CHAPTER 2
Operating from Total Oblivion

The fractal is the emblem of Cyberia. Based on the principles of chaos math, it's an
icon, a metaphor, a fashion statement, and a working tool all at the same time. It's at once a
highly technical computer-mathematics achievement and a psychedelic vision, so even as an
image it bridges the gap between these two seemingly distant, or rather discontinuous,''
corners of Cyberia. Once these two camps are connected, the real space defined by "Cyberia''
emerges.
Fractals were discovered in the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot, who was searching for
ways to help us cope, mathematically, with a reality that is not as smooth and predictable as
our textbooks describe it. Conventional math, Mandelbrot complained, treats mountains like
cones and clouds like spheres. Reality is much rougher'' than these ideal forms. No
real-world surface can accurately be described as a "plane,'' because no surface is absolutely
two-dimensional. Everything has nooks and crannies; nothing is completely smooth and
continuous. Mandelbrot's fractals--equations which grant objects a fractional
dimensionality--are revolutionary in that they accept the fact that reality is not a neat, ordered
place. Now, inconsistencies ranging from random interference on phone lines to computer
research departments filled with Grateful Deadheads all begin to make perfect sense.
Mandelbrot's main insight was to recognize that chaos has an order to it. If you look
at a natural coastline from an airplane, you will notice certain kinds of mile-long nooks and
crannies. If you land on the beach, you will see these same shapes reflected in the rock
formations, on the surface of the rocks themselves, and even in the particles making up the
rocks. This self-similarity is what brings a sense of order into an otherwise randomly rough
and strange terrain. Fractals are equations that model the irregular but stunningly self-similar
world in which we have found ourselves.
But these discontinuous equations work differently from traditional math equations,
and challenge many of our assumptions about the way our reality works. Fractals are circular
equations: After you get an answer, you plug it back into the original equation again and
again, countless times. This is why computers have been so helpful in working with these
equations. The properties of these circular equations are stunningly different from those of
traditional linear equations. The tiniest error made early on can amplify into a tremendous
mistake once the equation has been iterated'' thousands of times. Think of a wristwatch that
loses one second per hour. After a few days, the watch is only a minute or so off. But after
weeks or months of iterating that error, the watch will be completely incorrect. A tiny change
anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall system. The force
causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can be wrought by the
gentlest of "feedbacks.''
Feedback makes that loud screeching sound whenever a microphone is brought close
to its own speaker. Tiny noises are fed back and iterated through the amplification system
thousands of times, amplified again and again until they are huge, annoying blasts of sound.
Feedback and iteration are the principles behind the now-famous saying, When a butterfly
flaps its wings in China, it can cause a thunderstorm in New York.'' A tiny action feeds back
into a giant system. When it has iterated fully, the feedback causes noticeable changes. The
idea has even reached the stock market, where savvy investors look to unlikely remote
feedbacks for indications of which way the entire market might move once those tiny
influences are fully iterated. Without the computer, though, and its ability to iterate equations,
and then to draw them as pictures on a screen, the discovery of fractals would never have
been possible.
Mandelbrot was at IBM, trying to find a pattern underlying the random, intermittent
noise on their telephone lines, which had been causing problems for their computer modems.
The fact that the transmission glitches didn't seem to follow many real pattern would have
rendered a classical mathematician defenseless. But Mandelbrot, looking at the chaotic
distribution of random signals, decided to search for signs of self-similarity--that is, like the
coastline of beach, would the tiny bursts between bursts of interference look anything like the
large ones? Of course they did. Inside each burst of interference were moments of clear
reception. Inside each of those moments of clear reception were other bursts of interference
and so on. Even more importantly, the pattern of their intermittency was similar on each
level.
This same phenomenon--self-similarity--can be observed in many systems that were
previously believed to be totally irregular and unexplainable, ranging from the weather and
the economy to the course of human history. For example, each tiny daily fluctuation in the
weather mirrors the climatic record of the history of the planet. Each major renaissance in
history is itself made up of smaller renaissance events, whose locations in time mirror the
overall pattern of renaissances throughout history. Every chaotic system appears to be
adhering to an underlying order of self-similarity.
This means that our world is entirely or interdependent than we have previously
understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every
other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability
to redesign reality at large. Mandelbrot had begun to map the landscape of Cyberia.

It Is the Mind of God
The terrace of the Applied Sciences Building overlooks what students at University of
California at Santa Cruz call Elf Land''--a dense section of woods where psychedelically
enhanced humans meet interdimensional beings. Back in the corridor of the building, posters
of computer-generated fractal images depicting the "arithmetic limits of iterative nonlinear
equations'' line the walls. The pictures nearest the terrace look like the ferns on the floor of
the forest. The ones farther back look more like the arrangements of the trees above them.
Posters still farther seem like aerial maps of the forest, seen from above.
The mathematician residing in this self-similar niche of academia and psychedelia is
Ralph Abraham, who broke through to Cyberia on his own, and in a very different manner.
He abandoned Princeton University in favor of U.C. Santa Cruz in 1968, during what he calls
the apex of the counterculture.'' It was while taking psychedelics in huge barn "be-ins'' with
his newfound friends that Abraham became familiar with what people were calling the
emotional reality'' of numbers, and this led him to the hills and caves of the Far East where
he spent several years meditating and hallucinating. On returning to the university and his
computer, he embarked with renewed vigor into hyperspace to churn out the equations that
explain his hallucinations and our existence.
While it seems so unlikely to the modern mind that psychedelics could contribute to
real progress in mathematics and science, cyberians, for the most part, take this connection
for granted. In the sixties,'' Abraham explains, "a lot of people on the frontiers of math
experimented with psychedelic substances. There was a brief and extremely creative kiss
between the community of hippies and top mathematicians. I know this because I was a
purveyor of psychedelics to the mathematical community. To be creative in mathematics, you
have to start from a point of total oblivion. Basically, math is revealed in a totally
unconscious process in which one is completely ignorant of the social climate. And
mathematical advance has always been the motor behind the advancement of consciousness.
What's going on now is at least as big a thing as the invention of the wheel.''
The brief kiss'' Abraham witnessed was the marriage of two powerful intellectual
communities, both of which had touched Cyberia--one theoretically and the other
experientially. And as cyberian mathematicians like Abraham tripped out further, they saw
how this kiss was itself a fractal event, marking a point in human history from which the
underlying shape or order of existence--the very "roughness'' of reality--could be inferred.
They had conceived and birthed their own renaissance.
Abraham has since dedicated himself to the implications of this rebirth. He sees the
most important, seemingly sudden, and non sequitur events in human history--of which the
kiss above is one--as part of an overall fractal curve. It's happened before. The Renaissance
was one. Christianity is one. The troubadors in the south of France; agriculture; the new
concept of time that came along with the Old Testament--they are all actually revivals. But
they are more than revivals. It's sort of a spiral model where there's a quantum leap to a new
level of organization and complexity.''
Today, Abraham is in his Santa Cruz office, wearing a sweatshirt, drawstring pants,
and Birkenstocks. He does not sport a slide rule or pocket protector. He is Cyberia's Village
Mathematician, and his words are reassuring to those who are living in a world that has
already taken this quantum leap. Just as the fractal enabled Mandelbrot to comfort IBM
executives about the ultimately orderly nature of their line interference, Abraham uses fractals
to show how this uncharted island in history on which we have found ourselves fits into a
larger picture.
There is this fractal structure of discontinuity. If you look at the biggest
discontinuities in human history, you will see they all seem to have very similar structures,
suggesting a mathematical model behind the evolution of civilization.''
Abraham argues that cyberian interest in the pagan, psychedelic, spiritual, and tribal is
not in the least contradictory to the advances in computer technology and mathematics.
Historically, he points out, renaissance periods have always involved a resurgence of archaic
elements along with the invention of new technologies and mathematical systems. The success
of Cyberia, according to the bearded technosage, will depend on our ability to put these
disparate elements together. We have emphasized integration and synthesis, trying to put
everything together in one understanding, using mathematical models only as one tool. We
are also open to various pagan elements like astrology, telepathy, the paranormal, and so on.
We're an interesting network.''
For younger cyberians, Abraham's network provides an invaluable template by which
they can direct their own activities. As Ralph would say, he groks'' their experience; he
understands how these kids feel responsible for reshaping not only their own reality but the
course of human history.
We have to consciously interact with the creation of the future in order for it to be
other than it was.'' In past renaissances, each creative birth, each intimation of what we can
call "fractal reality,'' was buried by a tremendous counterrevolutionary force. What happened
with the Renaissance? Within 200 or 250 years, it was dead again.'' Society refused to cope
with Cyberia then. But the invention of the computer coupled with the undeniable usefulness
and profound beauty of the fractal has made today's renaissance impossible to resist.

Valley of the Nerds
Two men are staring into a computer screen at Apple's research and development
branch. While the first, a computer nerd straight out of Central Casting, mans the keyboard,
beside him sits the other, John Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, psychedelics explorer,
and Wyoming rancher. They watch the colorful paisley patterns representing fractal equations
swirl like the aftervisions of a psychedelic hallucination. Tiny Martian colonies forming on an
eerie continental coastline. The computer operator magnifies one tiny piece of the pattern, and
the detail expands to occupy the entire screen. Dancing microorganisms cling to a blue coral
reef. The new patterns reflect the shape of the original picture. He zooms in again and the
shapes are seen again and again. A supernova explodes into weather system, then spirals back
down to the pods on the leaf of a fern plant. The two men witness the creation and recreation
of universes.
Barlow scratches his whiskers and tips his cowboy hat. It's like looking at the mind
of God.''
The nerd corrects him: It is the mind of God.''
And as the latest kiss between the worlds of science and spirituality continues, the
fractal finds its way into the new American psychedelic folklore--as evidenced by that
fractal-enhanced Grateful Dead ticket.
It's the morning after a Dead show, in fact, when the young man who designed that
famous concert ticket unveils his latest invention for a small group of friends gathered at his
Palo Alto home. Dan Kottke, who was one of the original Apple engineers, left the company
and sold off his stock to launch his career as an independent computer graphic designer. He
has just finished the prototype for his first effort: a small light-up LED device that flashes
words and pictures. He plugs it in and the group watches it go through its paces. It's not as
trippy as a fractal, but it's pretty mesmerizing all the same. So is Kottke, who approaches the
psychedelic-spiritual search with the same patience and discipline he'd use to assemble an
intricate circuit board.
When I was a freshman in college,'' he carefully removes the wires from the back of
his invention, "I would take psychedelics and sit by myself for a whole day. What I arrived at
was that cosmic consciousness was a completely normal thing that one day everyone would
arrive at, if they would just sit and think clearly.''
Kottke, like many of the brilliant people at his home today, sees Cyberia as a logical
result of psychedelics and rationality. That's how I became friends with Steve Jobbs. We
used to take psychedelics together and talk about Buddhist philosophy. I had no idea he was
connected with Woz [Steve Wozniak] or selling blue boxes [telephone dialers that allow you
to make free calls] at the time. We just talked about transcendentalism and Buddhism and
listened to Bob Dylan. It must have been his alter ego.''
Until Jobbs and Wozniak created the Apple personal computer, cyberian computer
exploration was limited to the clunky and essentially unusable Altair brand. It appealed to
the soldering iron kinds of hackers,'' explains Dan, "but not the spiritual kind.'' So the very
invention of the personal computer, then, was in some ways psychedelics-influenced. Maybe
that's why they called it Apple: the fruit of forbidden knowledge brought down to the hands
of the consumer through the garage of a Reid College acid head? In any case, the Apple gave
computing power and any associated spiritual insights to the public and, most important, to
their children.
It's easy to understand why kids are better at learning to use computers than adults.
Just like in the immigrant family who comes to America, it is the children who learn the new
language first and best. When mainframe computers appeared in high schools around the
country, it was the students, not the administrators, who became the systems operators. This
set into a motion a revenge of the nerds'' on a scale we haven't yet fully comprehended. But
when the computer industry was born and looking desperately for skilled programmers and
developers, these kids were too young to be hired. The companies turned instead to the acid
heads.
When your brain is forming,'' explains Kottke, using his long fingers to draw pictures
in the oriental rug, "it makes axons that are long, linear things, feeling their way to some part
of the brain very far away to get connected. Your consciousness develops the same way. The
middle teen years are about making connections between things in your mind like computers
and psychedelics and fractals and music.'' Everyone is staring at the impression Dan's fingers
have left in the rug, relating the pattern he's drawn to the design of the colorful weave
underneath.
Kottke's soft voice grounds the group in reality once again. But this kind of thinking
is very easily discouraged. The quelling of creativity is like a virus that gets passed down
generation to generation. Psychedelics can break that cycle.'' So, according to firsthanders like
Kottke, everything old becomes new again, and the psychedelics user's mind is rejuvenated to
its original ability to wander and wonder. The frames and systems of logic one has been using
to organize experience fall away. What better language to adopt than computer language,
which is also unfettered by prejudices, judgments and neuroses?
Consciousness is binary,'' poses Kottke, from a casual lotus position. "It's essentially
digital.'' At least this is the way computers think.'' When information is stored digitally rather
than in a picture, on a record, or even in a book of words, it is broken down into a series of
yes/no's or dot/dashes. Things must be spelled out explicitly. The computer functions purely
in duality but, unlike the human mind, has no interpretive grid.
One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human
computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who
archives Tim Leary's writing, is that it reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'' That
is, one's experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One
sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel
cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the
moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of
intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive
traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains
the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.
Just like the great chaos mathematicians, great programmers must be able to come
from a point of total oblivion'' in order to fully grok cyber language, and in the mid-1970s
and early 1980s, psychedelics users were the only qualified, computer-literate people available
to rapidly growing companies trying to develop software and hardware before their
competitors. In the field of pure research, no one cares what an employee looks like or what
kinds of drugs he eats--it's creative output that matters. Steve Jobbs felt this way, which is
why his Macintosh project at Apple was staffed mostly by tie-dye---wearing young men.
Today, even executives at the more establishment-oriented computer companies have been
forced to include psychedelics-influenced developers in their ranks.
Chris Krauskopf, manager of the Human Interface Program at Intel, admits, Some of
the people here are very, very, very bright. They were bored in school, and as a result they
hung out, took drugs, and got into computers.'' Luckily for them, the drug tests that defense
contractors such as Intel are required to give their employees cannot detect psychedelics,
which are taken in microdoses. As for marijuana tests, well, it's gotten pretty easy to predict
when those are coming, and a phone call or two from personnel executives to the right people
in Research and Development can easily give, say, forty-eight hours' notice. ...
A high-level personnel executive from a major Southern California defense contractor
admits that the company's biggest problem now is that alternative culture members'' are
refusing to work for them. In a secret, off-the-record lunch talk, the rather elderly gentleman
said, between sips of Earl Grey, that the "long hairs we've hired have the ability to attack
computer problems from completely different angles. It would be interesting to take the plans
of a stealth bomber and trace back each innovation to the computer it was drawn on. I bet the
tie-dyes would win out over the pocket-protectors every time.'' According to him, the
company's biggest problem now is finding programmers willing to work for a defense
industry contractor. They're all against the idea of making weapons. We may not be able to
meet our production schedule--we may lose contracts--because we can't get enough of them to
work for us.''
Marc de Groot, a programmer and virtual-reality designer from San Francisco,
understands why companies in the defense industry might depend on cyberians. My question
to you is: Which is the less moral of the two propositions: doing drug testing on your
employees, or doing defense contracting in the first place? That's the real question: Why are a
bunch of acid heads working for a company that makes weapons?'' De Groot's two-bedroom
apartment in the hills is modestly appointed with furniture that looks like leftovers from his
college dorm room. Trouble is, de Groot didn't go to college. After three tries, he realized he
could learn more about computers by working for his university as a programmer than by
taking their classes, so he dropped out as a student and dropped back in as an employee.
I think that people who like to expand their minds with things like higher math and
computers and media are fundamentally the same people who would want to expand their
minds with anything available. But this is a very bad political climate for talking about all
this. You can't mix a thing like drugs with any intellectual endeavor and have it stay as
credible.'' Yet, de Groot's apartment--which has one small bedroom dedicated to life's
comforts and the rest filled with computer hardware--shows many signs of the alternative
culture he prefers to keep out of the public eye. Dan Kottke's fractal Grateful Dead ticket is
pinned to the wall next to the computer on which de Groot designed sound systems for VPL,
the leading "virtual reality'' interface design firm.
Psychedelics are a given in Silicon Valley. They are an institution as established as
Intel, Stanford, marriage, or religion. The infrastructure has accommodated them. Word of
which companies are cool'' and which are not spreads about as rapidly as Dead tickets. De
Groot finds his "user-friendly'' employment opportunities on the WELL, an acronym for
Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or on other bulletin board services (BBSs).
One of the articles that goes around on a regular basis is a list of all the companies
that do urine testing in the Silicon Valley. So you can look it up ahead of time and decide
that you don't want to apply. Computer programmers have set up this information service
because they know that a lot of their friends and they themselves use these drugs.''
De Groot pauses. He is careful not to implicate himself, but his emotions are running
high. And even more than that, people who don't use the drugs are outraged because of the
invasion of privacy. They just feel like it's an infringement on civil liberties. And I think
they're right. I have a friend who applied simultaneously at Sun Micro Systems and Xerox
Park, Palo Alto Research Center. And he found out--and he's someone who uses drugs--he
found out that Xerox Park was gonna do a urine test so he dried out and he went in and did
the urine test and passed and then they offered him the job, and he said, `I'm not taking the
job because you people do urine testing and I'm morally opposed to it,' and he went to work
for Sun. Sun does not do urine testing. They're very big on not doing it. I think it's great.''
Not surprisingly, Sun Micro Systems' computers run some of the most advanced
fractal graphics programs, and Intel--which is also quite Deadhead-friendly,'' is an industry
leader in experimental technologies like virtual reality. The companies that lead in the Valley
of the Nerds are the ones that recognize the popularity of psychedelics among their
employees. Still, although they have contributed to or perhaps even created the computer
revolution, psychedelics-using cyberians feel like a persecuted sect in an oppressive ancient
society that cannot see its own superstitious paranoia. As an engineer at a Microsoft research
facility complains, drug testing makes her feel like the "target victim of an ancient voodoo
spell.''
From the cyberian perspective, that's exactly what's going on; so computer
programmers must learn not to give any hair or bodily fluids to their employers. The
confiscated parts are being analyzed in scientific rituals'' that look into the employee's past
and determine whether she has engaged in her own rituals--like smoking pot--that have been
deemed heretical by the dominating religious body. In this case, that dominating body is the
defense industry, and the heretics are pot smokers and psychedelics users, who have
demonstrated a propensity to question the justifiability of the war machine.