The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 79

Albrecht, who wrote self-teaching guides, including the popular My Computer Likes Me (When I Speak BASIC), launched a publication called the People’s Computer Company, which was not really a company but called itself one in honor of Janis Joplin’s band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The scraggly newsletter adopted as its motto “Computer power to the people.” The first issue, in October 1972, had on its cover a drawing of a boat sailing into the sunset and the hand-scrawled declaration “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that—we need a PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY.”⁸¹ Most issues featured lots of line drawings of dragons—“I loved dragons ever since I was thirteen,” Albrecht recalled—and stories about computer education, BASIC programming, and various learning fairs and do-it-yourself technology festivals.⁸² The newsletter helped to weave together electronic hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and community-learning organizers.

Another embodiment of this culture was Lee Felsenstein, an earnest antiwar protestor with an electrical engineering degree from Berkeley who became a featured character in Steven Levy’s Hackers. Felsenstein was far from being a Merry Prankster. Even in the heady days of student unrest at Berkeley, he eschewed sex and drugs. He combined a political activist’s instinct for community organizing with an electronic geek’s disposition for building communications tools and networks. A faithful reader of the Whole Earth Catalog, he had an appreciation for the do-it-yourself strand in American community culture along with a faith that public access to communications tools could wrest power from governments and corporations.⁸³

Felsenstein’s community-organizing streak and love for electronics were instilled as a child in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1945. His father was a locomotive machinist who had become a sporadically employed commercial artist, and his mother was a photographer. Both were secret members of the Communist Party. “Their outlook was that what you were fed by the media was generally phony, which was one of my father’s favorite words,” Felsenstein recalled. Even after they left the Party, his parents remained left-wing organizers. As a kid, Felsenstein picketed visiting military leaders and helped organize demonstrations in front of a Woolworth’s in support of the desegregation sit-ins in the South. “I always had a piece of paper to draw on when I was a kid, because my parents encouraged us to be creative and imaginative,” he recalled. “And on the other side there was usually some mimeographed leaflet from an old block organization event.”⁸⁴

His technological interests were instilled partly by his mother, who repeatedly told of how her late father had created the small diesel engines used in trucks and trains. “I took the hint that she wanted me to be an inventor,” he said. Once, when he was reprimanded by a teacher for daydreaming, he replied, “I’m not daydreaming, I’m inventing.”⁸⁵

In a household with a competitive older brother and an adopted sister, Felsenstein took refuge in going to the basement and playing with electronics. It instilled in him a sense that communications technology should enable individual empowerment: “The technology of electronics promised something I apparently wanted greatly—communication outside the hierarchical structure of the family.”⁸⁶ He took a correspondence course that came with booklets and test equipment, and he bought radio handbooks and ninety-nine-cent transistors so that he could learn how to turn schematic drawings into working circuits. One of the many hackers who grew up building Heathkits and other solder-it-yourself electronic projects, he later worried that subsequent generations were growing up with sealed devices that couldn’t be explored.^III “I learned electronics as a kid by messing around with old radios that were easy to tamper with because they were designed to be fixed.”⁸⁷

Felsenstein’s political instincts and technological interests came together in a love for science fiction, particularly the writings of Robert Heinlein. Like generations of gamers and computer jockeys who helped to create the culture of the personal computer, he was inspired by the genre’s most common motif, that of the hacker hero who uses tech wizardry to bring down evil authority.

He went to Berkeley in 1963 to study electrical engineering, just as the revolt against the Vietnam War was brewing. Among his first acts was to join a protest, along with the poet Allen Ginsberg, against the visit of a South Vietnamese dignitary. It ran late, and he had to get a cab to make it back in time for chemistry lab.

In order to pay his tuition, he entered a work-study program that got him a job with NASA at Edwards Air Force Base, but he was forced to quit when the authorities discovered that his parents had been communists. He called his father to ask if that was true. “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone,” his father replied.⁸⁸

“Keep your nose clean, son, and you won’t have any trouble getting your job back,” Felsenstein was told by an Air Force officer. But it was not in his nature to keep his nose clean. The incident had inflamed his antiauthoritarian streak. He arrived back on campus in October 1964 just as the Free Speech Movement protests erupted, and, like a sci-fi hero, he decided to use his technology skills to engage in the fray. “We were looking for nonviolent weapons, and I suddenly realized that the greatest nonviolent weapon of all was information flow.”⁸⁹

At one point there was a rumor that the police had surrounded the campus, and someone shouted at Felsenstein, “Quick! Make us a police radio.” It was not something he could do on the spot, but it resulted in another lesson: “I made up my mind, I had to be out front of everyone applying tech for societal benefit.”⁹⁰

His biggest insight was that creating new types of communications networks was the best way to wrest power from big institutions. That was the essence, he realized, of a free speech movement. “The Free Speech Movement was about bringing down the barriers to people-to-people communications and thus allowing the formation of connections and communities that were not handed down by powerful institutions,” he later wrote. “It laid the ground for a true revolt against the corporations and governments that were dominating our lives.”⁹¹

He began to think about what kind of information structures would facilitate this type of person-to-person communications. He first tried print, launching a newsletter for his student co-op, and then joined the underground weekly the Berkeley Barb. There he acquired the semi-ironic title of “military editor” after writing a story about a landing ship dock and using the initials “LSD” in a satirical fashion. He had hoped that “print could be the new community media,” but he became disenchanted when he “saw it turn into a centralized structure that sold spectacle.”⁹² At one point he developed a bullhorn with a mesh network of input wires that allowed people in the crowd to talk back. “It had no center and thus no central authority,” he said. “It was an Internet-like design, which was a way to distribute communications power to all the people.”⁹³

He realized that the future would be shaped by the distinction between broadcast media like television, which “transmitted identical information from a central point with minimal channels for return information,” and nonbroadcast, “in which every participant is both a recipient and a generator of information.” For him, networked computers would become the tool that would allow people to take control of their lives. “They would bring the locus of power down to the people,” he later explained.⁹⁴