Warren Brodey is dead: making technology dance

Warren Brodey, who died in Oslo at the age of 10 at the age of 101, was perhaps the most influential tech visionary that they have never heard of-a psychiatrist who became a cybernetic and whose radical ideas about reactionable technologies in the 1960s shaped our digital present, if not in a way that he would have liked. His story reads like a cyberpunk novel: the CIA financed experiments with a supernatural perception, a computer laboratory that was also the world’s first tech start-up, intellectual bromances With Marshall McLuhan and Gregory Bateson and a life path that led him from with a Norwegian iron foundry to Maoist China.

However, the importance of Brodey is not in these dazzling details, but in a fundamental question that he asked half a century ago: Should the technology adapt to us, or should it stimulate us to develop us? The Silicon Valley decided on the first way and provided us with algorithms that predict each of our needs. Brodey was committed to the second way – for technologies that are “soft” and reactionable, not to satisfy our needs, but to help us discover needs that we did not know about.

Table of Contents

• Jazz status Muzak
• A house made of foam
• The complete alienation
• The Unseen Visionary: Warren brodey – A Legacy in the Digital Age
• frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

As Nicholas Negroponte, who described Brodey as “one of the earliest and most important influences” on his thinking, wrote about a future in 1995 in which “her interface agent can read every news agency and newspaper.. And creates a personalized summary,” he picked up Brodey’s vision of responsive environments. But where Brodey Jazz saw – improvisation, surprise, growth -, Negroponte and Silicon Valley Muzak: predictable, calming, profitable.

In the Environmental Ecology Lab am Lewis Wharf in Boston, which Brodey founded in 1967 together with the engineer Avery Johnson (the heir of the Palmolive capacity), visitors met the world’s first tech start-up in the modern sense-with a very counter-cultural ethos and an deeply experimental atmosphere. Your “Soft Control Materials” – plastic bubbles filled with gas, which, depending on the temperature, changed their shape – created surfaces that breathed and reacted to touch.

Brodey’s way to the techno prophet was not necessarily expected. Born in Toronto in 1924, he became an emerging star of American psychiatry as a pioneer of family therapy. In his groundbreaking work, he applied cybernetic principles to understand family dynamics as complex systems. His work with talented blind people for the CIA taught him that human perception can be radically expanded-a knowledge that has been reinforced by his participation in LSD experiments of the government.

In 1965, Brodey gave up his lucrative practice in Washington and took on an unpaid area on. His timing was as perfect as it was terrible. The Vietnam War escalated, and Brodey saw horror how military spending corrupted his vision. “All the money flows to kill in technologies,” he wrote into his diary. “This environment is evil.”

The laboratory moved into an old quarry in New Hampshire, which acted as a municipality, in which wearing clothing was optional and who attracted personalities such as an armaments consultant who assembled most of an intercontinental rocket in Brodey’s guest room. Brodey built a foam house there – not only as a place to think, but as his actual place of residence, which embodied his philosophy that architecture should be soft, reactionable and alive.

His ideas spread through underground channels such as the magazine “Radical Software”, discussions with McLuhan and Bateson or as a mentor of young thinkers like Negroponte. But while Negroponte became famous by the adaptation of Brodey’s ideas to the big US corporations, Brodey chose exile himself. He moved to Norway in 1972, turned to Maoism and worked for years as a auxiliary worker in an iron foundry where he manufactured Jøtul wood furnaces. In doing so, he hid his bourgeois background as a doctor in front of his colleagues and forbade his children to reveal their father’s true profession. In 1980 he taught “biological cybernetics” in China to finally be disillusioned, which he regarded as another version of the mechanistic society in which he had fled.

Brodey understood that the real problem was not in such mechanistic ideas of human psyche, but that capitalism itself made humanistic technology impossible on a large scale. His move to socialist Scandinavia reflected this knowledge – the Warren Brodey from 1975, which Lenin and Mao studied, would have laughed at today’s suggestions for a “nicer” information capitalism. When I met him in Oslo for the first time in 2014 – a fateful visit that led to a decades of discussions and finally to a ten -piece podcast – he gave a relentless assessment of today’s digital landscape: “At this point, alienation is really completely complete. And the computer contributed a huge part.”

What Brodey had understood and what the Silicon Valley does not want to admit is that responsive technology without sense of human development is only sophisticated manipulation. His “soft” machines should be partners in an ecological dance, not a servant who predict our next steps. “We are against a large standardized network that extends around the world,” explained Brodey in 1971. Instead, he introduced himself to networks “who organize itself in a natural way, like a field or a meadow”.

This alternative internet never came about. Instead, we got Negropontes “Daily Me”-today embodied in our social media feeds-where algorithms deliver exactly what we want before we know that we want it. Warren Brodey spent his last decades to watch his nightmares true and his dreams were monetized. But his legacy lives on in a simple, radical question: What if our technologies would help us to become alien to ourselves instead of confirming who we are? In an age of algorithmic self -reflection, this question is more urgent than ever.

From the English by Harald Staun