timothy-leary-chaos-cyber-culture

SECTION 11.2 CYIERNETICS AITIFICIAL INTIIUCENCE JiTHE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTERHesse, of course, was not the first toanticipate digital tliouglit-processing.Around 600 B.C. tiie Greeii Pytiiagoras(music of the spheres) and the Chinese Lao (yin-yang) -tzu werespeculating that all reality and knowledge could and should beexpressed in the play of binary numbers. In 1832 a youngEnglishman, George Boole, developed an algebra of symbolic logic.In the next decade Charles Babbage and Ada Countess Lovelaceworked on the analytic thought-engine. A century later, exactlywhen Hesse was constructing his "game" in Switzerland, the brilliantEnglish logician Alan "Riring was writing about machines thatIn this last sentence, Hesse describes the theory of digitalcomputmg. The wizard programmer can convert any idea, thought,or number into binary-number chains that can be sorted into allkinds of combinations. We reencounter here the age-long dream ofphilosophers, visionary poets, and linguists of a imiversUas, a synthesisof all knowledge, the ultimate data base of ideas, a global languageof mathematical precision.Hesse understood that a language based on mathematicalelements need not be cold, impersonal, rote. Reading The GlassBead Game we share the enthusiasm of today's hacker-visionarieswho know that painting, composing, writing, designing, innovatingcould simulate human thinking. A.I.artificial intelligence.with clusters of electrons (beads?) offers much more creative freedomthan expressions limited to print on paper, chemical paintsHesse's unique contribution, however, was not technical,but social. Forty-five years before Toffier and Naisbitt, Hesse predictedthe emergence of an information culture. In The Glass BeadGame Hesse presents a sociology of computing. With the rich detailof a World-Cup novelist (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature withthis book) he describes the emergence of a Utopian subculture centeredaround the use of digital mind-appliances.Hesse then employs his favorite appliance, parody (psyberfarce),to raise the disturbing question of the class division betweenthe computer hip and the computerilliterate. The electronic eliteversus the rag-and-glue proles with their hand-operated Coronas.The dangers of a two-tier society of the information rich and theinformation have-nots.smeared on canvas, or acoustic (i.e., mechanical-unchangeable)sounds.HESSE'S GOLDEN AGE OF MINDIn the Golden Age of Chemistry scholar-scientists learnedhow to dissolve molecules and to recombine the freed elements intoendless new structures. Indeed, only by precise manipulation of theplay of interacting elements could chemists fabricate the marvelsthat have so changed our worid.In the Golden Age of Physics, physicists, both theoreticaland experimental, learned how to fission atoms and to recombmethe freed particles into new elemental structures. In The Glass BeadGLORIFICATION OF THE CASTALIAN HACKER CULTUREThe Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, whomwe meet as a brilliant grammar-school student about to be acceptedinto the Castalian brotherhood and educated in the intricacies of theauthorized thought-processing system. The descriptions of Castaliaare charmingly pedantic. The reverent reader is awed by the sublimebeauty of the system and the monk-like dedication of theadepts.The scholarly narrator explains:This Game of games ... has developed into a kind ofuniversal speech, through the medium of which the playersare able to express values in lucid symbols and toplace them in relation to each other ... A game canoriginate, for example, from a given astronomical configuration,a theme from a Bach fugue, a phrase of Leibnitzor from the Upanishads, and the fundamental idea awakenedcan be built up and enriched through assonancesto relative concepts. While a moderate beginner can,through these symbols, formulate parallels between apiece of classical music and the formula of a natural law,the adept and Master of the Game can lead the openingtheme into the freedom of boundless combinations.Game Hesse portrays a Golden Age of Mind. The knowledge-informationprogrammers of Castalia, like chemists and physicists, dissolvethought molecules into elements (beads) and weave them intonew patterns.In his poem, "The Last Glass Bead Game," Hesse's heroJoseph Knecht writes, "We draw upon the iconography . . . that singslike crystal constellations."TECHNOLOGY INVENTS IDEOLOGYHesse apparently anticipated McLuhan's First Law ofCommunication: The medium is the message. The technology youuse to package, store, communicate your thoughts defines the limitsof your thmking. Your choice of thought tool determmes the limitationsof your thinking. If your thought technologyis words-carvedinto-marble,let's face it, you're not going to be a Ught-hearted flexiblethinker. An oU pamting or a wrinkled papyrus in a Damascuslibrary cannot communicate the meaning of a moving-picture fihn.New thought technology creates new ideas. The printing press creatednational languages, the national state, literacy, the industrialage. Television, like it or not, has produced a global thought-processingvery different from oral and Uterate cultures.Understanding the power of technology, Hesse tells us tiiatthe new mind culture of Castalia was based on a tangible mentaldevice, a thought machine, "a frame modeled on a child's abacus, a