. Conversation with William Gibson
2. Artificial Intelligence: Hesse's Prophetic Glass Bead Game
3. Our Brain
4. How to Boot Up Your Bio-Computer
5. Personal Computers, Personal Freedom
6. Quantum Jumps, Your Macintosh, and YouCAROLYN FERRIS II.1. Conversation with William Gibson Timothy Leary: If you could put Neuromancer into one sentence, how would you describe it?
William Gibson: What’s most important to me is that it’s about the present It’s not really about an imagined future. It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live. I’m anxious to know what they’ll make of it in Japan. Oh, God—I’m starting to feel like Edgar Rice Burroughs or something. I mean, how did Edgar Rice Burroughs finally come to feel about Tarzan in his own heart, you know? He got real tired of it. Wound up living in Tarzana, California.
TL: You’ll end up living in a space colony called Neuromancer.
WG: That would be okay. I don’t think we’re going to have this kind of future. I think this book is so much nicer than what seems to be happening. 1 mean, this would be a cool place to visit I wouldn’t mind going there.
TL: Where?
WG: To the Sprawl, to that future.
TL: Going up the well?
WG: Yeah. Go up the well and all of that. A lot of people think that Neuromancer is a bleak book, but I think it’s optimistic.
TL: I do, too.
WG: I think the future is actually gonna be more boring. I think some kind of Falwellian future would probably be my idea of the worst thing that could happen.
TL: Yeah. That was a wonderful scene where you have those Christians who were gonna mug those girls in the subway.
WG: It’s not clear whether they’re going to mug them or just try to force some horrible pamphlet on them or something.
Personally, I have a real phobia about guys like that coming up to me on the street...
TL: That’s a powerful scene! And you describe the girls as like hoofed animals wearing high heels.
WG: Yeah. The office girls of the Sprawl.
TL: Yeah, and they’re wearing vaginas, and—Oh, God! That’s a powerful scene.
WG: I like the idea of that subway. That’s the state-of-the-art subway. It goes from Atlanta to Boston, real fast.
TL: You’ve created a world.
WG: What you’re getting when you read that book—the impression is very complicated, but it’s all actually one molecule thick. Some of it is still pretty much of a mystery to me. You know, the United States is never mentioned in the book. And there’s some question as to whether the United States exists as a political entity or if, in fact, it’s been Balkanized in some weird way. That’s kind of a favorite idea of mine, that the world should be chopped up into smaller...
TL: Me too, boy.
WG: West-coast separatism and stuff. In Count Zero, 1 mention what’s happening in California a little bit. One of the characters has a girlfriend who lives in a pontoon city that’s tethered off Redondo. Kind of like a hallucinated... it’s the Sprawl goes Sausalito—the Sprawl but mellower.
At the end of Neuromancer, the entire Matrix is sentient. It has, in some ways, one will. And, as it tells Case, kind of matter-of-factly, it’s found another of its kind on Alpha Centuri or somewhere; so it’s got something to talk to. Count Zero starts seven years later, and like Yeats’s poem about how the center wouldn’t hold, this sort of God-consciousness is now fragmented. It hasn’t been able to keep it together.
Case could be one of Burroughs's wild boys... in a way. I’m deeply influenced by Burroughs.... he found ’fifties science fiction and used it like a rusty can opener on society’s jugular.
So the voodoo cultists in the Sprawl, who believe that they have contacted the voodoo pantheon through the Matrix, are in fact dealing with these fragmented elements of this God tiring. And the fragments are much more daemonic and more human, reflecting cultural expectations.
Anyway, I’ve got to do a different kind of book now, because I’m already getting some reviews saying, “Well, this is good, but it’s more of the same stuff.” I’m desperate to avoid that.
TL: Frank Herbert, who was a lovely guy, wrote a book that’s entirely different from Dune. It’s about humans who became insects up in Portland. Did you ever read it? It’s a nice change. In some ways, I like that book as much as Dune. He got into an entirely different situation.
WG: Well, he was trapped! That’s something I’m very worried about. I get flashes of “I don’t want to be Frank Herbert.” Because even as wealthy and as nice a guy as he was, I don’t think he was happy with what had happened to him creatively. He did get trapped. It’s different for somebody like Douglas Adams, where I think that the whole thing started off as such a goof for him that it was just a stroke of good luck that he built on. But Herbert was very serious, at a certain point. And then, gradually, he wound up having to do more of the same, because, I mean, how can you turn people down when something like that gets enough momentum?
TL: Douglas Adams told me that the three books were one book, and the publisher said to split them up into three. He made a million dollars on each one of them. And they’re nice. It’s a nice tour.
WG: Yeah. They’re funny.
TL: These big books...
WG: I can’t go for that.
TL: I'm glad about that. Norman Spinrad... by the way—1 love Norman. But I have a terrible problem with him. He makes them too big. Did you read Child of Fortune?
WG: It was too big for me.
TL: Yeah. If he had divided it down the center. If he could only cut it in half.
WG: He wrote a book called The Iron Dream. It’s a science-fiction novel by Adolf Hitler, in an alternate world where Hitler became a science-fiction writer. It’s a critique of the innately fascist element in a lot of traditional science fiction. Very funny. For me, given the data in the books, the keys to Case’s personality are the estrangement from his body, the meat, which it seems to me, he does overcome. People have criticized Neuromancer for not bringing Case to some kind of transcendent experience. But, in fact, I think he does have it. He has it within the construct of the beach, and he has it when he has his orgasm. There’s a long paragraph there where he accepts the meat as being this infinite and complex thing. In some ways, he’s more human alter that.
TL: In some ways he reminds me of some of Burroughs’s characters.
WG: (Equivocally) Yeah. Case could be one of Burroughs’s wild boys... in a way. I’m deeply influenced by Burroughs. I always tell everybody that there’s a very strong influence there. I didn’t think I’d be able to put that over on the American science-fiction people, because they either don’t know who Burroughs is or they’re immediately hostile... he found 'fifties science fiction and used it like a rusty can opener on society’s jugular. They never understood. But I was like 15 when I read The Naked Lunch and it sorta splattered my head all over the walls. And I have my megalomaniac fantasy of some little kid in Indiana picking up Neuromancer and pow!
TL: Well, that happens, dude. Don’t worry. There’s five hundred thousand copies already.
WG: I had to teach myself not to write too much like Burroughs. He was that kind of influence. I had to weed some of that Burroughsian stuff out of it. In an interview in London, in one of my rare lucid moments, I told this guy that the difference between what Burroughs did and what I did is that Burroughs would just glue the stuff down on the page but I airbrushed it all.
TL: Burroughs and I are close friends. We’ve been through a lot together. I went to Tangier in 1961. I was in a hotel bar and Burroughs walks in with these two beautiful English boys. I started telling him about these new drugs and, of course, he knew much more about drugs than anyone in the world! I was just this childish Harvard professor doing my big research project on drugs. And Burroughs is saying, “Oh, shit. Here they come. Boy Scouts. And they’re gonna save the world with drugs. Yeah, sure.” We brought him back to Harvard. He came to the prison project and all. I got to know him very well. He couldn’t stand us. We were much too goody-goody. It’s implied that the crowd that Case hung out with is a drug crowd.
WG: Yeah. This seems to be a world where everybody is pretty much stoned most of the time.
TL: That first chapter... whew!
WG: I had to go over and over that. I must have rewritten it a hundred and fifty times.
TL: I'll bet. It’s like a symphony or a fugue. This is the fifth line in the book: “It’s like my body developed this massive drug deficiency. It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.” (Laughs) Of course, his life was jacking in.
WG: Oh yeah. He just lives for...
TL: Cyberspace.
WG: Yeah. For cyberspace.
TL: Would you describe cyberspace as the matrix of all the hallucinations?
WG: Yeah, it’s a consensual hallucination that these people have created. It’s like, with this equipment, you can agree to share the same hallucinations. In effect, they’re creating a world. It’s not really a place, it’s not really space. It’s notional space.
TL: See, we live in that space. We that are hooked up to Neuromancer are living in that consensual hallucination.
WG: I didn’t think women would go for the Molly character very much. I’ve really been surprised at the number of women who have come up to me and said, “Molly’s great. I really got off on her.” I think America is ready for a female lead who beats the shit out of everybody.
TL: Molly says, “You like to jack in. I've gotta tussle.” That’s a beautiful two-liner.
WG: I was originally gonna call this book Jacked In. The people at Ace said it sounded too much like “jacked off,” but that was my first thought for a title. Molly’s tougher than Case because Case is the viewpoint character, and I wanted an enigmatic character; so she’s more shut off from me. It’s the symbolism of the sunglasses. He never even finds out what colour her eyes are.
TL: And making love, she says...
WG: “No fingerprints.” Yeah, she’s a tough one for me to do, because that’s some kind of image from my... She’s a bushido figure. When she says she’s street samurai, she means it quite literally. She has this code. And it may grow out of a sort of pathological personality, but it still is her code.
TL: What was that segment where she was like in hypnosis; so she didn’t know what was going on?
WG: Oh, they use a sort of sensory cut-out, so that she isn’t conscious when this stuff is happening, but her motor system was being run by a program. So, in effect, she became kind of a living sex-shop doll. Programmed. The people who write the program are in Berlin. She says, “They have some nasty shit there.”
Actually, this starts in Burning Chrome. That’s where it comes from. One of the key things in that story is when this guy realizes that his girlfriend is working in one of these places in order to buy herself an improved pair of artificial eyes. I described it a little more clearly in that story. The prostitutes aren’t conscious. They don’t remember. In Burning Chrome, the guy says the orgasms are like little silver flares right out at the edge of space, and that’s the...
TL: That’s the guy’s orgasm, not hers. She’s not even feeling it.
WG: Well, she can feel a little bit, maybe...
TL: What would you say about Riviera?
WG: Riviera is like some kind of terminal bag-person. He grows up in a radioactive pit, with cannibalism pretty much the only way to get along. It’s like Suddenly Last Summer. Ever see that? Where the guy's ripped apart by the little Mexican children? Well, Riviera is like that, a feral child. He’s smart, incredibly perverse. But all the stuff that he does—the little projected hallucinations and things—are relatively low tech. He’s just projecting holograms.
There’s this amazing German surrealist sculptor named Hans Belmer who made a piece called “The Doll.” He made a doll that was more his fetish object than a work of art, this totally idealized girlchild that could be taken apart and rearranged in an infinite number of ways. So 1 have Riviera call his piece “The Doll.” Belmer’s doll. Riviera also represents the fragmentation of the body. People see things like that, sometimes, out of the corners of their eyes.
TL: What about Armitage?
WG: He’s a synthetic personality, a character utterly lacking character. As Molly says, “This guy doesn’t do anything when he’s alone.” It’s some kind of post-Vietnam state.
TL: I can see certain Gordon Liddy qualities in Armitage.
WG: Yeah, I saw a video of his Miami Vice performance without realizing it was Liddy. When 1 saw that, I thought of Armitage. This book’s fraught with psychotics.
TL: (Laughing) You see, there are a few of us who think it’s a very positive book in spite of that.
WG: Yeah? Really? Well, I just try to reflect the world around me.
TL: I know. You’re a mirror. Yes. How about Lucas Yonderboy?
WG: Lucas Yonderboy was my reaction to the spookier and more interesting side of punk. Kind of young and enigmatic. Cool to the point of inexplicability. And he’s a member of the Panther Moderns. They’re sorta like Marshall McLuhan’s Revenge. Media monsters. It’s as though the worst street gang you ever ran into were, at the same time, intense conceptual artists. You never know what they’re going to do.
TL: What recent book have you most enjoyed?
WG: Bruce Sterling is my favorite science-fiction writer. Schismatrix is the most visionary science-fiction novel of the last twenty years or so. Humanity evolves, mutates through different forms very quickly, using genetic engineering and bio-chemistry. It’s a real mindfucker. When he first got it out and was getting the reviews back, he told me, “There are so many moving parts, people are scared to stick their heads in it.” People will be mining that, ripping off ideas for the next thirty years.
TL: Like Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: Yeah. That’s one of my personal favorites. Have you ever met Pynchon?
TL: Ohhhh... I had him tracked down and I could’ve. It was a deal where there was a People magazine reporter with an expense-paid thing. We were going to rent a car and pick up Ken Kesey. Pynchon was living up near Redding, Pennsylvania. We had him tracked there.
And I decided I didn’t want to do it. I’ve said this to many people, so I should say it to you. Your book had the same effect on me as Gravity’s Rainbow.
The way I read Gravity’s Rainbow is pretty interesting. At one point, the American government was trying to get me to talk. They were putting incredible pressure on me. This FBI guy said if I didn’t talk... “we’ll put your name out at the federal prison with the jacket of a snitch.” So I ended up in a prison called Sandstone. As soon as I got in there, there was a change of clothes and they said, “The warden wants to see you.” So the warden said, “To protect you, we’re going to put you here under a false name.” And I said, “Are you crazy? Are you gonna put me on the main line with a fake name?” And he said “Yeah.” I said, “What name are you going to give me?” He said, “Thrush.” And you know what a thrush is? A songbird. So I said, “Uh-uh. In a prison filled with dopers, everybody’s going to know that my name isn’t Thrush. I refuse to do it.” He says, “Okay. Well have to put you in the hole.” And I said “Do what you gotta do—but I want to be out there in my own name. I can handle any situation. I can deal with it. I've been in the worst fucking prisons and handled it so far. So I can handle it and you know it. So fucking put me out there!” And he said, “Sorry.” He was very embarrassed because he knew.
He was a prison warden. His job wasn’t to get people to talk or anything like that. He knew it was a federal-government thing. The reason they were trying to get me to talk was to protect the top FBI guys that had committed black-bag burglaries against the Weather Underground; so they wanted me to testify in their defense. They actually went to trial, if you remember, and got convicted, and were pardoned by Carter.
Well, they put me in the worst lockup that I've ever been in, and I'd been in solitary confinement for over a year and a half. This was just a clean box with nothing but a mattress. The only contact I had with human beings was, five times a day, I could hear somebody coming down the hall to open the “swine trough” and pass me my food. And I'd say, “Hey, can I have something to read?” And they’d say, “No.” One of the guards was this black guy and, this one night, he came back. I could hear him walking -- jingle, jingle, jingle—walking down the metal hall. He opens up the trough and says, “Here, man,” and throws in a book. A new pocketbook. And it’s dark, so I waited ’til dawn and picked it up. And it was Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: Perfect! Of all the books you could get, that’ll last you a while.
TL: You should only read that book under those circumstances. It is not a book you could...
WG: It stopped my life cold for three months. My university career went to pot, I just sort of laid around and read this thing.
TL: What I did—first of all, I just read it. I read it all day until dark when they turned the lights out. I woke up the next morning and read it. For three days, I did nothing but read that book. Then I went back and I started annotating it. I did the same thing to yours. Yours is the only book I’ve done that with since. The film industry’s never been able to do anything with Gravity’s Rainbow.
WG: It’s got eight billion times more stuff in it than Neuromancer does. It’s an encyclopedic novel.
TL: But there’s a tremendous relationship, as you well know, between Neuromancer and Pynchon. Because Pynchon is into psychology. The shit he knows about! It’s all about psychology. But you’ve taken the next step, because you’ve done that whole thing to computers. You don’t have any new drugs in Neuromancer.
WG: I’ve got the beta-phenethylamine. When that hits the street, watch out!
TL: That’s the one that makes your teeth rattle the nerves.
WG: Yeah. That’s actually a brain chemical. We all have a little bit, as we sit around the table. But you’d have to get it out of forty million people. Sort of like the Hunter Thompson story about adrenochrome. If you could eat somebody’s pineal gland, or something...
TL: That’s a very powerful drug experience that you describe, where he can feel it in his teeth.
WG: Yeah. I had a lot of fun writing that. (laughs)
TL: I know you did. I appreciate the disciplined work that went into that!
WG: Beta-phenethylamine is the chemical that the brain manufactures; when you fall in love the level rises. I didn’t know this when I wrote the book. I called Bruce Sterling in Texas, and I said, “This guy’s been modified; so he can’t do traditional stimulants. So, what can he get off on?” Bruce said (in laconic Southern drawl), “beta-phenethylamine.” It’s in the book. Beta-P. Actually, some people have called me on how I spelled this in the book. I never checked it. So I may have misspelled the name of the real brain chemical. About a month alter I finished the book, there was an article in Esquire. I think it was called, “The Chemistry of Desire.” And they talked about beta-phenethylamine, which is structurally similar to amphetamine. And it’s also present in chocolate. So there’s some possibility...
TL: Ohhh! I’m a chocolate addict. Notice last night, how the waiter automatically brought me an extra plate during dessert? They know my weakness. Double-dose Tim.
WG: Japanese kids get high on big candy bars that are just sucrose and caffeine. They eat five or six of these things and go to concerts on this massive sucrose-and-caffeine high.
TL: One of the things that’s wonderful about Neuromancer is that there is this glorious comradeship between Molly and Case. And he sings to her while she rubs her nipple and she’s talking to him and telling him.
WG: How they gonna do that in the movie? There’s no Neuromancer Part II.
TL: Case and Molly have children? WG: Son of Neuromancer. People have children in Count Zero, which was a real breakthrough for me. I was trying to up the ante. I like Count Zero better. Neuromancer, for me, is like my adolescent book. It’s my teenage book—the one I couldn’t have written when I was a teenager.
II.2. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCEIn the 1960s, Hermann Hesse was revered by college students and art rowdies as the voice of the decade. He was a megasage, bigger than Tolkien or Salinger, McLuhan or Bucky Fuller.
Hesse's mystical, utopian novels were read by millions. The popular, electrically amplified rock band Steppenwolf named themselves after Hesse's psyberdelic hero, Harry Haller, who smoked those "long, thin yellow... immeasurably enlivening and delightful" cigarettes, then zoomed around the Theatre of the Mind, ostensibly going where no fictional heroes had been before.
The movie Steppenwolf was financed by Peter Sprague, at that time the Egg King of Iran. I lost the male lead to Max Van Sydow. Rosemary's part was played by Dominique Sanda. But that story is filed in another data base.
Hesse's picaresque adventure, The Journey to the East, was a biggie too. It inspired armies of pilgrims (yours truly included) to hip-hike somewhere East of Suez, along the Hashish Trail to India. The goal of this Childlike Crusade? Enlightenment 101, an elective course.
Yes, it was that season for trendy Sufi mysticism, inner Hindu voyaging, breathless Buddhist searches for ultimate meaning. Poor Hesse, he seems out of place up here in the high-tech, cybercool, Sharp catalogue, M.B.A., upwardly mobile 1990s.
HERMANN HESSE: PROPHET OF THE COMPUTER AGE But our patronizing pity for the washed-up Swiss sage may be premature. In the avant-garde frontiers of the computer culture, around Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, around Palo Alto, in the Carnegie-Mellon A.I. labs, in the back rooms of the computer-graphics labs in Southern California, a Hesse comeback seems to be happening. This revival, however, is not connected with Hermann’s mystical, eastern writings. It’s based on his last, and least-understood work, Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game.
This book, which earned Hesse the expense-paid brain ride to Stockholm, is positioned a few centuries in the future, when human intelligence is enhanced and human culture elevated by a device for thought-processing called the glass-bead game.
Hesse's Prophetic Glass Bead Game
Up here in the Electronic Nineties we can appreciate what Hesse did at the very pinnacle (193 M2) of the smoke-stack mechanical age. He forecast with astonishing accuracy a certain postindustrial device for converting thoughts to digital elements and processing them. No doubt about it, the sage of the hippies was anticipating an electronic mind-appliance that would not appear on the consumer market until 1976.
I refer, of course, to that Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge called the Apple computer.
THE ALDOUS HUXLEY-HERMANN HESSE FUGUE I first heard of Hermann Hesse from Aldous Huxley. In the fall of 1960, Huxley was Carnegie Visiting Professor at MIT. His assignment; to give a series of seven lectures on the subject, “What a Piece of Work Is Man.” A couple thousand people attended each lecture. Aldous spent most of his off-duty hours hanging around the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research project coaching us beginners in the history of mysticism and the ceremonial care and handling of LSD, which he sometimes called “gratuitous grace.”
Huxley was reading Hesse that fall and talked a lot about Hermann’s theory of the three stages of human development.
1. The tribal sense of tropical-blissful unity,
2. The horrid polarities of the feudal-industrial societies, good-evil, male-female, Christian-Moslem, etc., and
3. The revelatory rediscovery of The Oneness of It All. No question about it, Hegel’s three authoritarian thumbprints (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) were smudged all over the construct, but Hesse and Huxley didn’t seem to worry about it; so why should we untutored Harvard psychologists?
We all dutifully set to work reading Hesse.
Huxley claimed that his own spiritual-intellectual development in England followed the developmental lifeline of Hesse in Germany. Aldous delighted in weaving together themes from his life that paralleled Hesse’s.
PARODIES OF PARADISE Huxley’s last book, Island, presents an atypical, tropical utopia in which meditation, gestalt therapy, and psychedelic ceremonies create a society of Buddhist serenity.
I spent the afternoon of November 20,1963, at Huxley’s bedside, listening carefully as the dying philosopher spoke in a soft voice about many things. He fashioned a pleasant little literary fugue as he talked about three books he called “parodies of paradise”: his own Island, Orwell’s 1984, and Hesse’s Glass Bead Game.
Aldous told me with a gentle chuckle that Big Brother, the beloved dictator of Orwell’s nightmare society, was based on Winston Churchill. “Remember Big Brother’s spell-binding rhetoric about the blood, sweat, and fears requisitioned from everyone to defeat Eurasia? The hate sessions? Priceless satire. And the hero’s name is Winston Smith.”
Aldous was, at that moment in time, fascinated by the Tibetan Book of the Dying, which 1 had just translated from Victorian English into American. The manuscript, which was later published as The Psychedelic Experience, w as used by Laura Huxley to guide her husband’s psychedelic passing.
Huxley spoke wryly of the dismal conclusions of Island, The Glass Bead Game, and Orwell’s classic. His own idealistic island society was crushed by industrial powers seeking oil. Hesse’s utopian Castalia was doomed because it was out of touch with human realities. Then the crushing of love by the power structure in 1984. Unhappy endings. I timidly asked him if he was passing on a warning or an exhortation to me. He smiled enigmatically.
Two days later Aldous Huxley died. His passing went almost unnoticed, because John F. Kennedy also died on November 22, 1963. It was a bad day for Utopians and futurists all over.
THE ONTOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF HERMANN HESSE Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in the little Swabian town of Calw, Germany, the son of Protestant missionaries. His home background and education, like Huxley’s, were intellectual, classical, idealistic. His life exemplified change and metamorphosis. If we accept Theodore Ziolkowski’s academic perception, “Hesse’s literary career parallels the development of modem literature from a fin de siecle aestheticism through expressionism to a contemporary sense of human commitment.”
VOICE OF ROMANTIC ESCAPISM, DISILLUSIONED BOHEMIAN, WAR RESISTER Hesse’s first successful novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), reflected the frivolous sentimentality of the Gay Nineties, which, like the Roaring Twenties, offered a last fun frolic to a class society about to collapse.
“From aestheticism he shifted to melancholy realism.... Hesse’s novels fictionalize the admonitions of an outsider who urges us to question accepted values, to rebel against the system, to challenge conventional ‘reality’ in the fight of higher ideals” (Ziolkowski).
In 1911 Hesse made the obligatory mystical pilgrimage to India, and there, along the Ganges, picked up the microorganisms that were later to appear in a full-blown Allen Ginsbergsonian mysticism.
In 1914 Europe convulsed with nationalism and military frenzy. Hesse, like Dr. Benjamin Spock in another time warp, became an outspoken pacifist and war resister. Two months after the “outbreak of hostilities,” he published an essay titled “0 Freunde, nicht dieser Tone” [“Oh Friends, Not These Tones”). It was an appeal to the youth of Germany, deploring the stampede to disaster. His dissenting brought him official censure and newspaper attacks. From this time on, Hesse was apparently immune to the ravages of patriotism, nationalism, and respect for authority.
PROTO-BEATNIK? PROTO-HIPPY? FATHER OF NEW-AGE PSYCHOLOGY? In 1922 Hesse wrote Siddhartha, his story of a Kerouac-Snyder manhood spent “on the road to Benares” performing feats of detached, amused, sexy one-upmanship.
In the June 1986 issue of Playboy, the Islamic yogic master and basketball superstar Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (“noble and powerful servant of Allah”) summarized with his legendary cool the life stages he had experienced, using bead-game fugue techniques to weave together the strands of his biography: basketball, racism, religion, drugs, sex, jazz, politics. “In my senior year in high school,” says Abdul-Jabbar, “1 started reading everything I could get my hands on—Hindu texts, Upanishads, Zen, Hermann Hesse—you name it”
Playboy: “What most impressed you?”
Abdul-Jabbar: “Hesse’s Siddhartha. I was then going through the same things that Siddhartha went through in his adolescence, and I identified with his rebellion against established precepts of love and life. Siddhartha becomes an aesthetic man, a wealthy man, a sensuous man—he explores all these different worlds and doesn’t find enlightenment in any of them. That was the book’s great message to me; so I started to develop my own value system as to what was good and what wasn’t.”
Steppenwolf (1927), observes Ziolkowski, was greeted as a “psychedelic orgy of sex, drugs, and jazz.” Other observers with a more historic perspective (present company included) have seen Steppenwolf as a final send up of the solemn polarities of the industrial age. Hesse mocks the Freudian conflicts, Nietzschean torments, the Jungian polarities, the Hegelian machineries of European civilization.
Harry Haller enters “The Magic Theatre. Price of Admission: Your Mind.” First he engages in a “Great Automobile Hunt,” a not too subtle rejection of the sacred symbol of the industrial age. Behind the door marked “Guidance in the Building-Up of the Personality. Success Guaranteed!” H. H. learns to play a post-Freudian video game in which the pixels are part of the personality. “We can demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.”
This last sentence precisely states the basis for the many postindustrial religions of self-actualization. You learn how to put together the elements of your self in what order pleases you! Then press the advance key to continue.
The mid-life crisis of the Steppenwolf, his overheated Salinger inner conflicts, his Woody Allen despairs, his unsatisfied Norman Mailer longings, are dissolved in a whirling kaleidoscope of quick-flashing neurorealities. “I knew,” gasps H. H., “that all the hundred pieces of life’s game were in my pocket... One day 1 w ould be a better hand at the game.”
THE CLASS-BEAD CAME CONVERTS THOUGHTS TO ELEMENTS What do you do after you’ve reduced the heavy, massive boulder-like thoughts of your mechanical culture to elements? If you’re a student of physics or chemistry you rearrange the fissioned bits and pieces into new combinations. Synthetic chemistry of the mind. Hesse was hanging out in Basel, home of Paracelsus. Alchemy 101. Solve et coagule. Recompose them in new combinations. You become a master of the bead game. Let the random-number generator shuffle your thought-deck and deal out some new hands!
Understandably, Hesse never gives a detailed description of this pre-electronic data-processing appliance called the bead game. But he does explain its function. Players learned how to convert decimal numbers, musical notes, words, thoughts, images into elements, glass beads that could be strung in endless abacus combinations and rhythmic- fugue sequences to create a higher level language of clarity, purity, and ultimate complexity.
A GLOBAL LANGUAGE BASED ON DIGITAL UNITS Hesse described the game as “a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and interfacing of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics.”
In time, wrote Hesse, “the Game of games had developed into a kind of universal language through which the players could express values and set these in relation to one another.”
In the beginning the game was designed, constructed, and continually updated by a guild of mathematicians called Castalia. Later generations of hackers used the game for educational, intellectual, and aesthetic purposes. Eventually the game became a global science of mind, an indispensable method for clarifying thoughts and communicating them precisely.
Hesse, of course, was not the first to anticipate digital thought-processing Around 6oo B.C. the Greek Pythagoras (music of the spheres) and the Chinese Lao (yin-yang) Tse were speculating that all reality and knowledge could and should be expressed in the play of binary numbers.
... We reencounter here the age-long dream of philosophers, visionary poets, and linguists of a universitas, a synthesis of all knowledge, the ultimate data base of ideas, a global language of mathematical precision.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER Hesse, of course, was not the first to anticipate digital thought-processing. Around 600 B.C. the Greek Pythagoras (music of the spheres) and the Chinese Lao (yin-yang) -tzu were speculating that all reality and knowledge could and should be expressed in the play of binary numbers. In 1832 a young Englishman, George Boole, developed an algebra of symbolic logic. In the next decade Charles Babbage and Ada Countess Lovelace worked on the analytic thought-engine. A century later, exactly when Hesse was constructing his “game” in Switzerland, the brilliant English logician Alan Turing was writing about machines that could simulate human thinking. A.I.—artificial intelligence.
Hesse’s unique contribution, however, was not technical, but social. Forty-five years before Toffler and Naisbitt, Hesse predicted the emergence of an information culture. In The Glass Bead Game Hesse presents a sociology of computing. With the rich detail of a World-Cup novelist (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature with this book) he describes the emergence of a utopian subculture centered around the use of digital mind-appliances.
Hesse then employs his favorite appliance, parody (psyber-farce), to raise the disturbing question of the class division between the computer hip and the computer illiterate. The electronic elite versus the rag-and-glue proles with their hand-operated Coronas. The dangers of a two-tier society of the information rich and the information have-nots.
GLORIFICATION OF THE CASTALIAN HACKER CULTURE The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, whom we meet as a brilliant grammar-school student about to be accepted into the Castalian brotherhood and educated in the intricacies of the authorized thought-processing system. The descriptions of Castalia are charmingly pedantic. The reverent reader is awed by the sublime beauty of the system and the monk-like dedication of the adepts.
The scholarly narrator explains:
This Game of games... has developed into a kind of universal speech, through the medium of which the players are able to express values in lucid symbols and to place them in relation to each other... A game can originate, for example, from a given astronomical configuration, a theme from a Bach fugue, a phrase of Leibnitz or from the Upanishads, and the fundamental idea awakened can be built up and enriched through assonances to relative concepts. While a moderate beginner can, through these symbols, formulate parallels between a piece of classical music and the formula of a natural law, the adept and Master of the Game can lead the opening theme into the freedom of boundless combinations.
In this last sentence, Hesse describes the theory of digital computing. The wizard programmer can convert any idea, thought, or number into binary-number chains that can be sorted into all kinds of combinations. We reencounter here the age-long dream of philosophers, visionary poets, and linguists of a universitas, a synthesis of all knowledge, the ultimate data base of ideas, a global language of mathematical precision.
Hesse understood that a language based on mathematical elements need not be cold, impersonal, rote. Reading The Glass Bead Game we share the enthusiasm of today’s hacker-visionaries who know that painting, composing, writing, designing, innovating with clusters of electrons (beads?) offers much more creative freedom than expressions limited to print on paper, chemical paints smeared on canvas, or acoustic (i.e., mechanical-unchangeable) sounds.
HESSE’S GOLDEN AGE OF MIND In the Golden Age of Chemistry scholar-scientists learned how to dissolve molecules and to recombine the freed elements into endless new structures. Indeed, only by precise manipulation of the play of interacting elements could chemists fabricate the marvels that have so changed our world.
In the Golden Age of Physics, physicists, both theoretical and experimental, learned how to fission atoms and to recombine the freed particles into new elemental structures. In The Glass Bead Game Hesse portrays a Golden Age of Mind. The knowledge-information programmers of Castalia, like chemists and physicists, dissolve thought molecules into elements (beads) and weave them into new patterns.
In his poem, “The Last Glass Bead Game,” Hesse’s hero Joseph Knecht writes, “We draw upon the iconography... that sings like crystal constellations.”
TECHNOLOGY INVENTS IDEOLOGY Hesse apparently anticipated McLuhan’s First Law of Communication: The medium is the message. The technology you use to package, store, communicate your thoughts defines the limits of your thinking. Your choice of thought tool determines the limitations of your thinking. If your thought technology is words-carved-into-marble, let’s face it, you’re not going to be a light-hearted flexible thinker. An oil painting or a wrinkled papyrus in a Damascus library cannot communicate the meaning of a moving-picture film. New thought technology creates new ideas. The printing press created national languages, the national state, literacy, the industrial age. Television, like it or not, has produced a global thought-processing very different from oral and literate cultures.
Understanding the power of technology, Hesse tells us that the new mind culture of Castalia was based on a tangible mental device, a thought machine, “a frame modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colours.”
Please do not be faked out by the toy-like simplicity of this device. Hesse has changed the units of meaning, the vocabulary of thought This is serious stuff. Once you have defined the units of thought in terms of mathematical elements you’ve introduced a major mutation in the intelligence of your culture.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE GAME The glass-bead appliance was first used by musicians: “The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time values of the notes.”
A bare two or three decades later the game was taken over by mathematicians. For a long while indeed, a characteristic feature of the game’s history was that it was constantly preferred, used, and further elaborated by whatever branch of learning happened to be experiencing a period of high development or a renaissance.
At various times the game was taken up and imitated by nearly all the scientific and scholarly disciplines. The analytic study of musical values had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and mathematical formulae. Soon afterward, philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic configurations as physics measures processes in nature. The visual arts soon followed suit. Each discipline that seized upon the game created its own language of formulae, abbreviations, and possible combinations.
It would lead us too far afield to attempt to describe in detail how the world of mind, after its purification, won a place for itself in the state. Supervision of the things of the mind among the people and in government came to be consigned more and more to the intellectuals. This was especially the case with the educational system.
INTIMATIONS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND ALIENATED HACKERS “The mathematicians brought the game to a high degree of flexibility and capacity for sublimation, so that it began to acquire something of a consciousness of itself and its possibilities ” (emphasis mine).
In this last phrase, Hesse premonitors Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s nightmare about neurotic artificial intelligence:
"Open the pod doors, HAL"
"Sorry about that, Dave. This mission is too important to be threatened by human error."
Hesse tells us that the first generations of computer adepts created a “hacker culture,” an elite sect of knowledge processors who lived within the constructions of their own minds, disdaining the outside society. Then Hesse, with uncanny insight, describes the emergence of a phenomenon that has now become the fad in the information sciences.
THE ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE CULT By 1984 billions of dollars were being spent in Japan (the so-called Fifth Generation projects), in America, and in Europe to develop artificial-intelligence programs. Those nations that already suffer from a serious intelligence deficit—Soviet Eurasia and the third-world nations—seem to be left out of this significant development.
The aim of A.I. projects is to develop enormously complicated smart machines that can reason, deduce, and make decisions more efficiently than “human beings.”
The megabuck funding comes from large bureaucracies, federal, corporate, the military, banks, insurance firms, oil companies, space agencies, medical-hospital networks. The mental tasks performed by the A.I. machineries include:
• Expert systems that provide processed information and suggest decisions based on correlating enormous amounts of data. Here the computers perform, at almost the speed of light, the work of armies of clerks and technicians.
• Voice-recognition programs; the computer recognizes instructions given in spoken languages.
• Robotry.
A.I. has become the buzzword among investors in the computer industry. There seems little doubt that reasoning programs and robots will play increasingly important roles in Western society, and, of course, Japan.
Just as the bead game became the target of outside criticism, so has there been much grumbling about the A.I. movement Some have asserted that the very term “artificial intelligence” is an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms, like “military intelligence.”
Other critics point out that A.I. programs have little to do with individual human beings. These megamillion-dollar machines cannot be applied to solve personal problems, to help Ashley get a date on Friday night, to help Dieadra’s problem with self-esteem. A.I. systems are designed to think like super-committees of experts. Remember the decision that it was cheaper to pay off a few large injury/death claims than to change the position of the gas tank on the Ford? Recall those Pentagon figures about “tolerable loss of civilian lives in a nuclear war”? That’s why many feel that these toys of top management are more artificial than intelligent.
As it turns out, our HAL paranoias are exaggerated. Computers will not replace real people. They will replace middle- and low-level bureaucrats. They will replace you only to the extent that you use artificial (rather than natural) intelligence in your life and work. If you think like a bureaucrat, a functionary, a manager, an unquestioning member of a large organization, or a chess player, beware: You may soon be out-thought!
NATURAL INTELLIGENCE Humanists in the computer culture claim that there is only one form of intelligence—natural intelligence, brain power which resides in the skulls of individual human beings. This wetware is genetically wired and experientially programmed to manage the personal affairs of one person, the owner, and to exchange thoughts with others.
All thought-processing tools—hand-operated pencils, printed books, electronic computers—can be used as extensions of natural intelligence. They are appliances for packaging, storing, communicating ideas: mirrors that reflect back what the user has thought As Douglas Hofstadter put it in Godel, Escher, Back “The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself.” And that power, Hesse and McLuhan, is determined by the thought tool used by the culture.
Individual human beings can be controlled, managed by thinking machines—computers or bead games-only to the extent that they voluntarily choose to censor their own independent thinking.
MAGISTER LUDI BEGINS TO QUESTION AUTHORITY In the last chapters of The Glass Bead Game the hero, Joseph Knecht, has risen to the highest post in the Castalian order. He is “Magister Ludi, Master of the Glass Bead Game.”
The game, by this time, has become a global artificial-intelligence system that runs the educational system, the military, science, engineering, mathematics, physics, linguistics, and above all, aesthetics. The great cultural ceremonies are public thought games watched with fascination by the populace.
At this moment of triumph the Mind Master begins to have doubts. He worries about the two-tier society in which the Castalian “computer” elite run the mind games of society, far removed from the realities of human life. The Castalians, we recall, have dedicated themselves totally to the life of the mind, renouncing power, money, family, individuality. A Castalian is the perfect “organization man,” a monk of the new religion of artificial intelligence. Knecht is also concerned about the obedience, the loss of individual choice.
Hesse seems to be sending warning signals that are relevant to the situation in 1986.
First, he suggests that human beings tend to center their religions on the thought-processing device their culture uses.... Second, control of the thought-processing machinery means control of society. The underlying antiestablishment tone of The Glass Be d Game must surely have caught the attention of George Orwell, another prophet of the information society.... Third, Hesse suggests that the emergence of new intelligence machines will create new religions.
Computers will not replace real people. They will replace middle- and low-level bureaucrats. They will replace you only to the extent that you use artificial (rather than natural) intelligence in your life and work. Ii you think like a bureaucrat, a functionary, a manager, an unquestioning member of a large organization, or a chess player, beware: You may soon be out-thought! Hesse seems to be sending warning signals that are relevant to the situation in 1986. First, he suggests that human beings tend to center their religions on the thought-processing device their culture uses. The word of God has to come though normal channels or it won’t be understood, from the stone tablet of Moses to the mass-produced industrial product that is the “Good Book” of fundamentalist Christians and Moslems.
Second, control of the thought-processing machinery means control of society. The underlying antiestablishment tone of The Glass Bead Game must surely have caught the attention of George Orwell, another prophet of the information society. Like Joseph Knecht, Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, works in the Ministry of Truth, reprogramming the master data base of history. Smith is enslaved by the information tyranny from which Hesse’s hero tries to escape.
Third, Hesse suggests that the emergence of new intelligence machines will create new religions. The Castalian order is reminiscent of the mediaeval monastic cults, communities of hackers with security clearances, who knew the machine language, Latin, and who created and guarded the big mainframe illuminated manuscripts located in the palaces of bishops and dukes.
Most important, Hesse indicated the appropriate response of the individual who cannot accept the obedience and self-renunciation demanded by the artificial-intelligence priesthood.
TO ACT AS MY HEART AND REASON COMMAND After some hundred pages of weighty introspection and confessional conversation, Joseph Knecht resigns his post as the high priest of artificial intelligence and heads for a new life as an individual in the “real world.”
He explains his “awakening” in a letter to the Order. After thirty years of major-league thought-processing, Knecht has come to the conclusion that organizations maintain themselves by rewarding obedience with privilege! With the blinding force of a mystical experience Knecht suddenly sees that the Castalian A.I. community “had been infected by the characteristic disease of elitehood—hubris, conceit, class arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitiveness... ”!
And, irony of all irony, the member of such a thought-processing bureaucracy “often suffers from a severe lack of insight into his place in the structure of the nation, his place in the world and world history.” Before we in the sophisticated 1980s rush to smile at such platitudes about bureaucratic myopia and greed, we should remember that Hesse wrote this book during the decade when Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were terrorizing Europe with totalitarianism. The cliche Athenian-democratic maxim “think for yourself; question authority” was decidedly out of fashion, even in civilized countries like Switzerland.
Gentle consideration for the touchiness of the times was, we assume, the reason why Hesse, the master of parody, leads his timid readers with such a slow, formal tempo to the final confrontation between Alexander, the president of the Order, and the dissident game master. In his most courteous manner Knecht explains to Alexander that he will not accept obediently the “decision from above.”
The president gasps in disbelief. And we can imagine most of the thought-processing elite of Europe, the professors, the intellectuals, the linguists, the literary critics, and news editors joining Alexander when he sputters, “not prepared to accept obediently... an unalterable decision from above? Have 1 heard you aright, Magister?”
Later, Alexander asks in a low voice, “And how do you act now?”
“As my heart and reason command,” replies Joseph Knecht.