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 Shannon, 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 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. 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 a 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.
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.
Now: 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 deals 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. Let’s take a quick look at this process by organizing our thoughts around five important films from the last half of the twentieth century.
When, in her 1967 hit song, “White Rabbit,” Gracie Slick sang that “one pill makes you large and one pill makes you small” she was alluding to the contemporary use of LSD to explore altered states of consciousness. But she was specifically invoking words from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll’s Alice books are that sort of children’s book that are also, albeit perhaps secretly, aimed at adults. In the guise of providing charming entertainment for children, Carroll wrote metaphysical fables for adults in which the most fundamental aspects of reality – the conformation and behavior of objects in space and time, their identity from moment to moment – are curiously and marvelously fluid. There is some suspicion that Carroll himself experimented with hallucinogenic drugs – the caterpillar in the famous Tenniel illustration is sitting on a hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria. Whether or not that is so, drug use and its hallucinogenic effects was not exactly a secret among educated Europeans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To name three few obvious examples: Samuel T. Coleridge’s most famous poem, “Kubla Khan,” was supposed to have been composed under the influence of opium; Sigmund Freud experimented with cocaine; and William James wrote about his experiences with nitrous oxide.
For Alice’s author, an instructor in mathematics and logic, and the adults in his audience, a child’s book was a way to escape the reality-based thinking demanded of Victorian adults. This trio – a dreamland, childhood, and mathematical logic – is the mental venue which hosted the late 20th century dance of drugs and computers.
First released in 1940, Fantasia was the third animated feature produced by Walt Disney and was a tour de force. Disney wanted to break new cinematic ground, to present moving images of a kind that had never been seen before. His animators set non-narrative and even abstract imagery to music, packaging avant-garde visual material as a new form of family entertainment. Animation freed image-makers from the bounds of ordinary reality allowing Disney to create worlds beholding only to the idealized patterns and rhythms of the human nervous system. The public, however, was not ready for Disney’s vision and it failed at the box office. 60s, hardly the audience Disney had originally imagined.
Meanwhile physicist Richard Feynman was at Los Alamos running the computation shop in a secret government project to build an atomic weapon. An assembly-line of women cranking mechanical calculators ran algorithms specified by Feynman. This, and the British code-breaking shop that employed Alan Turing, is where the modern computer was born. When the hot war against Germany and Japan gave way to the Cold War against Russia and its allies the US government funded the further development of computing as part of its defense and space programs.
Thus we have the cultural niche in which the seeds of psychedelia and cyberspace were planted. Disney provided the latent rationale for psychedelia in the form of a child-oriented garden of multi-sensory delights while Dr. Benjamin Spock’s best-selling Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care provided an ideology of childhood that justified and protected this niche. The exigencies of defense drove the development of computing and, as we will see, psychedelia as well. As William Wordsworth has said, “the child is father to the man.” And so it would be with the children reared in this, their culture’s playhouse of the mind.
1956 – The Forbidden Planet Within
Based loosely on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Forbidden Planet takes us on a Freudian trip to another world where we meet Robbie the Robot, the progenitor of Steven Spielberg’s R2D2 and C3PO, and the Monster from the Id, the progenitor of those irrational computers that crop up in science fiction. This use of Shakespeare underscores the point that the imaginative devices used publicly to comprehend and present computers often have old cultural roots. Part of the world that Disney had carved out for an indeterminate audience is now being crafted to fit the needs of young adults through the guise of science fiction and the fantasy fiction of J. R. R. Tolkein. Disney’s abstract imagery becomes the stuff of special effects. Similar imagery would be reported by subjects of the LSD experiments that were conducted by the CIA – in search of truth drugs and agents for psychological warfare – and by various clinicians in the United States and Canada.
The term “artificial intelligence” was coined at a 1956 conference held at Dartmouth; the Russians launched Sputnik a year later. Noam Chomsky vanquished behaviorism and revolutionized linguistics by making the study of syntax into a technical discipline modeled on the notion of abstract computation. The human mind was declared to be fundamentally computational in nature.
In the literary world Aldous Huxley initiates modern writing on drug experiences with The Doors of Perception while Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs all published major drug-influenced works. At the same time banker R. Gordon Wasson reaches the general public with an ecstatic article in Life magazine about having discovered that the hallucinogenic mushroom, Amanita muscaria, was the root of much religious experience throughout the world. Psychiatric experts were predicting great things of LSD-aided psychotherapy.
The Josiah Macy Foundation was funding conferences in both arenas, cybernetics and psychedelics. It seemed as though, at last, we were on the verge of discovering the material basis of the human mind and harnessing it to our will. Yet, however this played out in the press, the “real goods” were restricted to relatively small and elite groups of people. Computers were very large and expensive devices that had to be kept in environmentally controlled rooms; very few people saw or worked directly with them. Similarly, these wonderful psychedelic drugs were not readily available; one had to travel to Mexico, or one had to live in a big city and know the right psychiatrist.
People were wishing upon a distant star, imagining a future world over which they, in fact, had no control and for which they had little responsibility. That safe remoteness was about to change. In the 1960s psychedelics became freely available on many college campuses and in their surrounding neighborhoods while the 1970s would see the emergence of personal computers, computers small enough and cheap enough that individuals could own them.
2001: A Space Odyssey – The Crazy Computer Trips the Light Fantastic
From the origins of man to the trip leading us to a new world, Stanley Kramer’s 2001 was both a counter-cultural and a mass cultural event. Based on a story by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark, 2001 features HAL, a computer that goes crazy through being rigorously rational. The film’s final sequence utilizes abstract color imagery – reminiscent of Fantasia, but also of acid trips – ending in an enigmatic image of a cosmic infant. Many of the counter-cultural young were prepared to see that sequence as the Ultimate Trip. It was as though that Final Trip were the only antidote to a computer-induced madness that brings one human epoch to a close and places us at the brink of another one. 2001 was an attempt to create a new mythology of humankind, one thoroughly grounded in the science and technology of the late twentieth century.
Psychedelic drugs broke free of the laboratory and the elite clinic and became available on the street. Many young people experimented freely with these drugs and not a few adopted a lifestyle featuring drug use. Eastern religion, rock and roll, colorful clothes, and back-to-nature utopianism were all part of the formula. However superficial much of this turned out to be, it was quite sufficient to shock and scare people into wondering what was happening in the world. One concrete effect was that psychedelic use and experimentation was made illegal. By that time, however, the cultural cat was out of the middle-class bag. If anything, the prohibition increased the attractiveness of psychedelics as agents of adolescent and generational rebellion and both popular and elite culture in all spheres felt the influence of psychedelia.
This same generation was the first in which many individuals got their hands on computers at a relatively young age. Courses in computer programming entered the college curriculum and departments of computer science were formed. Computers were still large and expensive, but the invention of time-sharing – an outgrowth of the AI movement – made terminals available to many.
Computer culture began to spawn imaginative forms of its own. MIT gave birth to the first video game, Space War, in the 1960s. It ran on a mainframe computer of the time and was the progenitor of those point-and-shoot games that would soon replace pinball machines and invade television sets. In the mid-1970s Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab gave birth to Adventure, a computer game in which players entered Colossal Cave and went from room to room in search of treasure. This game was played by typing and reading text. Adventure became the prototype of the role-playing games which blossomed into elaborate fictional worlds with meticulously constructed visual settings and multiple characters the players could assume. As personal computers became more powerful and graphics techniques advanced, both types of games – and hybrids of the two – became ubiquitous and, when the web emerged, they went online and became communal.
Computer programming became a recognized profession and, as such, needed a mythology of its own, explicating its place in the world of natural and human affairs. These young engineers turned to the same imaginative sources as their drug-taking hippie brethren, science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction in particular gave birth to an experimental drug-influenced New Wave and began to move from the low rent precincts of genre fiction into the hallowed realm of The Literary. These new professionals often sported hippie-style hair and informal dress, thus making a dramatic contrast with the blue suit and white shirt that had been the uniform at IBM and other corporations, which were forced to compromise on these basic issues of personal appearance.
Thus the rhythms of Fantasia began moving out of the world of entertainment and into the broader fabric of life. People modified institutions and cultural practices so that they could live those rhythms rather than simply appreciate them in the guise of childhood innocence. The emerging computer culture becomes a vehicle for domesticating and routinizing some of the freedoms revealed through psychedelia.
1982 – Tron, Into the Mind’s Maze
In Tron we have the first major motion picture where the main action takes place inside a computer, in what has become known as cyberspace. This world, of course, has no visual reality. To depict this world in film, then, one must invent a visual language. The language invented for Tron derives from video games, experimental film, and visionary imagery of psychedelia.
Through the wonders of computer graphics, the computer itself now becomes the medium for a Trip. The lead character of Tron was based loosely on computer guru Alan Kay – his wife was one of the screen writers – who is best-known as the developer of the GUI interface that has come to dominate both personal computers and high-end workstations. When Tron was made the personal computer revolution was in full swing, and Apple’s ground-breaking Macintosh computer was only two years away. The Macintosh would change the way people interacted with computers and make them more accessible to adults as well as to children.
The counter-cultural sixties were thoroughly over and the high tech world of PCs had absorbed much of the adventurous spirit of youth. In the 1960s and 1970s young people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out to form communes and other collective living arrangements. In the 1980s and into the 1990s bright and adventurous young people formed high-tech companies in hopes of becoming wealthy at an early age. They dressed informally and listened to rock and roll though headsets while programming their way, if not to fame and fortune, then at least to exhaustion and sleep. Just as San Francisco and its hinterlands played a seminal role in the counter-cultural 60s, so the same region, and often the same people, played a seminal role in the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s.
New Age this and that became part of the cultural landscape. Yoga and the martial arts were fixtures of shopping malls across the land. While Yoga had been introduced into the West late in the nineteenth century, it owes much of its current popularity to receptiveness engendered in the psychedelic 60s. The martial arts master, with his superior physical prowess and mystical powers of insight and concentration, had become a figure of popular culture. Alternative forms of medical treatment had become more widely available; even the most prestigious medical institutions were teaching meditation to heart attack patients.
Meanwhile the elite world of artificial intelligence had fallen into disarray. The brilliant promises of the 1950s and 1960s went un-kept and the attempt to turn AI into a commercial enterprise went belly-up. The so-called “AI-winter” set in. At the same time the nation’s War on Drugs had kicked into high gear by the moralizing enthusiasm of William Bennett. The post-war baby boomers began moving into middle age.
Using imaginative special effects to combine martial arts mysticism with a look of near-future high-tech grunge, The Matrix brings metaphysics to a mass audience. This particular (solipsistic) metaphysics is quite old, dating back to Descartes; but the film-makers cloaked it in a story that made it accessible to teenagers – the children of baby boomers – out for an evening’s entertainment. What had originated as obscure ideas accessible only to highly educated philosophers working at the limits of their intellectual craft has become transformed into entertainment delivered through the vicarious physical thrills of a scifi action movie.
In the mythology of The Matrix computers represent, not only the oppressive Establishment that has been the object of fear and anger since the counter-cultural sixties, but the fabric of reality itself. Human beings have become prisoners in a giant machine that cultivates them for its own use. Humans need to “trip” – our hero takes a pill prior to being freed from his incubator – to see through the virtual reality illusions the machine spins for them. The object is to break free of the computer-supplied fabric and come to see the world as it really is. Drugs, mystical knowledge, and the martial arts have become a way of escaping and, perhaps ultimately defeating, the machine.
Meanwhile, between laptops and smart phones, computing has become ubiquitous in the world at large. One might thus argue that the world of The Matrix is but an extreme extrapolation from the role that computing does in fact play in the lives of many people. Before dancing down that rabbit hole, however, we should remind ourselves that many citizens of cyberspace use their computers to create conversations and communities that are alternatives to the Establishment symbolized in the movie. The movie uses computing to present a metaphysical fable, but that fable does not necessarily depict how computing technology is actually used by its target audience.
Coda: Bodhisattvas and Philosopher Kings
In Buddhism a Bodhisattva is one who has become enlightened, and thus is free of the cycle of rebirth and its attendant suffering, but elects to remain among the unenlightened so as to help them achieve enlightenment. A Bodhisattva is thus like Plato’s Philosopher King who, having freed himself from the cave of ignorance and illusion to bask it the light of The Good, chooses to return to the cave to help others find their way out. The challenge for today is to become cultural Bodhisattvas and Philosopher Kings. To achieve this end, emerging generations will need to arrive at a new understanding of the sacred – the challenge bequeathed by psychedelic culture – and of the methods and implications of computing. If those projects seem somewhere between hopeless and quaint in the context of current discussions about the implications of Large Language Models and, more generally, whether to regulate the development of AI, and how, well, you see the problem, no?