Category: Interviews

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James Gleick: The Chaos of Time

James Gleick is one of the best science writers alive today. His body of work includes the phenomenal Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (both of which were Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists in the United States) and countless articles for New York Times Magazine.

He just finished his next book titled Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything which is due out in September.

Roy Christopher: Could you preface your new book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything? In light of this, Moore’s Law and other recent concepts of time — such as Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis’ Clock of the Long Now — where do you stand on the seeming elasticity of time and the general population’s perception thereof (where responsibility, coping and the eventual circumstances are concerned)?

James Gleick: I guess I’m going to have to learn how to compress my view of all this into a few words. Somehow it was easier to ramble on for the length of a book. We know life is speeding up; Moore’s Law just makes it official, in one small domain. We know we’re surrounding ourselves with time-saving technologies and strategies, and we don’t quite understand how it is that we feel so rushed. We worry that we gain speed and sacrifice depth and quality. We worry that our time horizons are foreshortened — our sense of the past, our sense of the future, our ability to plan, our ability to remember. That’s the (worthy) motivation for the Clock of the Long Now, I think.

Anyway, my book is an attempt to weave many different threads together into a kind of whole. I spent a lot of time doing old-fashioned reporting, hanging out at places like the U.S. military’s Directorate of Time, television postproduction studios, airline control centers, and so forth — places where the compression of time really matters. Without giving anything away, I guess I can say that I found myself recoiling at the notion that we’re somehow just victims. We make choices, I feel. We haven’t always been able to work through the consequences of every choice, but we’re not stupid, either.

RC: Having been online longer than most, do you find the ever-increasing corporate encroachment on the Web saddening, or does it bother you in the least?

JG: Well, both. Mostly I just enjoy the explosion of connectivity, the Web penetrating into every part of modern life. It’s depressing to see banner ads on every page and to endure all the scummy get-rich-quick junk mail, but there’s no reason to expect the Internet to be free of the vices that afflict the off-line world. Sure, I’m shocked, shocked, that there’s commercialism online, just as I’m shocked that there’s pederasty and racism online. I wish I could go to a ballgame without seeing any advertising, too.

RC: Do you follow the Open Source software movement, and if so, do you have any thoughts on its brewing battle with Goliath (Microsoft)?

JG: Sure, I think the Open Source movement is great, and more or less the world’s only hope. Software is just bits, after all, and the marginal cost seems to be pretty close to zero. So either you accept that, or you try to win as a monopoly. Unfortunately, books are just bits, too. I hope when the dust settles there will be a way for software developers and writers to make a living.

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Esther Dyson: Release 2.0

Esther DysonEsther Dyson personifies the expression “mover and shaker” like no other. She keeps more figurative fingers in more pies than she has actual fingers on her hands: Russian, Central European as well as American start ups, multiple boards of directors, frequent flying, constant consulting (for the likes of the two Bills: Gates and Clinton, among countless others) and she still finds time to swim for one hour every single morning. One of the least interesting facts about her is that she’s the daughter of famous physicist Freeman Dyson. Continue reading “Esther Dyson: Release 2.0”

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Ellen Ullman: Close to the Machine

Ellen UllmanEllen Ullman has been programming computers for over two decades, but her best writing isn’t her code: it’s her literary writing. Her 1997 book Close to the Machine is a haunting memoir from the front lines of the digital revolution. Whether it’s her many articles for Wired, The New York Times, her commentary on NPR or her books, Ellen’s grasp of the human condition through the ever-thickening haze of whiz-bang technology is her real strength. Continue reading “Ellen Ullman: Close to the Machine”

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Stewart Brand: The Long Now

After chronicling the innovations of M.I.T in the late eighties, Stewart Brand turned to the aging of old buildings, and thereafter, to the aging of civilization for his subject matter. He is often called “the least recognized, most influential thinker in America.” Whether we’re talking about the Internet, technology in general, architecture or Sociology, Stewart’s insights abound.

Roy Christopher: What can you tell me in advance about your forthcoming book, The Clock of the Long Now?

Stewart Brand: It’s a brief book on a large new subject: civilization learning how to take long-term responsibility. It’s also a book about the early stages of building a 10,000-year Clock, the world’s slowest computer, designed by Danny Hillis.

RC: I’ve been asking most everyone this, but being a pioneer on the Web, do you feel a loss with all the corporate interests now involved where it used to be a hip-geek phenomenon?

SB: Shoot, like all the other geeks, I get paid (at Global Business Network) to educate the corporate interests. They’ve been playing catch-up for five decades now, and that doesn’t seem about to change, what with the all-empowering Internet revolution overlaying on the ongoing Moore’s Law revolution. The fastest minds continue to guide.

RC: Your book The Media Lab is all about different aspects of media and information. Tell me about How Buildings Learn. It seems a most curious turn from the context in which you’re usually found.

SB: I was fleeing Versionitis in the infotech biz, where one winds up paying too much attention to what goes on in a weekly time frame. Buildings flow at about a 30-year turnover rate, and are the main capital event in every advanced economy. Since no one had looked systemically at what happens with buildings over time, I had a scoop, and I had it all to myself for six working years. That project led directly to The Clock of the Long Now, where the subject is what happens to civilizations over time, and to Civilization as a whole, which is just 400 generations (10,000 years) old.

How Buildings Learn has had a surprisingly strong following among software engineers, along with Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which is also about architecture.

RC: Who do you admire writing right now?

SB: Ellen Ullman (Close to the Machine), for her programmer’s insight and her deeply literate and original writing style.

James P. Carse (Finite and Infinite Games), for the finest manifesto idea and style since Martin Buber’s I and Thou

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Hans Moravec: Robots Rising

Hans MoravecHans Moravec has been building robots since 1963: his first at age ten. His 1988 book, Mindchildren began a public access to the ideas of his speculative science. His current volume, Robot continues these conjectures of a future robot-run world with fervor. Moravec holds that a robot-reign is inevitable and that it won’t be so bad.

Hans Moravec is currently a Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Continue reading “Hans Moravec: Robots Rising”

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Kevin Kelly: New World Man

Kevin KellyKevin Kelly is probably best known by the magazine of which he is Executive Editor. Wired, the self-proclaimed “voice of the digital revolution,” is his day job. Other revolutionary non-Wired involvements include publishing and editing the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news from 1984 to 1990. In 1989 he launched the first 24-hour virtual reality jamboree, and the first venue to bring VR technology to the public. He was co-founder of the Hackers’ Conference and is an early board member of the Well, the first “real” online community. Continue reading “Kevin Kelly: New World Man”

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Unwound: Our Own Way

Unwound represents a true rarity in the cluttered and mundane music milieu that engulfs us here in the late nineties. Hailing from the small but prolific indie community of Olympia, Washington, Unwound does their own thing, makes consistently incredible records, and earns respect from everyone who counts.

Unwound

Justin Trosper (vocals/guitar), Vern Rumsey (bass), and Sara Lund (drums) have proven themselves time and time again as an undeniable positive force against lame music and attitudes everywhere. With their sixth proper album, Challenge for a Civilized Society (Kill Rock Stars), they’ve once again pushed boundaries that they set with their previous records. Each recording has moved in a seemingly different direction around a solid hub of ideas both musical and socio-political.

“Well, sometimes you go into the studio with an idea, and you come out with something totally different,” Justin explains. “At least that’s what usually happens to me. Every one of our records has its own purpose. I don’t think we’ve aimed too high and I don’t think any of our records are perfect.” But they are very mindful of recording techniques and the studio as an instrument. “We just started building an eight-track studio and trying to learn more about recording.

There’s always been a veil of mystery surrounding this trio, partly due to their selectivity when doing interviews. “We’ve done lots of interviews just not with any major magazines,” Justin says, “but we’ve always done interviews with fanzines. We don’t have any problems doing interviews. We’re just cautious.” This understandable caution comes from music journalists’ propensity to lump bands into movements or scenes that they have nothing to do with in an attempt to pigeonhole the band’s sound or attitude. Unwound has been called “The West Coast Fugazi” and “The West Coast Sonic Youth” more times than I’d like to count, but they don’t have much in common with those bands other than their independence and the fact that they’ve toured with both. “I feel like we have our own thing,” Justin says seriously. “Definitely earlier on we were inspired by those bands, but now when people say that, I don’t really have anything to say about it.”

Unwound’s caution toward the music industry and their staunch independence also spill over into their emphatic dedication to their roots. All of their proper records have been released by Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars, and they’ve tried to keep ticket prices at their shows down as well. “It’s pretty hard to have five-dollar shows everywhere now. A band like Fugazi can pull it off ’cause they can kinda do what they want, charge five dollars, and everybody still gets paid. We can’t do that yet, but we still try to keep our shows down to five or six dollars. Then at least if we play a shitty show, it was only five dollars, and that’s not that big a deal. The money was still better spent than going to see some bad Hollywood movie. We’re just into sticking to out roots with the five-dollar shows and staying in Olympia instead of moving to a big city and trying to have a higher profile. Sometimes it’s really boring, but there’s definitely a community here.”

As it gets harder and harder to find a decent listen through all the shit that just keeps coming out, rest assured that where there is a fertile independent music scene like Olympia, there will always be an Unwound putting out true-to-the-core good music.

[Originally published in the June 1998 issue of SLAP Skateboard Magazine]

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Godflesh: Heads Ain’t Ready

Justin Broadrick“I think Hip-hop is more important than any sort of Rock music,” states a resolved Justin Broadrick matter-of-factly. “Most of the beats are fatter and heavier than your average Rock n’ Roll riff.” Justin is the head of one of our planet’s most brutal ensembles. England’s Godflesh plows monolithic basslines and ear-searing guitar riffs over Hip-hop’s most brutal breaks. Their sound has been pummeling eardrums for nearly a decade now, and most of their fans don’t even get where the music is coming from. You see, Justin is a total Hip-hop junkie. Continue reading “Godflesh: Heads Ain’t Ready”