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

kinds of drugs he eats--it's creative output that matters. Steve Jobbs felt this way, which is
why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye---wearing young men.
Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer companies have been
forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.
Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel, admits, Some of
the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in school, and as a result they
hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them, the drug tests that defense
contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees cannot detect psychedelics,
which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's gotten pretty easy to predict
when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel executives to the right people
in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours' notice. ...
A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern California defense contractor
admits that the company's biggest problem now is that alternative culture members'' are
refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk, the rather elderly gentleman
said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired have the ability to attack
computer problems from completely different angles. It would be interesting to take the plans
of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer it was drawn on. I bet the
tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.'' According to him, the
company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work for a defense
industry contractor. They're all against the idea of making weapons. We may not be able to
meet our production schedule--we may lose contracts--because we can't get enough of them to
work for us.''
Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer from San Francisco,
understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on cyberians. My question
to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing drug testing on your
employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's the real question: Why are a
bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De Groot's two-bedroom
apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that looks like leftovers from his
college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After three tries, he realized he
could learn more about computers by working for his university as a programmer than by
taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped back in as an employee.
I think that people who like to expand their minds with things like higher math and
computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want to expand their
minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political climate for talking about all
this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual endeavor and have it stay as
credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment--which has one small bedroom dedicated to life's
comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware--shows many signs of the alternative
culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's fractal Grateful Dead ticket is
pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed sound systems for VPL,
the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.
Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an institution as established as
Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has accommodated them. Word of
which companies are cool'' and which are not spreads about as rapidly as Dead tickets. De
Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the WELL, an acronym for
Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services (BBSs).
One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is a list of all the companies
that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up ahead of time and decide
that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this information service
because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves use these drugs.''
De Groot pauses. He is careful not to implicate himself, but his emotions are running