English

Think for Yourself; Question Authority

Many people know Timothy Leary as drug-guru of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s. Not so many people know, however, that Leary reemerged in the eighties as energetic promoter of the Internet and spokesman of the Cyberpunks, an Information-Age counterculture whose members believe that technology can help us to free ourselves from all limits - physical as well as metaphysical. In this paper, I describe the development of Leary's theories - how his focus shifted from psychedelic drugs to computers -, and discuss Leary's impact on the cybernetic counterculture (the Cyberpunks) of the eighties and nineties. I compare Leary's earlier theories, in which he praises LSD as key to "cosmic consciousness" and sweeping societal changes, to his later theories, in which he describes the computer as tool of liberation and transcendence. In a critical analysis of the cybernetic counterculture I try to find out what role Leary played in this counterculture. My comparison of Leary's earlier and later theories shows that the psychedelic counterculture of the sixties and the cybernetic counterculture of the eighties and nineties have many things in common; most important of all, they share th

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