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1996-05-06
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From: brock@ucsub.Colorado.EDU (Steve Brock)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books.reviews,rec.arts.books,alt.cyberpunk,sci.cognitive,alt.drugs.culture,alt.cyberpunk.movement
Subject: Review of Chaos and Cyberculture by Timothy Leary
Date: 16 Jan 1995 22:54:19 GMT
Approved: brock@colorado.edu
Message-ID: <3feter$auj@CUBoulder.Colorado.EDU>
CHAOS AND CYBERCULTURE by Timothy Leary. Ronin Publishing, Box
1035, Berkeley, CA 94701, (510) 540-6278, FAX: (510) 548-7326.
Illustrated (over 100 black-and-white), bibliography, lists of
resources. 292 pp., $19.95 paper. 0-917171-77-1
Reviewed by Steve Brock
"The PC is the LSD of the Nineties."
-- Timothy Leary
"Every time you think he's senile, he's not."
-- Winona Ryder, Leary's god-daughter,
in "Life" magazine
This compilation of Leary essays, interviews, and profiles
from the 1980s (widely printed in a variety of mediums and
distributed through several Internet newsgroups), is a user-
friendly, if not particularly focused, tour of several stops on
Leary's ever-evolving cultural agenda. This incarnation is
dedicated to "high-tech pagans and digital philosophers."
In "Chaos," Leary examines digital technology's effects on
chaos theory with the help of William Gibson, David Byrne, William
S. Burroughs, and others, with a good measure of new-age
metaphysics on the side.
As humans further develop their psychological capabilities,
Leary says, they become ever-closer to "forming neural-electronic
symbiotic linkups with solid-state computers." These linkups,
Leary believes, will cause us to operate at higher levels of
intelligence - "mapping and colonizing the next frontier - one's
own brain," and "protecting [it] from invasion and exploitation
from without."
"Chaos" doesn't try to be a significant contribution to the
study of chaos theory and digital technology. The book is
whimsical, jargon-ridden, undisciplined and frequently off-topic
(such as his chapter on war). But it's typical Leary, who, with
his team of guerilla computer artists that liven up each page,
dares us to "just say know," and to have a good time as we create
our mutual digital realities. Grade: B.