LSD, weed and speed ran through MIT, Stanford and the Homebrew Computer Club before the internet did. Two hackers explain what the drugs actually did to the code.
This article originally appeared in High Times’ Spring/Summer 2026 print edition. Get yours here.
Once upon a time, being a nerd wasn’t deemed cool. It was the 1970s when university environments, hacker communities and psychedelic hippie circles began to intertwine. And it was at MIT, Stanford and California where the real life Revenge of the Nerds slowly began to brew. From today’s perspective, it seems quite obvious: those great creators were tripping on a little something when they had all those breakthroughs. And so, a psychedelic wave washed over the nascent hacker scene.
We’re talking about an era in which the use of psychedelic drugs skyrocketed, sparking a profound exploration of alternate universes. “When you’re under the influence of drugs, you see alternative realities. Then, when you’re sober, you see that there are many realities, or rather, many angles of interpretation. That opened up the idea of alternative realities and the idea of this intellectual space of hacking and networks,” says Daniel “El Chacal” Sentinelli, one of the first hackers in Latin America. “Discussion spaces were formed; it wasn’t just about technological implementation. Everything was being forged in that proto-internet of the early university days,” he continues.
That’s how personal computing was shaped in the same breeding ground where Owsley Stanley’s LSD, the counterculture, hippie communes, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog were simmering. “At MIT, Stanford and the Homebrew Computer Club, engineers, dropouts, enlightened nerds and psychedelic travelers coexisted. The early hacker ethos is inseparable from that mix,” reinforces hacktivist Santiago Siri, author of the books Hacktivism: The Web and Its Reach to Revolutionize Power and Technosapiens: Crypto, AI, and Ladders: Capsules to Understand the New World.
For decades, tech culture lived under the premise of “staying awake for 48 hours to ship something”: caffeine, amphetamines, Modafinil and all kinds of cognitive enhancers, more or less legitimized depending on the day and age. “Today, there are more sober abstinents, but for decades, tech culture lived with that old idea,” Siri confesses.
In his personal experience, when he lived in San Francisco, one of the world’s foremost tech hubs, he tried nootropics like Modafinil based on recommendations he had read on Reddit. The truth he found? If you didn’t focus your attention on what you should be doing, it became a double-edged sword. “Instead of 8 hours programming, I could spend 8 hours glued to Twitter, hyper-focused on the wrong stimulus. Plus, sleep was dangerously disrupted, and the cumulative effect wasn’t worth it. Today I feel it’s useless. The best thing is still the age-old thing: sleep,” says Siri.
Thus, the proto-hacking trips kissed all stimuli right on the lips, and from that fusion emerged Mandelbrot fractals, colors, hippie hackers and hacker hippies. But in the 1980s, the world changed: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War and a darker world arrived. Cyberpunk emerged as a social response.
“Spiritually, hacking was more like The Matrix, even though it’s a ’90s movie. But that was ’80s hacking: rotary phones, colors, cyberpunk aesthetics. That’s what ’80s hacking was like. They went from weed and LSD to amphetamines and cocaine. Those marathon sessions, hanging up for hours and hours all night, had an affinity with those drugs,” says Sentinelli.
And among so many substances, cannabis has always been the most typical, associated with stimulating creativity. “It always worked as a kind of lubricant to see patterns where there previously was only noise. Some hackers used it as a creative tool. Others say it slows them down,” says Siri, who admits to partaking in vaporized forms, oils and medicinal extracts. “For me, it gives perspective: it allows me to see patterns or creative angles that I might not see sober.”
So, does cannabis promote creativity? “I think it does,” El Chacal replies immediately. “It’s a lighter version of what you find more strongly in shrooms and LSD, while still allowing you to have a different perception of reality. Now, how does it impact each person? Well, that’s something very personal, very special. Still, there are some hackers who, at most, have coffee.”
“It always worked as a kind of lubricant to see patterns where there previously was only noise.”
Santiago Siri, hacktivist and author
And in the hacker world, there’s an established idea that the computer is an extension of the mind, that software is a language for manipulating realities, and that code is a creative act, not just a technical one. “All of that comes from the intersection of cybernetics and psychedelia,” Siri confirms. Engelbart, Brand, the pioneers of graphical interfaces: they were all in either direct or cultural dialogue with lysergic imagery.
By the way, Siri takes the opportunity to share a personal anecdote: “One of the best Bitcoin hackers I met in the US, let’s call him DeSantis, one of his many pseudonyms, he told me that before penetrating a system he consumed extremely high doses of mushrooms. He said they generated intense synesthesia, and that when faced with the screen he understood the labyrinth in colors, as if the attack routes were illuminated in his mind.”
During the 1990s, there was a resurgence of LSD use, in line with the massification of the internet and, in particular, with the subsequent emergence of social media. “Indeed, there is an alternative reality constructed through social media. That whole world that Facebook, Instagram and Photoshop show is a concept that evolved from cyberspace, from that alternative reality that ranged from the octagonal to the physical world,” El Chacal confirms.
Currently, the hacking world has a more or less commonplace, more or less functional menu: caffeine (bordering on abuse), various nootropics (Modafinil, L-theanine, microdoses), cannabis, and microdosing psychedelics for brainstorming. “All mixed with biohacking, supplements, cold showers, and an obsession with performance,” lists Siri. “In our day, the hacker community was very small, limited to certain very special nerdy circles. Today there are so many people and so many hackers around, that I don’t really know if it’s a countercultural segment like before, but rather that substance use will be more or less within the standard of the general population,” Sentinelli adds.
In that sense, most agree that the internet is the great hacker project influenced by drugs. And with that same sensibility stand ARPANET, graphical interfaces, the Whole Earth Catalog of the 1970s, and free software. “The utopia of a network that connects minds, distributes power, and erodes hierarchies comes from both psychedelic thought and computer engineering,” Siri points out.
Born as a defense experiment, which was later abandoned and revived by the hacker community, the internet was sustained and revitalized by different branches within that same community. “I think that the whole cryptographic aspect, which is basically creating hidden subworlds within alternative realities within the alternative reality of the internet, is influenced by drugs. So too are metaverses, Second Life, first-person shooters, artificial intelligence, and alternate realities, augmented reality, and artificial reality. All of these largely originate from this drug-fueled vision. Exposure to drugs and this perception of alternate realities led people to become very interested in psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and the idea of how the human mind works,” Sentinelli explains.
Currently, immersive projects, psychedelic video games, procedurally generated worlds, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are revealed as technological attempts to replicate what was previously sought chemically: altering perception, expanding experience and reorganizing mental maps. “There’s something quite mind-blowing about computer-generated alternate universes, alternate realities, and augmented realities. So yes, the perception of alternative realities is intrinsically linked to psychedelic drugs,” Sentinelli points out.
And if, after all, the world is but a simulation, what could be more hacker-like than experimenting with one’s own avatar to understand how it’s connected to it? Riding that wave, Siri indulged in an acid experience at DevConnect, an international hacker conference. “For me, hacker conferences have always been a fusion of two planes: machine code and human code. And, throughout various DevCons around the world, I’ve experimented with substances that allowed me to read between the lines, as if at times the essentialist architecture of the system we live in were revealed,” he confesses.
And amidst this technology, which literally operates at the speed of light, and its galactic nature, there is the unfading presence of language, which we are only just beginning to decode. “It sounds mystical, yes, and there’s always the risk of seeming delusional… but for many hackers, that boundary between psychedelia and computing was never as far apart as people think,” Siri concludes. And, perhaps, the greatest hack of all was rewriting the matrix of reality from the code of the mind.
