In Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, the Martians give this the name “grokking,” a mode of understanding that is individual and collective at once: it means, we are told, “to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and,” Heinlein’s novel adds, “it means as little to us,” meaning earthbound humans, “as color means to a blind man.” This too is part of grokking: in order for you to get it, everyone else must not get it. The word “grok” quickly made it into the counterculture’s vocabulary, showing up in the work of Ram Dass (whose 1971 Be Here Now Steve Jobs cited as an early inspiration) and in Tom Wolfe’s firsthand description of the sixties counterculture, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), although Wolfe misuses it. But before long it made its way into the parlance of computer culture.
There are serious disagreements among these books about what exactly you transcend when you drop out. But there is perhaps a more obvious, and therefore less noticed, disagreement on when you transcend. Although Harry Haller’s age is never stated in Steppenwolf, he is clearly middle-aged. He is well established in the society he rejects. Will Farnaby, who discovers a utopian Polynesian society in Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962), is a disillusioned middle manager. And while Kerouac is a quintessential young person’s writer, Sal Paradise starts the road trip in On the Road (1957) to get over a divorce.
When it appropriated these heroes, the counterculture of the sixties aged them down quite a bit. Suddenly, you didn’t have to experience work life, family life, and adult life to grow disillusioned with it. You could be disillusioned even before you joined the machine. But in tech this wasn’t really true—the evangelists of what Turner calls the “cybernetic counterculture,” such as the artists and theorists of USCO (“Us Company”), were in their thirties by the late sixties. Their idols, including Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller, were even older. Meaning they had a good sense of the world they were rebelling against. So did Leary (forty-six when he addressed the Human Be-In) and Kesey (thirty when he threw the first Acid Test). The average college dropout is significantly younger, and their vision quest is for that reason quite different. That’s not to discount their vision, but rather to say that their sense of the society that vision opposes isn’t that likely to be as developed.
Professors at Stanford see students drop out with some regularity. Stanford’s previous president even invested in a couple of ventures undertaken by students who had dropped out to pursue them, which raised some eyebrows. Call it a kind of for-profit Thiel Fellowship. When students do drop out, it’s spoken of in hushed tones, the way you’d comment on someone’s placing a giant bet at a roulette table. These kids must have something really special, to wager their futures like this. You almost get the sense that this mythos is sort of the point—that without the sense of urgency, risk, and free fall created by the act of dropping out, maybe the startup idea wouldn’t seem as exciting to investors and journalists.
While being careful not to talk about individual students, I will point out that the atmosphere of risk appears to be massively overstated. Mark Zuckerberg admitted he knew “I’d be fine if Facebook didn’t work out.” And while at Stanford we rarely see those dropouts who go on to make boatloads of money again, in my experience, those whose startups either go bust or don’t do as well as the dropouts hoped eventually come back and get their degrees. They’re not crawling back either; it’s evidently almost as well traveled a road as the one leading prematurely out of Stanford and into the incubators of Mountain View and Redwood City. So perhaps it’s better to think of dropping out as the ultimate semester-abroad experience. You’re leaving college, but are you really leaving college?
And for all the echoes of the anti-authoritarian sixties, the break with the collegiate environment is far from a rejection, especially when it comes to social aspects. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard and quickly moved into what sounds like a frat house in Palo Alto. In several massive Victorians around Alamo Square Park in San Francisco, you can find communal live-work spaces that resemble a mix of the fanciest hippie commune you’ve ever seen with the fanciest dormitory you can imagine. This in spite of the fact that its denizens are about as far from collegiate age as Zuckerberg is now.
And, as in the case of Zuckerberg’s venture, the business models of so many of these startups carry some aspect of the collegiate experience into the wider culture. “The Facebook” started out as an online equivalent of a service that college students had long taken for granted and relied on for dating, judging, and stalking—an actual, physical, lowercase “facebook.” Now everybody could get in on the fun. The famous knock against tech startups is that about 90 percent of them seem aimed at answering the question, “What things isn’t my mom doing for me anymore?” But probably the question should read, “What will I do now that I no longer have access to a dining hall, a laundry service, a ready-made dating pool, or a student directory?” Tinder frames itself as the high-tech equivalent of a frat party. It seems that by turning their back on college, the dropouts make the outside world look and behave a little more like the groves of academe.
These are extreme examples, of course, but they set the tone for the entire industry. Tech professionalizes early,
