Psychedelic Software: A Forensic History of Post-Literary Computing

In the 1960s, Timothy Leary was known as the Harvard professor who popularized psychedelic drugs through the burgeoning counterculture. By the mid-1970s, he was thrown into the United States’ federal prison system for drug-related offenses. Leary later “pivoted”—like so many counterculture veterans—into digital computing and software development. Leary operationalized his earlier psychedelically informed theories of perception by working with interdisciplinary teams that produced interactive software interfaces. During this period, they designed digital psychological diagnosis programs and software adaptations of literary works. Researchers from Apple Computer, Inc.’s Advanced Technology Group invited Leary to contribute a chapter in an edited volume entitled The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, alongside institutional computing heavyweights like Alan Kay and countercultural eccentrics like Ted Nelson. Leary’s intellectually fertile decade of experimentation generated niche media technologies that, by the 1990s, exemplified many features common within the booming software industry. Echoes of Leary and his milieu’s digital experiments can be found today in expressive media like animated GIFs and emoji.

I argue that to understand the social and political implications of digital culture today, we should return to the moment when psychedelic individualism was operationalized in software. I use the term post-literary computing to unite technical and aesthetic practices of this era that transcended the limitations of linear print media and its logocentric approaches to understanding subjective experience. Through an analysis of Leary’s post-literary software, this book adds much-needed nuance to contemporary debates about the relationship between computing and the humanities.