CYBERLIFE Douglas Rushkoff A potted history

The mainstream media has found yet another Internetrelated threat to our
wellbeing: the preponderance of “prodrug” dialogue online.

A recent frontpage New York Times piece leads the battle charge of
articles decrying open conversations online between marijuana users and
advocates. The newspaper worries that these controversial words and ideas
could be accessed by young people.

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the question of whether the mainstream
media’s bias against the legalisation of cannabis is based on wellfounded
concern for our brains. Pot and most other mindaltering substances are
illegal, and our media should certainly be expected to lament violations of
the law and people who appear to be encouraging others to do so.

Still, the New York Times and the antimarijuana groups it likes to quote
could find no evidence of any of the actual drug sales online that the
catchy headlines would suggest. They only report “promarijuana sites”,
forums where people “discuss LSD experiences”, sites listing possible
dangers of drugs and others with instructions on how to grow pot and
psychedelic mushrooms. And, for some reason these journalists can’t
understand, all this “prodrug” information seems to travel and spread much
faster and wider on the Internet than do antidrug messages.

The reasons are simple. First, and at least for the present, the kind of
information that spreads most readily on the Internet tends to be
countercultural and antiprohibitive. The Internet as an idea, an
experience and a complex of hardware, fights censorship and control. Simply
expressing oneself online is to subvert a mediaspace that has traditionally
served to support the status quo. Most people feel little need to use the
Internet to reiterate the opinions they hear on the news. We use it to
discuss the issues we don’t see being discussed effectively anywhere else.

And because the information that is crucial to those who have chosen to eat
or smoke illegal plants is not provided by the overground press, it is no
wonder that these communities have turned to the Internet. Although the
information they share is sometimes anecdotal or inaccurate, it is
generally more honest and detailed than the “just say no” dogma of their
counterparts on television and in newspapers.

Even more significantly, the reason why online culture appears so infused
with propsychedelic conversations is that today’s Internet was, in many
ways, an achievement of psychedelics users. Yes, the Internet we know and
love was brought to us, at least in great part, by California’s LSD
community.

The very conception of the almost hallucinatory realm we call cyberspace
required the imaginative capacities of people who were familiar with
navigating hallucinatory headspace. This is why so many Silicon Valley
firms eschew the employee drug testing of other industries. If hightech
companies weeded out weed users, they’d have few employees left.

Instead of reviling the Internet’s psychedelic members, we should perhaps
thank them for what they have given us. In any case, we can’t feign
surprise or confusion that a community based in independent thinking and
free access to technologies of self expression would tend to disseminate
information about growing or using pot.

The ideas that really spread on the Internet are ones that we tend to
repress in mainstream media. Our only real choice is to relegate such
subjects to the potentially hazardous inaccuracies of online culture and
then impotently bemoan their existence, or begin intelligent conversations
about them in the light of day.

© Douglas Rushkoff 1997

[You can reach Douglas Rushkoff at http://www.levity.com/rushkoff]
mailto:rushkoff@interport.net
02 July 1997