Steve Jobs’ LSD Legacy
Alternet/ The Fix editor Walter Armstrong noted this week that virtually every mainstream obituary of Mac founder Steve Jobs ignored his well known enthusiasm for LSD, which he revealed in an interview in 2005.
Chatting to New York Times reporter John Markoff for his book ‘What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer’, he suggested Microsoft’s Bill Gates would ‘be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once’ and was open about his own youthful experimentation.
“Doing LSD was one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life,” he declared.
" Markoff describes many of the people and organizations who helped develop the ideology and technology of the computer as we know it today, including Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer and Microsoft Windows. Markoff argues for a direct connection between the counterculture of the late 1950s and 1960s (using examples such as Kepler's Books in Menlo Park California) and the development of the computer industry"
His enthusiasm for alternative culture and outsiders was also revealed in one of his best known speeches ‘Think Different’ in which he eulogized ‘the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes’.
“You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things,” he suggested, “they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
His most widely circulated truism since his death from cancer last week has been a quote from his stunningly inspiring address to the Stanford University in 2005, in which he chatted candidly about dropping out of college, being sacked from Mac aged 30 and diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the age of 49.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition,” he recommended.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc (Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address: “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life . . .”)
http://bit.ly/b5TnL5 (Steve Jobs’ speech; the text in full)
Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff
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