Who Owns the Future? (31 page)

The process is described in an essay
¹
by Alan Watts on how to be a guru that was well-known around the time Apple was first taking off. The successful guru is neither universally nor arbitrarily scornful to followers, but there should be enough randomness to keep the followers guessing and off guard. When praise comes, it should be utterly piercing and luminous, so as to make the recipient feel as though they’ve never known love before that moment.

Apple’s relationship with its customers often followed a similar course. There would be a pandemic of bleating about a problem, such as a phone that lost calls when touched a certain way, and somehow the strife seemed to further cement customer devotion instead of driving them away. What other tech company has experienced such a thing? Jobs imported the marketing techniques of India’s gurus to the business of computation.

Another way in which Jobs emulated the practices of gurus is in the psychology of pseudo-asceticism.

Consider the way he used physical spaces. Jobs always created both personal and workspaces that were spare like an ashram, but it is the white Apple store interior that most recalls the ashram. White conveys purity, a holy place beyond reproach. At the same time, the white space must be highly structured and formal. There must be a tangible aura of discipline and adherence to the master’s plan.

The glass exteriors and staircases of elite Apple stores go further. They are temples, and I imagine they might someday be repurposed for use along those lines. (Maybe, some decades from now, our home 3D printers will just pop out the latest gadgets, leaving stores empty.)

There is yet another Beatles reference to bring up: It was Yoko Ono who first painted a New York City artist’s loft white. Conceptual avant-garde art invites people to project whatever they will project into it, and yet the artist offering a white space, or the silence of John Cage’s “4:33,” still becomes well-known. This is the template followed by Apple marketing.

A dual message is conveyed. The white void is empty, awaiting you and almost anything you project into it. The exception is the surrounding institution, the business, which is not something to be projected away.

While that setup might seem to only benefit the establishment offering the white space, there’s actually a benefit to the visitor who projects what they will into it. It’s like a good parent or lover who will listen endlessly without complaint but also sets boundaries. Narcissism can then be indulged without the terror of being out of touch or out of control. This formula is a magnet for human longings.

It’s all about you, iThis and iThat, but we will hold you, so you won’t screw yourself up. Of course that’s not really a possible bargain. To the degree you buy into the ashram, you
do
give up a certain degree of yourself. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s like how Apple customers experience culture in general through the lens of Apple’s curation whenever they use an Apple device. Maybe it’s the right mix for some people. But one ought to be aware.

It’s tempting to ridicule this aspect of Jobs’s legacy, but everything people do is infused with some degree of duplicity. This is doubly true of marketing.

Putting the duplicity up front might be best. Back to the Beatles: Lennon’s “Sexy Sadie” ridiculed the guru shtick, while McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” praised it, and they were singing about the same guru. These two songs could well be applied to the appeal of Apple under Jobs. Yes he manipulated people and was often not a nice guy, and yet he also did either elicit or anticipate the passions of his devotees, over and over. (No one can say what the mix of eliciting versus anticipating really was.)

MONKS AND NERDS (OR, CHIP MONKS)

There is no single explanation for why tech culture has come to be as it is. However, Apple exemplifies one strain of influence that is particularly underappreciated: the crossover between countercultural spirituality and tech culture.

The prevalence of the New Age was a heavy burden to bear for skeptics in Palo Alto in the 1980s. Everyone was attending preachy “workshops” where a narrative about a mystical path to self-empowerment was reinforced. If you found it to be a load of claptrap you learned to keep quiet. It wasn’t worth the arguments.

We like to pretend this phase of Silicon Valley culture didn’t happen, but it did. To my mind, this was a distinct period from the 1970s hippie/tech crossover, which was documented nicely in John Markoff’s book
What the Dormouse Said
.

Well before the computer nerds showed up, California was already a center of “Eastern Religion.” There were Tibetan temples and Hindu ashrams. The wave of Eastern-influenced spiritual style was inescapable. During the wild early development of Virtual Reality, in the 1980s, I lived for a while in a faux Greek temple in the Berkeley hills built by friends of the radical dancer Isadora Duncan much earlier in the century. Looking out at the ocean through the vines, you could melt into the Bay Area’s pervasive drama of almost erotic spiritual pageantry. It was life in a Maxfield Parrish painting. The exoticisms of the world made comfortable.

“est” (I recall one was supposed to spell it in all small letters) was an expensive workshop that started out with mystical metaphysics and led to secular, almost Confucian ideals about self-improvement. I never attended a session, but everyone else I knew seemed to have, much in the way that everyone is on Facebook now. The main thing attendees talked about, in addition to confiding that they were now masters of their fates, was that one was not allowed to pee during the workshop. You had to hold it in.

Many of the top scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs attended est or similar happenings. Terms like
self-actualization
became ubiquitous. You’d develop yourself, and your success would be manifest in societal status, material rewards, and spiritual attainment. All these would be of a piece.

It’s hard to overstate how influential this movement was in Silicon Valley. Not est specifically, for there were hundreds more like it. In the 1980s the Silicon Valley elite were often found at a successor institution called simply “the Forum.”

The Global Business Network was a key, highly influential institution in the history of Silicon Valley. It has advised almost all the companies, and almost everyone who was anyone had something to do with it. Stewart Brand, who coined the phrases “personal computer” and “information wants to be free,” was one of the founders. Now Stewart is a genuinely no-nonsense kind of guy. So is Peter Schwartz, who was the driving force behind GBN and wrote
The Art of the Long View
. And yet the ambience of the New Age was so thick that it helped define GBN. It was inescapable.

I was one of the so-called remarkable people of GBN. These were experts who would consult or speak when GBN interacted with clients. I always thought the honorary designation was odd and a little embarrassing. It turns out to come from George Gurdjieff! Gurdjieff died in 1949, but he was a primary source of the New Age style of spirituality that defined the flavor of the Bay Area in the late 20th century and continues to thrive.

One of Gurdjieff’s books was called
Meetings with Remarkable Men
. There was also a movie made. We GBN “remarkables” were so-named to recall the esoteric masters Gurdjieff supposedly had to seek by climbing mountains in Turkmenistan. Feminism tempered the honorary title to “Remarkable People.”

Meanwhile, the world of marketing was being reinvented at the Stanford Research Institute. This is the same SRI that employed Doug Engelbart, who first demonstrated the basics of person-oriented computing in the 1960s. More recently SRI spawned Siri, the voice interface used in Apple products.

SRI had a unit called VALS, for Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles, which was for a while the guiding light of a transformation in corporate marketing. (The use of the term
transformation
was long a signal of the technocratic/spiritual New Age. It has been mostly replaced by
disruption
since the Singularity replaced Gurdjieff as the spiritual North Star.)

The marketing, investment, and media sectors in the United States were all heavily influenced by VALS in the 1970s and beyond. VALS classified consumers and customers into a system that was reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s “enneagrams.” I knew some of the principals at VALS and they would speak openly about their goal being to change the world so that it would be more suitable for spiritual people, called “Inner Directeds” in VAL-speak. The expectation that a few people living near Stanford ought to be able to go and change the world in a few years wasn’t born with Facebook.

IT’S ALL ABOUT I

The lexicon of the New Age, or self-actualization, movement reserved a special place for the word
Abundance
. Abundance could mean two things. At the rational, technocratic, Confucian end of the spectrum, it might mean that people ought to take responsibility for their failures and successes, but they ought to believe that great success is possible. This sensibility sprouted the motivational speaker industry. Its traces are preserved in reality television and popular song.

In America before the New Age, you could find untold success if you went out and searched for it. This classically entailed a physical search, such as “going west.” In America after the New Age, you expect to find untold success once you have perfected yourself. What that means is becoming self-confident, “believing in yourself,” and the rest of a sequence of prompts that has become utterly ubiquitous.

But the other end of the spectrum of the meaning of
Abundance
penetrated the mire of superstition and magical incantations.

The idea was that the physical world is a mere façade conjured by people who are too asleep in their lives to realize they are the ones making up their own confinements. This was a taunt Gurdjieff always returned to, that most people are effectively asleep all the time. An enlightened, “remarkable” person would know better.

The magical version of Abundance is that if you can buck up your self-confidence, not only will you succeed in the world of human affairs, but you will also be able to bend or “dent” physical reality. It is really your show, if you would only realize it.

This idea of Abundance continues to thrive. An extremely popular book called
The Secret
promulgated the hope in the early 21st century. If you can only gain the confidence to just expect the finest lovers, the most exquisite possessions, the most vibrant health, then these things will simply accede to your robust imagination.

The faith that it’s all you, and not the world out there, probably runs thickest in the Bay Area. At a California vegan restaurant chain, with roots in the Forum and related institutions, each item on the menu
²
is called something like, “I am successful.” That might be tofu with eggplant. A radish stew might be called “I am charismatic.” You have to say those things to the waitperson in order to eat. You have to be your own hypnotherapy tape in front of everyone.

Or more precisely, you have to prove fealty to an institution or be shunned for not being sufficiently self-actualizing.
³
This twisted transaction is similar to what people buy into when they live their social lives through today’s consumer-facing Siren Servers.

Express yourself, you are prompted, but through Facebook’s template. If you don’t, you are not empowering yourself. Same old pattern, same old tricks.

“ABUNDANCE” EVOLVES

The business of starting Siren Servers would certainly seem to confirm the worldview of the Abundance movement. You just imagine that the whole world will use your social network and it does. Just like that.

Around the turn of the century, with the rise of Google, a new merger of the techie and the New Age streams of Bay Area culture appeared.

For some time, at least since those dinners at Marvin Minsky’s house, there had been talk of every manner of amazing future tech revolution. Maybe we’ll disassemble our bodies temporarily into small parts that will be easier to launch into space, where we’ll be reassembled and then float naked except for a golden bubble to shield us from radiation.

This was an utterly typical idea. But if there were anything actionable, it would be in the realm of engineering. Could you really sever and then reattach a head?

After the rise of Google, the tenor of these speculations changed in Silicon Valley. Now the top-priority action item was perfecting one’s mentality, one’s perspective and self-confidence. Are you really enlightened enough to “get” accelerating change? Are you really awake and aware, preparing for the Singularity?

The engineering will come about automatically, after all. Remember, the new attitude is that technology is self-determined, that it is a giant supernatural creature growing on its own, soon to overtake people. The new cliché is that today’s “disruptions” will deterministically lead to tomorrow’s “Singularity.”

The strange inheritance of ideas has induced a number of comic reversals. Now I find myself arguing that human agency is the better way to interpret events. Doesn’t that make me sound a little like the kind of motivational speaker I used to make fun of? We must take responsibility for our own successes and failures, I declare.