John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said is subtitled How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. Though Markoff is a good writer and an excellent reporter-the book contains quite a number of interesting anecdotes-it fails to live up to its grandiose subtitle.
The preface reads:
Now, more than three decades later, the sixties are at best a hazy apparition. The joke, of course, is that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there. Today, it's easy to laugh at the long hair, headbands, VW buses, and love beads that were trademarks of the counterculture. Two fingers held aloft in a V no longer stood for victory but for peace, and millions of people united in idealistic causes ranging from civil rights to ending the war in Vietnam. How unlike the cynical, selfish nineties, or even our own increasingly uncertain decade.
It's easy to forget, too, especially from the vantage point of today's "just say no" antidrug morality, and almost impossible to understand how different attitudes were toward drugs during the sixties. LSD, in particular, has become an incendiary subject. Demonized today, its impact is glibly dismissed. Yet four decades ago, LSD was a defining force in a cultural war. (p. xvii)
The preface reads:
Now, more than three decades later, the sixties are at best a hazy apparition. The joke, of course, is that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't really there. Today, it's easy to laugh at the long hair, headbands, VW buses, and love beads that were trademarks of the counterculture. Two fingers held aloft in a V no longer stood for victory but for peace, and millions of people united in idealistic causes ranging from civil rights to ending the war in Vietnam. How unlike the cynical, selfish nineties, or even our own increasingly uncertain decade.
It's easy to forget, too, especially from the vantage point of today's "just say no" antidrug morality, and almost impossible to understand how different attitudes were toward drugs during the sixties. LSD, in particular, has become an incendiary subject. Demonized today, its impact is glibly dismissed. Yet four decades ago, LSD was a defining force in a cultural war. (p. xvii)
Unfortunately, Markoff's stance toward the culture war that the sixties started remains hazy throughout the book. What were the sixties about? Free Speech? Peace? Drugs? Revolution? All of these appear at some point in What the Dormouse Said, but they seem to be window dressing rather than motivation, with few exceptions. In part, Markoff may be constrained by his sources: a number of anecdotes involve one or more unnamed parties, which robs them of their power to describe anything more particular than a social milieu-such stories do not illuminate their participants so long as they remain unnamed.
Some characters shine through: Doug Engelbart, the visionary behind the personal computer as we know it today; John McCarthy, an artificial intelligence pioneer; and Fred Moore, an activist who wanted to harness the power of computing for social change, are all well-drawn. Engelbart in particular is central to Markoff's story, but his relationship with the sixties seems to have been expressed primarily through an abiding interest in different organizational structures and practices he could experiment with in his computer lab. Markoff reports that Engelbart tried LSD twice, but it's unclear how those experiences made a mark on his personality or his ideas.
Perhaps like the decade, the book is loosely organized around particular milieus: Doug Engelbart's AHRIC project at SRI, John McCarthy's SAIL project, Xerox PARC, and the Homebrew computer club, among others. But Markoff wanders through both space and time: although his preface explores the notion of Kepler's, a Menlo Park bookstore, as at the epicenter of the cultural earthquake that produced the personal computer, the bookstore shows up only fitfully, and none of the action takes place there. Roy Kepler appears several times, as a mentor to peace activists, and numerous activities are said to have taken place "near" the bookstore, but that's as far as it goes.
Readers wanting to learn about the history of computing might do better to start with Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution; readers wanting to learn about psychedelics and the 1960s would do better to start with Jay Stevens Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Markoff generously cites both of these books in his text. For readers who have read these and want more, specifically more about Engelbart, McCarthy, and Moore, What the Dormouse Said is an excellent next step.
Readers wanting to learn about the history of computing might do better to start with Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution; readers wanting to learn about psychedelics and the 1960s would do better to start with Jay Stevens Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream. Markoff generously cites both of these books in his text. For readers who have read these and want more, specifically more about Engelbart, McCarthy, and Moore, What the Dormouse Said is an excellent next step.
