A Word from the Control Group
AN INTERVIEW WITH JARON LANIER BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: OK Jaron, first, will you comment on a remark Tim made some time ago that computers would be the acid of the ’80s?
JL: Well, I think I can explain pretty well what Tim meant, although I have to say that I never agreed with him. In fact I used to bug him about it because I didn’t think it was a helpful metaphor. Actually, the first person to say something like that might have been William Burroughs. But Tim certainly, as is always the case, said it in the most charmingly public way. I think his hope was that computer technology would, first of all, help people to communicate with one another and therefore allow them to identify themselves as individuals rather than as members of institutions. On that count I think computer networks—the Internet and so forth—do actually succeed. This fits into Tim’s notion that there’s an increasing progress toward fulfillment of people as individuals, as whole strikingly beautiful beings in and of themselves, instead of parts that are only validated by some sort of institutional or governmental body. That certainly was one aspect of what Tim hoped psychedelic drugs would accomplish, and it’s one aspect of what computers have accomplished. I think that’s valid.
Then we get into the more interesting territory which has to do with the realization of imagination, and that’s where psychedelics might be related to my work in virtual reality. Now I’ve probably been asked about the connection between psychedelic drugs and virtual reality literally thousands of times in the course of my career, and what I always say is that I think they’re practically opposite—in that drugs act on the subjective aspects of human beings, in other words, on their neurons, whereas virtual reality only creates alternative objective worlds outside of the human sense organ. So in that sense they really act in absolutely opposite ways. Furthermore, virtual reality creates experiences that have to be hand-crafted by people. There’s an intentional, waking-consciousness state that has to precede and indeed occur during virtual reality experiences, whereas in a psychedelic experience there’s a sense in which it moves on its own momentum. Not entirely, certainly, and certainly the content comes from within the people who experience it, but nonetheless the psychedelic drug provides its own momentum. So I think they’re quite different.
Anyway, Tim saw a parallel, and certainly his comments about the similarity between the onset of mass computer culture in the ’80s and the ’90s and the onset of a mass culture of psychedelic drugs in the ’60s was one of the prevailing metaphors that guided the culture of computers during that time. There’s no question about it. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of me, because it raised all of the same old reactions of fear that had come around in reaction to drugs in the ’60s, and I had thought that perhaps we didn’t need to go through that again. I thought that perhaps we could be in a time of construction instead of rebellion. But at any rate, Tim still said some wonderful charming things about the stuff and I think he helped inspire a whole sort of crossover movement that’s embodied by things like Mondo 2000 magazine, of people who were interested in both psychedelic culture and computers; that influence can still be seen in such places as the graphic design of Wired magazine and the sort of vaguely transcendence-seeking character of the metaphors in the computer world that are used in advertising and rhetoric.
In fact, almost to a person, the founders of the computer industry were ex-psychedelic style hippies. Now the one person who might be outside of that—a pretty major exception—would be Bill Gates, who was hanging out with the hippies, but I remember him being a little different from the start. Nevertheless the impact psychedelics had is unquestionably enormous. Mitch Kapur, Steve Jobs, and many, many others. And on the science side, too. Within the computer science community there’s a very, very strong connection with the ’60s psychedelic tradition, absolutely no question about it.
RF: But you’re not a member of that family in that regard because your visions are not inspired directly by psychedelics.
JL: Right. I think I’m an honorary member by now but in fact I am probably the sole member of my generation not to have used drugs. I’ve sometimes been referred to as the control group. One time Timothy asked if he could get a transfusion of my blood because he thought I must have something he wanted to try. I’ll take that as a compliment. But for myself psychedelics just never seemed like the right thing to do. It’s always been anomalous and I’ve had many discussions and even arguments with folks about it.
RF: How did you meet Timothy?
JL: I originally met Tim because he was interested in computer science in the early ’80s, and I was around the MIT scene at that time—I wasn’t at MIT but I was working in a lab that Alice Kay had put together for Atari. Tim was interested in meeting some of us. So I ran across him there and visited his home in Los Angeles and we had a delightful time, of course. Tim is one of the most charming and gracious fellows you could hope to meet. Then the next time I met him was really quite striking. I called him to rendezvous at Esalen where he was giving a workshop. When I met up with him there he informed me that the workshop was a dud, the students were a dud, Esalen seemed to be dead, and would I mind figuring out a way to smuggle him out of Esalen past the guard gate? So all of a sudden we were in “East Berlin” evading the authorities at the guard gate. We bundled up Tim in the back seat, smothered under blankets, and got him out. That’s what happened. Just recently—and this must be thirteen years later—I told that story to Michael Murphy, who was just absolutely delighted and said, “That was so cool!”
RF: Let’s look at the evolutionary impact of virtual reality for a minute. I don’t readily see the significance in terms of furthering wisdom in our culture or furthering some kind of social transformation through these technologies. From a Hindu or Buddhist standpoint, reality is already virtual. Human beings haven’t learned that, haven’t learned that process by which we create reality. Can these technologies help us in that regard?
JL: Well, to state a point that I think should be obvious, any value that a teaching tool can have has to be specific to a culture. There can’t be any absolute value in a teaching tool because people are always moving and changing. In another culture at another time, virtual reality might not only be worthless, but indeed it might not even exist, since it is solely valued by its subjective qualities. It’s something whose value and qualities on every level are completely ethnocentric to us. As it happens, we are a culture that, in a sense, worships technology. Technology is our talisman. Technology is our source not only of power but also of transcendence in our own mythologies—for most people in the mainstream. And virtual reality turns the tables on the traditional mainstream technologies in a number of ways. One way is that virtual reality doesn’t actually increase the human power. Instead it focuses on human experience. And that in itself is really an extraordinary difference. With virtual reality for the first time you had technology enthusiasts running around saying, “I had an amazing experience. Can we change this so we get an even better experience?” As opposed to saying, “I got more powerful. I’m faster, bigger than before.” That change of focus to the inward instead of the outward is both useful in terms of personal development, and it’s also deeply moral in the sense that the sort of unchecked momentum we have to make ourselves more powerful with technology has reached a destructive stage because we are already powerful enough for a great many things.
RF: Okay, let me come at this another way. In the ’60s we saw a renaissance of spirituality, a return to nature, a return to inner spiritual dimensions of the human being. Tim used to talk about this ancient battle between the flower people and the metal people. Maybe we think of technology as our route to transcendence, but then we saw we are slaves to it. So I’m wondering how does virtual reality and these computer technologies redirect us back to a humanistically centered . . .
JL: Well there’s a big difference between the metaphor of metal, this nineteenth-century notion of technology, and the new technologies that are dealing purely with information. And there’s absolutely no guarantee that these things are positive teaching machines for us, absolutely not. A great many people encounter this world of information technology and come away nerdier and blander than they were before. So I don’t think anything in human affairs is simple or has guarantees. I don’t think any path is certain at all. But what I do think about virtual reality is that it rewards imagination in a remarkable way. It does it through our particular talisman, through technology.
To oversimplify in the extreme: Before virtual reality, you were really stuck with a choice between two fundamental sorts of reality. One was the practical world where other people are, where you’re not alone, and where you have to eat and work to survive and all that; and the other was the internal world of imagination where you experience the infinity of your own imagination and its constant fluid variability, but you also have to be utterly alone in your dreams, in your daydreams, and so forth, or in your psychedelic trip. Of course I know many people would point to something like Yage and say, “Aren’t there shared experiences?” Let’s leave that aside because that’s really not part of the cultural palette we have to work with in the mainstream anyway. So given the stark choice between a shared world that’s dull and an utterly solipsistic world that’s alive and wonderful and fluid, virtual reality comes in seemingly providing a third alternative: a world that’s objective, in exactly the same way as the physical world, that fits in between people the way the physical world does, but one that’s fluid and subject to the flow of imagination in a way that is much more responsive than the physical world is. And that’s what’s so exciting—that notion of making dreams real, making dreams objective. That’s why children get so excited about virtual reality. I mean virtual reality has become as popular as dinosaurs among children. Dinosaurs represent power and bigness to them, but virtual reality represents the notion that their imagination could be treated as being real instead of something that has to vanish as they grow up. And I love that as a role for technology. I think that’s a lovely role for technology to play.
RF: Have you seen in your own work, in the twenty years or so you’ve been doing this, a healing effect of virtual-reality-type technology? Have you seen people transformed, become less militant, more wise?
JL: I can point to examples. I would hasten to add that I can point to counter examples too. So it’s really hard to know about the big picture. If I were going to point to some of my examples I would say that within the military/industrial complex just the notion of coolness is a huge driving factor. Sometimes billions and billions of dollars are spent on some technology that will actually make the world a less safe place simply because people are compelled to pursue what is cool. That happens very frequently, actually, much more so than I think most people realize. Virtual reality is an extremely cool technology, in many ways the coolest, since it deals directly with experience itself and inherently creates cool experiences, better than some other technologies that can only create experiences indirectly. Because of that it’s drawn a lot of people from the sort of coolness stream of things into this work on subjective-experience technologies. One example is Tom Furness, who used to develop simulators for the air force and ended up working on virtual reality stuff in a rather humanistically oriented department in a university. I could list many others. Another example is the application of virtual reality to people with disabilities, a field that’s burgeoning in its own right and has its own conferences now, in which people are able to not only achieve experiences but achieve collaborative experiences, achieve connection that they could not before because of their disabilities.
I could also point to some wretched examples of the use of virtual reality—stupid, violent virtual reality video games that are shown in malls and that sort of thing. The human adventure is not simple. We always wish we could understand ourselves in terms of melodrama and come up with easy good and bad definitions, but the key is really to try to just be sensitive to the effects of what one does and to keep on trying, keep on refining, and try to perceive as honestly as possible what’s happened thus far. I certainly try to do that.
RF: What are you most grateful to Timothy for in your own life?
JL: Timothy exudes a remarkable attitude that the universe is, in fact, friendly—that the universe is conspiring to help you. He believes that in a deep way. And that’s an entirely sensible framework for thinking about the world. In fact, it’s a better one than the alternatives. Tim also has found a way to synthesize a kind of private spiritual development with a public life. For people who live partially public lives, I think he’s really a model. That’s been shown most recently by his statements that he’s thrilled about dying and so forth, to be able to deal with fundamental issues in a public way. That is extraordinarily rare, and it’s shocking how rare it is, but Tim has done it and very few have in such a direct manner.
I was once with Tim at a workshop when a disturbed fellow started asking questions that had a threatening edge to them, a clear edge of paranoia. He was a scary person. I was very impressed with how Tim handled him. Tim was very warm, very open toward him, absolutely fearless, asked him to come up into the light so we could all see him, and utterly diffused the situation in a way that was remarkably skillful. I thought that was an example of Tim at his best, that Tim had experienced such a wide variety of people and situations in his life that he had perfected a sense of cool that I think very few people could rival.
I’ll tell you something else: Tim has a profound guru-like effect on people and he doesn’t abuse it and that’s a precious rare quality. I’ve never seen him take advantage of young people who adore him. People sometimes stay with him and help him or stuff like that, but he’s never set himself up to be a cult leader or a guru and he could have done that extremely easily. To be offered power and to not take it is one of the most profoundly moral acts you can do.
RF: You talked about Timothy’s private spiritual life, but nowadays he might eschew the word “spiritual,” reject it as a non-word. He might say there is no “spiritual” but that the universe is physical, fundamentally, and that the brain is the mediating organ of all this. When we’re dead that’s it, there’s no more.
JL: Well those are two different issues. I mean there could be spirituality and it also could be true that our identity ends with death. I know Tim has adopted that view. I think that’s because there is a sort of a mainstream in philosophy now that’s been influenced by computers to adopt this new sort of materialism and reductionism. I personally reject that. My approach to rejecting it is pretty simple. I would point out that computers are not capable of detecting other computers, and what I mean by that is if you set down a probe on an alien planet and the probe was supposed to determine whether there were computers there, it wouldn’t be able to if they didn’t happen to look like our computer. The reason arises from a theoretical problem: no computer can fully analyze another. There’s a problem with computability. You end up with an unbounded problem. Since computers can’t recognize each other, what exactly brings them into existence? How do we know which particular computers are there? I’ve come to believe that computers are subjective objects; they exist only through the prism of cultural relativity. Aliens might never notice our Macintoshes, but find computers in our traffic patterns or hairstyles. You can try to get rid of consciousness, you can try to say there’s nothing magical going on, but it always pops up again. Computers create the illusion that they finally vanquished it, but in fact they haven’t, because without us to recognize them the computers wouldn’t even exist.
RF: Have you and Tim had this discussion?
JL: Nope. Actually this argument just came to me in the last year so I haven’t had an occasion to. Maybe I’ll try it out on him sometime.
RF: Isn’t this what the philosopher’s stone is? That is, the individual’s recognition of the creative power of their imagination, that the individual creates reality.
JL: Right. Well for myself, I mean I think it’s kind of easy to either get rid of reality or get rid of individuals in one’s philosophy. A lot of the reductionist philosophers lately would say, well, it’s all just matter and the brain and all that, so we only have the world and not people. And there are a lot of folks that would say, well, we create reality so we only have people and not the world. I think truly a philosophy ought to be able to have both people and the world. That’s what I’ve been working on, but it would be going outside the scope of this conversation.
RF: Well I’m not sure. Tim mentioned in Flashbacks that ever since his first LSD trip he has looked at the world with a sense of humor because he knows that whatever he’s experiencing, he’s experiencing the play of a script that he wrote, that’s mediated by his own brain. Reality really relativized through his LSD trips.
JL: Well, as I say, I think that both people and the world do really exist. I don’t think either one excludes the other. It’s hard to come up with a philosophy that acknowledges them both—very hard. I think that’s the job of philosophy and why it’s very difficult.
RF: There are several people in the book that are going to articulate that Tim’s life is a consistent thread since the time of his early work as a clinician and a diagnostician. The man has been working to treat mental illness really, for a long time. His appointment to Harvard originally was based on his research which showed that psychotherapy didn’t work any better than the ordinary passage of time. It was that understanding that led him to create more innovative models of assessment and treatment for psychopathology.
JL: Tim once told me that if Freud were alive today he would seem to be a raving lunatic, and I’d be terrified of him. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
RF: Well a lot of people are terrified of Tim.
JL: A lot of people view him as a person to blame for the country’s drug problem, and of course that’s absolutely irrational. The country’s drug problems existed long before Leary. The economics and the warfare surrounding drugs has long predated Tim’s arrival. But of course Tim introduced an entirely different type of drug and in a very public way suggested that mainstream upper class kids would be interested in it, and they listened. That made him scary in a certain sense. Of course what’s interesting is this intense violent reaction against things that seem purely oriented toward freedom, pleasure, joy, and imagination; that somehow if a great many people pursue these things they must be kept in check.
This happens again and again. I had an op-ed piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago about freedom of speech and I got quite a load of what I’d call hate mail from people who didn’t like it just because they could sniff the ’60s in it. And I think that’s happened here, that since the fall of the Soviet Union, with a lack of credible enemies, a lot of the folks who were enemy-minded just decided that anything that smelled slightly sixtyish or slightly liberal is the enemy, and that’s a very sad turn of events. It turns us against ourselves, and I hope it’s a phase that will pass with as little violence as possible.
I think Tim is going to be seen in history more as a poet and philosopher than a political figure anyway. One of the things that’s not as acknowledged is just what a good writer he is. What Does Woman Want? is one really amazing novel, beautifully written.
RF: The Politics of Ecstasy has essays that are among the most lucid expositions of the problems between the sacred and the profane, integrating spiritual notions into a secular society.
JL: Yeah. . . . One of the sad things is that the characteristics of the mainstream drug culture are so different from what Tim was hoping for in the early days. He was hoping for a culture that would intelligently use psychedelics for ecstasy and self-realization.
What’s interesting now is that some of the most conservative voices in Washington have actually come around to the notion of legalizing drugs, but if that happens the ones that would be legalized are probably exactly the worst ones, you know. It’s so preposterous. You know, there’s an argument that Timothy Leary had early in his life with Aldous Huxley about whether you could broadcast esoteric knowledge on a large scale via mass media. Huxley argued a conservative position and thought that it wasn’t a good idea. Timothy not only argued but enthusiastically acted on the notion that it was a very good idea. That is, I think, still the crux of Tim’s career. It’s the big question, and I don’t know the answer to it. It comes down to the question of whether people are really ready to see themselves honestly or not, and perhaps we’re not. Perhaps Tim’s notion of broadcasting the esoteric knowledge into the mainstream was premature. I think it’s too early to judge.
Another question that haunts me is, Where did the ’60s come from? Because the ’60s happened all over the world at once, and in places that really had very little contact with one another. And certainly these places did not all have contact with psychedelic drugs, yet here was this remarkable exuberant spirit and creativity. Again and again, even ideas that are only becoming popular now originated in the late ’60s. First virtual reality system—1969; first superstring theory—1969; all these things that we think of as ’80s and ’90s innovations actually started there. And the same could be said about the arts. There was just sort of a Cambrian explosion of culture.
How should we understand those things? Is it a demographic effect? Is it something about kids growing up after World War II and reaching their puberty? That’s one theory. But that doesn’t really seem adequate either. I personally do not believe that it was psychedelics in and of themselves, and the reason for that is that psychedelics can have so many different meanings. I don’t think the meaning of anything is fixed, and indeed there are people who have used psychedelics for a very cruel kind of mind control and there are people who really do use psychedelics just for recreation, in ways that are just kind of banal, not even bad, just dumb. I would love to understand what creates this kind of cultural ambience and produces this kind of joyous experimentation, trust, and a decline in fear. I don’t believe it’s substances, I believe it’s something else that’s yet unidentified.
RF: Well the substances came up in the midst of this too, whether or not it was causal or synchronistic. They were certainly impactful once they arrived.
JL: Another thing that I’ll point out anecdotally is that a great many of the most stupid Rush Limbaugh, Ayn Rand-type fanatics that are running around these days, electing the republican congress, of the ones I know, I know a lot of them were LSD users in the ’60s.
I talked at some length to some of the people who wrote me nasty letters about my op-ed piece, and sure enough, a whole bunch of them had been LSD users; this doesn’t in any way impugn LSD’s good name. I’m just saying that nothing has a fixed meaning, that everything is culture, and people can change in untold ways. I’m not saying that these people represent the majority of LSD users or anything like that. All I’m saying is that the situation is actually very complex. You can’t make some sort of simple equation saying that people who used LSD then go out into the world and spread peace and beauty and love automatically. It’s not that simple at all.
One of the things I hope this festschrift does is record a balanced picture of both Tim and the LSD movement, rather than the one that is falsely written into the mainstream memory now. I was one of the people who sat for the great physicist Richard Feynman once when he was taking LSD—obviously eminently qualified, never having taken it myself. I bring this up now because the mainstream culture imagines LSD as sort of a bad dream that ruined people, that was destructive, while in fact a great many intelligent, creative, productive people found it to be an interesting, useful thing. A great many of them took Tim seriously even though Tim’s public persona was at times outrageous and sometimes contradictory. I think that right now, lacking any possible external enemy, the culture is turning on itself and trying to call a part of itself false and bad and ugly. In doing so we are creating a distorted picture of ourselves. It’s very important that we not do that; that the image we have of ourselves is more true and more balanced. I dearly hope that will happen. I find myself having to defend the ’60s a lot and it’s odd because I was only born in 1960. I do think the ’60s represented a lot of good things—an incredible burst of creativity, of joy and trust, a lot of decency, and I hate to see us turn on ourselves. It’s like an autoimmune reaction or something where the culture is attacking some of its best parts.