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nebris · 6 years ago

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The Book No One Read

Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel room after two days covering The Singularity Summit, an annual gathering of scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs discussing the future obsolescence of human beings.

In math, a “singularity” is a function that takes on an infinite value, usually to the detriment of an equation’s sense and sensibility. In physics, the term usually refers to a region of infinite density and infinitely curved space, something thought to exist inside black holes and at the very beginning of the Big Bang. In the rather different parlance of Silicon Valley, “The Singularity” is an inexorably-approaching event in which humans ride an accelerating wave of technological progress to somehow create superior artificial intellects—intellects which with predictable unpredictability then explosively make further disruptive innovations so powerful and profound that our civilization, our species, and perhaps even our entire planet are rapidly transformed into some scarcely imaginable state. Not long after The Singularity’s arrival, argue its proponents, humanity’s dominion over the Earth will come to an end.

I had encountered a wide spectrum of thought in and around the conference. Some attendees overflowed with exuberance, awaiting the arrival of machines of loving grace to watch over them in a paradisiacal post-scarcity utopia, while others, more mindful of history, dreaded the possible demons new technologies could unleash. Even the self-professed skeptics in attendance sensed the world was poised on the cusp of some massive technology-driven transition. A typical conversation at the conference would refer at least once to some exotic concept like whole-brain emulation, cognitive enhancement, artificial life, virtual reality, or molecular nanotechnology, and many carried a cynical sheen of eschatological hucksterism: Climb aboard, don’t delay, invest right now, and you, too, may be among the chosen who rise to power from the ashes of the former world!

Over vegetarian hors d’oeuvres and red wine at a Bay Area villa, I had chatted with the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who planned to adopt an “aggressive” strategy for investing in a “positive” Singularity, which would be “the biggest boom ever,” if it doesn’t first “blow up the whole world.” I had talked with the autodidactic artificial-intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky about his fears that artificial minds might, once created, rapidly destroy the planet. At one point, the inventor-turned-proselytizer  Ray Kurzweil teleconferenced in to discuss, among other things, his plans for becoming transhuman, transcending his own biology to  achieve some sort of  eternal life. Kurzweil  believes this is possible,  even probable, provided he can just live to see  The Singularity’s dawn,  which he has pegged at  sometime in the middle of the 21st century. To this end, he reportedly consumes some 150 vitamin supplements a day.

Returning to my motel room exhausted each night, I unwound by reading excerpts from an old book, Summa Technologiae. The late Polish author Stanislaw Lem had written it in the early 1960s, setting himself the lofty goal of forging a secular counterpart to the 13th-century Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas’s landmark compendium exploring the foundations and limits of Christian theology. Where Aquinas argued for the certainty of a Creator, an immortal soul, and eternal salvation as based on scripture, Lem concerned himself with the uncertain future of intelligence and technology throughout the universe, guided by the tenets of modern science.

To paraphrase Lem himself, the book was an investigation of the thorns of technological roses that had yet to bloom. And yet, despite Lem’s later observation that “nothing ages as fast as the future,” to my surprise most of the book’s nearly half-century-old prognostications concerned the very same topics I had encountered during my days at the conference, and felt just as fresh. Most surprising of all, in subsequent conversations I confirmed my suspicions that among the masters of our technological universe gathered there in San Francisco to forge a transhuman future, very few were familiar with the book or, for that matter, with Lem. I felt like a passenger in a car who discovers a blindspot in the central focus of the driver’s view.

Such blindness was, perhaps, understandable. In 2007, only fragments of Summa Technologiae had appeared in English, via partial translations undertaken independently by the literary scholar Peter Swirski and a German software developer named Frank Prengel. These fragments were what I read in the motel. The first complete English translation, by the media researcher Joanna Zylinska, only appeared in 2013. By Lem’s own admission, from the start the book was a commercial and a critical failure that “sank without a trace” upon its first appearance in print. Lem’s terminology and dense, baroque style is partially to blame—many of his finest points were made in digressive parables, allegories, and footnotes, and he coined his own neologisms for what were, at the time, distinctly over-the-horizon fields. In Lem’s lexicon, virtual reality was “phantomatics,” molecular nanotechnology was “molectronics,” cognitive enhancement was “cerebromatics,” and biomimicry and the creation of artificial life was “imitology.” He had even coined a term for search-engine optimization, a la Google: “ariadnology.” The path to advanced artificial intelligence he called the “technoevolution” of “intellectronics.”

Even now, if Lem is known at all to the vast majority of the English-speaking world, it is chiefly for his authorship of Solaris, a popular 1961 science-fiction novel that spawned two critically acclaimed film adaptations, one by Andrei Tarkovsky and another by Steven Soderbergh. Yet to say the prolific author only wrote science fiction would be foolishly dismissive. That so much of his output can be classified as such is because so many of his intellectual wanderings took him to the outer frontiers of knowledge.

Lem was a polymath, a voracious reader who devoured not only the classic literary canon, but also a plethora of research journals, scientific periodicals, and popular books by leading researchers. His genius was in standing on the shoulders of scientific giants to distill the essence of their work, flavored with bittersweet insights and thought experiments that linked their mathematical abstractions to deep existential mysteries and the nature of the human condition. For this reason alone, reading Lem is an education, wherein one may learn the deep ramifications of breakthroughs such as Claude Shannon’s development of information theory, Alan Turing’s work on computation, and John von Neumann’s exploration of game theory. Much of his best work entailed constructing analyses based on logic with which anyone would agree, then showing how these eminently reasonable premises lead to astonishing conclusions. And the fundamental urtext for all of it, the wellspring from which the remainder of his output flowed, is Summa Technologiae.

The core of the book is a heady mix of evolutionary biology, thermodynamics—the study of energy flowing through a system—and cybernetics, a diffuse field pioneered in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener studying how feedback loops can automatically regulate the behavior of machines and organisms. Considering a planetary civilization this way, Lem posits a set of feedbacks between the stability of a society and its degree of technological development. In its early stages, Lem writes, the development of technology is a self-reinforcing process that promotes homeostasis, the ability to maintain stability in the face of continual change and increasing disorder. That is, incremental advances in technology tend to progressively increase a society’s resilience against disruptive environmental forces such as pandemics, famines, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. More advances lead to more protection, which promotes more advances still.

And yet, Lem argues, that same technology-driven positive feedback loop is also an Achilles heel for planetary civilizations, at least for ours here on Earth. As advances in science and technology accrue and the pace of discovery continues its acceleration, our society will approach an “information barrier” beyond which our brains—organs blindly, stochastically shaped by evolution for vastly different purposes—can no longer efficiently interpret and act on the deluge of information.

Past this point, our civilization should reach the end of what has been a period of exponential growth in science and technology. Homeostasis will break down, and without some major intervention, we will collapse into a “developmental crisis” from which we may never fully recover. Attempts to simply muddle through, Lem writes, would only lead to a vicious circle of boom-and-bust economic bubbles as society meanders blindly down a random, path-dependent route of scientific discovery and technological development. “Victories, that is, suddenly appearing domains of some new wonderful activity,” he writes, “will engulf us in their sheer size, thus preventing us from noticing some other opportunities—which may turn out to be even more valuable in the long run.”

Lem thus concludes that if our technological civilization is to avoid falling into decay, human obsolescence in one form or another is unavoidable. The sole remaining option for continued progress would then be the “automatization of cognitive processes” through development of algorithmic “information farms” and superhuman artificial intelligences. This would occur via a sophisticated plagiarism, the virtual simulation of the mindless, brute-force natural selection we see acting in biological evolution, which, Lem dryly notes, is the only technique known in the universe to construct philosophers, rather than mere philosophies.

The result is a disconcerting paradox, which Lem expresses early in the book: To maintain control of our own fate, we must yield our agency to minds exponentially more powerful than our own, created through processes we cannot entirely understand, and hence potentially unknowable to us. This is the basis for Lem’s explorations of The Singularity, and in describing its consequences he reaches many conclusions that most of its present-day acolytes would share. But there is a difference between the typical modern approach and Lem’s, not in degree, but in kind.

Unlike the commodified futurism now so common in the bubble-worlds of Silicon Valley billionaires, Lem’s forecasts weren’t really about seeking personal enrichment from market fluctuations, shiny new gadgets, or simplistic ideologies of “disruptive innovation.” In Summa Technologiae and much of his subsequent work, Lem instead sought to map out the plausible answers to questions that today are too often passed over in silence, perhaps because they fail to neatly fit into any TED Talk or startup business plan: Does technology control humanity, or does humanity control technology? Where are the absolute limits for our knowledge and our achievement, and will these boundaries be formed by the fundamental laws of nature or by the inherent limitations of our psyche? If given the ability to satisfy nearly any material desire, what is it that we actually would want?

Lem’s explorations of these questions are dominated by his obsession with chance, the probabilistic tension between chaos and order as an arbiter of human destiny. He had a deep appreciation for entropy, the capacity for disorder to naturally, spontaneously arise and spread, cursing some while sparing others. It was an appreciation born from his experience as a young man in Poland before, during, and after World War II, where he saw chance’s role in the destruction of countless dreams, and where, perhaps by pure chance alone, his Jewish heritage did not result in his death. “We were like ants bustling in an anthill over which the heel of a boot is raised,” he wrote in Highcastle, an autobiographical memoir. “Some saw its shadow, or thought they did, but everyone, the uneasy included, ran about their usual business until the very last minute, ran with enthusiasm, devotion—to secure, to appease, to tame the future.” From the accumulated weight of those experiences, Lem wrote in the New Yorker in 1986, he had “come to understand the fragility that all systems have in common,” and “how human beings behave under extreme conditions—how their behavior when they are under enormous pressure is almost impossible to predict.”

To Lem (and, to their credit, a sizeable number of modern thinkers), the Singularity is less an opportunity than a question mark, a multidimensional crucible in which humanity’s future will be forged.

I couldn’t help thinking of Lem’s question mark that summer in 2007. Within and around the gardens surrounding the neoclassical Palace of Fine Arts Theater where the Singularity Summit was taking place, dark and disruptive shadows seemed to loom over the plans and aspirations of the gathered well-to-do. But they had precious little to do with malevolent superintelligences or runaway nanotechnology. Between my motel and the venue, panhandlers rested along the sidewalk, or stood with empty cups at busy intersections, almost invisible to everyone. Walking outside during one break between sessions, I stumbled across a homeless man defecating between two well-manicured bushes. Even within the context of the conference, hints of desperation sometimes tinged the not-infrequent conversations about raising capital; the subprime mortgage crisis was already unfolding that would, a year later, spark the near-collapse of the world’s financial system. While our society’s titans of technology were angling for advantages to create what they hoped would be the best of all possible futures, the world outside reminded those who would listen that we are barely in control even today.

I attended two more Singularity Summits, in 2008 and 2009, and during that three-year period, all the much-vaunted performance gains in various technologies seemed paltry against a more obvious yet less-discussed pattern of accelerating change: the rapid, incessant growth in global ecological degradation, economic inequality, and societal instability. Here, forecasts tend to be far less rosy than those for our future capabilities in information technology. They suggest, with some confidence, that when and if we ever breathe souls into our machines, most of humanity will not be dreaming of transcending their biology, but of fresh water, a full belly, and a warm, safe bed. How useful would a superintelligent computer be if it was submerged by storm surges from rising seas or dis- connected from a steady supply of electricity? Would biotech-boosted personal longevity be worthwhile in a world ravaged by armed, angry mobs of starving, displaced people? More than once I have wondered why so many high technologists are more concerned by as- yet-nonexistent threats than the much more mundane and all-too-real ones literally right before their eyes.

Lem was able to speak to my experience of the world outside the windows of the Singularity conference. A thread of humanistic humility runs through his work, a hard-gained certainty that technological development too often takes place only in service of our most primal urges, rewarding individual greed over the common good. He saw our world as exceedingly fragile, contingent upon a truly astronomical number of coincidences, where the vagaries of the human spirit had become the most volatile variables of all.

It is here that we find Lem’s key strength as a futurist. He refused to discount human nature’s influence on transhuman possibilities, and believed that the still-incomplete task of understanding our strengths and weaknesses as human beings was a crucial prerequisite for all speculative pathways to any post-Singularity future. Yet this strength also leads to what may be Lem’s great weakness, one which he shares with today’s hopeful transhumanists: an all-too-human optimism that shines through an otherwise-dispassionate darkness, a fervent faith that, when faced with the challenge of a transhuman future, we will heroically plunge headlong into its depths. In Lem’s view, humans, as imperfect as we are, shall always strive to progress and improve, seeking out all that is beautiful and possible rather than what may be merely convenient and profitable, and through this we may find salvation. That we might instead succumb to complacency, stagnation, regression, and extinction is something he acknowledges but can scarcely countenance. In the end, Lem, too, was seduced—though not by quasi-religious notions of personal immortality, endless growth, or cosmic teleology, but instead by the notion of an indomitable human spirit.

Like many other ideas from Summa Technologiae, this one finds its best expression in one of Lem’s works of fiction, his 1981 novella Golem XIV, in which a self-programming military supercomputer that has bootstrapped itself into sentience delivers a series of lectures critiquing evolution and humanity. Some would say it is foolish to seek truth in fiction, or to draw equivalence between an imaginary character’s thoughts and an author’s genuine beliefs, but for me the conclusion is inescapable. When the novella’s artificial philosopher makes its pronouncements through a connected vocoder, it is the human voice of Lem that emerges, uttering a prophecy of transcendence that is at once his most hopeful—and perhaps, in light of trends today, his most erroneous:

“I feel that you are entering an age of metamorphosis; that you will decide to cast aside your entire history, your entire heritage and all that remains of natural humanity—whose image, magnified into beautiful tragedy, is the focus of the mirrors of your beliefs; that you will advance (for there is no other way), and in this, which for you is now only a leap into the abyss, you will find a challenge, if not a beauty; and that you will proceed in your own way after all, since in casting off man, man will save himself.”

Freelance writer Lee Billings is the author of Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-book-no-one-read

Summa Technologiae https://publicityreform.github.io/findbyimage/readings/lem.pdf

#The Sisterhood

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denimbex1986 · 3 years ago

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Another Best Actor nod for Andrew :-)

#Andrew Garfield #Best Actor #San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics

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365daysoflesbians · 7 years ago

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AUGUST 25: Bernice Bing (1936-1998)

The iconic artist and lesbian activist Bernice Bing passed away at the age of 62 on this day in 1998. Having made a name for herself on the San Francisco Bay Area art scene, Bernice became known for her “calligraphy-inspired abstractions” as well as for bringing a much-needed Chinese-American voice into LGBT activism.

A young Bernice Bing is photographed sitting in her art studio in her hometown of San Francisco, California (x).

Affectionately called Bingo by her friends, Bernice was born in 1936 in San Francisco, California’s Chinatown District. Her father was an immigrant from Southern China, but her mother had been born in America. After her mother’s death when Bernice was only 6-years-old, she and her sister were shifted around to different white foster homes in the city, only being exposed to their Chinese heritage briefly when they were allowed to live with their grandmother in Oakland from time to time. A poor student, Bernice developed a passion for drawing and the arts in high school. She would eventually attend California College of Arts and Crafts where she was introduced to Zen Buddhism and Chinese philosophers by a Japanese-born professor, Hasegawa, who would remain influential to her throughout her career.

Bernice Bing, Blue Mountain No.4 1965 (x).

After graduating, she became heavily involved in the circle of Beat writers and artists who lived and worked in the Bay Area such as Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, and Fred Martin. In 1961, she was given a one-woman show at San Francisco’s Batman Gallery titled “Paintings & Drawings by Bernice Bing,” which received wide critical acclaim. In addition to her painting, Bernice was also present in existentialism circles, political activism, and arts administration. She created an art workshop in collaboration with a Chinatown gang called the Baby Wah Chings in response to the deadly shootings of the Golden Dragon Massacre in 1977 and became the first executive director of the South of Market Cultural Center (SOMArts) in 1980.

vimeo

Watch the trailer for The Worlds of Bernice Bing, directed by Madeleine Lim!

Bernice sadly passed away from cancer on August 25, 1998. Before her death, she became the first Asian-American artist to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Women's Caucus for Art and was also recognized by the Asian Heritage Council in 1990. The documentary The Worlds of Bernice Bing celebrating her life and legacy premiered at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival in 2013.

-LC

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rickyvalero · 4 years ago

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2021 Awards: San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) Winners

Best Picture – Nomadland Best Director – Chloé Zhao, Nomadland Best Original Screenplay – Lee Isaac Chung, Minari Best Adapted Screenplay – Kelly Reichardt, Jonathan Raymond, First Cow Best Actor – Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Best Actress – Frances McDormand, Nomadland Best Supporting Actor – Paul Raci, Sound of Metal Best Supporting Actress – Youn Yuh-jung, Minari Best…

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thejewofkansas · 1 year ago

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Awards Season 2023-24: Awards Round-Up 1/15

The Oscar nominations are a week from tomorrow and the BAFTA nominations are Thursday. It’s crunch time. This week I’m covering a whopping 14 groups: African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) Austin Film Critics Association (AFCA) Critics’ Choice Awards (CCA)/nominees DiscussingFilm Critic Awards (DFCA) Denver Film Critics Society (DFCS) Greater Western New York Film Critics…

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#2023 Films #2023 in Film #African-American Film Critics Association #Austin Film Critics Association #Awards Season 2023-24 #Critics Choice Awards #Denver Film Critics Society #DiscussingFilm Critics Association #Film Awards #Greater Western New York Critics #Hawaii Film Critics Society #Hollywood Creative Alliance #Music City Film Critics Association #National Society of Film Critics #Portland Critics Association #San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle #Seattle Film Critics Society #Utah Film Critics Association

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awardswatcherik · 13 days ago

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2024 San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) Nominations

#anora #nickel boys #san francisco bay area film critics circle #the brutalist #the substance

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produtorasemiotica · 4 years ago

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Prêmios e nomeações

- 7 vezes nomeado ao Oscar

- 1 Globo de Ouro - Grande Hotel Budapeste

- 1 BAFTA

- Writers Guild of America Award de Melhor Roteiro Original

- Urso de Prata de melhor diretor

- Gotham Independent Film Award de Melhor Filme

- Prêmio da Sociedade Nacional de Críticos de Cinema para Melhor Roteiro

- Prêmio David di Donatello de Melhor Filme Estrangeiro

- Prêmio Independent Spirit de Melhor Diretor

- New York Film Critics Circle Award de Melhor Roteiro

- MTV Movie Award: Melhor Diretor Novo

- San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Award for Best Adapted Screenplay

- Los Angeles Film Critics Association New Generation Award

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comm160strickland · 5 years ago

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Characters in the movie: “Jobs”

Jobs is a 2013 American biographical drama film based on the life of Steve Jobs, from 1974 while a student at Reed College to the introduction of the iPod in 2001. It is directed by Joshua Michael Stern, written by Matt Whiteley, and produced by Stern and Mark Hulme. Steve Jobs is portrayed by Ashton Kutcher, with Josh Gad as Apple Computer's co-founder Steve Wozniak. Jobs was chosen to close the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

Who’s Who in the film?

Apple Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs: Steven Paul Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Jobs was born in San Francisco, California and put up for adoption. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area.

JOBS WAS AWARDED OVER 450 PATENTS AS HE REVOLUTIONIZED SIX MAJOR INDUSTRIES

Steve Jobs’ ability to visualize, conceptualize and deliver path breaking products through his team and companies took the world aback and made everyone take notice. During his lifetime of work as a creative entrepreneur he focused on the “look and feel“ of his products and aspired for perfection in design. He was awarded close to 450 patents ranging from computers, touch based interfaces, keyboards, portables to staircases, clasps and sleeves. Along the way he revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing.

Read more about Steve Jobs: https://learnodo-newtonic.com/steve-jobs-achievements

Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak: Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur. In 1976 he co-founded Apple Inc., which later became the world's largest information technology company by revenue and largest company in the world by market capitalization. He and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs are widely recognized as two prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

Lukas Haas as Daniel Kottke: Daniel Kottke was a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of the first employees of Apple Inc.

Victor Rasuk as Bill Fernandez: Bill Fernandez is a user-interface architect and inventor who was Apple Computer's first employee when after incorporated in 1977 and is, overall, Apple employee #4. He is the son of Judge Bill Fernandez and Bambi Fernandez (both Stanford University graduates). He worked on both the Apple I and Apple II personal computers, and in the 1980s was a member of the Apple Macintosh development team. He contributed to several user interface aspects of the classic Mac OS, QuickTime and HyperCard and owns a user interface patent granted in 1994. He is also credited with introducing fellow Homestead High School student Steve Jobs to his friend (and Homestead alumn) Steve Wozniak. Eddie Hassell as Chris Espinosa: Chris Espinosa is a senior employee of Apple Inc., officially employee number 8. Having joined the company at the age of fourteen in 1976 when it was still housed in Steve Jobs' parents' garage, writing software manuals and coding after school, he is the company's current and all-time longest-serving employee. Ron Eldard as Rod Holt: Frederick Rodney Holt is an American computer engineer and political activist. He is Apple employee #5, and developed the unique power supply for the 1977 Apple II.

Nelson Franklin as Bill Atkinson: Bill Atkinson is an American computer engineer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Atkinson was the principal designer and developer of the graphical user interface (GUI) of the Apple Lisa and, later, one of the first thirty members of the original Apple Macintosh development team, and was the creator of the ground-breaking MacPaint application, which fulfilled the vision of using the computer as a creative tool. He also designed and implemented QuickDraw, the fundamental toolbox that the Lisa and Macintosh used for graphics.

Elden Henson as Andy Hertzfeld: Andy Hertzfeld is an American computer scientist and inventor who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2011 he was the key designer of the Circles user interface in Google+.

Lenny Jacobson as Burrell Smith: Burrell Carver Smith is an American engineer who, while working at Apple Computer, designed the motherboard (digital circuit board) for the original Macintosh. He was Apple employee #282, and was hired in February 1979, initially as an Apple II service technician. He also designed the motherboard for Apple's LaserWriter.

Giles Matthey as Jony Ive: Jony Ive is one of the world’s most esteemed industrial designers and has worked on products, including a wide range of Macs, the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and more. He also had a hand in designing the company’s “spaceship” Apple Park campus and establishing the look and feel of Apple retail stores.

Dermot Mulroney as Mike Markkula: Armas Clifford "Mike" Markkula Jr. is an American electrical engineer, businessman and investor. He was an angel investor and second CEO of Apple Computer, Inc., providing early critical funding and managerial support. Markkula was introduced to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak when they were looking for funding to manufacture the Apple II personal computer they had developed, after having sold some units of the first version of this computer, the Apple I. With his guidance and funding, Apple ceased to be a partnership and was incorporated as a company.

Matthew Modine as John Sculley: John Sculley III (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman, entrepreneur and investor in high-tech startups. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of Pepsi-Cola (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$10.2 million.Sales at Apple increased from $800 million to $8 billion under Sculley's management.

J. K. Simmons as Arthur Rock: Arthur Rock is an American businessman and investor. Based in Silicon Valley, California, he was an early investor in major firms including Intel, Apple Computer, Scientific Data Systems and Teledyne.

Kevin Dunn as Gil Amelio: Gilbert Frank Amelio is an American technology executive. Amelio worked at Bell Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor, and the semiconductor division of Rockwell International but is best remembered as a CEO of National Semiconductor and Apple Inc.

Brett Gelman as Jef Raskin: Jef Raskin was an American human–computer interface expert best known for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.

Family John Getz as Paul Jobs. Steve Jobs father.

See: https://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/key_people/paul_jobs

Lesley Ann Warren as Clara Jobs. Steve Jobs mother. See: https://g.co/kgs/AC8BCR

Abby Brammell as Laurene Powell Jobs: Laurene Powell Jobs has become an influential and formidable presence in the investing world. And she ranks among the richest women in the world, with a net worth of $21.3 billion, according to Forbes. Upon her husband's death in 2011, Powell Jobs inherited his fortune — primarily shares of Apple and Disney.

Ahna O'Reilly as Chrisann Brennan: Chrisann Brennan is an American painter and writer who wrote the autobiography The Bite in the Apple about her relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. They had one child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Annika Bertea as Lisa Brennan-Jobs (adult) Ava Acres as Lisa Brennan (child)

Other James Woods as Jack Dudman: Jack Dudman was a much-loved math professor and later dean of students at nearby Reed College.

David Denman as Al Alcorn: Allan Alcorn is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist best known for creating Pong, one of the first video games.

Brad William Henke as Paul Terrell: Paul Terrell: Owned local computer store and was an original investor in Jobs and Wozniak’s very first big idea.

Robert Pine as Edgar S. Woolard, Jr.: Edgar S. Woolard Jr. is an American businessman. He was chairman and chief executive officer of DuPont from 1989 to 1995.

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rememberthattime · 5 years ago

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Chapter 49. Second Anniversary

Let’s start with the destination: New Zealand. Again.

Yes, this is our third time here in just 8 months, but what can I say: it’s a great country. Actually, I’m not sure any country better reflects Chelsay and I than New Zealand. The US seems angry these days, Asian cultures are a bit rigid, and Europe… Please. But New Zealand: adventurous, easy going, and a sense of humor. That’s Chelsay and I in a nutshell!

New Zealand is the geographic embodiment of Chelsay and I’s relationship, and that’s why it’s the perfect place to celebrate our second anniversary.

Now, my last post ended with a teaser for our return to the UK, but that’s turned into a longer process than expected. In the words of my boss: “No country moves slower than the UK.” ...Yep, I remember.

That doesn’t mean Chelsay and I have been idle though. A few bullets on our past two months in limbo:

We discovered our “Richmond Park” equivalent, with weekend walks up the Northern Beaches: Freshwater, Curl Curl, and Dee Why.

I had a quick work trip to San Francisco. I can’t even remember the business purpose – I think it was to recreate scenes from Vertigo.

Chelsay and I finally explored some famous Sydney neighborhoods we hadn’t visited, Palm Beach and Watson’s Bay.

We ran the City 2 Surf, along with 80,000 other Sydneysiders.

We started horse riding. This has been a dream of Chelsay’s for a while, and that enthusiasm shows in her riding: through just three lessons, she’s already trotting with ease. Meanwhile, Mike is a bit behind, though in fairness, I’m at a disadvantage. The stable’s typical clientele is primarily young girls (not a lot of 30 year old men learning to ride), so they only have one horse for someone my size, Jazz. One problem: Jazz is blind in one eye. While Chelsay is trotting in circles around the arena, I’m battling a blind horse to avoid running into a wall.

Chelsay nearly burned the house down while cooking. We can laugh about it now, but at the time: this was catastrophic. I’ll just say that the situation required me to burst out of the shower to help.

Anyway, we’ve stayed busy, and after a demanding few months at work, we were ready for a vacation. Our September anniversary falls in winter in the Southern Hemisphere, so Chelsay and I decided we’d take advantage by making this year’s celebration a ski trip. Crisp air and hot chocolate: very romantic.

New Zealand has two hubs for skiing: Queenstown and Wanaka. They’re fairly close to one another but are drastically different. Queenstown is beautifully set below The Remarkables, but can feel a bit crowded in peak season. On the other hand, Wanaka has an equally beautiful setting, but is much quieter and basically only has one street. Ultimately we went with Wanaka because we’re old people… and also because it’s closer to Treble Cone, whose advanced runs better suited Chelsay & I’s “gnar shredding”.

We arrived late on the first day, driving through some beautiful yet brooding landscapes.

We got really lucky with our hotel. I’d mentioned that we were celebrating our anniversary, and they upgraded us to a suite. The extra space was critical after long days on the pistes. One side note on the hotel room: while Chelsay and I were enjoying our Night 1 chacuterie, we had a strange feeling: we were in shorts. Indoors. And not freezing… Why did it feel so strange? My god, is this what it’s like to be… warm!? It was tangibly strange to us to feel warm! Our Sydney apartment had been so consistently cold all winter, that we were genuinely perplexed with a temperature about 55. Suite life got this trip off to a hot start.

The next day we hit the slopes. Treble Cone doesn’t have any accommodation, so it’s a short, steep, unpaved, cliff-side, and overall just treacherous drive up from Wanaka. We felt like we were on double black diamond runs before we even arrived.

After surviving the ride up, we geared up and took one “Welcome Back” practice run on the bunny hill. I’m very surprised by this fact: it had been FOUR years since the last time Chelsay and I skied (Austria in 2015). That’s the same amount of time it’d been between Innsbruck and the time before (Whistler in 2011). You might remember that we were RUSTY in Innsbruck, with Day 1 highlights including Chelsay being dragged up the bunny hill by the rope pulley as five-year old Austrian children looked on. Another Innsbruck gem: once on the real slopes, Chelsay and I failed to disembark the gondola on time. As the lift turned away from the dismount area, I leapt off the chair and crash landed on the slope below. I yelled back to Chelsay: “You gotta bail!”, but she refused. She would’ve been content riding the gondola all the way back down, had the large Austrian attendant not forcibly picked her from the chair and set her on the snow.

Luckily we weren’t as rusty in Wanaka. We successfully managed the bunny hill rope-pulley, and dismounted the chair lifts at the appropriate time.

That said, we found a new hiccup this time around.To get to the chair lift, you have to present your lift pass. Treble Cone uses RFID lift passes, so all you do is ski up to the gate, it reads your pass, and you ski through. Think of a toll tag. Not that hard right – you just have to be in control for the gate to read your pass. Well, Chelsay was not in control, and went screaming up to the gate, smashed right through the barrier. I was actually impressive that she kept her balance and skied on, unscathed. The same cannot be said for the broken barrier.

Once at the top of the mountain, the views were breathtaking. Most ski resorts are surrounded by snow-capped peaks – this will always be an incredible sight. But Treble Cone’s views are more diverse: sure, there are snow-capped peaks, but you can also see the stark, undulating landscape surrounding Lake Wanaka. It makes Treble Cone one of the most unique and beautiful ski resort we’ve visited.

The slopes matched the views, with a mix of wide, well-groomed runs where you can get some speed, but also steep & narrow runs that require a bit more technique. As a quick aside, Chelsay’s technique is best described as “clench”. She torched her thighs bracing down the slope, cutting sharply on each turn. It’s so easy to pick her out from the crowd. Rather than slide across the snow, occasionally using friction to slow down, it looked like she was using her skis to carve a path down the mountain.

This was payback for her horse-riding prowess. While she metaphorically “rode a blind horse”, I was bombing blue runs in no time. I brought Chelsay along on one, but she was convinced they were black diamonds. I remember her turning to me and saying in terror, “I shouldn’t be on this one.”

Chelsay may not be as enthusiastic about skiing, but I love it. I rarely slow down – if you traced our routes, Chelsay’s would look like an ‘S’, but mine would be and “I”. I actually wish I had an Apple Watch to capture my max speed. At the end of each run, my teeth were cold from smiling the whole way down.

By Day 2, I was on some really challenging red runs, battling moguls on steep, ungroomed slopes. Meanwhile, Chelsay was improving too. She’d loosened her ��clench” a bit and was getting more and more comfortable at speed. In fact, on our last run of Day 2 (dubbed ‘the poop shoot’ by Chelsay), I secretly led her down a red run. She did great! But also collapsed from exhaustion at the bottom of the run.

Chelsay’s legs were shot for our third and last day of skiing, so we only got half day passes at Cadrona, a less challenging resort than Treble Cone. That said, Cadrona does have a terrain park, so the resort gets a weird mix of graceful Olympians and awkward amateurs. While the pros were busting 1080s in the halfpipe, I saw one guy get run over while waiting for the chair lift. This is how I must’ve looked in Austria.

Like Treble Cone, Cadrona has great views of the surrounding Southern Alps. We managed a few solid morning runs, but decided to save our already worn-out legs for the afternoon’s activity: horse riding.

Although Chelsay & I were barely capable of trotting, we’d heard New Zealand was one of the best places in the world for horse riding. It’s quiet, crisp, and secluded, yet you’re riding through pristine landscapes: glacial rivers, evergreen forests, and mountainous valleys. Its so beautiful that the stable we booked, High Country Horses in Glenorchy, lends their horses to the dozens of movies filmed nearby: Lord of the Rings, X-Men, Vertical Limit, Chronicles of Narnia… Our guide was riding Tom Cruise’s horse in Mission Impossible Fallout.

The ride itself lived up to its Hollywood billing. First, the setting was cinema worthy. Second, my horse wasn’t blind, so I was able to trot with ease. Third, Chelsay was in heaven. We wrapped up our ride just as the sun fell below the Southern Alps.

It was an eventful day in which we started on the slopes and ended on horseback. Luckily, Chelsay & I were near Taj, the Indian restaurant we’d gone to the last time we were this ravenous in New Zealand. In January, we took Taj to-go after hiking Gertrude Saddle, enjoying the garlic naan, hearty daal, and spicy murg chettinad curry while watching the Hobbit from our warm AirBnB. For Round 2, we ran back the exact same order – it somehow was even better. Its hard for me to admit this because I love Dishoom in London, but Taj is the best Indian restaurant I’ve ever been to.

I just realized that I’ve skipped over the meals in this post, so I want to come back to a couple we really enjoyed. First, at the Cadrona Hotel, Chelsay’s Beef Wellington was her dream savory dish: a juicy steak coated in buttery pastry. She made British Bake Off commentary the whole meal. We also gorged ourselves with a Fergberger lakeside in Queenstown, and enjoyed pumpkin risotto and lamb ragu at our old favorite in Wanaka, Francescas. Finally, even the quick breakfasts we grabbed before skiing were tasty: Chelsay and I would take our chicken & corn pie and bacon & egg sandwich from The Doughbin and eat by Lake Wanaka. Guess who ordered each dish.

Now, a lot of these restaurants were repeats from previous trips: Taj, Cadrona Hotel, Fergberger, Francescas. As I said at the start of the post, New Zealand itself is a repeat for Chelsay and I. But these recurrences are fitting for an anniversary, and I am so thankful to repeat every day, week, month, and year with Chelsay as my wife.

Much like our trips to New Zealand, each anniversary with her is perfect no matter how many times we repeat.

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yasbxxgie · 6 years ago

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The Jonestown We Don’t Know

This past November marked forty years since Jonestown, shorthand for the collective suicide of more than 900 Americans in a South American jungle settlement named for the pastor who led them there, Jim Jones. As the greatest loss of American life in a single incident before September 11, 2001, it deserves a significant place in our historical memory. The commemorations, however, have unfortunately tended to focus on the aberrant behavior of Jones, who sometimes claimed to be God and sometimes a reincarnation of Lenin and sometimes the Buddha reborn.

Jones preached in a prophetic evangelical style, while wearing sunglasses, from his People’s Temple pulpit, as the church migrated from Indianapolis to California’s Redwood Valley to San Francisco’s Fillmore District. His dark glasses allowed him to steal surreptitious glances at cheat sheets bearing intel on his congregants as he staged sensational healings; in a performance with many reprises, Jones would pass off raw chicken liver as a tumor shed by a cancer patient spontaneously cured during his service. Many of the books and films produced about the tragedy bear his image, as if he were posthumously still promoting the personality worship he cultivated among his followers, who called him Dad or Father. He stands at the deranged center of these accounts, which linger on the grisly details of the deaths and on Jones’s charlatanism, his infidelity, his use and abuse of drugs and corporal punishment, his childhood obsessions with funerals and Adolf Hitler.

The “Cult of Death,” as Newsweek and Time Magazine dubbed Jonestown in cover stories illustrated with images of flocked corpses decaying in the tropical sun, came to its macabre conclusion in 1978 in the fledgling postcolonial republic of Guyana, where I was born. I was living there, in a coastal village some 250 miles away from the settlement, when the Americans killed themselves. I was only three. Within a decade, my family and I would ourselves be Americans. Like many other Guyanese, we fled the country’s economic and political mayhem for the United States. Growing up outside New York City in the 1980s, it was hard to escape the infamy of Jonestown. Often, when I revealed my birthplace, the response would be some riff on: “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid, right?” As an immigrant kid, I did not much enjoy being placed on a map of associations with a seemingly inscrutable and eerie spectacle of death. I bristled at the implication that Jonestown had anything to do with Guyana or the Guyanese.

In this, I had something in common with Guyana’s ruling elite. Eager to disavow responsibility, they depicted their country as merely the incidental backdrop to the tragedy. It was as if, in the words of a Guyanese government statement cited by journalist Jeff Guinn for his 2017 book The Road to Jonestown, “a Hollywood movie team had come here to shoot a picture on some aspect of American life. The actors were American, the plot was American. Guyana was the stage, and the world was the audience.”

An aura of contingency continues to surround Jonestown, so often portrayed as the tale of a lone madman, a charismatic crackpot who imploded in a random heart of darkness. In truth, as I have come to learn, Jonestown does not point to a singular erratic Svengali but, rather, to fundamental aspects of both my adopted and my home countries. About 70 percent of the community’s 914 dead were African Americans, whose precarious place in the country of their birth made them responsive to pitches to leave it. Their individual stories have been lost in the commemorations, an erasure that also obscures the systemic character of what unfolded. America in the 1970s was still so warped by the legacies of slavery that it inspired the followers of Jim Jones to dream elsewhere, and Guyana’s politics at the time made it fertile ground for their dreaming.

Jones, the estranged son of a Ku Klux Klan member from small-town Indiana, had built a robust black following in Indianapolis through a ministry focused on social justice; by taking his parishioners into the pews of white churches and into whites-only restaurants in the 1950s, he also emerged as a leading force for integration in the city. He and his wife were the first white couple to adopt an African-American child in Indiana. But even as the political establishment there and, later, in the Bay Area wooed him for his influence with African-American voters, critics noted that his trusted inner circle, who made up the temple’s leadership, was predominantly white.

Fewer than ninety of the nearly 1,000 People’s Temple members present in Guyana during the suicide ritual escaped it. Most did so because they were in Georgetown, the country’s capital, rather than in the rainforest settlement with Jones when he ordered everyone to kill themselves. These survivors, broadly defined, belonged to Jonestown’s white elite stationed in Georgetown as emissaries to the Guyanese government or were members of the settlement’s basketball team, including Jones’s faithful bodyguards and his sons, who happened to be in the capital to play a game against the Guyanese national team. Others who emerged alive had defected from the settlement earlier that day under the protection of California Congressman Leo Ryan, who had visited to investigate charges that people were being held there against their will. Ryan’s visit ended in a dramatic armed attack by Jones’s enforcers at a nearby airstrip that claimed five lives (including Ryan’s) and precipitated Jones’s decision to activate his long-plotted suicide plan.

In the wings of this great drama were the unseen. Hidden in the rainforest where the violence was staged, in the eerie aftermath of the tragedy, were three people whose stories cue political contexts in both the US and Guyana crucial to understanding how and why Jonestown may have happened.

Literally unseen that fateful night, to her great good fortune, was Hyacinth Thrash, a seventy-six-year-old African-American woman born in the Jim Crow South who had crossed decades and distances with the preacher, from Indiana in 1957 to Guyana in 1978. On the night of the suicides, she did not respond to the loudspeaker summons to the settlement’s central pavilion where her sister Zipporah, along with the rest, would either drink or be injected with a lethal purple brew of Flavor Aid, cyanide, and tranquilizers. Thrash, who used a cane, wasn’t feeling up to the walk. That night, unaware of what was unfolding, she stayed in bed. For an unknown stretch of time, perturbed by noises outside, she crawled beneath her bed. She was either hidden under it or camouflaged in sleep, with the covers pulled over her, when Jones’s deputies came through the senior citizen dormitories delivering the poison to those too frail or weary to make it to the final ceremony. The next morning, she awoke to stillness and the epiphany that she was the apparent sole survivor, “The Onliest One Alive,” as the self-published book that relates her story—a little-known oral history collected and edited by a white Presbyterian church elder in Indiana—is titled. Thrash, it turned out, was one of four people actually at the settlement that final night, in the physical thrall of Jim Jones, who did not die. All four were black.

Yet, of the many books about Jonestown published by People’s Temple attorneys, defectors, survivors, members, or their relatives, in no case was the author an African American. There have been more than seventy-five published accounts of Jonestown—by People’s Temple insiders as well as US reporters, several canonical West Indian novelists, a Caribbean historian, a medic sent to the scene, a San Francisco radical poet, a ghostwriter for televangelists, and a child safety expert (a third of the dead were children). The “survivor” accounts were written by white people, although most of the dead and all of the survivors were black. Indeed, the historiography around Jonestown would seem to confirm Thrash’s observation about her education in a small town along the railroad tracks in segregated Alabama. “Books,” she said, “were cast-offs from the white school. Stories was all about white children. History was all white.”

Some narratives have explored what Jonestown says about America’s dysfunctional approach to race. A few have also noted that Jones misappropriated Black Panther co-founder Huey P. Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide,” which called for targets of racist violence at the hands of the state to be willing to lay down their lives in the fight against it. It’s hard to say how aware or free Jones’s followers were when they killed themselves; several survivors have argued it was more murder than suicide. Jones drugged his followers, controlled some through manipulative and transgressive sex, blackmailed others with damaging confessions signed under duress, demoralized many and destroyed family bonds––but he also reinforced their distrust of the US government. For his elderly African-American congregants, their lives had certainly given them ample evidence of state-sponsored racial persecution.

Thrash’s own encounter with institutional racism began with her childhood in rural Alabama. In her small town, whites attended school nine months a year; for blacks, it was only four. Nor could her parents, an illiterate domestic worker and a small-time farmer who supplemented his income as a cook on the railways, exercise the vote. Surrounding “sundown” towns barred blacks with, effectively, a curfew. Thrash’s family believed that her grandfather had been killed for violating such an ordinance. When they moved north as part of the Great Migration—though only as far as Indiana, a stronghold of the Klan—the discrimination took other forms. The department store where she worked as an elevator operator paid its black employees less than whites. She and her sister bought their own house in a section of Indianapolis vacated by white flight, and their white neighbors spurned them, going inside whenever the sisters sat on their porch. Thrash observed: “Sometimes I think whites didn’t want to come close to us ’cause they’d find out we weren’t so bad.”

It was Jones’s promise to heal such wounds and rejections that first attracted Thrash and her sister Zipporah to him. The Bible had so suffused their upbringing that they played at baptizing chickens as children, and Zipporah bore the name of the wife of Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage. Zipporah never did become anyone’s wife, but when she first saw Jones preaching on television, she was smitten by his good looks and by his integrated choir. In The Onliest One Alive, Zipporah emerges as a true believer to the last, rushing into the cottage where her sister rested, obliviously, to change into a special red sweater before responding to Jones’s call to death.

As for Thrash, she had once believed that Jones cured her of cancer and had the charisma to reunite her with her ex-husband; but her account, published in 1995, bristles with skepticism at all levels about Jones. She wonders if he was less like Moses than a demagogue accusing others of racism to mask his own prejudice and “making fools of black folks,” especially the gullible and the propertied. (Over the years, Jones took $150,000 in tithes, houses, and Social Security checks from the sisters.) In the oral history, Thrash criticizes him for betraying his wife and the Bible (the settlement, for instance, scandalized her by using a shipment of Gideon Bibles as toilet paper). Instead of praising God, she says, his sermons morphed into “ranting and raving about the FBI and the CIA coming to get us.” As early as his ministry in Indiana, he had warned his parishioners of threats to kill them. In a landscape dominated by the Klan, this was not far-fetched, just as it was perhaps not far-fetched, in the long arc of lives marred by discrimination, to buy Jones’s final prophesy: that after Congressman Ryan’s murder, US government forces would soon descend on Jonestown to destroy it, and it would be far nobler for his followers to take their own lives before that happened.

But Thrash’s testimony—the only instance of an African-American survivor speaking in her own words to posterity—suggests a growing cognitive dissonance about Jones among his followers. “When Jim started acting up, I had double feelings,” she admits. “Sometimes, I thought I’d never get out, sometimes I did. I was ready to walk through the jungles to escape; then I’d get resigned to dying there.” She went so far as to devise a getaway plan: on a trip to the capital to see the dentist, she would defect to the US Embassy. Jones’s paranoia, cruelty, and hypocrisy had disillusioned many, she reports: “Got so folks said they’d just as soon take their chances with the enemy. Folks were getting more scared of Jim than the enemy.” She heartbreakingly recounts that, toward the end, he had the elderly residents (one third of Jonestown’s population was senior citizens) arm themselves with picks and shovels and stand guard. “’[C]ause the US army was coming to get us! Huh!” she tells the church elder in The Onliest One Alive. “The US wasn’t even thinking of us! They didn’t even know who we were or where we were.” Even as she doubts Jones, her sense of being unnoticed by the powers-that-be in the country of her birth is visceral, sharp.

Unseen, too, was Kalinyas, a chief of the Caribs, the indigenous group that has long lived in the high-canopied tropical rainforests in Guyana’s far northwest, edging its border with Venezuela, where Jonestown’s settlers built their farming cooperative on 3,000 acres of ancestral Carib land leased exceedingly cheaply from the Guyanese government. “(F)or the short season they were here, I saw them without being seen,” Kalinyas told his grand-nephew, the writer and intellectual Jan Carew. “I was there the afternoon death surprised them, just as the sun was going down. They chanted and clapped hands for a while, and then there was a terrible silence. With candle flies in bottles to light the way, I walked amongst their dead. They’d died in circles, like worshippers around invisible altars.”

The Carib chief complained to the writer that “they [the Yankees] wrote so many words about Jonestown, but they wrote about themselves. For them, we were invisible.” Carew, perhaps best known for his novel Black Midas, was a BBC broadcaster in London and a professor of African-American Studies in the United States. He relayed his great-uncle’s grievance in an essay that appeared in another self-published account, the 2016 anthology A New Look at Jonestown: Dimensions from a Guyanese Perspective. Guyanese perspectives are usually missing from Jonestown narratives, a gap that obscures its place in histories of colonization.

As Carew walked, many years after the incident, with his elder relative, through the wreckage of what had been Jonestown, the old man recounted singing Carib death-songs among the suicide victims. The elder explained that he was calling on the homeless spirits of the Americans to reconcile with the ancestral Carib dead, because they had never asked for permission to share the land. Jonestown was built in the Kaituma region, heartland of the Caribs, who had dispersed to various islands from their historical homeland in Guyana over centuries. Named after the river running through it, Kaituma means Land of the Everlasting Dreamers. Traversing the ground there that Jonestown occupied, the writer and the Carib chief found it still littered with the abandoned shoes of the dead, overgrown with wild flowers and bromeliads. A sapling had lifted a child’s patent leather shoe off the ground like “strange fruit that some rare and exotic plant had produced.” Carew reflected that if anyone understood mass suicides, it was the Caribs, whose mythology marks sites across the Caribbean islands where they jumped from cliffs to their deaths rather than accept slavery at the hands of European colonizers.

Jim Jones had nurtured in his followers a paranoia framed by fears of a standoff with reactionaries and a sense of themselves as martyrs persecuted for their faith, anchored less by orthodox Christianity than by declarations of socialism and interracial brotherhood. But apart from their self-annihilating fate, how does their story echo the struggles around colonization? The answer is twofold. For Pan-Africanists in the twentieth century, the fight for civil rights in the United States was intertwined with battles for independence across the colonized world, from Africa to Asia to the Americas; as they imagined it, blacks constituted a colonized people within the United States as well.

That raises another aspect to what unfolded that often goes untold. Jonestown was one in a history of ventures—beginning with the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century—that explored and pursued futures for African Americans outside US borders, for various political reasons. What became Liberia, for instance, was formed in 1822 as a West African colony in a slavery-era scheme to resettle free American blacks elsewhere, out of the way. During the same period, in 1840, “free colored” congregations in Baltimore dispatched two envoys to Trinidad and Guyana, then still British Guiana, to determine which was the better Mecca for their lives and labors. The delegates recommended Guiana, describing it as a paradise with its best land lying fallow, simply awaiting enterprising workers. “[L]et us imagine,” the envoys reported, “a large and extensive country, with the most luxuriant soil, capable of producing everything that grows in a tropical region.” They advertised, if not the utopia suggested by the name Land of Everlasting Dreamers, then certainly a land of plenty.

More than a century later, Jones would claim to have seen in Guyana both natural abundance and an invitation to reimagine society. Before stamping the People’s Temple acres there with his own name, for years previously, during which the mission to grow subsistence crops in a self-sustaining socialist commune was an idea without a location, Jones had called it the Promised Land. He borrowed this name directly from the farm that his role model, Father Divine, the son of a slave, had established in upstate New York in the 1930s to feed his communes housed in hotels. Jones had sought out and cultivated Divine, a prominent, flamboyant, and unorthodox religious leader whose Peace Mission was celebrated by some as an idealistic social reform movement and denounced by others as an ascetic cult.

Exodus motifs course through African-American religion and history, and both Jones and Father Divine tapped into them to market their visions. Every exodus needs a promised land. And it helps if the officials overseeing that land are invested in peopling it. For Baltimore’s “free colored” in 1840, that official was a British colonial governor anxious to provide sugar and coffee planters with field laborers, two years after slavery ended in the British empire. In the case of Jonestown, in the 1970s Guyana’s prime minister, Forbes Burnham, was promoting agricultural cooperatives as a way to develop his country’s vast interior. He pitched his country, the only black-led nation in the Western hemisphere with a non-black majority, as a refuge for African Americans.

Jones made that pitch, too, sometimes crudely. He contended with unruly teenagers by punishing them with beatings and solitary confinement in a black box or by encouraging them with the promise of supremacy. As Hyacinth Thrash recalled, “He’d say, ‘This is Black Town. You might be Prime Minister some day.’ The boys was all tickled to hear that.”

Also watching on Jonestown’s final night, but hidden in the jungle some thirty miles northwest, where he was farming and breeding parakeets, was Abdullah Abdur-Razzaq, formerly Malcolm X’s right-hand man at the Organization of Afro-American Unity in the last year of the assassinated leader’s life. Disillusioned with the United States, heartbroken, and afraid that he was being watched after Malcolm X’s killing, Abdur-Razzaq had been living in Guyana’s remote hinterlands for two years when the Jonestown suicides occurred. He did not wish to be seen. The government surveillance that Jones trained his followers to suspect was a fact of life for Abdur-Razzaq and several other Black Power figures, targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, who found a haven in Guyana during the 1970s. When Abdur-Razzaq spied planes carrying US officials and soldiers descending from the sky in the tragedy’s aftermath, “he was so isolated,” his son told me, “that he thought the US government was swooping down on him.” In fact, Abdur-Razzaq was so fearful that he disappeared from his farm and hid in the bush for an extended period of time.

Abdur-Razzaq went to Guyana as part of an agricultural mission started by the Brooklyn-based black nationalist community group and arts organization The East, which scouted out Guyana’s northwestern rainforest at the same time the People’s Temple did. With black nationalists deriding Jones as a “white savior” who cynically exploited the anxieties and woes of African Americans, the two groups didn’t have much interaction. Yet they brokered the same deal, as part of the same government program, with Guyanese politicians. In 1975, in The East newsletter Black News, a pioneer at the group’s Kaituma cooperative described a daily regimen for working and living there that mirrored Jonestown’s, including rules against leaving without permission and nightly classes on Guyanese history. The East’s leader, in a pitch to recruit more Brooklynites to “return to the soil,” explained that the group “wanted to live and progress outside the US’s influences and tentacles.”

Abdur-Razzaq, who lived in Guyana for a total of more than twelve years, had wanted to take his family with him, but his wife objected. In cassette-tape dispatches he mailed home, he compared himself to the ancient Spartans who sallied forth into battle but ultimately returned home. His wife would argue with the tape recorder. The Spartans, she would say, got new families where they did battle. She unspooled and destroyed his missives.

So few of the accounts of Jonestown have bothered to examine searchingly why it happened where it did. Overwhelmingly, the books and movies fail to acknowledge the fundamentally intertwined relationship of the United States with this tiny republic in its sphere of influence. This entwining is such that a Guyanese national song usurps Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” swapping “the Redwood Forest” for “the greenheart forest”—as some 1,000 People’s Temple members, in fact, did when they moved from California’s Redwood Valley into the dense mass of Guyana’s famously impenetrable greenheart trees. The entanglement is built into the very structure of the relationship: Guyana’s independence was midwifed by covert CIA agents and American labor union emissaries, who placed Forbes Burnham in power.

Burnham was a leader unique in the Caribbean for beckoning, not banning, Black Power exiles. Other politicians in the region, who feared the potentially dissident influence of Black Power on their electorates, governed in societies with black majorities. By contrast, more Guyanese were of Asian-Indian than African origin, and their voting proceeded along ethnic lines; Burnham, who was black, had rigged elections to maintain power. Given his nation’s volatile, frequently violent ethnic politics and his own insecure hold, Burnham found it useful to make appeals based on race. He also wanted to change his country’s demographics and understood the role that migration might play. An Indian-Guyanese exodus to America alongside a black exodus from America would help his cause. When Jonestown’s chroniclers speak of Guyana’s interests in welcoming Jones and his followers, they repeat the government line that it was geopolitically strategic to settle 1,000 Americans along the disputed border with Venezuela, as a buffer against attack. Another, largely unexamined piece of the puzzle was that the Guyanese government had been successfully courting African-American settlers, through offers of jobs, political asylum, and cheap land, for nearly a decade when the suicides occurred.

Jim Jones Jr., the preacher’s black adopted son, recently spoke at a screening of Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown documentary at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where I am currently a fellow. An audience member asked how Guyana, as a country of black and brown people, could be duped by a crazy white savior like Jim Jones Sr. The film’s editor insisted that the Guyanese government couldn’t be held responsible for the holocaust. Invited to draw lessons from the tragedy, Jones Jr. asserted that his father’s demagoguery was alive in the presidency of Donald Trump. It was, however, a different, chance encounter at the Schomburg that best captured for me how Jonestown still echoes in the present.

A stranger, an African-American man in his fifties who introduced himself as Mr. Tinsley, overheard me tell a librarian that I was doing research on Guyana. His ears pricked up because he was, too, in advance of his first trip there in a dozen years. He told me that he owned 478 acres in an isolated swath of the country that had been home for two centuries to a downriver penal settlement and for two billion years to a majestic tabletop mountain that had incited the imaginations of both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (inspiring his 1912 novel The Lost World) and Sir Walter Raleigh (who searched for the mythological city of gold there).

Mr. Tinsley, an unemployed former limo driver born and raised in Harlem, said he bought the land for $10 in 2005, soon after his father died. That’s when he lost the property on Frederick Douglass Boulevard where his family had lived and run a construction company for decades. Gentrified out of his inheritance, he fixed his gaze instead on the distant horizon of Guyana. A Jonestown survivor who was a family friend had made him aware of the country. “From what he told me, what was down there (could) show people what this place could do for the world,” Mr. Tinsley whispered, as if sharing a potentially lucrative secret that he shouldn’t. “They’ve got so much natural resources.”

“Guyana is still really an untapped world,” he pronounced, adding that its natives had squandered its plenty and needed guidance. In his first venture there, as a rice farmer, he had found his Guyanese rivals “couldn’t get their acts together” or transcend their pride and squabbling. I found it hard to picture the paunchy, life-long city-dweller reaping paddy. The rice farm had been a failure. Next time, he planned to grow fruits and vegetables for export, but Guyana signified more to him than a business opportunity. He suffered from kidney disease, and he saw the country’s interior as an exotic oasis with the power to heal. Had I not seen the film The Medicine Man, which casts Sean Connery as a scientist hunting for a cure to cancer in the Amazon?

I was astonished by the lofty hopes he had projected onto the very place that my own family had, after all, fled. Guyana’s landscape, especially its vast, undeveloped interior, has long invited fantasies of riches and peopling, from Raleigh’s conquistador visions of it as “El Dorado,” or the realm of gold, to an abortive proposal to resettle Jewish refugees there during World War II. It also had a specific hold on the African-American imagination that seems still to live. Mr. Tinsley’s tale draws on a black radical tradition of investing Guyana with the glittery allure of an imagined homeland, a tradition that Jim Jones Sr. exploited to build his promised land gone horribly awry.

Photographs:

The Evans family, who survived the Jonestown massacre by walking out of the camp on the morning of November 18, saying they were going on a family picnic, United States, November 30, 1978

Cards and pictures found at Jonestown made by children of members of the People’s Temple, Guyana, November 22, 1978

Coffins awaiting shipment to the US after the Jonestown mass suicide, Georgetown, Guyana, November 23, 1978

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