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McKenna and the Noosphere: Before the Internet

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Series ArticleFood of the Gods258 words3 source entriesstatus: editorial complete

McKenna and the Noosphere: Before the Internet

“In the early 1990s, McKenna began describing the internet as a psychedelic …”culturephilosophy

“In the early 1990s, McKenna began describing the internet as a psychedelic technology, a system for the collective exteriorization of human imagination. Food of the Gods was published the year the World Wide Web was invented.”

Food of the Gods was published in 1992, the same year Tim Berners-Lee made the World Wide Web publicly available. McKenna did not know this was happening, but he anticipated something like it.

In the lectures he gave through the early 1990s, McKenna described a coming technological transformation that he framed in psychedelic terms: the exteriorization of the human imagination into shared space. Virtual reality, which was then a laboratory concept rather than a consumer product, seemed to him like a technology for making visible the content that psychedelics revealed internally, a way of creating the 'visible language' he had been describing for twenty years.

His engagement with the early internet, documented in lectures from 1993-1995, was enthusiastic and prescient in some ways. He saw in networked communication the possibility of the kind of collective consciousness that the psychedelic experience gestures toward, a space in which individual minds could pool their contents and where the usual isolation of the ego might be partially dissolved.

He also saw the risks. The same technological substrate that could serve genuine collective intelligence could serve the dominator culture's purposes just as well, a more efficient version of the television he'd criticized in Food of the Gods, optimized for the same purpose: keeping people passive, consuming content rather than producing experience.

McKenna died in April 2000, eight months before Wikipedia launched, thirteen years before smartphones became ubiquitous. He didn't see social media. His prediction about the internet's dual nature, liberation engine and attention capture machine, has been validated more fully than he knew.