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from Morozov
from 2024 Year End Review

A Sense of Rebellion

28 Dec 2024 - 28 Aug 2025
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    • podcast by Morozov A Sense of Rebellion. It tells the story of an extremely obscure private research lab in Boston in the 1970s, led by Warren Brodey and his associates. I was very surprised to have never heard of this lab or people before; given how close it was to my own world (in fact some of Brodey's ideas made it into Negroponte's Architecture Machine and from there to the later Media Lab ).
    • The hero, Warren Brodey sounded to me like just another sixties guru-type guy – and nothing wrong with people like that in general, but he was also a complete failure, his big ideas never materialized into anything coherent. His personal life story (hippie communes and a late turn to Maoism followed by some scammy business schemes) also sounds like just another sixties story. His vocal style is reminiscent of Leary, Ted Nelson, and other rakish gurus of the time (a lot of McLuhan and Negroponte there too). As a tech visionary or as a psychologist, he didn't seem to make any lasting contributions. I mean, his life is nothing to be ashamed of, but I couldn't figure out why it should be interesting.
    • One amusing feature of the podcast is that many of the people Morozov interviews also can't figure this out. It's all ancient history, everybody has died or moved on, its in the ash-heap of history and why would anybody bother dusting it off? Nobody can understand why Morozov is pursuing this project. Why is it interesting?
    • Some theories
      • It's a kind of Eastern european literary tic to be fascinated by losers and elevate them to protagonists. Brodey's failure make him more interesting than the winner
      • It illuminates the reality of tech, by contrast
      • Brodey's ideas were actually inflential and important, even if he didn't get very far in realizing them
      • They represent an alternative and better path, one that might provide a corrective to some of the excesses of Actually Existing tech.
    • Morozov sets up a conflict between Brodey's lab and the West Coast Whole Earth Catalog nexus. It's funny, in episode 4 he mentions "counterculture publications" but the only two he names are WEC and CoEvolution Quarterly, which are the same thing (he does this twice). To Morozov, Brand and WEC represent the capitalist sellout of the counterculture.
    • This is not completely unfair I suppose. Brand and Wired and that whole scene, it is hippies and technology melding seamlessly. That is something that always appealed to me, and I was part of the same general tendency at MIT. But maybe I and people like me were always in denial of the unpleasant fact that you can't merge with technology without also inviting in capitalism, militarism, and the state. At some point the hippie values will clash, or be discarded. Or worse, mutated out of their original purposes to serve other ones.
    • Brodey and his colleagues, in Morozov's telling, faced basically the same problem but did not sell out. Of course they also accomplished nothing, and not just because the forces of technology and capitalism were opposing them, it's more that they were compeletly clueless about practical affairs.
    • He build on this dichotomy in the final episode, contrasting Brodey's vision with that of Buckminster Fuller as more alive, less involved with the evils of the corporate world. Fuller, Brand, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all on the bad side of some divide, as is "solutionism". Brodey was more radical in this view, he envisioned using technology for a genuine positive transformation of the human, not mere products or corporate tools. But he was also a complete failure and narcissist, which at least lets him retain the purity of his vision.

    • Listening notes

    • Ep 5 deals with Negroponte and The Media Lab
      • the intellectual contrast he tries to set up between Brodey and Negroponte/Minsky/Papert, but it kind of falls apare when he acknowledges that many Media Lab projects (dance interfaces!) sound like they could have come from Brodey's lab.
      • The real difference: Brodey was both unwilling and unable to cooperate with military or corporate funders, whereas the MIT people were quite able to do work with them. This would be more tragic if Brodey's vision was any good, but I am not all that impressed.
      • Weird to think that Negroponte was ever some kind of anti-corporate populist, I guess maybe some of the early ArcMac rhetoric could give that impression.
    • Ep 8
      • Mentions that Brodey ran into trouble at MIT with the slogan "human enhancement", had vague Nazi connotations. Wonder if Engelbart had that problem also.
      • Morozov paints Brodey as a poet at MIT among the engineers (and as an inherently hopeless proposition). Overly simplistic but OK. Brodey even more reminds me of Ted Nelson, another charasmatic humanist trying to mold tech into his vision, with mixed results.
    • Ep 9/10
      • Well, here things fall apart fast. The lab has a big demo day and muffs it entirely, nothing works, nothing to show for 18 months of work. Embarassing. My reaction: the Media Lab had some bullshit, but always knew at least how to give a convincing demo. These people come off as just incompetent dreamers, entirely self-indulgent without the technical and organizational chops to back up their visions.
      • Again, I'm not sure why they are worthy of a long podcast series. Morozov seems to be having fun describing this gang of lovable losers and weirdos, with a mixture of scorn and affection, but I'm having trouble seeing why I should be interested. I guess I too kind of dig this stuff, dreamers from a different age, whether or not they could mold the world to match the vision (see also Paul Otlet and the prehistory of the web and many others)
      • Brodey has a negative take on Bucky Fuller, comparing his sterile symmetry disfavorably to Gaudi's "architecture of becoming". Imagine a different world...Fuller repreents the Pentagon and Corporate America (?). Visionary poets do not invent the future, they just endorse something from a corporate lab. 1:43 or so, this is important. The future is something to fight for, not just invent...we need more than art, we need politics, solidarity, etc.
      • Narcissim, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk...none of these truly give us a different future.
      • Brodey is forgiven for taking CIA money, somehow doing time as a Maoist in Norweign steel mill canceled out his karmic debt or something.
      • Final theory: that technology will help manage mastering family languages..."solutionism", of course.
    • Bonus 2
      • I think this is where Morozov sets up a radical dichotomy between technologies of "human augmentation" and "human enhancement". The latter is what Brodey and gang were up to, the lesser augmentation is what the establishment sellouts were doing. Enhancement of the human soul, not mere tools for effective work in some industrial setting.

    • Random notes

    • The content of the lab's work seems to have a lot in common with Ted Selker's work at IBM Research and MIT Media Lab (which came later of course).