—"Are you scared of dying?" I ask him after the last mirror is fixed in place.
—"Not a bit."
—"And you're going through with the freezing of your head?"
—"It can't hurt."
—"But what if you're already dead, going through the Bardos you wrote about in the Psychedelic Experience, and then all of a sudden you're stuck - frozen in the process?"
—"Well," he says, looking away for a moment, "I don't think it works like that. I hope not."
—I am suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. How dare I try to pull him into a bad trip? Why did I feel the need to project my own fear of death onto him? Because for me, like everyone else, he's just a mirror for my own unfinished business
—While I don't believe my questions caused him a moment's doubt, a few days later one of the 'Cryocare' representatives comes to visit with a covert photographer, and something in Timothy snaps. He kicks them out of the house so they dismantle the shrine and take back their equipment. Timothy later spun the story for the media: "They were so serious I was scared I'd wake up and there'd be all these people standing around me with clipboards." I still think it had more to do with the 'strings attached' to his cryonics deal They wanted to exploit their access to his dying and freezing for a photo spread in Wired. Tim would rather just die than be reanimated with someone else's spin.
—In the next couple of weeks, Timothy becomes more protective of his private space. A photographer who has known him for years is stunned to tears when he tells her she is too demanding and to leave. Several people are banished this way. Then he begins granting interviews only to those he knows, or those who pay. His stepson Zach returns from school, and Tim begins to treasure his family and friends over everything else.
—The hospice nurses tell us that his level of pain is extraordinarily high, and that we shouldn't be surprised by new behaviors. But what surprises us all the most is his final decision not to go out as he had originally planned. He says he doesn't want to implicate any of us in an assisted suicide legal charge, and then cancels the online death.
—The next week, after a string of Ministry concerts that he, John Barlow, and some of the kids attend in a wheelchair convoy, Tim becomes too weak to make any real decisions at all. No one has been fully entrusted to make the suicide decision for him, and we realize that Timothy Leary will end up dying pretty much like the rest of us: quietly succumbing to the inevitable. Besides, he realizes that he likes life so much, that he can't even conceive of ending it. He would endure any amount of pain for the pleasure of another day.
—Rosemary, the kids at the house, and Tim's stepson Zach are at his bedside in the last moments. It is an intimate and loving finale, where the politics, personal issues, and media hoopla surrounding him finally give way to the deep love and respect all Tim's friends have in common. A hi-8 camcorder records the final hours.
—Just before losing consciousness for the last time, he asks "why?" The room goes silent. Is he afraid? Does he feel forsaken? Then he smiles and says, "why not?" He repeats, "why not?" about fifty times in fifty different voices - a performance meant to reassure his onlookers while psyching himself up for the final curtain. In this paradoxically dignified fashion, Tim provides the comic relief at his own death. By dawn, helicopters are already swooping in to capture aerial footage of the house; but Leary has left the building.
—While some see Tim's final retreat into the solitude of death as a lack of conviction, or a submission to the same forces that seem to conquer everyone else, I think he has more than proved his point. He died the way he wanted to, even if his chosen method and expression changed over time. He didn't owe it to us to die spectacularly online any more than he owed it to consensus culture to die shamefully in a hospital.
—Just as in the 1960's, when he was jailed for telling us to turn on, it is those of us around him who are unable to let a free soul to do as it pleases. Timothy Leary has been imprisoned twice by a culture incapable of seeing who he is through its own fears and prejudices.
—It is we, and not Timothy Leary, who have failed to meet the challenge.
Electronica: The True Cyber Culture 07/1998
—What do you think of when you hear the word 'cyberculture'? The most popular answers I received in my informal poll this week were:
—1) the nerds of Silicon Valley
—2) conspiracy theorists
—3) old men pursuing children for sex or married people conducting sex chats
—4) suicidal Web cults
—But none of these stereotyped groups truly represent a culture. They are simply the kinds of people we imagine to be spending a lot of time online.
—We don't limit our views on the members other cultural revolutions to such tightly defined profiles. Rock and roll culture, literary culture, and Hollywood culture (if you use the word 'culture' loosely), represent much more than longhair guitar players, lonely authors, and beautiful starlets Rock music created the modern teenager. Literature gave rise to the humanities. Movies generated what we now call popular culture.
—Cyberculture, too, has given rise to a social and artistic community whose members may have never touched a keyboard, yet finds its very foundations in the computer It is called Electronica.
—Culturally speaking, it was the California 'bohemian' communities that first embraced the computer as a tool of artistic and spiritual expression. As early as the mld-1970's psychedelic renegade Timothy Leary was appearing in documentaries predicting that someday in the future, all of us would be exchanging messages electronically through our 'word processors'. The visionary Whole Earth Review editor Stewart Brand announced to his hippy, environmentalist following that computers should be seen as aids to positive social and spiritual transformation. West Coast rock musicians like the Grateful Dead and Todd Rundgren were the first to popularize colorful, swirling computer graphics on concert tickets and video projections during shows.
—Maybe this is why the first major impact of computers and the Internet on our culture has been in the music and club communities of young people. Cheap micro-processing technology put high-quality sound synthesizers and mixing studios in the hands of musicians who never had access to professional recording equipment before. These young musicians, generally members of the countercultural communities who had already embraced computer technology, were profoundly changed by their ability to manifest in sound almost anything they could imagine.
—By the late 1980s, a global community of young people had formed around this music and the gatherings at which it was played. Some say it started in England or the island Ibiza, others credit the 'techno' clubs of Detroit. Wherever it began, 'rave' had become a cultural phenomenon as big as rock and roll. Literally thousands of kids would drive to remote locations, usually outdoors, ingest mild psychedelics and dance until morning to electronic music made by young people a lot like them.
—Although rock and roll enthusiasts considered this early rave music dull and repetitive, the kids who danced to it appreciated it deeply. As democratic as the Internet itself, rave music could be produced by almost anybody. Moreover, it was composed of digitally recorded samples of music and sounds from around the world: the South American shaman's drum beat could ride under the sound of industrial machinery. The bleeps of a videogame could accent the vocals of a Pakistani chant. This was a global community at least as diverse as any Usenet newsgroup.