The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things

John Tinnell, a professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, has written a fascinating book that works in some respects like a time machine. By detailing the life of Mark Weiser at Xerox Parc, we learn about the origins of so many technological things and processes we take for granted today - anything from the iPad I’m using to write this review (primarily using voice recognition) and the Fitbit on my wrist to so-called smart kitchens and cities. Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing, much influenced by the holistic philosophy of Martin Heidegger and, later, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was embodied and utopian. (You should know that ubiquitous computing does not involve checking your smartphone every few minutes.) But like all visionaries, Weiser didn’t foresee the unintended consequences of his thought experiments or how others’ thought experiments attached to other institutions, like MIT, would be even more influential in the digital sphere. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in how technology has, is, and could shape our world.

This 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.

I was a member of PARC’s Computer Science Lab for essentially all of the period under discussion. I liked Mark a lot but my memories of events are not in good sync with the story told by this book. A possible explanation is that the author apparently didn’t interview lab members, only John Seely Brown (JSB), Lucy Suchman, and Mark’s family. JSB almost never came down to CSL and Lucy was at the other end of the building. The book also missed or misunderstood key elements of the CSL research culture.Also missing was a sense of Mark’s other contributions to the computer systems community — there is a reason why the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (ACM SigOPS) has the Mark Weiser Award as one of its premier awards.So … This is an important story for the history of science but this telling is flawed.