Will the dog still roll over in the absence of its master? This is the question that now haunts the aging Mao.
Timothy Leary, in Neuropolitics, 1975
Bob Dylan once said, "I accept chaos. I'm not sure if chaos accepts me." Timothy Leary made friends with chaos by throwing a mad chaotic party for his inoperative prostate cancer during the last year-and-a-half of his life, which ended 1 June 1996. His Beverly Hills home became the scene of a constant social swirl. Old friends, young friends, film industry legends from Oliver Stone to Tony Curtis, rock stars from Perry Farrell to Yoko Ono, and representatives of every major media outlet stomped past the giant hookah, the spilled drinks, the overflowing ashtrays, and other telltale signs of a great party in the decadent Hollywood tradition to talk, drink, interview, and - sometimes - trip with the master of psychedelic pop culture.
In the midst of this Felliniesque madness, Leary and a courageous young group of co-conspirators managed to design and operate a very popular Web site, leary.com, according to the Doctor's theory of "home media": "Individuals and small groups are now broadcasting from the home. This model is replacing the big, alienating, downtown office environments that catch otherwise sane human beings in the vice grip of player-itis - the tendency to undervalue creativity, which is seen as expendable, replaceable property."
Literalizing the home-media theme, the site was designed as a visit to Tim's house. Once inside, you could find several substantial streams of ideas and information. These included a library filled with many of Leary's books and letters, a public forum area that primarily featured the rantings of hipster youths, and the Global Village Voice - a newsletter with writings by former Saturday Night Live writer Tom Davis, and Douglas Rushkoff, among others. It became popular enough to be named one of the five favorite sites in a People magazine poll. If the world believed that the Internet had been conquered by corporate vibes, here was proof that ribald free-thinkers still roamed the virtual terrain.
Carry that weight
In Leary's more expansive visions, leary.com wasn't merely a psychedelic rebellious funhouse of a Web site, it was a route to eternal life - a method for electronically preserving himself and attaining what he called "archival, informational immortality." He even wrote about eventually uploading this informational "hypertext memoir" into a robot body, quoting mathematician/cyberpunk writer Rudy Rucker's statement that "if a robot is complicated enough, it might in some sense be conscious."
When Leary died however, leary.com ground to a halt and the young Web team scattered to the four winds. They had lived with Leary throughout the entire chaotic and emotionally draining year-and-a-half-long death trip and they were, understandably, freaked.
As Rushkoff reported in his post mortem for Esquire: "These kids were with Tim 24 hours-a-day, seven days a week, changing his linens, responding to his whims, and jumping into action whenever he shouted "hello," only to find him collapsed, bleeding, and disoriented ... they are shell-shocked. These kids were right there with Tim in the piss-and-blood-soaked trenches of his losing battle with death."
Now, 14 months after Leary's death, his stepson, Zach Leary, has taken sole responsibility for updating leary.com - at his own expense.
"The crew found it difficult to keep working for free in the absence of our moral leader, Tim," says Zach. "Now that some time has passed, I feel more obliged and responsible to keep Timmy's cybernetic reincarnation in order.... Part of Tim's easy transition into death was the satisfaction that he got from being alive in cyberspace."
If Leary's personal immortality-by-Web-site never quite coalesces into some sort of semi-living whole system packed inside a robot body, it hardly matters. The expansiveness of the good Doctor's visions were not frequently matched in the realizations of his projects, however delightful those projects were. And while one of Leary's visions involved attaining personal immortality, as a project he typically refused to take it too seriously.
For at least a decade, Leary would proudly rattle the bracelet that signified his membership in the Alcor cryonics organization (and later, that of a different company, CryoCare) at all his friends and talk about his plans for cryonic preservation. Yet weeks before his time came, he decided against this extreme long shot at physical immortality, saying that he didn't want to "wake up in 50 years surrounded by humorless men with clipboards." He had earlier told Ken Kesey, "I've exhausted this planet's particular pleasures."
Leary was a futurist by nature. He always lived a few decades - if not centuries - ahead of his time. If his visions came true within the time frame he expected, we'd all be ageless tantric sex masters living rent-free in an L5 space colony. It's a glorious vision, and there are many who believe that, in its own fuzzy way, it's a realistic one that will perhaps come to fruition some time in the 21st century. Which is why, even in the absence of the charismatic techno-psychedelic philosopher, attempts will be made to keep the vision alive.
The return of leary.com
On 1 August, Zach Leary uploaded the first new leary.com update, a pair of QuickTime VR visits to Leary's Beverly Hills digs, including a tour of the infamous "Drug Room," the space where thousands of trips into psychedelic dimensions were logged by Leary and his friends during the highly publicized "death party." The first new texts - to go up within a few weeks - will be pieces by John Perry Barlow and Rushkoff.
What's it like for Zach to suddenly find himself keeper of the flame? "I must admit, I wasn't even dimly aware of his legacy until I was a teenager. I thought it was some heady mess that I'd figure out later.... I liked the whirlwind of chaos and glamour, but never in a million years did I think that I would have a hand in keeping the flame alive."
Meanwhile, fans of Leary's expanded visions are keeping their fingers crossed that the return of leary.com will be successful, ongoing, and - in the Leary tradition - raise a little holy hell. And if some day a couple of decades down the line a handsome robot comes up to you and starts ranting some strange stuff about "neuropolitics" and "activating the transcendental brain circuits," you'll know that leary.com exceeded all expectations.
