10.01.2014
·
Be imaginative, exciting, compelling, inspiring: That’s
what John Brockman expects of himself and others. Arguably, the planet’s
most important literary agent, Brockman brings its cyber elite together
in his Internet salon „Edge.“ We paid a visit to the man from the Third
Culture.
Von
Jordan Mejias, New York
© wowe
At the age
of three John Brockman announced: „I want to go to New York!“ For
decades he has been a leading light behind the scenes in the city’s
intellectual life.
The
Internet had yet to be born but the talk still revolved around it. In
New York, that was, half a century ago. „Cage,“ as John Brockman
recalls, „always spoke about the mind we all share. That wasn’t some
kind of holistic nonsense. He was talking about profound cybernetic
ideas.“ He got to hear about them on one of the occasions when John
Cage, the music revolutionary, Zen master and mushroom collector, cooked
mushroom dishes for him and a few friends. At some point Cage packed
him off home with a book. „That’s for you,“ were his parting words.
After which he never exchanged another word with Brockman. Something
that he couldn’t understand for a long time. „John, that’s Zen,“ a
friend finally explained to him. „You no longer need him.“
Norbert Wiener was the name of the author,
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
the name of the book. Page by page Brockman battled his way through the
academic text, together with Stewart Brand, his friend, who was about
to publish the
Whole Earth Catalog, the shopping primer and
bible of the environmentally-driven counterculture. For both readers,
physics and mathematics expanded into an infinite space that no longer
distinguished between the natural and human sciences, mind and matter,
searching and finding.
Like the idea of the Internet—which was slowly acquiring contours during these rambling 1960s discussions—the idea of
Edge,
the Internet salon around which Brockman’s life now revolves, was also
taking shape. Edge is the meeting place for the cyber elite, the most
illustrious minds who are shaping the emergence of the latest
developments in the natural and social sciences, whether they be
digital, genetic, psychological, cosmological or neurological. Digerati
from the computer universe of Silicon Valley aren’t alone in giving
voice to their ideas in Brockman’s salon. They are joined in equal
measure by other eminent experts, including the evolutionary biologists
Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the
cosmologist Martin Rees, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the
economist, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the
quantum physicist David Deutsch, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky,
and the social theorist Anthony Giddens. Ranging from the co-founder of
Apple Steve Wozniak to the decoder of genomes Craig Venter, his guest
list is almost unparalleled even in the boundless realm of the Internet.
Even the actor Alan Alda and writer Ian McEwan can be found in his
forum.
The bridge of the third culture
A
question is sent out to all salon members at the start of every year.
This year it is: „What scientific idea ready to be retired?“ The
„editorial marching orders,“ written by Brockman, reveal the heart of
Edge: „Go deeper than the news. Tell me something I don’t know. You are
writing for your fellow Edgies, a sophisticated bunch, and not the
general public. Stick to ideas, theories, systems of thought,
disciplines, not people. Come up with something new, be exciting,
inspiring, compelling. Tell us a great story. Amaze, delight, surprise
us!“
Does he really need to spell all that out so
clearly? After all, quite a few of the authors number among his clients.
He markets them and their works globally, and they know exactly what he
expects of them and what they can expect of him. As their literary
agent, he never misses a business opportunity. Indeed, he has built a
reputation for negotiating mind-boggling prices for individual works
that, in contrast to Edge, adopt a more populist approach to the
sciences. But above all, it’s his concept of The
Third Culture
that glitters, the miraculous formula that Brockman evokes to secure
the supremacy of the so called hard sciences, even in the instances when
the world and our place in it is surveyed in quasi-philosophical mode.
As physicist, politician, and the novelist C. P. Snow lament, there is a
chasm separating the twin cultures of the natural and human sciences;
and the enterprising Brockman fills this divide with bestsellers from
his Third Culture.
Business
isn’t just blossoming, he says, it has never been better. Anyone
harboring any doubts should pay him a visit on Fifth Avenue, where
Brockman, Inc. has been spreading its wings of late in premises that are
awash with light and where gravity seems to have been suspended. The
two glass corner offices are a testament to transparency. The one for
the company’s founder allows the Empire State Building to peek over his
shoulder as he works at his paper-free desk; the other is for his son
Max, the company’s brand new CEO, who can admire the perpetually
breathtaking silhouette of the Flatiron Building though the gigantic
windows. Between them Katinka Matson, the co-founder of Edge, President
of Brockman Inc., mother of Max, and business and life partner of
John—has stylishly set up shop. As the daughter of a literary agent, the
profession is in her DNA. In her spare time she now brightens up the
office with multi-colored, larger-than-life scans of floral images.
Brockman,
who was born in 1941, could comfortably retire and devote himself
completely to Edge, his intellectual hobby. But Edge is no mere hobby
for him, no pastime pursued at times when the demands of work abate. „I
have never thought of money. I have only ever done what interested me,
and that always brought in enough to get me by.“ Before opening his
Internet salon, he had published a newsletter with the same title and
philosophical outlook. This evolved out of the Reality Club. „Trippy
stuff“ topped the agenda when a group of people started meeting in New
York during the 1980s, a group whose fluctuating composition included
the physicist Freeman Dyson, the feminist Betty Friedan, the social
revolutionary Abbie Hoffman and the film stars Ellen Burstyn and Dennis
Hopper. They were charged with asking each other the questions that they
asked themselves. No instant answers were expected. The focus was on
asking the questions. In literary New York Brockman had never glimpsed
the prospect of this type of exchange of ideas, the adventure that he
wanted for himself and to share with others. He preferred the empirical
study of our cosmos, on both micro and macro scales, to the imagined
world. Not that this forced him to relinquish story-telling. With the
frequently spectacular experiences they describe, the books and authors
he represents offer him more suspense and excitement than he can find in
any novel. And his own life? As he describes it, that too emerges as a
collection of gripping stories that veer off in numerous different
directions while always following a clear, very personal line. From Day
One he was curious and hungry for knowledge, and had an appetite for
excitement and new experiences.
A blueprint for the Internet
Brockman’s
life-story begins with the proclamation: „I want to go to New York.“ He
was three years old at the time, lying in a Boston hospital, seriously
ill with cerebrospinal meningitis, and these are said to have been the
first words he spoke when he woke up from a six-week coma. He finally
made it to New York at the age of 20—enrolling as a graduate student at
Columbia University where he completed a degree in business. After this
he worked within the financial services industry, not that his life
revolved exclusively around money and transactions at the time. The
crazy 1960s burst into life and Brockman felt compelled to immerse
himself in the vibrant cultural mix. He experienced the New York
underground for himself on the stage of the Living Theater. It was
culture shock, a call to action, an invitation to engage. But Brockman
didn’t participate in the avant-garde experiments with his banjo and
guitar, but with his gift for organization. Today we would probably call
him a cultural impresario.
New York
gave him confidence, telling him „You can be free.“ He didn’t need to be
told twice. With Sam Shepard, who was still working as a waiter, he
discussed ideas for „intermedia“ stage performances. In no time he had
become an indispensable part of the multimedia theater and film scene.
He was entrusted by Jonas Mekas, the great father of experimental film
in the U.S., with commissioning films from Nam June Paik and Robert
Rauschenberg for an „expanded“ film festival. His organizational skills
even got him into the Lincoln Center Film Festival where he presented
the work of newcomers like Martin Scorsese when he wasn’t escorting
European guests—with names like Federico Fellini and Jean-Luc Godard—out
to dinners. Even Jackie Kennedy, still not an Onassis, makes an
appearance in the background during this period.
While the
stars of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and the Beatniks were slowly
fading, and the folk scene around Bob Dylan dawning, Brockman was
spending time working with Andy Warhol. But the drug-sodden collective
in the Factory wasn’t for him. He needed to be his own master. For the
same reason, things didn’t work out with the countercultural Yippies,
after his friend Abbie Hoffman recruited him for the founding meetings
of the movement. Brockman had no interest in revolution. However: „The
ideas behind it interested me.“ Cage taught him how to perceive the
non-linear structure of reality using cybernetics. With hindsight he
came to feel this was „like a construction diagram for the Internet.“ He
wrote a book with the title By the Late John Brockman, an aphoristic
volume of his various insights and experiences.
In the circle of elites
And then,
at MIT in 1965, he finally came face to face with a computer. There is
precisely one example of this type of computer, a humungous contraption,
surrounded by busy men in white lab coats, and secured behind a glass
screen against which he pressed his nose. „I fell in love on the spot.
It was pure magic.“ Brockman had no more doubts whatsoever that
everything was interconnected: the arts and the sciences and the
psychedelic shows with their flashing strobes, through whose cacophony
of sound Marshall McLuhan trumpeted his theory of communications.
At the Esalen Institute, the personal growth
laboratory on California’s Pacific coast, he listened to talks by
scientists and madcap geniuses whose names hardly anyone on the East
Coast knew. A treasure trove just waiting to be opened. An awakening. In
1973 this gave rise to his literary agency, albeit circuitously. Once
again he found himself promoting something that interested him. Slowly
but surely he realized that he had struck gold. Or, as he prefers to
say, he discovered an oil well that has never stopped bubbling. Since
then Brockman has been keyed to the Third Culture from head to foot.
Famous scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs and sponsors are drawn to
him like moths to a light bulb. At his desk in New York he clicks on the
invitation to a party he is flying to in San Francisco the following
day. The hosts include the co-founder of Google Sergey Brin, the Russian
billionaire Yuri Miner, the co-founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, and
Art Levinson, Chairman of the Board of Apple Inc. and the former CEO of
the biotech company Genentech. It is safe to assume that Brockman also
enjoys get-togethers with such distinguished names.
But even
more he evidently enjoys the gatherings at his picturesque farm in
Connecticut with its numerous nooks and crannies. For one day or weekend
every summer, he affords himself the intellectual pleasure of
transforming his New England idyll into a swap meet for the latest
scientific research and ideas. From Princeton and Yale, Harvard and MIT,
Silicon Valley and New York’s executive suites, he invites thinkers,
movers, shakers and clients—all of them friends—to discuss the hottest
topics in their various fields. The most recent edition of these bucolic
conferences held beneath ancient maple trees began with an up-to-date
tour d’horizon by the economist Sendhil Mullainathan, who mused that the
excessive volumes of data might threaten the qualitative character of
science. The social scientist Fiery Cushman reported on the failure of
algorithms in complex calculations, the experimental philosopher Joshua
Knobe on the elusively ephemeral nature of the self, the psychologist
June Gruber on the problem of positive emotion and the initial
solutions.
Weitere Artikel
In
total 10 scientists gave talks on this perfect summer’s day, which now,
thanks to Edge, no longer has to end. Since November Brockman has been
posting the videos of the contributions on the Web. By February the
day’s entire program should be accessible. Those online, however, can
only guess at the pleasure John Brockman feels as he observes the mind
games he has staged. „Edge,“ says its creator, „for me that means ideas,
for me that means culture.“
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