blog 005: what the dormouse said

we take airplanes to ecology conferences.. and other contradictions in STEM



what the dormouse said is a nonfiction book by john markoff which hastily chronicles the transition from mainframe computers that solved problems to personal computers that can store information and communicate with other computers. markoff identifies protest, psychoactive drugs, counterculture communities, and a general sense of anarchic idealism as the defining features of the 1960s which helped forge the computer technologies that we take for granted today. basically the decade-defining bay area antics that trickled eastward via music, sex, drugs.. and the fearmongering about those things. it should also be noted that pretty much all American technological innovation was paid for— and used by— the mother of all venture capital firms: the department of defense.



electrical engineer + inventor of the computer mouse, william english (1963)

dormouse answers the "Who"s, "How"s, and "Why"s about the development of personal computer work stations with SCREENS and KEYBOARDS and MOUSES and (eventually) GUIs that could (eventually) communicate with one another via ARPAnet and either augment your brain (a computer has "memory" for you to use, so it can act like a secretary or a file cabinet) or replicate/replace the brain via artifical intelligence (this is a longstanding divide within the AI community). one of my personal heroes, claude shannon, published a paper proposing a computer that could face a human in chess in 1949. around the same time, alan turing delivered an algorithm on paper capable of playing chess (hardware was not yet mature) and in 1957 Turing's work was realized by IBM engineer Alex Bernstein on the IBM 704; it took about eight minutes per move. dormouse starts in February of 1960 and hardly looks back.

dormouse centers the lives of early designers and engineers (Douglas Englebart, William English, Alan Kay, Fred Moore, Stewart Brand, John McCarthy, Larry Tessler... even herman miller) and the details surrounding their innovations at SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) and PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center). dormouse is dense and unorganized, so it reads as vignettes of peoples' lives and pivotal ideas rather than a textbook account of personal computer history. markoff also covers the origins of proto-silicon valley hacker stereotypes: hackers owned the night back when computers were on a time sharing system.. they also did drugs, pulled pranks, and took interest in electronic music.. sounds like a few of my mutuals.. o_O



when i saw the title of the book, i thought it was merely a cheeky symbol of psychedelia (alice in wonderland; jefferson airplane) but a few chapters in i understood that it specifically recalls the contradictions unique code of logic that alice faces in wonderland— much of American STEM life is indeed fantastical (USA research labs and companies are a hotbed of tech innovation...) but it's fraught with contradiction: in the "free speech capital of the world," we are censored, monitored, and punished for criticizing our country's defense industry in college campuses and research labs. curiouser and curiouser..

many of the main players of early personal computers:





my favorite part about dormouse involved Stewart Brand's whole earth catalog and computer lib, dream machines which Ted Nelson modeled after Whole Earth Catalog. there was a concerted effort to teach non-tech people about computers as a means of survival and expression, because a few people recognized that computers had the power to be a huge part of our everyday lives.. such a remarkably prescient and ever-relevant body of work that champions decentralization and access to information. Whole Earth Catalog not only tickles (and funds) early inklings about free tools and information that later spawned the open source software movement, but all of computer history thereafter. steve jobs referred to Whole Earth Catalog as "Google, 35 years before Google"..

anne hero will always mourn the loss of computer literacy courses in elementary and middle school— students need those skills more than ever! we are losing the opportunity to learn the anatomy of our computers under the guise of streamlined access.


afterthoughts TW: death—

in a very simplistic sense, STEM is divided into practices that hurt or help people.

my background is in mechanical engineering, so i saw myself in the anecdotes of the engineers who resisted the military, or maintained ambivalence towards taking pentagon research money while getting high with hippies on grass lawns. no matter how progressive engineers are in their personal lives, their techonological contributions have been used to surveil and destruct, both domestically and abroad. wracked with guilt, some of these engineers went on to build off-grid communes, donate their fortunes, fund their peers' grassroots projects, etc.

on the topic of pentagon-funded endeavors, even seemingly innocuous NASA is a government appendage that shares a funding with the Department of Defense (2023: NASA received $25.4 billion from the US goverment compared to $857.9 billion given to the DOD). on top of that, NASA's scraps get shared with space & planetary researchers abroad due to the fact that our small sliver of DOD funding dwarfs other countries' entire space budgets. anne hero used to work in aerospace, but all of this funding information is public. the numbers are truly astonishing...

my university's mechanical engineering department was functionally a feeder program for lockheed martin missles and fire control (and it's companion or competing companies), so our maker spaces and classrooms were funded by lockheed, harris, northop, raytheon... i know plenty of mechanical engineers who enjoy the benefits and security that comes with manufacturing death abroad. i've always known i could never get involved with all that.

without assigning a value to these engineers, many of them rationalize their career choices by thinking, "well, this is just the controller for the missile; i'm not working on the part that denotates. i'm not doing anything wrong." this country deliberately grooms people to enter the military so i don't think it would be productive to call the people that fall for it "stupid" or "evil," although some of these guys are enthusiastic about war dead black and brown people.

i assume it's very easy for defense industry engineers to remain objective when your work is abstracted via blackbox and simulation. the philosophy behind how evil engineering can be.. is something that our engineering degrees don't let us think about; we aren't given the tools to psychologically reckon with designing efficient ways to kill people. this is likely an artifact of university administration combatting 1960's anti-war demonstrations.

i don't think it's a stretch to say that anyone making a lot of money in the USA is in some capacity feeding the engine of the imperial core, no matter how progressive their politics are. as the class divide deepens, maybe the best thing we can do is look out for each other via mutual aid and sharing access to resources.


-AH



8 august 2024