#27 John Markoff | Reflecting on 50-year-old Silicon Valley

Thomas Gauthier

Hi John.

John Markoff

Good morning.

Thomas Gauthier

So here you are, you’re looking at the oracle, and to the questions you ask her about the future, she will answer, and she will answer right every time. Could you please tell us what is your first question for the oracle?

John Markoff

Yeah, this is on my mind a lot. My first question would be, is the climate crisis an existential risk for humanity?

Thomas Gauthier

Okay, you’re starting with a very tough question. Could I ask you, please, why this question comes first to your mind?

How is it connecting with the thought processes you may have been going through, readings, meetings? Tell us where this question is coming from, please.

John Markoff

Yeah, so I’ve been someone who spent all the time that he can. I have a desk job, but the rest of my life is outside.

Once upon a time, I spent my summers in the mountains. I’ve seen climate change in California, dramatic change, just in the space of my lifetime.

A glacier I crossed in Northern California no longer exists. If you go there in the summer, there’s just gravel.

If you drive into the Sierra now, in the mountains that I grew up in, a third of the trees are dead. It’s really remarkable, both from forest fires and from beetle infestations.

And I have this feeling that we’re in this pot that the… The water temperature is rising slowly, and it’s a little bit like frogs.

We don’t sort of notice it, but it clearly, if you live in California over the last three years, besides the COVID, we’ve had increasing fires. Climate is all around us, and it feels like the world that we took for granted has gone and we’re in a new phase.

And so. At the same time, there’s this huge resistance to making changes.

It’s absolutely clear to me that if climate change is following the models that the climate scientists have developed, that we have a very short time to make big changes in humanity. And I don’t see that happening.

And so I think a lot about that.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, let me try and continue on this thought. It sounds to me like what you’re saying is that we are getting more and more disconnected from the… earth system so we are belonging to human systems those human systems are more and more disconnected from the earth systems and we seem to have a very hard time appreciating what the scientists are telling us about climate change now it occurs to me that when thinking about the future it sounds like we have one of two options option one is the collapsed future which is you know about recognizing that for some reason there is no future, whatever we do, the window of opportunity has closed down already.

And the other option would be a technology-oriented option where there is still going to be a highly impactful technology in the future that will allow us to go beyond those existential risks that you are talking about here. My question to you then is, do you see signs of a richer relationship with the future?

Do you see signs of people or do you see signs of organizations that are working at developing alternative future narratives that would fall neither in the… no future category or in the technology will save us future.

John Markoff

There’s a lot to pick apart there. A couple of thoughts.

You know, this notion, I understand what you’re saying about increasingly living in a world, a human created world that’s disconnected from the surrounding world. And I understand that as someone who lives in a suburban community.

But also, I think that, I think the phrase, I may pronounce it incorrectly, the anthropo… Anthropocene.

We are in a period where the humans have had such an impact on our environment, on the climate, on even the geological nature of Earth, that we’re inseparable from the world in which we live, and you can see our impact. So that’s one thing.

The other question about whether there’s a path forward that’s positive. One of the sort of deepest questions about whether we can make the necessary changes to live more in tune with climate is about capitalism.

We live in America in an economic system that’s based on growth. And all of the values are around growth and individual profit.

And in that context, it’s very difficult to see a way forward to a sustainable future. That said, there are examples everywhere.

There are technological examples. There are technological paths that are… potential alternatives.

I’ve always been interested at the interplay between, I guess, speculative writing, whether it’s science fiction or other kinds of fiction, and the path of technology and the emergence of technologies. I’ve even charted it in here in Silicon Valley, and you can clearly see examples where the designers have been inspired by science fiction.

I was heartened to see the reaction to Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction book called The Ministry of the Future, where it had a real measurable impact. You know, it’s a pessimistic and an optimistic book.

But he tried to sketch that path that you’re talking about. For me, it’s not just technology, though.

It’s this blend of culture and politics and society and technology that are sort of inseparable. But I don’t believe the paths are fixed.

And I do see some signs of optimism. If you live here in Silicon Valley, you know, every second car is a Tesla.

We seem to be making a transition toward non-fossil fuel based transportation. That’s essential, it seems to me.

And, you know, there are a million other things to do. But, you know, that’s when you can see around you.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, now that you’re driving the conversation in the, let’s say, space of… capitalism that brings another question that I am struggling with. My understanding of how capitalism works is that it needs a brighter future story.

There is no functioning capitalistic system that is not resting upon a brighter future narrative. We have to believe, enough people have to believe in a brighter future narrative for any capitalistic system to function.

Now that takes growth because we believe that growth is the engine of this brighter future and leaders, be they, you know, public leaders or private leaders, are building their legitimacy on the prospect that there is going to be brighter future. Now, I’m wondering if, like some are suggesting or going back to 1972 and the limits to growth report, the MIT scientists were pointing at the necessity of stopping growth.

The question that comes to mind then is, What happens to leadership? You know, what is leadership in an era where growth is not the engine of a brighter future anymore?

How are leaders transitioning for themselves into a future space where growth is not our collective engine anymore?

John Markoff

Boy, you know, the framing of the future from the 1970s and the framing of the future in the 2020s. is so different. I’m thinking about your question about where are the leaders.

In America, in the United States, you know, that’s a little bit on the table with the platform of the Democratic Party. But if you look at the debate nationally, we have a very conservative and libertarian component to our government that’s about about individual freedom, about the ability.

America has got this frontier mentality, even though there is no longer a physical frontier. There are some people who believe they should behave, they should be able to behave as if they’re on the frontier with no limits.

And that’s still playing out. I see the elections and I keep thinking that these obvious things will be political forces.

And then… The reactionary forces are actually very strong.

People don’t want to be moved out of their individual narratives, in your sense. It’s hard to change those narratives.

I see stuff on the national, on the international scale, where there are these climate movements that seem to be capturing the young. And I see that a little bit in America.

But if you look on a state-by-state basis in the United States, it’s hard to feel optimistic that you see this kind of… You know, the last time I was really swept along by a political movement that had that kind of force was in the 1960s.

Maybe we can talk about that later. And I don’t see that kind of effect.

I believe that the Internet as a as a social and cultural force has actually limited collective activism rather than reinforced it. It’s it is actually separated us from each other. and it’s actually a force against that limits collective action in the traditional kind of political sense.

And I think about that a lot and I’m not certain of that, but I’m concerned about the lack of ability to organize around these issues or even for new leadership to emerge. It seems we’re really stuck in the United States.

I’m less familiar with Europe, and it may be different there. But in the U.S., we’re stuck.

We’re still fighting the last war, if you will. I mean, the culture wars in America were laid down in the 1960s, and we’re stuck in those paths as a nation.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, I think we’ve discussed around your first question at length. And, of course, the Oracle would like another question from you.

So what would that be, John?

John Markoff

Okay, this one will go in a very wild direction. I have to know whether there will be contact with alien civilization.

Thomas Gauthier

Okay, John. Well, this question brings to memory the time when I was a student, you know, somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And back then, I had downloaded on my computer this screensaver that would allow my computer to be used by this university research lab at the University of California in Berkeley to process some potential alien data. So tell me, why are you interested in getting an answer to this?

What would contact with alien change for us?

John Markoff

So that program was on my computer too. I ran that computer, that program as well.

I was very disappointed that I didn’t find the aliens myself. This is so much a part of my childhood growing up in the 60s in America.

I was part of that generation. that grew up after Sputnik, that was really shaped by a generation of science fiction writers, you know, the Asimovs and the Heinlands and the Clarks, that, you know, that was our framing reference. We were looking toward a world that was much broader.

You know, we are in some sense at the end of a frontier and we were looking for this new frontier. When I was 16, my dad took me to the local junior college, and I heard a lecture by Frank Drake, the astronomer who created the Drake equation.

And that sort of became gospel to me. I wanted to be an astronomer until I ran into calculus, and then I realized I wasn’t going to be an astronomer.

And so I did a course correction, but I’ve followed that. I belong periodically.

I don’t think I’m currently, but I’m frequently a member of SETI. I support the people who are here locally, they’re in Silicon Valley, and it’s fun to, I go to their meetings and I hear the discussion.

And, you know, we’ve all of a sudden, I mean, I, you know, there, I, I follow the philosophical debate about whether they’re alien civilizations, all, all going on in this great vacuum, because of course we haven’t contacted them, but there is, you know, either they’re everywhere or they’re nowhere and we have no idea which is right. But if they You know, we’ve just started looking in terms of historical times.

We’ve been looking for a half a second. And we’re also looking like the drunk looking for his keys under the under the streetlight.

You know, I know all the discussion and the and the parameters. But, you know.

When we send these beautiful telescopes into space, they can actually look at stars and see that there are planets everywhere and that there are Goldilocks planets everywhere. It just seems that the problem here is the challenges of communication rather than…

It still seems inevitable to me that we will learn that we’re not alone in the universe and that we’ll really… In terms of the philosophical view of what humanity is, that will change everything.

And I hope it happens in my lifetime.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, if we, you know, look at what the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese and to some extent the Europeans are trying these days in terms of returning on the moon and exploring deep space, there might be such encounter happening at some point in the future. I’d like to ask you then a somewhat related question.

And what is… space exploration about today? Is it to be connected with what you brought up earlier, this idea, this metaphor of a frontier that we would have to cross, that we would have to go beyond?

What, in your opinion, are the prime reasons why there is excitement around space exploration? Again, there is excitement around in-situ resource utilization on the moon.

What is this all about, according to you?

John Markoff

Yeah, so I haven’t followed that debate as closely, although I do, you know, I listen to Elon Musk at all and the notion, I mean, you know, I know Kim Stanley Robinson, the notion of colonizing Mars. I look at that with some contempt, though.

I think that that is the worst sort of escapism. I think the human’s place is on Earth, which to my mind does not. conflict with the notion of exploring the universe.

I could see the rationale of colonizing the moon to exploit resources, perhaps. That makes sense to me.

But to leave the Earth and try to terraform another planet makes no sense to me. And first of all, I think, at least in the current human form, I think it’s impossible.

Maybe if we are able to evolve a class of cyborgs that can survive in these environments that are non, you know, just very hostile to. our particular envelope, then maybe it’s possible. But I think the kind of exploration of the universe that I envision is based on robotics and AI.

We have the ability to create these intelligent machines that could actually populate the universe. And I see that as fascinating and as exciting and as a project for humanity that makes some sense.

And so you can… You can both return our Earth to a more habitable place, and you can explore the universe.

You know, what is Elon’s famous line? He wants to die on Mars, just not on impact.

I don’t see any point in going there either to die or to live. But I do see exploring the universe is a great human project.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, let’s… Go and meet the Oracle for one final time.

This is your chance to ask a third and last question. What would you like to ask the Oracle now?

John Markoff

Okay, well, so I’m going to cheat here. I’m going to ask a two-part question if I can, because I can’t decide.

So the first half is, will democratic institutions survive this era? And the second half of that, which I think is very related, is will the next generation of the internet have a positive or negative impact on society?

And I think those are intertwined.

Thomas Gauthier

How are they intertwined in your mind? Why would you connect democratic systems with the next wave of the internet?

John Markoff

Well, so I was part of a generation that grew up with, you know, early networking. I grew up reading that generation of science fiction called cyberpunk that described a dystopian world based on computer networks.

So I had a very, I had an early grounding in that world. I reported on it.

And I saw as it reached a broader and broader part of humanity till now, I think it reaches about half of humanity or something like that is touched by the network. So, and I saw the political influence it had as it reached a broader and broader group.

And I began, I really was in that camp. I was very, I was very naive because I was, I was reading the cyberpunk science fiction.

So I saw this dystopian future. And at the same time, I believed guys like John Perry Barlow, who was famous for writing this essay in Wired Magazine.

You know, John Perry Barlow was a songwriter for the Grateful Dead. He was also a…

He was also a farmer and he was kind of a well-known libertarian. And he believed that the Internet would be this sort of Socrates abode that would be separate from and insulated from the physical world and the physical politics.

And I can’t believe how unimaginably naive that was. I was pretty quickly disabused of that utopian philosophy and decided that, the internet, if anything, is simply a mirror of our political positives and negatives.

But once again, to go back to my original concerns about the impact of networking on political organization, all of those things have been sharpened by the latest turns in technology. It was funny in the 1990s when the New Yorker said that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Now that we know that that’s true and we don’t have an answer to that problem. So what is a human?

What is a political actor? All of these things are up for grabs in America.

You know it will play out in the next election cycle in a significant way. There’s a big debate about what its impact has been on earlier ones.

And I read all of the discussion about whether the Russians or the Chinese are actors in the American political system. But the boundaries are blurred clearly. and it’s not clear that we can preserve those democratic institutions against these new technologies.

Thomas Gauthier

Yeah, I mean, to make a connection with the work of Stuart Brandt that we might come back to in a second, it brings to mind that in his pace layers model analysis, we find this fashion layer that perhaps we could associate also with technology, we find this infrastructure layer that we might associate with internet. We find this governance layer that we might associate with democracy.

Listening to you, I’m feeling like when you combine democracy with the internet, it might trigger the need for some sort of a rethinking of the way human beings are organizing themselves. The way I think about this is that we are a very social species.

We need to organize. This is our force.

We are never stronger than when united. We’ve united according to certain kinds of organizations.

Let’s call them states. Let’s call them corporations.

Let’s call them NGO. And with the internet, it’s almost, I mean, theoretically to me, calling for the need of a organizing reboot, but I don’t know what would be the next generation way of organizing ourselves.

Any thoughts on where we might go from an organizing perspective?

John Markoff

I have some friends who are part of Stuart Brand’s circle who argued that the impact of this technology would be to lessen the influence of nation states and increase the power of the City State, of these smaller units. And that was a very fashionable idea.

It hasn’t played out very well that way. I mean, the nation states still seem to be perturbing the world in all kinds of terrible ways.

And nationalism seems to have reemerged as a force in the world. I mean, one of the, you know, Brand is not super committed to this idea anymore, but, you know, he was associated with a perspective in the 1970s about planetary governance. and, you know, that had some force then.

And clearly, if you assume that climate change is an existential risk, the only option is a planetary organization in some format. And I despair a little bit about reaching that.

I mean, the UN has been our one sort of serious attempt. Kim Stanley Robinson articulates some other organizational structures that might, you know.

Those are very interesting to me. I don’t see any, you know, the nationalist forces are so in opposition to any kind of planetary or, you know, multinational approach to problems that it’s very challenging.

At least that’s the way it looks from inside America right now. I mean, the Brexit issues are also, you know, a bad sign in terms of European politics as well.

So I’m a little pessimistic about that. And yet I think, you know, that would have been the promise of the internet.

It makes it possible to transcend these boundaries and to connect globally. And so the technology is there.

I, you know, there, I have friends who are optimistic about next generation internet technologies that are highly distributed. I’m a super blockchain skeptic, so let’s not get into that.

But I think that there are these technological forces that are there to create new institutions and sustain new institutions. So I’m not entirely pessimistic.

I just need to see something work.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, you’ve made reference to the 1970s hopes of global governance. So that drives us naturally into the second part of this interview.

I’d like to… ask you to please look in the rear view mirror. Could you please start by bringing back one key event or one key historical process that you think have marked history and could serve as a lesson for the present or as a way to orient ourselves in the present?

What can history tell us today?

John Markoff

Yeah, so this was a challenging for me. I’ve taken three events, maybe four from the from the 20th century that were influential on my life.

And so that’s framed my world. And so the first one was the Vietnam War, which was, you know, a decade long entanglement of the United States that believed it was in this global confrontation with communism and that we had to stop communism in Southeast Asia or they would, you know, they would be in Canada and then they would be in the state of Washington.

And it seems like that was a lesson, a war that America clearly lost. And we could have taken lessons away from that.

And we missed the opportunity to take any real meaningful lesson away from that. The United States seems to have the ability to recapitulate the same errors over and over again.

So that was the first thing that came to mind.

Thomas Gauthier

Is the war in Vietnam, in your opinion, today playing any role in American leaders strategizing. Do we see signs or do we feel that this war is still with us today?

John Markoff

Well, clearly in America, it is. In terms of leader strategy, that’s a more complex issue.

But I do believe that the Vietnam War and the opposition it created in the United States, the emergence of a counterculture created a political and cultural divide, which still defines American politics. As a matter of fact, it’s the principal fracture line in a lot of the stuff that’s going on.

And it’s sort of in the back. You know, it’s the subtext of a lot of the wars that we’re fighting domestically in this country.

I don’t see an easy resolution. The rise of Reagan, Nixon’s efforts to end the war, you know, the Democratic politicians that came afterwards all have collided over issues that were really raw in the 1960s in America.

Thomas Gauthier

Let’s now perhaps look at another milestone for you in history. What would that be?

John Markoff

Well, the other one that shaped my generation and now sits in the forefront again was the invention and the first use of the atom bomb. I grew up in the 1950s.

As part of my childhood, we would go through these exercises where we would have to get under our desks as part of the civilian defense. And so it really was sort of drummed into us that a Soviet bomber could be overhead or a Soviet missile could be.

And it was absurd because if a nuclear weapon had landed on us, the desk would not have done anything. But that, you know, it deeply affected our psyche.

And then through the SALT Treaty and other things, it kind of it sort of backed away. You look to the doomsday clock that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists keeps.

I mean We’re farther away from midnight. And now in the political situation in the war in Ukraine and Putin’s willingness to put nuclear weapons on the table, it’s right back as a meaningful factor in life.

This was brought home over the last week with a Chinese spy balloon floating over a nuclear missile base in America, which just seems like, stuff that we haven’t dealt with since the 1960s, and now it’s shaping international and domestic politics again. And so, you know, thankfully, nuclear weapons haven’t been used.

But as recently as three or four years ago, the idea was distant and seemed like it was off the table. Now it seems like it’s back on the table.

And it’s going to shape all kinds of international politics. So I’m worried.

Thomas Gauthier

Would that risk of a nuclear war be at the level of the And… existential risk that you used as a phrase to characterize climate change? I mean, is nuclear war a worry that is today, according to you, again, on the minds of politicians?

Is this something that I guess we need to reconceptualize, we need to re-engage with as we’ve been living through decades where it was a bit distant, it was… possibly discussed in Geneva, Switzerland, or elsewhere in the world, but it seemed as something that had gone underground. Is this possibly reshaping the geopolitics of the future?

John Markoff

Yeah, so it clearly has because of Putin’s behavior. So, you know, I grew up with these two disconcerting models in nuclear war.

One was the notion of mutually assured destruction. We built a military system in America. that ensured that nuclear weapons would never be used because if they were used, they would end the world.

And both the Russia and the U.S. created the capability to destroy the world or destroy humanity on the world. And so that was supposed to, you know, two scorpions in the bottle.

That was supposed to make the world safer, which is just as Orwellian and insane as you can imagine. But I also, I was part of an activist campaign in the 1970s that for a while stopped the construction of the B-1 bomber.

And the B-1 bomber. which was in some ways, I mean, it was never really used as a weapon system, maybe a little bit by the U.S. and the Middle East, but it was never used for its original mission, which was to fight a war. And, you know, they had a faction of the defense establishment in the United States and the Pentagon who kept designing these weapons with the idea that you could use them as part of a warfighting capability.

And they exist. And, you know, if they exist, there’s the possibility they’ll be used.

So there are these two models. And so far, MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, has kept us from using nuclear weapons.

But it’s a very thin firewall, I’m afraid. And, you know, all of a sudden, if Putin is cornered, we’ll reach the, you know, if he’s threatening the British prime minister with a one minute attack.

The whole hair-trigger notion gets, you know, then we are in Dr. Strangelove territory.

It seems like it’s not science fiction anymore. It’s not Hollywood.

It’s a real potential existential risk for America, for the world.

Thomas Gauthier

I’m wondering, based on what you said, I mean, this might be a bit surprising hypothesis, but now that we are possibly being focused again on the prospect of a thermonuclear war like Herman Kahn would be writing about in the 1960s. And this is in a way getting our attention not focused on climate change anymore.

And at the same time, we’ve got IPCC scientists and other climate scientists saying that the window of opportunity to change course is rapidly shrinking. Could it be in the end that this nuclear threat is ending up delaying our collective action?

Because it is driving our attention and it is essentially letting time run while we might be better using this time to find ways of going after adjusting to climate change.

John Markoff

I’ve heard both sides of that argument. I mean, there is sort of a there’s an optimistic take on the on the war, the Ukrainian war, saying it’s forced us to make energy decisions that are actually positive.

I haven’t reported on this. I don’t know if it’s true, but. it may end up accelerating the move away from fossil fuels.

That would be wonderful if that was true, because you’re right. I mean, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley.

I’m an expert at the notions of exponentials. Things don’t change in a linear fashion.

And if that’s true about climate, and I know that’s debated, but it seems like it might be true about climate, then it becomes very compressed. And you can kind of see the hints of that in the concentration. you know, CO2 and all kinds of other things that are starting to move in a nonlinear fashion.

Thomas Gauthier

And so we’ve got, let’s say, linear wired institutions, linear wired brains, but possibly nonlinear dynamics that are reshaping our environment. Let’s perhaps look a third time in the rearview mirror.

What would be the third historical landmark that you bring?

John Markoff

Well, this is a very difficult one for me. You know, I grew up in California.

I grew up in a secular home, but I’m ethnically Jewish. And I never could really confront the Holocaust growing up.

I avoided thinking about it. I avoided everything about it.

And then the war in the Ukraine happened. And I realized that my grandfather left a village to avoid being drafted in World War I.

His village was ????, the site of the Kiev International Airport. And that’s where the Russian paratroopers landed and were wiped out.

That was my grandfather’s village. My grandmother came earlier, and her village, Grosolova, was just out of Odessa, and it was leveled by the Russians by bombardment in the first week of the war.

And so that sort of brought it home in ways that I haven’t been forced to think about the Holocaust before. And so here I find myself incredibly sympathetic with the Ukrainian plight.

And yet my grandparents left the Ukraine at the turn of the last century to avoid anti-Semitism. And it’s made me confront issues about the world that I have avoided thinking about for a long time.

And, you know, in America today, there’s a dramatic rise of anti-Semitism. I think that’s also probably true in Europe.

Things that I thought were impossible are now on the table in America as political reality. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that.

Once again, all of these problems, you know, that I’m bringing up, all these events are sort of unsolved things that… were trapped by and continue to confront us today.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, the Holocaust is arguably one of the toughest world memories that we can think of. It brings a question to me.

Do you think there are ways in which we can develop not just memories of the past, but memories of the future? Do you think there are ways, you know, there are processes whereby communities, even perhaps large group of people, if not humanity, develop a sense for memories of the future so that not only are we inspired by memories of the past, but we could also rehearse our ways of acting collectively when confronted with future circumstances and possibly helping us avoid that those future circumstances ever happen for real.

What could be memories of the future?

John Markoff

I think that’s a wonderful way of framing it. I mean, For me, the best example of that in terms of what can have an impact are… books like Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, that the Ministry of the Future is an attempt to do that.

And, you know, I think about alternative futures for Israel and Palestine. I mean, it looks so bleak now.

It’s just so dark. The right-wing government in Israel is so provocative and they’re attacking Iran.

It’s just, there’s stuff that seems on the cusp of starting a third World War all around us at the moment. And yet.

You know, you think about what Carter did. You think about the possibility of a two-state solution.

I mean, I don’t think there’s any other way out of this. At some point, these people have to, I mean, I finally went, you know, I avoided going to Israel for the longest time because I didn’t want to face the reality of that situation.

I finally went, and I was in Jerusalem, and I spent some time with a guy who had been a lieutenant in the Israeli army. He was my guide.

He took me around. He was a settler.

And so I got the settlers, you know, the Jewish settlers perspective. And so at least I learned what that was.

But my predominant memory of my time in Israel was barbed wire. There was barbed wire everywhere.

And it was just, it was, it was just so disheartening. I didn’t, it still fills me with all kinds of conflict.

But there, you know, to your question about, are there memories? And that process of writing about a…

Somebody needs to write an alternative of the Palestinian-Israeli situation that gives a path forward, because I don’t think there’s any other option.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, then perhaps we have to take very seriously, even more seriously, the work of fiction writers and recognize that fiction is not an intellectual venture that would be marginal or to be discounted, but it is a very effective way of generating knowledge about the future, generating knowledge about the present, and it complements very well the more analytical ways that have been very successful for us to help us, you know, appreciate the present and forecast the future and project ourselves into the future. Fiction shall be part of our complete set of knowledge generation processes.

John Markoff

Absolutely. And, you know, I’ve seen that as a reporter and as someone who’s written history, I can give you chapter and verse of how…

Science fiction has shaped Silicon Valley. I mean, let me give you one example.

I know the two inventors of Siri, the Apple speech engine, Tom Gruber and Adam Chirer were the architects of Siri before they went to Apple. They worked for SRI and they were developing this technology.

They both set off on that journey because they’d seen this vision video that Apple and Computer had created in 1987 called Knowledge Navigator. It’s on the internet.

You can see it. We’re almost to Knowledge Navigator now, but they wanted to build Knowledge Navigator.

So this vision video actually inspired real designers and helped them shape the particular technology. I’ve seen that multiple times.

Two well-known early AI people, Rod Brooks and Jerry Kaplan, who both were very early in the AI field. They got into the field after they saw a space odyssey and they decided they wanted to build Hal, that computer.

Now, that wasn’t, I saw it. That was not my reaction, but that was their reaction.

They wanted to build a thinking machine. And so this, I know this stuff helps shape the way we see the future.

And I think your point about broadening it to the future, not just for, you know, Silicon Valley or technology, but broadening it to a vision of society. Yeah, it’s probably the one positive path forward.

I wonder, I’m trying to think if I’ve seen it in film. I read, but I’m trying to think of examples in film that would have that impact.

But there should be if they aren’t there. That should be the filmmaker’s challenge.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, I think I heard you say earlier that you might have a fourth historical landmark to share with us. So here you go.

John Markoff

Once again, this is very personal. But when I was a young reporter, just starting out in my career, I moved. back to Silicon Valley and I was looking around for things to write about, I stumbled across this book by a British journalist.

It was called The Micromillennium. The microprocessor had been invented in 71.

And that’s the fourth event. It’s actually the creation of the microprocessor, I think, has actually transformed the world.

And Evans, for me, He wrote this book called The Micromillennium. And I looked at that book and he basically argued that the microprocessor was going to transform the world over the next couple of decades.

And I thought, well, that’s a good beat for a reporter. I’ll write about that.

And he turned out to be right. And so it was a good path forward for me in terms of trying to understand what the impact of the technology would be.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, through your reflections and the questions you asked to the Oracle and now the historical landmarks you’re bringing back, we can tell again that you’ve got this knowledge and experience of the Silicon Valley and the work that you’ve done in the Silicon Valley. Let’s finally focus on the present for the third and final part of this interview.

Could you please simply tell us about the many ways in which you have and in which you are currently intervening in the world?

John Markoff

So the arc of my career. So, So, you know, I started. as an activist.

I was part of an American social movement called the New Left. That defined my outlook on the world.

I got very interested in technology early on as a result of the Vietnam War. And I came back to Silicon Valley to write about the way new technology was transforming warfare.

And I did that until 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. And…

Then we got into the situation where I could see what I called the dark side of the force, and that was the use of microelectronics for weapons. And then at the same time, personal computing was emerging, and I called that the light side of the force.

And it was more fun to write about. personal computing and all that technological change than it was to write about the militarization of advanced military technology. And so I shifted my focus.

Also, at a certain point, I realized that the new left in America had vanished. It had dissipated and I hadn’t gotten the memo and I realized it was time to get a day job.

And so I took some of those values that I had from the the new left, but, you know, criticizing what I saw wrong with society. I was never, I was never a sectarian.

I was never a Marxist. I was never a Leninist.

I was never a Maoist. I kept looking for an authentic American democratic left.

There really wasn’t one. And so at a certain point, I thought, well, you know, as a journalist, you can actually do, you know, who was it who said the duty of newspapers is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That was my mantra. You know, that in terms of the fourth estate, there was a role you could play as a fair witness.

And that’s sort of what I set out to do. And, you know, I became fascinated with technology.

And that was sort of my focus, trying to understand what was going to happen on the world. And then because of the Internet, the nature of journalism changed tremendously.

It’s still going through deep changes. And so I sort of stepped away more or less from daily journalism in 2016.

I left the New York Times. And I had written a book for a long time.

One of the things that intrigued me was trying to understand why Silicon Valley happened, when it did and where it did. I still don’t think there’s a perfect explanation, but I was very interested in that question.

And I wrote a book called What the Dormouse said about the impact of politics and culture and technology during the 1960s that led to personal computing and the modern internet. And then in some sense, the last book I read, I spent five years working on a biography of Stuart Brand.

I wrote all my earlier books in six months because I had a day job I had to get back to. Now, after I left, I had more time.

And so I located myself near Stanford and I began reading his letters and his journals and his documents. and interviewing him. And so that book appeared last year.

And, you know, now I’m in one of these junctures in terms of, you know, a lot of my friends sort of have, are trying to become what I described as public intellectuals. They’re trying to have an impact on the stage.

And there are many, many talking heads. I’ve been very uncomfortable with that.

And so I think I’m at this crossroads. I’m still writing a little bit for the New York Times.

And I’m not sure that it makes sense to try to be a daily reporter unless you’re going to do it 24 by 7. And I’m not sure that, you know, I’m 73 years old right now.

I’m not sure I have the energy to do what I did for 45 years, which is, you know, get up and work all day that way. And so I haven’t found a next book project yet, but if one came along, I think that would make me very happy.

So. I’m at a crossroads.

I guess it’s a simple answer.

Thomas Gauthier

Well, speaking about crossroads and connecting back with one of your works on the history and, let’s say, the beginning of the Silicon Valley, I didn’t think I would offer this little thought experiment. But if you were to write or to tell a counterfactual history about the late 60s, early 70s, how could things have developed differently? in the Silicon Valley?

You know, what were, let’s say, opposing forces back then in the late 60s and early 70s that could have changed the face of the Silicon Valley that we know now 50 years later? What could have happened?

John Markoff

That’s really interesting. So I think that one of the things that’s not as well understood about Silicon Valley as it should be is why is it an innovation center?

And And I think that it is almost entirely because it is multicultural. a place, probably more multicultural place than any place on the face of the earth. I mean, I’ve just been going through the census data and it’s remarkable.

There are many cities near me, not Palo Alto, but that have a majority of people who immigrated, who are foreign born. I mean, the majority of the population of places like Fremont and Cupertino are non-American born, largely technologists.

And so the key thing about the valley is it was a magnet for the best and the brightest people wanted to come here from all over the world. And I think that one of the things, if you’re going to ask this sort of looking backwards, if the immigration doors had not been opened. then Silicon Valley would never have happened.

But they were open, and now we’re in danger of closing them. And if they close, or if people find that there’s more opportunity in India, or in Beijing, or Shanghai, or wherever else, these other innovation centers, then the chemistry that made the valley may dissipate.

It’s happened before in America. An innovation center like Detroit lasted for about a half a century.

And there’s nothing that says that Silicon Valley has stood. to stay forever.

Thomas Gauthier

And one final question that connects also with your more, let’s say recent work on, on the life and work of Stuart Brandt. I read or heard somewhere that he might be currently working on a project regarding maintenance, like maintenance of earth.

Can you please tell us what this is all about?

John Markoff

Brandt is a fascinating character in that sense that he believes along with his friend, Danny Hillis, who set out to build this clock that would… run by itself for 10,000 years, actually not by itself, but would have the capability of running for 10,000 years. That clock is almost, the first prototype of that clock is almost finished.

But Brands, when Danny first came up with this idea, Brand was the one who responded to him. People like me, when I heard Danny mention this, I didn’t think, I thought, what was this?

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. But Brand responded.

He said, you know, if you’re going to build a clock, the clock needs a library. And the purpose of the library was to provide cultural continuity.

The best example about why that’s important is this story they tell in this group they created called the Long Now Foundation to build the clock. And they talk about this forest that was kept by Oxford University.

And at a certain point, they had their own forest. And at a certain point, the rafters on one of their beautiful buildings on campus wore out, and they realized they needed new beams, new giant oak beams.

And they went to the forester and they said, do you have any of these? these trees? And he said, oh, we wondered when you were coming to ask, because they planted the forest 600 years earlier.

And that is the very nature. That’s sort of one of the best maintenance stories, that somebody had the forethought to think that if you want the continuity in our culture, in our society, you need to maintain it.

And so Brand is looking, I mean, it really was neat. When I first started my project, he was kind of burned out.

He’d been thinking about writing an autobiography. He realized he didn’t have the energy for it.

But as we finished up, And my interviews with him, he got very inspired with the idea of writing about the importance of maintenance in the continuity of civilization and culture, society. I mean, you know about pace layers.

This is an essential component on the cultural level, maintaining civilization.

Thomas Gauthier

So it’s been almost an hour already that I’ve had the privilege of interviewing you. I’d like to thank you very much, John, for the insightful comments and thoughts and questions that you raised.

I personally come out of this interview with more questions than I had coming in. So thank you so much for your time.

John Markoff

Thank you very much, Thomas. I hope we can talk again.