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Links for this post:
"The Internet, Revolution and LSD: A Brief Review of a Recent Speech" by Steve Gordon on The Hammer of Truth Blog. He discusses a speech which is found at the next link.
"The Internet vs. the State by Eric Garris" — a talk given at the Burton S. Blumert Conference on Gold, Freedom, and Peace. which is found on LewRockwell.Com
No, the flat-screen monitor in the picture is not the one I got with my Mac which was plagued by a pink cast and I’m not running Psychedelic Screen-saver on it. This "psychedelic"monitor is from a page on a site called Hammer of Truth posted by Steve Gordon. On the post, he says:
Al Gore can no longer justify his claim to have invented the Internet, as we now know the proper credit goes to 1960s counterculture icon and LSD advocate Timothy Leary. Or at least Leary accurately predicted what the Internet is currently on the edge of becoming …
Gordon then discuses a talk by Eric Garris which I except at length here:
At the 1977 Libertarian Party Convention, mind-expansion advocate and LSD guru Timothy Leary gave a speech that few of us took very seriously. He spoke of something called the Internet, a network that would connect computers worldwide, allowing participants from around the globe to sign on and retrieve text, photographs, audio and video instantaneously, and to communicate in realtime with anyone in the whole world who also had a computer and a connection. He said that it would be the new revolution against the current social order and stifling status quo. He predicted it would be much, much bigger than drugs in its ability to overthrow the establishment. Whereas tuning in, turning on and dropping out had been of great interest to a somewhat narrow subset of the population, everyone would be able to use the Internet, in his own way, and thus the new revolution against the old order would transcend class, age, nationality and all other demographics. The bourgeois would have just as much interest and use for it as the so-called counterculture. And nothing would ever again be the same.
As I said, no one at the time really believed it. We figured Leary had just done a little too much acid and his imagination had gotten the best of him. The network of information he described seemed totally impossible – and yet it exists, precisely as he predicted it, right now.
In fact, even Timothy Leary might be surprised to see the newest developments. Hardly a week goes by without some substantial revolution in cyberspace. When Leary died in 1996, data storage, processing and transfer had yet to approach anything anywhere near their current magnificent levels of utility and speed. And next year will make this year look like nothing. Already, we think back five years and can hardly comprehend the breathtaking progress over that time.
A lot of people say the Internet is overrated. They think it’s just a bunch of vanity sites and ranting and raving kooks – and while they acknowledge it is nice that you can buy products online and have them delivered to your house, they doubt the net will prove as revolutionary of culture and industry as is predicted of it. Ever since the Dot-Com Boom of the late 1990s and the subsequent bust, many are inclined to dismiss the alleged greatness of the net. Some see it only as a novelty or fad that will hardly evolve far past its current size and scope.
These people could not be more wrong. The Internet is not just not overrated – it is vastly underrated.
In the Internet we see our greatest hope for freedom and for the continual progress of humanity. In the Internet we see the anachronistic and obsolete institutions of society being pushed aside for a new dawn of better things. In the Internet we see the key to diminishing the power and status of the state and liberating ourselves from its oppression and deception.
This is a great history lesson and we all need to understand this in light of the totalitarian nuttiness which has infected our society lately.
Note: painting of Timothy Leary by Dean Chamberlain<
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