Technology that reconnects us with what makes us human.Technology that reconnects us with what makes us human.

Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville build a flicker device: the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed.

Marshall McLuhan argues that every medium is an extension of ourselves, and that it reshapes us as we use it.

Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and Ramón Sender stage three nights of light, sound and performance in San Francisco.

A mathematician moves to UC Santa Cruz after his first LSD and treats mathematics as a skeleton key to the structures of consciousness.

John C. Lilly describes the mind as a computer that can be reprogrammed from within.

“Access to tools.” Stewart Brand gives the counterculture a way to see technology as personal.

Doug Engelbart shows the mouse, hypertext and video conferencing in one sitting, with Stewart Brand helping behind the scenes.

Ivan Sutherland builds the first head-mounted display: the ancestor of every headset since.

Buckminster Fuller writes an operating manual for the planet, and asks us to think like its crew.

John C. Lilly writes an autobiography of inner space, mapping the mind from the inside.

“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.” Stewart Brand finds the counterculture in the computer labs, for Rolling Stone.

Myron Krueger's responsive environments let people step into a world that answers their bodies, without a headset.

Philip K. Dick's 1968 question about what makes us human reaches the screen.

Roy Ascott links artists in cities across the world by computer to write one story together: distributed authorship, and the viewer becomes a participant.

William Gibson gives cyberspace its image: “a consensual hallucination.”

R.U. Sirius starts a journal of psychedelics, science and the space age. It becomes Reality Hackers, then Mondo 2000.

Jaron Lanier's company sells the first VR goggles and gloves, and makes “virtual reality” a household phrase.

Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant found one of the first online communities.

The cyberdelic manifesto in print: technology, mind expansion and creative expression, in one glossy, mutant magazine.

John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore organise to defend freedom in the new space.

In Stuttgart, Terence McKenna puts the cyberdelic future in front of a German audience, with virtual reality in the hands of artists.

Terence McKenna joins mushrooms, shamanism and virtual reality into one argument about the future.

Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake on chaos, creativity and the sacred.

Neal Stephenson names the metaverse, and treats language itself as a virus of the mind.

Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland build a shared virtual world where you can take on the body of a spirit animal.

“The PC is the LSD of the 1990s.” Timothy Leary popularises the idea behind the word cyberdelic.

Douglas Rushkoff reports from the rave, the hacker scene and the first days of the net.

In Char Davies' virtual world you move by breath and balance. Many visitors call it meditative.

John Perry Barlow claims the net as a realm free of governments and corporations.

Erik Davis traces the myth, magic and mysticism running through information technology.

The dot-com bubble bursts and the techno-utopian dream fades. Wikipedia records the movement as collapsed. It goes underground instead.

Roy Ascott keeps the question alive in the academy: how networks and new media change consciousness.

John Markoff shows how the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer.

Fred Turner follows Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network into the rise of digital utopianism.

Ernest Cline brings the virtual world back into the popular imagination.

A Kickstarter restarts consumer VR, and with it the old question of what these machines could do to a mind.

Mikey Siegel starts a meetup in San Francisco for technology that serves awareness and wellbeing. It grows into a movement with groups around the world.

David Pescovitz tells the story at the Lift conference in Geneva: “Just Say Know.”

Consumer headsets ship, and the first meditative and contemplative experiences reach people's living rooms.

Neuroscientists use VR and deep dream imagery to study altered perception without a drug.

We start finding the others: the community the Nexus grew from.

Standalone headsets put immersive worlds within reach of far more people, without a computer.

Robin Arnott releases SoundSelf: A Technodelic, and makes the word technodelic known: experiences designed with psychedelic intent, run by the body's own feedback.

A group VR experience scores like a medium dose of psychedelics on four scales of connectedness.

Context engineering meets psychedelics: designing for altered traits, not only altered states.

Cyberdelics becomes a design practice of its own.

This story isn’t finished, and no one is writing it alone. It takes shape through everyone who explores, questions, creates and takes part.