Introducing...A Sense of Rebellion
Sweet Bobby- 233 views
- 8 Jul 2024
We are partnering with the Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination, so that we can continue to bring our listeners brilliant investigations like Sweet Bobby. You can join Tortoise as a member to get early and ad-free access to new series and support our investigations at www.tortoisemedia.com/invite.Introducing...A Sense of RebellionA Podcast Series by Evgeny Morozov.Forget the military or Silicon Valley: we owe our smart technologies - from toothbrushes to beds - to a band of eccentric 1960s hippies. Hidden away in a secretive, privately funded lab on Boston’s waterfront, these visionaries developed intimate, personal technologies a decade before Steve Jobs. But their rebellion was fraught with obstacles: the military-industrial complex, corporate resistance, and the founders’ larger-than-life personalities. As Silicon Valley adopted their ideas, the lab's vision for more humane and diverse technologies was twisted into something entirely different. A decade in the making, this podcast unravels their captivating and often tragic tale. It's all here: Cold War psychiatry, Maoism, LSD, the Rockefellers, Scientology, CIA’s forays into extrasensory perception, and even the advent of tech libertarianism. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Hello, it's Tomeni from Tortus. Let me tell you about A Sense of Rebellion, a new podcast from the tech critic Evgeny Morozov. A decade in the making, it explores a fascinating countercultural project and a lab that foreshadow follows the tech startups of the 2000s with all the excesses, flaws, utopian ambitions, and truly fascinating characters. Forget the military or Silicon Valley, it turns out that we owe our smart toothbrushes and smart beds to a wild bunch of eccentric hippies from the 1960s. Toiling in a privately funded secretive lab on Boston's waterfront, they sought more intimate and personal technologies a whole decade before Steve Jobs. But the military-industrial complex, resistance from corporate America, and the larger-than-life personalities who founded the lab got in the way of their ambitions. A Sense of Rebellion is a whirlwind tour through the prehistory of the digital revolution, which sheds light on the paths not in the development of digital technologies. From LSD and the Scientology to AI and the CIA, each episode blends drama, mystery, and deep research. Here's the trailer.
A psychedelic loft on Boston's Waterfront, late 1960s.We had a lot of money. We had our own dedicated computers, analog and digital. We had all sorts of equipment, whatever we wanted. A mysterious sponsor, a looming deadline, and a bunch of nerds dreaming of a different AI. Now, you were wanting a different world from what the hippies wanted. They were wanting a whole new industrial cybernetic civilization. Well, I'm the project manager for the Environmental Ecology Lab. The what? I'd say, Well, it's an experimental lab. It's a cybernetic lab. It's a what? Then a startup, a hippie startup, a place in the woods where closing was optional, but play wasn't. Their nerd dream is still alive. They were the least likely people in the world to run a functional business. And he gave his talk to the people in the boardroom, from the chair on the conference room table, moving around. Underneath it all, a seizing rebellion. Money was so powerful, and people were so stuck, and I was getting so stuck. His rebellion, a passionate fight for that original dream. Oh, he became a wild man. But will his rebellion also be that dream's ultimate downfall? I can't think of a worse place to start tripping than a military base, but that's what he did.
I do remember going to the laundromat with him once, and he was wanting to take his clothes off and wash them. A life like no other. A psychiatrist, a hippie, a Maoist, the original cheerleader for smart technologies. A tech guru before tech gurus existed. Why and where did he disappear? How did this guy who was a pioneer in his field and in the forefront of his profession, what happened? How could he let this happen? He was living just horrible, and I don't know how he survived. We had to have a code because he was convinced that his phone was tapped. All of this and more in a sense of rebellion. A new podcast about the weird origins of the digital revolution. Researched, written, and presented by me, Evgeny Marozov, the creator of the Santiago Boys, produced by PostUtopia. That's why we call ourselves ecologists, because we're trying to learn how we, as humans, our environment to the Earth.
Listen to A Sense of Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts.