Reply #3: interesting quote

[RainDog]

haven't read that one in a long time.

we're so far from seeing the value in seeing things in another way in this society. funny thing, tho, is that so many of the innovations that make it possible to use DU at this time were part of this other way of looking at the world.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/early-co...

John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said (the title is taken from the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit") tells the story of the important period when the personal computer and the Internet as we know them came into being. He also describes how a new culture of drugs, sex and rock and roll was created at the same time as the computers, sometimes in the same rooms, by some of the same people. Some readers may be shocked by the degree to which the design of modern computing was a central component of the 1960s counterculture in Northern California.

Markoff's book covers the years 1960 to 1975 and the area south of San Francisco around Stanford University that would later come to be known as Silicon Valley. I arrived in Palo Alto in 1980, after the period described in the book, but got to know most of the people Markoff depicts. I can report that if anything, he underplays the degree to which they behaved in ways that would today be considered outrageous and radical, and what I saw was said to have been mild compared with what had come before.

...Masses of wires blossomed out of the rear ends of hot, giant early computers, looking rather like the hair on the heads of the engineers building them. The ragged, broken walls and ceilings were softened by the hippie décor and the fragrance of marijuana and candles, which created a warm ambience. And yes, there were drugs and naked people in the rooms where some of the code that now drives your e-mail around the globe was first set down. The people who conceived of critical aspects of modern computing moved in the same social circles as the musicians who became the Grateful Dead and the people who invented drug "tripping" and New Age spirituality.

What's also interesting now are studies about the value of psychotropics to help people overcome addictions of alcohol, to deal depression with the approach of death in terminally ill patients - I'm so tired of having a bunch of propaganda pass for reasonable policy in relation to anything associated with counter culture.