In the 80s and 90s, a very early advocate of the use of the internet and other digital technology was Terrence Mckenna. He believed that we were creating a cyberspace that would be sort of our own manmade version of nature's hyperspace, that the cyberspace and hyperspace would play off of eachother as we accelerated forward into a future that would show the end of history as we know it. To McKenna, history had failed and we were in the final sprint to the next step in our existence, whatever that may be.

To understand his idea of cyberspace, you must first understand McKenna's view of hyperspace. He described it as a land of sort of loose energetic and symbolic associations; the playground of the imagination. This is where all of our childhood dreams and fantasies go, the image of our soul, our personal art and poetry; a place that is a summation of everything we express ourselves and identify with, visually shown to us, and accessed through natural entheogens like DMT and mushrooms.

Parallel to this was his view of what the internet or this cyberspace would be. To him, it would be much like hyperspace; rife with poetry and images and metaphors and these sort of loose collections of things that represent humanity on both an individual and collective level. This cyberspace, he postulated, would drag us finally over the threshold. He also believed that much like psychedelics, the internet would dissolve cultural and identity boundaries resulting in a more collaborative less ego/preconceived bias driven world. So, did it happen? Did we create a cyberspace parallel to hyperspace? The internet today is a very different place than it was when he was saying this stuff, so was he prophetic? The answer is complicated.

In some ways, McKenna's prediction was correct. If you look at the way some communities and individuals function online, they are kind of using it to approximate their own personal hyperspace by putting their art and what represents them and a piece of who they are in that hyperspacian way out there. In that way, it definitely is being used in that manner. Additionally, the proliferation of memes and cultural archetypes and symbols (think pepe the frog, the 'boomer/zoomer' meme, ect) is somewhat like the collective mind of humanity coming up with ways to represent certain ideas or sentiments in a hyperspacian vein. McKenna didn't necessarily say that everything in hyperspace is 'good', after all... So perhaps the same applied to his idea of cyberspace. Also, he was correct that especially in regards to nationality, the internet did connect different peoples from all over in a way that probably promoted human understanding over prejudice.

On the other side of the coin, I don't think that this cyberspace is being utilized the way he envisioned it would be. While there are certainly some aspects of internet culture and life that do intersect with his notion of hyperspace, the internet also created a lot of problems and in some way made human interaction of a lower quality- the rise of political propaganda and polarization/extremism has been largely driven by the internet and has made many people more closed off from half of others than ever before. Many people with a selfish or hateful agenda utilize the internet to propagate it, and this hurts people further traumatizing which would also go against McKenna's vision. Additionally the aforementioned memes and archetypes and tropes online may resemble hyperspacian symbolism on a superficial level but often these memes and archetypes create more labels and boxes that prevent open and true commication as well. You can see the very clear effects of these issues on most popular platforms. This forum is a refreshing oasis in a vast space of closed off, untrue, and assinine commication seen online.

Sure it could be driving us to a critical mass as McKenna predicted, but it doesn't seem to be of a particularly transcendental nature. It seems like it's just giving people more excuses to justify the same issues Mckenna was laying out to us decades ago, except now at the click of a button. So unfortunately, I would say his prediction hasn't went down too well.

Of course, the internet story isn't over yet, and neither is the story of humanity. More and more people are discovering the other side so to speak and it is spreading slowly but surely. But we must remember that those spreading the opposite are there too and more numerous and powerful. Therefore, to best utilize the internet I offer to you all a simple suggestion - You must shine so brightly that your light infects others and they can shine and spread the light too.

What we have is a very powerful force, and very powerful ideas. They can make a change and reach people. But we must be clever and we must fight like hell. Because why would the universe give just hand the good ending over to us when we didn't try our hardest within our mortal capabilities? Thanks for reading everybody, and I hope this made you think. Good evening.

The levels of internet censorship were nothing like they are today during TMK's time. Big Tech (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) censor and put people in bubbles so hard, even many in the tech world are not aware of how common these practices are. TMK saw the interwebs spreading and evolving naturally, without all of this insular censorship and shadow banning and the like because it is against natural evolution. It is designed to keep people in bubbles, keep people from spreading the truth, keep like minded people from connecting, keep people from discovering the lies and mistruths told to them on a daily basis. If you look at Twitter 1.o vs Twitter 2.o as an example, look at all of the censorship, spying, shadowbanning and the like that had been going on at that company before the current owner took over and changed course radically. I'm not an Elon fanboy in the least, and do not have a Twit account, but I do watch it closely and have read most of the Twitter Files detailing the rampant censorship that had been going on there. Now apply that to all of the other major tech companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc that still censor and shadowban and create bubbles around people and their accounts. The user has little to no knowledge that they are inside of a constructed bubble of disinfo. They have no idea the amount of info they are not getting, the level of censorship they are living under, the level of lies they are being told are the truth. I don't think TMK ever factored in this aspect of the internet into his concepts. I don't think most of us back then envisioned this online distopia. I find it hard to envision it now, though I know it is all around me all the time.

I love your line, "You must shine so brightly that your light infects others and they can shine and spread the light too." This is how I try to live me life. Thanks for your post.

It’s been some years since I’ve delved into the Mckenna tapes, so please to forgive the lapses in memory.

In one rap or another he emphasized how the technological revolution was in the hands of the heads. That all these megacorps and their button up businessmen drones were effectively completely dependent on the long haired freak in the IT department to keep their business operational as we entered the information age. The hackers were heads and these heady hackers had the visionary perspective to ride this new frontier right off the cutting edge out past the event horizon.

Tim Leary once dubbed the personal computer “the LSD of the 1980’s”. Universal direct access to computing technology was (and is) every bit as much of a disruptive agent to the social order as was (and is) old Doc Hofmann’s magical elixir. At the beginning of the 1990’s the rise of the internet inherently held the promise of an ever improving future. Moore’s law was in full effect, technology was only going to get smaller, cheaper, and more powerful. The unprecedented connectivity and unlimited access to information was going to level the playing field and usher humanity into the digital utopia.

If you are interested in the history of the computing and what role psychedelics and counter cultural ideas played in it’s development, I can suggest a couple good books on the subject:

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Terence’s big rap was always to find the others, and in that regard, the internet has absolutely delivered on his promise, in spades, both for good and for ill. From social media echo chambers to open source development projects; from alt dot newsgroups to reddit; from forums to facebook. No matter how obscure, no matter how niche, no matter how occult, the others are out there to be found amidst the tangles of the www.

Now to my favorite one. The gist of the rap is thus: As we build out cyberspace, and specifically virtual reality spaces, into completely immersive, fully featured environments that are nearly indistinguishable from the physical, they will effectively become a landing zone for “the other”, the transcendental object. The eschaton itself will infuse the virtual world and hyperspace will merge with cyberspace dissolving all boundaries, freeing us from the shackles of the monkey body and allowing us to live as gods eternally surfing cyberdelic space happily ever after...

Or something to that effect.

I said it before and I’ll say it again. The internet is more than the top dozen applications that 98% of the traffic flows through. They’ll never stop peer to peer file sharing, they’ll never interrupt the bitcoin protocol, they’ll never censor the deepweb. Despite the theatrics of making the internet look co-opted, centralized, and controlled, the truth is, it’s just as much of a disruptive element now as it ever was. Those heady hackers will always find a workaround and yar har, fiddle di dee, those pirates really are free. 🏴‍☠️

P.S. - While I’m up here on my soapbox, please remember to share and support the projects that really do make the internet great: archive.org, libgen, sci-hub, github, eff, wikipedia, project gutenberg, librivox, tpb, etc.

and I just want to echo this one again because you really did nail it.

But these more unpleasant sides of cyberspace have existed from it's early beginning on as well.

I find it hard to believe that the early internet-utopists did not see all of these things coming.
It was always clear that there where going to be tech giants, that cyberspace was going to be an extension of the market economy and not a replacement of it.
Media conglomerates existed before the internet was born, and the intention of every internet start-up has always been to become a monopolist or quasi monopolist.

I remember that in the 90's there where a lot of movies about the dystopian side of the internet and AI.
And ofcourse holywood movies aren't real. But the fact that they appealed to so many people, that these dystopian visions where such popular themes, says to me that somewhere in the back of their heads, people have always been at least vaguely aware of the risks of information technology.

Utopian ideals are usually at least to a large extent bogus. Hot air.
Maybe that is what we need to get off our butts and move forward though.

I personally don't see counterculture, or most of it anyway, as a real counterculture, but as an integral and also necessary part of culture as a whole. Much of what used to be counterculture at some point, has become mainstream over time.

That is maybe the destiny of any good and succesfull countercultural ideal or belief.
And probably how things are supposed to be as well.

And to some people that means that the "magic wears off" of it. But that seems to imply that what was once "magical" about it was only that it once exclusively belonged to a small fringe group. A bit of a tribal sentiment maybe, when you come to think about it.

If anyone wants to explore the contents of the Twitter Files for themselves this URL provides links to Twitter Files 1-19.
https://jordansather.sub...ist-of-all-twitter-files