How a Psychonaut Became a Cybernaut Part 1 by Bruce Eisner
Originally published on Island Web and also Timothy Leary's original website
Part 1 of 2
This is the story of how I became a Cybernaut, traveling into the inner spaces created by a world-wide computer network–the Internet– the way that astronauts explore space. Where acronyms fly by like asteroids, with names like HTML, CGI, VRML and PEARL. It's about how I learned about the World Wide Web and entered the magic world of cyberspace, whose walls promise to become papered with new ideas and whose virtual dimensions may be limitless.
Let's explore further the birth of a media that appears to be evolving into the science fiction word called "cyberspace." We'll look at the spinning of the Island Web, the creation of a virtual global community of visionaries working to build a culture based on the psychedelic experience. Finally, we'll glimpse the potentials of the Web for rapidly evolving in new and remarkable ways — and in a direction that promises to link us into a planetary consciousness that was once the terrain only of mystics.
The Coming of the Web
Until about the beginning of 1994, most of us had never heard of the Internet. Today, we find World Wide Web addresses (URLs) on glowing images on TV tubes, bold letters on billboard signs and on the tongues of Radio DJs. In little more than two years, the World Wide Web, a new way of exploring the Internet has become the hottest, sexiest innovation to emerge in our collective public psyche since the telephone and TV. (At a recent Internet World I attended, once of the speakers predicted it would rank as the most important innovation of the Twentieth Century. And what's strange is, he might be right.)
The Internet has actually been around under various names for twenty years or more. Developed first by the military as a way of hooking up supercomputers, it soon became common at universities as a way of sharing academic information. However, because the Internet was based on UNIX, a computer operating system most people feel is difficult to use, it lay dormant for years.
All of this changed when a college student named Marc Andreessen, part of a team of teachers and students at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications invented a graphical way looking at the Internet named Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic, uses a special language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which allows book-like page combining pictures and words to be published on the Internet as well as being able to look at the information already in all the other forms also as pages as well.
Using this new technique, World Wide Web sites began to blossom, at first from a few universities and large companies. Soon, however, the underground hacker-fringe of Internet users began to publish their own Web sites. We should remember that many of the earliest Web sites were underground in nature, and focused in on topics that many of the readers of the Global Village Voice would find close to their hearts.
In April, 1994, Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, a maker of high-end graphics workstations, joined forces with others to form Netscape. Netscape put out a Web browser similar to the NCSA Mosaic, but with advantages that made it the sleekest cyber-surfboards for the rising breed of web surfers catching this new digital wave.
Bruce Becomes a Cybernaut
Living in Santa Cruz, a beach town populated by students and a considerable group of psychonauts from the 'Sixties and only 35 miles from computer capital Silicon Valley, I came to discover this new world slightly ahead of the crowd.. when there were only 10,000 sites on the then newly created World Wide Web. Today, the Web is growing explosively — a quarter million web sites are now up and a new web page is currently being created about every four seconds. A Psychonautt from the 'Sixties, I made the transition from "headspace" to "cyberspace.
I had first heard about the Internet two years before. At one of the Island Groups salons I hold at my home, someone in November 1992 asked me: "Do you have an e-mail address?" This innocuous question could be seen as the beginning of a transformation of my life — a first gentle push through the door into cyberspace. It turned out that I did have e-mail, but I didn't know it– on America On-line, I was IslandGrp@AOL.COM… I was no modem novice, having spent many a spare hour on computer bulletin boards and on-line services since I bought my trusty old Apple IIe back in 1982. But the long strange e-mail addressees looked more like the dreaded UNIX then Mac or Windows. All that work for a free, quick way to send mail to your friends? From the discovery of my e-mail address to the establishment of my own domain name and the publication of my first World Wide Web pages took a couple of years.
It was Timothy Leary who first alerted me to the promise of the personal computer. He was developing a software program called Mind Mirror back in 1982, and began to promote the PC at every stop along his college lecture circuits. . I began collecting computer "mindware": and discovered a dozen or more titles while a graduate student.
In 1988, I became I pre-Ph.D. psychology school dropout and launched the Mindware Catalog. During the five years between 1988 and 1993, I published 10 of these glossy catalogs — and discovered and sold hundreds of different titles of these computer "mind appliances" as Leary first referred to them. By the middle of 1993, I began to realize that it was far too expensive — as well as unecological — to sell our computer goods through glossy color catalogs. I wanted to sell the software through major on-line services but that also was too expensive for a small company without "working capital."
A coffee break in February 1994, with one of my Mindware employees Thadd Atkins, provided the breakthrough I'd needed. He had joined with a friend to start a new company, The Human Factor, to put up what he called "web sites." These could take the form of on-line catalogs — which would be perfect for Mindware.
Jeff White, a friend from the Bay Area rave scene had told me about "the Web." His company ,InterNex, was putting up sites — I decided to head to the experts as I saw them. It was at InterNex that I saw had a chance to see what all the excitement was about. I decided to hire them to do a Mindware catalog on-line.
At the same time, I gave Human Factor the job of putting up the Island Group site. These three wanted to show me how well they could do on-line catalogs, so the first Island Group site was an on-line catalog. The most frustrating part of the entire process was that I could only see the catalogs briefly at the two companies' headquarters since I didn't have Internet access. After visiting InterNex and watching high speed digital ISDN connections, I decided that's what I would use. But there were no "out-of-the-box" solutions to getting this line hooked up to my office. Several months after the phone company put in my new-fangled ISDN jack, I still couldn't look at my new cyberspace structures.
Within two weeks of each other, in March of 1994, two new web sites were born. I had worked closely with Brian Job of InterNex to develop the Mindware Catalog Web Site. I wrote the words and provided graphic images, and Brian put together electronic pages in a way very similar to the way desktop publishers create catalogs.. Because there was very little cost in publishing on-line, I discovered that Mindware was finally making money. Later I gave up the catalog publishing entirely and formed a new company –Mind Media — to publish software "mind-appliances" and sell them on the Web. You can view the current and always changing version of the Mind Media Interactive Self-Improvement Center at http://www.mindmedia.com.
The Internet as left-brained LSD
One day in April, a few days after returning from the first, quite small Internet World trade show, we finally got the ISDN talking to the computer and I had access to the Internet. Soon, I found myself staying at the office late into the night. What I found was that the World Wide Web became a kind of intellectual LSD.
Unlike ordinary pages, Web pages are sprinkled with hypertext links. The idea of hypertext had started with Ted Nelson, who many years before had conceived of a global information library connected by "hypertext" links .–which he called the Xanadu Project. Hypertext works on the principle of networks rather than hierarchies. Instead of having to navigate through a descending series of menu trees to get to your information — you leap directly from a link to a new information source, the way that starships in science fiction bypass light years in space by traveling through theoretical hyperspace warps.
The user of the Web experiences this ability to make hypertext jumps, not only between his or her own pages but also "external jumps" to any Internet-connected computer in the world. I found in exploring topics, that I would make many such leaps. Along the way, I would find new ideas, which would take me off in an unanticipated new direction. Ideas could be followed along branching paths. Along the way, I found new words like "extopians" and 'transhumanists" which are part of a futurist movement looking at new ideas, many of which overlap with the ideas that Island has been exploring.
Both the transhumanist and the extopians had entire pages filled with hundreds of hypertext links, each pointing to web sites with more information. Some of the sites they pointed to would have hundreds of more links. Viewing a web site for the first time can be like opening the cover of a book with millions of pages.
Timothy Leary once remarked that the psychedelic experience could be rated in "realities per second." Traveling through the ever changing fields of information on the World Wide Web gives this same psychedelic quality to the endlessly transforming realities on the computer screen. The universe within, filled with ever more complex and fast changing versions of what is real is mirrored by the universe without, finally able to communicate the psychedelic world into digital information able to express this multiplex.Spinning Island's Web
After spending some time on-line, I learned the prime directive, the essential ethic of the Internet is Give back to the Internet what you take. This giving takes the form of adding new content, graphical and written information, to the Web's collective database. The catalogs selling merchandise and information should only be part of a web site. As a writer with hundreds of manuscripts, published and unpublished –, and as editor of Island Views, which has a great collection of articles in back issues, I had lots of content that could be published and made available to anyone in the world. And for free! I also had collected a large "bookmark file" in my explorations of the Web. I realized that I could organize these links into starting place for those who want to explore the many new and ancient ideas that Island Group finds significant. I decided to take back control of my web sites, and to turn the Island Group catalog site into the present Island Web.
It was hard getting control of my web sites. InterNex and Human Factor and the other web-authoring companies make their living not only by creating on-line sites but also in maintaining and changing the content of the Web. I had to move Island to another server. But in the process, I was able to get a domain name so that people could access us directly by pointing their browser to http://www.island.org.
I began to advertise on various Internet Newgroups (there are currently 15,000 different special interest forums available to everyone on the Internet)s for a volunteer programmer to work with changing Island Group to The Island Web I outlined my ideas about adding the Island Views Electro-Zine and an introduction to Island that included "links to many new ideas." The first volunteer I chose was a graphic designer who got so busy at work that the site remained just a catalog for months. Then a computer-science student from U.C.San Diego, Greg Kogut, volunteered looking forward to being able to be a bit more creative than the meteorological site he maintains for the professors there.
With Greg's help, Island Web was finally launched. But I discovered that having a web site requires continuous work. Island Web changes daily. New links are sent and are added constantly. Greg found an experimental chat program and we then put up the Island Chat, enabling people to chat with each other in a room, putting up not only words but graphics and links tosites they want to show other participants.
Mike Markowski, a young graduate student from University of Delaware, showed web pages which he titled "Thoughts on Aldous Huxley's Island." Mike explains that the novel was an attempt by Huxley to create a real model for a better culture than the one we presently inhabit. He included poems from Island, quotations from Island on topics from eating to dancing to dying to taking the Moksha Medicine (probably based on magic mushrooms) and even why you shouldn't take the medicine too often. He also excerpted from the novel's text the words of the Old Raja, whose wisdom, combining eastern mysticism with western science and pragmatism was the core upon which the Island's culture was based. As a special treat, Mike presents a selection of poems Huxley had sprinkled through the novel.
I obtained permission from Laura Huxley to publish this material on-line. We linked to Mike's server and his pages became part of the Island Web. That is one of the wonderful aspects of the Web, information from other web sites as well as different parts of your web site, can be located in different parts of the world or on your server — it doesn't matter.
So part of Island's site is just a hypertext link to another computer in Delaware. Hyperreal's Brian Belindorf gave me permission to store Island's video and audio archives on his server, so you can download audio and video clips from seminars by myself and Timothy Leary as well as from our LSD's 50th Anniversary: Bicycle Day conference. You never really are aware that you have jumped to another server in San Francisco when grabbing megabytes of digital video and audio goodies.
Recently, a new Webmaster, Steven Harris a young programmer who loves the Grateful Dead and Mimetics and who is bringing up a baby girl with his wife Maile, has taken over the responsibility of maintaining stability within the bounds of the chaotic evolution of Island Web. If you visit our site, be sure to send him e-mail and tell him what you think. Your input makes our community grow.
To be continued…
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