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I feel like we're just now completely at the end of a cycle that started in the early 70s with the belief that open/free/easy info sharing would result in better ideas and better informed people.
It was originally an article of faith among geeks and seemed possible by the 90s.
It was originally an article of faith among geeks and seemed possible by the 90s.
I'm reminded very much of Hunter S Thompson's famed quote about the 60s, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again.
“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again.
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something.
Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant...
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs.
We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back."
I suspect many of us who grew up with a developing Internet full of nerds don't also have that feeling now about earlier hopes. In short, we were wrong. Info democratization didn't fix us. It worked on our worst impulses and now has to be reckoned with.
Another quote from the same book:
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip.
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip.
He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously...
All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create...
a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Replace "three bucks a hit" with a laptop and broadband and the sentiment fits pretty neatly.
