"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal computer, cyberian computer
exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable Altair brand. It appealed to
the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the spiritual kind.'' So the very
invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways psychedelics-influenced. Maybe
that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge brought down to the hands
of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In any case, the Apple gave
computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public and, most important, to
their children.
It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to use computers than adults.
Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the children who learn the new
language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high schools around the
country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the systems operators. This
set into a motion a revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't yet fully comprehended. But
when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for skilled programmers and
developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies turned instead to the acid
heads.
When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his long fingers to draw pictures
in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things, feeling their way to some part
of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness develops the same way. The
middle teen years are about making connections between things in your mind like computers
and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at the impression Dan's fingers
have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design of the colorful weave
underneath.
Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once again. But this kind of thinking
is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a virus that gets passed down
generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So, according to firsthanders like
Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics user's mind is rejuvenated to
its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of logic one has been using
to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than computer language,
which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?
Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual lotus position. "It's essentially
digital.'' At least this is the way computers think.'' When information is stored digitally rather
than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is broken down into a series of
yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The computer functions purely
in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.
One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human
computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who
archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'' That
is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One
sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel
cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the
moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of
intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive
traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains
the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.
Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers must be able to come
from a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber language, and in the mid-1970s
and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified, computer-literate people available
to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware before their
competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an employee looks like or what