It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to use computers than adults. Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the children who learn the new language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high schools around the country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the systems operators. This set into a motion a ''revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't yet fully comprehended. But when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for skilled programmers and developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies turned instead to the acid heads.
''When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his long fingers to draw pictures in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things, feeling their way to some part of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness develops the same way. The middle teen years are about making connections between things in your mind like computers and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at the impression Dan's fingers have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design of the colorful weave underneath.
Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once again. ''But this kind of thinking is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a virus that gets passed down generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So, according to firsthanders like Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics user's mind is rejuvenated to its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of logic one has been using to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than computer language, which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?
''Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual lotus position. "It's essentially digital.'' At least this is the way computers ''think.'' When information is stored digitally rather than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is broken down into a series of yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The computer functions purely in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.
One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it ''reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'' That is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.
Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers must be able to come from ''a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber language, and in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified, computer-literate people available to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware before their competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an employee looks like or what kinds of drugs he eats – it's creative output that matters. Steve Jobbs felt this way, which is why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye – wearing young men. Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer companies have been forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.
Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel, admits, ''Some of the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in school, and as a result they hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them, the drug tests that defense contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees cannot detect psychedelics, which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's gotten pretty easy to predict when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel executives to the right people in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours' notice. ...
A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern California defense contractor admits that the company's biggest problem now is that ''alternative culture members'' are refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk, the rather elderly gentleman said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired have the ability to attack computer problems from completely different angles. It would be interesting to take the plans of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer it was drawn on. I bet the tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.'' According to him, the company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work for a defense industry contractor. ''They're all against the idea of making weapons. We may not be able to meet our production schedule – we may lose contracts – because we can't get enough of them to work for us.''
Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer from San Francisco, understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on cyberians. ''My question to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing drug testing on your employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's the real question: Why are a bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De Groot's two-bedroom apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that looks like leftovers from his college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After three tries, he realized he could learn more about computers by working for his university as a programmer than by taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped back in as an employee.
''I think that people who like to expand their minds with things like higher math and computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want to expand their minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political climate for talking about all this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual endeavor and have it stay as credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment – which has one small bedroom dedicated to life's comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware – shows many signs of the alternative culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's fractal Grateful Dead ticket is pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed sound systems for VPL, the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.
Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an institution as established as Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has accommodated them. Word of which companies are ''cool'' and which are not spreads about as rapidly as Dead tickets. De Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the WELL, an acronym for Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services (BBSs).
''One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is a list of all the companies that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up ahead of time and decide that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this information service because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves use these drugs.''