In 1987, I was staying with Weir in Mill Valley and writing songs with him when he said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going down to Cupertino tomorrow to give a lecture to the people at Apple about using Macintoshes for songwriting.” Although Steve Jobs was already gone by then, he had given the Dead all these Macintosh computers that Apple thought were being used for songwriting and other creative purposes. The Dead were actually using them semi-creatively—for accounting in the office.
I said to Bobby, “That’s ludicrous. What are we going to say? We don’t write songs with a Macintosh. The last time I looked, I write songs with a legal pad and you write them with a guitar.” Weir said, “Yeah, but you can bullshit your way through anything and I’ll just follow your lead.” He had a point. And since I had been around people who used Macintoshes, I figured I could talk a pretty good game.
We drove down the next day, and everybody was sitting in this big auditorium. Once I got up in front of the room, I realized the audience was full of Deadheads. It is bad for your karma to lie to a Deadhead, especially if you are part of their pantheon. They are hapless and completely credulous and will believe anything you tell them. Lying to them about this would have been like drowning puppies.
So I said, “The truth is that I don’t write songs with a Macintosh. To the extent that I write songs with a computer at all, I write them with a Compaq luggable, and that’s because it seems like a better form of Wite-Out.” They were hissing and booing but it was pretty mild, the same kind of reaction I had seen when Weir would forget an entire stanza of a song onstage.
Then I said, “I would use a Macintosh but nobody ever told me you had given them to the band.” Typical Grateful Dead efficiency. They had them, but nobody had ever made me aware of this. Furthermore, I wasn’t actually sure I wanted one because they seemed toylike and promiscuous, so overly user-friendly that it was like they were giving you sloppy wet kisses. To me, the Macintosh really felt like a slut. And, that aside, they were also glacially slow in comparison to the Compaq.
I had the idea that what I wanted at this stage in my career was a device that would put words on paper that looked more or less like what used to come from a Selectric typewriter. As far as I could tell, the best way to do that was by using an IBM. Nonetheless, Bobby and I did the talk, and everyone seemed to like it all right and that was that.
A couple of weeks down the line, I got a letter from somebody at Apple saying they would be happy to provide me with a Macintosh as well as all the fixings, which in those days weren’t much. I was supposed to use it and tell them what I thought of it. As it turned out, though, Apple did not send me a Macintosh right away. In fact, they took so long to do so that I started sending them letters asking when it was coming.
Because I knew this big toy was on the way, I started thinking about the Macintosh and obsessing about everybody else’s Macintosh. Every time I got around one, I would be fucking with it and screwing it up and then leaving it in a wreck. It was really fun for me to be able to get into the operating system and fool around with it. It turned out that I was, in fact, a computer nerd.
As I was contemplating the end of my time on the Bar Cross, I began to wonder what was going to happen to the idea of community in the absence of little agricultural towns such as Pinedale, which contained in them a spiritual nutrient that was like the sourdough starter for society. I looked out at television land and the suburbs and I saw little of the sense of shared adversity, willingness to accept differences without suspicion or rancor, or general capacity for samaritanism that had been lovingly commented on by Tocqueville and other early observers of budding American culture.
It dawned on me that one of the substrates that might become the foundation of a new community was the strange and mysterious culture of the Deadheads. But they didn’t seem to have a central gathering place that was reliable. They also didn’t seem to have the ability to talk casually about community affairs among themselves. And they had no economic focus. At least not until they all became lawyers.
But I found it difficult to study the Deadheads in person. Whenever I tried do so, I found I was up against the sociological equivalent of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: As I would go roaming through the parking lot before a show, the Deadheads would eventually figure out who I was and then begin asking me questions, which meant that my ability to observe them objectively was gone because they were now behaving differently in my presence.
My friend Betsy Cohen, who was then at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford, said, “One way you could study them would be on the Internet.” I said, “What’s the Internet?” She then explained to me what that was, taking a quantity of time and language that embarrasses me to contemplate today.
At the end of her explanation, I still wasn’t quite sure what it was. But she helped me get a 300 baud modem complete with a rubber suction cup to attach to my phone receiver (for which I would have paid a considerable fine, had it been discovered, because it was an alteration of AT&T equipment). In addition, she got me a Tymnet dial-up number and an Internet address through Stanford. After that, I was on my own.
It was assumed that people who had modems with rubber suction cups knew all about the AT command set that one needed to operate modems. I had to learn how to do this the hard way because back then nobody else in Sublette County, Wyoming, even had a modem. I would be dialing the Tymnet number and eventually one sacred day, I heard the strange, seductive warble and boop that means you have connected to modems.
I immediately tried to log in my Stanford address and lo, I was on the Internet. I then followed Betsy’s instructions to get myself to the vast terrain of Grateful Dead–oriented Usenet groups where I could see people at all hours of the day or night rendering judgment about me and my closest friends in a condition that was entirely innocent. But it did suffice to teach me a lot about the culture of the Deadheads.
What was much more interesting to me was the Internet itself. Immediately, it became clear to me that this was the nervous system of the noosphere—a postulated sphere dominated by consciousness and the mind and interpersonal relationships—that I had been thinking about ever since I first encountered the notion in the works of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin while in college.
Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit renaissance man and a world-class paleontologist. He discovered Peking man and wrote a lot about the idea that the evolutionary process had reached a point of self-awareness and was now occupying a new layer of the relational ecology, which was the collective organism of mind.
I had spent fifteen years riding around the Bar Cross thinking about the noosphere, and suddenly after all that time, I had evidence that this was not just Teilhard’s pipe dream but was in fact real and growing its own nervous system. Indeed, it had been doing so since 1844, when Samuel F. B. Morse had tapped out the first telegraph message—“What hath God wrought?”—in Washington, D.C. Which is earlier than most people think of cyberspace being born. I knew then and there that without any plan or execution, I wanted to be part of making this particular concept happen.
It was about that time that I discovered the WELL, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which had been founded in 1985 by Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, and Kevin Kelly. Though not connected to the Internet, the WELL was still a fabulous digital salon filled with people who knew about Teilhard de Chardin and who were Deadheads and so open to all forms of wild inquiry. And it was also just about the right size for a small town to be.
All this gave me the ability to see what other people had not yet seen, which was that there was a space there and a community of people who identified with that space. I didn’t have a name for that space yet, but neither did anybody else. Back then, nobody called it anything. I’m pretty sure I was first person to identify the nature of that community and space and then start trying to write about it in what I suppose you might call a somewhat literate fashion.
I had also begun thinking about Apple as the new foundational corporate form of gathering. It was going to be horizontal rather than vertical, organic rather than mechanical, and very flat in assembly. As I continued writing letters to Apple asking where my computer was, I began including musings about Apple as a company.
In the beginning, there had been basically two steps on the ladder at Apple. You had Steve Jobs and then everybody else, which was why it always took so goddamn long for things to happen there, like them sending me my computer. In any case, they finally said, “Your computer is in the mail, really. And we’ve been getting such a kick out of your letters that we want to know if you would consider coming out here and writing a people’s history of Apple.”
It took me a while but I eventually wound up getting a contract to write the book from Viking Press. To initiate the project, I moved to Silicon Valley and spent the summer there with my family with the understanding that Elaine and my daughters would go back to Pinedale in the fall so the girls could go to school.
Within about a month and half of cruising around the valley, I realized I didn’t really want to write a book about Apple, because if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. And it was definitely not nice in there. Although John Sculley was running the show at Apple, the melody of the culture that Steve had created still lingered on in so many ways.
At one point, Steve had made everybody at Apple go to est, which stands for Erhard Seminars Training, and take these soul-destroying courses that had been created by Werner Erhard to transform the way in which people interacted with one another. The stated aim of the program was to teach people how to express themselves naturally rather than follow rules, but a lot of those people just became even bigger assholes than they had been before. Can you imagine an entire company that had been turned into est-holes? It was not pretty. I mean, I’ve dealt with East German border guards who were a lot friendlier than most of the building attendants at Apple.
Something else that made me realize I did not want to write a book about Apple was what they had done to Elmer Baum, the first guy who ever made a loan to Apple. Elmer was a sweet, marvelous guy. His son Allen had been one of Steve Wozniak’s high school buddies, and Elmer had provided the initial startup capital to Apple by taking out a $5,000 loan using Steve Jobs’s VW microbus as collateral.
Elmer then decided to go to work at Apple, where he became employee number thirty-four. By the time Elmer decided to retire, he was by far the oldest employee there. But Apple had not yet even considered creating a retirement plan, and so instead of taking care of him, they just fired his ass.
I had been given a wonderful house in San Jose, but that was pretty much contingent on my writing a somewhat fulsome book of praise about Apple and not about est and what they had done to Elmer Baum. By then, I had already gotten totally evangelical about the Internet. Having come to the water of Silicon Valley, I was now bathed in the sea of bits.
I decided that what I really wanted to do was write about how I thought the information companies were going to be fundamentally different from industrial companies. And so I transformed the book into an account of this great changing paradigm that I was going to call Everything We Know Is Wrong.
At some point during the period after Weir and I had gone to talk at Apple, I participated in an intervention for Bobby, and we sent him off to a place called Crutcher’s Serenity House in St. Helena. By then, just about everybody in the Dead was struggling with drug issues, and Bobby was no exception.
I was family to him, so to speak, so I went up there to spend family week with him. It was quite an interesting place, supported by the longshoremen’s union. That was appealing to Bobby because he was always saying, “I’m anything but anonymous and so I can’t go to one of those AA places.” But he was putting up with this place, and so I decided to go up there myself. It actually got to me because it was full of people who were really looking at themselves for the first time, and this was when I said to myself, “Yeah, he’s an alcoholic, but what about you?”
I came to understand that something about my relationship with Elaine had played a big part in my own alcoholism. For the first time, I also began to understand what her role as a codependent had been in my life. This wasn’t all that surprising, because I was then at the peak of my “needs a little work” phase in terms of alcohol use. I could have turned a fire plug into a codependent, and somehow, I had just adapted to her emotional expectations.
I called Elaine from Crutcher’s and said, “There’s a chance that you and I might have to get more distance from each other so I can get more distance from alcohol.” She was totally suspicious of this, but I started going to AA meetings anyway. I quit drinking and didn’t really take any drugs, with the occasional exception of psychedelics, for about two years.