Jack Trembath Davis Chapter VI



I think that Davis’s chapter “a most enchanting machine” in TechGnosis really touches on the more magical side of technology.  This mystical aspect goes against the intuitive nature of technology which aims at objective reality and finding answers to the more unknown.  Davis begins by writing about the role of psychedelics in shaping the counterculture that generated the computer.  Psychedelics as a means to transcend the body, alter and understand consciousness, and creatively shape the information surrounding oneself aligns with many of the original interests of the cyber community.  As cyberspace offers this potential to create a community and network of information and furthermore a space in which one can shape and use that information to truly find a better self-understanding, I begin to understand more why John Perry Barlow hoped for the internet to remain untouched by tyranny or control.  I also begin to better understand the magic potential of this formable space and how it can possibly give people a tool to understand themselves.  Davis touches on the work of Wozniak and Jobs and their creation of Apple, and how the apple represents information, but it is also the apple in the Garden of Eden.  I find this concept interesting.  When Adam and Eve ate the apple, they became aware that they were naked essentially gaining knowledge and self-awareness that altered their consciousness.  Apple and the computer in general, giving the mass populations access to cyberspace, is a tool or a way in which the people have this self-reflecting instrument full of information that can expand the human mind.  But as Davis stated, by extending our creative spaces we amputate other natural parts of ourselves.  I am curios if Davis will cover what is lost in all this cyber hype.
The video below highlights the role of psychedelics in the creation of computer culture.  John Markoff states that psychedelics didn’t influence the computer but went side by side with the creation of the computer.  He also talks about the work of Douglas Englebart and how he introduced a new model of computing via images and hyperlinks deeming it “The Mother of All Demos”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCMwZNR9DPE
The link below is the Mondo2000 History Project archives.  It has photocopies of different magazine issues.
 https://archive.org/details/mondohistory

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