by GEORGE DIEZ
New York’s avant-garde (from left to right) John Brockman, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan 1965: “The concept of freedom is absurd” PHOTO/Nat Finkelstein
Who is John Brockman? Even in New York, the world capital of people who know just about everybody, they are uncertain.
“Brockman, Brockman?” Shake of the head. “I don’t know”, says the reporter from the New Yorker. Says the colleague of the New York Review of Books. Says the young writer who cofounded the magazine n + 1.
In the literary milieu where he is ignored more than despised, John Brockman is about as well known as the first three digits of the number Pi.
“This crowd sees everything through the lenses of culture and politics,” he says. “But an understanding of life, of the world, can only come through biology, through science.”
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“No democratic government,” he writes in Afterwords, “no legislature, has ever indicated by voting, which information was desired. No one ever voted for the telephone. No one ever voted for the automobile. No one has voted for the printing press. No one ever voted for television. No one ever voted for space travel. No one ever voted for electricity.”
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