At around 3pm on October 24 1968, a sharply dressed executive from the pc manufacturer Control Data Corporation took the stage within the auditorium of the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
He was addressing the audience of the second annual symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics.
The society, a nexus of academics, spies, policymakers and businesspeople, was dreamt up a couple of years earlier by a CIA operative. It was designed to counter the USSR’s growing clout in computing and mastery of “cybernetics”, the precursor to today’s artificial intelligence. Consensus within the US of the late Sixties was fractured by foreign and domestic conflicts, but cybernetics promised to reassert control, deploying computers to tame the chaos and make life predictable again. The man from Control Data Corp, himself a CIA confidant, was there that day to sell a plan for what he called “communal information centers”, to make CDC’s supercomputers serve the general public by providing news, recipes, public health monitoring, even dating advice. Computers, he told the audience, were going to be our “willing slaves . . . employed within the service of mankind”.
Until 3.32pm, visions of cybernetic paradise washed over the audience. But then a lanky man in his late thirties strode as much as the rostrum. He was strikingly handsome, with a meticulously groomed goatee that gave him the look of a bohemian English professor crossed with a Nordic deity. Behind him was one other man, a decade or so older, wearing an oversized checked blazer and round glasses.
“I don’t know who you’re, sir, and this isn’t personal,” the second man told the speaker, as he grasped him by the elbow and moved him away from the microphone. “But I’m bored with listening to this.”
Avery Johnson and Warren Brodey made for an unlikely pair of rebels. They had been early members of the American Society for Cybernetics, but now they were leading a countercultural revolution within the small, staid world of computing. When they crashed the stage, they were hoping to stave off what they saw as an imminent catastrophe. They believed computer makers similar to IBM and CDC were steering society down a deadly path.
At the time, these manufacturers and half a dozen others were in gentle competition to develop and sell their enormous mainframe machines, most of which were still programmed by punch cards and used for handling payroll and inventory. While the era of non-public computing, tablets and smart appliances was still a distant dream, it was a period of intense excitement and experimentation. It is difficult to assume now, but in 1968 the essential query of what computers were actually for had no obvious answer.
Johnson and Brodey believed these corporations had missed a vital philosophical query concerning the technology they were working on: were computers really destined to be mere slaves, condemned to an eternity of performing repetitive tasks? Or could they be something more? Could they evolve into craftsmen? While slaves unerringly obey commands, craftsmen have the liberty to explore and even challenge directives. The finest craftsmen do greater than just fulfil orders; they educate and enlighten, expanding our horizons through their skill and creativity. Johnson and Brodey desired to wrest control away from those desperate to mass-produce a military of subservient machines.
To bring their vision to life, in late 1967 they’d established a clandestine, privately funded lab on Boston’s waterfront, aiming to personalise computing nearly a decade before Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had the identical idea. Their vision was daring, utopian and radical. Had they succeeded in swaying their peers, the tech we use today would look remarkably different.
But Johnson and Brodey were way more than simply predecessors to the Apple founders. Johnson had a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and had consulted at Nasa. An occasional sleepwalker, he would wake in the midst of the night, sit upright in bed and program an imaginary computer. A fan of beatnik poetry, skinny-dipping and luxury cars, he was also the heir to a sizeable fortune. His great-grandfather had founded what would eventually change into the Palmolive Company.
Brodey, the ideologue, was an ex-psychiatrist with a penchant for the dramatic: he once brought a toy gun to a session together with his analyst. He saw the rigidity and non-responsiveness of an industrial system of mass production because the explanation for so many empty, conformist American lives. At first, computers appeared to promise to upend this established order, however the more Johnson and Brodey observed them, the more they realised computers were just as more likely to implement conformity as eliminate it.
Their vision of computing was not about prediction or automation. The tech they were constructing was alleged to expand our horizons. Instead of trusting a pc to recommend a movie based on our viewing history, they wanted us to find and appreciate genres we might need avoided before. Their tech would make us more sophisticated, discerning and complicated, fairly than passive consumers of generative AI-produced replicas of Mozart, Rembrandt or Shakespeare.
Over the past decade, I’ve tried to unravel the legacy of Brodey, Johnson and their lab. This June, I launched a podcast delving deeper into their story. My journey took me from Geneva to Boston, to Ottawa, to Oslo, where I hoped to get better an idiosyncratic, humanistic and largely forgotten vision. I wanted to grasp when and the way our digital culture veered off beam.
What I discovered was that the sorts of interactivity, smartness and intelligence which might be baked into the gadgets we use on daily basis are usually not the one kinds available. What we now consider inevitable and natural features of the digital landscape are actually the results of fierce power struggles between opposing schools of thought. With hindsight, we all know that Silicon Valley ultimately embraced the more conservative path. The it produced mirrors the of contemporary economics, valuing rationality and consistency, discouraging flexibility, fluidity and likelihood. Today’s personalised tech systems, once the tools of mavericks, usually tend to narrow our opportunities for creativity than expand them.
Consider the much-criticised ad for Apple’s latest tablet. In “Crush!” a colossal hydraulic press steadily obliterates a mountain of musical instruments, books, cameras and art supplies, to the strains of Sonny and Cher’s 1971 hit “All I Ever Need Is You”, forsaking only an ultra-thin iPad. This one device, we’re meant to grasp, has inside it all of the capabilities of the demolished objects. We won’t be needing them any more.
Was there one other way? Perhaps.
In the photos from the symposium, the one woman stands out: 23-year-old Sansea Sparling (née Smith), then the resident artist at Johnson and Brodey’s lab. Clad in a sleeveless, A-line dress with a daring black-and-white pattern, Sparling looks just like the lone representative of the hippie generation on the event. But what was she doing at a male-dominated computer conference? Even for the late Sixties, her presence seemed improbable to me.
Last June, I travelled to New Haven, Vermont, to go to Sparling, who’s now 79. Her house is nestled in an abandoned lime quarry, with water clear as a sophisticated mirror reflecting dramatic rock faces. I wanted to listen to the story of how she became entangled with Johnson and Brodey.
Sparling had grown up in a small town in Arkansas, so when she got the possibility to check art in Boston she jumped at it. To support herself through school, she worked odd jobs, at the same time as a waitress in Mafia joints. In Boston she moved in the identical circles as Avery Johnson, whose house on Beacon Hill was a magnet for all kinds of bohemians. One day in 1968, Sparling told me, Johnson mentioned an intriguing opportunity. “He said, ‘I met a really interesting man who wants to start out this project.’ And I asked, ‘What sort of project?’ He replied, ‘Well, I don’t know learn how to describe it.’”
Johnson said the project can be financed by a person named Peter Oser, a mysterious Swiss millionaire who was about to reach in Boston. Oser’s background was illustrious. One of his great grandfathers was John D Rockefeller, once the world’s richest man. The other was Cyrus McCormick, the daddy of contemporary agriculture. Oser’s mother was so near Carl Jung that she built him a guest house on their Los Angeles estate. The psychoanalyst owed much of his international fame to the support of Oser’s grandmother, whom he once called his most difficult patient.
Sparling met Oser the subsequent day at 10am, and their conversation lasted until 2am. Gradually, the small print emerged. “He desired to fund an 18-month experiment with a lab of 4 to 6 people from diverse academic backgrounds,” Sparling said. What for? Something to do with expanding the “ecology of considering”, an idea that originally perplexed her. Ecology is the study of the interconnectedness and variety of living systems, “but I didn’t understand how that will ever relate to anything we could experiment with”, she said. Yet experiment they did.
It turned on the market was a way for technology and ecology to coexist in spite of everything. The secret was the concept of “responsiveness”. Early, more conservative strands of cybernetics had fixated on the easy model of the adaptive thermostat, marvelling at its ability to take care of a preset temperature in a room. Our modern-day smart-home systems, which intuit our preferences and automate every part, quietly adapting to our needs, are only fancier versions of this concept.
But the rebels on the lab thought this sort of automation was the antithesis of true responsiveness. They saw human relations, art and identity as open-ended, always-evolving ecologies that might not be reduced to the thermostat’s simplistic model of optimisation. Can one really pinpoint the “right” cinema, music or loved one in the identical way as the proper temperature of a room? Today’s TV, music and dating apps appear to think so. The Boston contrarians didn’t.
Within a couple of months, a brand new space emerged on Lewis Wharf, then a gritty enclave in Boston’s North End. The Environmental Ecology Lab, because it was known, occupied a spacious third-floor loft in a granite constructing dating back to the 1840s. The white brick partitions, creaky picket floors and rustic beams gave it an old-world charm. Expansive windows framed views of the harbour, evoking the constructing’s storied past. Once a bustling warehouse, it had stored an array of products, from blankets to Madeira wine, all of which were unloaded on the pier below.
The lab also boasted its own quasi-patron saint, Marshall McLuhan, the influential media theorist and friend of Brodey’s who had once visited. McLuhan promoted the thought of the “anti-environment”: distinctive spaces that illuminate missed elements of our on a regular basis surroundings. The sorts of spaces, McLuhan would say, that “tell fish concerning the water”. The lab was one such anti-environment, promising to jolt its visitors out of the numbing uniformity of their on a regular basis world. Everything was meant to shock, provoke and stimulate.
Visitors to 33 Lewis Wharf likened the experience to the mind-expanding effects of psychedelic drugs. Upon entering through an imposing metal door, visitors were confronted with huge, floor-to-ceiling cellophane bags suspended from above. These bags, equipped with sensors, would inflate and contract, demanding effort to push between them. Once past this barrier, the bewildered guests found themselves disoriented by an eclectic collection of objects. Two bulky, expensive computers, bristling with wires, stood out. The back half of a Ford automobile was a favorite place for brainstorming sessions. A large glass dome resembling a bell jar served as an area for personal conversations and, occasionally, for smoking dope (it was the Sixties, in spite of everything). And that’s not to say the paintings, the musical instruments and the varied other strange materials, including an enormous slab of froth.
The ceiling was festooned with strips of Mylar, two video cameras, a parachute. A settee-like structure, hung from overhead springs, was the venue for business meetings. Dubbed “The Cloud” (a reputation that will prove prophetic), the pie-shaped installation had six connected sections, ensuring that the way in which one person sat and moved affected the experience of everyone else. Underneath, sensor-operated colored lights flickered in response to the movement. Sparling took on the challenge of ensuring The Cloud’s secure suspension. “Looking for eight-foot springs in Boston — it’s an interesting adventure,” she told me.
Her partner in decorating the lab was Oser, who funded your entire experiment and brought his stage design expertise to the project. This was just the newest chapter in Oser’s eclectic profession. At Reed College within the late Nineteen Forties, he’d mingled with future Beat poets. He dabbled in Scientology when it was still called “dianetics” and once followed a Ouija board’s suggestion to maneuver to Angola, where he ran a sawmill. He produced French New Wave movies and owned a tech company in his native Switzerland.
Oser also had a deep love for science fiction. Frank Herbert’s novel , with its expansive vision of ecology, left an indelible mark. He found a kindred spirit in Brodey, who was particularly struck by a single line within the book’s appendix. It described the “production and maintenance of co-ordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity” as a fundamental principle of life. Oser and Brodey envisioned their lab because the place to supply perpetual diversity machines, designed to not streamline but to complement human experience.
Easier said than done. One of their first ventures into this strange territory was “the dancing suit”, a peculiar garment that will allow a dancer to influence the music they were listening to by changing their moves. They embedded copper wires into elastic bands, which were then sewn right into a full-body leotard to capture every movement. “If I had a band from my forearm to my upper arm and I bent my elbow, that will stretch the band, and the copper would send a signal,” explained Sparling, who bravely volunteered to wear the suit for tests.
The signals were transmitted to the “squawk box”, which generated and altered the music based on how the dancer moved. The resulting sound was removed from harmonious, however the experiment validated a broader philosophical point. Dancing became something qualitatively different when it could influence the music’s “ecology”. Establishing a two-way feedback loop between movement and sound redefined each art forms. While the person wearing the suit may not have transformed right into a Rudolf Nureyev or Richard Wagner by the tip of the session, they gained a more holistic understanding of each movement and sound. Whatever role the tech played on this case, it was actually not that of a slave.
The next major project drew inspiration from Brodey’s skilled traumas. Early in his profession as a psychiatrist, he viewed psychiatric hospitals as prisons where patients endured brutal treatments with no recourse. When I met Brodey in 2014, he was in his early nineties; he’s now 100. He recounted his clashes with hospital administrators as a psychiatrist. “They wanted me to offer young people shock therapy,” he said. He refused and shortly had to seek out one other job.
Sparling remembers Brodey posing an issue: “What if, as an alternative of being strapped down on a hospital bed, patients could influence their environment while restrained, making it not only tolerable but even nice?” The thought led to a responsive restraint blanket, which might stay loose if the patient lay still but tighten with abrupt movements. They devised a technique involving a chemical that expanded from liquid to gas upon skin contact.
The invention marked a brand new chapter for the lab, resulting in what the founders called “flexware”, a fusion of hardware and software, combining physical materials with the customisation of a pc program. Soon, Brodey envisioned responsive chairs, mattresses and even baby bottles. Everyday objects could possibly be free of rigid materials, their forms following not only function, but use.
For 30 years, our understanding of technology and its role in our lives has been shaped by Silicon Valley’s dominant ideology, which I term “solutionism” in my book . Solutionism posits that every one problems, whether personal, social or political, could be solved through tech. Excited by advancements in computing, connectivity and profitability, tech founders have championed the concept their products are the last word tool for fixing any social sick.
Solutionist considering has given us frictionless smart cities, where sensors monitor every part from traffic to waste management. It has driven the event of wearable devices that track our health metrics and social media platforms that claim to reinforce our personal connections. But it also reduces complex human experiences to data points and ignores the contexts wherein problems arise. The relentless drive for optimisation threatens to supply ludicrous or terrifying outcomes of the sort satirised in TV shows similar to and .
My interest within the Boston lab was sparked by the hunch that its members were the early proponents of solutionist thought. But after speaking with the individuals who worked at Lewis Wharf, I realised they were in direct opposition to those sorts of smart technologies. Unlike some critics of Big Tech today, they didn’t champion a return to vintage or “dumb” tech. Instead, they envisioned a sort of digital smartness that continues to be almost unimaginable to us today. They saw people as fickle and ever-changing, qualities they didn’t view as flaws. In 2014, after I asked Brodey concerning the possibility that his responsive mattresses and chairs would give you the chance to seek out a super position for every user, his response struck me: “That wasn’t our purpose,” he said. “There isn’t any ideal anything, because we’re consistently changing. We’re not like machines.”
He is true; machines we aren’t. But the unsuitable technologies could make us machine-like. And perhaps they’ve. Perhaps that is the foundation of our discomfort concerning the direction of the digital revolution: that fairly than making machines more human, it’s making people more mechanical. Speaking at a 1967 conference, Brodey minced no words: “man becomes captured, captured behind the grid of what could be programmed into the machine . . . We have been captured by automobiles, by houses, by architecture, simplified to the purpose of unresponsiveness.”
The maddening efficiency of our digital slaves has obscured the concept human agency is determined by constant course correction. As Brodey noted in 1970, “Choice just isn’t mental. It’s made by doing, by exploring, by checking out what you want as you go along.”
Sparling told me that a key query driving the lab’s work was, “What can we discover that enables the person within the loop to learn and progress with whatever they try to do?” The common thread uniting projects similar to the dancing suit and the restraint blanket, she said, was their celebration of improvised learning — jazz style — because the core value that ought to underpin interactive tech.
“Imagine a future where your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper, catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet, after which construct a personalised summary.”
This visionary idea comes from the 1995 bestseller, , by Nicholas Negroponte, who was once a protégé of Brodey. Negroponte is renowned for co-founding the MIT Media Lab, which he describes as a technological Bauhaus, mixing art and computing. His work there profoundly influenced the digital revolution. He once joked concerning the Media Lab’s opening: “Our speaker was Steve Jobs, our caterer was Martha Stewart . . . I told each of them that we launched their careers.”
Negroponte, an early supporter and columnist for the techno-utopian Wired magazine, had a knack for outlandish visions of the long run that resonated together with his readers. He got here up with a reputation for his newspaper-reading curatorial assistant, “The Daily Me”. He fantasised about its ability to “mix headline news with ‘less necessary’ stories regarding acquaintances, people you will note tomorrow, and places you’re about to go or have just come from”. To a reader in 2024, it sounds rather a lot just like the social media feeds we have now come to like and hate, which function as reliably as any thermostat, their dependability rooted within the constant commentary of our behaviour.
Negroponte was an early ally of the Lewis Wharf gang. As a young architecture professor, he visited the lab and attended seminars by Johnson at MIT’s Sloan School. Brodey, 20 years his senior, was a vital mentor. In an interview in October 2023 in London, he described Brodey to me as “one in all the earliest and most significant influences” on his considering. Negroponte got here from a wealthy Greek family. His father was a outstanding figure within the shipping industry. Young Nicholas desired to change into a sculptor in Paris but he proposed to his father a deal: he would spend five years studying at MIT before pursuing his artistic dreams. He never made it to Paris. But he earned multiple degrees from MIT and have become a professor there, only briefly pausing his academic profession for a stint working at IBM in 1966, where, as Brodey put it to me, “there was money”.
Brodey described Negroponte’s mission at IBM as a search to seek out meaningful uses for his or her computers for architects, planners and designers. But by the late Sixties, Negroponte had shifted his tactics. Instead of pitching computers to the skilled classes, he began touting the ways wherein they might help peculiar users bypass these experts altogether. Negroponte built on lots of the concepts from the Lewis Wharf crew. Influenced by their playful attitudes, he acknowledged that future smart technologies could possibly be whimsical, imagining elevators with personalities starting from courteous, to grumpy, to humorous. He also adopted Brodey’s ideas of “intelligent environments” and “soft architecture”, proposing that using sensors, computers and algorithms in built environments would allow automatic adjustments to our needs and habits. His goal was to attain a level of customisation beyond human capability. Responsive, yes, but a far cry from what Johnson and Brodey were dreaming of.
By 1995, Negroponte had fully capitulated to the concept human curiosity could be assessed, predicted and satisfied by clever programming, with a touch of algorithmically injected serendipity in the combo. This belief was the unifying theme of his work on the Media Lab. From there, the thought travelled to Silicon Valley, eventually finding its perfect manifestation in our social feeds and algorithmic playlists. By the time he wrote , Negroponte had brokered a peace treaty between the slaves and the artisans. Recycling a metaphor he first utilized in the early Nineteen Seventies, he argued that digital technologies ought to be like well-trained English butlers.
Sceptics amongst us would say that the world in 2024 bears more resemblance to Brodey’s gloomy prophecy of a mankind captured by machines than to the tech-utopians’ vision of armies of willing slaves working for us. When I visited Brodey in 2014, he lamented, “the alienation is pretty fucking complete at this point. And the pc has really done it in large measure.”
At the time, I didn’t press him on what he meant by that word, “alienation”. But over the past decade, we’ve stayed in contact, and the explanation for Brodey’s disaffection has change into clearer to me. Nearly half a century after he disrupted the cybernetics conference, his original concern has hardly been addressed. Instead, tech manufacturers, wearing a type of countercultural camouflage, have sold personal computers to us as ever more human, ever more intimate, just by shrinking the handsets and making them cheaper and user-friendly.
For Brodey, the epitome of an intelligent environment was the classroom, an area designed to ignite latest desires. By contrast, Negroponte’s was the lounge, a hub where we fulfil existing needs, for entertainment, shopping and infrequently work. Existing, as we now do, in Negroponte’s lounge, we are able to only wonder about what our digital universe would appear like if it had been modelled on a classroom.
Negroponte’s vision won the long run largely because corporate America and the Pentagon favoured easy, utilitarian solutions. They had little interest in dancing suits and cloud sofas. Instead, they bestowed substantial funding on to the precursor to the Media Lab, the Architecture Machine Group, which expanded and prospered throughout the Nineteen Seventies, taking grants from Darpa and other parts of the Pentagon to work on interactive projects similar to early types of virtual reality. Johnson and Brodey’s lab met a unique fate, tormented by internal strife. The two men ceaselessly clashed with Oser and Sparling, leaving other lab members stranded in between. Their grand ambitions compounded their troubles; they struggled even to make their prototypes functional.
Oser became deeply depressed by these setbacks. He died of a heart attack almost exactly a 12 months after pulling his funding from the enterprise in 1970. Sparling became a metalworker and, later, a teacher. Johnson and Brodey continued their efforts into the early Nineteen Seventies, growing increasingly radical. With no revenue from their business activities, Johnson needed to foot all of the bills, putting further strain on the partnership. They rejected funding not only from the military but additionally from MIT, viewing it as tainted by the Vietnam war. Their attempts to secure corporate backing failed too; few corporations were eager about their responsive products.
Disillusioned, Brodey left the US, his five children and his ex-wife in 1973. He moved to Norway and lived as a Maoist. Within a couple of years, he was writing letters to his friend Marshal McLuhan from an iron foundry, where he took work as a manual labourer. His political awakening had led him to a tough truth: the variety of alternative that his lab had championed was not something that could possibly be achieved through technology alone.
Despite the lab’s failure, Johnson and Brodey’s insights carry a vital message. If we wish technology that expands our decisions, we must recognise that somebody has to fund it, much as our governments fund public education or arts and culture. Achieving this on an enormous scale would require an effort comparable with the one which initiated the welfare state.
Consider this. Dumping all of the world’s classical music on to your Spotify playlist, regardless of how refined its recommendations, won’t turn you right into a connoisseur. Yet, isn’t there a strategy to harness the newest technologies to serve that mission? Here is a radical concept that Silicon Valley is not going to admit: technology just isn’t nearly freezing, stratifying and monetising existing tastes. It can even deepen, sophisticate and democratise them. This sort of post-solutionist approach seems more realistic than continuing to hope that legions of algorithmic slaves can solve all our problems. Despite the hype, generative AI — even when made widely accessible totally free — is unlikely to spark a revolutionary wave of creativity and might, actually, hinder it by depriving practising artists and educators of stable incomes. Making tablets ever thinner and more powerful won’t get us there either.
Perhaps Johnson and Brodey must have read the room back in 1968. After hijacking the rostrum and explaining their vision, they invited anyone interested to “come on, come up and stand here”. Only two people did. One of them, an elderly gentleman in a bow tie, a cybernetics grandee and former psychiatrist, only stepped up on to the stage to revive order. He reassured anyone eager about joining the cybernetic hippies that they might achieve this at lunch the subsequent day, provided they promised to not throw any food. And so, the primary — and last — cybernetic rise up got here to an end. It was a shortlived affair, but its lesson is evident: a tech with which we are able to truly interact remains to be a distant dream.
