I wrote this a some time ago. IBM is no longer on the ropes, as it was at that time. But it hasn't regained its past glory either. That is gone, perhaps forever (prediction: the Watson technology will bottom out in a decade). Meanwhile, Microsoft is running into trouble, having been outstripped by Google and, of all companies, Apple. Still, there's a basic truth stored away in these words and that truth doesn't change just becase the high tech world keeps whirlin' around. You might also check out this historical fantasy in the subject of Independence Day.
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Why is America the software center of the Universe?Because it is also the Rap-Rock-Funk-Soul-Jazz-Bluescenter of the Universe. What does that have to dowith the If-Then-Else imperatives of byte busting?Technology is not just technique. It is style andattitude. You can't write great software if yoursoul was nurtured on the mechanical clockwork andinternal combustion rhythms of the Machine Age. Youmust free yourself from the linear flow ofmechanical time and learn to improvise order fromthe creative chaos lurking in the multipleintersecting flows of the digital domain.Roll over Beethoven, it's Jimi Hendrix time.
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Cases in point: Steve Wozniak took time outfrom Apple to produce rock and roll concerts.Microsoft was co-founded by a guitar-playingJimi Hendrix fan, Paul Allen. Borland Internationalis the brainchild of barbarian jazz saxophonistPhilippe Kahn. Xerox and Apple guru Alan GUIKay worked his way through graduate school asa jazz musician. Lotus founder Mitch Kaporhas taken to riding the informatic frontierwith Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.* * * * *
Now, IBM is on the ropes. Marching to the tick tockstrokes of a steam locomotive, it can't swing to therhythms of the Apollo moon dance. Big Blue is cryingthe blues because it isn't hip enough to play the blues.If you don't want to be dogged by the hell-hound onIBM's tail, then baptize your brain in the soul-juiceof funkadelic jivometric drumology.
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Still, we can't create the future from nothing.The post-IBM world has been in the worksfor a long time. In the Roaring 20s the sons and daughtersof Henry Assembly-Line Ford and Tom Light-Bulb Edisoncruised the night spots of African America dancing to theimprovisations of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway,and all the other pioneering funkateers. Getting juiced,they got loose, and mechanical tick tock began to die.Their sons and daughters dug Elvis the Pelvis and blewBob Dylan's changing winds into the high-techstudio wizardry of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.When Woodstock Nation faded into decayingreels of audiotape and videotape the young, the hip andthe restless decided that communes were 19thcentury and created the video game and PC industry.
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Now a new cultural force has emerged on the scene.Tempered in battle with Ronald Raygun and hisBush League Wrecking Crew, hip hop reaches back tothe rhythms which created humankind on the Africansavannas and, through digital sampling, crosses thoserhythms with our recorded musical legacy. Silicon Agerappers insinuate body-heart rhythm into the digitalwarp and woof of emerging cultural patterns. The angercuts through accretions of industrial armor andcreates room to grow, letting the neurons branch in new patterns.
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That's where it all begins: the nervous system.While the genes lay down the basic plan, thedetailed wiring is worked out throughextended and intimate interaction with the environment.To update William Wordsworth,the jazz child is mother to the cybernetic man.The dancing you do at ten forms the matrix out of which you thinkwhen you are twenty. If you grow up to mechanical rhythms,digital dancing is unnatural.To be a natural born child of the 21st centuryyou must dance at the wedding betweenthe soul of John von Neumannand the science of Daniel Louis Armstrong.
