robert rossney

technology critic

He was born in Wooster, Ohio, in 1960, and grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and Pacific Palisades, California.

He majored in American history and cultural geography at the University of California, Berkeley, with a double minor in horrible relationships and clinical depression. He did not emerge from that fine institution with a degree clutched in his beak.

He has been a computer geek for the last twenty years, specializing, unintentionally, in obscure operating systems and platforms with short lifespans, including Microdata, General Automation, Control Data, Univac, and Logical Business Machines. Today he develops Visual Basic applications for courts and criminal justice systems, so now might be a good time to go short on Microsoft.

During a brief period in the mid-1980s, he was an organizational development consultant, an experience that has instilled in him a deep and abiding distrust of organizational development consultants.

He has been a loudmouthed and abrasive member of the online community on the WELL since 1985; presently he hosts the WELL's Books, Words, Sexuality, Golf, and Life Stories conferences.

He assisted the San Francisco Chronicle in starting what has grown to be The Gate, the Chronicle/Examiner's web-based electronic newspaper and conferencing system.

His writing has appeared in WIRED, New Scientist, the Whole Earth Review, and San Francisco Focus. For the San Francisco Chronicle, he wrote the biweekly column ONLINE, which provided that newspaper with its first coverage of public-key encryption, Time magazine's cyberporn fiasco, anonymous remailers, the Communications Decency Act, death online, and the World-Wide Web.

With his wife, novelist Sonia Simone, he co-wrote Quiet Americans, a serial that ran for the first twenty-six weeks of HotWired's existence and that is believed by some deluded individuals to have been the inspiration for Stephen King's The Green Mile.

Beginning with its launch in late October, he will be hosting an arena on Electric Minds. His arena, Technos, is dedicated to the exploring the feedback loop between culture and technology.

He lives in a snug little condominium in Berkeley, California, with his wife, their cats Jules and Vincent, and his enormous collection of European board games.