Nomad Codes

Silicon Valley heads. (See “Psychonaut” in this volume.)
    “There’s a sense,” says Doblin, “that the creative chaos and visionary potential that people have gotten from some of their psychedelic experiences have played a role in their accomplishments in the computer industry.” Steve Jobs is on record calling his first LSD experience “wonderful,” while Mitch Kapor credits “recreational chemicals” with inspiring crucial programming insights. “Psychedelics have infiltrated the computer industry,” says McKenna, “because psychedelic use is a response to the environment that’s been found to actually work.”
    Psychedelics have certainly left their mark on computer graphics, virtual reality, and animation. From fractals to Kai’s Power Tools to Hollywood f/x, digital imagery has often been inspired by the mutations in perception brought on by certain drugs. In the words of Mark Pesce, the co-creator of Virtual Reality Markup Language, “How often do you go to a web site and say, ‘This is really trippy!’? Well, why? C’mon—it’s because it was created by tripsters.” McKenna learned about computer animation from his son, Finn, who studied at the San Francisco Academy of Art and now works in New Jersey. Together father and son would get high and go to museums to analyze the objects. “How would you CAD this? How would you get this Minoan vase, this Etruscan statue, up on the screen in 3-D? If you look at a seashell or a glass vase as a modeling problem, then everything is an animation.”
    Ultimately, McKenna wants something more than trippy images. He hopes that computer graphics will blossom into a universal lingo, a language of constantly morphing hieroglyphic information that he claims to have glimpsed on high doses of mushrooms. “There is something about the formal dynamics of information that we do not understand. Something about how we process language holds us back. That’s why I encourage everybody to think about computer animation, and think about it in practical terms. Because out of that will come a visual language rich enough to support a new form of human communication.”
    In McKenna’s mind we are not just conjuring a new virtual language. We are also, in good old shamanic style, conjuring the ineffable Other. McKenna argues that the images of aliens and flying saucers that spring up in numerous tripping reports are symbols of the transcendental technologies we are on the verge of creating. In other words, we are producing the alien ourselves, from the virtual world of networked information.
    “Part of the myth of the alien,” says McKenna, “is that you have to have a landing site. Well, I can imagine a landing site that’s a web site. If you build a web site and then say to the world, ‘Put your strangest stuff here, your best animation, your craziest graphics, your most impressive AI software,’ very quickly something would arise that would be autonomous enough to probably stand your hair on end. You won’t be able to tell whether you’ve got code, machine intelligence, or the real thing.” McKenna thinks this is coming soon, within the next ten or twenty years.
    McKenna ties all this into the Timewave, his kookiest notion. The Timewave is a strange fractal object McKenna pried out of the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination, back in the La Chorera days. He believes that it charts the degree of novelty active at any point in human history. The wave spikes in times of change, coinciding with the Black Death, the Enlightenment, and the birth of Mohammed. A computer program McKenna helped develop predicts the future as well, at least up until December 21, 2012, when novelty spikes to infinity and the Timewave stops cold. For McKenna, all of human history, with its flotsam and jetsam of books and temples and mechanized battlefields, is actually a backward ripple in time caused by this approaching apocalypse.
    Coping with his own personal day of reckoning, McKenna spent much of 1999 sorting and answering fan e-mail. As he read on, he made an unexpected discovery. “It isn’t really me they support,” he says. “It’s a statement they are making about something that has probably provided them more insight and more learning than anything else in their lives outside of sex and marriage and a few of the other major milestones. My real function for people was permission. Essentially what I existed for was to say, ‘Go ahead, you’ll live through it, get