In the winter of 1983-84, I'd dropped out of school and was a rent-free stowaway on a different college campus in a friend's on-campus housing quad. As if that weren't enough, I also survived financially by working under someone else's work-study number/contract and getting paid in cash under the table.

Ah, the good ol' days.

One weekend, Timothy Leary was booked for an evening to speak at the campus auditorium. My friend and I, we knew only superficial stuff about Leary, his involvement in the counter-culture of the 1960s -- the usual. But as my friend said, "Eh. We should go hear him talk. I mean, he's old. He'll be dead soon!"

And so, with the carefree bulletproof attitude that people in their 20s excel at, and tickets in hand, off we went.

It was a commanding performance. Leary was intelligent, funny, and very physical. His hair was silver, his skin pale, he wore all white, and a spotlight followed him as he moved and gestured expansively across the stage, clutching a mic.

The main thread of his talk -- at a school with a reputation for technology and science degrees -- was to walk us through humankind's various evolutions and revolutions.

He pantomimed drawing ourselves up out of the primordial ooze. He became a primate, leaving the trees and walking across the savannah. The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. Eventually, he talked about the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution -- all the technological revolutions, including the then-current computing/computer programming innovations that so many in the audience were striving toward making a living at. And he had equally captivating movements and quips all along the way, all the way up to the present moment of... 1984.

Now, he said, we were on the cusp of a new revolution. He wanted to distinguish it from every other technological revolution, and he called it the "Information Transfer Technology Revolution."

Yeah, it was a mouthful, not exactly catchy. It was where he lost a lot of the audience. Information? Information is obvious. Information is free. It's indisputable.

No, Leary said. You're deluding yourselves. He went on to describe how information, information ITSELF would become the new Coin of the Realm, and whoever controlled the information and the flow of information would rule. At this point, the audience was openly scoffing. What was he talking about? That was ridiculous.

Well. Not if you own and operate the means of communication. In Marxist terms, communications have become the means of production.

Of course Leary was an idealist, so he imagined and described how all that would be in the hands of the people, how liberating this revolution would be, rather than what is actually happening now.

I'm a storyteller. During Trump's first term, before the office of the presidency had even a fraction of the wealth and the apparatus that that now controls it, I was emceeing an event, and I told this story as part of a short preamble to the night's theme of psychedelics.

When I got to the quote about information becoming the new coin of the realm, people in the audience audibly gasped at the realization of what Leary has actually been saying, as they grappled with what that would mean in the hands of corrupt leadership.

And now, that "leadership" behind the curtain has not only stolen the information, the truth, the facts. They are actively working to ensure that our minds are hollowed out, that we come to depend on their version of forming ideas. We're being force-fed not just lies but a specific technology known to atrophy our cognitive abilities and be habit-forming. Designed to make critical thinking seem like an enormous effort, an inefficient waste of our oh so valuable time.

And it is precisely our time that is valuable. Our time and our attention, sucked away so that we have no resources with which to object. And now it's stealing our information-conveying jobs, so that we have no money with which to fund an alternative.

#storytelling

In the winter of 1983-84, I'd dropped out of school and was a rent-free stowaway on a different college campus in a friend's on-campus housing quad. As if that weren't enough, I also survived financially by working under someone else's work-study number/contract and getting paid in cash under the table.

Ah, the good ol' days.

One weekend, Timothy Leary was booked for an evening to speak at the campus auditorium. My friend and I, we knew only superficial stuff about Leary, his involvement in the counter-culture of the 1960s -- the usual. But as my friend said, "Eh. We should go hear him talk. I mean, he's old. He'll be dead soon!"

And so, with the carefree bulletproof attitude that people in their 20s excel at, and tickets in hand, off we went.

It was a commanding performance. Leary was intelligent, funny, and very physical. His hair was silver, his skin pale, he wore all white, and a spotlight followed him as he moved and gestured expansively across the stage, clutching a mic.

The main thread of his talk -- at a school with a reputation for technology and science degrees -- was to walk us through humankind's various evolutions and revolutions.

He pantomimed drawing ourselves up out of the primordial ooze. He became a primate, leaving the trees and walking across the savannah. The Stone Age. The Bronze Age. Eventually, he talked about the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution -- all the technological revolutions, including the then-current computing/computer programming innovations that so many in the audience were striving toward making a living at. And he had equally captivating movements and quips all along the way, all the way up to the present moment of... 1984.

Now, he said, we were on the cusp of a new revolution. He wanted to distinguish it from every other technological revolution, and he called it the "Information Transfer Technology Revolution."

Yeah, it was a mouthful, not exactly catchy. It was where he lost a lot of the audience. Information? Information is obvious. Information is free. It's indisputable.

No, Leary said. You're deluding yourselves. He went on to describe how information, information ITSELF would become the new Coin of the Realm, and whoever controlled the information and the flow of information would rule. At this point, the audience was openly scoffing. What was he talking about? That was ridiculous.

Well. Not if you own and operate the means of communication. In Marxist terms, communications have become the means of production.

Of course Leary was an idealist, so he imagined and described how all that would be in the hands of the people, how liberating this revolution would be, rather than what is actually happening now.

I'm a storyteller. During Trump's first term, before the office of the presidency had even a fraction of the wealth and the apparatus that that now controls it, I was emceeing an event, and I told this story as part of a short preamble to the night's theme of psychedelics.

When I got to the quote about information becoming the new coin of the realm, people in the audience audibly gasped at the realization of what Leary has actually been saying, as they grappled with what that would mean in the hands of corrupt leadership.

And now, that "leadership" behind the curtain has not only stolen the information, the truth, the facts. They are actively working to ensure that our minds are hollowed out, that we come to depend on their version of forming ideas. We're being force-fed not just lies but a specific technology known to atrophy our cognitive abilities and be habit-forming. Designed to make critical thinking seem like an enormous effort, an inefficient waste of our oh so valuable time.

And it is precisely our time that is valuable. Our time and our attention, sucked away so that we have no resources with which to object. And now it's stealing our information-conveying jobs, so that we have no money with which to fund an alternative.

#storytelling