Nomad Codes

Brazil or the Dominican Republic to be with these great maestros who can save you. The other thing is to do what you always wanted to do. So that means head to Cape Canaveral to see a shuttle launch, on to sunrise over the pyramids, on to a month in the Grand Hôtel de Paris. I wasn’t too keen on that, either. My tendency was just to twist another bomber and think about it all.”
    There’s a lot to think about in McKenna’s lair. An altar lies on top of a cabinet over which hangs a frightening old Tibetan tangka. With McKenna at my side, the altar’s objects become icons in a computer game. Click and a story emerges. Click on the tangka and get a tale of art-dealing in Nepal. Click on the carved Mayan stones and hear about a smoking god who will arrive far in the future. Click on an earthen bowl and wind up in the stone age. “Back then,” he says, tapping the vessel, “this was advanced technology.”
    Gamers know that the most interesting objects usually lie near the obvious ones, and indeed, the real prizes here lurk inside the narrow cabinet drawers. Butterflies. Click on these hummingbird-sized beauties and you’ll be transported back thirty years to the remote islands of Indonesia, where McKenna dodged snakes and earthquakes in order to capture prize specimens for the butterfly otaku of Japan.
    The most prominent features of the room are the fourteen large bookcases that line the walls, stuffed with more than three thousand volumes: alchemy, natural history, Beat poetry, science fiction, Mayan codexes, symbolist art, hashish memoirs, systems theory, Indian erotica, computer manuals. Deeply attuned to the future of consciousness, McKenna remains a devoted Gutenberg man. “The majority of my fans could not conceive of this room,” he says. “They would have no idea that a printhead could push so hard against electronic culture.”
    McKenna derives great pleasure from pushing the envelope of the human mind, but he is equally turned on by technology. On the one hand, the house, which was only finished last year, is completely off the grid, irrigated with rainwater collected in a large cistern up the hill, and powered by solar panels and a gas generator. There are no phone lines. At the same time, Ethernet connections are built in everywhere, even out on the deck. The computers in his office—a 7100 Power Mac, a dual-processor NT, a G3 PowerBook, and Silness’s PC laptop—jack into cyberspace at two Mbps through the fifteen-hundred-pound high-gain dish on his roof. Using spread-spectrum radio technology, McKenna’s dish swaps packets with a similar rig on the roof of CTI, his ISP, thirty miles north. The twenty-thousand-dollar system carries voice traffic as well. His plan was to eventually stream lectures over the net, thus eliminating the need to travel in order to “appear” at conferences and symposia.
    McKenna normally spends four or five hours a day online, devouring sites, weeding through lists, exploring virtual worlds, corresponding with strangers, tracking down stray facts. Sometimes he treats the net like a crystal ball, entering strange phrases into Google’s search field just to see what comes up. “Without sounding too cliché, the Internet really is the birth of some kind of global mind,” says McKenna. “That’s what a god is. Somebody who knows more than you do about whatever you’re dealing with.”
    As our society weaves itself ever more deeply into this colossal thinking machine, McKenna worries that we’ll lose our grasp on the tiller. That’s where psychedelics come in. “I don’t think human beings can keep up with what they’ve set loose unless they augment themselves, chemically, mechanically, or otherwise,” he says. “You can think of psychedelics as enzymes or catalysts for the production of mental structure—without them you can’t understand what you are putting in place. Who would want to do machine architecture or write software without taking psychedelics at some point in the design process?”
    It’s a typical McKenna question: simultaneously outrageous and, in some twisty way, true. For obvious reasons, hard statistics on the extent of psychedelic use in the high-tech industry are tough to come by. But Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, will tell you that both MAPS and another psychedelic research outfit called the Heffter Research Institute have raised more than fifty percent of their funding from