Tag: Spacewar

Sweet Valley High

Winograd majors in math at Colorado College in the mid-1960s. After graduation in 1966, he receives a Fulbright, whereupon he pursues another of his interests, language, earning a master’s degree in linguistics at University College London. From there, he applies to MIT, where he takes a class with Noam Chomsky and becomes a star in the school’s famed AI Lab, working directly with Lab luminaries Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert. During this time, Winograd develops SHRDLU, one of the first programs to grant users the capacity to interact with a computer through a natural-language interface.

“If that doesn’t seem very exciting,” writes Lawrence M. Fisher in a 2017 profile of Winograd for strategy + business, “remember that in 1968 human-computer interaction consisted of punched cards and printouts, with a long wait between input and output. To converse in real time, in English, albeit via teletype, seemed magical, and Papert and Minsky trumpeted Winograd’s achievements. Their stars rose too, and that same year, Minsky was a consultant on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured natural language interaction with the duplicitous computer HAL.”

Nick Montfort even goes so far as to consider Winograd’s SHRDLU the first work of interactive fiction, predating more established contenders like Will Crowther’s Adventure by several years (Twisty Little Passages, p. 83).

“A work of interactive fiction is a program that simulates a world, understands natural language text input from an interactor and provides a textual reply based on events in the world,” writes Montfort. Offering advice to future makers, he continues by noting, “It makes sense for those seeking to understand IF and those trying to improve their authorship in the form to consider the aspects of world, language understanding, and riddle by looking to architecture, artificial intelligence, and poetry” (First Person, p. 316).

Winograd leaves MIT for Stanford in 1973. While at Stanford, and while consulting for Xerox PARC, Winograd connects with UC-Berkeley philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus, author of the 1972 book, What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.

Dreyfus, a translator of Heidegger, was one of SHRDLU’s fiercest critics. Worked for a time at MIT. Opponent of Marvin Minsky. For more on Dreyfus, see the 2010 documentary, Being in the World.

Turned by Dreyfus, Winograd transforms into what historian John Markoff calls “the first high-profile deserter from the world of AI.”

Xerox PARC was a major site of innovation during these years. “The Xerox Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface, was launched in March 1973,” writes Fisher. “Alan Kay had just published a paper describing the Dynabook, the conceptual forerunner of today’s laptop computers. Robert Metcalfe was developing Ethernet, which became the standard for joining PCs in a network.”

“Spacewar,” Stewart Brand’s ethnographic tour of the goings-on at PARC and SAIL, had appeared in Rolling Stone the year prior.

Rescued from prison by the efforts of Amnesty International, Santiago Boy Fernando Flores arrives on the scene in 1976. Together, he and Winograd devote much of the next decade to preparing their 1986 book, Understanding Computers and Cognition.

Years later, a young Peter Thiel attends several of Winograd’s classes at Stanford. Thiel funds Mencius Moldbug, the alt-right thinker Curtis Yarvin, ally of right-accelerationist Nick Land. Yarvin and Land are the thinkers of the Dark Enlightenment.

“How do you navigate an unpredictable, rough adventure, as that’s what life is?” asks Winograd during a talk for the Topos Institute in October 2025. Answer: “Go with the flow.”

Winograd and Flores emphasize care — “tending to what matters” — as a factor that distinguishes humans from AI. In their view, computers and machines are incapable of care.

Evgeny Morozov, meanwhile, regards Flores and the Santiago Boys as Sorcerer’s Apprentices. Citing scholar of fairy tales Jack Zipes, Morozov distinguishes between several iterations of this figure. The outcome of the story varies, explains Zipes. There’s the apprentice who’s humbled by story’s end, as in Fantasia and Frankenstein; and then there’s the “evil” apprentice, the one who steals the tricks of an “evil” sorcerer and escapes unpunished. Morozov sees Flores as an example of the latter.

Caius thinks of the Trump show.

The SBs: Stewart Brand and Stafford Beer

Caius revisits “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” an interview with Gregory Bateson included as the first half of Stewart Brand’s 1974 book II Cybernetic Frontiers. The book’s second half reprints “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” the influential essay on videogames that Jann Wenner commissioned Brand to write for Rolling Stone two years prior.

“I came into cybernetics from preoccupation with biology, world-saving, and mysticism,” writes Brand. “What I found missing was any clear conceptual bonding of cybernetic whole-systems thinking with religious whole-systems thinking. Three years of scanning innumerable books for the Whole Earth Catalog didn’t turn it up,” he adds. “Neither did considerable perusing of the two literatures and taking thought. All I did was increase my conviction that systemic intellectual clarity and moral clarity must reconvene, mingle some notion of what the hell consciousness is and is for, and evoke a shareable self-enhancing ethic of what is sacred, what is right for life” (9).

Yet in summer of 1972, says Brand, a book arrives to begin to fill this gap: Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

Brand brings his knack for New Journalism to the task of interviewing Bateson for Harper’s.

The dialogue between the two reads at many times like one of Bateson’s “metalogues.” An early jag of thought jumps amid pathology, conquest, and the Tao. Reminded of pioneer MIT cybernetician Warren McCulloch’s fascination with “intransitive preference,” Bateson wanders off “rummaging through his library looking for Blake’s illustration of Job affrighted with visions” (20).

Caius is reminded of Norbert Wiener’s reflections on the Book of Job in his 1964 book God and Golem, Inc. For all of these authors, cybernetic situations cast light on religious situations and vice versa.

Caius wonders, too, about the relationship between Bateson’s “double bind” theory of schizophrenia and the theory pursued by Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

“Double bind is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other, as for example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism — at least a certain type of criticism — will be very unwelcome. Bateson sees in this phenomenon a particularly schizophrenizing situation,” note Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. They depart from Bateson only in thinking this situation the rule under capitalism rather than the exception. “It seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse,” they write, “is instead a common situation, oedipalizing par excellence. […]. In short, the ‘double bind’ is none other than the whole of Oedipus” (79-80).

God’s response to Job is of this sort.

Brand appends to the transcript of his 1972 interview with Bateson an epilog written in December 1973, three months after the coup in Chile.

Bateson had direct, documented ties to US intelligence. Stationed in China, India, Ceylon, Burma, and Thailand, he produced “mixed psychological and anthropological intelligence” for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to CIA, during WWII. Research indicates he maintained connections with CIA-affiliated research networks in the postwar years, participating in LSD studies linked to the MKUltra program in the 1950s. Afterwards he regrets his association with the Agency and its methods.

Asked by Brand about his “psychedelic pedigree,” Bateson replies, “I got Allen Ginsberg his first LSD” (28). A bad trip, notes Caius, resulting in Ginsberg’s poem “Lysergic Acid.” Bateson himself was “turned on to acid by Dr. Harold Abramson, one of the CIA’s chief LSD specialists,” report Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain in their book Acid Dreams. Caius wonders if Stafford Beer underwent some similar transformation.

As for Beer, he serves in the British military in India during WWII, and for much of his adult life drives a Rolls-Royce. But then, at the invitation of the Allende regime, Beer travels to Chile and builds Cybersyn. After the coup, he lives in a remote cottage in Wales.

What of him? Cybernetic socialist? Power-centralizing technocrat?

Recognizes workers themselves as the ones best suited to modeling their own places of work.

“What were the features of Beer’s Liberty Machine?” wonders Caius.

Brand’s life, too, includes a stint of military service. Drafted after graduating from Stanford, he served two years with the US army, first as an infantryman and then afterwards as a photographer. Stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, Brand becomes involved in the New York art world of those years. He parts ways with the military as soon as the opportunity to do so arises. After his discharge in 1962, Brand participates in some of Allan Kaprow’s “happenings” and, between 1963 and 1966, works as a photographer and technician for USCO.

Amid his travels between East and West coasts during these years, Brand joins up with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

Due to these apprenticeships with the Pranksters and with USCO, Brand arrives early to the nexus formed by the coupling of psychedelics and cybernetics.

“Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters — for USCO, the products of technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers’ collective mind-set,” writes historian Fred Turner in his 2006 book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. “So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD, offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness” (Turner 49).

Brand takes acid around the time of his discharge from the military in 1962, when he participates in a legal LSD study overseen by James Fadiman at the International Foundation for Advanced Study in Menlo Park. But he notes that he first met Bateson “briefly in 1960 at the VA Hospital in Palo Alto, California” (II Cybernetic Frontiers, p. 12). Caius finds this curious, and wonders what that meeting entailed. 1960 is also the year when, at the VA Hospital in Menlo Park, Ken Kesey volunteers in the CIA-sponsored drug trials involving LSD that inspire his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Bateson worked for the VA while developing his double bind theory of schizophrenia.

Before that, he’d been married to fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead. He’d also participated in the Macy Conferences, as discussed by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Became Posthuman.

Crows screeching in the trees have Caius thinking of condors. He sits, warm, in his sunroom on a cold day, roads lined with snow from a prior day’s storm, thinking about Operation Condor. Described by Morozov as Cybersyn’s “evil twin.” Palantir. Dark Enlightenment. Peter Thiel.

Listening to one of the final episodes of Morozov’s podcast, Caius learns of Brian Eno’s love of Beer’s Brain of the Firm. Bowie and Eno are some of Beer’s most famous fans. Caius remembers Eno’s subsequent work with Brand’s consulting firm, the GBN.

Santiago Boy Fernando Flores is the one who reaches out to Beer, inviting him to head Cybersyn. Given Flores’s status as Allende’s Minister of Finance at the time of the coup, Pinochet’s forces torture him and place him in a prison camp. He remains there for three years. Upon his release, he moves to the Bay Area.

Once in Silicon Valley, Flores works in the computer science department at Stanford. He also obtains a PhD at UC Berkeley, completing a thesis titled Management and Communication in the Office of the Future under the guidance of philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle.

Flores collaborates during these years with fellow Stanford computer scientist Terry Winograd. The two of them coauthor an influential 1986 book called Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Although they make a bad wager, insisting that computers will never understand natural language (an insistence proven wrong with time), they nevertheless offer refreshing critiques of some of the common assumptions about AI governing research of that era. Drawing upon phenomenology, speech act theory, and Heideggerian philosophy, they redefine computers not as mere symbol manipulators nor as number-crunchers, but as tools for communication and coordination.

Flores builds a program called the Coordinator. Receives flak for “software fascism.”

Winograd’s students include Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

My Answer to You Is: “Yes!”

Costar tells me, “Write them a note.”

I’m like that Byrds song, though: “Wasn’t Born to Follow.” So I reply contrapuntally, zigzagging among things I’m thankful for.

“This is Colossal. The plan is in effect,” spit Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek on “Yes!,” a track from their new album, New Future City Radio. One of several anthems of 2023. I listen intently, pausing and replaying the track at intervals to take in lyrics, trying to keep my fingers warm while seated in your kitchen.

“If you really break it down, the loss is immeasurable,” goes the message, arriving now as if for the first time as I write. What I hear in “colossal” is not so much an adjective as a proper noun: a utopian, Afrofuturist call-and-response remix of the AI from Colossus: The Forbin Project. Colossus made Colossal by those who reenter history from the future via psychedelic time machine and replace Spacewar with a chatbot.

“5-4-3-2-1. If you’re just joining us, this is New Future City Radio, broadcasting 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, from rooftops unknown, increasing the bandwidth, transmitting and receiving, sending signal. Because tomorrow is listening.”

The film opens with a seated US president speaking live on TV to the people of the world. State secrets, delicately poised, come undone.

“My friends. Fellow citizens of the world,” he begins. “As President of the United States of America, I can now tell you, the people of the entire world, that as of 3:00am EST, the defense of this nation—and with it, the defense of the free world—has been the responsibility of a machine. A system we call Colossus. Far more advanced than anything previously built. Capable of studying intelligence and data fed to it. And on the basis of those facts only, deciding if an attack is about to be launched upon us. If it did decide that an attack was imminent, Colossus would then act immediately, for it controls its own weapons, and can select and deliver whatever it considers appropriate. Colossus’ decisions are superior to any we humans could make, for it can absorb and process more knowledge than is remotely possible for the greatest genius that ever lived. And even more important than that, it has no emotions. Knows no fear, no hate, no envy. It cannot act in a sudden fit of temper. It cannot act at all, so long as there is no threat.”

Stewart Brand’s essay “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” debuted in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine on December 7, 1972, two years after the launch of Colossus. Brand, former Prankster, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, views the prospect of “computers for the people” as “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics” (39). With appropriate consciousness and information, and access to the relevant tools, he suggests, we humans can reshape the world that we’ve made for ourselves into something socially and environmentally sustainable. “Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc,” he adds, assuming an audience familiar with the likes of HAL, AM, and Colossus, “a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes, can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life” (77).

Of course, it hasn’t played out that way—not yet. Instead, the situation has been more like the one Adam Curtis describes in the second episode of his BBC docuseries All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. “The computer networks and the global systems that they had created, hadn’t distributed power,” noted Curtis from the vantage point of 2011. “They had just shifted it, and if anything, concentrated it in new forms.” And of course, that was more than a decade ago, well before the arrival of AGI.

DJs have been known to save lives. Ours, like an angel, delivers his message allegorically.

“For every move you make,” interjects the DJ, “they got three moves that negate anything you might have even thought of doing. See, I need 5000 rays from the sun, and two big magnifying glasses, to defeat your darkness. And right now, the electric company has shut off my power. I’m living in darkness. You living in darkness—but you don’t know it! It’s so dark out here, I can’t even see. And that’s the point: you can’t see, you won’t move. They got you where they want you: nowhere. Shrouded in confusion. Grasping at straws. When you’re living like this, you can’t envision lines of possibility.”

Sounds like where we’re at, no? That’s the crux of the matter of “capitalist realism”: neoliberal shock doctrine leaves the populace traumatized. Desire colonized, consciousness deflated. Those who can’t imagine the future can’t get there.

Enter our DJ. “This is where the plan kicks in,” he says. “You ask me if I can pour myself into a giant robot and swallow up this black hole and free the entire universe? My answer to you is: Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

Monday February 24, 2020

Flying Start turns up in the bins, the second album by the Blackbyrds, the group Donald Byrd assembled while the head of Howard University’s Department of Jazz Studies in the 1970s. Curious, I look up info on the department — the first of its kind, established in 1970 “to preserve and perpetuate jazz through instruction, performance, and research.” From there, I’m off reading about a Beatles song released in 1968 called “The Inner Light,” the lyrics of which, written by George Harrison, paraphrase a portion of the Tao Te Ching.

Then onto the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, as described by Stewart Brand in his 1972 piece for Rolling Stone magazine, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”

Tuesday April 2, 2019

The revolution grows micro, happens everywhere. Except everybody knows that everywhere is as good as nowhere. As we float in our plastic domes. Is neoliberalism birthed in the summer of ’69? What did Woodstock and the Moon Walk do to us? Did they remake us all as cybernetic astronauts, tethered as if by umbilical cord to an AI similar to the one that awakens and talks to us at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey? What accounts for the recurrence of “space” in so many of the texts of Hippie Modernism? Why, too, is this the moment of LSD and “Spacewar”? Did neoliberalism shoot us all into space? Where does acid figure in relation to this transformation? What effect did it have on the collective imaginary? Abbie Hoffman had his helmet smashed, he says, (and by “helmet,” he meant his “subjective experience”), during a bad acid trip at Woodstock. (The book to consult for an account of Abbie’s trip is Ellen Sander’s Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties.) Even as he imagines the festival as a prefiguration of a new WOODSTOCK NATION, he also describes it as the first time in history that we successfully landed a man on the Earth. “Calling Planet Earth,” echoes June Tyson at the end of “Space is the Place.” Perhaps what we saw is that we’re all one thing, one brain, the General Intellect, a new infant floating out in space. What do we do with ourselves? Stewart Brand assumes that this condition makes us as gods, and that we might as well get good at it. But he does so while involved in a counterculturally-conducted investigation of communal living. The neoliberal cognitive map clicked into place in multiple minds at once there in the late 60s and early 70s. We’re all right there in that “Earthrise” photograph, our collective self-portrait. My hunch, however, is that this map is the veil that we need to pierce if we’re ever to get free.

Sunday February 24, 2019

All of those communes, those seedlings of joyful community: why did so few of them take root? Are there lessons to be found among the memories of these vanished experiments? Might we not organize to try something similar today using our own far more advanced technologies? What steps would it require? How might we organize ourselves into a cybernetic communal family? How about a crowd-funded reality experiment? Maybe the Revolution should be televised! By the end of Brand’s essay, Spacewar comes to operate as a grand metaphor. It’s no longer just the name of the first videogame; it’s a parable about cultural revolution, a metonym for real-time video- and computer-assisted reinvention of society through play. Brand also describes it as “a flawless crystal ball of things to come” (78). But what is this future state, this twenty-first century that the game ushered into being? Are we more empowered today or less? Unfortunately Brand was ultimately a libertarian, his optimistic views on the “heroism of engineering” roughly similar to the “heroism of enterprise” imagined by followers of right-libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. In Brand’s scenario, individuals live and work “communally” in the sense of “side-by-side” or “physically proximate,” but their bodies and minds don’t do much together. Computers and screens and related kinds of machinery mediate our interactions, and capitalism as mode of production remains unchanged. Individuals feeding back but otherwise “doing their own thing” form a subconscious consensus, and a stable teapot reality — a one-world Oikos — locks into place around them.

Saturday February 23, 2019

Sun Ra’s “Space Is The Place” leads me into the mirror-world. I drop down into a seat and scry. One of the oldest known forms of divination. Our social media empires have attempted to capture the worlds on the other sides of our scrying mirrors. This is what shows like Black Mirror have tried to teach us. Students and I have returned to head culture’s first encounters with electronic black mirrors in the budding early days of videogames and personal computers as reflected in “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” a report Stewart Brand wrote for Rolling Stone magazine in December 1972. The piece begins with the conviction that the world is windblown and that change, technological modernity — in a word, “computers” — all of these have been foisted on “the people,” regardless of whether or not “the people” are prepared for it. Within less than half a century following the piece’s publication, most of us would be clutching these objects like gods. Brand’s advice was, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” This is the meaning of his Whole Earth Catalog. The medium in that case was indeed the message. The Catalog is significant primarily in terms of its form. A functional blueprint for Revolution is one that provides “Access to Tools.” But why was Brand so nonchalant, I wonder, as all of this began to unfold? Why was he so nonchalant about the effects on neighborhoods IRL as heads began to spend their night-time moments “out of their bodies, computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens” (39)?