Coming Soon: Psychedelic Software

Haring, K. (circa 1987) [Blue 3.5in floppy disk with "Drink Me" written on label]. The Timothy Leary papers (MssCol 18400). New York Public Library. New York: NY.

My book is under contract. It started as a grad school project in 2013, looking at the archival preservation of unreleased software. Over the next decade-plus it slowly grew into a book about ways that theories of consciousness popular in the 1960s psychedelic counterculture informed the technical design of software interfaces in the 1980s and 1990s.

Maybe it was fate. Just when I was looking for some interesting materials to build a dissertation around, I learned that New York Public Library had made over two hundred floppy disks available for research from the personal archives of famous Harvard-psychologist-turned-“acid guru” Timothy Leary. I asked a bunch of technical questions about the disks themselves during my first research appointment, but the curator kept encouraging me to learn more about Leary’s theories of consciousness and “mind expansion.” This is how my grad school project on software preservation turned into a book about the psychedelic properties of software.

I didn’t set out to write a book about anything “trippy,” but it wasn’t unfamiliar territory. My dad was both a counterculture veteran and a computer programmer. He always had a collection of psychedelic rock records in the “stereo room” and a couple hand-me-down computers in the “computer room.” He encouraged me to tinker with those computers myself, and that background with outdated technology is part of what got me into digital archives. I’d be lying if I claimed that all the time I spent listening to his Iron Butterfly records didn’t have a lasting impact as well.

1988. [5.25in Floppy disk with "Neuromancer" written on label]. The Timothy Leary papers (MssCol 18400). New York Public Library. New York: NY.

I’m definitely not the first person to write about countercultural influence in the computing industries-- people like Fred Turner and John Markoff covered that ground a while ago. But I might be the first to do it using technical analysis, rather than relying on written or oral testimonies. Hippies can make for rather unreliable narrators, so I prefer not to take them at their word. Instead, this book shows that when you crack open 1980s software at a bitstream level, you can actually see that the programs embody the same theories of consciousness advanced by counterculture favorites like Aldous Huxley and Marshall McLuhan in the 60’s. This includes a belief in the communicative properties of repeating patterns, as well as the simultaneous perception of phenomena from multiple perspectives and scales, among various other mind-bending phenomena.

My book doesn’t only diverge from existing research on methodological grounds. It also takes a slightly different political approach. Watching Silicon Valley steadily drop its “progressive” façade over the last twenty years has, for me, prompted questions about how politically radical the counterculture ever was in the first place. In their drive to transcend traditional institutions and communication frameworks, many psychedelic and computing proponents contributed towards undermining the very foundations of mass literacy and political organizing. Was it an accident that these individualistic approaches to system configuration and communication grew out of computing initiatives funded by the U.S. Department of Defense? Authors like Paul Edwards have already addressed the importance of anti-communism to early computing research, but I don’t think anyone else has yet shown how these political projects informed later consumer software products at the nitty-gritty levels of interface design and digital code.

It will still be a while before the manuscript is revised and out to press, but I’m quite enthused about the process. My other projects will continue in the meantime, and I actually just published a new article in Internet Histories addressing the history of coastal water quality tracking. I’ll say more about how all these facets of my research hang together in the future, but in the meantime I look forward to a summer full of Psychedelic Software.