Our Review
Most people know Timothy Leary as the counterculture psychedelic guru who told a generation to turn on, tune in, 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. I read this book in college, around the time Windows 95 came out, when I was experimenting equally with bulletin board systems and psychedelics — which, it turned out, was exactly the convergence Leary was writing about.
I came to him having found my footing in beat literature young, with a taste for sixties counterculture and extracurricular consciousness expansion. Most of what I knew about Leary I'd picked up from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and while I tended to lean toward the Kesey and Merry Prankster faction, I hadn't really picked a side in the original East Coast / West Coast acid divide.
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. What struck me was a connection I'd never quite made before: MK Ultra and the acid tests had shaped a whole generation of art, music, and literature, but I'd never followed that same thread into the technology industries taking root in the same Bay Area soil. The people I talked to about Huxley, McKenna, and Kesey were the same people running BBSs and writing code. The countercultures weren't parallel. They were the same culture.
Some of his optimism reads painfully naive now, knowing what the internet actually became. But his core insight — that technology changes consciousness — feels more true than ever. This book is an artifact of a particular moment, the breath before the internet fully blossomed, and I'd recommend it to anyone drawn to the place where psychedelics and technology converge.
And for me, it's personal. I'm a licensed ham radio operator and SYSOP for a nationwide bulletin board system that runs entirely over RF using packet radio, bypassing phone lines and internet infrastructure altogether. Leary was rhapsodizing about networks that would liberate information and decentralize power. I'm building one — just over radio waves instead of copper.
For a different countercultural take on consciousness expansion, Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations takes the psychedelic exploration Leary championed into the Amazon rainforest and toward very different conclusions.