About This Book
Most people know Timothy Leary as the counterculture psychedelic guru who told a generation to turn on, tune in, and drop out. What fewer people know is that in the last decade of his life, Leary became genuinely fascinated by the emerging digital frontier and saw in it the same liberating potential he had once found in altered states. Published in 1994, just as the internet was becoming accessible to ordinary people, Leary was already arguing that the personal computer was the LSD of the information age. Reading it now, knowing what the internet became, is a complex experience. Some of his optimism feels painfully naive. But his core insight—that technology changes consciousness—feels more true than ever.
For a different countercultural take on consciousness expansion, Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations takes the psychedelic exploration that Leary championed into the Amazon rainforest and toward very different conclusions.