Seven Glass Beads

A string of thematic histories in search of a thesis.

(Quick programming note before we get started properly: these are 20th-century glass bead stories, not the more famous one. Manhattan probably wasn’t really “bought” with glass beads. There are a lot of conflicting accounts of that story—as near as I can tell from googling, Dutch traders almost certainly gave seven people about $1000 worth of trade goods, which could plausibly have included glass beads thrown in as extras, in exchange for some sort of promise. To me it sounds a lot like one of the earliest cases of the Brooklyn Bridge scam.

Also, spoiler warnings for the novels The Glass Bead Game (1943) and Anathem (2008).

Also also, tone warning: these stories get super dark, which might be jarring if you’re reading these posts in chronological order.)

1: Das Glasperlenspiel

In 1931, German author Herman Hesse began writing a novel whose title translates literally to “The Glass Bead Game” (the first English translation was titled “Magister Ludi”). It takes the form of a faux-biography from an alternate universe, or possible future, where religion, art, science, and philosophy have all merged into the same pursuit, conducted by intellectuals cloistered in something like a university/monastery. This pursuit is never described in detail, but its purest expression is considered to be a game played with glass beads. The protagonist, Knecht, becomes a master of the game. It’s a cozy, affectionate exploration of lives spent in search of truth and beauty. Until the protagonist decides to leave his ivory tower and share the wisdom he’s learned with the real world, whereupon he immediately makes a mistake and dies, with the book ending abruptly shortly afterwards. I felt so betrayed.

2: Trinitite

By the time he finished his novel, Hesse wasn’t allowed to publish it in Germany, because the Nazis had taken over and Hesse was a known anti-fascist. When they were defeated, it was partly due to their disdain for theoretical, ivory-tower research. Fascists like strong men, not nerds who play with beads. They invented plenty of devastating weapons, but almost all of their best theoretical physicists were undesirables, mostly Jews, who had been forced into this less-prestigious field and then forced out of the country. So they never managed the atomic bomb. Supposedly, Hitler ultimately killed the project both because it wasn’t going to finish in time, and because he was afraid of being the one who ended the world, preferring to leave that job to future generations.

One of the many grim ironies there is that he was still responsible for the invention of weapons of mass destruction—by providing unprecedented levels of motivation to his enemies, in particular the scientists who otherwise might well have suppressed the relevant ideas as long as possible. The project code-named Manhattan detonated a device code-named Trinity in 1945, an atomic explosion in a New Mexican sand desert. When you superheat sand, you get glass. When you also irradiate it and send it flying up into the sky in a mushroom cloud, you get a unique material known as trinitite, multicolored glass beads scattered over the desert, a kind of bead that, with any luck, will never be made again.

People put it into jewelry, at first, which was both bad taste and a fatal mistake.

3: MENACE

The Manhattan Project was far from the only innovative research project motivated by defeating the Nazis. In Bletchley Park, a sprawling country manor in England, the development of the digital computer was secretly kickstarted in order to break Axis codes. At least two of the researchers had a parallel realization to Oppenheimer’s “I am become Death,” although it took much longer for them to realize it. I.J. Good, a Bletchley researcher who kept working on computing after the war, was the first to articulate the possibility of an “intelligence explosion,” which is one of the things people sometimes mean when they say The Singularity. Reasoning abstractly and theoretically, he made a persuasive case that a machine would eventually be built that was intelligent enough to improve its own design, at which point it would, perhaps very quickly, surpass us. He was at first optimistic about this potential, but eventually started writing that this event was more likely to cause our destruction than our salvation.

His friend and colleague, Donald Mitchie, was another leading researcher in computing at Bletchley and after. In the fifties and sixties, Mitchie had an idea for a prototype of what techies today call “convolutional neural networks”—the foundation of the machine learning process responsible for most modern AI. Computers were hard to come by, so he made a working prototype out of matchboxes and beads. This “mechanical computer” didn’t require any physical engineering. It played Tic-Tac-Toe with humans, by having them pull a bead at random from the matchbox labeled with the board’s current state and matching the color of the bead to a list of moves. Over multiple games, beads that lead to losses are removed, while beads that lead to victory are returned. The setup as a whole thereby learns to play better and better.

Mitchie was British and called the game “Naughts and Crosses”, not “Tic-Tac-Toe”. So he named the invention the Matchbox Educable Naughts And Crosses Engine. MENACE, for short.

4: The Valdice Monastery

I wasn’t able to find a photograph of the original beads used in MENACE. I don’t know for sure that they were glass, although I found some articles that at least assume that they were. But in 1963, they might well have been plastic, and cheaper. Nobody cares, nor should they care. The materials involved were irrelevant to the operation of MENACE. The beads could’ve been coins, or scraps of paper with numbers written on them. The matchboxes could’ve been Matroyshka dolls, or men pulling beads out of a bag, or maps of the board. Anything that started with M would’ve worked with that acronym.

But in general, plenty of people do care about the difference between plastic and glass beads, and the details of their manufacture. In 20th-century Europe, glass beads were most associated with Bohemia (the part that’s now the Czech Republic). Bohemian Glass Beads were the go-to bead from the 13th century on. Before costume jewelry was much of a thing, they were made mainly for rosaries. Often they came out of a (well-ventilated) family home. Czech glass beads were artisanal, a cottage industry, but an increasingly significant part of Czechoslovakia’s economy as it became globalized.

Then the Communists took over. The USSR under Stalin essentially banned glass beads, and their manufacture, as a frivolous bourgeois luxury item. After Stalin died, however, they did a 180. Czechoslovakia needed to export frivolous bourgeois luxury items, as many as possible, in order to exploit the gullible capitalists willing to trade things of actual value for worthless trinkets.

This was accomplished with typical Soviet scale and brutality. A 17th-century monastery, presumably originally a consumer of prayer beads, had long ago been converted into a prison. There and elsewhere, prisoners were enslaved and forced to mass-produce glass beads, in a grotesque parody of Hesse’s idyll.

So in 1963, I guess Mitchie had a choice between soulless capitalist plastic beads, whose mass manufacture has a terrible environmental impact, or soulless communist glass beads made in prison. I’m not sure which would’ve been more appropriate for MENACE.

“Bead” 5: Anathem

Around the end of the 20th century, Neal Stephenson started, unwittingly, to write a novel with roughly the same premise as Hesse had used. We follow a young man, Erasmas, in a monastic community in an alternate world, a mostly-cloistered campus engaged in what we would call religion, art, science, and philosophy (they slice these concepts up differently). There’s no single synthesis, no glass bead game. The unifying theme of their pursuits, to the extent there is one, is the Long Now—projects and perspectives that approach future millennia as an immediate concern.

Erasmas, like Knecht, eventually decides to leave his ivory tower to use what he’s learned to help the outside world. He and some friends leave their monastery, immediately make a mistake, and are beaten up. They return to the monastery, think over what they did wrong, then come back out again. Then they save the world.

6: Contrasting Colors

These two books, Das Glasperlenspiel at the beginning of the century and Anathem at the end, can be used as an accidental controlled experiment. Neither writer had read the other’s book (sources: question asked and answered at a book signing, and the concept of linear time, respectively). Their backgrounds leading up to the book are also analogous in some relevant ways. Both had a taste of university life, found it oppressive, and bailed, first in favor of engineering, then writing. Hesse dropped out of school and worked in a machine shop (whose owner gets a shout-out in his novel), while Stephenson switched his major from physics to “whatever gets me the most time on the university mainframe,” then got into writing with a satirical novel about his university experiences.

So why do their plots eventually diverge—specifically at the point where the intellectual tries to put theory to practice in the outside world? (Other than the obvious, which is that Stephenson loves to write really really long books, not ones where the protagonist dies a mere five hundred pages in). I think this is an example of a massive shift in mindset that took place in the intervening time.

To Hesse, everything interesting, everything stimulating, was pure and abstract. His work in the shop was dull and repetitive. Everything he liked, even the craft of writing, felt very removed from the secular world. Abstract thought was only impactful at the level of personal engineering: learning to meditate, finding joy in projects. He survived Hitler, he said, by absorbing himself in writing his novel.

To Stephenson, “abstract” is barely even a thing. Characters in his novels have swordfights in virtual reality over the release of a program of mass destruction. They invent cryptocurrency with the explicit goal of preventing the next Holocaust, and realize too late that a sociological paper about their mindsets made some good points. They die and are uploaded to the cloud, where they live meaningful afterlives as pure data. Even his historical fiction treats ivory tower pursuits as matters of great and tangible import.

So, of course their characters fare differently when trying to cross that abstract/concrete boundary. To Hesse, it’s a wide river that Knecht literally drowns trying to swim across. To Stephenson, it’s a single step Erasmas takes from a gated community to the city outside.

7: Synthesis

What happened in between to create that shift in mindset between Knecht’s failure and Erasmas’s trial→error→success? I think trinitite, MENACE, and Valdice are what happened.

MENACE exemplifies the way programming merges the abstract and the concrete. It’s an algorithm that generates a model, and it’s a machine that beats you at your own game. Its descendants represent a multitude of concrete threats, including an existential one. STEM folk, today, are having all sorts of impact via work that lives mostly in conceptual space.

The atomic bomb and communism each, in their way, showed the world that abstract ideas can leap out of the ivory tower and concretely kill you. Time magazine’s Person of the 20th Century, their single person who most exemplifies the good and bad, was Albert Einstein. He’s a strong choice. Among many other impacts, he wrote the letter to Roosevelt that started the Manhattan Project, and he wrote the equations that let us communicate with satellites that are experiencing time differently from us. What’s the first image that pops into your head when you think of Einstein? For me, it’s a cartoon of a guy with weird hair writing “E=MC2” on a chalkboard. He’s the iconic ivory tower intellectual, and he was the most important person in the world.

What nuclear war did for the secular view of science, the Cold War did for the secular view of philosophy. Both sides came to see ideological impurity as concrete, immediate threats. Some of the slaves making glass beads in the old Czech monastery were intellectuals. They had been imprisoned solely for abstract crimes, not against a person or even the state, but against communism itself. In the West, people didn’t just hate and fear Stalin. They hated and feared Marx, too, and he was just another intellectual with weird hair.

The flip side of fear is hope. From an abstract enough standpoint, they’re identical—a preference for one possible future over another. In game theory jargon, we’d say that payoff matrices generate equivalent optimal strategies under linear transformation, or something like that. My jargon’s a little rusty.

We believe, now, that ideas can change the world. That’s the hope that glues us to our screens, posting on blogs and arguing on social media. It’s not enough to think or act abstractly, but it’s also not enough to think or act concretely. Power lies in the union of the two.

The former monastery at Valdice is still a prison today. People there are enslaved and tortured, partly because we don’t call imprisonment slavery or torture. We can change that with philosophy. And do a thousand other things, and then we’ll be able to set them free.