At the 1977 Libertarian Party Convention, mind-expansion advocate and LSD guru Timothy Leary gave a speech that few of us took very seriously. He spoke of something called the Internet, a network that would connect computers worldwide, allowing participants from around the globe to sign on and retrieve text, photographs, audio and video instantaneously, and to communicate in realtime with anyone in the whole world who also had a computer and a connection. He said that it would be the new revolution against the current social order and stifling status quo. He predicted it would be much, much bigger than drugs in its ability to overthrow the establishment. Whereas tuning in, turning on and dropping out had been of great interest to a somewhat narrow subset of the population, everyone would be able to use the Internet, in his own way, and thus the new revolution against the old order would transcend class, age, nationality and all other demographics. The bourgeois would have just as much interest and use for it as the so-called counterculture. And nothing would ever again be the same.
As I said, no one at the time really believed it.
lewrockwell.com: The Internet vs. the State
(via Reason)
October 21, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Just a side note on Leary’s model of developmental psychology HERE
October 25, 2007 at 12:06 am
I am deeply and pleasantly surprised to see that Lew would give Leary his due like that.
October 25, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Actually, Lew Rockwell didn’t – Eric Garris did (he’s the web master of lewrockwell.com and of antiwar.com).
October 18, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Apparently he didn’t take enough visionary drugs to see that some of us have censored internets, have illegal surveillance (with feedback even), are constantly hacked by government agencies, and that the rest have to down in the ocean of disinformation.