Bunch of Amateurs (2 page)

On a late afternoon, Barron and I hung out for a while at the Gungywamp structures. They are charming shelters—about the size of a good tool shed built with flat stones stacked closer together as they get to the top, which is formed by a large, flat capstone. The entire
construction, except the opening, is often covered in dirt, which in turn is overgrown with grasses. Being inside feels extremely ancient. Barron wanted to show me the main building. He believed it to be an oratory, a one-room chapel, examples of which are still standing in Ireland. These edifices began going up in Ireland after
A.D
. 400, when the Christian church opened for business there. In this particular hut, there was a “vent hole” whose orientation, it was accidentally discovered in 1987, admitted light only twice a year—on the equinox.

Barron gave me a sharp look, flaring his eyes and nostrils. His hat seemed to pop up a bit and meant to signal that the proof was fairly conclusive, right? That I was a convert, right? I flashed a neutral smile. Earlier that day, I had spoken to Connecticut’s state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni. He let me know right away he was quite tired of this crowd and couldn’t they see already that the stone buildings were just colonial root cellars or pigsties?

Across from the vent hole was another small opening at the ground level that Barron wanted to show me. In Ireland, Barron continued, such doorways were common in these chambers. They led to hidden rooms where Celtic farmers might wait for the passing of an invading horde of Vikings. The dark hole was not more than a foot and a half square.

“A secret passageway,” Barron said. So I crawled in.

When I originally hung out with Barron, I loved all this. Stories about crackpot amateurs like the Gungywampers are a journalistic chestnut. First and foremost, they require a slightly oddball protagonist who can supply lots of character detail (some editor is always urging the writer to “make it zany”—that word is practically jargon in the modern magazine business). And in order to really bring it—the zany—you not only need a Gungywamp zealot who curses in weird German like Barron, but you also need his foil, an official expert bristling with skepticism. So I was good to go, article-wise. I had the two key characters in the crackpot subgenre.

I was thinking about all this when I crawled out the other end of
the secret tunnel. I was in another conical room also shaped into a rounded pyramid. It was just tall enough for me to set my six-foot self into a crouching stand.

I sat down on the dirt floor in the secret chamber and illuminated the drywall masonry with my flashlight. Even though this story was coming easily, some of the details weren’t dovetailing. Sitting in this little room, and touching these old stones, I began to ask myself: Why would any colonial build nine very labor-intensive root cellars so close together? A collection of outbuildings like this doesn’t occur anywhere else in the United States, and how many storehouses for potatoes and squash do you need in the eighteenth century? Who would ever build a solar-oriented root cellar? Why would any farmer create a crawl space in a pigsty that led to a hidden chamber? So instead of rushing to my computer to write the usual crackpot story, a new question popped into my mind: What if David Barron were right?

The first thing one usually hears about the era of the self-taught theorist and the garage inventor is it’s supposed to be dead. The Golden Age of American Amateurism is over. You can read all about it in countless books with tombstone titles, such as Thomas P. Hughes’s classic
American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970
, or any of a shelf full of books with titles beginning
The End of …
More broadly, the entire American experiment seems to be shutting down, if you read Naomi Wolf’s book
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot
.

I’m not sure I’d write America’s obit just yet, for the same reason that I wouldn’t write the closing chapter of amateurism either. Every
generation likes to think that its time has grown too complex and sophisticated for any real homebrew breakthroughs. But then, each generation also discovers that what they thought were very expensive, highly unobtainable technologies suddenly turn into the next generation’s play toys.

A few years ago, the technology for looking through surface materials—like those full-body scanners at airports—was incredibly complicated and expensive. Already, amateurs online have hacked the technology and created cheap DIY versions involving little more than certain cameras, a combination of filters, and specific wavelengths of light. This homemade method for peering beneath people’s clothes is about to do for those old “X-ray specs” ads in comic books what the cell phone did for
Star Trek
’s “communicator badge.” Make it real, and cheap. Like it or not, nude imagery is about to undergo the same change-up that personal information on Facebook did only a few years ago. And on we go.

Like so many trends in this country, amateurism is no different. It’s not a moment that ends, but a cycle that’s always coming around.

Business scholars have attempted to deconstruct how such amateurs succeed and one noted theory, published in the
Harvard Business Review
, argues that outsiders are not burdened with the “curse of knowledge.” It turns out that ignorance
is
bliss and, in many cases, a more productive perch to start from. Not knowing anything about something is often precisely what’s needed to see something new. And then the cycle starts over.

That’s why, in the 1970s, IBM’s top executive could say that the world would only need a few computers, because that’s how they saw it. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were not cursed with such presumptions and so famously went into Jobs’s Cupertino garage and roughed out an early desktop computer from parts sold in the local electronics store or improvised with skills picked up at the now-famous Homebrew Computer Club.

Amateurism mysteriously summons America back, like some
Great Gatsby
imperative, to that very mythological garage to begin once again the work of thinking about things far away from expert prejudices. It’s not a coincidence that Hewlett-Packard recently restored the original garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, where Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett first formed their company in 1939 (and then provided Disney with some of the sound equipment used in making
Fantasia
). That quintessential location is the temple of American amateur ingenuity, and after stepping out to report the stories in this book, I found that plenty of folks still hie to this sacred space (literally) every weekend, hoping to make the big breakthrough.

In the pop culture itself, the evidence is constantly emerging that Americans are figuratively returning to this fertile place too.

There are the thriving new magazines like
Make
and a host of others catering to the resurgence of the DIY—do-it-yourself—impulse in America. Contests summoning amateurs to their workbenches and offering millions in rewards are now sponsored by the Pentagon (to invent robot cars), NASA (new lunar technology), the X Prize Foundation (space tourism), Congress (hydrogen energy), Al Gore (carbon emissions abatement), and even Google ($20 million reward for a robot that can get to the moon and explore).

There is also a steady stream of interest in weekend hobby clubs, where Americans have long retreated to tinker—depending on the decade—with their radios, remote-control vehicles, computers, and robots. The Internet has set loose a massive new style: open-source amateur collaborations that completely restructure entire disciplines. My own field of journalism is being thoroughly undermined, crashed, and rebuilt by the blogosphere, Slate, the Daily Beast, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. There is now open talk among the most fuddy-duddy editors that the dead-tree format—i.e., the newspaper—may be the illuminated manuscript of the twenty-first century. The old financial models are crumbling. Between 2000 and 2008, Craigslist alone eliminated about 49 percent of newspaper revenue that once
came in from classified ads—as bloggers swarm every news story with fact-checking and commentary. They’ve created a heightened sense of being observed and have fundamentally altered the way journalism now gets reported and written.

There is almost no field that isn’t experiencing similar tectonic quakes. Just casting about, it’s not hard to find outsider collaborations. Amateur weather freaks, “storm spotters” who now communicate online, have long been relied upon by local governments and are acknowledged by the National Weather Service as “the Nation’s first line of defense against severe weather.” The world of biodiesel (not to mention the latest emblem of American freedom—the solar-powered car) has launched a thousand backyard inventors, as well as roving salesmen peddling devices that home-brew gasoline from table scraps. Google maps have inspired a new generation of self-appointed spies to scout enemy landscapes. Do-it-yourself builders of submarines, or “personal submersibles,” now explore the ocean floor (
PSUBS.org
). Thiago Olson is a kid in Oakland Township, Michigan, who is now classified as the eighteenth amateur to create nuclear fusion in his backyard. It’s the number 18 that’s arresting.

Once you start looking for it, the only real shocker is how ubiquitous a figure the aspiring amateur is in America and yet how seemingly invisible these people are in our journalistic media.

The title of the nation’s most watched program—an amateur hour, mind you—captures it:
American Idol
. The amateur breaking out and getting recognized—that is our secular God. We are the land of fresh starts
and
second acts; the promised land of immigrants starting anew.

The elevation of the amateur is not just this season’s top-rated TV show. Prime time is now jammed with knockoffs and spinoffs of
American Idol
(
America’s Got Talent
,
America’s Next Top Model
,
Project Runway
,
Dancing with the Stars
,
The Apprentice
,
The Voice
). Before
American Idol
, which discovered Kelly Clarkson, there was
Star Search
, the show responsible for Britney Spears. But the pedigree
of such programming goes way back, possibly all the way back. In the 1970s, the amateur show had already been such a staple that its parody was a huge hit.
The Gong Show
was straight-up ridicule of the genre (and yet managed to discover PeeWee Herman, Boxcar Willie, and Andrea McArdle—the first of the ginger ’fros who played Little Orphan Annie).

Before that was
Amateur Night at the Apollo
, which gave us Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. At that time, there was another glut of these shows. One could also watch
Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour
, a primetime show that launched the career of Gladys Knight and Pat Boone. The other big one was called the
Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts
, where we first saw performers ranging from Patsy Cline to Lenny Bruce.

Mack got his television show because he had been the band leader for a radio show called
Major Bowes’ Amateur Theatre of the Air
, which dates to the early 1930s and gave us the careers of Beverly Sills and Frank Sinatra. And before radio, various small theaters thrived on weekly amateur shows, like Miner’s Bowery Theater in Manhattan, which discovered Eddie Cantor, or Halsey’s Theater in Brooklyn, where Jackie Gleason first appeared. And before that, vaudeville would tour the country and perform in the local opera houses. The shows typically featured a local amateur contest—both to draw nearby audiences into the seats to watch their neighbors perform and, given the chance, to discover someone they could convince to tour with them, as they did Bob Hope and Milton Berle.

These amateur nights weren’t just entertainments but confirmations of what Americans believe is true in every sphere. There is no realm that is understood to be off-limits to the lowest or newest citizen here. Americans affirm this idea in every aspect of their vernacular life (“Anybody can grow up to be President”). It’s the essential faith of the amateur and the creed of America. It’s why George Washington opted to be called Mr. President instead of going with the pompous alternative “Your Excellency.” Every four years voters typically affirm their suspicion of “professional politicians” by elevating an inexperienced
pol to the White House (with, arguably, a very wide range of results). The amateur narrative is encoded in our national DNA.

The cyclical return to the garage is happening now, as Americans sense that some great turn in history has come. It’s time to tear down the fortresses and build them again, which is always traumatic. When one of the
New Republic
’s professional writers, Lee Siegel, was discovered to have posed online as his own fan, fluffing himself with cringe-inducing praise, he was suspended. The people who brought him down were bloggers who figured out that he was engaging in sockpuppetry (yes, there already was a word for online onanistic praise). Later, Siegel wrote a book about how horrible these amateur journalists were that were attacking him. “I love the idea of the amateur—that’s what popular culture is all about,” he told
New York
magazine. “But what the Internet’s doing is professionalizing everyone’s amateuristic impulses.”