The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 71

Ken Kesey was a muse of the hippie strand of this cultural tapestry. After graduating from the University of Oregon, he went to the Bay Area in 1958 as a graduate student in Stanford’s creative writing program. While there, he worked the overnight shift at a mental hospital and signed up to be a guinea pig in a CIA-funded series of experiments, Project MKUltra, testing the effects of the psychedelic drug LSD. Kesey ended up liking the drug, very much. The combustible combination of creative writing, dropping acid for pay, and working as an orderly in an asylum led to his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

While others were starting electronics companies in the neighborhood around Stanford, Kesey used the proceeds from his book, combined with some acid he had been able to liberate from the CIA experiments, to form a commune of early hippies called the Merry Pranksters. In 1964 he and his posse embarked on a psychedelic cross-country odyssey in an old International Harvester school bus dubbed Furthur (spelling later corrected) painted in Day-Glo colors.

Upon his return, Kesey began hosting a series of Acid Tests at his home, and at the end of 1965 he decided, since he was an entrepreneur as well as a hippie, to take them public. One of the earliest took place that December at Big Ng’s, a music club in San Jose. Kesey enlisted a bar band that he liked, led by Jerry Garcia, which had just changed its name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead.⁶ Flower power was born.

Concurrently there arose a companion cultural phenomenon, the peace movement, that shared this rebellious spirit. The confluence of hippie and antiwar sensibilities led to memorable period pieces, amusing in retrospect but considered deep at the time, such as psychedelic posters exhorting “Make love not war” and tie-dyed T-shirts featuring peace symbols.

The hippie and antiwar movements were both wary of computers, at least initially. The hulking mainframes with whirring tapes and blinking lights were seen as depersonalizing and Orwellian, tools of Corporate America, the Pentagon, and the Power Structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the sociologist Lewis Mumford warned that the rise of computers could mean that “man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”⁷ At peace protests and hippie communes, from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the injunction printed on punch cards, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” became an ironic catchphrase.

But by the early 1970s, when the possibility of personal computers arose, attitudes began to change. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his history of the period, What the Dormouse Said.⁸ In The Greening of America, which served as a manifesto for the new era, a Yale professor, Charles Reich, denounced the old corporate and social hierarchies and called for new structures that encouraged collaboration and personal empowerment. Instead of deploring computers as tools of the old power structure, he argued that they could aid the shift in social consciousness if they were made more personal: “The machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends, in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”⁹

A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the 1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” to proclaim instead “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”¹⁰ Richard Brautigan was the poet-in-residence in 1967 at Caltech, and that year he captured the new ethos in a poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”¹¹ It began:

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

STEWART BRAND

The person who best embodied and most exuberantly encouraged this connection between techies and hippies was a lanky enthusiast with a toothy smile named Stewart Brand, who popped up like a gangly sprite at the intersection of a variety of fun cultural movements over the course of many decades. “The counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of the entire personal-computer revolution,” he wrote in a 1995 Time essay titled “We Owe It All to the Hippies.”

Hippie communalism and libertarian politics formed the roots of the modern cyberrevolution. . . . Most of our generation scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control. But a tiny contingent—later called “hackers”—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation. That turned out to be the true royal road to the future . . . youthful computer programmers who deliberately led the rest of civilization away from centralized mainframe computers.¹²

Brand was born in 1938 in Rockford, Illinois, where his father was a partner in an ad agency and, like so many fathers of digital entrepreneurs, a ham radio operator. After graduating as a biology major from Stanford, where he was in Army ROTC, Brand served two years as an infantry officer, including airborne training and a stint as an Army photographer. He then began a joyful life meandering among different communities at that exciting juncture where performance art and technology intermingle.¹³

Not surprisingly, life on that techno/creative edge led Brand to become one of the early experimenters with LSD. After being introduced to the drug in a pseudoclinical setting near Stanford in 1962, he became a regular at Kesey’s Merry Prankster gatherings. He also was a photographer, technician, and producer at a multimedia art collective called USCO, which produced events that involved acid rock music, technological wizardry, strobe lights, projected images, and performances that enlisted audience participation. Occasionally they featured talks by Marshall McLuhan, Dick Alpert, and other new age prophets. A promotional piece on the group noted that it “unites the cults of mysticism and technology as a basis for introspection and communication,” a phrase that served as a suitable credo for techno-spiritualists. Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious.

For Brand, the 1960s protest slogan “Power to the people” began to ring hollow when used by New Left political activists, but computers offered a true opportunity for individual empowerment. “Power to the people was a romantic lie,” he later said. “Computers did more than politics did to change society.”¹⁴ He visited the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and wrote an article for Rolling Stone in 1972 calling it “the most bzz-bzz-busy scene I’ve been around since Merry Prankster Acid Tests.” This counterculture and cyberculture combination, he realized, was a recipe for a digital revolution. “The freaks who design computer science” would wrest power away from the “rich and powerful institutions,” he wrote. “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” This utopian vision, he added, was “in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science, such as Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, John von Neumann, and Vannevar Bush.”¹⁵

All of these experiences led Brand to become the impresario and techie for one of the seminal events of the 1960s counterculture, the January 1966 Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. After the joys of the Acid Tests, which had been held weekly throughout December, Brand proposed to Kesey that they throw a blowout version that would last for three days. The extravaganza opened with Brand’s own troupe, America Needs Indians, performing a “sensorium” that included a high-tech light show, slide projectors, music, and Native American dancers. It was followed by what the program described as “revelations, audioprojections, the endless explosion, the congress of wonders, liquid projections, and the jazz mice.” And that was just the opening night. The next night was kicked off by Kesey, who had been busted for drugs a few days earlier on Brand’s North Beach roof but was out on bail and orchestrating the event from a command scaffold. Featured were the Merry Pranksters and their Psychedelic Symphony, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang. The writer Tom Wolfe tried to recapture the technodelic essence in his seminal work of New Journalism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: