This video is sponsored by Schedule 35. students was Stewart Brand a former Marine who had dropped out of college to hang out with the Merry Pranksters and follow Ken keezy around the country but eventually found his way back to Stanford and was inspired to start the Whole Earth Catalog a sort of proto-internet magazine that served as a kind of spiritual guide for the tech world

Mr. Nerds’ psychedelic hippies and Baptist preachers, polyamorous thruples that met at the Church of Satan, may not seem to have much in common. Shockingly, psychedelic experimentation is an essential part of the development of modern computing and the internet. Unfortunately, attending a key party is not an essential part of the Baptist Seminary curriculum.

We recently covered psychedelic culture more generally and explored how the U.S. government criminalized substances like lysergic acid even after they were clinically shown to help with things like overcoming addiction and depression. This ended mainstream psychedelic research for decades, and this research has only begun to start back up in recent years. But don’t worry, the US government has made sure that it’s always easy to get your opiates (shout out to the Sackler family).

We wanted to focus a little more on the specific areas of culture shaped by psychedelia for our first installment. We wanted to get into the secret psychedelic history of the internet. So let’s dial up, plug in, drop out and tune in to this wisecrack edition on the internet’s trippy history.

We all know that 60s culture in America, especially in the Bay Area, was largely defined by things like lovins at Golden Gate Park, Ken Keezy and his Mary Pranksters putting up posters for fake Beatles concerts, college students protesting alongside the Black Panthers, and of course my beloved Grateful Dead serving as the house band for the famous acid test.

On the other side of the bay was Silicon Valley, a place more associated with lab coats and pocket protectors than with long hair, flowy dresses, and naked guys dancing at concerts. But like their counterparts across the bridge, the young engineers attending Stanford and other local schools were also interested in questions of life, the universe, and their place in the world. Coming of age in an era of sterilized suburban tranquility, they felt like there had to be some greater meaning beyond this hollow American Dream.

We’ve discussed this before, but the TL;DR is that young, middle-class white people had been raised in seemingly perfect nuclear families that were actually super grim. They had traumatized fathers who’d come home from the war aloof at best and abusive at worst. Mothers who experienced social and professional freedom during the war were expected to get back into the household to cook, clean, and raise children. This led many to become addicted to Mommy’s little helpers (also known as Valium) along with antidepressants more generally and of course, good old-fashioned booze. No wonder children of the 60s largely rejected this culture in the search for something more.

Now, while the Bay Area’s STEM grads didn’t drop out of society with the help of psychedelics like some of their hippie buddies, they were cut from a very different cloth than today’s Silicon Valley geniuses. They were inspired by the optimism of the time and looked at technology as a means to make life better for humans. These folks weren’t pursuing innovation to get rich, but wanted to use technology to help solve real-world problems. And as we’ll see, their commitment to spending hours in the labs of Stanford didn’t keep them from also taking their own sort of acid test.

One unlikely figure who helped to turn the Silicon Valley world onto psychedelics was Stanford business law professor Harry Rathbun, who gave a series of lectures in Palo Alto that pushed the audience to think about the aforementioned big questions in life and asserted that we had immense untapped potential just waiting to be realized. In his telling, maybe you were just one trippy nature retreat away from spiritual enlightenment. He was also a super culty type of Christian, which was probably not the best, but his teachings and some of the hippie vibes surrounding them had an effect on a generation of young engineers and scientists.

One of Rathbun’s students was Stewart Brand, a former Marine who had dropped out of college to hang out with the Merry Pranksters and follow Ken Keezy around the country. But eventually, he found his way back to Stanford and was inspired to start the Whole Earth Catalog, a sort of proto-internet magazine that served as a kind of spiritual guide for the tech world. aht I did no it was to open up the mind to new ways of thinking and to make connections that otherwise wouldn’t be seen

PC hobbyists in the 1960s were driven by their hunger for their own computers, but they missed the crux of the original idea: communications as an integral part of the design. LSD’s influence continued to loom large in this era, and according to Rich Green, Vice President of the Palo Alto Historical Association, it’s possible that the personal computer might not have even been invented without LSD. Famous turtleneck enthusiast and Apple founder Steve Jobs was also a proponent of LSD, having taken the substance 10 to 15 times between 1972 and 1974, counting these trips as one of the most important experiences of his life. His early Apple colleagues were similarly enthusiastic, using the substance for breakthroughs in their technology. Timothy Leary conceived of personal computing, seeing the cyber world as the future and psychedelics as an intrinsic part of the technological process. He called PCs the LSD of the 1990s and updated his famous motto to “turn on, boot up, jack in”.

Today, psychedelics have again become popular in Silicon Valley, but more so in a microdose form. According to David Nutt, director of the Center for Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, these drugs change cortical functions, making them more fluid and less rigid. An anonymous British biologist in a Wired article described using 1P-LSD, an LSD analog that is slipped past regulation in the UK. He said that the microdose makes him more productive and gives him outside-the-box thinking when programming. This is in line with what the Silicon Valley psychedelic pioneers envisioned. However, today many are using microdosing not only as a way to open up creativity and make new connections, but as a way to be more efficient and effective in their jobs, reflecting the hustle culture of the 2020s more than the social and spiritual optimism of the 1960s.