Valley of the Nerds - 3

[Vijay Joglekar]

Valley of the Nerds - 3
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Readers may logically wonder at this point just how people like David
hold on to their job, considering the amount of time they spend riding cosmic
submarines. What's more, in this age of widespread drug testing, how did they
get their job in the first place? The answers to these questions lie in the
nonconformist, fairly hallucinogenic nature of the computer industry itself.
In a business that seeks to shrink the human mind and put it in a box for easy
access, access to one's own mind is not a guilty pleasure but something
approaching a duty.
R.U. Sirius, whose journalistic rounds put him in constant contact with
Siliconites of all descriptions, says, "In my experience, the most creative
people in computers experiment with drugs. It's a very bizarre culture, where
the freaks are the elite. At a company like Autodesk [a cutting- edge developer
of virtual-reality technology], the R&D department includes a little room full
of people in sandals, with hair down to their ass. At Apple, they buy group
tickets to the Grateful Dead show at the end of the year."
But what about bad trips? What about those terrifying times when the
submarine fails to surface? R.U.'s answer brims with common sense: "People in
those fields, if they know what they're doing, seldom freak out. Say that a
computer person takes some acid now, in 1991, and everything he sees and hears
and feels is speeding by and changing shape. What's the difference between that
and his everyday reality?"
Chip Krauskopf is the manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel
Corporation, the nation's top maker of microprocessors and also a Defense
contractor. He corroborates R.U.'s impressions. That Krauskopf is willing --
even eager--to speak for attribution underlines Silicon Valley's no sweat
attitude toward chemical recreation.
"Some of the people here are very, very, very bright," says Krauskopf.
"They were bored in school, and, as a result, they hung out, took drugs and got
into computers. A lot of people I know took exactly that path. And remember,
this is an industry that grew up in the Sixties, so there was never any stigma
against so-called 'hippies.' People at Intel get judged strictly by how good
they are. If their skills and arguments are strong, nobody cares if they wear
tie-dye and sandals."
But what about the urine tests often required by the federal government
for suppliers such as Intel? Don't they weed out the heads? Well, no. For one
thing, urinalysis does not detect most hallucinogens--a fact that led cyber-
essayist Robert Anton Wilson to predict, in /Mondo 2000/, "The corporate
structure of the short-term future will therefore thin out the ranks of pot
smokers and coke freaks while the acid heads climb merrily upward in the
hierarchy." Furthermore, the tests can pick up only relatively high
concentrations of drugs, and Intel's executives virtually see to it that
potential employees have an opportunity to clean up their act, at least
temporarily, before their pee is screened.
"We tell candidates when they first come in for an interview that
eventually they will be tested," says Krauskopf. "The levels that are tested
at, you see, are such that you have to have taken drugs in the past forty-eight
hours. Unless you're a total idiot and do drugs every day, you're going to
test clean."
If this comes as disturbing news to the straightlaced--the idea that
inside the high-tech core of everything from your office PC to the guidance
system of the Patriot missile lurks a psychedelic genie--just consider the
alternative. If drug testing /were/ effective and if it had begun, say,
twenty-five years ago, chances are that some of our country's most vital
industries might not exist today. Software magnate Mitch Kapor, founder of
Lotus Development, whose 1-2-3 spreadsheet forever changed accounting, has
publicly credited "recreational chemicals" with helping him form his business
outlook. David Bunnell, who started /PC Magazine/ and helped create the Altair,
one of the first personal computers, remembers his co-pioneers as looking as if
"they were just coming down off a ten-year acid trip." (One of Bunnell's hippie
colleagues, Microsoft's Bill Gates, is now one of the country's richest
individuals, worth more than $4 billion. )
It's time to face facts, America. With our buttoned-down financiers in
prison, our uptight bankers in bankruptcy and our automotive titans in retreat,
perhaps our freaks are our last, best hope. And it's not that they've been
co-opted by the system--they've co-opted it. Yesterday's dropouts, in many
cases, are to day's insiders, and some of today's head honchos are heads.
But what about tomorrow?
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If you're looking for a prophet the scientific future, you could do
worse than mathematician Ralph Abraham, a shaggy middle-aged professor at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, who can use the word "grok" in casual
conversation and get away with it Abraham's revolutionary specialty, in which
he is an acknowledged leader, has come to be known as "chaos math" or
"dynamical systems theory." What people such as Abraham try to do is graph and
predict, with the help of computers, seemingly unpredictable events: global
climatic change the rise and fall of financial markets, even the social origins
of war. What makes this math revolutionary, of course, is that no one has
really mastered it yet, although aficionados believe it /can/ be mastered and
that the attempt is eminently worth making.
The driving idea behind chaos math--that there is order in randomness
and randomness in order--sounds like one of those drug-induced epiphanies you
scrawl on a napkin at 3 A.M. and then throw away the next day. Well, in a
rather literal sense, it is a drug-inspired notion, except that Ralph Abraham
kept the napkin and has been doodling on it ever since.
"In the 1960s," he says, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely
creative kiss between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know
this because I was a purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community."
Math and acid--not, one would think, a natural combination. It's like
hearing a champion marathon runner credit his success to chain-smoking Camels.
I'm confused. The image of a frying egg ("This is your brain on drugs") flashes
in my mind's eye.
Abraham explains, "To be creative in mathematics, you have to start
from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate.
And mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of
consciousness. What's going on now with dynamical systems theory is at least as
big a thing as the invention of the wheel."