F E A T U R E S    Issue 1.05 - September 1995

Agent Of The Third Culture

By Phil Leggiere



High-octane literary agent John Brockman has been a powerful presence in the American cultural vanguard for the past 30 years. In his 20s, when he was the only denizen of New York's art bohemia with a business degree, Brockman the impresario backed Andy Warhol's underground movies. Since then he has moved from guerrilla epistemology (his 1969 book, By the Late John Brockman, was an early mix of cybernetic theory and philosophy) to smuggling such intellectual contraband as The Whole Earth Software Catalogue into the techno-illiterate world of New York publishing.

As an agent and as a founder of a group called "The Reality Club," Brockman has been instrumental in bringing the ideas of maverick thinkers into public consciousness.

At his penthouse office in midtown Manhattan, Brockman spoke about his two newest entrepreneurial projects. The Third Culture, published by Simon & Schuster, is a book of dialogues with premier scientists. Content.Com Inc. is a Web-based publishing company Brockman is launching in partnership with David Bunnell of US PC Magazine and PC World fame.

Wired: You write in your introduction to The Third Culture that literary intellectuals are "reactionary and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant" of science, an attitude that has pushed science into cultural invisibility in the last few generations. How does the smug, anti-science, anti-technology attitude you write of manage to dominate Western culture?
Brockman: The literary culture I talk about is pretty well finished. Let me emphasise that I'm not talking about all litera-ture but about a specific culture of literary commentators that became dominant about 50 years ago, in periodicals like The Partisan Review, Commentary, and Encounter. It was an establishment that dictated fashionable discourse and prided itself on its indifference to science. It favoured opinions and ideology over empirical testing of ideas - commentary spiralling upon commentary. As a cultural force, it's a dead end. When I first came to New York 30 years ago, it was important to get the latest issue of the literary journals to read, say, Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann or Harold Rosenberg on contemporary art. Nowadays, most of those journals are still doing the same-old same-old. It's not about anything real, just facile opinions of other facile opinions. That doesn't stop journalists and media people from worshipping at its altar, though.

What damage has the "hijacking" of intellectual media wrought?
In a culture shaped by truly critical thinking and scientific method, being proved wrong, being constantly challenged to prove your most cherished concepts, is understood as part of intellectual evolution. In the mainstream literary world it's not. There, it seems that the more important one's reputation, the less one is challenged not to repeat oneself.

What makes the rise of the Third Culture intellectually revolutionary?
We're going through a rapidly accelerating epistemological sea change. We're using tools with unprecedented power, and in the process, as the scientist J. Z. Young wrote, we're becoming those tools. What we've lacked is an intellectual culture able to transform its own premises as fast as our technologies are transforming us. The only place you're going to find that is in sciences where empiricism and epistemology collide, and everything becomes different. That synergy exists, for example, in the work of biologists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould; physicists Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and Freeman Dyson; astronomer Sir Martin Rees; computer scientists Danny Hillis and Marvin Minsky; as well as others discussed in the book.

What's your take on all the recent "backlash" books against the new sciences and technologies, extolling the so-called "Neo-Luddites"?
If what you're talking about is a debate between a cutesy literary intellectual bragging about how he doesn't use a computer (which, whether he knows it or not, isn't true) and a propeller head bragging about his way-cool high-tech toys, they're both off the mark. "Luddite" versus "Progressive" is a non-issue. Yes, we're living through the most intense change in the history of the human race. It's absurd to hide one's head in the sand. It's just as absurd to commodify that change as the next chic lifestyle.

Serious critical thinking about new technology is what's at a premium. Clifford Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil is foolishly dismissed as "Luddite," but he's merely trying to establish balance. Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television taught me as much about technology in 1977 as Marshall McLuhan did in the 1960s. It didn't convince me to smash my television set. It did enable me to see for the first time what television really is. We need to cultivate a critical perspective towards the tools we use.

Who are the prime enemies of the Third Culture?
It's not about personalities but about cultural attitudes that reward ignorance. In Europe, for instance, an editor or journalist will have studied physics and will be able to hold a reasonably informed dialogue with scientists. Here, the deeply ingrained attitude that still dominates most media is that "well-educated" people needn't have a clue about such "technical" matters. Thankfully, the reading public knows better, and that's why so many serious science books have done so well in the last decade, despite the incomprehension and downright befuddlement of those supposedly in the know.

You've said that when you started out, publishing was run by "white boys from Harvard in the '50s." How has it changed?
About 10 years ago, I went to a party held by Richard E. Snyder, then-chair of Simon & Schuster. Instead of a publishing crowd, his guests were investment bankers or real estate moguls. Snyder presented a chilling vision of publishing. He said that instead of 50 companies there would be six, vertically integrated. He predicted that the power would shift from the agents to these new conglomerates.

Sounds pretty prophetic.
It turned out to be mostly true. What is publishing today? It's Newhouse, the Hearsts, Time Warner, Viacom, Bertelsman, Pearson, Murdoch, and now Holtzbrink. Snyder was right, but he missed one thing. At the highest level, everybody knows each other and it's a game. They're enormously wealthy conglomerates, and they play to win. So my strategy is to be the mosquito that makes the elephants dance.

What was your purpose in bringing together two dozen scientists in The Third Culture?
I tried to reproduce for the reader the experience of dynamically complex systems, a notion the scientists in the book explore in various ways. It's a kind of "oral history" in which I try to stand aside and convey the rich dialogues taking place between such frontiers as molecular biology and artificial life, all the while letting the top people speak in their own singular voices.

You're also "serialising" the book on the Internet, on GNN ( http://www.gnn.com).
Yes. The physical book becomes the table of contents for an exchange between author, collaborators, and readers - one that I hope will continue far into the future.

Tell me about Content.Com, your Internet publishing enterprise. Do you see the Web replacing books?
Not in the short run. The most interesting fact about the Net is that people there enjoy reading and writing. Content.Com's first major site is going to be called BookChannel - a multimedia-rich, interactive electronic bazaar devoted to books and readers. It will be the place for anyone interested in new ideas. The book is still the best delivery system for new ideas we have, though that will eventually change.

How are traditional publishing companies relating to the Web?
The corporate owners and a few of the top trade publishing executives are looking seriously at new technologies, but the trade publishers are still mostly techno-illiterates. Many trade editors have e-mail addresses. The problem is that most of them don't have computers and modems.

So what's the content of Content.Com?
Solely digitising texts is not what it's about. It's about creating intellectual community, where people come for the compelling subjects and then stay for each other. We're trying to create a place that users searching for state-of-the-art knowledge will find reliable and credible.

The people I work with are mainly university people or specialists at the absolute top of their fields. In many cases, they've invented the field. But they are effective public thinkers, the true public intellectuals of our time - in spite of academia, not because of it.

Computer scientist Danny Hillis says in your book that the term "populariser" is still an epithet among many academic scientists. You were recently criticised in The New Republic as a purveyor of "soft science." How do you respond?
John Cage once told me to weigh my publicity rather than read it. The New Republic weighs very little.

Phil Leggiere (philguy@echonyc.com) is a cultural and political critic and journalist living in Hoboken, New Jersey.