What it Is, Is Up to Us

In 2002, the Reed College alumni magazine published this biographical profile of me:

In the spring of 1968, with the world expected to end any minute, Reed College relinquished a bachelor’s degree to Howard Rheingold in exchange for a senior thesis titled What Life Can Compare with This? Sitting Alone at the Window, I Watch the Flowers Bloom, the Leaves Fall, the Seasons Come and Go.

Thirty-three years later, with the apocalypse delayed but perhaps still imminent, Rheingold has become a renowned popularizer of the technologies of mind expansion.

He has frequently been called a guru by journalists, but in fact he is merely one of them—a journalist. He chronicles and speculates on current events and sketches the possible consequences of recent inventions. Rheingold’s core interest, the transformation of human consciousness, has not changed, but today he devotes his attention to what he describes as augmented consciousness— minds aided by microprocessors.

I recently visited Rheingold in northern California in his garden office in Marin County. My purpose was to see how much he would tell me about his upcoming book, which was rumored to be critical of the social effects of computer technology. But I was also curious about something else. Rheingold’s work involves sitting around in his backyard reading books, inviting people over to chat, going on visits, poking his nose into interesting conversations, and having vehement opinions about the direction of human history. I wondered: how has he managed to turn the habits of a Reed student into a professional career?

His answer led me down some interesting bypaths of intellectual history. Rheingold was lured to Reed by Gary Snyder ’51—or rather, by his knowledge that Gary Snyder had once attended school there. In Phoenix, where he was living with his artist mother and salesman father, he saw Alan Watts on television. Watts mentioned Jack Kerouac, Kerouac led him to Snyder, and Snyder led him to Reed. “Phoenix was arid, geographically and intellectually,” he says. “Snyder and Reed seemed juicy.”

Arriving at Reed in 1964, the eager freshman immediately consumed a vast quantity of morning glory seeds, found himself too high to attend orientation, and spent 24 hours in his room painting. He soon encountered Lloyd Reynolds, professor of English and art history. Reynolds taught him calligraphy, but he also introduced Rheingold to the lure of the esoteric. Reynolds, remembers Rheingold, “showed me that what you saw carved on a cathedral contained hidden meanings you had access to through study.”

In 1968 a researcher named Joe Kamiya at the Langley Porter Institute in San Francisco began hooking up Zen monks to electroencephalograms and recording patterns of electrical activity that he called alpha rhythms. Rheingold, who majored in psychology, was fascinated by this research. When he was at Reed he decided on a career in science, hoping to contribute to the scientific mastery of spiritual enlightenment; though he went on to graduate school he soon found that he did not have the makeup of a scientist. “I was not competent, and also I was bored,” he admits.

At Reed Rheingold had begun dating Judy Maas, a Portland native who frequented the campus looking for trouble, as she puts it.

In 1971 they moved to San Francisco. Judy worked at a clothing store on Fisherman’s Wharf and Rheingold spent his time writing long letters to his friends. He still expected the end of the world and therefore gave priority to his spiritual development. But he acknowledged it was not fair to live entirely off Judy’s salary, and one day she said to him, “Since you spend all day writing, why don’t you write a dirty book and make us some money?”

Rheingold obeyed, writing three dirty books, and then two science fiction books that he describes as “bad.” The books were brought out by Maurice Girodias, the famous Parisian litterateur and pornographer who published Nabokov’s Lolita. “Girodias was a smooth, old-world, silver-haired, pot-smoking con man,” recalls Rheingold. “He was a French Jew who ran a nightclub during the Nazi occupation, so his survival skills were well honed.”

Rheingold, like Nabokov, broke with the publisher over business matters. “He didn’t pay me,” Rheingold explains.

Fortunately, in the meantime Edgar Mitchell had been to the moon and had an epiphany. Mitchell, an Apollo 14astronaut, caught sight of the earth floating in space while on his return voyage. “The presence of divinity became almost palpable andI knew that life in the universe was not just an accident,” he later wrote.

Mitchell founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences, devoted to the study of mystical and intuitive experience. The newly appointed head of the institute was Willis Harman, a futurist who was then working for the Stanford Research Institute. Rheingold had written to the institute because he wanted to learn how to be a futurist himself; instead, he ended up collaborating with Harman on a book called Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights.

The Institute for Noetic Sciences was one of those obscure but influential cultural nodes through which fringe ideas influenced the mainstream, and Rheingold would make his career as an instrument of this influence. For instance, he soon met plush-toy mogul Henry Dakin, a member of the institute’s board of directors. Dakin was a visionary capitalist devoted to reconciliation between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was also optimistic about technology, and he bought one of the first available personal computers and set it up at the bottom of an abandoned redwood hot tub in the basement of the institute’s posh headquarters in Pacific Heights.

Dakin gave Rheingold access to his new toy. Working with a female Russian psychic who was one of the institute’s sponsorees, Rheingold sat in the empty hot tub for hundreds of hours, mastering the computer with the help of a stapled-together document that vaguely outlined its capabilities. His interest in computers led him to Xerox PARC, where engineers and scientists had invented the personal computer. Rheingold began pestering them for a job. “It looked like computers were about to become mind amplifiers,” he recalls, “and I wanted one.”

The PARC staff began to throw him some emergency ghost-writing assignments, and in 1985 Rheingold launched his career as a popularizer of computer science with a book called Tools For Thought: The People and Ideas of the Next Computer Revolution. He also discovered the Well, a Marin-based electronic bulletin board that was popular among computer hackers, technology journalists, and fans of the Grateful Dead. The Well was associated with the famous countercultural magazine The Whole Earth Review (formerly the Co-Evolution Quarterly), of which Rheingold eventually became editor.

Among the many actual and pretend visionaries Rheingold met during his years working the border between science and mysticism, there were some whose specialty was financing and profiting from the coming metamorphosis. The most important to him personally was John Brockman, a literary agent and minor countercultural celebrity who specialized in representing scientists and who was known, among many other accomplishments, for a certain shameless talent in extracting well-timed and lucrative contracts from publishing executives temporarily excited by an intellectual trend. “The apocalypse didn’t happen in 1968, or ’69, or ’70, or ’71,” Rheingold explains in reference to his association with Brockman. “After a while, you can’t live as if the world is going to end tomorrow.”

John Brockman occupies an office in the Fifth Avenue penthouse that once housed the New York Playboy Club, a detail he very much enjoys sharing. He is the type of agent who can make the words “three thousand dollars, MIT Press” sound like the rudest insult, and this was the kind of answer he traditionally gave Rheingold to his book ideas. But in 1991 he called with a more Brockmanian offer: an editor in New York had heard about something called virtual reality and was willing to offer $75,000 for a nonfiction account. The only problem was that Rheingold was not especially interested in virtual reality. He was interested in virtual community—the new possibilities for disembodied, multiparty conversation that he had discovered on the Well. But in 1991 online communities had no cachet. Editors believed the internet was a flash in the pan. But virtual reality—now there was crucial techno-cultural innovation. “I’ll strangle you if you do not write this book,” said Brockman.

“No, I’ll strangle you if you do not write this book,” said Maas, when Rheingold told his wife of the offer he was going to refuse. So Rheingold wrote the book, which served a valuable delaying function, for by the time he finished with it there was more widespread recognition that the internet might be interesting, after all. His next book, The Virtual Community: Home-steading on the Electronic Frontier, was a best seller.

The first promoters of online communication harbored serious hopes that these new technologies—modems, bulletin boards, internet sites—would contribute to the resolution of social problems. By reducing the cost of publishing and by shielding appearance, accent, and other particulars of identity, online technologies might prove an antidote to prejudice and chauvinism. Rheingold shared this idealism and presented it forcefully. He was embraced by the next wave of internet promoters and embarked on a successful speaking career. He became, for a brief time, the executive editor of a commercial web site, HotWired (where I worked for him briefly), and then launched his own internet company, Electric Minds.

Neither of these forays into business was successful. Rheingold fought ferociously with the founder of HotWired and resigned after a few months. Electric Minds was generously funded by venture capitalists, then quickly went bankrupt.

“I was caught up in the excitement of the moment,” Rheingold says. “You could tell someone a story and they would give you two million dollars. But they wanted twenty million back in eighteen months.” Such returns were impossible to provide, and his investors pulled the plug. “It was really embarrassing to crash a dot com back in 1997, before everybody did it.”

The publication of The Virtual Community and his association with two early internet businesses earned Rheingold his “guru” label. The evident weakness of the internet as an ultimate cure for social conflict also earned him accusations of naivete. But he says he has never been overly credulous about the promise of technology.“At Whole Earth I published articles by Jerry Mander, who believes that things started to go wrong with the introduction of agriculture. And I published Kevin Kelly (author of Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization), who is firmly convinced that we will happily live with twenty billion people on earth.”

Rheingold promises that his next book will articulate his criticisms more sharply. His subject this time is the social effect of pervasive computing—of the digital processors that will inhabit all of our appliances, and, eventually, our bodies. He has been spending time in Japan and Finland, where mobile communication is more advanced than in the U.S. Decentralized, highly mobile computer networks create opportunities to harness enormous power outside traditional channels. Individuals can build social, business, and political contacts, move funds, and collaborate on work across great distances, even, when necessary, maintaining anonymity and shielding their communications behind strong encryption. Such powers can be harnessed to any variety of ends. “What it is,” says Rheingold, in a message he includes at the end of every email he sends, “is up to us.”

Today Rheingold spends most of his time in a small office near Mt. Tamalpais, with a lush garden outside his door and an enormous flat-screen Apple monitor on his desk. “I’ve created my own fantasy world,” he says. “It is a combination of a quietist Zen retreat and a Reed conference.” His style of thought remains resolutely individualistic and countercultural. But he declines to interpret his retreat as a withdrawal. In fact, he still anticipates the end of the world, and still hopes that spiritual progress will spark a transformation in advance of obliteration.

“I believe that the world can be transformed instantly through the right idea,” he says. “If we don’t succeed, the process starts again with the cockroach. If we do, we’ll live in a different type of world. We are racing towards some kind of climax, and everybody has a contribution to make.”