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SUNDAY 8 JANUARY 2012

From left: Amber Rudd

MP, barrister Joanne

Cash, Louise Mensch

MP and Claire Perry MP.

romleft: Amber R dd

MP, barrister Joanne

ash, Louise Mensch

MP and Claire Perry MP.

Why a new group of Conservative women are talking about the F word. By Gaby HinsliffWhy a new group of Conservative women are talking about the F word. By Gaby Hinsliff

Tory The face of



12 THE NEW REVIEW | 08.01.12 | The Observer

CULTURE

The man who runs theSince the mid-1960s, John Brockman has been at

the cutting edge of ideas. Here, John Naughton introduces a passionate advocate of both scienceand the arts, whose website, Edge, is a salon for

the world’s finest minds. On the facing page they discussMarshall McLuhan, elitism and the future of the internet

To say that JohnBrockman is a literaryagent is like saying that David Hockneyis a photographer.For while it’s truethat Hockney has

indeed made astonishingly creativeuse of photography, and Brockman isindeed a successful literary agent whorepresents an enviable stable of high-profile scientists and communicators,in both cases the description ratherunderstates the reality. More accurateways of describing Brockman would beto say that he is a “cultural impresario”or, as his friend Stewart Brand puts it,an “intellectual enzyme”.

The first thing you notice aboutBrockman, though, is the interesting way he bridges CP Snow’s “TwoCultures” – the parallel universes of thearts and the sciences. When profilersask him for pictures, one he often sendsshows him with Andy Warhol and BobDylan, no less. But he’s also one of thefew people around who can phone

Nobel laureates in science with a goodchance that they will take the call.

Cynics might say that this hassomething to do with the fact thatBrockman has a reputation as an agentwho can extract massive advancesfrom publishers. And he is indeed ahustler who spotted early on that therewas a massive audience for writing about science, but there’s more toit than that. Brockman is genuinelypassionate about big ideas. He isfascinated, he told Wired magazine,“by people who can take the materialsof the culture in the arts, literature andscience and put them together in theirown way. We live in a mass-producedculture where many people, evenmany established cultural arbiters,limit themselves to secondhandideas. Show me people who createtheir own reality, who don’t accept an

ersatz, appropriated reality. Show methe empiricists – and not just in thesciences – who are out there doing it,rather than talking about and analysing the people who are doing it.”

Brockman’s immersion in both sidesof the Two Cultures runs deep. He didan MBA at Columbia in the early 1960sand started his own financial leasing company on Park Avenue. But a friendintroduced him to avant-garde theatre,thereby launching him on the primrosepath into the arts.

He then got involved in the city’sunderground movie scene, becoming manager of the Film-Makers’Cinematheque, the home of underground cinema, in 1965, wherehis mandate was to produce a festivalthat expanded the form of cinema.He commissioned 30 performancepieces by world-class artists, dancers,poets, dramatists and musicians. Theresulting festival made a big splash.“Intermedia”, the term Brockmancoined and used as his logo, wassuddenly hot. A number of notableart-world figures were immersed in thegenre, among them Les Levine, RobertRauschenberg , Andy Warhol, severalkinetic and “happenings” artists, avant-garde film-makers and dramatists, the Velvet Underground, and composerJohn Cage.

This immersion in New York’sarts scene also led to deep interest inscience and technology. Many of thepieces at the festival were informed byartists’ interest in cybernetics. Theywere reading and discussing books byscientists. Rauschenberg suggested

to how it may appear, is not exclusive.Elitist, yes, but in the good sense of anopen elite, based on meritocracy. Theway someone is added to the Edgelist is when I receive a word from aSteven Pinker, a Brian Eno, a MartinRees or a Richard Dawkins, telling me to do so. It’s as simple as that andI don’t recall ever saying no in suchcircumstances.”

Ever since it appeared online,Edge.org has consistently been oneof the most thought-provoking andinteresting sites on the web. As I write,the front-page lead is an extraordinarypiece by the evolutionary biologistMark Pagel in which he argues thathumans’ capacity for social learning has made us less intelligent than welike to think we are. “If I’m living in apopulation of people,” he writes, “and Ican observe those people, and see whatthey’re doing, seeing what innovationsthey’re coming up with, I can chooseamong the best of those ideas, withouthaving to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example,

if I’m trying to make a better spear,I really have no idea how to makethat better spear. But if I notice thatsomebody else in my society has madea very good spear, I can simply copyhim without having to understand why.

“What this means is that sociallearning may have set up a situation inhumans where… we have been selectedto be very, very good at copying otherpeople, rather than innovating on ourown. We like to think we’re a highlyinventive, innovative species. But sociallearning means that most of us canmake use of what other people do andnot have to invest the time and energyin innovation ourselves.”

This essay is a perfect illustrationof Brockman’s idea of what Edge.org should do: to serve as a forum for big,intriguing and/or disturbing ideasadvanced by intellectuals who have a

track record of major achievements intheir fields. He doesn’t seem to havemuch time for the scholar who crawlsalong the frontiers of knowledge with amagnifying glass.

This philosophy is also what drivesone of his annual rituals. Every year,on the anniversary of the launch of thesite, he poses a question and invitesEdge participants to answer it.

What kinds of question? “Questionsthat inspire answers we can’t possiblypredict. My goal is to provoke peopleinto thinking thoughts they normallymight not have.” In previous years, thequestions have included:

What do you believe even though youcannot prove it? (2005) What is your dangerous idea? (2006) What are you optimistic about? (2007) What will change everything? (2009)

In 2010, Brockman’s question was:“How is the internet changing the wayyou think?” He received 172 repliesin the form of mini-essays of varying length. These were published on theEdge site in the usual way, but 150 of them have now been collected betweenhard covers under Brockman’seditorship. The result: a whopping hardback, How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impacton Our Minds and Future, publishedlast week by Atlantic Books.

Reading it over Christmas, I wasintrigued by the book and emailedJohn Brockman to discuss some of the thoughts it evoked. What follows isan edited transcript of our exchanges.

to Brockman that he read GeorgeGamow’s One, Two, Three… Infinity andThe Mysterious Universe. Gerd Stern,co-founder of media collective USCO,who performed in conjunction withtalks by Marshall McLuhan, introducedBrockman to several scientists andeventually arranged for him to meetMcLuhan and his colleagues.

In cyberspace, Brockman is bestknown for Edge.org , a site he foundedas a continuation of what he describesas “a failed art experiment” by hislate friend, performance artist JamesLee Byars. Byars believed, Brockmanrecalls, “that to arrive at a satisfactoryplateau of knowledge it was pure follyto go to Widener Library at Harvardand read six million books. Instead,he planned to gather the 100 mostbrilliant minds in the world in a room,lock them in and have them ask oneanother the questions they’d beenasking themselves. The expected result– in theory – was to be a synthesis of all thought.” But it didn’t work out thatway. Byars did identify his 100 most

brilliant minds and phoned each of them. The result: 70 hung up on him!

Byars died in 1997, but Brockmanpersisted with his idea, or at anyrate with the notion that it might bepossible to do something analogoususing the internet. And so Edge.org wasborn as a kind of high-octane onlinesalon with Brockman as its editor andhost. He describes it as “a conversation.We look for people whose creativework has expanded our notion of whoand what we are. We encourage workon the cutting edge of the culture and

the investigation of ideas that have notbeen generally exposed.”

As of now, the roll call of current anddeceased members of the Edge salonruns to 660. They include many of the usual suspects (Richard Dawkins,Craig Venter and Stewart Brand, forexample ). It’s a predominately malecrowd, with women accounting foronly 16.5% of the members – which isprobably a reflection of the fact thatscience is still largely a male-dominatedbusiness. There are a lot of what onemight call the “digerati” – the ClayShirkys, Douglas Couplands andHoward Rheingolds of this world.Two generations of the Dyson clanare represented – the great physicistFreeman and his two kids, Esther andGeorge. Edge seems biased towardsthe Anglo-Saxon world; at any rate,there are surprisingly few continentalEuropeans or Asians. Brits, on the otherhand, figure prominently: names thatstand out include those of Brian Cox,Charlie Leadbeater, Colin Blakemore,Karl Sabbagh, Martin Rees, Mark Pagel,Lewis Wolpert, Patrick Bateson, SimonBaron-Cohen, Ross Anderson, TimBerners-Lee and Helena Cronin.

Asked how he had assembled thisintriguing posse of thinkers, Brockmanreplied: “It’s all based on word of mouth and reputation. Edge, contrary

Brockman canphone Nobellaureates with

a good chancethat they willtake the call



The Observer | 08.01.12 | THE NEW REVIEW 13

Continued overleaf

orld’s smartest website John Naughton I see you’ve beenvariously described as a “culturalimpresario” and an “intellectualenzyme”. How would you describeyourself?

John Brockman Wallace Stevens wrotein his poem “Man With the BlueGuitar”:

Throw away the lights, the definitions, And say of what you see in the darkThat it is this or that it is that,

But do not use the rotted names. Any attempt to describe myself

would end in awkwardness, confusionand contradiction. Also, I like to keepchanging the subject, to surprisemyself.

JNWhat’s your intellectual background?From which of the original “TwoCultures” do you come? I’m an engineer,so this two/three cultures stuff reallyresonates with me.

JB In 1944, at three and a half years old,I was stricken with spinal meningitisand was in a coma for six weeks atBoston’s children’s hospital. Thedoctors had given up on me when,unexpectedly, I opened my eyes. I amtold the first thing I said was: “I want togo to New York.”

I arrived there at age 20 in 1961 forgraduate school at Columbia. I wasimmediately struck by, and impressedwith, the argumentative and exciting culture in which conversations were

being carried out month after month inthe pages of literary magazines such asCommentary, Partisan Review and theUK’s Encounter.

For a dollar or two, I was privilegedto look over the shoulders of theintelligentsia of the day – LionelTrilling , Stephen Spender, HannahArendt, Alfred Kazin et al – as theywent at one another over importantissues such as the Eichmann trial and/ or more trivial pursuits as to who sleptwith whom on a particular Bloomsburyweekend or who was still a Stalinistafter the purge trials of 1937.

It’s interesting to note that while Iwas ostensibly at Columbia to studyeconomics and finance, my interestsand instincts were strictly cultural andI made the most of the resources of agreat university and New York Cityto educate myself in the areas that

interested me and also to situate myself in the milieu where the action wastaking place.

JN How did you get involved in thearts?

JB I quickly realised, but didnot articulate, something theanthropologist Gregory Batesontold me 10 years later: that of all ourhuman inventions, economic man wasby far the dullest. A friend suggested Icome downtown at night and help outat Theatre Genesis, an off -Broadwaytheatre in St Mark’s in the Bowery, theavant-garde church that also was hometo a bustling poetry centre.

So every night I would show upin my three-piece banker’s suit andhelp set up the theatre. Working with me were the 21-year-old SamShepard, a young playwright from themidwest, and his room-mate, CharlieMingus Jr.

One of the artists I got to knowwas the poet Gerd Stern, who had,on occasion, collaborated withMarshall McLuhan, incorporating live McLuhan lectures into USCOintermedia performances. Gerd,with his unkempt hair and abundantbeard, was an odd counterpoint tothe buttoned-down classics professorfrom Toronto, but they got along famously. Through Gerd and otherartists, McLuhan’s ideas had begunto permeate the art world, though itwould be several more years beforethey hit the mainstream.

Gerd introduced me to the

IN CONVERSATION JOHN BROCKMAN’S

EXCHANGE WITH JOHN NAUGHTON

anthropologist Edmund Carpenter,McLuhan’s collaborator, who in turninvited me to Fordham University in1967 to meet McLuhan, Father JohnCulkin and other members of thatcharmed circle of communicationstheorists. The discussion centred onthe idea that we had gone beyondFreud’s invention of the unconsciousand, for the first time, had renderedvisible the conscious.

JN OK, so you’re deeply immersed inthe avant-garde scene and entrancedby McLuhan. But how did you get fromthere to an involvement with scienceand technology?

JB It was McLuhan who turned meon to The Mathematical Theory of Communication, the book by BellLabs scientists Claude Shannon andWarren Weaver that began: “The word‘communication’ will be used here ina very broad sense to include all of theprocedures by which one mind mayaff ect another. This, of course, involvesnot only written and oral speech,but also music, the pictorial arts, thetheatre, the ballet and in fact all humanbehaviour.”

He also pointed me to Oxfordzoologist JZ Young’s 1950 BBC Reithlectures entitled “Doubt and Certaintyin Science”. And I recall his quoting onememorable line that has stuck with meand informed my thinking since thatday: “We create tools and mould

ourselves through our use of them.”

John Cage had also picked up onall these ideas. He convened weeklydinners during which he tried themout, as well as his mushroom recipes,on a group of young artists, poets andwriters. I was fortunate to have been

included at these dinners where wetalked about media, communications,art, music, philosophy, the ideasof McLuhan and Norbert Wiener.McLuhan had pointed out that byinventing electric technology, wehad externalised our central nervoussystems; that is, our minds.

Cage went further to say that wenow had to presume that “there’s onlyone mind, the one we all share”. Hepointed out that we had to go beyondprivate and personal mindsets andunderstand how radically things hadchanged. Mind had become socialised.“We can’t change our minds withoutchanging the world,” he said. Mindas a manmade extension became ourenvironment, which he characterisedas “the collective consciousness”,which we could tap into by creating “aglobal utilities network”. In some waysin 1964 and 1965 he was envisioning what would become the internet, long before the tools became available for itsimplementation.

Inspired also by BuckminsterFuller and others, I began to readavidly in the field of informationtheory, cybernetics and systemstheory. I also seized the opportunityto become the first “McLuhanesque”consultant and producer and soonhad a thriving business working withclients that included General Electric,Metromedia, Columbia Pictures, ScottPaper and the White House.

I wrote a synthesis of these ideasin my first book, By the Late John

‘Any attempt todescribe myselfwould end inawkwardness,confusion andcontradiction’

John Brockman, New

York, 201 1.

Photograph by Peter

Yang/August Image



14 THE NEW REVIEW | 08.01.12 | The Observer

‘Elites thatare openand basedon merit canbe nurturing’

INSIDE TRACK Edge members share their opinions about

MARTIN REESEx-president of the Royal Society,

professor of cosmology and astrophysics,

University of Cambridge

e internet enables far wider participationin front-line science; it levels the playingfield between researchers in major centresand those in relative isolation, hithertohandicapped by inefficient communication.It has transformed the way scienceis communicated and debated. Morefundamentally, it changes how research isdone, what might be discovered and howstudents learn.

JON KLEINBERGProfessor of Computer Science, Cornell

University

When I first used an Internet search enginein the early 1990s, I imagined myselfdipping into a vast, universal library, amuseum vault filled with accumulatedknowledge.e fact that I shared this

museum vault with other visitors wassomething that I knew in principle, butcould not directly perceive.

When I go online today, all thoserooms and hallways are teeming. Whatstrikes me is the human texture of theinformation. I’ve come to appreciate theway the event and th e crowd in fact livein symbiosis, each dependent on theother – the people all talking at onceabout the event, but the event only fullycomprehensible as the sum total of thehuman reaction to it.e cacophonymight make sense, and it might not.

HELEN FISHERResearch professor, Departmentof Anthropology, Rutgers University

e internet is a return to yesteryear; itsimply allows me (and the rest of us) tothink and behave in ways for which we werebuilt long, long ago. Take love. We think it’snatural to court a totally unknown personin a bar or club. But it’s far more natural to

CULTURE

Continued from page 13

Brockman (1969 ), taking informationtheory – the mathematical theoryof communications – as a model forregarding all human experience.A main theme has continued toinform my work over the years: newtechnologies = new perceptions.

An incident from those years standsout. During an evening at dinner, Cagereached across the table and handedme a copy of Cybernetics by NorbertWiener. Fast forward two years.Around 1967, I spent two days withStewart Brand while he was assembling the first edition of the Whole EarthCatalog and we sat and read the booktogether, underlining as we went along.Central to our interest was the notion of “feedback”, the non-linear relationshipof input to output. It was apparent thatthe ideas in cybernetic theory were farmore important than the applicationsfor which the mathematicaldescriptions were designed.

Stewart and I have been in touchregularly since then – a 45-yearconnection.

JNWas it difficult to come up with Edge’s2010 question, about the internet?

JB Every August, I begin a conversationwith three of the original membersof Edge – Stewart, Kevin Kelly andGeorge Dyson. Eventually, I came

up with the idea of asking how theinternet is aff ecting the scientificwork, lives, minds and reality of thecontributors. A big considerationof this question is the diff erencebetween “we” and “you”. Whenpeople respond to “we” questions,their words tend to resemble expertpapers, public pronouncements ortalks delivered from a stage. “You”leads us to share specifics of our livedexperience. The challenge then is notto let responses slip into life’s morebanal details.

JN I was struck by something that onerespondent, Evgeny Morozov, saidabout his fear of a chasm opening “between the disengaged masses andthe overengaged elites”. The elites,he goes on, “continue thriving in thenew environment, exploiting superb

online tools for scientific researchand collaboration” etc. Actually, it’sclear that many – most? – of yourrespondents are, par excellence,members of those elites. That’s nota criticism, but it might mean thata casual reader could come awayfrom the book thinking that publicengagement with the internet and itssignificance is rather more elevatedand intelligent than is actually the case.

JB The problem with a discussionthat uses the word “elites” is that theword is automatically perceived as apejorative. But that’s not how I feelabout it at all. Elites are a problem if they’re closed and exclusive. Elitesthat are open, inclusive and based onmerit can be nurturing. Also, membersof elites give one another permission tobe great. One example is the Beat poets.Another example is the mix of peoplewho created Silicon Valley.

While Edge is a read-only site, thecast of characters contributing to thevarious projects is ever-changing andinclusion is by recommendation of members of the community. That said,Edge is not for everybody. It helpsto know some stuff . But one thing you won’t find in the responses isarrogance. The site stands or falls onthe quality of the questions it asks.

In terms of this particular question– “Is the internet changing the wayyou think?” – there’s the question of people having skin in the game. Thecontributors to Edge are what I callthird-culture thinkers or intellectuals.Not only are they focused on science-

minded pursuits based on evidenceand empiricism, they are also publiccommunicators, reaching out tothe public by means of their books,lectures, etc. They live by their wits,

and doing so in the changing timesof the digital age is a challenge. Theirconcerns are very diff erent than, say,the casual user, who has signed upfor a social network and by defaultbecomes the product whose privateinformation is sold to advertisers.

JN In a way, the shadow of MarshallMcLuhan looms over the conversation.

Two of his aphorisms in particular –“The medium is the message” and “Weshape our tools and later they shapeus” – seem particularly apposite. Thefirst captured the thought that what’s

important about a medium is not thecontent of the messages it carries butwhat the medium is doing to those whouse it. That seemed to me to emergefrom lots of the responses (and not justNick Carr’s, either). And the memeabout our tools shaping us surfacedagain and again in the essays.

JB McLuhan is certainly central to



The Observer | 08.01.12 | THE NEW REVIEW 15

the internet, from John Brockman’s new book

this crowd and to the book. Thisis interesting because for morethan a decade his name was barelymentioned. He certainly was aninfluence on me in terms of my

intellectual development and career. Inone typical conversation, he recountedhis ideas on how psychoanalysis hadgone the way of the gods and wewere in a new realm where we werelooking at the evolution of patterns andinformation. A lot has been writtenabout the diff erences between atomsand bits, but the first time I heard itwas from Marshall. For anyone who

met him during the 60s, his mannerand the way in which he presentedhimself were remarkable and never tobe forgotten. Sitting down at lunch, youwould be faced with machine gun-like

expositions of facts and ideas ranging from medieval classical literature toarcane scientific matters concerning the aural space of the native NorthAmerican Eskimos, the focus of thework of his collaborator EdmundCarpenter.

It was Carpenter who explained tome what he thought was the secretbehind Marshall’s brilliance. At the time,

McLuhan was hospitalised after being operated on for the removal of a braintumour. “And all those years we thoughtabout the brilliance and we thought itwas just Marshall,” Ted said. “But it wasthe pills he was taking for symptoms of what turned out to be the tumour.”

JN I noticed that Martin Rees andRichard Dawkins avoided talking about themselves and wondered if there might be something cultural– ie British – at work here? I’m anIrishman and so can say this!

JB Actually not. In this regard, themajor challenge is to get 150 to 200 of the most brilliant people in the worldto follow a simple set of guidelines.And one of the pronouncements thisyear is: “No anecdotes about spouses,significant others, kids, family pets.”

The reason for this prohibition isthat Edge is a conversation – it’s not amagazine written for the public. Theaudience for the contributors to Edgeis the other contributors. The readershave the opportunity to look over theshoulders of some extraordinarilygifted individuals as they go back andforth in the battle of ideas. And sincethe scientific method is central to ouractivities, I want to avoid the personaland focus on evidence.

JNI was pleased to see quite a lot aboutthe “collective IQ” of the net – which issomething that the mainstream mediadon’t seem to understand at all. A

passage in William Calvin’s essay wherehe talks about the net enabling us to“stand on the shoulders of a lot moregiants at the same time” reminded meof an older metaphor coined by, I think,Doug Engelbart, who invented themouse, windowing interfaces and a lotof other seminal computing technology:“Power steering for the mind”.

JBOne of the concepts that peoplewere talking about in the late 60s was“the collective conscious”. McLuhanmade specific reference to it on manyoccasions. Cage used to talk about“the mind we all share”. The culturalanthropologist Edward T Hall, who wasin that circle, and studied what he calledthe silent languages of time and space,once pointed out to me that our mostsignificant, most critical inventionswere not those ever considered to be

inventions, but those that appeared tobe innate and natural.His candidate for the most

important invention was not thecapture of fire, not the printing press,not the discovery of electricity, notthe discovery of the structure of DNA. Our most important inventionwas… talking. This was something considered innate and natural,or actually something that wasprobably never even considered,until the first human rendered itvisible by saying: “We’re talking” –probably an important moment inour evolutionary past.

The internet is such a newinvention, a code for the collectiveconscious or “distributed networkedintelligence”. The internet is ourcollective externalised mind. I thinkof it in terms of the concept of feedback:the infinite oscillation of our collectiveconscious interacting with itself,adding a fuller, richer dimension towhat it means to be human.

It’s not about computers. It’snot about what music your friendsare listening to. It’s about humancommunication. “We’re talking.”

How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? , edited by John Brockman,is published by Atlantic Books. John Naughton’s From Gutenberg toZuckerberg: What You Really Needto Know About the Internet is published by Quercus Books . To buyeither title for a special price with freeUK p&p, call 0330 333 6847 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk

know a few basic things about an individual

before meeting him or her. Internet dating

sites, chatrooms, social networking sites

provide these details, enabling the modern

human brain to pursue more comfortably

its ancestral mating dance.

en there’s the issue of privacy.

Some are mystified by the way others,

particularly the young, so frivolously

reveal their intimate lives on Facebook,

Twitter, in emails and via other i nternet

billboards. Yet for millions of years our

forebears had almost no privacy. With

the internet, we are returning to this

practice of shared community.

So for me, the internet has only

magnified – on a grand scale – what I

already knew about human nature.

RODNEY BROOKS Panasonic professor of robotics,MIT Computer Science and ArtificialIntelligence Lab

e internet is stealing our attention. It

competes for it with everything else we

do. A lot of what it offers is high-quality

competition. But unfortunately a lot of

what it offers is merely good at capturing

our attention and provides us with little

of long-term import – sugar-filled

carbonated sodas for our mind.

We, or at least I, need tools that will

provide us with the Di et-Internet, the

version that gives us the intellectual

caffeine that lets us achieve what we

aspire to, but which doesn’t turn us

into hyperactive intellectual junkies.

JUDITH RICH HARRISIndependent investigator and theoretician

e internet dispenses information the

way a ketchup bottle dispenses ketchup.

At first, there was too little; now, there is

too much.

In between, there was a halcyon interval

of just-enoughness. For me, it lasted

about 10 years.

ey were the best years of my life.

John Brockman with AndyWarhol and Bob Dylan in theFactory, 1966. Below, four ofthe Edge members whosethoughts on the internet areincluded in Brockman’s newbook (from left): Brian Eno,Freeman Dyson, StevenPinker, Marina Abramovic.Nat Finkelstein

‘Edge is not foreverybody. It helpsto know somestuff. But you won’tfind arrogance inthe responses’

guardian observer

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