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A conversation with John Glen

With razor-sharp clarity, John Glenn recalls his pioneering 1962 flight to become the first American in orbit. Now 90, he discusses the mission, a subsequent shuttle flight, and the current state of NASA.

Fifty years ago Monday, a young Marine Corps fighter pilot shoe-horned himself into a cramped Mercury capsule blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas rocket to become the first American in orbit — and one of the nation’s enduring heroes.

John Glenn, inside his Friendship 7 Mercury capsule, on Feb. 20, 1962, the first American in orbit.

(Credit: NASA)

John Glenn went on to a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate before making history again in 1998, blasting off aboard the shuttle Discovery to become, at 77, the oldest human to fly in space.

Now 90, Glenn’s memories of his historic Feb. 20, 1962, flight aboard Friendship 7 remain razor sharp, “indelibly” etched in his mind. But 50 years after his pioneering mission, Glenn sees a space program in disarray, the result of tight budgets and a presidential decision to retire the space shuttle before a replacement spacecraft was available to take its place.

In his view, it’s not yet clear whether America’s current space policy will keep the nation at the forefront of science and technology. CBS Space Analyst William Harwood recently interviewed Glenn for a look back. And a look ahead.

Q: Looking back on your Friendship 7 flight, I’m reminded that your Atlas rocket was still a fairly risky ride in the early 1960s. What do you remember about the launch itself? Where you nervous?
Glenn: It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 50 years. It seems more like a couple of weeks ago to me, because that fight was pretty well indelibly impressed on my memory back in that time. I’ve recalled it so often since then it stays very, very vivid.

The Atlas, you know, I think the first 18 or 20 Atlases that fired, I think they had a 45 percent failure rate, that’s the figure I remember. … The first time they took us (the Mercury 7 astronauts) down there to see a booster launch, we’d never seen a launch, and they took us down for a night launch and the thing blew at high Q at 27,000 feet right over our heads. It looked like an atomic bomb going off.

Anyway, they came back and improved the whole thing and had several straight successes and had the problems worked out before I got on the thing. But it was something we were very concerned about at the time.

What was your impression of launch? It seemed like a very slow climb off the pad.
Well, it did. The people who watched some of those launches get the wrong idea. They see all the fire and the flame and the light and everything and they think the astronaut must be under some tremendous pressure in there. And it’s just the opposite, it’s very gentle, a gentle liftoff. One of the first things I said was ‘the clock is operating, we’re underway,’ those were my first words and that was because you wanted to check the clock to make sure you had lifted off. That’s when the clock started. It’s the same thing on the shuttle launches, you know, they’re held down and then they’re finally released. But on the Atlas, the thrust just barely exceeded the weight of the booster so you’re very slow in that first part and then as it burns (the propellants) out, why, you start picking up speed as you get up higher.

How did that launch experience compare to your ride on the shuttle?
The difference in the sensations, I don’t think are that different. It takes longer getting up there on the shuttle, about eight minutes and 20 seconds or something like that, as opposed to five-and-a-half minutes on the Mercury. And you’re accelerating at different accelerations. But just the liftoff, the first part while you’re clearing the gantry and getting going, it’s much the same kind of feeling as far as the shaking. And there isn’t much shaking, it’s fairly smooth. Now, once you get higher, then it does get a little bit different. Because you’re stretching out the launch period on the shuttle to about eight minutes and 20 seconds as I recall and it’s very, very gentle, you never get above 3 Gs. We got up to 7.9 on the Mercury, but it’s taken straight into your chest and you’re in a contour couch, so it’s quite tolerable. It’s not like sitting up in a fighter airplane pulling 9 Gs.

Feb. 20, 1962: An Atlas rocket blasts off from Cape Canaveral, boosting John Glenn’s Mercury capsule into orbit.

(Credit: NASA)

But on the shuttle, you never get above 3 Gs. And coming back in, where we hit almost 8 Gs on the Mercury, on the shuttle the return to the Cape you never got above about 2 Gs deceleration. Very, very gentle compared to the Mercury, where you built up to almost 8 Gs. But on the shuttle, of course, you started your re-entry about 9,000 miles out. Mercury, I think was about 3,500 miles. I think we fired the retros just a little west of the West Coast. But it’s not like that 9,000-mile very gentle re-entry on the shuttle.

Do you still remember your first impressions of the view out your Mercury window?
When I hit orbit up there, I said, I think it was ‘zero G and I feel fine.’ I think the next thing I said was ‘that view is tremendous!’ Actually, in the Mercury days, when you got up there you immediately turned around and went into retro attitude so if you did not have orbital speed — and it was very dicey if you were going to get orbital speed or not — if you didn’t have orbital speed, you wanted to be in an immediate re-entry position so you could fire retro rockets and come down, hopefully, before you got to Africa. Or, you let it go a little while and overshoot Africa and get picked up in the Indian Ocean. So it was right after detachment from the booster, from the Atlas, that I turned around and it went immediately into retro attitude, which was nose down a little bit looking back along the flight path. i could look back clear across Florida and along the Gulf of Mexico, and it was beautiful. I couldn’t believe the view.

They say first impressions are the most memorable. The shuttle had larger windows and I guess the view was more expansive. But I’m wondering if the Mercury view is the one that stuck with you.
Oh, I think, yeah, that was the one that was a shock. And then I had several opportunities during the flight to look out and look down. It wasn’t so much the type of window you were looking out of, which was bigger, of course, on the shuttle, but it was the view you were looking out at. The first time you see that it’s sort of breath taking.

When you re-entered the atmosphere, there was concern that your heat shield was loose. But they didn’t come out and tell you that. How did that play out?
Well, there was some little chatter back and forth about did I hear any bumping on the spacecraft and things like that. So in the debriefing, that’s one of the things I complained a little about. I think from the earliest time, whatever the indications are on the ground, they ought to give that to the astronaut, especially back in those days when we weren’t all that positive that communications were going to be solid for certain periods. If you happened to lose communications, then the astronaut should have all the information they have on the ground. And I know they were concerned they were going to rattle your cage up there and lead you to do something wrong. The best safety thing I thought was to give the astronaut every bit of information at the earliest possible time.

At age 77, Glenn becomes the oldest human in space after blasting off aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998.

(Credit: NASA)

How much were you able to figure out in orbit, just based on the questions you were getting? Did you realize there was a problem with the heat shield?
I did, because there was only one thing they could be talking about on that. And so I knew, but it was a little irksome they didn’t just come out and tell me until later, just before retro fire.

I’d like to switch gears and look ahead a bit. I remember going to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1968 and thinking that future — a moon base, a huge space station, all that — looked believable. Reality today is very different. Are you disappointed the space program hasn’t accomplished more in the past 50 years?
Neil (Armstrong), Buzz (Aldrin) and Mike (Collins) when they went to the moon (on the Apollo 11 mission), that was what we were building up to at that time. We went from Mercury to Gemini and then on to Apollo, with some delay in there after the pad fire down there, that was a real tragedy. But that was brought about very, very successfully. I think the only part of what’s happened since then that I disagree with a little bit, I think that our exploration as we go along should always (be focused on two themes). One is macro exploration, and that’s just going out, seeing how far you can go out there, land on Mars or some place and come back. The other is to use that new ability to travel (in space) to do basic research that may be of benefit to people right here on Earth. The International Space Station, for instance.

John Glenn and Friendship 7, we have 50 years (photos)

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I disagreed strongly, and still do, with George Bush’s decision to (retire the shuttle). … If they want to establish a base on the moon and pay for it, fine. But what he proposed, and directed NASA to do, is he directed NASA to plan to land on the moon and go on to Mars, but no addition in the budget. To pay for it, you’re doing it out of the existing budget, which meant that he also cancelled the shuttles at the end of 2010 and wanted to cancel the space station. I think that was just ridiculous. Because we’ve now spent $100 billion building the space station, it’s the most unique laboratory humans have ever conceived of. And during this time period, we haven’t had our own transportation back and forth to it, so we’ve not been able to maximize the research return off what I call micro exploration, which is the laboratory type stuff, or the human body type exploration you can do up there.

On the shuttle flight I was on, we had 83 different research projects and on Columbia before it burned up, it had 90 research projects. So there’s lots of things that the scientists want to look at. Here we have the opportunity to do that with the most unique laboratory and we can’t even get back and forth to it ourselves without going over and paying the Russians to take us up and bring us back down. And we have no heavy lift capability whatsoever to do anything else.

That has to be one of the great ironies of this 50th anniversary, the fact that the United States is paying Russia for space transportation. It would have been hard to invent that scenario just a few years ago.
They’d have laughed at it. A class-C movie, not even a class-B movie. And yet back in those days, one of the major driving forces in support of the program was the fact that we were in competition with the Soviets. And yet here we are these 50 years later, (paying) 60-some million dollars per astronaut to go up there and back. And this is supposed to be the world’s greatest space-faring nation? That part of how we’ve developed I don’t agree with at all. I don’t think the shuttle should have been canceled until we had a replacement for it.

Everybody talks about how the shuttle is 30 years old. Well, we didn’t have anything better. It’s still the most complex vehicle ever put together by human beings, I think, and it was working well, we’d made upgrades to it. I thought we should be trying to extend its life instead of cutting it down.

What do you think of the effort to build commercial manned spacecraft to service low-Earth orbit? Is that just a different way of accounting, or is it a significant change of course?
I don’t know, it seems to me it’s more accounting than anything else. We’re giving them a little more free reign to do the first stages of development, and that’s about it. NASA has never owned a production factory in their life. It’s all been commercial, it’s just we contracted with them, and now we’re saying well, OK, you guys go ahead and develop this, the first part of this, and be a little more competitive with each other and then we’ll still back one of you and buy your product. I’ve never seen the commercialization emphasis as being something that was hugely different. What they’re hoping is that there will be enough interest in the space program that we can go commercial and the government will eventually not be involved in space missions. You could have private space missions. But that’s a long way away.

Sounds like you agree with former Administrator Mike Griffin, who says he’s not opposed to commercialization, he just thinks it’s premature.
That’s exactly the way I feel about it. I’m not objecting to it. If people want to commercialize and pay for building boosters and go launch, fine, let’s help them do it. But as far as it paying its own way commercially, I think we’re quite a ways from that.

John Glenn discusses U.S. space policy with President Barack Obama, John Holdren (left), director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Rob Nabors, a White House staffer, during a July 2010 meeting in the Oval Office.

(Credit: Pete Sourza/White House)

The Obama administration’s space policy calls for NASA to help develop commercial manned spacecraft for flights to Earth orbit while at the same time developing its own rocket and capsule for deep space exploration. Does it bother you NASA has been forced to implement what amounts to two manned space programs?
Whatever we turn other people loose to do, I think the government will always be involved with these far out, or the newer type of exploration and research. That’s been true whether it’s been agriculture or whatever. The government’s played a leading role where there were big investments required for which there was no support at the moment commercially. And that’s sort of where we are right now. … My problem is, I wish they’d gotten all this stuff going and kept the shuttle until we had some of these things so we don’t have a big gap here.

I don’t think most people know that right now if something happened to the Soyuz, we don’t have a manned space program. That’s it, it ends, until we get our new vehicles built. But that’s some time in the future. They say three to five years, but they’ve been saying three to five years for the last four years. So I think it’s more like five to seven to 10 years, something like that. Maybe some of these (commercial) things will work out. But the better way to me would have been to keep what you have as a transportation system while you develop a replacement for it, not just can it and put yourself at the mercy of the Russians and taking us down to where there’s no backup whatsoever. If anything happens to the Soyuz, why, it ends the manned program until we build our new ones.

When the Superconducting Super Collider got canceled, high-energy physics ultimately moved to Europe. Are you worried something similar is happening to the space program?
If people ask me what are just a couple of things that made this country expand and be vibrant and alive and lead the world in a very short time period, there were two things. One is education. In this country, education became more general for everybody than it ever had been in Europe. Education here was for everyone, not just for the kids from the castle and the rich kids. The other element was basic research. We’ve led the world in basic research, and it was those two things, basically, that this country went from being a nothing nation along the East Coast with two or three million people and over a period of about only 125 years became a world leader by 1900.

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That’s where the space program to me fits in. It’s doing basic research that nobody else can do. We have competitive research and education programs now that are getting to be better than the United States, already is in K-12, which is your standard education, we’re already way behind many other nations. We’re way behind right now as far as general education goes in math and science and technology. Now in research, we still lead, but our lead is being cut down. Other nations are looking at us and saying, ‘they got to be what they are by education and research, we’re going to out-do them on that’ and they’re beginning to set up programs to do it. China and India are two good examples.

That’s where I see NASA fitting in. NASA’s doing the most fundamental, basic research with the station and we have not had the vehicles to even go back and forth to maximize that research return that will keep us ahead. So that’s where I just disagree strongly with Bush. To cancel the shuttles and the station when we need more of the most basic research capabilities, I just think that was absolutely wrong, I disagreed with it and still do. The Soyuz has been pretty reliable, I don’t decry it, but it’s had a couple of hiccups where it’s scared us a little bit (and) there’s no heavy lift capability to it at all. It’ll take three astronauts and 120 pounds (of cargo) and that’s it.

You’ve said you were disappointed with President Bush’s decisions. What about President Obama? You met with him at the White House in 2010. Do you fault him for the current space policy or do you view him more as a victim of circumstance in the sense that he walked into a bad situation?
I do to some extent. I had a good meeting with him, I had about 35 minutes or so in the Oval Office. It was with (John) Holdren, who is the OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) guy, and (a White House staffer) there, it was the four of us. And I went through all my litany of things about what I felt about the program. … He didn’t disagree with me on any of it, he said that the position we’re in with the budget right now, there just isn’t the money to do it. I think at that time it would have been expensive to change direction, but I had hoped he could keep the shuttle going until we had an actual replacement. He just said there wasn’t the money to do it. He’d been handed a pretty lousy hand on that one, also, as far as the budget went. So I couldn’t really criticize him too much on that, but I wish he had been able to do that.

Are you hopeful about the future? What’s your sense of where things stand 50 years after your pioneering mission?
I think the jury’s still out. If this goes on for another 10 years or 15 years, that we don’t have our own way of getting into space, then I think other nations will go ahead of us and we’ll regret the decisions made in these days. If some of the proposals now for manned space flight and taking our own vehicles up to the station, if those really can come through within two or three years, if that was possible, then maybe we’ll not have lost too much. But I think if there are a lot of problems as there may be and it goes out and we’re still contracting with the Russians, then we’ll see other nations go ahead of us. And I think whatever nation that leads the world in education and basic research will be a world leader 50 years from now.

Lately inequality has re-entered the national conversation. Occupy Wall Street gave the issue visibility, while the Congressional Budget Office supplied hard data on the widening income gap. And the myth of a classless society has been exposed: Among rich countries, America stands out as the place where economic and social status is most likely to be inherited.

So you knew what was going to happen next. Suddenly, conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals. Never mind wage stagnation and all that, the real problem is the collapse of working-class family values, which is somehow the fault of liberals.

But is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money.

To be fair, the new book at the heart of the conservative pushback, Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” does highlight some striking trends. Among white Americans with a high school education or less, marriage rates and male labor force participation are down, while births out of wedlock are up. Clearly, white working-class society has changed in ways that don’t sound good.

But the first question one should ask is: Are things really that bad on the values front?

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

Yet the truth is that some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

Most of the numbers you see about income trends in America focus on households rather than individuals, which makes sense for some purposes. But when you see a modest rise in incomes for the lower tiers of the income distribution, you have to realize that all — yes, all — of this rise comes from the women, both because more women are in the paid labor force and because women’s wages aren’t as much below male wages as they used to be.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson.

Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group — say, working-class whites — experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has.

So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.

In Oakland and Redwood City, industrial shredders the size of department stores grind thousands of junked automobiles into fist-sized scraps, loading the lumps onto waiting ships to become fodder for a global recycling industry.

But as the “green steel” goes out to sea, the leftovers — pulverized seat cushions, insulation and grime, collectively known in the shredding industry as “auto fluff” — are trucked to regional landfills. There, buried in mountains of trash, the byproducts of long-dead cars begin a second, potentially toxic life that could loom as a hazard to environmental health.

Off the road, junk cars continue to pollute because of what some critics say is a decades-long failure by California to properly regulate the powerful automobile recycling industry. Millions of tons of potentially toxic refuse created by recyclers of cars and heavy home appliances in the Bay Area have been buried in municipal landfills, instead of being transported in specially designated trucks and placed in dumps for toxic materials — a mode of transport and disposal that can dramatically increase costs.

The recyclers are able to avoid the increased cost of toxic waste disposal because of a special exemption from state regulators.

“Populations have moved close to those landfills,” said Gale Filter, a former deputy director for enforcement at the Department of Toxic Substances Control, or D.T.S.C., under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. “We have an industry that’s not keeping pace with huge concerns about human health and the environment.”

“The shredding business poses a risk to the environment, as well as to people’s health,” Mr. Filter said.

In 2010, auto shredders deposited 591,271 tons of waste in California landfills. At the same time, their massive shredders can spew tons of toxic dust into the air, putting nearby residents at risk, according to a study by the University of California, Davis, that was commissioned by the toxic substance control agency. The industry commissioned its own study, which concluded that toxic emissions detected near a Los Angeles area facility came from sources other than automobile shredding.

The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, announced in January that it had ordered Sims Metal Management to comply with federal Clean Water Act laws after inspections that revealed evidence of unlawful discharges of mercury, lead, copper and zinc near San Francisco Bay, as well as banned carcinogens known as PCBs, which are found in older cars.

The company issued statements saying it was committed to a healthy environment, and expected the matter to be resolved to the E.P.A.’s satisfaction.

Meg Rosegay, a lawyer in San Francisco who represents the auto recycling industry, said that the fluff is safe, despite Mr. Filter’s comments. “I think the former director of enforcement is expressing his personal opinion, and perhaps the opinion of certain individuals on the department staff,” she said. “We have done significant testing on the material and have reached different determinations.”

State regulators have long been concerned about the environmental impact of auto recycling. But for 30 years, former state officials say, the industry has used its influence in Sacramento to thwart further environmental controls. Recently, with Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointment of a new Department of Toxic Substances Control chief, there are signs the situation could be about to change. But any new rules about the handling of auto fluff may come too late to deal with millions of tons of potentially toxic waste already buried in California landfills.

“Can I tell you where it all went? No,” said Brian Johnson, who succeeded Mr. Filter as the agency’s deputy director for enforcement, referring to auto fluff generated over the past three decades. “We at the D.T.S.C. don’t have a clear handle on where it goes because we have not regulated it.”

In 1988, regulators exempted auto shredders from state rules that required hazardous waste to be buried in landfills designed to provide extra protection for underground water supplies. What some critics call a toxic loophole was the result of a compromise, struck between regulators and California recyclers. The exemption allows the industry to declare waste safe if it is insulated with a special, cement-like coating in a process akin to covering the chocolate center of an M&M with a hard candy shell. The idea was that the coating would seal in heavy metals and other toxins, keeping them from leaching through the rotting, wet garbage of a landfill.

Industry representatives say the treatment makes their waste safe. State regulators agreed to the plan, in part because one potential alternative — millions of junked cars rusting in fields around California — posed an even more daunting environmental danger.

But in 2000, one of the state’s own experts confirmed what other scientific specialists had been saying for years: that the coating, made from industrial lime, could not withstand the highly corrosive sludge found inside landfills.

Peter Wood, a scientist with the toxic substances control agency, ascertained that even with the hard coating, the waste could leach lead, zinc and other hazardous minerals into landfills.

Ordinarily, his 2002 draft report should have led to a final version, Mr. Wood said, which in turn could have triggered re-evaluation of the fluff exception. But the report sat on a shelf for years in draft form. “I think it raised a number of questions that caused people not to want it finalized,” Mr. Wood said.

Even as Mr. Wood’s report remained in draft form, officials in local communities began to suspect that the buried auto fluff was unsafe. In 2005, auto-recycling waste ignited at a landfill near Livermore, leading to tests by the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board that detected leachable toxins.

Similar concerns were raised in San Mateo County, as well as in Simi Valley during hearings about a proposed local landfill.

In 2009, Mr. Schwarzenegger’s toxics control chief let industry officials know the state would consider closing the shredder waste exception.

“Staff was looking at whether, in fact, the materials were toxic,” said Maureen Gorsen, a former chief of the toxics agency. “They were doing studies. We were hiring experts. And that was in process when I left the agency.” But, she said, the auto recycling industry “hired a bunch of lobbyists and something happened.”

Proposed new rules were set aside. Recently, California shredding plants have been cited for air and water quality violations associated with operational pollution rather than landfill waste.

In September, state regulators announced a $2.9 million settlement with S.A. Recycling, a joint venture involving Sims Metal Management, which describes itself as the world’s largest auto recycling company. The company’s Terminal Island shredder was accused of spewing tons of microscopic particles of lead and other contaminants onto neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.

In a statement, Sims Metal said government allegations involving hazardous waste did not relate to the period when Sims operated the shredder, with “neither S.A. Recycling nor Sims admitting to the truth of any of the allegations.”

In January, the E.P.A. issued a separate notice of violation to Sims after finding PCB levels of 195 times accepted levels, and more than 10 times accepted levels of lead, in sediment near where its 13-acre shredding yard meets Redwood Creek, in San Mateo County.

Asked to comment on the allegations regarding Sims, Ms. Rosegay, the lawyer representing the auto recycling industry, said, “I’ve worked with the industry for 30 years, I have a comprehensive understanding of the industry’s practices.” She added that she knows the industry follows rigorous procedures.

¶Palo Alto, Calif.

¶THE other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

¶Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?

¶Engaging the history of flânerie may be a good way to start answering these questions. Thanks to the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German critic Walter Benjamin, both of whom viewed the flâneur as an emblem of modernity, his figure (and it was predominantly a “he”) is now firmly associated with 19th-century Paris. The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

¶While not deliberately concealing his identity, the flâneur preferred to stroll incognito. “The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,” the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once remarked. The flâneur was not asocial — he needed the crowds to thrive — but he did not blend in, preferring to savor his solitude. And he had all the time in the world: there were reports of flâneurs taking turtles for a walk.

¶The flâneur wandered in the shopping arcades, but he did not give in to the temptations of consumerism; the arcade was primarily a pathway to a rich sensory experience — and only then a temple of consumption. His goal was to observe, to bathe in the crowd, taking in its noises, its chaos, its heterogeneity, its cosmopolitanism. Occasionally, he would narrate what he saw — surveying both his private self and the world at large — in the form of short essays for daily newspapers.

¶It’s easy to see, then, why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”).

¶Online communities like GeoCities and Tripod were the true digital arcades of that period, trading in the most obscure and the most peculiar, without any sort of hierarchy ranking them by popularity or commercial value. Back then eBay was weirder than most flea markets; strolling through its virtual stands was far more pleasurable than buying any of the items. For a brief moment in the mid-1990s, it did seem that the Internet might trigger an unexpected renaissance of flânerie.

¶However, anyone entertaining such dreams of the Internet as a refuge for the bohemian, the hedonistic and the idiosyncratic probably didn’t know the reasons behind the disappearance of the original flâneur.

¶In the second half of the 19th century, Paris was experiencing rapid and profound change. The architectural and city planning reforms advanced by Baron Haussmann during the rule of Napoleon III were particularly consequential: the demolition of small medieval streets, the numbering of buildings for administrative purposes, the establishment of wide, open, transparent boulevards (built partly to improve hygiene, partly to hamper revolutionary blockades), the proliferation of gas street lighting and the growing appeal of spending time outdoors radically transformed the city.

¶Technology and social change had an effect as well. The advent of street traffic made contemplative strolling dangerous. The arcades were soon replaced by larger, utilitarian department stores. Such rationalization of city life drove flâneurs underground, forcing some of them into a sort of “internal flânerie” that reached its apogee in Marcel Proust’s self-imposed exile in his cork-lined room (situated, ironically, on Boulevard Haussmann).

¶Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely. That so much of today’s online activity revolves around shopping — for virtual presents, for virtual pets, for virtual presents for virtual pets — hasn’t helped either. Strolling through Groupon isn’t as much fun as strolling through an arcade, online or off.

¶THE tempo of today’s Web is different as well. A decade ago, a concept like the “real-time Web,” in which our every tweet and status update is instantaneously indexed, updated and responded to, was unthinkable. Today, it’s Silicon Valley’s favorite buzzword.

¶That’s no surprise: people like speed and efficiency. But the slowly loading pages of old, accompanied by the funky buzz of the modem, had their own weird poetics, opening new spaces for play and interpretation. Occasionally, this slowness may have even alerted us to the fact that we were sitting in front of a computer. Well, that turtle is no more.

¶Meanwhile, Google, in its quest to organize all of the world’s information, is making it unnecessary to visit individual Web sites in much the same way that the Sears catalog made it unnecessary to visit physical stores several generations earlier. Google’s latest grand ambition is to answer our questions — about the weather, currency exchange rates, yesterday’s game — all by itself, without having us visit any other sites at all. Just plug in a question to the Google homepage, and your answer comes up at the top of the search results.

¶Whether such shortcuts harm competition in the search industry (as Google’s competitors allege) is beside the point; anyone who imagines information-seeking in such purely instrumental terms, viewing the Internet as little more than a giant Q & A machine, is unlikely to construct digital spaces hospitable to cyberflânerie.

¶But if today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.

¶It’s easy to blame Facebook’s business model (e.g., the loss of online anonymity allows it to make more money from advertising), but the problem resides much deeper. Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.

¶What this means in practice was explained by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, on that same show. “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends?” he asked, immediately answering his own question: “You want to go with your friends.”

¶The implications are clear: Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and even browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively. Through clever partnerships with companies like Spotify and Netflix, Facebook will create powerful (but latent) incentives that would make users eagerly embrace the tyranny of the “social,” to the point where pursuing any of those activities on their own would become impossible.

¶Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg really believes what he said about cinema, there is a long list of films I’d like to run by his friends. Why not take them to see “Satantango,” a seven-hour, black-and-white art-house flick by the Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr? Well, because if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you.

¶Besides, isn’t it obvious that consuming great art alone is qualitatively different from consuming it socially? And why this fear of solitude in the first place? It’s hard to imagine packs of flâneurs roaming the streets of Paris as if auditioning for another sequel to “The Hangover.” But for Mr. Zuckerberg, as he acknowledged on “Charlie Rose,” “it feels better to be more connected to all these people. You have a richer life.”

¶IT’S this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. To that end, Facebook is encouraging its partners to build applications that automatically share everything we do: articles we read, music we listen to, videos we watch. It goes without saying that frictionless sharing also makes it easier for Facebook to sell us to advertisers, and for advertisers to sell their wares back to us.

¶That might even be worth it if frictionless sharing enhanced our online experience; after all, even the 19th-century flâneur eventually confronted advertising posters and murals on his walks around town. Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable. It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way.

¶Worse, when this frictionless sharing scheme becomes fully operational, we will probably read all our news on Facebook, without ever leaving its confines to visit the rest of the Web; several news outlets, including The Guardian and The Washington Post, already have Facebook applications that allow users to read their articles without even visiting their Web sites.

¶As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

¶This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. As the German writer Franz Hessel, an occasional collaborator with Walter Benjamin, put it, “in order to engage in flânerie, one must not have anything too definite in mind.” Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?

¶According to Benjamin, the sad figure of the sandwich board man was the last incarnation of the flâneur. In a way, we have all become such sandwich board men, walking the cyber-streets of Facebook with invisible advertisements hanging off our online selves. The only difference is that the digital nature of information has allowed us to merrily consume songs, films and books even as we advertise them, obliviously.

Since the moment he dropped out of Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg has stayed remarkably focused on two things: Facebook, and being the boss of Facebook.

Early on he was persuaded of the vast potential of the social network he built in his dorm room, say friends, investors and detractors. He pushed his team to be fast and take risks. He resisted efforts to change the way Facebook looked and worked, even if, in the beginning, it meant giving up revenue.

Most important, he arranged the ownership of Facebook so as to give himself extraordinary power to steer the company. By the time Facebook filed for a $5 billion public offering on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg had managed to hold on to more than one-fourth of the shares in the company, and his agreements with other investors enhanced his voting power to almost 60 percent of total shares.

That’s a greater measure of control than Bill Gates had at Microsoft when it went public in 1986 (49 percent), and far greater than what the co-founders of Google had in 2004 (16 percent each). Typically, say Silicon Valley veterans, a first-time entrepreneur gets to the public market with a far smaller stake in his or her creation. Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement leaves little room for investors to have much input on the company’s direction.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s success is an object lesson in what works in crowded, competitive Silicon Valley: Remain in charge, stave off potential predators and expand the company so quickly that no one can challenge the boss.

“He always knew before the rest of us what Facebook could be,” said Paul Madera, managing director at Meritech Capital Partners, who invested in the company in 2005. “Mark’s vision on the purity of the product really did benefit from his control and ownership. It wasn’t subject to committee decisions. It was all Mark.”

The power that Mr. Zuckerberg wields over the company has already drawn scrutiny. “You’re willing to take someone’s money but not willing to invite their participation,” said Charles M. Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware. “It makes meaningless the notion of investor democracy.”

Professor Elsen added that Mr. Zuckerberg’s arrangement is similar to moves by founders of other technology companies, including Google, to create special classes of stock that grant them extra voting power. (The New York Times Company and other media companies have similar structures.)

Facebook declined to make executives available for interviews ahead of the offering.

The focus on staying in charge began early. Sean Parker, one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s first and most important advisers, helped him with that. Mr. Parker had learned a hard lesson himself about losing control: He was ousted by the backers of a company he founded, an online address book called Plaxo. Mr. Parker helped ensure that would never happen to Mr. Zuckerberg.

In 2005, when Facebook got an early injection of capital from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Mr. Parker insisted that he control one board seat and Mr. Zuckerberg control two, Mr. Parker said in an interview last year. When he left the company not long after, Mr. Parker insisted that Mr. Zuckerberg inherit his board seat, giving him three out of five seats.

“The only way I will resign,” Mr. Parker recalled telling the rest of the board, “is if Zuck receives control of the board seat, because he’s the only one I trust to steer the company.”

Before Facebook came about, sites like Friendster and MySpace had already defined social networks. But Mr. Zuckerberg was convinced early on that Facebook could be something greater, and his convictions impressed both peers and elders.

Mr. Madera, the venture capitalist, met him in 2005. At the time Facebook was open only to college students, and the only advertising it took in was from things like students selling bikes at the end of the semester. But Mr. Zuckerberg described what he thought it would become. “It was going to be the first place people went to when they got up in the morning and the last thing they went to before they went to bed,” Mr. Madera recalled him saying. “I thought he was unrealistic. If I’ve learned one thing in the investing business, it’s that when people talk about unrealistic things, you don’t tell them they’re crazy.” Mr. Madera invested anyway, putting in a total of $25 million.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s early backers included many technically skilled company founders, including Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal; Reid Hoffman, who helped build PayPal and founded LinkedIn; and Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape. Through them and others, Mr. Zuckerberg sought out the most successful technology bosses: Mr. Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google.

“There is no problem he doesn’t think he can solve, but he constantly tries to find the smartest people he can to give him advice,” said one of his early advisers and a Facebook investor, who asked not to be identified in the run-up to the offering. “Nearly universally, he asks them, ‘Who are the smartest people for me to talk to about this?’ ”

In 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg brought in Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran executive from Google with expertise in online advertising, to be chief operating officer. She has become a prominent public face for Facebook, but it is always clear who is in charge.

Mr. Zuckerberg has always kept a direct hand in controlling the way the Facebook site works, his associates and advisers say, refusing early on to clutter the news feed with advertising. He tweaked the site constantly, sometimes even earning the ire of users, as when it suddenly made some information that people had made visible only to friends available for all to see. That misstep ultimately prompted the Federal Trade Commission to cite Facebook for engaging in deceptive business practices. Mr. Zuckerberg issued a personal apology, admitting to mistakes.

“Better done than perfect” was how Mr. Zuckerberg described his philosophy on products in Facebook’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

One former Facebook engineer described Mr. Zuckerberg as having taken on a role similar to the one Mr. Jobs held at Apple. Everyone understood that Facebook was his creation, and that he would have the final say over what it would become.

A few years ago, for example, a small team at the company worked long and hard on building a social calendar feature, the engineer recalled. They talked about it for weeks, until the day when they suddenly stopped. The engineer asked what had happened to the project. “Zuck said no,” they told him. “Killed it. Not modified it. Killed it.”

Just as remarkable, he recalled, no one seemed especially upset. “We all sort of viewed Facebook as a manifestation of Zuck’s taste, his idea, his vision,” the engineer said. “When he made a decision, that was the decision.” The engineer did not want to be identified ahead of the public offering.

To Mr. Zuckerberg’s advantage, Facebook grew fast and became so valuable that its chief executive’s influence could not be challenged.

“Mark has retained nearly absolute control over his board of directors,” said Joe Green, a former roommate at Harvard who now runs Causes, which has a popular Facebook application. “Facebook would have been sold a zillion times over if not for Mark. Especially as you hire older people with direct financial needs, you get a lot of pressure to get liquidity. But you need Zen-like self-confidence to turn down a billion-dollar acquisition offer.”

By all accounts, one of the most critical decisions Mr. Zuckerberg made was to defer a public offering for as long as possible. He did not want to get bogged down with regulatory requirements and, improbably enough given his site’s bread and butter, sharing the details of his company’s workings.

David Sacks, who was at PayPal when it went public, remembers what happened there: employees obsessed over the value of their stock and executives worried about making quarterly earnings targets. “You would rather be a pre-I.P.O. company than post-I.P.O.,” Mr. Sacks said.

After Mr. Zuckerberg’s I.P.O., it seems highly unlikely that he will take his billions and leave Facebook. The company’s filing gives Mr. Zuckerberg the authority to designate his successor “in the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death.”

On Wednesday night, hours after the filing, a photo was posted on his Facebook page. It showed his desk, with an open Mac laptop, a yellow Gatorade bottle and a sign that read: “Stay focused and keep shipping.”

What’s the best thing in your city?

Which mani-pedi place represents the pinnacle of nail care according to the aggregated opinions of hundreds of people ranking all the mani-pedi places on a scale of one to five?

Thanks to online tools like Yelp, you can now know the answer to questions like that. These crowdsourcing tools have transformed the way we experience cities, often for the better — they help us streamline our lives and avoid wasting time with subpar businesses. It’s now easier than ever to avoid bad meals and dingy hotel rooms. Jeff Howe, author of“Crowdsourcing,” sums it up nicely: “I’m a guy with three jobs and the parent of nettlesome little children,” he says. “I don’t really have time for a lot of bad experiences.”

But for all Yelp’s virtues, pre-screening every experience can inhibit us, too. These days, many of us wouldn’t think of trying a new hairstylist or hotel without first checking others’ impressions online. “There’s something about Yelp that creates hesitancy,” says Howe. “Before going to a trivia night at an East Village bar I check out the bar’s Yelp page to see what others have said about it, what it looks like, what types of people go there — what I’m essentially looking for is, does this look like me? Do people like me go here?”

I know exactly what he means. I pre-screen everything these days. Usually I’m trying to avoid feeling awkward — I’ve ended up at too many bars where I’m the only patron who remembers life before cable. Last year I decided not to attend the annual Time’s Up! “Fountain Ride” after aYouTube video of one of the past rides convinced me I’d feel insufficiently artsy.

But am I dodging uncomfortable situations, or missing out on great ones? “The efficiency that the Web has brought has downsides,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture. “On balance, it works against happy accidents.” Tenner calls this counter-serendipity: when preconceived notions prevent lucky flukes. For instance, a poorly rated restaurant on Yelp might have a few die-hard fans — outliers who, for whatever reason, love the place. Their reviews might even be posted. But many of us go with the general consensus, writing off anywhere with a three-star ranking or less. “Is it possible that a place you really would have liked doesn’t have many positive comments, but you would have been one of the few positive ones?” asks Tenner.

Even if the ranking doesn’t deter us, by the time we do go to the club or the restaurant, we’ve sometimes seen so much of the place online that we’ve basically pre-experienced it. Having online access to so many venues might make us more adventurous in one sense, prompting us to try things we never would have tried or even have known about. But in another sense, it becomes a less-adventurous adventure, certified for us by hundreds of others who’ve already checked it out, assured us we’ll like it, testified to its quality, cleanliness and safety.

This isn’t the same, by the way, as choosing a restaurant based on a review in the paper. Now everything is reviewed — every bar, every corner store — everywhere, all the time. And if Yelp’s popularity is any indication (the site posted its 20 millionth review last July) our need to check these reviews before doing anything is becoming a borderline addiction. When you can no longer have a drink at a bar that wasn’t first vetted by 83 strangers, spontaneity — which, in some ways, is one of the best things about life in the city — is lost.

An example: A trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C. is preceded by a scan of its 1,400 Yelp reviews, from which you’ll learn some useful information: be prepared for a wait, there are vegetarian options. But you’ll also learn that if you sit at the counter you can chat with the cooks if it’s slow, that the TVs play footage of Barack Obama’s visit, and that the crowd swells with concertgoers whenever a show at the nearby 9:30 Club ends. Supplementing these descriptions are 431 photos of the space, the food, the cooks, the servers. No unanticipated curve balls await you. The scene has been thoroughly canvassed in advance.

Ben’s is an institution that survived the riots of the ’60s to become a D.C. landmark. On Yelp, it’s just another a three-and-a-half-star chili-dog joint. And in some ways, this is one of Yelp’s greatest services: providing a reality check for legendary places hawking average products at insane prices. (Canter’s Deli and the Russian Tea Room also get this treatment.) In fact, in a lot of ways, Yelp is a godsend for good businesses — it’s a meritocratic rating system that rewards quality service with a relative lack of bias.

But quantifying every service and product with a one-through-five ranking can also discourage innovation. One study showed that an extra star on Yelp can boost a business’s revenues by 9 percent. When your cumulative score is worth that much, doing something unorthodox that some people won’t like isn’t necessarily in your best interest. Economists call this the high-level equilibrium trap. Innovating can sometimes mean a brief period of declining quality as you struggle to smooth out the kinks — not such a big deal when you’re only being written about by a professional critic every few years, but a very big risk when you’re being reviewed by your customers on an almost daily basis and those reviews will drastically affect your bottom line.

Even just getting a good score isn’t enough — you need lots of them. “I’m looking for volume,” says Howe, describing how he uses Yelp to find things in the city. “I need at least 35 or 40 reviews. If there are 40 reviews and 4.85 stars, I know that’s going to be good” — a tactic that ends any promise of finding an undiscovered gem.

“And to actually choose … and then to stop looking is to limit your experience of the Internet,” writes cultural critic Lee Siegel in his Internet-skeptical book, “Against the Machine.” Siegel’s talking about the experience of buying watches online in that excerpt. But you could replace the word “Internet” with the word “city,” and the theory would hold up. Today, even a word-of-mouth recommendation can feel insufficient. We want to cross-check it with others’ opinions online, and search for additional options that we might like better. Life in the city is (somewhat embarrassingly) often about consumer choices. Crowdsourcing is supposed to make those choices more manageable, but somehow it also makes them feel relentless.

Too many choices. That’s the first-world urban problem we face. Yelp was created to deal with this problem. And like so much technology, there’s nothing wrong with it. Until we become reliant on it. Then, like Google Maps, we feel lost without it. And suddenly, making the trip to the far-flung neighborhood to check out that Turkish bath or Congolese cafe, having only a vague sense of what it will look and feel like, knowing only what we heard from a friend or read in a blurb in the local alt-weekly — this type of experience becomes a little too unnerving, something we’d better first check out online, just to see.

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