All the lights and images that Brand deployed were like LSD, an attempt to artificially induce a heightened sense of consciousness. America needed Indians, and it needed acid, too. A jolt to rouse the country from its gray flannel numbness. In time, Brand would ascribe the same mind-bending powers to computers. But before he celebrated those machines, he didn’t much like them. Everything the nascent counterculture would come to despise—the mindless submission of the herd, the tyranny of bureaucracy—could be reduced to a pungent symbol, the computer. When Brand later looked back on the sixties,
...more
