From Library to Playground to Drug Den -- and Back Again?
Paul Allen, book sellers, librarians and the future
If you’re more interested in the Paul Allen stuff scroll down…
One of the seditious thoughts that I’ll admit to is that many people wind up doing the same job that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents did. Now there are some exceptions, to be sure, and it’s often hard to find the exact analogue but if you look closely (or squint) you’ll end up seeing it.
Among the many unpaid jobs I’ve taken upon myself over the years — no man was remembered for what he got only what he gave — it’s the role of reminding the oligarchs of our time their responsibilities. It isn’t easy.
And the propaganda is strong. This scene from The Social Network (2010) is all the more disturbing when we consider what we now know about Victoria Secret's Les Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, thanks to the wonderful reporting of Whitney Webb. Yes, I know Victoria Secret cofounder Ray Raymond jumped to his death after selling to Wexner. But was he pushed?
Sometimes founders believe the story they tell others. The best con men con themselves. And they are encouraged to lie to themselves and to pretend that they are gods. What would a technology ecosystem look like if it were more humble? What would happen if the mega rich in our society behaved as knights and not oligarchs? As public servants?
I know this Substack is read by some of the most powerful people in the country and so I tread lightly and try to treat my subjects fairly. Often things are written obliquely. Blame my Straussian education which if it didn’t quite make me a believer in esotericism it certainly taught me how to write in code and read carefully.
(The inspiration for this examination work comes from reading Churchill’s collection of essays, Great Contemporaries, which left a stirring impression on me when I read it in my late teens. Some years ago I attended a conference on Churchill put on Professor James Muller at the Hotel del Coronado. My grandparents settled in Coronado and I regard it as the closest place to heaven that I’m likely to see. The title of this Substack itself is lifted from Churchill’s great book Thoughts and Adventures, which I first read when I was attending that conference. A man, I think, should be dedicated to a life of thought and adventure. Though Churchill’s empire collapsed around him he remained its servant. A flawed, yet beautiful man.)
We’ve hitherto explored the role of librarian science in the life of 23AndMe cofounder Anne Wojcicki and how she ought to take after her grandmother, a librarian. We mentioned a bit Jeff Bezos’s grandfather and his role. We also took on the PayPal and Facebook origin stories though we have left a few nuggets unexplored for another day. We’ve looked closely at Elon’s family background.
And do we really need to discuss the obvious library science connections taped at the Special Libraries Conference from June 1997?
Another seditious thing that I’ll admit to is that the boyish science fiction of my youth was the most powerful psyop I’ve ever experienced. I moved West aged 18 just to see the frontier that they had promised me. I got married in Alaska — the last frontier — and I put something up into geostationary orbit after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s discussion of what became known as the Clarke belt. I met Ray Bradbury and even wrote about his death for Reason Magazine. If you watch the great Netflix series Prophets of Science Fiction by Ridley Scott you’ll get a sense of how wondrous these thinkers are.
The greatest living science fiction writer — David Brin — routinely briefs CIA. So do a number of other science fiction writers. Brin’s work changed my life, especially The Transparent Society, The Postman (Yeah, I liked the movie, too, I’ll admit it, especially this scene) and the Uplift series. His essay on political blackmail is newly relevant in the Epstein era.
Among Brin’s best lines is that we ought to “stop wasting talent.” Now I am not a feminist — I resist all “ists” because they are really just what you can’t say— but I, like Robert Frost, do not want to live in a homogenized society and I want the cream to rise.
I think of that often when I think about my grandmother, Marian, who was one of the smartest women in Wyoming. Her father, my great grandfather and namesake, was a world class inventor and surveyor, whose activities in Wyoming were famous. Marian was the wife to a rear admiral from Oklahoma and later, manager of an independent book store. She taught me books are everything.
LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. This we know and we’ve written about.
How much the two were friends we aren’t privy to know but there is something quite disturbing about the fact that Epstein sold LinkedIn shares and that Hoffman’s idea of investing in the seven deadly sins seems to have coincided with each other.
This is the central difference, I think, between the Washington State tech companies and the Silicon Valley ones: Washington State tech companies seek to help you work while Silicon Valley ones prey upon your vices. There’s a reason so many people are descendant from miners in Silicon Valley.
The Washington State based companies are really Amazon and Microsoft. I’m looking at Facebook, Apple, Google vs. Amazon and Microsoft. We have studied this companies because they are the commanding heights of our society. Knowing their true history is essential, especially if they are going to continue to behave like kings.
This discussion is about the real founding of Microsoft.
In the spirit of full disclosure I am co-invested with Paul Allen’s estate and I knew the late Allen who once had me at his L.A. home when I was in college. He was promoting his memoirs, Idea Man, and had a number of nerds over. I was among them.
The conversation we had was about libraries and how important they are and whether or not I think that they would survive the modern era where things could be readily deleted. I said that that they would and that all of the world was a sort of library it just had to be organized. Allen seemed satisfied and worried that the Internet was becoming a sort of addiction den.
I didn’t know this at the time but his parents were from Oklahoma, like my grandfather.
Allen’s mother, Faye Allen, was obsessed with libraries and reading. You can read about it in her obituary.
[Faye’s] late husband, Kenneth S. Allen, was the longtime associate director of the University of Washington library system.
In her later life, Mrs. Allen became known as the mother of her son, the technologist and philanthropist. But throughout Seattle she was known first as a beloved public school teacher whom students would remember for a lifetime. Long after they were grown, former students in Mrs. Allen’s fourth grade class at Ravenna School would stop her on the street to thank her for instilling in them a love of reading. They’d remember how she would read aloud to them with perfect diction and a finely tuned sense of drama.
Although she retired from teaching a generation ago, Mrs. Allen always loved children and would look back at her time in the classroom with great fondness. “It’s not like work,” she’d say. “It’s like living.”
Reading and book collecting was a constant in her life. She read everything from the classics to the latest novel. She volunteered at Seattle’s Wise Penny Thrift Shop, pricing books for customers, but buying plenty of books, too, that filled up shelves throughout the house.
Her love of literature led to a lifetime commitment to public libraries and public education, causes she championed through the family’s charitable foundation.
…
Edna Faye Gardner was born in Carnegie, Oklahoma. She grew up with four older brothers and a younger sister, in a close family that nurtured her outgoing personality. She was musical from an early age, but soon became absorbed in reading and books. Working nights at a local library, she set a goal to read at least one novel from every great author in the world.
What a lovely mother. Paul Allen wrote in his 2011 memoir that his parents were after “something bigger for themselves and their children to come.”
Allen never had children but I’d like to think he had heirs and that I might be among them.
My view is that the central problem of the Internet is that we went from libraries to playgrounds and ultimately to drug dens.
Can we go back again to the library? Only if we treat the entire Earth as a library, worthy of cataloguing and protecting. The library belongs to everyone, homeless and billionaire alike. While Silicon Valley types were running from taking care of the homeless and moving to Miami Paul Allen donated millions to solving their plight.
In my own investments I’ve tried to follow Allen’s lead. Thanks for paving the way, Paul. All aboard the Starship Galileo!
Watch
I have never liked Bill Gates. There, I said it.
Mostly I felt that his “charity” wasn’t very charitable. I said as much when Gates’s people visited my alma mater on a recruiting drive. Michael Larson, Gates’s weird money manager and apparent sexual harasser, was an alum of Claremont McKenna and is the chief investment officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He selected the sort of people I hated to be his interns. That was the tell for me. There’s a lot of weird behavior around Gates.
Nor was his “charity” altogether effective. I remember watching him and Warren Buffett discuss all the failures of their operations in Africa in that Netflix special.
I like the idea of the Giving Pledge, at least in theory, but where is the money going to go? Isn’t the devil and the decimal always in the details? Who is getting paid and what?
I wondered could they be doing bad things? Turns out they were.
There’s a lot to be said about Microsoft’s Bill Gates and he merits a post in his own right, especially as he is pushing vaccine mandates everywhere. (Do I dare write what I really think here? I wonder..)
I share Whitney Webb’s view that the ties between Gates and the Maxwell family go back at least into the 1980s and that we really are one nation under blackmail.
In fact, I believe that the real reason that Paul Allen left Microsoft in the 1980s was over this concern which has as much to do with Steve Ballmer as anything else. (We will turn to him soon enough.)
History may well prove that right. After all, there’s this long and crazy history of Gates having weird conmen around him, the most recent of which was this weird Pakistani guy.
How should we think about this photo anyway?
We want fewer Epsteins wandering about using our vices to own us. We need more librarians helping us find our virtues.
The goal then is to make the Internet a library (and then to have the world become one too) and to get the wealthy to own up to their “nobless oblige.”
In the end we are all merely librarians, faithful stewards of our inheritance, taking care to take care as best we can.