The Philosopher of Palo Alto

The Philosopher of Palo Alto is a strange little book that covers the life of Mark Weiser, a man who the author seems to believe occupies a pivotal role in the history of personal computing. Whether the author’s belief is warranted—or if indeed the entire book is warranted—is something I couldn’t quite decide by the time I reached the end of it.

Weiser’s professional life was spent working at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he had the enviable task of thinking Big Thoughts for a living. That is, imagining what the future of office technology might look like and setting a course for Xerox product research and development. This was in the 1980s and 90s when it still looked like a well-funded corporate tech think tank could single-handedly invent the future in some of the same ways that Bell Labs had done.

Author John Tinnell establishes Weiser as someone who grew up in thrall to early punch card-directed computers but who was also was keenly aware of how they could isolate their users from the world and other people. With a deep personal interest in certain philosophers, Weiser was compelled to find a new path for computing devices that would harness their beneficial powers without requiring that their users be holed up in isolating environments like college basement computer labs. Weiser’s love of computing instilled in him a desire to see computers in use everywhere, in a form that was so small and unobtrusive that they would be both a significant part of daily life and a glue that brought people closer together. In other words, he was an early techno-optimist. Tinnell suggests that Weiser’s interest in philosophy, coupled with his own frustrations in establishing deep personal relationships supplied the main motivations for the course of his professional career at Xerox PARC.

Fine. All well and good, but Tinnell’s case for why a book about Weiser’s career was needed isn’t particularly well made.  

Weiser’s great claim to fame is the concept of ubiquitous computing, or “ubicomp.” Precisely what this concept is is never quite clearly articulated. And the author obliquely acknowledges as much multiple times throughout the text. While ubicomp seems to have been about the idea of computers packed into as many ordinary devices as possible, always fading into the background so as not to draw attention to themselves, it never really gets more specific than that. Instead, we’re fed a repeating stream of philosophical mumbo jumbo that doesn’t translate into understanding what Weiser was getting it. From Tinnell’s telling, Weiser’s audience often had the same problem. His ideas were vague and insubstantial, often with no demo hardware to look at. Indeed, Weiser himself may never have had a firm grasp of what ubicomp should have looked like. That’s a problem if you’re trying to establish an individual as a key figure in a technological history.

Weiser’s place is somewhat cemented in the minds of computing historians for a 1991 Scientific American article about ubicomp. At a time when the tech-interested were looking for a prophet to tell them from which direction the Next Big Thing was coming, Weiser scored big with this article. Unfortunately, Weiser seems to have ridden this moment of modest public fame to…well, not a lot beyond repeating the same pitch for several years at various international conferences. No major breakthroughs resulting from this article would ever come. Weiser would die from an untimely illness before reaching the age of 50, having little to show for his thoughts and efforts.

Weiser’s impact on the history of computing is murky at best. But one thing that’s clear is his (and his contemporaries’) deep enthusiasm for the embedding of computing devices into the tiniest corners of daily life. In the techno-enthusiast’s mind of the 1980s and 90s, computing tech was to be seen as a glorious boon that would free mankind and enhance his existence. What strikes me about their ideas is their rank naivety. They imagined what people like themselves would do with the technology. They never tried to imagine what the Worst People in the World would do with it, instituting relentless tracking, harvesting personal data, and continuously surveilling vast populations.