{"id":1979,"date":"2012-10-23T11:54:14","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T17:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1979"},"modified":"2012-10-23T11:54:14","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T17:54:14","slug":"consciousness-expansion-in-silicon-valley-a-brief-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1979","title":{"rendered":"Consciousness expansion in Silicon Valley: a brief history"},"content":{"rendered":"

1965<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Pranksters are\u00a0primed in full Prankster regalia. Paul Foster has on his Importancy Coat and now has a huge head of curly hair, a great curly mustache pulling back into great curly mutton chops roaring off his face. Page Browning is the king of face painters. He becomes a full-fledged Devil with a bright orange face and his eyes become the centers of two great silver stars painted over the orange and his hair is silver with silver dust and he\u00a0paints his lips silver with silver lipstick. This very night the Pranksters all sit down with oil pastel crayons and colored pens and at a wild rate start printing handbills on 8-1\/2 x 11 paper saying CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST? and giving Big Nig’s address. As the jellybean-cocked masses start pouring out of the Rolling Stones concert at the [San Jose] Civic Auditorium, the Pranksters charge in among them. Orange & silver Devil, wild man in a coat of buttons \u2014 Pranksters. Pranksters! \u2014 handing out the handbills with the challenge, like some sort of demons, warlocks verily, come to channel the wild pointless energy built up by the Rolling Stones inside.<\/p>\n

They come piling into Big Nig’s, and suddenly acid and the Worldcraze were\u00a0everywhere, the electric organ vibrating through every belly in the place, kids\u00a0dancing not rock<\/em> dances, not the frug and the \u2014 what?\u2014\u00a0\u00a0swim,<\/em> mother, but dancing ecstasy,<\/em> leaping, dervishing, throwing their hands over their heads like Daddy Grace’s own stroked-out inner courtiers \u2014 yes! \u2014 Roy Seburn’s lights washing past every head, Cassady rapping, Paul Foster handing people weird little things out of his Eccentric Bag, old whistles, tin crickets, burnt keys, spectral plastic handles. Everybody’s eyes turn on like lightbulbs, fuses blow, blackness \u2014 wowwww! \u2014 the\u00a0things that shake and vibrate and funnel and freak out in this blackness \u2014 and then\u00a0somebody slaps new fuses in and the old hulk of a house shudders back, the wiring\u00a0writhing and fragmenting like molting snakes, the organs vibro-massage the belly\u00a0again, fuses blow, minds scream, heads explode, neighbors call the cops, 200, 300, 400 people from out there drawn into The Movie, into the edge of the pudding at least, a mass closer and higher than any mass in history, it seems most surely, and Kesey makes minute adjustment, small toggle switch here, lubricated with Vaseline No. 634\u20143 diluted with carbon tetrachloride, and they ripple,<\/em> Major, ripple,<\/em> but with meaning, 400 of the attuned multitude headed toward the pudding, the first mass acid experience, the dawn of the Psychedelic, the Flower Generation and all the rest of it . . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2012<\/a>:<\/p>\n

That shifting mind-set \u2014 the idea that life and work must be blended rather than separated \u2014 is increasingly common, according to other doctors, scholars who study work habits and the generally well-compensated workers of Silicon Valley like Andrew Sinkov, 31, a vice president of marketing at Evernote, a digital note-taking service. \u201c\u00a0\u2018Life-work balance\u2019 is a nonsense term,\u201d Mr. Sinkov said. \u201cThe idea that I have to segment work and life is based on some archaic lunar-calendar thing.\u201d Given that his employer is paying to clean his apartment, Mr. Sinkov and his girlfriend do not have to quibble about cleanup duties. The value of the perk is greater than the money saved, he said.\u00a0\u201cIt eliminates a decision I have to make,\u201d Mr. Sinkov said. \u201cIt\u2019s just happening and it\u2019s good, and I don\u2019t have to think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

His boss, Mr. Libin, also gives employees $1,000 to spend on vacation, but it has to be \u201ca real vacation.\u201d\u00a0\u201cYou can\u2019t visit the in-laws; you have to go somewhere,\u201d Mr. Libin said, adding that he did not see these perks just as ways to keep his work force \u2014 and their families \u2014 engaged. He said he also tended to be frugal as a chief executive, preferring these types of peace-of-mind benefits to, say, business-class travel, which the company does not pay for. \u201cHappy workers make better products,\u201d he said. \u201cThe output we care about has everything to do with your state of mind.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1965: The Pranksters are\u00a0primed in full Prankster regalia. Paul Foster has on his Importancy Coat and now has a huge head of curly hair, a great curly mustache pulling back into great curly mutton chops roaring off his face. Page Browning is the king of face painters. He becomes a full-fledged Devil with a bright […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1988,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}