[Editorial note by
George Turin: I got two responses to my recent comparison of Silicon Valley to other historical sites of great creativity such as Elizabethan London, in which I pointed out that creativity depended heavily in all those sites on a free interchange of
ideas—'open sourcing' in modern lingo [1]. A writer friend was
shocked that I would make the comparison at all, and I responded to him in [2]. My son David had a
totally different complaint: I hadn't recognized that Silicon Valley's
creativity was just one facet of the wider-spread creativity of the San Francisco
Bay Area, exhibited not only by the digirati but by the literati and 'musicati'
too. I was interested in his take, and asked him to write a guest
posting, which follows.]
Recently there was a squawk about Steve Jobs'
claim, in his posthumously released autobiography, that he conceived of his
Apple empire while on LSD. Tales of acid inspiration are not
uncommon—it's routine to associate the drug with the Beatles' groundbreaking
later recordings and, maybe not so coincidentally, with their own Apple
trademark. But Jobs' claim rattled
a nerve in the straights. That LSD
could inspire a computer organization was too cute to leave untouched, so his
comment ricocheted around the newswires. More than a few times, it ran up
against the press that a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead was getting at around the time of Jobs' death. I think that's not coincidental: both
the Grateful Dead and
Jobs were nurtured in the ethos of Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s.
I bring this up in The Berkeley Write because,
although I like its earlier assertion that Silicon Valley is the Mecca of our
times in part because of the open sourcing of technology there, I feel that it
short-changed the overarching role that the Bay Area played as a hub for many creative communities, not just technical ones. It also didn't take into account a
common thread that ran through all of these communities: LSD.
In a
1985 Playboy interview, Jobs said
something about the Silicon Valley area that I think is important:
"Woz
and I very much liked Bob Dylan's
poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was
California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night
with your girlfriend. California
has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new
possibilities." (Emphasis is mine.)
(It's ironic that, while Stanford inspired Silicon
Valley through supporting student enterprises, it apparently also did so by
making acid. Both activities found fertile ground in the Bay Area of the
day.)
The
California that Woz and Jobs were experiencing was also home for a young Jerry Garcia. Garcia and the Grateful Dead were
originally from Menlo Park, only a few miles away from where Woz and Jobs grew
up. They started as the house band
that Ken Kesey employed to
play at his experimental acid parties.
Kesey had participated in early psychedelic experiments while a student
at Stanford.
If acid
was inspiring the creative community of Silicon Valley, then openness to taking
the drug has to be attributed to San Francisco. The Beat Generation (including such creative
literary lights as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) had taken firm
root there, giving the city yet another burgeoning creative community and a
growing reputation for open-mindedness.
While
surely not everyone participating in the percolating open-source mentality of
the Bay Area was dosing, one could say metaphorically that those who did were
affecting the water supply. Inspired by new visions of how the world
works and at least temporarily disabused by the acid muse of the concept of ownership, many techies began freely sharing technology and the Grateful Dead
began freely sharing tapes and encouraging audiences to record their
shows. In these cases the Beatnik/hippie dream did not die—it became big
business. And more.
I'm now
an expat from the Bay Area—I live and learn in London. The interest in
the UK in Jobs' life when he died caused a surge of pride in me about my
roots. As you may know, Californians aren't always favorably viewed
abroad. Yet stories about Jobs, the Grateful Dead and the California that
nurtured them ran through the UK papers for a few months, along with widespread
speculation that the Bay Area had given the world its new brain. The
world in turn was learning where to send a thank-you letter. I didn't
rush to re-introduce 'cute' and 'yummy' to my lexicon, but I did put my San
Francisco-ness up front again in casual conversation.
Still, in discussions about San Francisco with
Londoners who'd picked up on the spate of recent headlines and chosen to
commend me for my great choice of birthplace, I noticed that the common thread
of LSD was missing. I was
disappointed to see it missing from this blog too. Perhaps that is understandable—it is very hard to publicly
commend a drug like LSD for advancing our evolution. No matter how hard
that is, it is harder still to deny that taboo substances are often the common
experience of a generation, intimately linked with its ideals, creations and in
some cases with its centers of creativity. If wine gave us poetry, what
then LSD?
I've
not really tried LSD—the 'really' is a long story—but I have my eye on the new
'standardized' approach to taking it in legal, sympathetic 'retreat'
environments guided by Shamanic coaches. I'm thinking that these organized
psychoactive rituals might bear some fruit for us humans—maybe even a few more
Apples.
David Turin