Musings on Terence McKenna and the Role of Blockchain Technology in 2016
The holiday season has come to remind me of several significant happenings in my life, one of which is the day I first learned about Bitcoin. During my college years, my friends and I were complete Terence McKenna junkies. McKenna was a counterculture prophet whose books and public speaking appearances earned him a die-hard cult following in the decades leading up to his untimely death in the late 1990s. He was subsequently immortalized thanks to his followers who seem to have succeeded in digitizing and uploading to the Internet everything the man ever said or wrote.
McKenna spoke on many topics ranging from psychedelics, consciousness, culture, politics, and extraterrestrial life to the Internet and the significance of computer technology. He believed that the Internet is a technological manifestation of the collective unconscious, providing a medium through which all information and imaginations can be shared.
McKenna had built himself a computer and modem setup in his home on the big island of Hawaii in the early 1990s and was surfing the web and using the Internet on a level entirely unknown to the world at the time, accessing US Department of Defense databases and academic research abstracts long before most of us had even heard of the Internet.
I had always been fascinated by many of McKenna's musings, but his musings on computers and the Internet were of particular interest to me. Coincidentally, it was at Terence's brother Dennis' Boxing Day party in late 2012 where I learned about Bitcoin for the first time during casual conversation with a man I had met there. He conveniently had a laptop with him and we sat down as he showed me his wallet, sent me some coins, and explained to me why this technology was so revolutionary.
I can only imagine what Terence may have had to say about blockchain technology if he were still alive today. If he thought of the Internet as a manifestation of the collective unconscious, then perhaps he may have explained the blockchain as a sort of codified manifestation of objectivity.
The blockchain is a distributed ledger system, a copy of which is maintained on every single node participating in the network. McKenna at times speculated that something of the sort is
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