By Nathaniel Allison
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
“Electric technology, by virtue of its immediate relation to our nervous system, is itself a sort of inner trip, with drugs playing the role of sub-plot or alternative mode. It may well appear a few years hence that the panic about psychedelic drugs relates less to the chemistry than to the hidden terrors which people feel in the presence of electric technology.”
– Marshal McLuhan
In this series of articles, I’ll be discussing the cultural cross-currents that were emerging in 1960’s America. I’ll be exploring the social, political, and technological forces that were changing the Standard Operation Procedures of the United States. A new type of democracy was forming, where the entire world would be seen as an interconnected system. A system predicated on feedback loops that can be tuned to amplify change and shift societal goals. This new society would be oriented around the principles of cybernetics and behavioral control. A self-regulating world where everything becomes interconnected to everything else. This inter-planetary connection would birth citizens of a New Age, and computers were designed to be the supreme tool to unlock and harness the mysteries of the human mind. I examine how technologies were created for implementing new thought patterns, and creating new types of self-imagery. In this new dream world, you don’t participate, or try to change, you just experience. The last frontier to conqueror was never space, it was always the human mind.
The 1950s represented post-WWII prosperity, conformity, and stability in American culture; suburban expansion, nuclear families, consumerism, Cold War patriotism, Blue Collar jobs galore. Society was still oriented to traditional gender roles, and racial segregation. An intense anti-communist fervor was bubbling under society’s surface. The tension between a dominant culture of conformity, and a burgeoning youth-led rebellion was bubbling to the surface. The rejection of conventional mores was a trademark of 60’s. Pop culture shifted from 1950’s wholesome, to rebellious and psychedelic, reflecting the shift from unity to fragmentation. This new circus was the end of drag-city! The 1960’s were a decade full of catalyzing moments, where entire groups of people became focused on the blurring of boundaries, and the breaking of mechanical social structures. The 60’s were an era where desires of the night came into daylight. This was the era of The Swinging Sixties, and the dawn of the Age of Aquarius; the Season of the Witch. This era became the culmination of what the occultist Aleister Crowley called The Aeon of the Child, where every man and woman becomes a star.
There were many important culturally catalyzing moments across the decade. Elvis Presley returned from military service. The folk music revival gained traction with the emergence of artists like Bob Dylan. The Beach Boys launched Surf-Rock. The British Invasion exploded with the Beatles’ U.S. arrival and their Ed Sullivan Show appearance. Bob Dylan went electric creating the folk rock genre. James Brown set funk in motion with the track “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Psychedelic Rock was initiated with albums like Revolver by The Beatles and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. The Grateful Dead invented Acid Rock. Johnny Cash revived his career performing At Folsom Prison. The Green and Sexual Revolution’s continued to gain momentum. The zenith of hippie culture kicked off with the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and the Woodstock Festival in New York. The moments that accelerated the counterculture are too numerous to mention.
It was during the 1960’s that the psychedelics of electricity transformed the Theatre of the Absurd into a theater of violence and cultural mayhem. Guerrilla and Street Theater turned into organized chaos. The Psychedelic Cold War of the 50’s turned into a Psychedelic Hot War in the 60’s. New mechanisms were created to blot out and numb the increasing fear and anxiety, entire groups and segments of culture were turned into laboratories for experimentation. During the fifties, the US Government, were focused on perfecting tools for programming and controlling the mind, the sixties were focused on implementing those techniques.
The counterculture symbolically died at the “Woodstock West.” On December 6th, 1969, The Rolling Stones brought the Hell’s Angles to the event for security, and while playing Sympathy For The Devil, violence erupted and the Hell’s Angels stabbed a spectator to death. The final nail in the coffin happened in August of that year with Helter Skelter and the Manson Family murders. The Hippie Era was officially dead.
EVERY NEW TECHNOLOGY NECESSITATES A NEW WAR
“At present, we have no generally agreed-upon social values and/or rules that can be readily applied in judging whether the effects of electronic communication are beneficial, acceptable, or harmful. Our print-based conception of electronic media prevents us from making social decisions based on a correct understanding of our new communication environment.”
– Tony Schwartz, The Responsive Chord
By the 1960’s the television was in 90% of U.S. homes. TV was not merely a content-delivery device, but a transformative environment that reshaped human perception, social organization, and even warfare. It set the stage for the Vietnam War to emerge as America’s first “Living-Room War.” Nightly broadcasts brought the conflict’s brutality straight into our living rooms, turning viewers into unwitting participants in every aspect of the fighting. In the process, this media phenomenon erased the traditional divide between civilian and soldier. The folks at home weren’t just spectators, they were participants. The structural effects of the TV form itself changed our senses, psyches, and collective life. By the nature of the technology, TV increases feelings of fantasy and disembodiment. Its nature is inward-turning and globally involved. In the Electric Age every person becomes closely involved with all people across the globe.
Human technologies have always fundamentally reshaped how we perceive and interact with the world. Elites and powerful institutions have always exerted control through technology. You can witness this effect in the Civil War, America’s first railroad war. The power of trains were harnessed for troop moments and supplies. World War I amplified this paradigm to a greater industrial scale; fueled by booming factories and cities, it resulted in massive armies and firepower. Every aspect of this industry fed into the war effort. The society that considered all civilians as workers, metamorphosed to where all workers became soldiers. War World II was as much a radio war as it was a chemical and industrial war. The world had previously never seen a war of such unprecedented scale. This radio war with its various electronic technological developments, unleashed a primordial energy dominant in Western society.
These electric technologies have unleashed tribal and communal energies such as jazz music and dance. The radio stirred something primal in people. It was only the beginning in the development of electronic technologies that connected society back with its tribal roots. You can see how President F.D.R. harnessed the radio through his fireside chats, turning it into an instrument of propaganda. The juxtaposition of antiquated mechanical industries, and emergent electric technologies, contributed to the erosion of traditional American identity; effectively energizing and radicalizing an entire generation. This clash ignited a generational shift, the electrical technologies “turned-on” an entire generation.
The era really was about sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The 1960’s was an era of upheavals – Vietnam, assassinations, riots – and trauma that contributed to a growing apathy and cynicism. The intersection of political activism, societal shifts, pop-cultural explosions, technological influences, and in-between elements like festivals and drug culture led to the creation of many new cultures. Electronics, automation, and other elements of modernization brought on profound societal transformations.
As Marshall McLuhan has said, electricity birthed various technologies of consciousness. He said that electronic technology is an extension of the central nervous system and consciousness itself. Electricity wasn’t just a utility, it was also a cultural force that reshaped our world and perceptions. Things like electric light essentially ended the constraints of darkness. This electronic technology sped up the societal processes of transformation. Like the famous child safety sticker says; Remember kids, electricity will kill you!
The Electric Age was the dawn of the Global Village. McLuhan saw satellites as the ultimate technological driver of the global village. He once said: “Do you know what the satellite does to you? As an environment, when it goes around the planet? It’s a prosceniumarch. It turns the planet into a stage, and makes you want to be an actor.” This man-made environment turned the entire globe into a stage, where all human activity becomes public, everything becomes a performative event witnessed by a worldwide stage. When you’re on the internet, the television, the phone, you’re fundamentally in the air, floating in the ether as a discarnate being with no body. Everyone’s identity tends to merge with everyone at the speed of light into what McLuhan calls “Mass Man.” The electric age deprives people of their private identity. This process has created an entirely new environment, one that’s fundamentally altered human perception. For example, it reoriented the science of ecology to see the world, or Global Village, as an entirely programmable resource. The Global Village retrieved a mythic world full of goddesses and monsters. “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations” as the Beach Boys sang.
In response to these changes, numerous subcultures were created that departed from the rigid uniformity and social homogenization of postwar America. This generation was trying to find a solution to the alienation that was brought on by the fragmentation of the mechanical world. Both psychedelics and electronic media were seen as technologies for bridging this gap. They were avenues for increasing enlightenment, and achieving a unified collective consciousness. Thus creating a world of simultaneous all-at-once awareness, a shared experience, and a transfigured Brave New World. Can you dig it?
From the alphabet to computers, McLuhan posits that all technologies are extensions of the human body and human senses. When we extend these parts of ourselves through technology, the extensions act as a form of self-amputation from ourselves. Our nervous systems naturally institute a self-protective numbing to insulate us from the shock of the amputation or intensification of these new technologies. These extensions can numb perception until the user becomes a servomechanism of his own image. Just like fish swimming in water, the water is invisible to the fish; we’re numb to how these new technologies create new environments of psychic and social effects. New technologies allow humans to become fascinated by their own reflections in the media they use, becoming a kind of closed system. This apathy keeps us from seeing how new technologies are reshaping our minds.
The Counterculture Era was when rebellion was commercialized, and nonconformity a marketing tool. This mechanism utilized isolated individuals that were cyberly transformed into a tribalized underground network. The anti-establishment ethos helped unify people into a community centered on a countercultural worldview. Individual sensory experiences were blended with collective cultural narratives, amplifying the countercultural visibility. Human interactions and emotions were turned into commodities.
The counterculture focused on expanding consciousness, communal living, and spiritual exploration. Personal enlightenment and self-transformation became the norm. Identity was redefined through collective spirituality and the rejection of materialism. The psychedelic experience emphasized ego dissolution and spiritual transcendence. This ego death fostered a re-evaluation of the self as more interconnected and malleable. It was sold as a place where you can control and design your own reconfiguration, but in reality it enabled a schizophrenic-like fragmentation.
When traditional faith became subverted, the void was filled with alternative belief systems. It was a type of neo-feudalism the psychonaut Terence McKenna called an Archaic Revival. Creating a culture of thoughtless individuals and debased Deadheads. Figures like Elvis “The King” Presley, made the worship of “rock idols” normal again. Utilizing godhead symbols, the High Priests of Rock & Roll established a fanbase that held a quasi-religious devotion to the musicians.
Right on, man!
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
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