Chaos and Cyber Culture

by Leary, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9781579511470
• ISBN10: 1579511473
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-07-01
• Publisher: Ronin Publishing

Summary

America's most dangerous man — according to Richard Nixon — and the Pied Piper of Youth is BACK!

This book is about designing Chaos and fashioning your personal disorder: On screens with cyber tools from counterculture perspectives with informational chemicals (Chaos drugs) while delighting in cybernetics as guerrilla artists who explore de-animation alternatives while surfing the waves of millennium madness to glimpse the glorious wild impossibilities and improbabilities of the century to come. Enjoy it! It's ours to be played with!

Chaos & CyberCulture conveys Timothy Leary's vision of the emergence of a new humanism with an emphasis on questioning authority, independent thinking, individual creativity, and the empowerment of computers and other technologies. Leary's last great work, this book includes over 100,000 words in 40 chapters and 80 illustrations, as well as conversations with William Gibson, Winona Ryder, William S. Burroughs, and David Byrne.

Timothy Leary, the visionary Harvard psychologist who became a guru of the '60s counterculture, has reemerged as an icon of the new edge cyberpunks.

Author Biography

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) was a psychologist, author, lecturer, and cult figure. He was best known for having popularized the use of mind-altering drugs in the 1960s.

Timothy Leary was born October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was educated at Holy Cross College, the U.S. Military Academy, the University of Alabama (A.B., 1943), Washington State University (M.S., 1946), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D., 1950). During World War II, Leary served in the U.S. Army, achieving the rank of sergeant in the Medical Corps. Subsequently he was an assistant professor at the University of California; director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Foundation, Oakland, California; and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University.

Leary and colleague Alpert (Ram Dass) were expelled form Harvard for their LSD research with students. Leary and Alpert then founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) to promote LSD and similar drugs. In 1965 Leary visited India and converted to Hinduism, announcing that his work was basically religious. The following year, IFIF headquarters at Millbrook, New York, was raided by local police under the direction of G. Gordon Liddy, later to become notorious himself as the iron man of the Watergate scandal.

Leary had been arrested for possessing a small quantity of marijuana in 1965 and again in 1968. He was given ten-year sentences on each count, to be served consecutively rather than concurrently. This harsh sentence was almost certainly a result of his notoriety, as it bore little relation to the offenses, which even then were not regarded as serious. After serving only six months, Leary, with the aid of the Weather Underground, a left-wing terrorist organization, escaped from prison. Thereafter, he resided in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally Afghanistan. In 1973 he was seized and returned to California, where he was given an additional sentence for his prison escape. Leary was not released from confinement until 1976.

Leary's last book, Chaos and Cyber Culture was a hypertext instruction book of sorts, proclaiming that "the pc is the lsd of the '90s." Leary even "wired" his own final days on his website (Leary.com) in word and image. Leary surrounded himself with friends, famous and otherwise, as well. As Gen X chronicler and longtime friend of Leary, Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Esquire, "On learning of his inoperable prostate cancer, Tim realized he was smack in the middle of another great taboo: dying. True to character, he wasn't about to surrender to the fear and shame we associate with death in modern times. No, this was going to be a party." Originally, Leary had planned to have his brain cryogenically frozen, but decided instead to have his ashes shot into space. Leary died in Beverly Hills, CA, on May 31, 1996. His last words: "why not?"

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note by Susan Sarandon
Editor's Note by Michael Horwitz
Preface: The Eternal Philosophy of Chaos by Timothy Leary

Part 1 SCREEBS:
1. How I Became an Amphibian
2. Custom-Sized Screen Realities
3. Imagineering

Part 2: CYBERNETICS: CHAOS ENGINEERING
1. Conversation with WIlliam Gibson
2. Artificial Intelligence: Hesse's Prophetic Glass Bead Game
3. Our Brain
4. How to Boot-Up Your Bio-Computer
5. Personal Computers, Personal Freedom
6. Quantum Jumps, Your Mac and You

Part 3 COUNTERCULTURES
1. The Woodstock Generation
2. From Yippies to Yuppies
3. The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot
4. The New Breed
5. Electronic Cultures
6. The Next Twenty Years
7. The Godparent: Conversation with Winona Ryder

Part 4 INFO-CHEMICALS & DRUG WARS
1. Conversation with William S Burroughs
2. The Sociology of LSD
3. Just Say Know
4. Czar Bennett & His Holy War on Drugs
5. MDMA: The Drug of the 1980s
6. The Case for Intelligent Drug Use

Part 5 CYBEROTICS
1. Hormone Holocost
2. In Search of the True Aphrodisiac
3. Operation Sex Change
4. Digital Activation of the Erotic Brain

Part 6 GUERILLA ART
1. Pranks: An Interview
2. Keith Haring: Future Primeval
3. Robert William: Power to the Pupil
4. On William S Burrough's Interzone
5. How to Publish Heresy in Mainline Publications
7. reproduced Authentic: The Wizardry of David Byrne
8. Conversation with David Byrne

Part 7 DE-ANIMATION/RE-REANIMATION
1. Common-Sense Alternatives to Involuntary Death
2. Hybernating Andy

Part 8 MILLENNIUM MADNESS
1. Backward Christian Soldiers
2. God Runs for President
3. Who Owns the Jesus Property?
4. High-Tech Paganism

Part 9 EPILOGUE
1. Brillig in Cyberland

Part 10 RESOURCES
1. Checklist of Primary Works by Timothy Leary
2. Bibliographic Data
3. List of Illustrations
4. Cybertising