Silicon Valley’s Technolibertarian Dream Was Invented By Timothy Leary

https://theoutline.com/post/1030/timothy-leary-silicon-valley-technolibertarian

by dpflan • 9 years ago

53 62 9 years ago

api• 9 years ago

I highly recommend finding a bunch of Leary's out of print material. A lot of it's been scanned and uploaded to various places. It's both fascinating and culturally very significant, not to mention stylized and weird to the point of being a work of art.

I also highly recommend his biography Flashbacks.

dpflan• 9 years ago

Thanks for the recommendations. Can you provide any links to resources?

xherberta7• 9 years ago

"... In the 1980s, [Leary's] vision could be summed up in one word: SMI2LE.

A neat summary of Leary’s vision of the future of the human species, SMI2LE stands for Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, and Life Extension. (First published in his book Terra II (1974))

... [Leary] came to this conclusion while rotting away in prison."

----

My 2 cents:

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

Increased Intelligence: Not that helpful in an era when humans are going to have to re-articulate their raison d'etre in the face of superhuman machine intelligence. I would expect an LSD guy like Leary to have a better grasp on the purpose of being human than that. See also Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Life Extension: One of the key features of being human is being mortal. It's not just an inconvenience to be done away with. (That's a personal view; disagreement is welcome.) I sort of wonder if LE is a screwball project for people who secretly are afraid of a judeo-christian afterlife? Again, it boggles me that Leary failed to make peace with death? Maybe drugs are not as awesome as I thought.

nickparker2• 9 years ago

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

If I can soapbox for a moment, I think you might be framing space colonization wrong. The big upside to me is that it will give us powerful new capabilities in space.

If we reach the point where Mars has a worthwhile industrial base, Mars becomes the launch pad for just about everything. The weaker gravity combined with the thinner atmosphere (so you can fly vacuum optimized engines from the surface) makes it a good order of magnitude cheaper to launch mass from. For large structures destined for Earth orbit, it would eventually make sense to build them on Mars and fly them into Earth orbit.

By analogy, colonizing the Americas was a pretty bad deal at first. The colonies took a ton of support and it was really hard to bring any value back. In hindsight though, it was one of the most profitable ventures ever. New technologies created exponential gains from the raw ingredients found in the new world.

Orbital manufacturing is also pretty important. Made in Space is working on producing ZBLAN fiber optic cable in orbit, because gravity causes artifacts which degrade signal quality[0]. This seems like a narrow niche but I think it's not. Think about microchip fabs and turbine blades. There are a lot of high value high tech processes that could likely be improved by either the removal of gravity, or the choice of arbitrary levels of artificial gravity <1g on rotating structures. Interplanetary radiation is an issue now, but it's one that can be solved with a bigger mass budget.

I suppose my main point is that this isn't space migration, it's colonization, with all the profit-motive and empire building that word usually comes with.

[0] http://www.madeinspace.us/projects/fiber/

SilasX• 9 years ago

If we reach the point where Mars has a worthwhile industrial base, Mars becomes the launch pad for just about everything. The weaker gravity combined with the thinner atmosphere (so you can fly vacuum optimized engines from the surface) makes it a good order of magnitude cheaper to launch mass from. For large structures destined for Earth orbit, it would eventually make sense to build them on Mars and fly them into Earth orbit.

But you could say the same of the moon, right?

frenchy3• 9 years ago

Maybe drugs are not as awesome as I thought.

I suspect this to be the case. It seems to me that the a key feature with psychedelic drug users and proponents is that they end up discontent with life [1] (and to a degree, with reality). They're often talking about how these drugs helped them see some sort of truths, but as far as I can tell, these truths don't help them interact with reality.

[1] There's a good chance they actually just started out this way and I'm seeing a selection bias.

comstock• 9 years ago

Hmm I'd quite like to try drugs and am also quite discontent with life.

To be frank, I think most people are discontent. It's the human condition. I see this on a personal level, but there seem to be some polls to back it up [0]. It seems like being discontent could have evolutionary benefit (always reaching for more rather than stagnating).

[0] http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3354524

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

In "Escape From Reason", Francis Schaeffer said that modern humanity was faced with a total dichotomy: Rationally, there is no meaning, and we are just machines made of atoms. Any meaning (or even freedom) is in a place divorced from rationality. Faced with this, in the 1960s, people (including Leary) took drugs as a way to (hopefully temporarily) escape into irrationality, hoping to find meaning.

But the problem is the dichotomy. Even if you find meaning in the acid trip, you can't ever rationally explain that meaning, even to yourself. You know it happened, but that's all.

CoryG89• 9 years ago

Regarding LE. It's not like it's a particularly new idea. Look how much our life expectancy has increased in just the last few hundred years. I would imagine that 100 years ago, there were those saying the same thing. That anyone who felt the need to use new-fangled drugs like penicillin were just afraid of a Judeo-Christian afterlife.

bcg12• 9 years ago

Isn't LE more about increasing longevity than increasing life expectancy? That is, we don't have people living to be 200 years old; people's maximum lifespan seems relatively unchanged from 100 years ago (or even several thousand years ago if you go by 120 year limit in the Bible)... we just have a higher percentage of people who reach old age.

mc322• 9 years ago

LE, I think, is optimistic and dismisses the issue of psychological buildup. It's good to have new people come along questioning the status quo and current belief systems. LE ignores to some great extent the role psychological blank slates provide to the progress of a population.

In other words we'll miss out on the intergenerational dynamics and tensions which lead to change and renewal. Old people seldom deconstruct and then rebuild their psychological profile.

msabalau• 9 years ago

I agree that it is good to be able to question the status quo. It's less clear why we should accept that people dying in exactly the way they happen to do at the moment is the correct and only possible solution--as opposed to, say, the use of psychedelics, bioengineering in more curiosity or less fear, or simply consciously acknowledging the issue and building personal skills or social structures to resist current belief systems.

zeristor• 9 years ago

LE is a screwball project for people who secretly are afraid of a judeo-christian afterlife

Not meaning to be contentious but I don't recollect a judeo-christian afterlife being proven.

adrianN• 9 years ago

Not too long ago, a key feature of being human was hunting large animals using wooden sticks. I'm pretty happy that we did away with that feature.

The main benefit of research into life extension is imho not the actual life extension, but the necessary health extension. Death is not the bad part, frailty, Alzheimer's and all the other atrocities of old age are.

xherberta7• 9 years ago

I guess the paleo and Weston Price crowds would argue that Alzheimers and other degenerative diseases were unknown during the hunting-with-sticks days. (I mention it for the fun irony.)

lithos• 9 years ago

It's a little bit of a relief that the current crop of SV figures won't be the group of people who hand pick the first space generation.

Though I'd probably say that about anyone (or at least hope I would).

xherberta7• 9 years ago

Amen to that. I don't like to see the elites making a break for the life raft.

maverick_iceman2• 9 years ago

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

That's a pretty stupid comment. Space colonization has a lot of excellent motives, escaping earth's environmental problems are not one of them. To me the rationale would be to continue our species' glorious tradition of exploration, intellectual curiosity and exploiting the limitless resources of the universe.

FullMtlAlcoholc• 9 years ago

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

Or maybe some see space as the final frontier and want humanity to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.

Or, as Elon Musk has said many times, an insurance policy against extinction from any number of unavoidable causes such as disease or a meteor strike.

Increased Intelligence: Not that helpful in an era when humans are going to have to re-articulate their raison d'etre in the face of superhuman machine intelligence.

Why are you against increased intelligence? Humanity saw increased intelligence throughout the 20th century due to things like getting proper nutrition during childhood. Superhuman artificial general intelligence isn't the only outcome, nor do I think it is the most probable. We're more likely to become one with the machine using AI to augment our own intelligence, much like we do today with computing devices.

Life Extension: One of the key features of being human is being mortal. It's not just an inconvenience to be done away with.

First of all, life extension != eternal life. Even immortality != eternal life. Nothing lasts forever and on a long enough timeline, you will die and have to make peace with that. You don't have to be afraid of the afterlife to want to live longer. Perhaps you just want to visit another planet or see more than .0000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe.

Second and most importantly, we've already been through this. The 20th century added ~30 years to human lifespan. That represented a whopping 61% increase! It's not unreasonable to see these gains continue or even increase with accelerating technology. Arbitrarily mandating that people die at a certain age because of one's personal belief on the meaning of life is savage and barbaric.

Third, you may want to see what humanity evolves into. I'll leave this quote from Battlestar Galactica:

“I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.

xherberta7• 9 years ago

Thanks, I do appreciate the quote, and the clarification on LE.

Why are you against increased intelligence?

I'm not against increased intelligence per se, but I think it's a wrongheaded goal for the times. We don't seem to know how best to use the considerable native and machine-aided intelligence we already possess. I'm not convinced it's translating into better quality of life for all or most. In many domains, solutions are going to be non-technical.

I think a better goal is to prepare against the case in which AI will go on to surpass us once it has achieved our level of (technical) intelligence. (You and I may differ in our assessment of the likelihood.)

In this event, we won't be able to recover the advantage. I think we'll have to argue the case for our value in other terms, such as that we are able to have subjective experiences and relationships, we can emapthize, and can be amazing as poets, philosophers, lovers, and philanthropists.

Maybe it's time to pay more attention to the domains in which we excel at being human.

If AI learns from the de facto "human value system" that it sees in evidence among us, how do we expect to be treated if we become subordinates?

Living by a better value system strikes me as a more important perogative than boosting intelligence, which I view as a commodity market in which we've enjoyed a monopoly. Competition is on the way, and I'm not sure intelligence will seem as profitable as it used to. We need to differentiate and find our human niche.

ryandrake• 9 years ago

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

According to climate scientists, aren't we already beyond the point of no return climate change-wise? And there continue to be strong economic incentives towards trashing the environment even more. If so, Earth's already a lost cause.

Think of it like being on Easter Island hundreds of years ago: The place is rat-and disease-infested, and we're chopping down the last trees. We can choose to either build ships and GTFO or navel-gaze about how great it would be to have a livable environment again.

xherberta7• 9 years ago

I dispute that we're chopping down the last trees. I think it's tough to argue that the earth isn't still the option that's most hospitable to life.

In the Easter Island metaphor, space migration strikes me as the islanders who control most of the resources opting to chop down the rest of the trees to build rafts for themselves. There might be viable options for rehabilitating our ancestral homeland if they'd use their resources differently. But if we let them take remaining resources with them, all bets are off.

notahacker2• 9 years ago

If you think a gradually warming Earth with a few polluted patches and a small hole in the Ozone layer is becoming inhospitable to human life, just wait until you get into space.

It's more akin to the residents of Easter Island devoting their efforts to reaching the South Pole or building a house under the sea.

Tenhundfeld• 9 years ago

Space migration: an obscenely expensive way to sideline earth's environmental problems

What‽‽‽ There are so, so many reasons for space migration that have nothing to do with earth's environmental problems – assuming you mean global warming/dimming/<things humans are affecting>. Asteroid. Super volcano. Gamma ray burst. Magnetic field reversal. Pandemic. Super fungus. Artificial super intelligence. Nuclear war.

Our understanding of life, geology, climatology, astronomy, etc., has improved much in the last 6000 years, but at a fundamental level, we are extremely rudimentary. We don't really know what's normal on a galactic/universal scale.

It's like saying having a failover server is just an expensive way to sideline taking good care of your primary server. Huh? No, having a backup plan is what you do when something is important, because shit happens. On a long enough timeline, shit that you can't predict always happens.

arohner2• 9 years ago

There are so, so many reasons for space migration that have nothing to do with earth's environmental problems. Asteroid. Super volcano. Gamma ray burst. Magnetic field reversal. Pandemic. Super fungus. Artificial super intelligence. Nuclear war.

I understand everything on that list with the exception of magnetic field reversal. Can you explain why it's so bad?

cgriswald2• 9 years ago

Space migration:

As far as we know, Earth is home to the only life in the universe. It seems likely that microbial life is abundant, but as yet we lack proof. Animal life may be incredibly rare. Intelligent life, rarer still. A lack of such life is a compelling answer to the Fermi paradox. You seem to have some undefined idea of the purpose of humanity. I am not sure what that purpose would be if not to spread life into a cold, empty universe.

From a more practical point of view, we can't screw up the biosphere or atmosphere of the moon. We probably can't screw up Mars too badly, either, in the short term. Both these places can spare Earth further environmental damage as our demand for resources continues to grow. And what we learn constructing and maintaining artificial biospheres will probably provide new insights into protecting, rehabilitating, and maintaining the Earth.

xherberta7• 9 years ago

I am not sure what that purpose would be if not to spread life into a cold, empty universe.

In my view, sending our physical bodies elsewhere is irresponsible unless they are a container for a store of meaning and magnanimity that we've not yet expressed here on earth. It's as irresponsible as the US sending forces to Iraq with nothing to offer except carnage and art lessons about Marcel DuChamp's Toilet. (See Adam Curtis' amazing docu, Bitter Lake.) We acted as envoys of freedom and democracy, but it turned out we lacked the substance.

I'm reminded of Cpt. Adama's speech in which he essentially asked "Who are we? Why do we deserve to survive?"

mercer• 9 years ago

I think one big advantages of putting a big effort into a, uh, moon-shot like space migration is that it will probably lead to many innovations that we wouldn't see, or that we wouldn't see happen as rapidly.

d--b• 9 years ago

The author does not understand the term libertarian. Certainly Silicon Valley is chasing utopian dreams, but not necessarily libertarians. Thiel is a libertarian, but it's not obvious that Musk is. Musk doesn't seem to have a big opinion about fat or lean government (for instance). And some very prominent people in the Valley (starting with y combinator guys), are very far from libertarianism.

70s technology-inspired utopias are really interesting though.

Buckminster Fuller and Superstudio have been very influencial too

magicmu• 9 years ago

This was my thought as well, but for somewhat different reasons. I think Musk does fit this modern definition of libertarian -- a lack of faith in government progress is a necessary logical foundation for attempting to pioneer space travel privately. I definitely agree, though, that many YC guys don't seem to be libertarian at all. It's also definitely worth noting that this modern definition of "libertarian" is so divorced from it's original anti-capitalist meaning that it's almost a different word. Leary's vision was "libertarian" in the sense that it was wholly at odds with capitalism as it currently exists, and put the onus of human progress on people instead of government. It was not "libertarian" in the sense of advocating for exploitative private companies like those we see in the Valley.

Alex39172• 9 years ago

"There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

mc322• 9 years ago

Do they mean to say BSD?

duozerk• 9 years ago

No, they meant LSD due to Timothy Leary (even if LSD was initially synthetized in Switzerland); that's the joke.

cameroncooper• 9 years ago

haldean• 9 years ago

BSD is one of the first Unices (probably second only to AT&T UNIX), so both would be correct, although "LSD and BSD" might make for a punchier joke :)

Diederich2• 9 years ago

This was in my .signature for a long time back in the 1990s.

Alex39172• 9 years ago

On Slashdot or K5? That's probably where I first heard it.

alexilliamson• 9 years ago

I would be curious to hear some opinions from people here on The Outline, both in terms of design and content. I was really pumped for its launch, which happened in late 2016 (maybe November?), but in the time since I've only occasionally used it (less than weekly). This is in contrast to NPR, Hacker News, and news-twitter, all of which I check several times per day.

bananaoomarang• 9 years ago

Pretty much my exact experience with it. I think I just haven't found many of the articles I have read very interesting, and I find the site a little hard to navigate.

superkuh• 9 years ago

Nothing exists in total vacuum. Check out early 20th century Russian cosmism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism

The Earth is the Cradle of the Mind—but one cannot eternally live in a cradle.

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

I think it's worth remembering/noting that Leary was heavily manipulated by the intelligence agencies, not just in their search for knowledge of mind control ala MKULTRA/ARTICHOKE/BLUEBIRD, but also as a general informant and counter-culture insider and influencer. For example, many of his space ideas were pushed through L-5 Society, but L-5 society was on the brink of collapse when rescued by huge donations from military intelligence people.

I don't necessarily think all the things they were aiming for were bad, even though I have major issues with the type of domestic experimentation they were (and probably still are) performing (Sirhan Sirhan anyone?), but in the case of the space focus, they were very much wanting to be on the edge of science for the betterment of humanity with a side effect of keeping American genuis at the head of the game for national pride reasons.

Just goes to show you that the motivations inside the dark recesses of the three letters can sometimes be at odds morally, but let's not paint people manipulated by that system with too white a brush, or forget their connections to the darkside.

gonerill• 9 years ago

See: Fred Turner (2006), From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...

kefka• 9 years ago

    It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
    with the erasure of the of the last invidious boarder
    when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
    and delinate the arrhythmias of drought
    to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savana
    as rich as a thousand human tongues
    and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
    ancient beyond mythology's reach

    So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
    no patent can encompass zero and one
    no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
    no empire rules the quantum waves

    And there must be room for all at the celebration of
    understanding
    for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
    imposed by force, resisted
    or escaped

~~ Greg Egan, forward of the novel Distress

EthanHeilman• 9 years ago

Leary was tapping into an existing techno-utopian dream in that part of the world.

FTA: >First published in his book Terra II (1974), it’s a neat summary of Leary’s vision of the future of the human species, the next step in human evolution.

Yet we have poems like 'All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace'[0] by Richard Brautigan written in 1967. The same year Brautigan was made Poet-in-Residence at CalTech.

This isn't to say that Leary didn't help shape the modern and stable form of west coast techno-utopianism we see today. I think he did, however he did this by amplifying a subset of the already existing techno-utopian ideas into the greater sphere of American culture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...

sixQuarks• 9 years ago

The author lost credibility with this paragraph

Musk is very typical of the Silicon Valley technolibertarian mold. He was happy to take a $465 million government loan for Tesla Motors, then soon after paying it off, he was more than happy to speak out against government subsidies like the one he just paid back. This has been Silicon Valley’s modus operandi for years, of course: promoting the tech sector’s independence from and superiority to mundane governance, while relying on it. In a nutshell, this is the reality behind the myth of the “free market.”

The author doesn't understand the hidden subsidies on fossil fuels. If we were to bake in the cost of climate change and pollution into the price, solar energy would have never needed subsidies. And what is Musk supposed to do? Ignore and reject subsidies that are available? The author is grasping at straws here and should have done more research.

lend000• 9 years ago

Not to mention the lack of sufficient pollution taxes that would exist in a 'libertarian society' to counter the inherent infringements on individual liberty.

snrplfth• 9 years ago

Libertarians tend, by and large, to be amenable to taxing externalities like pollution.

unprepare• 9 years ago

much more importantly, the author is conflating "loan" and "subsidy" which is completely insane.

Tesla received a 465 million dollar /loan/ which they /paid back/

Oil receives billions in /Subsidies/ that they /do not pay back/

the only slight similarity is that the department of energy loan likely had favorable interest terms, but that would make the financial benefit to Tesla vastly less than 465 million dollars - their benefit would be the difference in total interest over the life of the DoE loan vs a market rate loan.

RichardHeart• 9 years ago

What about the cypherpunks?

Silicon Valley’s Technolibertarian Dream Was Invented By Timothy Leary

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