From: pc@slipknot.eng.pyramid.com (pc)
Newsgroups: alt.drugs
Subject: Re: Computers and drugs. (?)
Date: 22 Jul 92 16:05:30 GMT
Organization: Pyramid Technology

In article <1992Jul20.100539.10714@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> bx461@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Leo J. Mauler) writes:
>
>>After Rob Cain noticed that the person that the "father of AI"
>>was here,  and seeing a program on TV about "The Machine that
>>Changed the World", it  made me wonder.  What's the connection
>>between computers and drugs?  
>>
>>On that TV show, I noticed that ~1/2 of the people were
>>"hippies" (by  the way they dressed.  Sorry for the s-type),
>>and that Intel has a nice  drug policy ("Hey, you're going to
>>have a drug test in a few weeks.  Stop  taking stuff now!"
>>and e-mail party invites with "bring your own  substance" etc)
> 
>Well, I don't know about in general, but most of the computer 
>programmers and engineers in Silicon Valley are regular users 
>of hallucinogens, especially the Fractal programmers.  I have 
>an article lying around somewhere saying this, and that the 
>inventor of the Plasma Fractal seriously doubts that he could 
>have made it as good without having used LSD in the past.

Don't know of too many Fractal programmers in Silcon valley.  The only
one I know of lives near LA.  I think this might be the article
he was thinking of.  I deleted most of the article, but included
the part about Arnie, who was employed by Teledyne (or was it Teradyne?)
up until the point that this article was published, after which he 
mysteriously became unemployed.  He sells all sorts of fractal
stuff like vidoes, T-shirts, magnets, stickers, etc.  He can 
be found selling this stuff at Dead shows on the west coast.  I
highly recommend the video.  Pretty trippy.  He was also here on
the net until he lost his job.  If you want a copy of the video
or other fractal stuff, let me know and I'll give you his phone
number.


  Valley of the Nerds
  -------------------
  By Walter Kirn
  (Transcribed w/o permission
  from the July 1991 issue of GQ Magazine (p.96)
  by Patrick G. Salsbury <salsbury@acsu.buffalo.edu>)
      [/text/ was originally in italics]

The keys to our economic future are in the hands of Silicon Valley's
young computer visionaries. And a lot of those visions are triggered by
hallucinogens created in labs just yesterday. Welcome to the Second Psychedelic
Revolution.

They call themselves MacAddicts. They are hard-core users of the Apple
Macintosh personal computer, and they've come to San Francisco by the tens of
thousands for their annual tribal gathering, the Macworld Expo. Some have on
suits and carry briefcases. Some have on Grateful Dead T-shirts and carry
briefcases. More than a few of them look MacStoned.

This is not just another convention; in many ways it's a cybernetic
Woodstock, a be-in for the Information Age. Inside the vast Moscone Center, a
dizzying sound-and-light show is in progress as corporate exhibitors with names
such as Gizmo Technologies, MacroMind and Lifetree push their mind-bending
wares, both hard and soft. The conventioneers stand mesmerized before the
pulsing VDTs, absorbing each new data rush with giddy nods. A bearded man in an
ill-fitting sport coat (he looks as if he wears a serape at home and subsists
on organic trail mix) stares at a screen aswarm with 3-D graphics and grins
beatifically. The Mac is beautiful, long live the Mac. Even the Japanese in
attendance seem caught up in the digital euphoria. There is no doubt about it:
The Apple PC, conceived in a garage by Stevens Jobs and Wozniak, has evolved
from a kind of homegrown, countercultural calculator into a multibillion-dollar
commercial miracle.

But the Macintosh is not the only attraction at the Macworld Expo. On
the sidewalk outside the convention hall, a trollish young man with
shoulder-length hair and a funky brocade vest is drawing his own adoring
audience. Ken Goffman, known to his public by the pen name R.U. Sirius, is the
editor of /Mondo 2000/, a rapidly growing desktop published glossy magazine
that documents, among other things, the strange convergence of psychedelic-drug
use and avant-garde computer science. Recent articles have included an
interview with Timothy Leary on higher computer consciousness (LSD meets the
PC), a rundown of the latest intelligence-boosting pharmaceuticals and a talk
with the medical scientist John Lilly, the inventor of the sensory-deprivation
tank and the trippy pioneer of human/dolphin communication.

Today, Goffman has a new issue for sale, and MacAddicts, even the
suited, Rolexed ones, are lining up to purchase it (at $5.95 a copy) at an
astonishing rate. Possibly thinking I'm with /Mondo/, one of the buyers
apologizes to me for his Brooks Brothers costume ("My straight clothes") and
tells me about a party tonight where he and some of his techie friends plant to
drop 25D, a mild designer hallucinogen, and check out musician/computer-head
Todd Rundgren's Utopia Grokware products.

I look at the man's Macworld Expo badge and see that he's an employee
of a major San Jose software firm. It doesn't surprise me at all. I've been in
California for almost two weeks, deep in the psycho-silicon jungle, and I've
met enough of its denizens to know that the "enemy" in the war on drugs
includes quite a few of our country's best minds and leading scientific
innovators. (Jobs, for example, is a self-confessed former acidhead.) If a
massive nationwide raid were held today, it would net mathematicians,
inventors, technicians and a multitude of free-lance visionaries--the very
people we're counting on to beat out the Japanese, renew a stagnant economy and
generally lead us into the MacFuture. Indeed, this corps of turned-on nerds has
already helped to change our lives, providing much of the high-test zeal that
has joysticked us from the age of heavy industry into the point-and-click
MacPresent of megabytes and mice, shrinking the modern office to the size of a
laptop computer and enlarging the laptop computer, via such things as modems
and networks, into a walkie-talkie for the global village.

So before the crackdown goes any farther, perhaps it's time to ask: 
Can America afford to take the "high" out of high technology?
		---------------

Arnie Greif is the sort of young man who free-market conservatives
applaud in principle but tend to ignore, or even to attack, in practice: a
committed, free-thinking entrepreneur. Along with his wife, Sherri, he operates
a business, FractalVision, out of a modest one-story house in a Los Angeles
suburb. He keeps a punishing work schedule. By day, he toils full-time as a
systems analyst for a large electronics corporation, then puts in another forty
or fifty hours a week at the Sun workstation computer in his den. Fortunately,
the long nocturnal hours are paying off. Unlike most small businesses these
days, FractalVision is growing and has doubled in income every year since 1987.

Basically, what FractalVision produces is digitized hallucinations.
Greif pops a tape into his VCR and plays some of them for me. Immediately, the
screen is suffused with flowing fields of vibrant imagery. The images are
abstract yet familiar, outrageous yet structured--the sort of shapes people
often see after taking some magic mushrooms. An iridescent snowbank melts away
in time-lapse motion. Colonies of Martian microbes fuse and mutate and split
apart. The effect on the viewer is slightly disconcerting; you feel as if
you're peering into your own brain, watching neurons fire by the millions.
Greif explains that the forms are not random but are visual translations of
certain simple equations fed to his computer. This so-called "fractal geometry"
--pioneered by Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM research scientist--governs the
behavior of natural phenomena from waterfalls to clouds to brain waves. This is
the new psychedelia, where math and mysticism mix.

"On the Fourth of July, 1979," Greif says, "I stared at a blank white
wall. I was doing a lot of hallucinogens at the time, and patterns like these
are what I saw. Later, I discovered fractal geometry and learned that these
shapes are the building blocks of the universe. Now I am able to reproduce
these forms mathematically rather than chemically."

Arnie goes on to detail the applications of his fractal designs. Some
have appeard in music videos--in Cher's /Heart of Stone/, for example. Also,
psychotherapists have used his tapes as relaxation aids for their patients. And
the principles underlying the designs have implications for acoustic science.
Currently, he is working with an engineer to improve studio recording
techniques.

Eventually, I ask the 30-year-old Greif if he still trips. It seems
like an inappropriate question, given the squareness of our surroundings: a
living room straight out of the Levitz catalogue, strictly suburban sub-modern.

"No, but that doesn't mean I won't go out there again," he says, toying
with a strand of shag rug. "I've got kids now, so it's hard, it's hard to find
the time. I don't really side with the war on drugs, however. Psychedelic drugs
are like a chef's knife: dangerous in the wrong hands but useful to the
professional."

He nods at the video monitor and adds, "I don't think I could have
accomplished what I have without them."

Among high-tech entrepreneurs, Arnie Greif is not alone in feeling that
chemicals and achievement really can mix, all those stern public-service
announcements notwithstanding. Ron Lawrence and Vicki Marshall are the founders
of a company called KnoWare, a Los Angeles publishing firm and Macintosh
consultancy. "Whatever problem you're having with the Mac," Ron boasts, "we're
here to solve it. Day or night." Most recently, KnoWare was summoned to
troubleshoot the office system of a West Coast fashion magazine.

Lawrence, a 45-year-old Vietnam veteran who returned from the war
depressed and alienated, credits his personal salvation to three forces: the
Macintosh computer, the writings of Timothy Leary (which KnoWare publishes) and
psychedelic drugs. "Drugs for me were a catalyst," he says. "By taking
psychedelics, you clean out the storage banks and have to reprogram yourself.
That's what I did. And that's what I do with this baby here." He pats his
computer as if it were a pet, as if it were part of himself.

"Just like with the mind," says Lawrence, "nothing appears on that
screen that you don't put there. Psychedelics teach you that."


- Rest of article deleted -

pc
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