Escape Velocity Read Online Free PDF
Author: Mark Dery
computer animation, and advanced film graphics. A guaranteed mind-war ping experience!^
In addition, cyber-hippies sometimes seek switched-on bliss through Mindlabs, InnerQuests, Alphapacers, Synchro-Energizers, and other "mind machines"-headphone-and-goggle devices that flash stroboscopic pulses at the user's closed eyes, accompanied by synchronized sound patterns and, in some cases, low-level electrical stimulation of the brain. Advocates claim the devices induce trancelike states characterized by deep relaxation, vivid daydreams, and greater receptivity toward autohypnotic suggestions for behavior changes.
Alternately, a cyber-hippie might choose to boost his or her brain power with "smart drugs"-Piracetam, Vasopressin, and other central nervous system stimulants and so-called "cognitive enhancers" that allegedly increase the production of chemicals associated with memory or speed up the rate of information exchange in the brain's synaptic structure.^
What distinguishes the cyberdelic culture of the nineties from psychedelic culture, more than anything else, is its ecstatic embrace of technology. In his 1993 Time cover story on the phenomenon, Philip Elmer-Dewitt asserts that cyberdelia "is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As [Howard Rheingold] puts it, They're tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the '60s were.'. . . For all their flaws, they have found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs-something the back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished."^ Similarly, in his introduction to Mirrorshades, the 1986 cyberpunk omnibus that brought the SF subgenre into the mainstream, Bruce Sterling argued that cyberpunk signaled "a new alliance ... an integration of tech-
nology and the '80s counterculture."'^ Sixties counterculture, by comparison, was "rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech."'*
To the extent that they define themselves in opposition to the Woodstock Nation, high-tech subcultures-whether cyberdelic or cyberpunk-insist on this reductive reading of sixties counterculture. Even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the w^idespread dismissal of sixties counterculture as "a return to nature that ended in disaster," to quote Camille Paglia.'^ Hippiedom inherited the Blakean vision of a return to Eden and the Emersonian notion of a transcendent union wdth Nature by w^ay of Beat poets such as Gary Snyder, w^ho counseled a tribal, back-to-the-land movement, and Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" demonized America as an industrial Moloch "whose mind is pure machinery." Such intellectual currents led, for some, to the antitechnological utopianism expressed in the rural commune. "It was inevitable that hippie values would lead true believers back to nature," the popologists Jane and Michael Stern write in Sixties People. "Although virtually all of them were Caucasian, hippies relished their romantic self-image as nouveau red men, living in harmony v^th the universe, fighting against the white man's perverted society of pollution, war, and greed."'^
Nonetheless, sixties counterculture simultaneously bore the impress of Zbigniew Brzezinski's technetronic age. As Sterling notes, "[N]o counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid-it came from a Sandoz lab."'"^ A popular button turned the E.I. Du Pont slogan, "better things for BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY," into a sly catchphrase for acidheads. At the same time, as Theodore Roszak points out in The Making of a Counter Culture, the Learyite article of faith that the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change could be found in a chemical concoction sprang from a uniquely American faith in technology. In that sense, he argues, the Du Pont slogan on the hippie button
[wasn't] being used satirically. The wearers [meant] it the way Du Pont means it. The gadget-happy American has always been a figure of fim because of his facile assumption that there exists a technological
In addition, cyber-hippies sometimes seek switched-on bliss through Mindlabs, InnerQuests, Alphapacers, Synchro-Energizers, and other "mind machines"-headphone-and-goggle devices that flash stroboscopic pulses at the user's closed eyes, accompanied by synchronized sound patterns and, in some cases, low-level electrical stimulation of the brain. Advocates claim the devices induce trancelike states characterized by deep relaxation, vivid daydreams, and greater receptivity toward autohypnotic suggestions for behavior changes.
Alternately, a cyber-hippie might choose to boost his or her brain power with "smart drugs"-Piracetam, Vasopressin, and other central nervous system stimulants and so-called "cognitive enhancers" that allegedly increase the production of chemicals associated with memory or speed up the rate of information exchange in the brain's synaptic structure.^
What distinguishes the cyberdelic culture of the nineties from psychedelic culture, more than anything else, is its ecstatic embrace of technology. In his 1993 Time cover story on the phenomenon, Philip Elmer-Dewitt asserts that cyberdelia "is driven by young people trying to come up with a movement they can call their own. As [Howard Rheingold] puts it, They're tired of all these old geezers talking about how great the '60s were.'. . . For all their flaws, they have found ways to live with technology, to make it theirs-something the back-to-the-land hippies never accomplished."^ Similarly, in his introduction to Mirrorshades, the 1986 cyberpunk omnibus that brought the SF subgenre into the mainstream, Bruce Sterling argued that cyberpunk signaled "a new alliance ... an integration of tech-
nology and the '80s counterculture."'^ Sixties counterculture, by comparison, was "rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech."'*
To the extent that they define themselves in opposition to the Woodstock Nation, high-tech subcultures-whether cyberdelic or cyberpunk-insist on this reductive reading of sixties counterculture. Even so, there is more than a grain of truth in the w^idespread dismissal of sixties counterculture as "a return to nature that ended in disaster," to quote Camille Paglia.'^ Hippiedom inherited the Blakean vision of a return to Eden and the Emersonian notion of a transcendent union wdth Nature by w^ay of Beat poets such as Gary Snyder, w^ho counseled a tribal, back-to-the-land movement, and Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" demonized America as an industrial Moloch "whose mind is pure machinery." Such intellectual currents led, for some, to the antitechnological utopianism expressed in the rural commune. "It was inevitable that hippie values would lead true believers back to nature," the popologists Jane and Michael Stern write in Sixties People. "Although virtually all of them were Caucasian, hippies relished their romantic self-image as nouveau red men, living in harmony v^th the universe, fighting against the white man's perverted society of pollution, war, and greed."'^
Nonetheless, sixties counterculture simultaneously bore the impress of Zbigniew Brzezinski's technetronic age. As Sterling notes, "[N]o counterculture Earth Mother gave us lysergic acid-it came from a Sandoz lab."'"^ A popular button turned the E.I. Du Pont slogan, "better things for BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY," into a sly catchphrase for acidheads. At the same time, as Theodore Roszak points out in The Making of a Counter Culture, the Learyite article of faith that the key to cosmic consciousness and sweeping societal change could be found in a chemical concoction sprang from a uniquely American faith in technology. In that sense, he argues, the Du Pont slogan on the hippie button
[wasn't] being used satirically. The wearers [meant] it the way Du Pont means it. The gadget-happy American has always been a figure of fim because of his facile assumption that there exists a technological
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