TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Lilly was by no means the only countercultural cyberneticist to dream of galactic machines. During the 1960s, Timothy Leary was the archetypal egghead hippie, draping himself with guru flowers and delving into The Tibetan Book of the Dead for maps of the psychedelic fun house. But by the mid-1970s, he had rejected the “sweet custard mush” of Eastern mysticism and embraced a proto-Extropian worldview that he dubbed S.M.I.L.E., an acronym formed from his pet obsessions at the time: space migration, intelligence increase, life extension. In a number of turgid if influential books, Leary engineered transformational models of the self out of his mildly tongue-in-cheek blend of developmental psychology, cybernetic jargon, and tanked-up cosmic boosterism.

  Sifting through the half-baked neologisms of 1977’s Exo-Psychology—a work rather impishly subtitled “A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers”—one discovers some surprisingly intriguing technomystical discussions of the only “robot designed to discover the circuitry which programs its behavior.” Leary outlines the development of human consciousness according to eight progressively “higher” circuits. When they are locked into the first four “terrestrial” circuits, people are basically asleep, robotically plugged into the fears and rewards of mammalian psychology, consensus trance, and the insectoid hive mind of industrial society. Drugs and metaprogramming tricks like yoga and isolation tanks help trigger the next four circuits, which take us progressively further into nonordinary reality. Liberated from psychosocial repression, the brain begins experiencing itself as an “electromagnetic transceiver” of galactic information; at a later stage, we establish communication with the genetic code itself, a cosmic database that contains the collective history of the species and the plans for its future.

  While claiming that these higher circuits tune in to “mystical” levels of reality, Leary always described them in the mechanistic language of biochemicals, neural pathways, electromagnetic waves, and genes. No “soul” emerges along the way. Like the Extropians, Leary looked to evolution as the true source of cosmic meaning and agency, as DNA becomes the real hero beneath our thousand faces. In a cosmic clown twist on Francis Crick’s theory that DNA may have been seeded from the stars, Leary argued that the double helix arrived on the planet with the sole purpose of producing intelligent life that could one day return to its sidereal palace. Literalizing the transcendent urge that animates gnostic desire, Leary claimed that activating the four higher circuits of his model would make us “post-terrestrial,” preparing us for life in space.

  In Leary’s cybernetic parable, even the technological developments of modern civilization are coded in DNA. Leary suggests that the massive social changes that emerged from the watershed year of 1945 were programmed in advance, DNA-spawned triggers for a new phase of human mutation. The baby boomers were the first crop of offworld superbrights, destined to turn on the higher circuits, go to the moon, build space stations, get “high.” With a brash optimism at once admirable and terrifying, Leary assures us that if we keep our eyes on the big picture, we have nothing to fear. “Billions of similar planets have suffered through Hiroshimas, youth-drug cults, and prime-time television.”26 Radioactivity, electromagnetic technologies, psychedelics, food additives, and even industrial toxins are all part of the plan, signals that sound Darwin’s final trump: wake up, mutate, and ascend. Echoing the otherworldly framework of “The Hymn of the Pearl,” Leary writes: “The brain is an extraterrestrial organ. The brain is an alien intelligence. The brain has no more concern for earthly affairs than the cultured, sympathetic traveler for the native village in which SHe [sic] spends the night.”27 This is the voice of the technomystical elect, the cool Gurdjieffean aristocrat who has overcome his own programmed behavior and now views the ordinary human personality as “an ignorant, gross, uneducated, opinionated, irascible rural innkeeper.” As we saw with the Extropians, a bracing arrogance lurks beneath the posthuman and techgnostic rerun of Darwin’s survival of the fittest.

  At the same time, Leary s vibrant “science faction” remains a creative if delirious call to keep our hands on the rudder of the self, a necessary skill at a time when human consciousness is increasingly interwoven with electronic technologies and media networks. Without going as far as Leary, it does seem that we need to rethink our fundamental relationship to mechanism, both in ourselves and in the world. In a 1992 essay titled “Remaking Social Practices,” the French psychologist and philosopher Félix Guattari noted how virulently we continue to oppose the machine to the human spirit: “Certain philosophies hold that modern technology has blocked access to our ontological foundations, to primordial being.” But, he asks, what if the contrary were true, and that “a revival of spirit and human values could be attendant upon a new alliance with machines”?28 This is the intuition that drives the spiritual cyborg into such uncharted and treacherous seas.

  In this sense, Leary’s prescient plunge into personal computer evangelism in the 1980s was not simply a sign of his relentless and desperate need to constantly ride the cutting edge. As Leary noted in 1987, when he revised Exo-Psychology into Info-Psychology, the new digital devices were destined to reawaken the cybernetic freak dream of reprogramming one’s states of consciousness. Etymologically speaking, after all, computers are literally psychedelic; that is, they manifest the mind. Many psychonauts recognized the potential of personal computers long before the rest of the culture caught on, and a few made fortunes off their iridescent intuitions. With his canny sociological radar, Leary also saw how much the offworld impulse toward outer space and higher planes would come to focus on the “inner,” or cyber, space of the computer. For reasons we will track down in the next chapter, many of the counterculture’s lingering dreams of self-determination and creative magic wound up migrating into the universe of digital code. With the spread of personal computers, the cyborg possibilities of the human-machine interface, spiritual and not, would fragment, decentralize, and begin to spin out of control. The System itself would begin to hallucinate, and the most popular technique of ecstasy would become the ecstasy of communication.

  VI

  A Most Enchanting Machine

  In the 1960s, the utopian imaginary seized America more forcefully than it had in living memory. For all the violence and waste the counterculture both encountered and engendered, it held out a furious hope for a better society, and this fury took the form of a millennialist expectation that ran deeper than reason. Freaks and radicals across the land felt in their guts that, whether it was called the Revolution or the Aquarian Age, a new and more perfect world was just dying to dawn, and this visceral sense of anticipation helped keep the movement’s internal contradictions at bay long enough to confront the System with a loosely united front. But when neither the hard rain nor the garden arrived, the counterculture’s political radicalism and magical desires fragmented and dispersed. In the 1970s, they found new purchase among such balkanized tribes as feminists, whale savers, religious cults, terrorist cells, liberal arts professors, and the nomadic heads who tracked the Grateful Dead through fields and parking lots across the land. But of all the cultural zones that wound up hosting lingering freak dreams, undoubtedly the most unexpected was the universe of digital code, a world tucked inside miniaturized versions of the very machines that once epitomized blue-suited technocracy and military command and control.

  Today the rhetoric that enchants personal computers and digital communication networks continues to draw upon such sixties values as radical democracy, personal empowerment, alternative community, and a decentralized society of free-flowing data. For a few years there, even Newt Gingrich sounded like an anarchist longhair with a megaphone as he spouted techno-Republican visions of the information age. In other circles, the computer radiates overtly cosmic vibrations, especially within the mostly Northern California subculture that Dery calls “cyberdelia,” a world of ravers, technopagan programmers, and high-tech hedonists whose emergence at the end of the last c
entury sought to reconcile “the transcendentalist impulses of sixties counterculture with the infomania of the nineties.”1 But this hopped-up crew, long past its prime, was only the most extreme example of a hallucinatory bitstream whose lava-lamp flows drip into Apple branding, fractal screen savers, virtual reality, CGI, computer game design, and the glory days of Wired.

  On closer inspection, the digital remastering of the counterculture should not seem altogether surprising, for the utopia of the sixties was in many ways a utopia of liberated technique. With designer-prophets like Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri at the visionary helm, one wing of freak technophiles sought to build a new helm for spaceship earth. Attempting to design a “people’s technology” that would harmonize with the rhythms of organic life, these pioneers embodied the same spirit of self-sufficiency and social tinkering that lay behind the experimental religious communes that once dotted nineteenth-century America. Among these architects of community, the most popular almanac was without a doubt the Whole Earth Catalog, founded by the Merry Prankster Stewart Brand in 1968 as an “outlaw information service” that promised “Access to Tools.” Most of the tools listed in the catalog were preindustrial marvels discarded in the hell-bent juggernaut of the twentieth century—wood-burning stoves, tipis, techniques for organic horticulture and midwifery. But the Whole Earth Catalog was also cottage-published and typeset for a fraction of the cost of mainstream magazines, and its editors drooled over hands-on media technologies as well—cameras, synthesizers, stereos, and, most significant for our tale, computers.

  In a landmark 1972 article for Esquire, Brand coined the term “personal computer.” Much of Brand’s fascination with the machines reflected his commitment to Bateson’s version of cybernetic systems theory, which offered a novel, productive, and computer-friendly way of thinking about the ecology and technology of design. Some hippie holists nursed a fascination with all systems, circuit boards as well as tide pools. As Robert Pirsig put it in his 1974 best-seller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”2 Along with the poet Richard Brautigan, a few freaks imagined a “cybernetic ecology” where animals and humans lived in “mutually programming harmony … all watched over by machines of loving grace.”3

  Some members of the counterculture had more political reasons for embracing computers. In 1970 a loose affiliation of dropout computer scientists and radicalized programmers in Berkeley realized that computers offered a potential alternative to the top-down information control that typified technocratic institutions and the mass media. These populist geeks imagined a society driven by the “Hacker Ethics” that the author Steven Levy traces to the late-night computer labs of MIT: an anarchic blend of hands-on control, decentralized networks, and a fierce commitment to the free flow of information. In the early 1970s, a handful of these Berkeley computer buffs made a donated IBM mainframe called Resource One available to the public. Others created Community Memory, a network of terminals stuck in libraries and record shops that served as a primitive bulletin board system, and which soon featured a now familiar stew of data swaps, soft sells, graffiti, and weird personas.

  Neither Resource One nor Community Memory lasted long, and the countercultural dream of bringing computers to the people would have to wait some years, until the scruffy hardware hobbyists at the Homebrew Computer Club near Stanford University started building their own micromachines. Homebrew was the kind of place where a slovenly mastermind like Stephen Wozniak felt at home showing off his cleverly hacked gear. It was also the kind of place that attracted the acidhead and part-time Buddhist Steven Jobs, whose fruitarian diet may have partly inspired the name of the computer he started selling out of a garage with Woz: the Apple. With a name that hearkened back to Eden’s fruit of knowledge (and an initial selling price of $666), the Apple proffered the Promethean dream of putting godly power in your hands. People didn’t just bite the thing—they swallowed it whole. As it turned out, Jobs was not the only former psychedelic bum who made a fortune on the personal computer revolution; Mitch Kapor, the designer of the enormously successful spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3, once taught transcendental meditation and credited “recreational chemicals” with sharpening his business acumen.

  As the eighties progressed, the dreams of the counterculture found a new home in the decentralized digital commons that computer networks had woven through the copper cables and routers of the telephone system. For years bulletin board systems had allowed mainframe Unix jockeys to exchange technical tips, but it wasn’t until people started logging on from personal computers that these computer-mediated conversations blossomed into the “virtual communities” and “grassroots group-minds” described by Howard Rheingold. Rheingold knew whereof he spoke. He was an editor and contributor to the Whole Earth Review, and the granddaddy of these communal BBSes had its roots firmly planted in the Whole Earth. In 1985, Stewart Brand and a former member of Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm founded the WELL—the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. Signing up some veterans from the Farm, one of the longest-lived communes of the early 1970s, Brand hoped to structure the WELL in a manner that would naturally breed community. The system would be an “open-ended universe,” self-governing and self-designing—a cybernetic ecology of minds. And for the smart, white, and liberal Bay Area denizens who started posting to the WELL’s various conferences, the experiment worked like a charm. By creating a place where the clever exchange of helpful information became what Rheingold calls a source for “social capital,” the WELL played the role of the “superior man” described in the I Ching hexagram called the Well: “the superior man encourages the people at their work, / And exhorts them to help one another.”

  Early in its history, the WELL also became a way station for hardcore fans of the Grateful Dead, one of the hoariest institutions of Bay Area freakdom. By the mid-1980s, the Dead were one of the sole living links to sixties bacchanalia, their iridescent jams and creatively engineered sound systems stretching all the way back to Prankster days. Though superficially unsuited for a decade associated with yuppie cokeheads and glossy New Wave haircuts, the Dead actually exploded in popularity as the eighties wore on. And one of their greatest draws was the nomadic community that Deadheads had managed to carve out of the belly of commodity culture. With their earthy costumes, bumper-sticker iconography, and revival-tent enthusiasm for ritualized ecstasy, Deadheads became the closest thing we’ll probably ever see to devotees of a mass psychedelic religion. Alongside their commitment to spontaneous experience and live performance, many Deadheads were also collector freaks and compulsive infomaniacs. During shows, many would regularly pause in the midst of their ecstatic trance-dancing to scribble down the set list; others gathered in the bootleg section of the concert floor to record the performance with high-tech equipment and microscopic concentration. Outside the hall, tapes were hoarded and swapped like baseball cards, while the most devoted geeks compiled mountains of set list data into thick “DeadBases.”

  On top of their already rather virtual community, this info-mania made the Deadhead transition to information space even more fruitful. Deadheads soon became the WELL’s single largest source of income and new members, and they created a community boisterous enough to attract the attention of John Perry Barlow, a prep school friend of Dead guitarist Bob Weir and the wordsmith behind a number of Dead songs. As we saw in the last chapter, Barlow went on to become one of the earliest and most colorful popular proponents of the information society, writing articulate pieces about hackers, hobnobbing with the budding digerati, and cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Mitch Kapor—an organization whose defense of cyberrights owed much of its early punch to the pioneer wing of the sixties counterculture.

  The genteel ex-hippies who first dug the WELL were not the only cognitive dissidents to leave their swirly fingerprints
on the blossoming computer culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Across the bay from the Sausalito houseboats that the Whole Earth folks called home, the freak machine was being savagely hacked anew by a mutant breed of weirdos lurking in the Berkeley hills. Led by a troll-like former Yippie named R. U. Sirius and a wealthy scion known as Queen Mu, this merrily posthumanist crew churned out Mondo 2000, a magazine that self-consciously spearheaded a slick new underground culture between its glossy, Photoshop-spawned pages. Infusing the Prankster psychedelia of the sixties with (over) doses of slacker irony and unrepentant techno-Prometheanism, Mondo 2000 created the demimonde it reported, a kinky pop-up romper room of brain machines, teledildonics, virtual reality games, fetish fashions, electronic dance music, and new designer drugs. It was a rave on paper.

  Mowing down the garden of flower power with cyberpunk glee, Mondo nonetheless perpetuated the freak dream by translating hedonism onto the perceptual plane (hence its fascination with virtual sex). As Dery notes, the magazine had “one foot in the Aquarian age and the other in a Brave New World.”4 But though it served up smart non–New Agey assessments of mind-enhancing drugs and gadgets, the magazine’s smorgasbord of brainware, neural boosters, and sound-and-light gizmos often seemed to be whirring and buzzing in the dark. In Mondo’s hands, consciousness-altering techniques became divorced from any broader notion of consciousness, social or spiritual. Everything was reduced to knobs and sliders on the control panel of the central nervous system. Compared with the flaky rhetoric of sixties utopians, Mondo’s brash attitude reflected a refreshing frankness about the technical dimension of our pleasures, visions, and ecstasies. But from another angle, the hopped-up, plugged-in superbrights of the Mondo world were little more than mindless instrumentalists, “users” in the most decadent sense of the term.