That (Steve) Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America’s foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates, would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn’t deny having dosed as a young man.

Thinking differently–or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it–is a hallmark of the acid experience. “When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing,” Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann’s one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly “solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead.”

“It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain,” said Herbert. “Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used.”

Burning Man, founded in 1986 by San Francisco techies, has always been an attempt to make a large number of people use different parts of their brains toward some nonspecific but ostensibly enlightening and communally beneficial end. The event was quickly moved to the desert of Nevada as it became too big for the city. Today, it’s more likely to be attended by a software engineer than a dropped-out hippie. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, are longtime Burners, and the influence of San Francisco and Seattle tech culture is everywhere in the camps and exhibits built for the eight-day festival. Its Web site suggests, in fluent acidese, that “[t]rying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.”

John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he’s certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he’s perhaps best known for Gilmore’s Law, his observation that “[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” He told me that most of his colleagues in the sixties and seventies used psychedelic drugs. “What psychedelics taught me is that life is not rational. IBM was a very rational company,” he said, explaining why the corporate behemoth was overtaken by upstarts such as Apple. Mark Pesce, the coinventor of virtual reality’s coding language, VRML, and a dedicated Burner, agreed that there’s some relationship between chemical mind expansion and advances in computer technology: “To a man and a woman, the people behind [virtual reality] were acidheads,” he said.

And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

It’s no secret that Crick took acid; he also publicly advocated the legalization of marijuana. Reese, who reported the story for a British wire service after Crick’s death, said that when he spoke with Crick about what he’d heard from the scientist’s friends, he “listened with rapt, amused attention” and “gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said, ‘Print a word of it and I’ll sue.’”

link to original article here.

By Melinda Newman

Special to The Washington Post
Monday, June 15, 2009

NASHVILLE — As tens of thousands of country music fans made the annual pilgrimage here over the weekend for the summer rite known as the CMA Music Festival, recent news from the four-day event’s organizer, the Country Music Association, has left some executives on Music Row quaking in their cowboy boots.

With the Internet becoming an increasingly dominant way for fans to discover and purchase music, a survey of 7,500 people by the country music industry’s trade organization revealed a sobering fact: Only 50 percent of core country fans have Internet access at home. That statistic, released in March, is far below the national average. A 2008 survey by Nielsen Media Research found that 80 percent of all U.S. homes have a computer, and almost 92 percent of those homes have Internet access.

The 50 percent figure “was a bit of an eye-opener,” admits Tammy Genovese, CMA’s chief executive. “We know that most of our fans have access to a computer. We just didn’t realize they didn’t have it in their homes.”

“It’s dial-up, and it’s just too expensive,” says Chuck Taulbee, 39, from Stockton, Mo., who was in town for the festival, which concluded Sunday and featured performances by such superstar acts as Kenny Chesney, Brad Paisley, Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift. Like many of the people polled in the CMA survey, Taulbee lives in an area without broadband, making accessing the Internet so tedious that he’d rather do without.

In addition to lack of broadband, those surveyed cited cost and concerns over content as reasons they stayed offline. Perhaps more disturbing to the country music industry is the news that 42 percent of those ardent fans who do not have home Internet access have no desire to remedy the situation.

Read more here.

Clearly, the notion that computer networks are booting up the mind of the planet is not a  techno-scientific scenario at all, however much the language of complex systems or artificial intelligence may help may help us get a handle on the Internet’s explosive, out-of-control growth or it’s possible mind-like properties. The leap from the global brain to the Gaian mind remains  essentially a metaphysical move– which doesn’t mean the leap is worth hazarding. For whether or not we take Mark Pesce literally, his vision of the online noosphere gives voice to a growing if inchoate intuition that computer networks and virtual technologies have opened up what amounts to a new category of knowing and being, a unique and unparalleled global space of intelligence, experience, terror, and communion. On the other hand, even if we accept the outlandish supposition that Gaia is indeed waking up and rubbing her satellite eyes, we cannot assume that this electronic consciousness will be unified to itself, let alone achieve a state of mystical perfection.

This is the lesson of Gibson’s Neuromancer myth: The cyberspace AI that achieves technological godhead at the end of his first novel cannot maintain its omniscient infinity, and it fragments into the crafty polytheistic subroutines of Haitian Voodoo.
- Erik Davis – Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information