IVIV Aunt Reet

[Doug Millison]

The switch from drugs to Internet+I+TV is, is the way I'd shade it,  
and this is a key insight, thanks János.

Reading McLuhan may be fruitful.  In the 50s and 60s, McLuan doesn't  
like very much the way that digital technology is changing humans,  
although his beef seems to be more that we're letting it happen  
without being aware of the changes that digital tech brings to our  
senses, than with the actual changes. He says we should use what we  
know of digital technology to re-program our senses and thus control  
the way that the technology is changing our bodies and minds.   
Manuscript man wasn't able to withstand the advance of print  
technology and the way it changed human perceptions, that leads to all  
kinds of problems, digital technology offers a chance to rectify  
things, but probably won't because of the way it's sucking us all up  
and changing us before we can do anything about it.  This is a very  
rough  paraphrase and reduction of an argument that McLuhan makes in 2  
books:  The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

I haven't read John Markoff's book, but I used to see and talk with  
him at press conferences and other industry events, in Silicon Valley  
in the 80s.  He's written a book that, from what I've read of it,  
includes a focus on the intersection of drugs and computers in the 60s:

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the  
Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

from the Amazon.com page:
"Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology  
or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and  
consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the  
consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant  
evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a  
group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for  
freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey  
and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth  
Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a  
poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology  
writers around."

I know a little about this scene.  After starting a publishing career  
as a marketing assistant working for the publishers of World Coal and  
World Mining  magazines in San Francisco, I was invited down to Menlo  
Park to join Peoples Computer Company  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Computer_Company 
) where we turned Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics &  
Orthodontia into a proper magazine, albeit one that would fulfill the  
PCC mission:
"Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used  
to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that -  
we need a...Peoples Computer Company."

I don't know about LSD at Apple in the Apple II daze, but by the time  
Steve Jobs had left Apple and started Next Inc., we were hearing  
stories about dropping acid with Jobs as part of the interview  
process, although I can't vouch for that being more than hearsay,  
i.e., I don't know anybody who personally did that.

I know people who were developing videogames for Atari, and, later,  
robotics toys for another Nolan Bushnell venture they were into LSD,  
which was also part of the scene at Stanford and Berkeley in certain  
computing circles in the 70s.



On Aug 29, 2009, at 11:26 PM, János Székely wrote:

> 2009/8/30 Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net>:
>> "Someday there will be computers for all this"
>
> A fake after-the-fact forecast quite similar to a fake prophecy
> written down around 1970, projected back to 1945:
>
> "Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are
> the wave of the future." (GR 258)
>
> Note the mention of waves in IT context, also appearing in the
> mysterious "Heart-to-Heart, Man-to-Man" episode (698-699). It is part
> of Semyavin's lament about information becoming the only real medium
> of exchange, supplanting drugs, sex and luxury items (dope notably in
> the first place).
>
>
> I think the switch from dope subculture to IT with all its
> consequences is a key background story in IV.
>
> János