Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
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author
Todd Brendan Fahey
Todd Brendan Fahey made the Digital Leap at the close of 1994. Mired to innumerable rejections of his psychedelic thriller Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel (Far Gone Books, 1996), pal ...view moreTodd Brendan Fahey made the Digital Leap at the close of 1994. Mired to innumerable rejections of his psychedelic thriller Wisdom's Maw: The Acid Novel (Far Gone Books, 1996), pal Gerard Martin offered to place portions of the unpublished manuscript on something called "the Web."
"Sure," Fahey said. "Whatever."
The struggling novelist had played around on GEnie, mostly to gain access to the Grateful Dead tape-trading community, but The Internet remained an enigma. So, when on a cold Louisiana winter evening, in the Educational Technology Resource lab at University of Louisiana-Lafayette, he was shown Levi Asher's Literary Kicks beat pages, the experience, for Fahey, was as profound as his first acid trip, beachside Santa Barbara (green windowpane gel: 500mic, it was).
Recalls Fahey, of his tour through the fledgling Web: "I `got it' instantly. I looked at Gerard and said, `Fuck, this is bigger than TV.' And all he could do was smile."
As a Ph.D. Teaching Fellow in English at USL, spring semester 1995, Fahey hijacked a Technical Writing course and began using his junior-year students as the guinea pigs of Web-page design, calling the class "Technical Writing Across the Internet." The offering raised little more than eyebrows and complaints from USL's English department; by fall, the Internet had exploded across the pages of Time and Newsweek, spawned a dozen NY slicks, and Fahey's Web design course was no longer an anomaly.
Fahey's own Far Gone Books/Wisdom's Maw Web site would quickly gain Magellan's 4-star rating, and through long nights of shameless e-mail self-promotion, he began to receive friendly notes from Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, Mondo 2000 co-founder R.U. Sirius and other digital hardcores.
The synthesis of psychedelic drugs and the Internet has not been widely written of by the mainstream media, but Fahey and others believe the relationship to run deep.
John Perry Barlow remarked to Fahey, in an as-yet unpublished interview: "I'll go so far as to say, if the government succeeds in its War On (some) Drugs--if everyone who used marjiuana and LSD were to really be put in jails--America would not have an operational computer left."
This remark mirrors Timothy Leary's assertion, to Fahey in 1992, that "Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were barefoot, long-haired acid freaks" and that Bill Gates was known to use LSD while at Harvard.
A nonlinear mode ...view less