Mind Hacks R Us: The Psychedelic Computer

In scientific prognostication we have a condition analogous to a fact of archery – the farther back you are able to draw your longbow, the farther ahead you can shoot.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

The child is father to the man.
– William Wordsworth

A bit earlier in this millennium I thought it would be interesting to write a book on the parallel evolution of computer culture and psychedelic culture in the United States from mid-century to the end of the millennium. I wrote up a proposal, called it Dreams of Perfection, and it went nowhere. Subsequently John Markoff and Fred Turner each published parts of the story:

John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Computer Industry, 2005.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, 2006.

So, now I’m publishing a slightly revised portion of that old book proposal as a series of posts. I’ve cut the marketing portions of the proposal, leaving only the conceptual overview and the chapter summaries. I’d envisioned five longish chapters, one for each decade. Each chapter was to have been named after a thematically relevant mass-market movie that showed (more or less) during that decade. I’ve retained that structure in this series of posts.

The rest of this post consists of the conceptual overview, slightly revised. The next post will have a short prelude and the chapter summary for first chapter, which used Disney’s Fantasia as its point of departure. That will be followed by posts taking off from Forbidden Planet, 2001, Tron, and The Matrix.

Graffiti by Plasma Slugs, with saturation and contrast boost from Photoshop.

The Dance of Drugs and Computers

During the last half of the 20th century various groups of insiders and outsiders adopted mind-altering drugs and computer technology to create cultural spaces in which we imagined and realized new venues for the human mind. These spaces engaged fundamental issues of freedom and control, of emotion and reason, which have bedeviled humans everywhere, and elaborates them in the through modern science and technology. The psychoactive drugs which, in some sense, free us, have been synthesized through laboratory techniques we have invented, but only recently. The computers which extend our powers of control and order in often surprising ways embody logical forms that date back to Aristotle but where only recently brought to fruition in the late nineteenth century work of George Boole and others. Science and technology thus provide us with objective physical touchstones for the otherwise abstract powers and activities of our hearts and minds.

Taken together with that great Victorian invention, childhood innocence, the technologies of drugs and computers would constitute a cultural arena which served as incubator, nursery, and playground for some of the major lines of development in late twentieth century culture. For, if a society is to progress it needs cultural playgrounds where new ideas can be conceived, tested and developed. Psychedelic drugs and computing – and their associated cultures – functioned as such playgrounds in the latter half of the 20th century. They were, in fact, among the most important cultural playgrounds in America. 

Given the fundamental differences between drugs and computers – what they are and how people use them, between Dionysian drugs and Apollonian computers – it is not surprising that different groups of people have been most interested in one or the other. What is most curious is that these people, and their creations, have often interacted, either directly or indirectly. In some cases, drug people and computer people are one and the same, as was the case in the San Francisco-Silicon Valley area during the 1970s.

Well before that, back in the 1950s, the Josiah Macy Foundation sponsored one series of high profile conferences about psychoactive drugs and another about computers. The cybernetics conferences – a series of about a half dozen of them – were chaired by MIT’s Grand Old Man of neuroscience, Warren S. McCulloch, and included such scientific luminaries as John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shanon, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Late in the decade, with the help of money from the CIA, the Foundation sponsored conferences on LSD; Bateson and Mead figured in those conferences as well. Both drugs and computers promised to reveal, in their different ways, the material basis of mind. And both were new in the 1950s, and so held forth only promise – but promise of what?

The answer to that questions depends, of course, on what people were looking for, what they wanted beyond what they knew and understood. In one way or another people looked to drugs and computers for powers beyond the ordinary, for transcendence of the human condition, and, more rarely, for insight into that condition. Thus if we are to understand the way in which drugs and computers have affected our culture over the last 50 years, we have to start with the aspirations we brought to drugs and computers.

Back in 1940s – and before – and continuing through the present. Animated films directed specifically at children (with their parents in tow) is the matrix in which these forces were brought together, a “universal kid space” in which fancy and fantasy are given full-rein. Walt Disney is the key catalytic figure. The images themselves came to depict human movement with a gravity-defying fluid grace heretofore realized only in the abstract designs of music, though shamans have imagined themselves in such flights while under the ritual influence of sacred drugs and sacred music. But the technology required to create those images embodied a relentless assembly-line logic that was new in the scope and precision of its repetitive actions. By directing these animated pictures specifically at children, film-makers freed themselves from the bonds of reality and allowed themselves freely to imagine idealized worlds quite unlike any places that humans had actually seen and inhabited. Disney’s Fantasia is the apotheosis of this cultural movement. It represents a fully-adult imaginative achievement that would have been impossible to those particular adults, raised as they were, without the facilitating guise of a commercial product aimed at children.

Fantasia, then, is the starting point for my main narrative. Psychedelic drugs take the mind to a different dimension, one that is often as more real than the mundane world. So it was with Fantasia. But Fantasia was constructed in a technological matrix which would soon give birth to the digital computer and, along with it, another series of idealized versions of human possibility, of a future in which machines relieved us of further work and toil. That too was part of the Disney vision.

From there I follow the development of computers and the emergence of psychedelic drugs as people use them to explore different ways of solving the same socio-cultural problem: How do you take the best aspects of the child-oriented world of animated films and make it the basis of a way of life? We have to drop the posture that this fantasy world is only for children and find a way to accept and rework selected aspects of it into lived adult reality.

Psychedelic culture dealt with this problem by trying out an ethic of in-the-moment hedonism that also included strains of romantic pastoralism, on the one hand, and Eastern mysticism on the other. Computer culture dealt with the same issues by offering a workplace ethic of libertarian entrepreneurship and dreams of a future where everyone can achieve a technologically-supported nirvana. These lines of cultural development have converged on science fiction, fantasy, and games as common venues for cultural exploration and expression. In either case, life is conceived along different lines than those described in the buttoned-down middle-class combat zone depicted in William Whyte, The Organization Man, David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, or Vance Packard, The Status Seekers.

This cultural reworking is by no means complete. Nor has it been an easy matter. On the contrary, it has often been confusing, difficult, and painful. As such things always are. Always.