Shownotes Transcript
Hello, it's Basha Cummings here. I'm an editor at Tortoise, which is the home of Sweet Bobby, Hoaxed and many more award-winning investigative podcasts. I'm here to tell you about Tortoise Investigates, where we curate the best of our chart-topping investigations in one place. Everything from extraordinary tales of deception to a suspicious killing to one mother's decades-long fight with the police. Just search for Tortoise Investigates wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, it's Tominy from Tortoise. 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 foreshadows 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 taken in the development of digital technologies. From LSD and 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. They 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? Let's 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 veered origins of the digital revolution. Researched, written, and presented by me, Evgeny Marozov, the creator of the Santiago Boys, produced by Post Utopia. That's why we call ourselves ecologists, because we're trying to learn how we as humans are environment to the earth.
Listen to A Sense of Rebellion wherever you get your podcasts.
