I fell in love with George Dyson about the time he was writing “Baidarka, the Kakak.” I never read it, because it was so expensive, so I leafed through it in bookstores, but I DID read Kenneth Brower’s “The Starship and the Canoe,” a “compare and contrast” between George and his father, Freeman, who was designing a space ship at the same time that George was learning to make a baidarka. Freeman never made it into space, but for years George lived in his kayak along the northern Pacific coast like the resourceful First Peoples who boat-hopped their way over to this continent from Asia before the glaciers had withdrawn. At least that’s what I choose to believe and I’m not alone. It’s also interesting to note that Kenneth himself edited his father’s environmentalist books and went on to write many of his own.
I love the tension between something so sensory, so thrust-up-against-survival and yet time-tested for millennia as a kayak and on the other hand something so cerebral and (oh, admit it) a little nutty like a spaceship the size of a football field that is propelled by racks of atomic bombs. Can’t you just imagine Freeman sitting around figuring out how many atomic bombs it would take? He did that.
For a while father and son were estranged. That’s pretty natural in the animal world, and for the good of the ecology, because it means new families in new places. For a while there it appeared that George was going to raise his family in his baidarka. But parenthood makes people slightly more conventional. I said slightly. It would be more practical to raise a toddler in a baidarka than thirty feet up in a redwood tree, which was another of his abodes.
This post is a reflection on a panel presented in Munich which you can either read or watch on video here:
Three of the speakers in this particular panel are original founders: John Brockman, Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly -- all white-headed now, none college educated, all much respected -- even beloved. The fourth is George, the only young one and the only academic. When asked what validates him, since his admired father and he were opposed to each other, he said it was Kenneth Brower’s book about him.
These are “Third Culture” people, who define themselves thus:
“In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.”
A man who paddles a baidarka among icebergs and walruses, who sits with his butt down below sea level and only a fragile skin between himself and the environment, is not going to be easily rattled by accusations of narcisssism or Oedipalism or what have you. In any case, those fancy academic cultural thinkers, now become commenters on comments, have invented a foreign language of their own that refers to constructs that are hard to see, though the best use metaphors like rhizomes or nomadism: analogs.
Much of what this group of thinkers does is to try to find new terms for what they hope are new ideas: handles for hot pots. Crucial problems. So one suggests “the anthropocene,” the age defined by the interference of humans: changes in the atmosphere, in the contours of the land, in the redistribution of populations. None of the four attended to the “deep ecology” alternative to anthropocentrism. ALL were thinking in terms of preserving humans. So even their thinking about the anthropocene was anthropic. They are admirers of cities and optimistic that ghettos and slums are merely stepping stones for ambitious people on their way to prosperity.
Perhaps this is because these men are aging. I was a little shocked that they cheerfully reversed themselves on atomic energy, saying now that it is a safe source with waste that can be confined, though the Hanford reach radioactive storage is filtering towards the Columbia River in detectable amounts. I was also surprised by their acceptance of GMO seeds, especially for Third World countries. They are optimistic about fusion as a source of power. And they brandished that old-fashioned object “the book” as markers of achievement.
Kevin Kelly http://www.kk.org proposes a new term that he sees as equivalent to a new category of living being, parallel to plants, animals, fungi, and so on: the Technium, which evolves and diversifies in a kind of family tree. He feels it is moving towards conscious life. His persuasive story was about a robot that looks very much like a benign version of a child’s transformer -- he does insist that the technium tips slightly towards “good,” meaning what’s good for anthros. This entity is programmed to roam the hallways of its company until it finds an unused electric outlet so it can plug in. Kevin deliberately stood in front of the suitable outlet to block the machine, which we see leaning towards him, plug in “hand.” Kevin terms this “desire,” an autonomous “wanting” to get at that plug. He feels that the “technium” has developed into a sort of being with goals of its own. If that isn’t anthropocentric, I don’t know what is.
George was interested in an entirely different dyad, the interplay between kinds of information. As an historian, he described how analog information was originally converted to digital and how powerful that was in terms of handling enormous amounts of information. But NOW he says this:
“If you look at what's exciting people here most, it's the things like Facebook and Google, search engines and so on. And an awful lot of what's being done there is actually analog computing. In the world of nature, in the world of brains, there's no digital code where a certain bit has a certain meaning. The computation is done in the analog way, where frequencies have meaning, and where how things connect — topology — has meaning.
“If you look at a search engine, that's exactly what's happening. It's counting the pulse frequency of connections between topological points. If you look at what Facebook does, if you took, say, a small high school and tried to write an algorithm that defined who was friends with whom, you would be completely lost very soon, because every day, somebody breaks up, and then somebody else's friend is not somebody's friend ... you could never keep track. And Facebook does this for 600 million people [in real time] and they did it by building an analog computer, by simply allowing all the people to connect with a very simple digital code. When you join Facebook, you download very little code. And then the whole system becomes its own analog computer, that maps the changes and the connections.” Note this metaphor carefully: Facebook is a big high school with all the adolescent characteristics: cliques, emotion, prestige. Anthropocentric.
“Pulse frequency coding and template-based addressing is how biology stores [and conveys] information. You get the next molecule by saying you want the next molecule that more or less matches this template. And that's how search engines work. You can address [a memory location] without having to give a precise numerical address.
“Computers are now being used to program cells, and my parting thought would be that it's also the other way. That living cells have, for billions of years, been storing their genetic information outside the individual cell, in the viral cloud. Why do we all get colds? If colds were purely harmful, we would have stopped having colds millions of years ago. But we get colds because we need that input/output mechanism to convey genetic sequences through the viral cloud.”
George is entering a viro-centric world. Forget people, forget machines, think code. What information is in the viral cloud? Who is trying to find out? Where’s our baidarka for traveling the virome?
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