The Internet vs. the State

by Eric Garris

At the 1977 Libertarian Party Convention, mind-expansion advocate and LSD guru Timothy Leary gave a speech that few of us took very seriously. He spoke of something called the Internet, a network that would connect computers worldwide, allowing participants from around the globe to sign on and retrieve text, photographs, audio and video instantaneously, and to communicate in realtime with anyone in the whole world who also had a computer and a connection. He said that it would be the new revolution against the current social order and stifling status quo. He predicted it would be much, much bigger than drugs in its ability to overthrow the establishment. Whereas tuning in, turning on and dropping out had been of great interest to a somewhat narrow subset of the population, everyone would be able to use the Internet, in his own way, and thus the new revolution against the old order would transcend class, age, nationality and all other demographics. The bourgeois would have just as much interest and use for it as the so-called counterculture. And nothing would ever again be the same.

As I said, no one at the time really believed it. We figured Leary had just done a little too much acid and his imagination had gotten the best of him. The network of information he described seemed totally impossible – and yet it exists, precisely as he predicted it, right now.

In fact, even Timothy Leary might be surprised to see the newest developments. Hardly a week goes by without some substantial revolution in cyberspace. When Leary died in 1996, data storage, processing and transfer had yet to approach anything anywhere near their current magnificent levels of utility and speed. And next year will make this year look like nothing. Already, we think back five years and can hardly comprehend the breathtaking progress over that time.