6 ms·

High Tech High Life: William Gibson and Timothy Leary in Conversation (1989)

135 points by prismatic 5y ago

axydlbaaxr 5y ago
What a blast from the past! Mondo2000...we had such glorious hopes for the future....
- mindcrime 5y ago
  Had? I mean, yeah, OK, obviously things have gone off the rails in a lot of ways. And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected. The question is, is this situation recoverable? Maybe the sentence above should end with the word "yet" as in "And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected, yet". We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. Maybe it's just time to step back, think really hard and long, do some strategizing, and figure out a way to get the train back on the rails?
  - narag 5y ago
    We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. I think the problem is we. Was there a we before? Maybe but there is no we anymore for sure. The Net used to be kind of a different world that escaped how the offline world worked. But the old powers have crawled back into.
    - mindcrime 5y ago
      True, if you interpret "we" as "the community of people on the Internet" (who in the early days were mostly hackers, academics, and technologists of various sorts), then that interpretation is no longer valid. Now "The Internet" is roughly synonymous with "everybody". But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. That's the "we" I'm referring to now. So the question, to my mind, is whether or not there is still a distinct "we" who had grand visions of what the Internet and technology could do for society (in a good way) and whether there are still actions we could take to encourage development in a positive direction. I think the answer is "yes", but that may just be wishful thinking. But I try to be an optimist.
      - narag 5y ago
        But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. I'm afraid that even if that's true, the us vs. them mindset is polluting the air.
    - rainonmoon 5y ago
      Maybe you don't have a "we", but there are hundreds of groups of hackers collecting on various Discord servers who are just as invested in exploring the potentials of the future of technology as anyone from last century, and there are likely far more of them now than at any previous point in time.
donorman 5y ago
Hehe, I'm old enough to have read the sprawl trilogy in my youth, good read indeed. I also remember seeing Gibson interviewed in pretty much every single paper and magazine out there in the begining of the Internet era because of he's writing regarding Cyberspace. Internet went bigger than expected but VR did take a lot more time than I initially expected. The start of a very interesting non the least! :-)
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Nice. Two really interesting people. A new friend of mine directed the movie "Timothy Leary's Dead", which coincidentally I bought this morning before I saw this HN link. My Dad's girlfriend also knew Leary and I plan on watching this movie with her and my Dad. Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the past. Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our future.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Those social structures are certainly salient, but do - sincerely - hope we see some positive alternative become prominent in the public mind.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns, Korean epidemia, and Chinese naval lasers off the Australian coast, that Gibson understated the human appetite for autocracy and big governance and overstated the facility of megacorps to succeed from nation states as the dominant social architects. Having worked in Samsung HQ, corporate dystopias melded with neo-Confucian or other East Asian culture-derived hierarchies are very much real. Only the AIs and some smart materials are yet to come. Synth-food is on the mark and flying robotics is technically here but not yet accepted by regulators. As someone I met from a major Chinese tech company yesterday said, as he confided corporate think-tank strategic future visions of a phone-free 5G future where smart surfaces like taxi windows beamed real time computing from the privacy-unobtainable corporate cloud and autonomous facial identification precluded antiquated rituals of QR-code based mobile payment, nobody cares about privacy and convenience is king. Gibsonian dystopia is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
  - Litost 5y ago
    Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well). b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'? Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory
criddell 5y ago
Thanks for posting this. I had no idea that Mondo 2000 was all online now. I think about that publication often and now I can check my memories. I was always fascinated reading about nootropics and smart drugs but never had the opportunity to give any a try. Drinking a cup of coffee is the closest I've been to that scene. It would be interesting to talk to some people who were deep into that 30 years ago and see what they think about it now.
mistrial9 5y ago
Mondo2000 - how decadence, ego and extreme parties led us to forget the fear of totalitarian uses of technology, while said uses became the Palantir darling of Peter Thiel's vast money club of clubs. source: organizing committee for pre-Mondo, did not get busted in that raid, you know which one I mean
- api 5y ago
  Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface but the view of the future was optimistic. Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate. Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.
  - e40 5y ago
    > The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center. Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
      - 5y ago
mindcrime 5y ago
On a semi-related note: I was watching some movie or TV show recently, and there's a scene that goes approximately like this: Character A: "something, something, something, Doors of Perception." Character B: "Okay, Timothy Leary." Character A: "Huxley." Character B: "What?" Character A: "Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, not Timothy Leary." The thing is, I can't remember now what that was from and it's bugging the shit out of me. Any chance anybody here is familiar with the work in question and could tell me what it was?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- johndoughy 5y ago
  I think it's from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch: https://transcripts.thedealr.net/script.php/black-mirror-bandersnatch-2018-dq8m https://transcripts.thedealr.net/script.php/black-mirror-ban...
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    That sounds like it. Thanks! The funny thing is, while I have seen that, it was a long time ago (right after Bandersnatch came out). But I have the nagging notion that I saw this recently. I suppose either somebody else riffed on that scene, OR (perhaps more likely) something I was doing led me to go back and watch a brief clip from Bandersnatch on Youtube or something, and it was in fact that very scene. Funny that I can't recall the details now though. I just recall the "OK Timothy Leary" and "it was Huxley, not Leary" thing. Weird. Edit: Aaaah... maybe what I'm remembering is this relatively recent HN thread which actually mentioned that scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631782 That thread itself being a discussion of Huxley and The Doors of Perception.
EL_Loco 5y ago
Ah, fond memories of reading Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, and there was also 2600 and a few smaller ones, and BBSs made you feel like an early resident of the future sprawl. I'll just link here to a cool comic that sometimes pops up on HN, and is pretty good regarding the whole vibe of the period: https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/ https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/
motohagiography 5y ago
I remember reading this in a class a few years later where we were studying Neuromancer in like gr. 12 English (alternative school), and if there's something I feel like I haven't seen since the 90s, it's a couple of guys talking about fiction. The books and authors they talk about were pillars of teenage aspiring intellectuals' ontology of the world. Books at the time were these rarefied pleasures, where they weren't cheap, they took a lot of time, and you never knew whether you would meet someone who would have read it too, but it really mattered when you did, because it was like having grown up together in a way, or being from the same place. Anyway, even in the world of infinite podcasts, that conversation transscript between those two guys stands the test of time as amazing.

135 points by prismatic 5y ago

axydlbaaxr 5y ago

What a blast from the past! Mondo2000...we had such glorious hopes for the future....

mindcrime 5y ago
Had? I mean, yeah, OK, obviously things have gone off the rails in a lot of ways. And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected. The question is, is this situation recoverable? Maybe the sentence above should end with the word "yet" as in "And a lot of our expectations didn't work out the way we expected, yet". We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. Maybe it's just time to step back, think really hard and long, do some strategizing, and figure out a way to get the train back on the rails?
- narag 5y ago
  We don't have to lean into defeatism and give up. I think the problem is we. Was there a we before? Maybe but there is no we anymore for sure. The Net used to be kind of a different world that escaped how the offline world worked. But the old powers have crawled back into.
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    True, if you interpret "we" as "the community of people on the Internet" (who in the early days were mostly hackers, academics, and technologists of various sorts), then that interpretation is no longer valid. Now "The Internet" is roughly synonymous with "everybody". But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. That's the "we" I'm referring to now. So the question, to my mind, is whether or not there is still a distinct "we" who had grand visions of what the Internet and technology could do for society (in a good way) and whether there are still actions we could take to encourage development in a positive direction. I think the answer is "yes", but that may just be wishful thinking. But I try to be an optimist.
    - narag 5y ago
      But the group of people that made up the "old we" (to the extent that such a thing ever existed) still exists. I'm afraid that even if that's true, the us vs. them mindset is polluting the air.
  - rainonmoon 5y ago
    Maybe you don't have a "we", but there are hundreds of groups of hackers collecting on various Discord servers who are just as invested in exploring the potentials of the future of technology as anyone from last century, and there are likely far more of them now than at any previous point in time.

donorman 5y ago

Hehe, I'm old enough to have read the sprawl trilogy in my youth, good read indeed. I also remember seeing Gibson interviewed in pretty much every single paper and magazine out there in the begining of the Internet era because of he's writing regarding Cyberspace. Internet went bigger than expected but VR did take a lot more time than I initially expected. The start of a very interesting non the least! :-)

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Nice. Two really interesting people. A new friend of mine directed the movie "Timothy Leary's Dead", which coincidentally I bought this morning before I saw this HN link. My Dad's girlfriend also knew Leary and I plan on watching this movie with her and my Dad. Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the past. Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our future.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Those social structures are certainly salient, but do - sincerely - hope we see some positive alternative become prominent in the public mind.
- contingencies 5y ago
  It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns, Korean epidemia, and Chinese naval lasers off the Australian coast, that Gibson understated the human appetite for autocracy and big governance and overstated the facility of megacorps to succeed from nation states as the dominant social architects. Having worked in Samsung HQ, corporate dystopias melded with neo-Confucian or other East Asian culture-derived hierarchies are very much real. Only the AIs and some smart materials are yet to come. Synth-food is on the mark and flying robotics is technically here but not yet accepted by regulators. As someone I met from a major Chinese tech company yesterday said, as he confided corporate think-tank strategic future visions of a phone-free 5G future where smart surfaces like taxi windows beamed real time computing from the privacy-unobtainable corporate cloud and autonomous facial identification precluded antiquated rituals of QR-code based mobile payment, nobody cares about privacy and convenience is king. Gibsonian dystopia is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- Litost 5y ago
  Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well). b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'? Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

criddell 5y ago

Thanks for posting this. I had no idea that Mondo 2000 was all online now. I think about that publication often and now I can check my memories. I was always fascinated reading about nootropics and smart drugs but never had the opportunity to give any a try. Drinking a cup of coffee is the closest I've been to that scene. It would be interesting to talk to some people who were deep into that 30 years ago and see what they think about it now.

mistrial9 5y ago

Mondo2000 - how decadence, ego and extreme parties led us to forget the fear of totalitarian uses of technology, while said uses became the Palantir darling of Peter Thiel's vast money club of clubs. source: organizing committee for pre-Mondo, did not get busted in that raid, you know which one I mean

api 5y ago
Different time. It wasn’t a totalitarian zeitgeist. The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. The art and music was darker and edgier on the surface but the view of the future was optimistic. Today you have authoritarian populist nationalism on the right and authoritarian technocracy on the left. The mood is pessimistic and everyone is arguing about who should be forced to think or do what. The music is trite and superficially happy and everyone is seething with hate. Machines are tools. Technology follows the zeitgeist. Everything is being bent toward totalitarianism and surveillance because that is what we are doing with it.
- e40 5y ago
  > The 80s and 90s had a more libertarian or liberal (less authoritarian left) vibe. Huh? The 80's were all Ronald Reagan. The 90's were Bill and Hillary Clinton sparking the rise of Newt Gingrich and the GOP we have today. Yes, Bill was a Dem, but he was very much not a lefty. He got stuff done (the notorious Crime bill) done because he was right of center. Please explain what you mean. I'm guessing I don't get it from the words you used.
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    I am betting that meant that the tech scene had a stronger libertarian vibe then (a la John Perry Barlow, say). Of course, some critics (I'm thinking of Curtis' Hypernormalization[1]) would say that was more like a retreat from reality. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
    - 5y ago

mindcrime 5y ago

On a semi-related note: I was watching some movie or TV show recently, and there's a scene that goes approximately like this: Character A: "something, something, something, Doors of Perception." Character B: "Okay, Timothy Leary." Character A: "Huxley." Character B: "What?" Character A: "Huxley wrote The Doors of Perception, not Timothy Leary." The thing is, I can't remember now what that was from and it's bugging the shit out of me. Any chance anybody here is familiar with the work in question and could tell me what it was?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
johndoughy 5y ago
I think it's from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch: https://transcripts.thedealr.net/script.php/black-mirror-bandersnatch-2018-dq8m https://transcripts.thedealr.net/script.php/black-mirror-ban...
- mindcrime 5y ago
  That sounds like it. Thanks! The funny thing is, while I have seen that, it was a long time ago (right after Bandersnatch came out). But I have the nagging notion that I saw this recently. I suppose either somebody else riffed on that scene, OR (perhaps more likely) something I was doing led me to go back and watch a brief clip from Bandersnatch on Youtube or something, and it was in fact that very scene. Funny that I can't recall the details now though. I just recall the "OK Timothy Leary" and "it was Huxley, not Leary" thing. Weird. Edit: Aaaah... maybe what I'm remembering is this relatively recent HN thread which actually mentioned that scene. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29631782 That thread itself being a discussion of Huxley and The Doors of Perception.

EL_Loco 5y ago

Ah, fond memories of reading Mondo 2000 and Boing Boing, and there was also 2600 and a few smaller ones, and BBSs made you feel like an early resident of the future sprawl. I'll just link here to a cool comic that sometimes pops up on HN, and is pretty good regarding the whole vibe of the period: https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/ https://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

motohagiography 5y ago

I remember reading this in a class a few years later where we were studying Neuromancer in like gr. 12 English (alternative school), and if there's something I feel like I haven't seen since the 90s, it's a couple of guys talking about fiction. The books and authors they talk about were pillars of teenage aspiring intellectuals' ontology of the world. Books at the time were these rarefied pleasures, where they weren't cheap, they took a lot of time, and you never knew whether you would meet someone who would have read it too, but it really mattered when you did, because it was like having grown up together in a way, or being from the same place. Anyway, even in the world of infinite podcasts, that conversation transscript between those two guys stands the test of time as amazing.