原作者：
来源From Satori to Silicon Valley: A TASTE FOR INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC
译者幻龙炎
A TASTE FOR INDUSTRIAL LIGHT AND MAGIC
追逐工业光魔
But now, if we were to fix upon this one aspect of the counter culture -- its mystic tendencies and principled funkiness -- we would not be doing justice to the deep ambiguity of the movement. We would be overlooking the allegiance it maintained, for all its vigorous dissent, to a certain irrepressible Yankee ingenuity, a certain world-beating American fascination with making and doing. For along one important line of descent, it is within this same population of rebels and drop-outs that we can find the inventors and entrepreneurs who helped lay the foundations of the California computer industry. The connections between these two seemingly contradictory aspects of the movement are fascinating to draw out and ponder -- especially since both wings of the counter culture came to be more fully unfolded here in the San Francisco Bay Area than any place else. This is where the Zen-Taoist impulse arose and found (for example, in the San Francisco Zen Center) its most studied expression in America; this is where the mendicant-communitarian lifestyle, both urban and rural, found its main public examples; this is where the new ecological sensibility first announced its presence and first organized its political energies. And this is where the inspired young hackers who would revolutionize Silicon Valley gathered in their greatest numbers.
但是现在，如果我们要专注于反文化的这一个方面──也就是它的神秘主义倾向和骨子里的复古主义──那么我们对于这场极度含混不清的运动便是不公平的。我们会轻视这场运动中那些积极的异议分子所坚守的那无法压抑的属于美国的创造力、和靠着实干震撼了整个世界的属于美国的魅力。因为沿着这条重要的家谱追溯下去，正是在这一批叛逆者和辍学生中，我们可以发现那些为加利福尼亚的计算机产业奠定了基础的发明家和企业家。这场运动看似矛盾的两个方面之间的关系，是令人惊异并引人深思的──尤其是反文化运动的两派最终都在旧金山湾区而不是其他任何一处被完整地展现。禅-道运动正是从这里首先兴起，并使旧金山成为全美禅-道研修水平最高的中心（例如，旧金山的禅宗中心）；也正是在这里，乞讨-社群主义（mendicant-communitarian）的生活方式，在城市和农村中，同时得以向公众展现自己；也正是在这里，全新的生态保护运动第一次宣告自身的存在，并且集合起自己的政治力量。也正是在这里，受到了启示的年轻黑客们彻底改变了他们所聚居的硅谷。
The truth is, if one probes just beneath the surface of the bucolic hippie image, one finds a puzzling infatuation with certain forms of outrè technology reaching well back into the early sixties. I first became aware of its presence when I realized that the countercultural students I knew during that period were almost exclusively, if not maniacally, readers of science fiction. They were reading more of the genre than the publishers could provide. Side by side with the appeal of folk music and primitive ways, handicrafts and organic husbandry, there was a childlike, Oh Wow! confabulation with the space-ships and miraculous mechanisms that would make Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and the television series Star Trek cult favorites, and which would eventually produce the adult audience for (and the producers of) Star Wars in the later seventies and eighties. The same eyes that were scanning the tribal past for its wonders and amazements were also on the look-out for the imagined marvels of what George Lucas would one day call 'Industrial Light and Magic.'
事实是，如果我们深入乡野嬉皮士形象的表面之下，便可以发现他们有一种令人费解的、对某些奇怪技术的迷恋，这种迷恋最早始于六十年代初期。我第一次意识到它的存在，是源于我发现我认识的带有反文化倾向的学生几乎都是科幻小说的读者，有些还颇为痴狂。正式印刷出版的作品已经无法满足他们对于不同流派的需求。他们在欣赏民间音乐和粗陋的技术、手工、有机畜牧业的同时，也对太空飞船和神奇的机械保持着如孩童般的兴趣，也正是这种兴趣造就了斯坦利·库布里克的《2001太空漫游》以及科幻连续剧《Star Trek》的独特观众群，并且最终创造出了七十年代末期和八十年代的《星球大战》的成年观众群（和制片人）。他们的眼睛在扫视着部族过去的奇迹和胜景的同时，也在展望着出想像中的奇景，而这奇景，后来被乔治·卢卡斯称为“工业光魔”。
Similarly, if we turn back to The Whole Earth Catalog, we can find the same hybrid taste. Alongside the rustic skills and tools, we discover high industrial techniques and instruments: stereo systems, cameras, cinematography, and, of course, computers. On one page the 'Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front' (Wendell Berry's plea for family-scaled organic agriculture); on the next, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. I recall how this juxtaposition jarred when I first noticed it. But then I thought again and tried to restrain my doubts. There was, after all, something charming about the blithe eclecticism of this worldview. Granted that a catalog is by its very nature a mélange. But this catalog clearly meant to project a consistent vision. It seemed to be saying that all human ingenuity deserved to be celebrated from the stone axe and American Indian medicine to modem electronics. Clearly, in so saying, the Catalog spoke for an audience that wanted to see things that way. Or rather, the Catalog found the voices that could do that job. And of all the voices to which it gave a forum, none was to become more prominent than Buckminster Fuller, the man who informed a generation that it was already on board a spaceship called Planet Earth, and who presumed to write its 'operating manual.'
类似地，如果我们回望《全地球目录》，我们可以发现同样混杂的口味。除了古朴的手艺和工具，我们还能发现工业化的高新科技和仪器：立体声音响系统，相机，摄影，当然了，还有，电脑。在某一页上是“疯狂农民解放阵线宣言”（Wendell Berry呼吁将有机农业家庭化），而在那一页的背面便是Norbert Wiener的控制论。我记得当我第一次注意到这奇怪的排列组合时是如何震惊。但后来我又想了一想，试图为自己释疑。毕竟，这种漫不经心的折衷主义世界观是有其迷人之处的。诚然，一份目录，就其本质来说便应当是混杂的。但是，这份目录很明显地试图展现一个明晰一致的愿景。它似乎想说，所有人类的智慧，从石斧到印第安人草药到现代电子技术，都是值得赞颂的。显然，如此说来，《目录》面向的是有同样愿景的读者。又或者说， 《目录》找到了能够完成这个任务的发声器。而在《目录》这一论坛中所有的言论里，再没有能比Buckminster Fuller更加知名的了，正是他告知了那整整一代人，他们已经登上了一艘叫做地球的太空飞船，而他便要编写这艘飞船的操作手册。
Now, as of the sixties, Buckminster Fuller already had a long career behind him. The baby boom generation may have embedded the Young Demographic in our media, but the counter culture always made a generous place for wise old souls, whether voices of the past like Black Elk and Henry David Thoreau or seasoned mentors like Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman. Fuller's prefabricated Dymaxion House of the late twenties (also called 'the four dimensional living machine') dates back to the grandparents of the countercultural generation. From that point forward, his life story went through many ups and downs; but there can be no question that the sixties (when Fuller was in his seventies) were his zenith. Not only did he make the front cover of Time magazine (in 1964), but he became one of the prophetical voices of the American counter culture, starting with a prolonged campus residency at San Jose State College that brought him to the Bay Area in early 1966. Thanks to that appearance and subsequently to the prominence Stewart Brand gave him in The Whole Earth Catalog, Fuller was launched on the final and most spectacular phase of his career. On the first page of the Catalog, the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under the inscription: 'the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog.' From that point forward, Fuller became the necessary presence at New Age conferences, symposia, and workshops, a sort of peripatetic global wizard who might tie his awe-inspired audience down for four or five hours at a stretch while he recited the history of the universe.
当时，在六十年代，Buckminster Fuller已经有了一段很长的职业生涯。婴儿潮一代可能已经成为我们媒体报道中所称的年轻人口，但反文化运动中总是慷慨地包容了睿智的老人，不仅有Black Elk和亨利·大卫·梭罗这些已经逝去的声音，也包括了赫伯特·马尔库塞和保罗·古德曼这样资深的青年导师。Fuller在20年代末预制的Dymaxion House（又叫做“四维生活机器”）跟反文化一代的祖父母年岁相近。在那以后，他的一生经历了许多跌宕起伏；但毫无疑问的是，六十年代（Fuller七十岁时）是他的顶峰。他不仅在1964年登上《时代》杂志封面，而且他成了美利坚反文化运动的先知之一，而这始于他在1966年搬到湾区后在圣何塞州立大学校园里开始的长期的生活。藉由他在《全地球目录》中的作品，和其后Stewart Brand给与他的名望，富勒的职业生涯进入了最后也是最精彩的阶段。在《目录》的第一页，富勒的全部作品被版权声明下的题词高度赞扬：“此目录缘起于Buckminster Fuller的洞见。”从那时起，Fuller成为New Age系列会议、各种专题讨论会和研讨会必请的人物，他如一位法师一般巡回全球，他能将那些虔信的听众牢牢绑在座椅中长达四五个小时，听他叙述整个宇宙的历史。
What was it that made this odd figure so remarkably influential in countercultural circles? In part, it may have been his grandfatherly persona, which appealed to young people in search of wise elders and finding so few. In part, too, it might have had to do with his maverick image, that of the outcast genius scorned by the schools and the professionals, and so becoming the senior drop-out who could speak to junior drop-outs. But one must add his unique talent for self-advertisement, his capacity, by way of grandiloquent obfuscation, to make much out of little ideas and little inventions that could be sensationally clothed in cosmic pretensions. If Fuller was half Tom Swift, he was also half P. T. Barnum. And just as Barnum could turn a not very special midget or an overaged elephant into wonders of the world, so Fuller was able to parley a few modest pieces of eccentric engineering into achievements of supposedly epoch-making genius -- at least in the eyes of an audience that was in the market for technological astonishments.
究竟是什么使得这个奇怪的人物在反文化圈中具有了如此的影响力？在某种程度上，可能是因为他如慈祥老人般的人格魅力，这吸引了那些遍寻睿智长者而不见的年轻人。在某种程度上，也有可能是因为他特立独行的形象：一个被学院派和专家们排挤的圈外的天才，也因此，他能够以资深退学生的身份教导年轻的辍学生。但是，在这些原因里我们必须再加上他独特的自我营销的能力，他能够以夸张而又故作含混的方式，使许多小创意、小发明，披上惊天动地的外包装。如果说Fuller是半个Tom Swift的话，那么他也是半个P. T. Barnum。而且正如Barnum可以把一个并不十分特别的侏儒或是一头年迈的大象变成世界奇观一样，Fuller能够把若干奇怪的工程零件拼接起来，使其看上去一副划时代的天才成就的模样──至少在那些追求技术奇观的观众眼中是如此这般。
Above all, it was Fuller's worldview that caught the temper of the time and the movement. While impishly dissenting in tone, he was up-beat in spirit: hopeful, sassy, inspirational almost to the point of euphoria. Fuller was, as one biographer calls him, a 'raging optimist.' I must confess that, though I shared a few platforms with Fuller and did my best to appreciate his books, I never came across anything he said that managed to be, at one and the same time, original, true, significant, and understandable. Worse still, I was never able to distinguish his optimism from plain egomania; I would not have been surprised to hear him announce that he had invented a better tree. Yet, again and again, I saw him send audiences away glowing with hope and resolution. That peculiar magic made Fuller and his Bay Area disciples the major spokesmen for a philosophy of postindustrial life that has done much to shape the style and expectations of the computer industry, especially as it has grown up in Silicon Valley over the past ten years.
总之，正是富勒的世界观，吸引了那个时代和那场运动的注意。虽然他的论调充满了恶作剧般的异议，但他的精神非常积极向上：乐观，追赶潮流，并且几乎如异常欣快般地鼓舞人心。如一名传记作者所述，Fuller是一名“极度的乐观主义者。”我必须承认，虽然我同Fuller有一些观点相近，我也竭尽我所能去赏析他的作品，我却从来没有看到那些他宣称的，曾经是既创新、又真实、又显明、而且可以为人理解的那些东西。更糟的是，我没法辨别，这些究竟是他的乐观主义，或仅仅是狂妄自大而已。所以，即便是他宣布他发明了一种更牛逼的树木，我也不会惊讶。然而，一次又一次地，我看见他的观众在散场时充满希望，意志坚定，容光焕发。这奇特的魔力，使得Fuller和他在湾区的追随者们成为了后工业时代生活哲学的代言人，而正是这种哲学塑造了计算机工业的风尚和愿景，其影响尤其体现于，这些风尚和愿景在过去10年中在硅谷中的成长。
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