“I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a
big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley.”
Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in
1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide. His first experience
with LSD “was kind of a bum trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of
other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours.
The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together
(which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard
Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what
computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down
tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a
handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and
virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe. How much does
the idea of cyberspace, an immaterial realm where one can construct a
new identity and merge with a community of virtual others, owe to an
imagination shaped by the experience of psychedelics? Or for that matter
virtual reality?* The whole notion of cybernetics, the idea that material
reality can be translated into bits of information, may also owe something
to the experience of LSD, with its power to collapse matter into spirit.
Brand thinks LSD’s value to his community was as an instigator of
creativity, one that first helped bring the power of networked computers
to people (via SRI computer visionaries such as Doug Engelbart and the
early hacker community), but then was superseded by the computers
themselves. (“At a certain point, the drugs weren’t getting any better,”
Brand said, “but the computers were.”) After his experience at IFAS,
Brand got involved with Ken Kesey and his notorious Acid Tests, which
he describes as “a participatory art form that led directly to Burning
Man,” the annual gathering of the arts, technology, and psychedelic
communities in the Nevada desert. In his view, LSD was a critical
ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment, and
tolerance of failure, that distinguish the computer culture of the West
Coast. “It gave us permission to try weird shit in cahoots with other
people.”
On occasion, the LSD produced genuine insight, as it did for Brand
himself one chilly afternoon in the spring of 1966. Bored, he went up onto
the roof of his building in North Beach and took a hundred micrograms of
acid—Fadiman’s creativity dose. As he looked toward downtown while
frankie
(Frankie)
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