Hooking Up (9 page)
The day one of the Valley’s new firms, Eagle Computer, Inc., sprang its IPO, investors went for it like the answer to a dream. At the close of trading on the stock market, the company’s forty-year-old CEO, Dennis Barnhart, was suddenly worth 9 million. Four and a half hours
later he and a pal took his Ferrari out for a little romp, hung their hides out over the edge, lost control on a curve in Los Gatos, and went through a guardrail, and Barnhart was killed. Naturally, that night people in the business could talk of very little else. One of the best-known CEOS in the Valley said, “It’s the dark side of the Force.” He said it without a trace of irony, and his friends nodded in contemplation. They had no term for it, but they knew exactly what Force he meant.
later he and a pal took his Ferrari out for a little romp, hung their hides out over the edge, lost control on a curve in Los Gatos, and went through a guardrail, and Barnhart was killed. Naturally, that night people in the business could talk of very little else. One of the best-known CEOS in the Valley said, “It’s the dark side of the Force.” He said it without a trace of irony, and his friends nodded in contemplation. They had no term for it, but they knew exactly what Force he meant.
T
he scene was the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan, in an auditorium so postmodern it made your teeth vibrate. In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students. The occasion was the opening of a show of the work of four of the greatest American illustrators of the twentieth century: Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, and James McMullan, the core of New York’s fabled Pushpin Studio. The show was titled
Pushpin and Beyond: The Celebrated Studio That Transformed Graphic Design.
Up on the stage, aglow with global fame, the Americans had every reason to feel terrific about themselves.
he scene was the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan, in an auditorium so postmodern it made your teeth vibrate. In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students. The occasion was the opening of a show of the work of four of the greatest American illustrators of the twentieth century: Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, and James McMullan, the core of New York’s fabled Pushpin Studio. The show was titled
Pushpin and Beyond: The Celebrated Studio That Transformed Graphic Design.
Up on the stage, aglow with global fame, the Americans had every reason to feel terrific about themselves.
Seated facing them was an interpreter. The Suntory’s director began his introduction in Japanese, then paused for the interpreter’s English translation:
“Our guests today are a group of American artists from the Manual Age.”
Now the director was speaking again, but his American guests were
no longer listening. They were too busy trying to process his opening line.
The Manual Age … the Manual Age …
The phrase ricocheted about inside their skulls … bounced off their pyramids of Betz, whistled through their corpora callosa, and lodged in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of their brains.
no longer listening. They were too busy trying to process his opening line.
The Manual Age … the Manual Age …
The phrase ricocheted about inside their skulls … bounced off their pyramids of Betz, whistled through their corpora callosa, and lodged in the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of their brains.
All at once they got it. The hundreds of young Japanese staring at them from the auditorium seats saw them not as visionaries on the cutting edge … but as woolly old mammoths who had somehow wandered into the Suntory Museum from out of the mists of a Pliocene past … a lineup of relics unaccountably still living, still breathing, left over from …
the Manual Age
!
the Manual Age
!
Marvelous. I wish I had known Japanese and could have talked to all those students as they scrutinized the primeval spectacle before them. They were children of the dawn of—need one spell it out?—the Digital Age. Manual, “freehand” illustrations? How brave of those old men to have persevered, having so little to work with. Here and now in the Digital Age illustrators used—what else?—the digital computer. Creating images from scratch? What a quaint old term, “from scratch,” and what a quaint old notion … In the Digital Age, illustrators “morphed” existing pictures into altered forms on the digital screen. The very concept of postmodernity was based on the universal use of the digital computer … whether one was morphing illustrations or synthesizing music or sending rocket probes into space or achieving, on the Internet, instantaneous communication and information retrieval among people all over the globe. The world had shrunk, shrinkwrapped in an electronic membrane. No person on earth was more than six mouse clicks away from any other. The Digital Age was fast rendering national boundaries and city limits and other old geographical notions obsolete. Likewise, regional markets, labor pools, and industries. The world was now unified … online. There remained only one “region,” and its name was the Digital Universe.
Out of that fond belief has come the concept of convergence.
Or perhaps I should say out of that
faith,
since the origin of the concept is religious; Roman Catholic, to be specific. The term itself, “convergence,”
as used here in the Digital Age, was coined by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Another ardent Roman Catholic, Marshall McLuhan, broadcast the message throughout the intellectual world and gave the Digital Universe its first and most memorable name: “the global village.” Thousands of dot-com dreamers are now busy amplifying the message without the faintest idea where it came from.
faith,
since the origin of the concept is religious; Roman Catholic, to be specific. The term itself, “convergence,”
as used here in the Digital Age, was coined by a Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Another ardent Roman Catholic, Marshall McLuhan, broadcast the message throughout the intellectual world and gave the Digital Universe its first and most memorable name: “the global village.” Thousands of dot-com dreamers are now busy amplifying the message without the faintest idea where it came from.
Teilhard de Chardin—usually referred to by the first part of his last name, Teilhard, pronounced TAY-yar—was one of those geniuses who, in Nietzsche’s phrase (and as in Nietzsche’s case), were doomed to be understood only after their deaths. Teilhard, died in 1955. It has taken the current Web mania, nearly half a century later, for this romantic figure’s theories to catch fire. Born in 1881, he was the second son among eleven children in the family of one of the richest landowners in France’s Auvergne region. As a young man he experienced three passionate callings: the priesthood, science, and Paris. He was the sort of worldly priest European hostesses at the turn of the century died for: tall, dark, and handsome, and aristocratic on top of that, with beautifully tailored black clerical suits and masculinity to burn. His athletic body and ruddy complexion he came by honestly, from the outdoor life he led as a paleontologist in archaeological digs all over the world. And the way that hard, lean, weathered face of his would break into a confidential smile when he met a pretty woman—by all accounts, every other woman in
le monde
swore she would be the one to separate this glamorous Jesuit from his vows.
le monde
swore she would be the one to separate this glamorous Jesuit from his vows.
For Teilhard also had glamour to burn, three kinds of it. At the age of thirty-two he had been the French star of the most sensational archaeological find of all time, the Piltdown man, the so-called missing link in the evolution of ape to man, in a dig near Lewes, England, led by the Englishman Charles Dawson. One year later, when World War I broke out, Teilhard refused the chance to serve as a chaplain in favor of going to the front as a stretcher bearer rescuing the wounded in the midst of combat. He was decorated for bravery in that worst-of-allinfantry-wars’ bloodiest battles: Ypres, Artois, Verdun, Villers-Cotterêts, and the Marne. Meantime, in the lulls between battles he had begun
writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.
writing the treatise with which he hoped to unify all of science and all of religion, all of matter and all of spirit, heralding God’s plan to turn all the world, from inert rock to humankind, into a single sublime Holy Spirit.
“With the evolution of Man,” he wrote, “a new law of Nature has come into force—that of convergence.” Biological evolution had created step one, “expansive convergence.” Now, in the twentieth century, by means of technology, God was creating “compressive convergence.” Thanks to technology, “the hitherto scattered” species
Homo sapiens
was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.”
Homo sapiens
was being united by a single “nervous system for humanity,” a “living membrane,” a single “stupendous thinking machine,” a unified consciousness that would cover the earth like “a thinking skin,” a “noösphere,” to use Teilhard’s favorite neologism. And just what technology was going to bring about this convergence, this noosphere? On this point, in later years, Teilhard was quite specific: radio, television, the telephone, and “those astonishing electronic computers, pulsating with signals at the rate of hundreds of thousands a second.”
One can think whatever one wants about Teilhard’s theology, but no one can deny his stunning prescience. When he died in 1955, television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a computer you could buy ready-made. Computers were huge, hellishly expensive, made-to-order machines as big as a suburban living room and bristling with vacuum tubes that gave off an unbearable heat. Since the microchip and the microprocessor had not yet been invented, no one was even speculating about a personal computer in every home, much less about combining the personal computer with the telephone to create an entirely new medium of communication. Half a century ago, only Teilhard foresaw what is now known as the Internet.
What Teilhard’s superiors in the Society of Jesus and the Church hierarchy thought about it all in the 1920s, however, was not much. The plain fact was that Teilhard accepted the Darwinian theory of evolution. He argued that biological evolution had been nothing more than God’s first step in an infinitely grander design. Nevertheless, he accepted it. When Teilhard had first felt his call to the priesthood, it had
been during the intellectually liberal papacy of Leo XIII. But by the 1920s the pendulum had swung back within the Church, and evolutionism was not acceptable in any guise. At this point began the central dilemma, the great sorrow—the tragedy, I am tempted to say—of this remarkable man’s life. A priest was not allowed to put anything into public print without his superiors’ approval. Teilhard’s dilemma was precisely the fact that science and religion were not unified. As a scientist, he could not bear to disregard scientific truth; and in his opinion, as a man who had devoted decades to paleontology, the theory of evolution was indisputably correct. At the same time he could not envision a life lived outside the Church.
been during the intellectually liberal papacy of Leo XIII. But by the 1920s the pendulum had swung back within the Church, and evolutionism was not acceptable in any guise. At this point began the central dilemma, the great sorrow—the tragedy, I am tempted to say—of this remarkable man’s life. A priest was not allowed to put anything into public print without his superiors’ approval. Teilhard’s dilemma was precisely the fact that science and religion were not unified. As a scientist, he could not bear to disregard scientific truth; and in his opinion, as a man who had devoted decades to paleontology, the theory of evolution was indisputably correct. At the same time he could not envision a life lived outside the Church.
God knew there were plenty of women who were busy envisioning it for him. Teilhard’s longest, closest, tenderest relationship was with an American sculptress named Lucile Swan. Lovely little Mrs. Swan was in her late thirties and had arrived in Peking in 1929 on the China leg of a world tour aimed at diluting the bitterness of her recent breakup with her husband. Teilhard was in town officially to engage in some major archaeological digs in China and had only recently played a part in discovering the second great “missing link,” the Peking man. In fact, the Church had exiled him from Europe for fear he would ply his evolutionism among priests and other intellectuals. Lucile Swan couldn’t get over him. He was the right age, forty-eight, a celebrated scientist, a war hero, and the most gorgeous white man in Peking. The crowning touch of glamour was his brave, doomed relationship with his own church. She had him over to her house daily “for tea.” In addition to her charms, which were many, she seems also to have offered an argument aimed at teasing him out of the shell of celibacy. In effect, the Church was forsaking him because he had founded his own new religion. Correct? Since it was his religion, couldn’t he have his priests do anything he wanted them to do? When she was away, he wrote her letters of great tenderness and longing. “For the very reason that you are such a treasure to me, dear Lucile,” he wrote at one point, “I ask you not to build too much of your life on me … Remember, whatever
sweetness I force myself not to give you, I do in order to be worthy of you.”
sweetness I force myself not to give you, I do in order to be worthy of you.”
The final three decades of his life played out with the same unvarying frustration. He completed half a dozen books, including his great work,
The Phenomenon of Man
. The Church allowed him to publish none of it and kept him in perpetual exile from Europe and his beloved Paris. His only pleasure and ease came from the generosity of women, who remained attracted to him even in his old age. In 1953, two years before his death, he suffered one especially cruel blow. It was discovered that the Piltdown man had been, in fact, a colossal hoax pulled off by Charles Dawson, who had hidden various doctored ape and human bones like Easter eggs for Teilhard and others to find. He was in an acute state of depression when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-four, still in exile. His final abode was a dim little room in the Hotel Fourteen on East Sixtieth Street in Manhattan, with a single window looking out on a filthy air shaft composed, in part, of a blank exterior wall of the Copacabana nightclub.
The Phenomenon of Man
. The Church allowed him to publish none of it and kept him in perpetual exile from Europe and his beloved Paris. His only pleasure and ease came from the generosity of women, who remained attracted to him even in his old age. In 1953, two years before his death, he suffered one especially cruel blow. It was discovered that the Piltdown man had been, in fact, a colossal hoax pulled off by Charles Dawson, who had hidden various doctored ape and human bones like Easter eggs for Teilhard and others to find. He was in an acute state of depression when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of seventy-four, still in exile. His final abode was a dim little room in the Hotel Fourteen on East Sixtieth Street in Manhattan, with a single window looking out on a filthy air shaft composed, in part, of a blank exterior wall of the Copacabana nightclub.
Not a word of his great masterwork had ever been published, and yet Teilhard had enjoyed a certain shady eminence for years. Some of his manuscripts had circulated among his fellow Jesuits,
sub rosa, sotto voce
, in a Jesuit
samizdat.
In Canada he was a frequent topic of conversation at St. Michael’s, the Roman Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Immediately following his death, his Paris secretary, Jeanne Mortier, to whom he had left his papers, began publishing his writings in a steady stream, including
The Phenomenon of Man
. No one paid closer attention to this gusher of Teilhardiana than a forty-four-year-old St. Michael’s teaching fellow named Marshall McLuhan, who taught English literature. McLuhan was already something of a campus star at the University of Toronto when Teilhard died. He had dreamed up an extracurricular seminar on popular culture and was drawing packed houses as he held forth on topics such as the use of sex in advertising, a
discourse that had led to his first book,
The Mechanical Bride
, in 1951. He was a tall, slender man, handsome in a lairdly Scottish way, who played the droll don to a T, popping off deadpan three-liners-not oneliners but three-liners—peopie couldn’t forget.
sub rosa, sotto voce
, in a Jesuit
samizdat.
In Canada he was a frequent topic of conversation at St. Michael’s, the Roman Catholic college of the University of Toronto. Immediately following his death, his Paris secretary, Jeanne Mortier, to whom he had left his papers, began publishing his writings in a steady stream, including
The Phenomenon of Man
. No one paid closer attention to this gusher of Teilhardiana than a forty-four-year-old St. Michael’s teaching fellow named Marshall McLuhan, who taught English literature. McLuhan was already something of a campus star at the University of Toronto when Teilhard died. He had dreamed up an extracurricular seminar on popular culture and was drawing packed houses as he held forth on topics such as the use of sex in advertising, a
discourse that had led to his first book,
The Mechanical Bride
, in 1951. He was a tall, slender man, handsome in a lairdly Scottish way, who played the droll don to a T, popping off deadpan three-liners-not oneliners but three-liners—peopie couldn’t forget.
One time I asked him how it was that Pierre Trudeau managed to stay in power as Prime Minister through all the twists and turns of Canadian politics. Without even the twitch of a smile McLuhan responded, “It’s simple. He has a French name, he thinks like an Englishman, and he looks like an Indian. We all feel very guilty about the Indians here in Canada.”
Another time I was in San Francisco doing stories on both McLuhan and topless restaurants, each of which was a new phenomenon. So I got the bright idea of taking the great communications theorist to a topless restaurant called the Off Broadway. Neither of us had ever seen such a thing. Here were scores of businessmen in drab suits skulking at tables in the dark as spotlights followed the waitresses, each of whom had astounding silicone-enlarged breasts and wore nothing but high heels, a G-string, and the rouge on her nipples. Frankly, I was shocked and speechless. Not McLuhan.
“Very interesting,” he said.
“What is, Marshall?”
He nodded at the waitresses. “They’re wearing … us.”
“What do you mean, Marshall?”
He said it very slowly, to make sure I got it:
“They’re … putting … us … on.”
But the three-liners and the pop culture seminar were nothing compared to what came next, in the wake of Teilhard’s death: namely, McLuhanism.
McLuhanism was Marshall’s synthesis of the ideas of two men. One was his fellow Canadian, the economic historian Harold Innis, who had written two books arguing that new technologies were primal, fundamental forces steering human history. The other was Teilhard. McLuhan was scrupulous about crediting scholars who had influenced him, so much so that he described his first book of communications
theory,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
, as “a footnote to the work of Harold Innis.” In the case of Teilhard, however, he was caught in a bind. McLuhan’s “global village” was nothing other than Teilhard’s “noösphere,” but the Church had declared Teilhard’s work heterodox, and McLuhan was not merely a Roman Catholic, he was a convert. He had been raised as a Baptist but had converted to Catholicism while in England studying at Cambridge during the 1930s, the palmy days of England’s great Catholic literary intellectuals, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Like most converts, he was highly devout. So in his own writings he mentioned neither Teilhard nor the two-step theory of evolution that was the foundation of Teilhard’s worldview. Only a single reference, a mere
obiter dictum
, attached any religious significance whatsoever to the global village: “The Christian concept of the mystical body—all men as members of the body of Christ—this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions.”
theory,
The Gutenberg Galaxy
, as “a footnote to the work of Harold Innis.” In the case of Teilhard, however, he was caught in a bind. McLuhan’s “global village” was nothing other than Teilhard’s “noösphere,” but the Church had declared Teilhard’s work heterodox, and McLuhan was not merely a Roman Catholic, he was a convert. He had been raised as a Baptist but had converted to Catholicism while in England studying at Cambridge during the 1930s, the palmy days of England’s great Catholic literary intellectuals, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Like most converts, he was highly devout. So in his own writings he mentioned neither Teilhard nor the two-step theory of evolution that was the foundation of Teilhard’s worldview. Only a single reference, a mere
obiter dictum
, attached any religious significance whatsoever to the global village: “The Christian concept of the mystical body—all men as members of the body of Christ—this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions.”
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