But what if we shifted our perspective? What if we looked more closely at the true losers of the digital revolution? Not giants like IBM or Microsoft — neither of which were even really defeated — but quixotic and eccentric tech rebels who dared to defy the status quo only to be crushed by the system. If we studied tech history by focusing on the rebels who failed, not just those who succeeded, what could we learn about the paths technology might have taken — and still might take?
That’s why I’ve spent the last few years exploring a unique group of 1960s hippie techno-utopians whose grand dreams were ultimately crushed. Operating from a secretive privately funded lab at 33 Lewis Wharf in Boston’s North End, they rebelled against the regimented, monotonous, and soul-draining world of computing. These countercultural nerds — several of them former MIT researchers — yearned for technology that could be idiosyncratic, playful, and ecological.
MIT neurophysiology researcher Avery Johnson with Environmental Ecology Laboratory cofounder Warren Brodey in 1968.Smithsonian Institution
Tech that’s curious, not a know-it-all
I explore this group’s story in detail in my newly released podcast “A Sense of Rebellion.” The group was called the Environmental Ecology Lab, and the founders envisioned computers and household gadgets that would be personal, responsive, and intimate. This vision went beyond making cheap and easy-to-use smart devices for your kitchen, bathroom, or living room. The lab aimed for a deeper connection. As one of the founders eloquently put it, their aim was to create devices that would cater to their users by displaying the same curiosity and sensitivity we exhibit when strolling through a summer garden, noting a friend’s firm handshake, or marveling at a child’s playful whims.
This might sound strange — how can machines show curiosity? — but it makes sense if you realize the users of those machines (us!) are very complex, occasionally cryptic, and not always consistent. The lab started with a very realistic view of human nature, seeing us as fickle, never stable, always evolving. This was only logical given that one of its founders had a long prior career in psychiatry and psychoanalysis: He knew a thing or two about human beings.
And their different assumptions paid off handsomely. Conventional technology tends to reinforce whatever part of our personality it happens to detect. Look up a book, a brand, or a vacation destination online, and our algorithmic overlords will assume that this is something you have felt passionate about all your life, with matching ad recommendations to boot. The lab on Lewis Wharf took a more holistic approach, hoping to use technology to elicit, try out, and help amplify our fleeting, actual interests — not some static statistical models of what our interests were a year ago or whenever the technology in question was manufactured. As one of the lab’s key figures put it, “The machines have never had a way to explore us, to see what it is we want from them.”
One of the lab’s most ambitious projects, whimsically named Telegrasp, aimed to revolutionize communication. Unlike telephones that let us hear and video calls that let us see, Telegrasp promised something unprecedented: the ability to feel the emotions of the person on the other end.
This wasn’t science fiction. The contraption consisted of two shoebox-sized containers filled with soft, balloon-like materials. When you placed your hand inside and began to grasp, sensors transmitted these movements to your interlocutor’s container, producing nearly identical changes in their balloons, so that their hand would come to “feel” your hand — the way it might in a handshake.
Ecology Tool & Toy, a successor to the Environmental Ecology Lab, envisioned materials that could change form once exposed to heat or light. This rendering for a patent filing indicates how spikes would rise out of a soft material when it expanded.US Patent and Trademark Office
This remote handholding might seem whimsical, but it was central to the lab’s ambitious quest to develop computer interfaces that surpassed the confines of language and vision. The members of the Environmental Ecology Lab feared that conventional interfaces — the kinds still favored by the tech industry today — alienated users from the richly contextual sensory experience of face-to-face conversations. Could machines be designed to engage all our senses? Why must computing ultimately reduce human users to mere automatons, trapping us in sensorially impoverished, formal algorithmic interactions, where everything is sequential, rational, and explicitly stated rather than intuitively understood?
These ideas were remarkably bold for 1967, the year EEL opened its doors. It took “only” 57 years for Apple to bring part of that vision to the masses, as it touted its Apple Pencil Pro for the iPad as having “magical capabilities” that “sense when you squeeze it” and “provide precise feedback that you can feel.”
Yet most of EEL’s ideas remain forgotten or ignored. Why hasn’t the world recognized such a radically innovative venture?
Nudist nerds in New Hampshire
That was exactly what I wondered in April 2014 when I discovered one of the key driving forces behind EEL: Warren Brodey, a psychiatrist-turned-cybernetician-turned-Maoist, then aged 90. I encountered his name by chance while flipping through an obscure book in a Paris bookstore.
At the time, I was a doctoral student in Harvard’s history of science department, specializing in the history of cybernetics, which was an interdisciplinary intellectual effort that compared humans, animals, and machines and laid the groundwork for today’s artificial intelligence. Despite my familiarity with the literature, I had never come across Brodey’s name before.
When I searched for him on Google, I discovered that in the late 1960s, he was a significant figure. He was influential enough that Marshall McLuhan, then arguably the world’s most famous public intellectual, endorsed Brodey’s book in an ad that appeared in The New York Times and announced that he would incorporate it into his teaching.
I found scant references to the Environmental Ecology Lab, but I found a piece in Rags magazine, which was once an important countercultural publication, that described what appeared to be EEL’s successor: a commune-like venture in Milford, N.H., intriguingly named Ecology Tool & Toy. I was immediately struck by the reporter’s description of what it was like in the early 1970s: a place that combined nudity and innovation — so much so that she felt uncomfortable wearing underwear from the moment she arrived.
Even more intriguing, I discovered that Brodey was a key influence on a young Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT’s famed Media Lab, who profusely thanks Brodey in his first two books. Could it be that this lab on Lewis Wharf was not merely an abstract precursor to Apple but also a tangible inspiration for the Media Lab?
Unraveling this mystery has consumed a decade of my life. I’ve visited dozens of archives worldwide and conducted over a hundred interviews. It has led me to many wild tangents, including Brodey’s encounters with the CIA’s Human Ecology Fund (which may have funded his pre-MIT research in psychiatry and extransensory perception) and his government-sponsored LSD experiments. His cofounders made forays into Scientology and libertarianism.
After completing a dissertation on Warren Brodey and now the podcast, I can highlight a few lessons to be learned from the dramas and traumas faced by a rebellious innovator in the late 1960s. This story points to questions, pursuits, and directions that today’s tech industry, despite its proclaimed commitment to disruption, is unlikely to explore on its own.
First, Brodey and his colleagues believed that truly responsive technology, including smart versions of everyday items like brushes and chairs, could offer us the kind of poetic, life-altering insights one normally expects from art. They believed that at its pinnacle, technology presents a way to see the world in all its complexity, even though this potential is frequently overlooked by designers and engineers.
Ecology Tool & Toy specialized in creating what the group termed “ecological toys.” Imagine self-locomoting worms and caterpillars that responded to both weather patterns and children’s interactions. These toys were designed to teach the complexity of ecosystems to younger generations; they were enjoyable to play with but also had an educational aspect.
This philosophy also inspired one of the lab’s first major projects: a peculiar sensor-filled dancing suit. The suit allowed the dancer to influence the music they were dancing to (a concept that was later replicated at the MIT Media Lab). The goal was to enable users to discover the interplay between movement and sound, encouraging them to master entirely new, previously unimaginable dance patterns.
The lab also made groundbreaking strides in resolving a long-standing philosophical dilemma in the realms of design and architecture. Should an artifact’s form follow function, as the austere designs of the Bauhaus suggest? Or should its function follow form, prioritizing aesthetic considerations over utilitarian ones?
The lab’s innovative solution to this problem was rooted in Brodey’s unique background. Before his transformation into a cybernetician at MIT, he spent years in Washington as a prominent family therapist and psychiatrist. One of his notable side projects involved working with exceptionally talented blind people employed by the CIA. These people developed extraordinary multisensory capacities, honing their hearing, smell, and touch in ways that far surpassed those of the sighted. (The CIA utilized these blind sensory geniuses to eavesdrop on intercepted Soviet communications — one of the bizarre facts I confirmed while researching this intriguing story.)
Warren Brodey during his time in Washington, D.C.Brodey Family Collection
One of Brodey’s key insights from this project was that the texture of built environments — such as ceiling height, wall padding, and heat resistance — significantly affects how much sensory information is perceivable. If we could dynamically alter the built environment using sensors and flexible materials, we could create on-demand spaces that maximize our sensory and, potentially, cognitive capacities. In other words, creativity is situational, and advanced information technology can nurture and stimulate it.
This led Brodey to two ideas central to much of the lab’s work: “soft architecture” and “intelligent environments.” These concepts paved the way for smart, adaptive, and interactive devices that would be developed in places like the Media Lab in subsequent decades. It’s no coincidence that Negroponte, a careful reader of Brodey’s article on intelligent environments, titled his second book “The Soft Architecture Machines.”
From here, it was only a few conceptual steps to resolving the philosophical dilemma about form and function. Brodey and his colleagues developed something called Soft Control Material, an interactive device that enabled objects to change shape based on temperature variations. These variations could result from human touch, natural processes, or computer commands. Imagine chairs and sofas that unfold when exposed to sunlight or beer cans and restaurant walls that change shapes or colors based on specific triggers.
Brodey’s lab was essentially liberating both form and function from the constraints of physics and social convention. As “soft” and “intelligent” objects, their creations could take on forms desired by users. However, as perpetually unfinished, adaptable artifacts, they would also upend our expectations of what objects are for. If someone wants to play jazz or scratch their back with an intelligent hammer, who are we to judge? Who said a hammer’s potential is reserved exclusively for nails? The driving motive was that technology could be a tool for unleashing and enhancing human creativity. It wasn’t merely about getting things done, one app at a time.
It matters who is funding tech
The Brodey lab’s eventual failure offers valuable lessons for our own contemporary quandaries over Big Tech. The Environmental Ecology Lab was far from a minor endeavor. Brodey used his renown and connections to get people like McLuhan to grace the lab with their presence. It also had the support of Warren McCulloch, the father of neural networks and an MIT luminary. Three of the lab’s six members hailed from influential and wealthy families. The lab was funded by a great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller; Brodey’s main collaborator was the heir to the Palmolive fortune; and one of the primary computer experts in the lab had a Hollywood mogul for a grandfather. If anyone could succeed in such a quixotic venture outside the military-industrial complex, it was they.
Yet the entire project unraveled — and spectacularly so — with family tragedies, alcoholism, death, immigration, and the fracture of many personal relationships. There’s no single explanation for the collapse of this grand effort, but the larger-than-life egos of the key players certainly didn’t help.
A significant issue was their hesitation to accept funding from the military and, eventually, even from MIT. The Vietnam War rendered such collaborations morally questionable, particularly for this group of hippies. However, by severing ties with these sources of the capital and influence necessary to scale such risky ventures, Brodey and his team were left with only one potential ally: corporate America. Unsurprisingly, big companies were not inclined to support the poetic vision of technology advocated by the Boston lab or its successor in New Hampshire.
Avery Johnson and Warren Brodey in 1968.Smithsonian Institution
Brodey’s disenchantment with the establishment was so intense that he emigrated to Norway, transforming into a far-left activist and even reinventing himself as a manual worker at an iron foundry. (He still lives in Norway, at the age of 100.) Yet as his political awareness grew, he realized that ensuring technology serves an ecological, mind-expanding, and creative purpose — one the lab aspired to — required citizens and public institutions to have firm control over its development.
In other words, using technology to make us more complex, well-rounded individuals is an expensive endeavor — and tech corporations won’t foot the bill. They’d rather offer apps to solve immediate problems or encourage us to consume more of the same — movies, music, news — albeit better refined thanks to their vast data on us. If technology is going to help us spot unrecognized problems or develop new tastes and skills beyond our current data profiles, we will need a stronger public voice in its development.
Even the MIT Media Lab, an institution subconsciously built on EEL’s legacy, primarily aligned its breakthroughs in interactivity and responsiveness with the agendas of its military and industrial sponsors (and a few random donors like Jeffrey Epstein). Redirecting technology to serve different agendas requires not only political courage but also the creation of new public institutions — the digital equivalents of libraries and parks. We won’t get more humane technology through startups alone.
Evgeny Morozov is the author of several books about technology and politics and is the founder of The Syllabus, a nonprofit knowledge curation initiative. Before his new podcast, “A Sense of Rebellion,” he produced “The Santiago Boys,” about utopian economists and engineers who served Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende in the early 1970s.
