The New Hallucinogens
This millenial "New Age" aspect of what we're now calling Web 2.0 was a big feature of Kevin Kelly's August 2005 Wired article, We Are the Web, which provoked Nicholas Carr's stinging rebuttal, The Amorality of Web 2.0. Roger Magoulas, the director of O'Reilly Research, has another take on the same subject. He wrote in email:
"I've been taking care of a neighbor's cat, and while waiting for the cat to return one night I did something I don't normally have time to do - speed remoting through cable tv channels. My attention was drawn to a VH-1 special called The Drug Years - a four hour documentary about drug use and its consequences over the last four or five decades. I was struck by how often the way pundits and folks interviewed used the same adjectives and metaphors to relate their drug experiences as we often hear to used describe the potential of software and the internet: mind expanding / mind blowing; connecting with everyone; global consciousness; new colors and shapes; combining music, colors and movement (i.e., animation); insiders vs. outsiders; the importance of play; ambivalence towards material wealth; etc.
Especially the section that focused on the 60's seemed to capture the same utopian euphoria I'm hearing in the current technology environment (and what I heard during the first boom). Besides the use of mind-blowing adjectives, four themes spanned 60's drug taking and the current technology wave: connecting to everyone (in some type of lovefest context); there are people who get it and people who don't; multi-media helps define what's happening; and, that everything will be different now (in an undefined way).
I know John Markoff made a connection between drug use and the original personal computer hackers in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, but I think this is different. Maybe the 60's counterculture never ended, it just went underground only to reemerge as a source of memes for the current technology culture.
So, following my logic, Web 2.0, DIY, open source, blogs, data are the new hallucinogens, only now it's all legal.
P.S. Hope the subject text doesn't trigger any extra scrutiny from the feds - evidence of another similarity between 60's drug culture and 21st century technology, justified paranoia."
While it's easy to use the parallels to dismiss Web 2.0, to do so is in fact to miss the enormous transformative power of the sixties counter-culture. Millennial thinking is always over the top, but the human longing for transformation and transcendence is nonetheless a powerful force for change. Culture moves in a spiral, not a circle; history repeats itself dynamically, not statically.
tags: meme wars
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Never lived in the 60s, so would never know, but surely the culture was way different back then. Looking at the generation above us abd the way they flinch at todays youth, there is no doubt about it.
The VH1 special was based on Can't find my way home : America in the great stoned age, 1945-2000, by Martin Torgoff. I recently read through a very interesting Well interview with Torgoff. It's possibly instructive to read and compare that one and the one with Markoff on What the Dormouse Said (which was quite good chapter by chapter, but which I found lacking as a book--Torgoff is waiting for me at the library.)
One might take Terence McKenna's hypothesis that just as psychedelic mushrooms first expanded the cerebral cortex to develop symbolic language in primitive man, the psychedelic renaissance that reached a critical mass in the 1960s spurred a new level of abstract thought that has spawned todays technological innovations in software and will eventually transform our perception of reality into a quasi-spiritual swirling mass of information as we approach the Singularity.
One might also suspect this is just magic brain candy :)
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Thomas Lord [07.07.06 08:37 AM]
What are you talking about?
Certainly a lot of things happened in the sixties, for a lot of different reasons. Was there really such a thing as "the sixties counter-culture" which we can study to find the True Origins of everything that happened? Was it really a global question for "transformation and transcendence?"
Sure, that's how certain cheerleaders close to certain mics described it at the time. That was the rumor, in certain circles, and the rhetoric that could be used from time to time to shut down discourse with "the straights." The boosterism sure did help to refine a demographic market of baby boomers. It helped lead no shortage of people into quite irresponsible forms of drug use.
Is it really the right explanation for the anti-war movement? For the student revolts of '68? Does it explain how we got the first live global satellite broadcasts or how their impact played out? Should we find the strength of the civil rights movement flowing from a spiked well spring in La Honda? Does the beat go on inside of hazmat suits outside an Apple store? Is it a refreshing echo of Free Love displayed in the sexual habits of today's teenagers?
A lot happened in the sixties and the first mistake is to pin it all on some some singular shared event ("the" sixties counter-culture) and the second mistake is to worship that non-thing in terms like "the human longing for transformation and transcendence". From that starting point, how can a critical reflection possibly flow? Isn't that just cheer-leading that's all but impervious to reality checks? Worse, isn't it ultimately at attempt to own certain positive events in the sixties -- to claim them as the product of one's own interesting experiences of the time (actual or vicarious)?
Nicholas Carrs' critique is right on the money. The fact that errors of analysis analogous to those he points out can also occur when talking about the sixties does not make them any less mistaken.
-t