INTERVIEW WITH TIMOTHY LEARY BY MARIANNE SCHNALL

TIMOTHY LEARY IN CYBERSPACE

Excerpts from an interview conducted by Marianne Schnall (1995)
On June 1st, 1996, on a full moon just slightly after midnight, Dr. Timothy Leary died in his sleep surrounded by friends at his mountaintop home in Beverly Hills.
He was seventy-five and died from inoperable prostrate cancer, and according to his son Zachary, his last words were, "Why not?" and "Yeah." A cyber-memorial took place at his site on the World Wide Web (http://www.leary.com), where he had posted health updates and described the process of "designer dying", which included his daily intake of both legal and illegal drugs. His last book, "The Ultimate Trip" explores his experience dying and is due out in the Spring of 1997.
Leary, always an iconoclast, had originally planned to capture his final moments on videotape for possible broadcast on the Internet and has arranged to have a portion of his cremated remains sent into space. The legendary futurist, who characterized himself to me as a "dissident philosopher", and who was known for sayings like "Turn on, tune in, drop out", "Question Authority" and "D.I.Y. - do it yourself" was always ahead of his time.
In the 1960's at Harvard University, Dr. Timothy Leary became a cultural icon with his controversial ideologies and experiments designed to expand human consciousness. Thirty years later, the legendary psychologist had continued to advance the frontiers of the human experience with his prolific research and scholarly output, which included his crusading endeavors into the world of cybernetic realities and electronic communication.
Tim Leary's experience in cyberspace began in the 1950's as a ground breaking psychologist who used mainframe computers to compile data to chart human behavior. He was one of the first psychologists to integrate the use of computers as a way to understand oneself and others, becoming a pioneer of cyberspace. He had since explored virtual reality and developed several interactive computer programs and games designed to enable individuals to digitize their thought images and create new electronic realities.
Beginning with the birth of the home computer in the late 1980's, a new international cybernetic community has been evolving, made up of interconnected computer networks. This "information highway" not only provides access to a vast universe of data bases, archives and products, but allows people to communicate through forums such as conferences, bulletin boards and electronic mail. Dr. Leary predicts this interactive medium will eventually surpass passive forms of media like the television. He envisions a cybernetic generation that will use computer networks to transcend geographic boundaries forming a "global village", fulfilling the prophesy of Marshall McLuhan. To quote Dr. Leary, "The aim to all this technology is to allow people to communicate... The notion of electronic realities, electronic environments in which we can visit each other is tremendously powerful because it cuts down the terrible, terribly divisive issues of class." In the conversation that follows, this inspired visionary and impassioned humanist discussed the implications of our impending existence within the "Wonder Land" of cyberspace. Rather than mourn his passing, Tim had wanted us to celebrate his death as he had celebrated his life.
Marianne Schnall: WHEN DID YOU BEGIN WORKING WITH COMPUTER LINGUISTICS AND DIGITAL THOUGHT?
Timothy Leary: Well, number one, I want to point out that I was one of the first psychologists to use computers way back in the late seventies. Early fifties, we were using main frame computers to get our scores which we then put on the bulletin board so patients could see how their scores compared with each other. I've always been involved in digitizing and score keeping as a way of understanding yourself and others. In the 1980's, of course, an incredible event happened which changed American culture - a new media developed. Radio developed as a new media in the twenties and created the jazz age and created a changed America and of course television changed America by bringing the world into our living room. But it was all passive. The problem with the sixties, the problem with most hippies, the problem with television watching, is it's passive consumption. You're sitting there, you have the choice of selecting your cables or your dials or channels. But in the 1980's an incredible technological advance happened in media - computers - YOU could change what's on your screen. And it's interesting, it's always young people that like and can use the new medium, because old people are stuck - you know, my mother and father never really liked television, they were stuck on radio. I really had to be taught by my grandchildren about computers because they were so far ahead of me.

MS: WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION?
TL: Since the 1980's, there's been a new way of communicating thoughts, a new language developing. It's called digital, or now, it's called multimedia. And the idea is instead of just using a telephone to send messages at the speed of light sound, you can edit in your own home appliance, your own multimedia message and send it at the speed of light, in glorious Technicolor and sound, to people around the world. And when I say that, sometimes people think that I'm hallucinating a bit. "What's this - there's going to be a new form of communication which will take the place of ABC and NBC and all that?" The fact is, as you probably know Marianne, is that right now, there's something like twelve million people who have modem systems and belong to electronic bulletin boards. In other words, they already belong to communities, to committees, to clubs, which they get on-line and share ideas with people from different countries. So this new culture is very much tied to my original idea of taking therapy away from the doctors and taking the drug power monopoly away from the doctors. Now we're taking the monopoly of ABC and NBC away from the big shots and we're building software that will allow a ten or twelve-year-old kid to edit their own multimedia audio visual self.

MS: IS CYBERSPACE, IN SOME WAYS, A TYPE OF MAN-MADE DRUG? IT SOUNDS LIKE IT'S A BEHAVIOR THAT COULD BECOME ADDICTIVE.
TL: Well, first of all let me examine what you just said. You implied that drugs were addictive. See, all psychedelics drugs are non-addictive. Marijuana doesn't addict you. LSD doesn't. Psilocybin doesn't. Cocaine can become addictive. Alcohol can be. No, it is possible that many people will get addicted to making pictures on screens but as long as they're sending them to somebody else . . . The horrible thing about addiction, no matter whether it's drug addiction or an addiction to television or whatever it is - that it's a lonely thing. You're doing it by yourself. And the key to the cybernetic communication is you're communicating with other people. You're sharing your cybernetic visions with other people. There are like two million bulletin boards out there right now and within two or three years, they'll not just be using letters, they'll be using images - multimedia film clips. It's like advertisers now who jam into thirty seconds a lot of information. We'll all be doing that within five years.

MS: LET ME JUST PLAYING DEVIL'S ADVOCATE FOR A SECOND. WHAT ABOUT CONCERNS ABOUT THAT RESULTING IN SOCIAL ISOLATION, WITH PEOPLE NOT INTERACTING WITH OTHER PEOPLE BUT WITH A COMPUTER? DO YOU THINK THOSE CONCERNS ARE VALID?
TL: No. Of course, there always will be some loners who like to do this. Addicts are people who can't deal with other human beings. But, think of the telephone. The telephone does not isolate you. As a matter of fact the telephone is an instrument of communication. You know, they told Gutenberg, "Hey, Gutenberg your book is going to make us all into introverts who spend all of our time home reading." But that's not true. You read a book and you want to run out and talk about it and find someone else who's read the book. No, the aim of all of this technology is to allow people to communicate. We call it interpersonal - not interactive - interpersonal - to communicate with each other at higher levels of acceleration and variety. And one important thing is a new language is developing. It's already developing. It's the global language. It does not depend on A-B-C or C-A-T or D-O-T. It's going to be a global language, which is going to do a tremendous amount to bring the different countries, the different races, the different religious groups together in what Marshall McLuhan called the global village. By the way, McLuhan is the father, the prophet, the key person, to figure this all out in the fifties.

MS: HOW CAN YOU MEASURE AND MODIFY BEHAVIOR WITH COMPUTER SOFTWARE, AS IN THE PROGRAM YOU DESIGNED, "MIND MIRROR"?
TL: Yes, many people see all this in a psychotherapeutic sense and that's not true at all. We're talking about a new form of communication that will empower you. Like, books don't cure, books allow people to communicate more effectively. See, the logic there? Computers and computer programs are not going to cure, they're not supposed to be used by doctors to play electronic games with people. They put individuals in touch with each other - to share viewpoints, to share experiences. There is always this notion that drugs are supposed to be . . . See, I believe very much in antibiotics. I had pneumonia over the weekend and I am very grateful to my wonderful doctor to give me antibiotics. So I do believe in the use of drugs for the body. But you simply cannot use drugs to change the mind because then you're getting into addiction or you're getting into a set of thinking you're being drugged.

MS: I REALLY ENJOYED YOUR LECTURE ON VIRTUAL REALITY. HOW IS VIRTUAL REALITY GOING TO CHANGE THE LANDSCAPE OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE?
TL: Well, the word virtual reality has many different meanings. It basically means electronic realities. And it means that we're developing very inexpensive equipment that will allow you to have goggles that you can wear just like two television screens, so you're actually kind of walking around immersed in an electronic environment. So, when you think of virtual reality, think of immersive realities in which you can move through the rooms and the halls of an electronic house. You can click on electronic books and open them up. You can click on paintings and you can go through the Louvre. It's simply the use of electronic realities. The nice thing about it is, you see, you can design your own realities and you can invite other people around. Within three or four years - even right now, some kids are doing it - but within two or three years, your average kid in America or Japan will be designing their own little homes. And you'll click through telephone, you'll modem over and you'll be in the person's home, and the person will say, "Hey, look at this new painting I have!" Click. Or "Hey, I've got my friend here Joe from Tokyo." Click. "Talk to Joe."

MS: HOW WILL THIS CHANGE HOW WE PERCEIVE EACH OTHER?
TL: The notion of electronic realities, electronic environments in which we can visit each other, in which we can design our own homes, is tremendously powerful because it cuts down and away the terrible, terribly divisive issues of class. A kid in Somalia simply can't have a middle class American house. But now with inexpensive Nintendo or Saga Genesis, they can. The same thing is true of geography. If you're stuck in Paris, you can't wander around unless you're rich and see Buenos Aires or Toronto, Canada. So that virtual reality, electronic realities will allow us to move around. But they're not going to substitute - since we can travel, called telepresence, through these electronic environments, we'll have actually more time for the real face to face, eyeball to eyeball and personal touch of which nothing can compare with. So we're freeing ourselves.

MS: YOU LECTURE AT COLLEGES ALL OVER THE COUNTRY. WHAT ARE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY, GROWING UP IN THE AGE OF COMPUTERS?
TL: You notice one thing about the new generation of kids, the high tech kids? They all have beepers and they can master any kind of computer - there's never been a generation that is more body conscious. They have tattoos, they have piercings, they have rings - they're using their bodies as forms as communication and decoration. And God knows, they're healthier. They're running around - young women are running around like track stars. And when people criticize the computer generation, the high tech generation, and say they neglect the body - well, just walk through a college campus and you'll see the healthiest, most physically conscious and alert group of human beings I've ever met. So, they're not nerds at all.

MS: YOU'RE A WELL KNOWN ADVOCATE FOR SPACE MIGRATION. WHAT IDEAS DO YOU HAVE FOR A FUTURE EVOLUTION WHERE FAMILIES MIGRATE IN SPACE?
TL: Well, in the 1970's, there was a big civilian movement for space migration. What happened was that in 1980 Ronald Reagan took NASA over and made it very military and Star Wars. Since that time, cyberspace is taking the place of intergalactic space. We are going to migrate from the planet, I have no doubt about that, but it's not going to happen as soon as we had hoped. And in the meantime, the way to get ready for this is build up communities of people from different countries who share cyberspace. It's a very interesting comment that they call it cyberspace. In other words - this new electronic environment, that you can visit, which in some ways is analogous to going out into real space out there in Jupiter and Mars - they call it cyberspace. This is a very interesting metaphor.

MS: WHERE DO YOU THINK THE HUMAN RACE IS AS FAR AS ITS EVOLUTION AND POTENTIAL IN UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF ITS OWN CONSCIOUSNESS?
TL: For about 25,000 years our means of communication was fire that is - actual fire itself and its ashes and then the metal and then it's candles - even the use of engines to create books - steam engines and all that. In the last seventy years, a new form of communication has developed called electricity. Electricity has given us radio, it's given us telephone, it has given us the television. It's given us an enormous amount of cable access. It has now finally given us digitized appliances so that we can actually change what's on our screen so we can communicate not in written words, not in rag and glue pages, but we communicate in the language of the galaxy, which is electronics, electric. And this is going to create within ten years - it's already happening - a new global village. And the young kids that are growing up now using Nintendo, using Macs, using the new editing equipment - they are a different species than those of us that grew up using reading and writing and radio. So I'm extremely, extremely hopeful to see there's this new generation that is learning a new language, they're a new breed.

MS: ON THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM, IS THE WORLD EXPERIENCING A CRISIS?
TL: Now, I must say that at the same time, I'm seventy-three years old now, and I've watched very carefully, I study what goes on, I read a lot of books and magazines - it's obvious - that civilization is collapsing. Back in 1986, for a whole year my lectures were called "Millennium Madness" and I predicted that it was going to get worse. That the structures, the systems, the politics, the religious structures of the past simply weren't working. And they were going to crumble and there was going to be a period of terror because when your solid reality of Newton or the Ten Commandments begins to crumble or dissolve, there's panic. You want order. We all want order. We're afraid of facing the actual naked truth of the matter which is, that the universe is - for at least species like ours - a very mysterious, highly complex form of chaos. That doesn't mean that you have to just get down on your knees and worship any person that comes along - it's a challenge. One thing you can do is deal with any amount of chaos that's around with you, always deal with other people who share your beliefs and I have a total, total optimistic confidence in the human spirit - humanity when it is freed. We want to look in each other's eyes. We want to activate our own brain. We want to be able to communicate. Basically, I think the spirit is there and you're going to see it in the younger generation in the next ten years and I think that the year 2000 is going to be a really celebratory moment.
No portion of this interview may be reprinted without permission of Marianne Schnall .
Marianne Schnall is a co-founder of the EcoMall, a free-lance writer and co-founder of the women's site Feminist.com.