The Lingering Legacy of Psychedelia

Steve Jobs claimed that dropping acid was one of the most important things he had ever done in his life. “LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin,” he said, “and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it.” Jobs’s openness to psychedelic experiences is an aspect of his formative years that’s often invoked to help shade in his genius, a way of decoding the inputs and stimuli that allowed him to—as the billboards used to say—“think different.” Last year, one of Jobs’s comrades from those shaggier days, Daniel Kottke, described their acid trips as fairly typical: they were “monk-wannabes” who would go hiking and listen to music, talk about consciousness, attempt to read books. And then, like many of their generation, they grew up. By the time both of them were involved with Apple, in the late seventies, Jobs had rerouted his creativity toward something less ephemeral. “Once Apple started,” Kottke, who would be one of the company’s first employees, said, “Steve was really focused with all of his energy on making Apple successful. And he didn’t need psychedelics for that.”