Escape Velocity (4 page)

In cyberdelia, the values, attitudes, and street styles of the Haight-Ashbury/Berkeley counterculture intersect with the technological innovations and esoteric traditions of Silicon Valley. The cartoon opposites of disheveled, dope-smoking "head" and buttoned-down engineering student, so irreconcilable in the sixties, come together in Sterling's hippie techno-phile and RushkofFs cyberians. Increasingly, the media image of the Gen Xers who predominate in high-tech subcultures is that of the cyber-hippie or, in England, the "zippie" ("Zen-inspired pagan professional"). Toby Young, the associate editor of England's Evolution magazine, defines zippies as "a combination of sixties flower children and nineties techno-people."

Like his or her sixties predecessor, the archetypal cyber-hippie featured in Sunday supplement articles is largely a media fiction, synthesized from scattered sightings. He or she sports jewelry fashioned from computer parts by San Francisco's Famous Melissa and dresses in "cyberdelic softwear" from the San Francisco designer Ameba-op-arty T-shirts

printed with squirming sperm, leggings adorned with scutthng spiders, belled jester caps popular at raves. He or she meditates on cyberdelic mandalas like the New Electric Acid Experience video advertised in Inner Technologies, a mail-order catalogue of "tools for the expansion of consciousness." "Recreate the Summer of Love with this '90s version of a '60s light show," the blurb entreats.

There's something for everyone here: soft swatches of moving color, hypnotic, pulsating mandalas, psychedelicized fractals, surreal film imagery, computer animation, and advanced film graphics. A guaranteed mind-war ping experience!^

In addition, cyber-hippies sometimes seek switched-on bliss through Mindlabs, InnerQuests, Alphapacers, Synchro-Energizers, and other "mind machines"-headphone-and-goggle devices that flash stroboscopic pulses at the user's closed eyes, accompanied by synchronized sound patterns and, in some cases, low-level electrical stimulation of the brain. Advocates claim the devices induce trancelike states characterized by deep relaxation, vivid daydreams, and greater receptivity toward autohypnotic suggestions for behavior changes.

Alternately, a cyber-hippie might choose to boost his or her brain power with "smart drugs"-Piracetam, Vasopressin, and other central nervous system stimulants and so-called "cognitive enhancers" that allegedly increase the production of chemicals associated with memory or speed up the rate of information exchange in the brain's synaptic structure.^

What distinguishes the cyberdelic culture of the nineties from psychedelic culture, more than anything else, is its ecstatic embrace of technology. In his 1993 Time cover story on the phenomenon, Philip Elmer-Dewitt asserts that cyberdelia "is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As [Howard Rheingold] puts it, They're tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the '60s were.'. . . For all their flaws, they have found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs-something the back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished."^ Similarly, in his introduction to Mirrorshades, the 1986 cyberpunk omnibus that brought the SF subgenre into the mainstream, Bruce Sterling argued that cyberpunk signaled "a new alliance ... an integration of tech-

nology and the '80s counterculture."'^ Sixties counterculture, by comparison, was "rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech."'*

To the extent that they define themselves in opposition to the Woodstock Nation, high-tech subcultures-whether cyberdelic or cyberpunk-insist on this reductive reading of sixties counterculture. Even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the w^idespread dismissal of sixties counterculture as "a return to nature that ended in disaster," to quote Camille Paglia.'^ Hippiedom inherited the Blakean vision of a return to Eden and the Emersonian notion of a transcendent union wdth Nature by w^ay of Beat poets such as Gary Snyder, w^ho counseled a tribal, back-to-the-land movement, and Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" demonized America as an industrial Moloch "whose mind is pure machinery." Such intellectual currents led, for some, to the antitechnological utopianism expressed in the rural commune. "It was inevitable that hippie values would lead true believers back to nature," the popologists Jane and Michael Stern write in Sixties People. "Although virtually all of them were Caucasian, hippies relished their romantic self-image as nouveau red men, living in harmony v^th the universe, fighting against the white man's perverted society of pollution, war, and greed."'^

Nonetheless, sixties counterculture simultaneously bore the impress of Zbigniew Brzezinski's technetronic age. As Sterling notes, "[N]o counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid-it came from a Sandoz lab."'"^ A popular button turned the E.I. Du Pont slogan, "better things for BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY," into a sly catchphrase for acidheads. At the same time, as Theodore Roszak points out in The Making of a Counter Culture, the Learyite article of faith that the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change could be found in a chemical concoction sprang from a uniquely American faith in technology. In that sense, he argues, the Du Pont slogan on the hippie button

[wasn't] being used satirically. The wearers [meant] it the way Du Pont means it. The gadget-happy American has always been a figure of fim because of his facile assumption that there exists a technological solution to every human problem. It only took the great psychedelic crusade to perfect the absurdity of proclaiming that personal salvation and the social revolution can be packed into a capsule.'^

The archetypal hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite, from the feedback-drenched electric soundtrack to the signature visual effects (created with film, slides, strobes, and overhead projectors) to the LSD that switched on the whole experience.

The emergent computer culture of the sixties overlapped, even then, with the counterculture. "Students were signing up in droves to take courses in computer studies," report the authors of The '60s Reader, "though having a home computer was beyond the wildest imaginings of most of them."^^ Prophetically, one of Ken Kesey's ragtag hippie troupe the Merry Pranksters was a not so distant relative of Sterling's bohemian techie-a computer programmer named Paul Foster whose life "seemed to alternate between good straight computer programming," when he wore the standard-issue suit and tie, and wilder times with the Pranksters, during which he sported a homemade psychedelic jacket festooned with "ribbons and slogan buttons and reflectors and Crackerjack favors."'^

Similarly, the electrical engineer and hardware hacker Lee Felsen-stein "balanced the seemingly incompatible existences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer," writes Steven Levy in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolutions^ Swept up in the political radicalism of the Berkeley-based free speech movement but obsessed with electronics at a time when technology was regarded with deep suspicion by radicals, Felsenstein strove to reconcile his divided loyalties. He and another activist hacker, Efrem Lipkin, went on to create the Bay Area electronic bulletin board Community Memory in 1973. Dedicated to the proposition that alternative networking was inherently empowering. Computer Memory was free to any and all through two public access terminals. "By opening a hands-on computer facility to let people reach each other, a living metaphor would be created," writes Levy, "a testament to the way computer technology could be used as guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies."'^

Felsenstein and Lipkin weren't the only members of the counterculture to champion personal computing as an engine of social change. Bob Albrecht, a longhaired, wild-eyed zealot with a background in computing, founded a newspaper and a computer center, both called the Peoples' Computer Company. The technovisionary Ted Nelson self-published a

"counterculture computer book" titled Computer Lib, an impassioned manifesto for an imagined movement whose battle cry would be "computer POWER TO THE people!" Intriguingly, Roszak recently countered Newt Gingrich's use of the term "countercultural" to demonize boomer Democrats with the charge that Gingrich is

more beholden to the '60s than he may know. It was guerrilla computer hackers, whose origins can be discerned in the old Whole Earth Catalogue, who invented the personal computer as a means, so they hoped, of fostering dissent and questioning authority. Ironically, this is the same technology on which Mr. Gingrich, the "conservative futurist," is banking to rebuild the economy.^°

Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand, who put the hacker subculture on the map with his 1972 Rolling Stone article, "Frantic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums," has straddled fringe computer culture and the counterculture almost since their inception. "It's all connected," he says. "It's certainly true that psychedelic research, on back to Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles, is very much a Californian phenomenon, as is the personal computer revolution, which is probably reflective of the frontier status of the American West Coast. The early hackers of the sixties were a subset of late beatnik/early hippie culture; they were longhairs, they were academic renegades, they spelled love 1-u-v and read The Lord of the Rings and had a [worldview] that was absolutely the same as the Merry Pranksters' and all the rest of us world-savers.

"But they had a better technology. As it turned out, psychedelic drugs, communes, and Buckminster Fuller domes were a dead end, but computers were an avenue to realms beyond our dreams. The hippies and the revolutionaries blew it, everybody blew it but them, and we didn't even know they existed at the time! They weren't getting on television like Abbie [Hoffman] and blowing their own horn; they were just inventing the future and they did it with an astounding sense of responsibility, which they embodied in their technology, right there in the chips-a complete blending of high technology and down-and-dirty pop culture."

Where Brand sees the PC revolution as the phoenix that rose from the ashes of hippie romanticism and New Left radicalism, Timothy Leary sees

it as a vindication of the counterculture; without the psychedelic revolution, he suggests, the personal computer w^ould have been unthinkable. "It's well known that most of the creative impulse in the software industry, and indeed much of the hardware, particularly the Apple Macintosh, derived directly from the sixties consciousness movement," he asserts. "pPhe Apple cofounder] Steve Jobs went to India, took a lot of acid, studied Buddhism, and came back and said that Edison did more to influence the human race than the Buddha. And [Microsoft founder Bill] Gates was a big psychedelic person at Harvard. It makes perfect sense to me that if you activate your brain with psychedelic drugs, the only way you can describe it is electronically.'*

Indeed, throughout the sixties, the social effects of psychedelic drugs, electronic technologies, and youth culture were perceived as synergistic. In a 1969 Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan theorized that hallucinogenic drugs were "chemical simulations of our electric environment," a method of "achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip."-^' "Movies That Blitz the Mind," a Life article on the wraparound, multiscreen extravaganzas at Expo '67 in Montreal, likened the disorienting whirl of high-tech multimedia to the sensory derangement of psychedelics: Spectators were "deliberately thrown off-balance mentally and even physically" by the LSDlike sensory assault of a "visual blitz" that made "audiences understand more through feeling than through thinking."^^

In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's picaresque chronicle of the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Kesey's proto-cyberdelic commune maintained a shaky equilibrium between psychedelics and cybernetics, between the counterculture's back-to-nature folksiness and its neon nowness. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is largely an account of the Pranksters' manic, cross-country trip, in which the wackily costumed^ acid-addled troupe challenged consensus reality with hit-and-run guerrilla theater. Significantly, the drug-soaked Pranksters employed both psychedelic and electronic technologies in their demolition of square reality. Their refurbished 1939 school bus, hand-painted with a riot of psychedelic Day-Glo motifs, was loaded down with gadgetry, wired for sound from stem to stern:

Sandy . . . rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it

would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road.^^

A Prankster could listen to the various sound sources simultaneously, on headphones, and free-associate into a microphone hooked up to a tape delay system, improvising over layers of his own echoed words. When the Pranksters returned to their headquarters in rural La Honda, California, Kesey created an electronic Arcadia, wiring nature itself: "There were wires running up the hillside into the redwoods and microphones up there that could pick up random sounds . . . [and] huge speakers, theater horns, that could flood the gorge with sound."^'* In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin describes the Prankster-sponsored acid tests as public mental meltdowns made possible by free acid,

pulsating colored lights, Prankster movies, barrages of sound and music, weirdly looped tape-recorders, assorted instruments, a flood of amplified talk. For Kesey, like Leary . . . had a vision of "turning on the world," electrifying it courtesy of the most advanced products of American technology. ^^

The slang says it all: The inhabitants of the sixties counterculture exemplified by Kesey and his Pranksters may have dreamed of enlightenment, but theirs was the "plug-and-play" nirvana of the "gadget-happy American"-cosmic consciousness on demand, attained not through long years of Siddharthalike questing but instantaneously, by chemical means, amidst the sensory assault of a high-tech happening. And when the Pranksters and their ilk attempted to go back to the garden, they brought the madcap, sped-up "electric circus" of modern media culture with them, wiring the garden for sound.