THE CYBERDELIC SINGULARITY

In the 1960’s psychedelic compounds kickstarted a consciousness revolution. Millions of minds were turned on to new possibilities, beyond their limiting beliefs and narrow mental patterns. “Reality tunnels”, lenses of perception and cultural operating systems dissolved and gave way to ecstatic new possibilities. Many of these people were in the San Francisco Bay Area and intersected with the nascent technology scene in Silicon Valley. In his book What The Doormouse Said, author John Marcoff maps this intersection of counterculture and tech, chronicling the evolution from psychedelics to cybernetics, birthing a kind of “CYBERDELIC” scene. The etymology of the word “psychedelic” is in fact “to manifest the mind”, which early computer pioneers realized is exactly what technology was potentiating: the manifestation of our minds and creativity in the world. Computers, they said, would be the new LSD… more recently Diana Slattery wrote that “Google is the first psychedelically-informed superpower”.. the overlaps