" This link between hippies and techies, which I have previously written about on Handful of Earth, is an important one to make. "
Important lapses in that analysis. Norbert Wiener was presented as the father of cybernetics. He is fact turned against the science, particularly the way it was applied. After WWII, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener's beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. And there is the 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, warning against the dangers posed by Cybernetics and automation.
Stewart Brand was not regarded as a hippie by everyone in the counterculture community in the Bay Area of the late '60s. Many regarded him as a hippie capitalist. There was a strong anti-capitalist tendency in the community, symbolized by the Diggers of the Haight Ashbury era, who held a "Death to Money" parade in the area in December '66. I became a part of that community in the early '70s. There was no pro-tech consensus and continuum which today's writers put forth. including works such as Surveillance Valley. Few if any of them actually took part in what happened back then,
And the MK-Ultra angle regarding LSD is way overplayed. Alfred McCoy of the U of Wisconsin, who has spent decades researching the CIA, especially its drugs connections and use of torture, discussed this angle in an episode of Democracy Now (for what it's worth, i'm not a fan of Amy Goodman), and his books. The use of psychedelics for brainwashing and interrogation was explored. In low to medium doses (which is the usual mode of use), they tend to make users LESS amenable to cooperating with authority. In high doses, they result in users who are turned inward, useless for any of the uses desired by the likes of the CIA, They were dropped, the CIA went on to other stuff. Such substances have in fact been used by humans for thousands of years. The idea that their usage is entirely the result of CIA operations is pretty.... flipped out.
"From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered — they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities — Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill — and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it’s in the book. And here, you can see the — this is the — if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows —- that’s the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University -—.......
AMY GOODMAN: Who has pioneered this at the C.I.A.?
ALFRED McCOY: This was done by Technical Services Division. Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately they were a negative result. When you have any large massive research project, you get — you hit dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results. All the drugs didn’t work. What did work was this."
Thanks for your comment, Jeffrey. I can't reply in-depth to all of these points. In brief, I don't think that all hippies were proto-techies and do not claim that here or in the essay on "The Net" that you seem to be alluding to in your comment. Certainly there was a major tension within the movement but, unfortunately, it was the Brands of the world that have exerted the most influence on the next generation. This history has been well documented in "The Net" itself.
Regarding Wiener, I haven't read the 1947 article you mention, but it sounds interesting. I think many scientists do have a change of heart at some point later in their careers, but I wonder how much this is just about the applications of their work (i.e. for war) or if it also goes to the deeper structures of thought that underlie the scientistic mindset in the first place (these must also be questioned and challenged).
The Brands exerted the most influence because that's whom the media paid attention to. The media were participants in the counterinsurgency which destroyed the more subversive and revolutionary aspects of the cultural revolution and co-opted/enhanced those aspects which could be fitted into a revamped control system. Recuperation deluxe, as described by Society of the Spectacle. I saw it happen in the early and mid '70s. This was an actual conscious project, described well in the books "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism" by John McMurtrey and "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" by Robert McChesney, both from 1999. The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education of the early '70s was a key component of it, as was "The Crisis of Democracy" by Samuel Huntington, written for the Trilateral Commission.
My sense is that Wiener did not challenge "the deeper structures of thought that underlie the scientistic mindset in the first place ," which i agree need to be thoroughly challenged.
" This link between hippies and techies, which I have previously written about on Handful of Earth, is an important one to make. "
Important lapses in that analysis. Norbert Wiener was presented as the father of cybernetics. He is fact turned against the science, particularly the way it was applied. After WWII, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener's beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. And there is the 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, warning against the dangers posed by Cybernetics and automation.
Stewart Brand was not regarded as a hippie by everyone in the counterculture community in the Bay Area of the late '60s. Many regarded him as a hippie capitalist. There was a strong anti-capitalist tendency in the community, symbolized by the Diggers of the Haight Ashbury era, who held a "Death to Money" parade in the area in December '66. I became a part of that community in the early '70s. There was no pro-tech consensus and continuum which today's writers put forth. including works such as Surveillance Valley. Few if any of them actually took part in what happened back then,
And the MK-Ultra angle regarding LSD is way overplayed. Alfred McCoy of the U of Wisconsin, who has spent decades researching the CIA, especially its drugs connections and use of torture, discussed this angle in an episode of Democracy Now (for what it's worth, i'm not a fan of Amy Goodman), and his books. The use of psychedelics for brainwashing and interrogation was explored. In low to medium doses (which is the usual mode of use), they tend to make users LESS amenable to cooperating with authority. In high doses, they result in users who are turned inward, useless for any of the uses desired by the likes of the CIA, They were dropped, the CIA went on to other stuff. Such substances have in fact been used by humans for thousands of years. The idea that their usage is entirely the result of CIA operations is pretty.... flipped out.
https://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/17/professor_mccoy_exposes_the_history_of
[From the transcript, at the page]
"From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they discovered — they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings, outsourced to our leading universities — Harvard, Princeton, Yale and McGill — and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it’s in the book. And here, you can see the — this is the — if you want show it, you can. That graphic really shows —- that’s the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGill University -—.......
AMY GOODMAN: Who has pioneered this at the C.I.A.?
ALFRED McCOY: This was done by Technical Services Division. Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately they were a negative result. When you have any large massive research project, you get — you hit dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results. All the drugs didn’t work. What did work was this."
Thanks for your comment, Jeffrey. I can't reply in-depth to all of these points. In brief, I don't think that all hippies were proto-techies and do not claim that here or in the essay on "The Net" that you seem to be alluding to in your comment. Certainly there was a major tension within the movement but, unfortunately, it was the Brands of the world that have exerted the most influence on the next generation. This history has been well documented in "The Net" itself.
Regarding Wiener, I haven't read the 1947 article you mention, but it sounds interesting. I think many scientists do have a change of heart at some point later in their careers, but I wonder how much this is just about the applications of their work (i.e. for war) or if it also goes to the deeper structures of thought that underlie the scientistic mindset in the first place (these must also be questioned and challenged).
Thanks, Vincent.
The Brands exerted the most influence because that's whom the media paid attention to. The media were participants in the counterinsurgency which destroyed the more subversive and revolutionary aspects of the cultural revolution and co-opted/enhanced those aspects which could be fitted into a revamped control system. Recuperation deluxe, as described by Society of the Spectacle. I saw it happen in the early and mid '70s. This was an actual conscious project, described well in the books "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism" by John McMurtrey and "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" by Robert McChesney, both from 1999. The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education of the early '70s was a key component of it, as was "The Crisis of Democracy" by Samuel Huntington, written for the Trilateral Commission.
My sense is that Wiener did not challenge "the deeper structures of thought that underlie the scientistic mindset in the first place ," which i agree need to be thoroughly challenged.