The Acid Aesthetic: A Brief History of Psychedelic Design | Hacker News Reader

The Acid Aesthetic: A Brief History of Psychedelic Design

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61 pointsohjeez35 comments

There was a renaissance of grassroots psychedelia in the overlapping hacker and rave culture of the 1990s. I miss that stuff.

Today's culture is disturbingly vapid. There is little in the way of either genuinely creative counterculture or mainstream high culture. The pop culture is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless remakes of the same film, and geek and fringe culture seems full of low effort meme trash and mean spirited nihilism. It's not at all surprising that fascism has risen up in those festering swamps.

It reminds me of the eerie artistic anticlimax that served as a prelude to collapse in one of Lovecraft's stories about the history of a vanished elder race. "The Cursed City" I think. Like the old ones our art and culture reached a peak from the 60s to the 90s and then gave way to blobs scrawled in MS Paint.

are you lamenting today's mainstream culture in contrast to previous decades' counterculture? seems like apples and oranges. i'll posit that today's counterculture is more vibrant than ever, and 60's-90's pop culture was as vapid as today's.

This era of digital media and unprecedented discoverability amplifies our differences and similarities. Counter-culture and subcultures find, share, fork, and reinforce ideas faster than ever before. The blandness of mainstream media is a red herring, that content was always designed for mass appeal and it's now appealing to a far wider audience than ever before...

>i'll posit that today's counterculture is more vibrant than ever

Not even close.

Then i'd posit that you need to get out more often :) you don't know what you're missing out on.

"The pop culture is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless remakes of the same film"

Hahaha. I remember lamenting about the same thing back in the early 90's.

Most of everything is always dull and vapid and so are most people who at best are imitators. When you are there anyway. Looking back it always seems the past was so groundbreaking and exciting. In my late teens/early 20's I wished I could have lived through the 60's (this was in the late 80's- early 90's). Because that was such a truly great and groundbreaking time according to the books. Now I realize it was probably a general stifled societies with a bunch of copycat posers growing their hair out and saying silly things they thought were cool and taking LSD. I laugh my ass off whenever I see 90's idolizing millennials.

Old man rant aside, there has been a pretty big cultural movement in the last 6 or 8 years. I guess a big part of it is the internet. In a way I'm glad I'm not 23 again, what a confusing age, but in some ways I'm a bit jealous. Ah well, I got the 90's. There were some cool times.

In the early 1990s, mainstream pop music was arguably a broader scene than it is now, inasmuch as hip-hop and R&B were both undergoing considerable evolution and present in several distinct forms in the charts, rock was still a strong force, and country music was briefly expanding to new markets. Compare that to today when rock is dead and hip-hop and R&B have increasingly merged into a single electronica style.

That said, beneath the surface of that pop mainstream is an incredible diversity of music available to any listener who cares to seek it out, and we are living in a music golden age even if we might be living in a pop culture depression.

I don't even know what pop music/culture is anymore. Justin Beiber I guess? We'll we've always had crappy commercial imitations with little artistic value. The 80's were full of it so I listed to "real" music from the 70's (not realizing the 70's were likely full of the same thing but only the quality stuck around).

This ignorance of current culture might because I'm older and don't have a TV. Or it might be that the internet has allowed me to isolate myself in my own little bubble of excellence. And there is some great music around now. The quantity of good stuff is mind boggling. You had like 10-15 choices when I was young. And the mechanisms for discovery. It truly is a dream time for people who love art and music.

> Looking back it always seems the past was so groundbreaking and exciting. In my late teens/early 20's I wished I could have lived through the 60's (this was in the late 80's- early 90's). Because that was such a truly great and groundbreaking time according to the books. Now I realize it was probably a general stifled societies with a bunch of copycat posers growing their hair out and saying silly things they thought were cool and taking LSD. I laugh my ass off whenever I see 90's idolizing millennials.

I could imagine that what you say (re: clueless copycats) holds true for the vast majority of those alive in a given decade. Yet I think some eras (they don't necessarily coincide with decades) were "10xer" when it comes to cultural enrichment. I'd subjectively describe the 60's/early 70's and the 90's/early 00's as "groundbreaking". The era we're in right now feels more like the 80's: somewhat numb and dystopic.

However, when I reflect on past decades I tend to use music as a proxy to evaluate them. This might be misleading since the primary medium through which people express themselves changes over time. The oh so great 90's, for instance, weren't groundbreaking when it comes to poetry. Similarly, today isn't groundbreaking when it comes to music. Music right now is probably more (incrementally) innovative than ever but we haven't witnessed a "big bang" like Techno or Hip Hop for quite some time. So I think you're right to point out the development of the Internet of the last 6-8 years. That's where it's at today. (Even though some good features of the late 90's web have died)

There's been a lot of cool technical innovation on the net in the last 8 years, but culturally it seems a lot worse. It's been taken over by memes, short attention span social media, next generation forms of spam, and click bait. I remember when people spent serious time on blog posts and sites. I see a lot less of that today.

>Most of everything is always dull and vapid and so are most people who at best are imitators. When you are there anyway. Looking back it always seems the past was so groundbreaking and exciting.

There are also long periods of valleys and short periods of peaks.

The "explanation" that all periods are the same, and it's just people bitching about periods after they were young doesn't hold water when one checks any timeline of important art moments and sees concentrated achievements and periods of tedium.

While I agree about peaks and valleys that wasn't an "explanation" (much less so that which you constructed from straw). More of a personal tale of observation and amusement.

But since you bring it up, ya, young people bitching. That's what they do. In fact, it's what people in general do. That never seems to go out of fashion.

>But since you bring it up, ya, young people bitching. That's what they do. In fact, it's what people in general do. That never seems to go out of fashion.

Seeing that that is a constant, it doesn't have much explanatory power over particular periods of increased or decreased bitching.

hahah, ok. You make a fair point. I do agree some times are different than others.

Today's culture is always disturbingly vapid unless you know where to look. I am in favor of much more and more blatant use of psychedelics though.

Where to look today?

Just ask around. You're never more than a person or two away from some acid.

I'd rather recommend you use TOR, buy online and benefit from ratings and other such quality signals. Online sellers have their reputation to lose, whereas some unknown person knows they will never see you again and have nothing to lose from selling you whatever they want. Also, but a testing kit.

Uh isnt it the opposite? If you are selling tainted stuff to a friend of a friend then you could have your friends turn on you.

While if you sell bad stuff over the internets all you have to do is buy positive ratings to counterweight the bad ones.

There are arguably more and easier to get drugs today. If drugs automatically made culture interesting we wouldn't be having this conversation.

60s and 90s psychedelic drug use was just one of many ingredients in a larger thing, and probably nowhere near the most important.

I meant where to find non-vapid culture, not where to find drugs :)

Talk to weird people. You don't have to take drugs, but if you find them interesting you probably should. Artists tend to congregate in cities during their maturation and early mating phases, and many artists are also weird.

>Today's culture is always disturbingly vapid unless you know where to look.

That's the thing: if you need to know "where to look" then it's not a culture (a phenomenon affecting a larger number of people, as even counter-culture in the 60s/70s did) it's some fringe phenomenon.

So even if the artists involved are good, their art doesn't serve the same purpose as they did back with a vibrant counter-culture.

It's not about the artist, nor about the quality of the work in isolation: it's also about its role.

Society is not a garden where everything grows and blooms on a predictable schedule, notwithstanding the efforts to make it that way in places like North Korea. Culture is messy and proceeds by fits and starts in my experience.

Sounds like a case of survivorship bias. For every Floyd and Hendrix, there are probably dozens of then contemporary pop artists who never made it out of the 60s.

The issue is that there were Floyd and Hendrix then, but not now. So the survivorship bias is not applicable in this case as nobody said there wasn't junk then.

(And actually what the parent talks about goes beyond Floyd and Hendrix, which are not counter-culturish or high culture themselves anyway(.

There exists equivalent artists today, but they are in new styles that may not suit the tastes of someone who grew up listening to 60's music and hasn't kept up with the evolution of music over the years.

Just like in the 60's, there's a lot of mainstream music now that will be considered foundational to cultural trends 50 years from now. However, they will be unappealing to people idolizing the music of 50 years past. They may not think much of modern hip hop or electronic music, or things like Radiohead or Kanye West, but those things will be regarded the same way we regard legends of decades past.

>Just like in the 60's, there's a lot of mainstream music now that will be considered foundational to cultural trends 50 years from now. However, they will be unappealing to people idolizing the music of 50 years past. They may not think much of modern hip hop or electronic music, or things like Radiohead or Kanye West, but those things will be regarded the same way we regard legends of decades past.

I don't think so, because the whole cultural role of music has changed. Not just sales, interest has plummeted, and young people have tons of over outlets besides music (tons of movies just for them, video games, the internet, social media, mobile apps, netflix soon vr and other stuff).

Music had more power when it was something everybody was tuned in at the same time (through radio, top-40 etc which was inescapable), was seen as subversive (now tech founders might be even more admired than the latest rock star), was expensive and had to be listened to in small doses and from start to end, was opaque and all kinds of myths surrounded it (without 24/7 media coverage and 200+ direct artist-to-fan outlets available), and more especially was one of a limited number of entertainment options.

It's true that the cultural role of music has changed a lot; that's important to bring up. However, I view it more as an evolution rather than a decline. The same way that paperback books "cheapened" the old experience of reading, or record players "cheapened" the live interactive experience of music. Things just became different, and it resulted in new cultural elements.

I think it's the same thing that happens with anything that you make more popular, easier to get, and cheaper. You'll get way more people who only engage with it superficially and maybe even detrimentally, but you'll also reach way more people that will appreciate it as much as ever, and help expand it into something greater.

There were many psychedelic rock bands active around 1967 which never made the charts, but which have been rediscovered and are highly regarded today: Kaleidoscope/Fairfield Parlour, July, Tintern Abbey, The Peep Show, Axe, The Factory, and numerous others from the UK and other countries.

So even though there was plenty of music from then which does deserve to be forgotten, there was also plenty of music from then which was nearly forgotten but deserves to be remembered.

Very brief, indeed. It left me wanting more.

In particular, I would have mentioned the explosion of independent printing shops in the 60's. There’s a great list of counter-culture and political print shops here: http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html

I would also love to see more on the role of experimental, underground comics in the psychedelic movement. But then comics are not quite as beloved by design historians and critics the way posters are.

If you're interested in the counter-culture of the 1960s the book BAMN (By Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, 1965-70 is interesting.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/BAMN-Any-Means-Necessary-Manifestos...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987215.BAMN

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/BAMN_By_Any_Means_Nec...

> Nazi scientists were among the first to explore LSD’s psychopharmaceutical potential

I'm gonna need a source for this. My understanding is that Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann discovered the psychedelic effect of LSD in April 1943 [1], and I think it very unlikely that the Nazis could have incorporated it into their purported mind-control experiments before the end of the war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#.22Bicycle_Day....

According to Operation Paperclip [1] part of the motivation for the US investigating weaponized LSD was the fear the Nazis were investigating it. But I'm not sure Nazi use was documented to the extent it was in the US, with the CIA's MK-ULTRA program experimenting on unknowing citizens by dosing them with LSD [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Prog... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs

If I understand correctly, saying that Nazi scientists were experimenting with LSD is technically true, but very misleading. The "scientists" (read: professional torturers) were /former/ Nazis working for the CIA /after/ the end of the war. This source [1] states that a paper-clipped Nazi scientist brought LSD to the attention of the CIA in 1948 (though its credibility is suspect because it suggests that a CIA operative died die to LSD poisoning, a highly improbable occurrence).

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-w...

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