by Mark Dery
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.20
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 l-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 would 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. “[The 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.”21 “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.”22
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.23
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.”24 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.25
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.
To some sixties futurologists, the machine and the garden were not irreconcilable. Writing in the December 1968 Playboy, the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke imagines an “uninhibited, hedonistic society” of cradle-to-grave leisure, made possible by “ultraintelligent” machines. Much of the planet will revert to wilderness, he predicts, and people will spend youthful idylls in this paradise regained “so that they never suffer from that estrangement from nature that is one of the curses of our civilization.”26Anticipating the techno-eschatology of the nineties, he concludes, “In one sense . . . History will have come to an end. . . . It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God–but to create him. And then our work will be done. It will be time to play.”27 Yoking the counterculture’s Rousseauistic dream of idling away the hours in Elysian Fields to the promise of artificial intelligence, he resolves the atheistic empiricism of modern science with the paternalistic God of Genesis in a clockwork caretaker.
In “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the hippie poet Richard Brautigan echoes Clarke’s sentiments, auguring a “cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony”:
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.28
Analyses of sixties counterculture that characterize it as intractably antitechnological neglect the cyberdelic motifs that counterpointed its back-to-the-land primitivism: the perception of psychedelics as liberatory technologies and of electronic media as mind-expanding psychedelics; the embrace of the public access computer terminal as an instrument of empowerment (“guerrilla warfare for people against bureaucracies”); SF visions of an earthly Elysium made possible by machines of loving grace.
Nonetheless, the reductio
n of the countercultural attitude toward technology to a retrograde neo-Luddism persists because it serves the needs of conservatives, the Left, and libertarian cyber-hippies alike. Time and again, we are reminded that the difference between the cyberdelic counterculture and its sixties prototype is, as Elmer-Dewitt observes, that the cyber-hippies “have found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs.”
In an early Mondo 2000 editorial, Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius (the magazine’s publisher/“Domineditrix” and then editor in chief, respectively) breathlessly promise to report on “the latest in human/technological interactive mutational forms as they happen.”29 Significantly, they place the Zeitgeist of the nineties in opposition to sixties counterculture, locating cyberculture squarely on the “culture” side of the nature-versus-culture polarity:
Back in the ’60s, Carly Simon’s brother wrote a book called What to Do Until the Apocalypse Comes. It was about going back to the land, growing tubers and soybeans, reading by oil lamps. Finite possibilities and small is beautiful. It was boring!30
In the next breath, however, the authors celebrate the decade’s bacchanalian side, which they imply lives on in the thrill-a-minute Nintendo futurism (“High-jacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games”) to which Mondo is dedicated:
[T]he pagan innocence and idealism that was the ’60s remains and continues to exert its fascination on today’s kids. Look at old footage of Woodstock and you wonder: Where have all those wide-eyed, ecstatic, orgasm-slurping kids gone? They’re all across the land, dormant like deeply buried perennials. But their mutated nucleotides have given us a whole new generation of sharpies, mutants and superbrights.31
Mu and Sirius’s Nietzschean “superbrights” are synonymous with Rushkoff’s cyberians, personified by the cyberpunk surfers in “Probability Pipeline,” an SF story by Rudy Rucker and Marc Laidlaw. Rucker and Laidlaw’s characters “are riding the wave of chaos purely for pleasure,” writes Rushkoff.
To them, the truth of Cyberia is a sea of waves–chaotic, maybe, but a playground more than anything else. The surfer’s conclusions about chaos are absolutely cyberian: sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe . . . a world free of physical constraints, boring predictability, and linear events.32
The rhetoric of Rushkoff and the Mondo editorialists reveals how selected intellectual threads have been teased out of sixties counterculture and woven into the cyber-hippie worldview, while others have been dismissed as irrelevant to the nineties. The profound disjuncture between political radicalism (the antiwar movement, the civil rights struggle, black power, the New Left, feminism) and psychedelic bohemianism created a fault line in sixties youth culture. Gitlin sums up the “freak”–politico dichotomy, circa 1967:
There were tensions galore between the radical idea of political strategy-with discipline, organization, commitment to results out there at a distance–and the countercultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself, or for the part of the universe embodied in oneself, or for the community of the enlightened who were capable of loving one another–and the rest of the world be damned (which it was already). Radicalism’s tradition had one of its greatest voices in Marx, whose oeuvre is a series of glosses on the theme: change the world! The main battalions of the counterculture–Leary, the Pranksters, the Oracle[a hippie newspaper]–were descended from Emerson, Thoreau, Rimbaud: change consciousness, change life!33
This dichotomy is resolved, in the cyber-hippie subculture, by jettisoning “the radical idea of political strategy” and updating “the counter-cultural idea of living life to the fullest, right here, for oneself.” In cyberdelia, the victory of the countercultural tradition over political radicalism is all but complete. As Gitlin notes, countercultural phrasemakers such as Leary were “antipolitical purists” for whom politics was “game-playing, a bad trip, a bringdown, a bummer. Indeed, all social institutions were games. . . . The antidote to destructive games was–more playful games.”34 In like fashion, movement politics or organized activism of virtually any sort are passé among the cyber-hippies, for whom being boring is the cardinal sin and “high-jacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games” the be-all and end-all of human existence. After all, “sport, pleasure, and adventure are the only logical responses to a fractal universe.”
The Yippies Take Tomorrowland:
Mondo 2000’s Brave New Age35
Mondo 2000 will introduce you to your tomorrow–and show you how to buy it today!
–publisher’s catalogue blurb for
Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge36
The Future is Fun! The Future is Fair! You may already have won! You may already be there!
—the Firesign Theatre37
Coming to grips with Mondo 2000 is like wrestling the shape-shifting liquid metal android in Terminator 2. By turns illuminating and infuriating, the magazine is an in-crowd status symbol, a career vehicle for would-be Warhols, a beacon of Utopian hope, and a source of dystopian anxiety. Epitomizing the contradictions of the cyber-hippie phenomenon, Mondo (“M2k” to its fans) has one foot in the Aquarian age and the other in a Brave New World. It is pessimistic about political solutions but Panglossian about technological ones; hardened by cyberpunk cynicism but softened by New Age credulity; eager to jettison the body but determined to retain its humanity; obsessed with upgrading brainpower (through smart drugs, mind machines, neural implants, and nanotechnological tinkering) but impatient for the fleshly pleasures of the “Dionysian revival” prophesied by Mondo’s publisher, Queen Mu.
Mondo’s contradictions manifest themselves in the jarring incongruity of its contents. Issue number five is typical: The soft-core pictorial “Bacchic Pleasures,” a cyber-Dionysian fantasy acted out by nude models with hunks of circuit board lashed uncomfortably to their privates, makes a strange bedfellow for John Perry Barlow’s “Virtual Nintendo,” a sobering reflection on the use of electronic media in the Gulf War to “give war a new lease on death–by keeping it at a distance and transposing another, denatured, reality between the electorate and barbecued bodies.”38
Mondo’s brief history has been fraught with internal tensions between the magazine’s hippie/New Age lineage and its libertarian/cyberpunk stance; between its Beavis and Butt-Head anti-intellectualism and the starstruck attentions it lavishes on academic celebrities; between the swooning, fin de siècle romanticism that flowers in Queen Mu’s prose (“Cancer of the penis must be the ultimate in karmic diseases–just too exquisitely perfect for an incarnation of Orpheus. Jim [Morrison] must have pondered the sweet irony.”) and the smirking, isn’t-it-ironic Gen X cynicism exemplified by Andrew Hultkrans’s column, The Slacker Factor (“This is our 15 minutes of fame. Sell out while you still have the chance.”).39
But Mondo turns its contradictions into rebel cool, running up the Jolly Roger of political incorrectness, “social irresponsibility” (Sirius’s catch-phrase), adolescent fun, and shameless sellout. It is no coincidence that Sirius, the magazine’s former editor and current “Icon-at-Large,” frequently sports a photo button of Andy Warhol. In Mondo, Warhol’s philosophy of brazen self-promotion reaches its zenith: Queen Mu interviews herself under a pseudonym, Sirius’s girlfriend is adoringly profiled, Sirius’s rock band is interviewed at length, a book is reviewed by its author, a pair of smart-drink manufacturers who advertise extensively in the magazine are the subject of frequent, fawning interviews.40
Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), a fortysomething former yippie who likes to toss off calculatedly contrarian zingers, is unruffled by such charges. “Be mercilessly politically incorrect,” he exhorts, in Mondo’s fourth issue. “Be commercially successful by being pleasingly offensive. Subvert through media, not because you think you can ‘change the system’ but because successfully tickling America’s self-loathing funnybone is an amusing form of foreplay.”41 This is D. H. Lawrence’s “revolution for fun,” staged by reality hackers who want to upset th
e apple cart not for lofty principles, but to see which way the apples will roll. In his poem “A Sane Revolution,” Lawrence wrote Mondo’s position paper:
If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don’t do it in ghastly seriousness,
don’t do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.42
On the BBS (bulletin board system) the WELL, Sirius responds to the cultural critic Vivian Sobchack’s charge that “fancy footwork” is required to resolve the tension between Mondo’s self-styled “New Edge” futurism and its New Age romanticism, between its sixties social consciousness and its “privileged, selfish, consumer-oriented, and technologically dependent libertarianism.”43 Emphasizing the magazine’s use of irony to let the air out of its own hype, Sirius counters that Sobchack takes Mondo’s “clearly double-edged, deliberately provocative, and at the same time honest ‘embrace’ of high-tech consumerism all too literally.”44
On the other hand, he implies, Mondo futurism and sixties-style social consciousness may not be as antithetical as they seem. Sirius refers Sobchack to the manifestos of the Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury-based anarchist collective that harmonized the counterculture’s Arcadian longings with the technetronic age. According to Sirius, the Diggers preached the Arthur C. Clarkeian gospel of “a post-scarcity culture where work was obsolete, ‘all of [us] watched over by machines of loving grace.’”45
In a Washington Post interview, Sirius recalled, “We wanted to believe in this cybernetic vision, that the machines would do it for us. And I maintained that vision, somewhere in the back of my head.”46 A fateful acid trip in 1980, days after John Lennon’s death, somehow assured him of “the all-rightness of everything”—a revelation that spurred him to leave the sixties behind and catch up with the emerging computer culture around him.47 Delving into Scientific American, he soon concluded that the Diggers’ anarchist utopia of universal leisure and infinite abundance lay within reach; the revolution, if it happened, would be brought about not by political radicals but by the high-tech breakthroughs of capitalist visionaries. But why settle for a cybernetic Eden when the promise of prosthetic godhood lay somewhere over the rainbow? Inspired by Timothy Leary’s premonitions in the seventies of “space migration” to off-world colonies, Sirius incorporated a high-tech take on the human potential movement into his vision of robotopia.