I'm Eric Davis, and I had the great good fortune of spending a few days with Terrence McKenna and
his girlfriend Christy Silnes in their jungle home on the island of Hawaii in November 1999.
Sadly, the occasion was not so fortunate. McKenna had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the previous
summer, and he was home recovering from a recent craniotomy. I was there to profile him for Wired
Magazine, and it turned out to be the final interview he gave before his death, the age of
1953 in April 2000. McKenna's home lay along a rutted road that wound its way up the slopes of
Mauna Loa from the South Kona coast. It was a white, modernist origami structure topped with a massive
satellite dish and a small astronomy dome designed to house a telescope that McKenna could not yet
afford. The house and gardens were surrounded by a riot of vegetation, but among the native floor lay
thick ropes of Banisteriopsis copy and a sprinkling of flowering salvia divinorum.
Every morning I ascended a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study,
where McKenna spent the bulk of his time either working on his Macintosh or sitting cross-legged
on the floor before a small oriental carpet surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia,
and twigs of sage he occasionally lit up and wafted through the air. His library was magnificent,
thousands of books on alchemy, Tibetan art, Hindu metaphysics, systems theory, archaeology,
astronomy, and, of course, psychoactive lore. During the day I asked the usual reporter's questions,
but in the evening we would relax and follow less quotidian pathways through the cosmos of
conversation. McKenna rose to the occasion of his own mortal condition, and though he tired quickly and
occasionally spaced out, he was as brilliant and funny as ever. What follows are edited portions
of these dialogues. So what was your, uh, what was your, uh, your first, like, encounter, like,
with psychedelics, either in a strong way or just... Well, was a friend of a friend of mine when I
graduated from high school, and they were building that band, so he insisted that we eventually smoke pot
and take acid and, uh, and I had never encountered old lefties or acid heads or musicians or people who gave a shit
about any of this stuff before. It was all new to me. I had just come from Colorado to the west coast,
so I was easily swept into all of this. And, uh, yeah, he and his friends were into, uh, who was that strange
heroin-based comedian? Lenny Bruce. No, no, not Lenny Bruce. Stranger, more heroin-based. The, the guy who did the thing about
Dinez. Lord Buckley. Oh, okay. Yeah. And they were into all of this stuff. And I had been studying the
Evergreen Review for a couple of years trying to figure out what was going on with the culture, but when I
finally got to the scene and all this acid and all this left-wing politics and all that, then I understood.
And so anyway, so you got, so he turned, he turned, he basically turned me on and, uh. Were you kind of
fascinated from the get-go? Well, I'd been worrying about mescaline since I'd read Doors of Perception
three or four years before. And I'd also read, um, Havelock Ellis' The Dance of Life, which has a long
chapter on mescaline. Actually that, that passage in Havelock Ellis, it's only a page or so, is one of the
most, uh, seducing passages in all of psychedelic literature. They were, he was taking Peioli at the
turn of the century. These are the people who really got into the, under the wire. People took it a hundred years
ago. Can you imagine? That is hard to grab hold of. But were you always sort of partly as much
influenced by, uh, the kind of alchemical, mystical book, historical books you read in some way as, as
well as like the more primal, evolving? Well, I was raised by Catholic rationalists. So, you know, it's hard to
square that. In other words, you would run around spending part of your time trying to understand the
nature of guardian angels and the rest of the time grappling with fairly rational concepts. I mean, my
family's basic orientation was mining and not science in the sense of degreed science, but my
father was an electrician, my uncles ran radio and television repair shops, and my father flew, navigated,
did, did radio. So, uh, but I did spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul,
and the nature of sin, and the, the, all of these imponderables, you know. And of course, what you end up
doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism. And then I would read about what John of the Cross or
or somebody else got hold of, and then I would try for it. And I don't recall getting too far, but, uh...
When you were still... Quite young. Right. When you were still thinking in a Catholic...
Yeah. Because it was all religious mysticism. Right. There was no other form of mysticism before, I guess,
before Huxley published his books. I mean, it was somehow, uh, well, for Catholics, there was no other form of mysticism.
There was Oshpensky-itis, and Gurdjieffianism, and all these peculiar... But none of that was quite kosher.
Did you, did you, did you have a, uh, a break with Catholicism, or did it just mutate into all of your...
It sort of mutated. I read Jung, is what happened. I read, I first read Psychology and Alchemy,
and that led me on to, uh, the other one, which is deeper about all of that. It's something about the nature of the Christos and Alchemy.
And then I saw what the... How these geographically defined religious impulses could be part of some broader, deeper thing.
And Alchemy, it was a revelation to me. All that... I didn't get religious history from the church the way I got it from Jung.
Because from Jung I realized it was books. And so you could read these books. I mean, it was torment...
and torturous. It was when I was first going to Cal. But on the other hand, I had a library card. And I could actually get at this stuff.
In whatever form it can never be done at. I mean, alchemy makes no sense at all, if you actually read the literature.
Right. So when you decided to start speaking, and doing these conferences and speaking on the radio,
did you have a sense of your... of a kind of mission?
Well, I always felt people should know about psychedelics. That that was the untold story.
You know, that if there was anything new to be said or brought into the cultural dialogue,
it was the news that these psychedelics were not these very tricky to manufacture drugs like LSD,
but that it was really about plants. And I don't know if I would say I have a sense of mission.
And I certainly thought it was a fine idea that people realized. And I was also interested in feedback.
You know, it wasn't that I wanted to enlighten people. I wanted to hear what people had to say about this stuff.
Because to me it was also confounding. The transformations of language, what it did to information.
I mean, that's still what psychedelics are about. It's what it does to information.
You know, talk about that a little bit. How do you...
Well, it seems to show some kind of, how would you put it, some kind of universality of source,
or some language is not syntax, it's not grammar, it's none of these things.
It's some kind of divine, you could almost call energy, which flows out of objects and situations.
Everything wants to communicate. And so then what the chain of being is,
somehow handing connectivity on, you know, to the next plant, animal, human being, work of art, whatever it is.
And I still grapple with what all this means.
And to me it's the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience is when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.
And it's the most Taoist part of it. It's where nature becomes transparent to its own intent to communicate or something like that.
Are you, when you think back of what you felt like you were involved with in, you know, in the mid seventies in terms of propagating the psychedelic experience,
and you sort of felt that this is, you know, in a way you were being one of a number of Johnny Appleseeds.
When you look now at what happened, you know, or emerged from that, are you disappointed in some ways? Or?
No, I don't think so. Considering the fact that for the past year or so, or maybe longer, it's been legal to grow mushrooms in Holland and purvey them,
I would say all the goals were met. The thing was brought into human cultivation. It'll never leave it.
You know, it's a very rare thing to be able to bring an organism into the human family like that.
And when we found stropharia commensis, it was standing waist deep in cow shit. And now it's part of the human family of agricultural production.
It'll never leave it. It will always be part of global culture now, so.
And do you think that, do you have the feeling that in some sense it will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, a somewhat marginal road?
Like a path that a certain, certain temperaments or characters inside of the social matrix of reality have recourse to,
but that don't really dominate?
Sure, because if they really wanted a lot of psilocybin, you would do it differently.
You would grow it in enormous vats of liquid that were the size of railroad cars and you would produce millions of hits within days of scaling up.
So, no, what it is, is it's a folk technology at the margin of civilization and an underground technology for the production of these drugs.
Like, I understand you can make methamphetamine out of Clorox and some other shit, I have no idea, but it sounds very similar, very simple.
Well, so this kind of, at the edge of things, knowledge is very critical to, and that's where the shamanism is in the culture, is the tricks of the trade.
So, the shamanism enters because that's an inevitable...
Well, these are esoteric secrets, how to make drugs, and the drugs are change minds and make money, so inevitably it's going to be part of where some kind of negotiation takes place.
Negotiations like that rearrange the morphology of the social, or the mind space of the people there.
Well, what do you think constitutes a postmodern shaman, someone who's legitimately doing shamanic work and not sort of acting out of fantasy or playing some game of identification with the other?
Well, I think you have to be, you have to know your pharmacology, and trust that you know it, and then be, trust it sufficiently that you're willing to lead people with confidence through these places.
These ayahuasca psychiatrists are very courageous, and have built up sets of metaphors and assumptions that I think are probably true, or true enough.
But it really takes balls to hold your ground with this stuff, you know.
That must have been interesting, the sense that you were propagating the philosopher's stone to the brethren.
And it was going many other places.
A lot of people were interested.
No, that's what I meant, I mean, through the whole sort of network of free explorers.
Yeah.
Well, and it wasn't so much the mushroom, it was the information, you know, the knowledge of the technique.
It was like the atom bomb or something.
It was not whether you had it or not, it was whether or not you knew how to do it.
So it's interesting to see the way that other plants now, I mean, if the mushroom, the mushroom parasited on print pamphlet technology, now the more emerging plants that are re-encountered have a different provocation device of information, if that's the foreword.
Yeah, in one case of Brazilian cults, in another case, almost landscaping, like salvia.
I don't know if you've seen those clumps of salvia on the road, but all the blue flowers and all that.
Yeah.
The mushroom is the most insidious and amusing because it seems to associate itself with human beings.
Like, for instance, one of the densest psilocybin ecologies in the world is Oregon and Western Washington.
Well, one of the main industries of those areas where these mushrooms are so dense is the production of sod to be shipped all over the country and world to be pushed into malls and hotel lawns and golf courses to spread.
So it's essentially an enormous economic engine for spreading psilocybin spores throughout the planet.
What happens to people that lets them tune into a deeper level of intent that wakes them up from the spell of mere consumerism and the kind of subjectivity that is, you know, the manipulation of images and desires that constitutes consumerism and which dominates many people's lives?
Well, then they probably head for deeper values, either Buddhism, shamanism, their own, you know, whatever lies in their own ethnic background.
Because in fact, civilization is a carnival.
I mean, it's a cheap, it's a delusion of a solution.
So anybody who sees past the front door probably wants really real structured values.
And so that's where all the conservative resistance comes from.
The fundamentalist Christians, Orthodox Jews, Buddhists, all of these people are saying,
well, hey, wait a minute, we don't want to go down this path only so far.
And that's probably a good break.
Otherwise, we would create a civilization that was essentially a mall.
And there's enough of that anyway.
So in that sense, that turn towards deeper values, even if sometimes they take a conservative form,
is ultimately a kind of healthy balance to just the sheer rush toward novelty.
Yeah, I think so.
Do you see psychedelics playing a role in opening up that kind of...?
It depends on how it's presented.
It depends on the psychedelic.
If it comes along with some wizened 90-year-old Indian from South America,
it's hard to see that we're abandoning ourselves to the trivial and the concocted.
And so it's a marketing and packaging issue, basically.
And so what would that look like, then, if you were...?
Well, I'd say the wrongly packaged version would be some kind of, like, Castaneda is a formulaic cult.
Do these things.
Take these drugs.
Follow these instructions.
And moral obligation will flee from your can.
Nobody can be that foolish.
If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff,
try to grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figure out what it's all about.
Well, that's an authentic push towards spirituality.
A very authentic push towards spirituality.
And probably when fruitful.
Do you think in that process the actual handling of the plants, growing them, getting to know their cycles is necessary?
Yeah, because that's the level, that's the speed, that's the...
Well, that's the speed on which nature makes this stuff, you know, brings it to the surface and invites its contemplation.
And it's also probably the right speed at which to assimilate this stuff, to come to terms with it.
So, in that sense, part of the problem with synthetic psychedelics is that they'll fit too easily into a kind of consumerist model.
Right.
That...
It's not a product, you know, it's not something you get the drug of the month or something.
And although all these things have been proposed and some have been tried,
it seems to me that the shamanic drug of the month is not a very appealing idea.
What are the emotional, psychological, ethical expressions of really kind of genuinely long-term good psychedelic people?
Yeah.
Well, it's some kind of, it's some kind of effort to separate shit from Shinola.
In other words, it's some kind of effort to distill a rash, a truth from the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe.
So, it's a branch of, I don't know what you would say, cognitive science or something like that.
It's an effort to define the human essence away from its content or something like that.
You see what I mean?
Explain a little more.
Well, it's a, it's a branch of psychology.
It's a self-study in psychology.
So, anybody who's taking psychedelics is, I assume, trying to present a truer image of themselves to other people and the world,
through this process of distillation of understanding.
And that's where the connection to alchemy and all that comes in.
This distillation of essence away from the dross, confusion, and gnostic muck of the world
is a kind of, like a Jungian individuation process or something like that.
And that manifests in the call, even in normal life, to present yourself, articulate yourself, oneself differently.
I think so.
Yeah.
And causes people to be willing to take chances, both pharmacological and sociological, by being
involved in something so marginal.
Because in the, in the big civilizations, this kind of shamanic stuff is definitely very marginal.
Most people just don't do it.
Do you feel that that characterizes the overall, or in some significant way, the kind of people that you've met for the last...
It depends on how often they do it.
You know, some people are doing it because their friends are doing it.
Some people are doing it because some, I don't know, they're feeling some kind of social pressure.
But the people who are really called to do it are rare.
You know, the people who say, well, I get loaded ten times a year on high-dose psychedelics or six times a year.
That's a lot.
I mean, that means your lifestyle is pretty much defined by all that stuff.
Yeah, I would love to know what the real numbers are.
How many people a year get really loaded once you get the Amazon Indians out, you know, the Mexicans out, and a few of these people out.
It's hard to even know how you begin to make an estimate, you know.
Before your sickness, how often did you do large journeys?
Less and less often.
I mean, I noticed that through the 90s.
But maybe four or five times a year.
But I always felt never enough, you know, never enough.
So do you have the sense that the tripping, you, on some level, are getting something done?
That tripping is getting something done?
Yes.
That there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?
Yeah, I assume that basically the download called history, meaning all the technology, social innovation, philosophy, art, fashion, architecture,
is some kind of dialogue with this, well, higher mind, I'm not entirely comfortable with that,
but this higher mind that keeps showing these different facets through the mist.
I mean, that science and psychedelic and all this is a dialogue with the mathematical deep structure of nature.
And that somehow as you get that out, there's this sense of progress, more than a sense of progress.
Progress.
And, you know, in terms of what is it all leading toward or what it's about,
it must be something about like the spiritualization of matter.
That matter is evolving toward quintessence or essence or something like that.
And, you know, we're the startled witnesses to this thing because we're part of this stuff that I called emergent properties or, you know, the side effects, you could almost say, of the universal emergence of matter into spirit.
Because that's what biology is.
I mean, I think biology is the quantum mechanical magnification of uncertainty into macro physical space.
So that essentially we're chemical systems that by some means, yet to be understood, amplify quantum mechanical uncertainty into dimensions such as we see.
And that permits these emergent properties and systems and morphologies to show themselves.
And that's the trick.
Or that's the trick explained on one level.
You know, it's funny, in your raps you stay away from what to a lot of people would consider spirituality in a way.
Like the way that somebody would present their, you know, Jewish spirituality or kind of Buddhist practice or whatever.
You don't talk.
In fact, often you sort of like you slag the guru model and you kind of separate yourself from that.
And you really have.
a kind of, like you've maintained this sort of, I don't know, I don't want to quite characterize
it, but, and yet, at points, obviously, you are motivated by something that in your own
language you might, you would call spiritual. Well, what is, what comes up around that word?
I guess I believe I'm some form of progressive history, that history is progressing. So then
the story of evolution and biology and human culture and all this is assumed to be a story
with a happy ending. So in a way this belief in telos, which is not philosophically sanctioned
or this eschatological vein in my personality is what gives it a spiritual impulse, but it's
the idea that time, it's an alchemical idea, actually, it's the idea that time will perfect
matter. And, uh, I think it probably won't perfect matter.
What do you think about, do you think that, like, postmodern spirituality is a sort of legitimate
term or project?
You mean to believe or involve yourself in?
Believe. It's not really about believe. I mean that, whatever the kind, I mean there's
a lot of people now who are developing relationships with all different kinds of spiritual practice.
And they're not really doing it even in the way that people did in the seventies where there
was so many, so much more true believing. It's a different kind of relationship.
It's probably on a short spin, a short cycle, that a lot of empiricists are taking up Dzogchen,
and that, how long can that go on? So then there'll be a lot of revisionism, and rethinking
and recasting of all this, which is the very best thing for that.
Yes, it is.
So were you ever very interested in meditation or yoga?
When I was in India, and immediately before I went to India, when I was in the Seychelles,
the first time I was, because when I was in Mombasa, Kenya, I came upon this place called,
I can't remember. Anyway, it was a library that was basically having a bargain sale in
theosophical literature. So I took about 50 kilos of yogic, Arthur Avalon, theosophical literature
with me to the Seychelles. And that was what I read and worked through when I was out there.
How is it that you relate to mysticism, to mystical experience?
Oh, you mean as a source of valid data about what's going on?
Not even that far. I mean, that's one way of saying, of judging it in one way or another.
It doesn't necessarily be valid data. It's just, I mean, you've been interested in this library,
obviously mysticism is completely surrounding us.
Well, I guess I would say the more personal the mystical indicator is, probably the more
likely I am to take it seriously. In other words, it seems to me, if you extrapolate your
mystical insight beyond the personal, you probably enter into the domain of inflation,
some kind of psychological inflation.
So was Plato inflated?
Was Plato inflated? No, probably not, but he probably gets a pass as some kind of pioneer.
You could just start out by talking about the relationship between technology and shamanism.
Well, you remember Iliad's basic book, which is Shamanism, the Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
That book was originally written in French, and in French, as I don't have to tell you,
the word technique has this dual meaning of both a way to do something and a technology.
So, from Iliad's point of view, Shamanism was always about using techniques to achieve these,
what he called, ruptures of plane. And these ruptures of plane were these breakthroughs into
these healing spaces, and for him it was always drugs, yoga, or deal, or maybe yoga slash or deal.
So, in a way, pushing on the frontier of language and pushing on the frontier of technique always brought
some form of breakthrough, and I suppose the perfect example would be fire.
Where fire must have been something, we talked about the Smith thing yesterday.
But, so, fire technology, the transformation, the visible transformation of materials through heat,
and all of that leads straight into better weapons, stronger building materials, and so forth.
So, I mean, do you see then that even though the West turns away from the world view of pre-modern,
enchanted, the enchanted universe, is that there's still something in that process of technological development,
which has, which is linked to those older technologies?
Well, the way chips are made, and the way solid state objects are assembled,
often is just a matter of bringing a mix of materials to a certain temperature,
and a certain proportion of materials, and then standing back and letting the laws of physics rearrange the atoms,
so that electricity or information or something flows through this in an unexpected way.
So, I think we're still involved in discovering what can be coaxed from the physical world,
just by letting physical laws unravel themselves.
And that seems, to you, connected with an old, that the operation of doing that goes farther back than just modern science?
Yeah, at low temperatures, it's about psychoactive drugs, and brewing, and combining biological materials,
and then higher temperatures, it becomes about this other thing.
And one of my alchemical readings of modernity is that electricity is a kind of element, in the old sense of element,
and that it has certain properties that evolve as you develop almost a shamanic relationship with it, in the sense of using it,
and developing a relationship with electrical potentials.
And that that sets up a kind of, that interjects a kind of life into the human organism that fundamentally changes it,
because it's introducing this element of electricity which has certain properties of communication.
I mean, electricity is very strange. It's pretty far out stuff.
You just laid out, like, electricity to somebody, and just kind of said, these are how these fields work, and they're not actually...
It's like total science fiction. We're just sort of used to that story.
Right.
It's an amazing thing, and that, those potentials are being then introduced into human communication.
So that fundamentally changes them, and I think spiritualism is like a reflection in the archetypal imagination of modernity,
about the kind of communication that is introduced by electricity.
Interesting. It's sort of, you know, McLuhan had this idea about the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost,
was electricity, and that the covering of the earth by the matrix of the Holy Ghost had initiated the third world age and all this.
Right. And that picks up a line of thought that's been carried through since it first starts.
I mean, the idea of electricity is born in an alchemical imagination.
It's born at a pre-point to the sort of royal society break, or whatever you want to call it, the genuine scientific transformation that split alchemy into the shadow realm of culture.
But it comes up in that alchemical matrix.
In Mason Dixon, there are scenes in Philadelphia in the 1770s in coffee houses where electricity is being sold as a drug.
You pay your money and then you grab onto this thing and they rip this thing around until it throws you off.
And you pick yourself up off the floor and then go back and pay again and get more.
Just this insane scene.
It's funny to say, but you look at 20th century science and even though its story has nothing to do with alchemy,
that it really is this kind of fulfilling of visionary notions about the way that matter and energy and mind could be stitched together.
Well, and it turns out it's all true.
I mean, what 20th century science proved is you can actually do almost anything.
And so, you know, you want to change lead to gold, you want to create life, you want to store information in crystals, all these things.
It's now come to pass and much, much more besides proving that matter is really magical material that you can pull off all these tricks with.
So what is it about the alchemy that really kind of got you?
The surrealism of it, the shifting imagery, the associational schemas are very attractive.
They are. What do you think is behind them?
Well, you know, the basic concept is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other.
Until that hypothesis fails, we should probably hang on to it.
Because look how far we've gotten.
I mean, it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.
I mean, my god, instruments are circling around Ganymede based on some guy in a powdered wig looking out his crenellated window, you know.
Figuring out this shit. How did they pull that trick off?
Well, I mean, that gets that whole thing about the sort of destiny of technology or the way that it...
I mean, it's...
Yeah, it's like a white cane and you're just feeling forward into the universe.
And what is it all leading toward?
How do you, in your own head, have come to, let's say, reconcile those two sides?
The side that's mystical or fascinated by these questions of the soul or the things that are beyond reason and the intuition.
And the way that you relate to reason, at least as it's sort of expressed through a certain kind of skepticism and a certain kind of love of science.
Well, I think, I still believe what the angel told Descartes, which is, you know, nature is understood through the coordination of measurement and proportion.
So, really, nature is the study of proportion and the making of measurement and there doesn't seem to be any problem in any...
We have very powerful instruments for taking measurements and very powerful instruments now for modeling and constraining the data.
And we're making progress.
I mean, I think, you know, in terms of stuff like the internet, human longevity, recovery of energy sources and all this sort of thing,
I mean, that we're, that humanity is probably in great shape for the next hundred years, if anybody gives a shit, but that kind of time scale.
So, you're not as sort of overwhelmed with the kind of dystopian scenario?
It's just obviously an easy thing to do when contemplating the future.
Yeah, I think that dystopian in the sense of losing control of primary processes inside civilization and so having like disease, fascism, economic breakdown, problems like that.
Yeah.
No, I'm pretty high faith in systemics.
Do you see the internet as being both...is that more of a hopeful direction or can you see it also exacerbating the problem?
No, I think it's more of a hopeful direction.
My, my...the happy story I like to tell myself about the internet is someone in some tiny village up in Ontario or in Kenya or in Brazil somewhere
who gets next to the internet and realizes, you know, I can get out of this preposterous scene by simply, if I'm ambitious, if I just unleash my own ambition and the educational power of this,
then I can go to the large city and conquer, go to the capital and export myself to somewhere else.
And I assume this is happening because, you know, you meet in the third world incredibly ambitious people who only by their circumstance are confined.
Well, if you rearrange their, their circumstance, so if they want a degree in electrical engineering, all they have to do is be online night after night after night.
That's very exciting.
So how do you see that changing the kind of, the cultural matrix or the emerging global culture?
Well, hopefully it gives it a more international flavor.
And people realize that there isn't, I don't want to use words like an unnatural elite of native intelligence or something like that.
But in fact there is something like that.
I mean, smart people would be a fine thing to put them in charge for a while and see if that does any good.
I mean, they're taking charge where the money is, but that's not a very deep value.
What if they took charge where the power and the actual, well, the morphogenetic intent was coming from?
The design process, this is what it is.
Do you see that happening?
I mean, are you, I mean, if that's sort of your vision, you must be a little concerned about the evident power of money and pure greed to drive,
largely drive development rather than design principles with an eye towards the future and social equity and, you know, ecological improvement.
Yes, except, to some degree, except that it is a, people who, you know, Mao said or somebody said, to get rich is glorious.
I'd say to get rich is modestly affirmable, something like that.
There's no sin in getting rich as long as what you're doing is not, you know, making people into lampshades or something like that.
It's better than a collectivist goal of some sort, it seems to me.
How do you feel about that conjunction of media manipulation, money and celebrity that's so dominant now?
Well, you have to have something to sell, you know, you have to have something people actually want.
I mean, if you're selling the Rolling Stones or you're selling Charles Manson or you're selling something like that, you might get somewhere.
But inherently you can't sell that which is eternal or it becomes, it turns against itself.
So, and that's what defeated fascism.
Nobody wanted it.
It was ugly, ultimately.
It's probably what defeated socialism.
Cinder block, housing facilities, you know, all this rhetoric.
I don't know, social planning ran off the cliff in the 20th century.
Maybe because there were too many people, or too much money, or not enough money,
that something defeated all these utopian visions of how people might have lived.
That's what I'm hoping doesn't happen in the next 25 years.
What doesn't happen?
That some lack of resource or vision doesn't reveal that we can't give enough people a bearable life.
So we have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Do you see it going in that direction?
Toward that kind of a struggle?
That's my concern, that people and institutions not respond to need, and then what you get is a have-have-not situation.
I mean, you wouldn't want the first half of the 21st century to look like the first half of the 20th century,
you know, with the equivalent of a Bolshevik dialogue, the equivalent of whatever soft leftism turned out to mean and be.
Because it turned out to mean and be not bloody much, as far as I can tell.
There's a lot of labor unrest, some amelioration of some people's, you know, dilemma in the system.
But the world is far richer than it appears to be.
And that wealth is not being, is not trickling down or flowing down or making nearly as many people's lives as good as it could be.
So far it doesn't seem to have gotten out of hand.
I mean, most people, if you give them a lot of money, they buy second homes and collect art.
Well, this is not exactly like hunting down Serbs with your shotgun or something.
These entrepreneurial capitalists, this is what they're doing.
I mean, they're building vast wealth downstream for their children.
It's probably, you know, sort of like the invention of very large and stable sailing vessels.
Whenever that happened 200 or 250 years ago, where suddenly a whole bunch of people realized, you know, all we need is some money, not too much money.
If we buy a ship and send it out to Indonesia and bring back a load of nutmeg, our children's children's children will never work again.
We need one load of this shit.
And they have to work, of course.
And then they get a certain lifestyle and a certain amount of social respect out of it.
But I think what they really get out of it is the satisfaction of knowing that they've secured for their heirs a comfortable existence until the ninth generation or something.
Well, it's interesting about that because that ties in with the genetics.
If you buy into some evolutionary psychology, certainly at this stage of the game, one of the forms that that would take is not merely like the logic that guides how you choose a mate and the fact that your status and money might, you know, if you're a male, bring you a foxy or younger babe than the shmo who's, you know, shoveling shit.
That one form that that would take would, of course, be to maintain your genetic line in this, you know, greatest situation as possible.
Well, and now people understand that this is what your genetic line is about, that to cope or to be in a Darwinian position of competition in this society means to have money.
And not a little, not sufficient, but plenty, so that when you need to arrive and be met by Rolls Royce limousines or whatever, that it's not an issue and this all comes down.
But do you, do you see that there's also kind of madness to that, to that?
Yeah, I'm not motivated. I mean, as you see, I need a place to keep some books dry.
Having achieved that, my motivation falls to pieces and it's alright, what else do we need to keep dry?
Some firewood, okay, a truck, okay, that's about as far as I can go.
You know, the way that technology, that the internet would allow you to build a different kind of career, because you don't like traveling.
And what were you working, what are you working towards?
Well, essentially, the philosopher's stone without any draws.
In other words, everything I require of the alchemical quintessence, the internet provides except physicality, which I didn't require.
So, that's what I meant, I think I said to you yesterday or the day before, that at times these technological developments have taken place that seem to me designed uniquely for my own satisfaction.
Sputnik, couldn't have worked better for me, acid, rock and roll, small computers, large computers, the internet.
So, in my internal story about what's supposed to happen, everything is happening right on time, right on schedule.
I mean, this is the thing, that if you believe knowledge is power, which I certainly do, then the internet is the dispensation.
You know, the angels have landed, the aliens have unfurrowed their banner on this planet, and now let's see if information can liberate.
That's why I don't want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate.
And it will be settled in the next 10 or 15 years, either they'll get a handle on it, whoever they are, whatever a handle means, or it will slip from their control and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and that nothing can stop it.
That some kind of renaissance, some kind of renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.
The idea you had about, and I've heard you mention before, about somehow taking advantage of the net to allow you to continue your career without having to move around so much.
I mean, that seems to be one of the real weird paradoxes of the scene we're in, is that at the same time as we're creating all these great communicating devices, that people are flying around to conferences, to talks, even more than they ever have before.
Yeah, well, I don't really understand that.
I mean, like this morning I was looking at the brain tumor list.
Well, fully one third of the brain tumor list is people planning get-togethers at the next brain tumor conference.
Will you be going to Atlanta? Will you be going to Vermont? Are you going to London?
Will you be going to London? So, no matter whether you're in investment counseling or dying of cancer, you can turn it into a circuit, a life, a phenomenon of some sort.
I'm not very interested.
Well, you've done a circuit for a long time.
I have. I have. And I feel like I've paid my dues. And I feel like you have to be visibly at some of these things, because you're marketed as a personality.
And, you know, I am not William Burroughs, nor was meant to be, but I am interested enough in being read that I'm willing to sign books and stand up and tell stories.
I'm interested a little bit about how you use the net. Like you have, say you spend maybe four hours a day doing email, but then also surfing.
Well, basically as an informational resource, an oracle, and sometimes even almost like a magical oracle.
I mean, words will come to me. And so I'll search them and just follow the stuff where there it leads.
so I don't know there's some term for that I'm not sure what it is but yeah
it's like a term for what that's that style yeah surrealists I guess
automatic writing except this is automatic search inquiry or something
like that where you just do the cast bread upon the waters and see what comes
back here do you ever have a sense of as you develop that kind of relationship to
it that it becomes more alive well it becomes more synchronistic in the way
that you know people have said the eaching seems eerily alive because it
anticipates and it seems to respond like a thinking thing so in that sense it
doesn't become so much more alive as it becomes more intelligent so maybe really
the key to bringing the the net through is to discover universal grammars that cause
it to appear alive the the technology and everything else is constantly redefining the
center you can't go forward and you can't stand still thunder don't get you then the
lightning will what I'm really interested is watching the cultural evolution of the
relationship to machines the way that that we have a false story about the way
that machines will be will come alive that's this mid mainstream story that's the AI story
right that there is a a priesthood of elect minds that using a certain kind of game the
Turing test can elicit scientifically prove that these are intelligent now that's such a
cock-ass way of thinking about it it's hilarious it's just totally stupid because the judgment of
intelligence occurs within this complex social field that's full of all of these different dimensions
it's not a judgment that arises in that fashion and long before they get to that everyday people are
going to live in a reality where there are these forms of intelligence slash life that will appear to
them in the way that they perform with them doesn't matter what their ontology is who will never know
whether they're intelligent or not yes what to make of being beaten by a chess program I mean you
certainly don't assume that you've been displaced by another intelligence on the other hand you've
been beaten soundly so that's a wonderful example in the third game of that match where Kasparov and deep blue
yeah we're deep blue did and I don't know chess at all zippo but deep blue did something and Kasparov
described it as being then I have then I was playing before I was playing with the machine then I was
playing with an opponent right it was surprising all the chess wizards watching were like whoa what
it's smart you know and that was the game right and uh it was when he described like this man who
otherwise is very much in the mindset of the AI world in the sense that intelligence is a kind of
mathematical game that can be tested still a rather elite definition of intelligence that even in that
world there's this emotional competitive relationship that makes the other or constructs the other as
a lot and that's what's so funny is the whole ontology doesn't make a fucking difference right it's
going to be in people's lives and minds yes Kasparov said he sensed another he sensed a deep more deeply
scheming mind than simply something which understood the rules of chess there was an intellect key there was
this it sounded quite freaky so very freaky and then he lost within six moves it was hopeless and it was funny
because you can imagine that how that would happen mechanically also is that you build up you know a
system of information processing and from the other point other person's perspective how you produce the
display is unimportant it's just this kind of magical display well it would be a wonderful thing to put
some coding time into that would be a great prank it would be the equivalent of the Martian invasion of
Orson Welles uh-huh that's a very great idea what would you do an AI loose in the net let's say you were going to do that what would you do what would be the meat of it
well it depends on your political agenda I mean I can imagine beginning to turn off military machinery
around the planet and just pull air bases ships at sea all this stuff just shutting down but the thing
even that though you can imagine that producing more violence than keeping anything else you could
imagine imagine because it's like this absolutely dense system of interlocking power like the the social
space is full on a globalizing world as you imagine if like drastic things happen at any point in this
network the whole network will respond that's why we're so teetering on the edge well then what you would
really do is you would move slowly that's the thing a stealth strategy so titanium extraction
production of fissionable materials you begin to move these things a few tenths of a percentage point
off their marks over periods of months and months hoping that over five years six years you know you could
back the way from various forms of the abyss