History takes a wicked twist when you jump into "Sunshine '69"! At least that's what the homepage of this "acid-laced multimedia novel"--featuring murder, moon landings, conspiracy, sex, drugs, and a lot of classic rock--promises us. "Sunshine '69" is a collaborative effort; major contributors are Bobby Rabyd, Richard Schuler, Colin Gagon, and Will Oldham. Visitors to the site have multiple options to enter the (mostly text-oriented) hypermedia narrative. They may pick a date in a monthly calendar--October, 1969--or, by visiting previous months, get a bird's eye view of the summer of 69; they may click on a map and transport themselves to various locations in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and Park, The Mission and Haight or South Berkeley; or they may rummage through a suitcase and approach the central characters through their clothes and the content of their pockets. Also featured at the site is an array of 8 soundtracks, which allows visitors to cruise the site in RealAudio comfort. 
"Sunshine '69" takes you on an enjoyable 'trip'--the options of navigation are well thought-out, and, largely due to the "acid-laced" rhetoric, the hypertext successfully manages to recreate a part of '60s culture. History indeed takes a twist, since "Sunshine '69" points to the influences the '60s had on a certain part of cyberculture, particulary cyberpunk.
William Gibson may be credited with the "invention" of cyberspace, but as any other writer he had his literary ancestors. Among the literary influences frequently mentioned in this context are William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. Burroughs' Naked Lunch --whose "Zone" may be said to be a forerunner of cyberspace--may not have been written in the '60s, but it gained cult status during that period; and Pynchon's novels, even if they aren't set in the '60s or have been published later, are deeply embedded in the ideas and rhetoric of that time. As Gibson himself pointed out in an interview, "[Neuromancer 's] Case could be one of Burrough's wild boys... in a way. I'm deeply influenced by Burroughs... he found 'fifties science fiction and used it like a rusty can opener on society's jugular." Gibson's cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a notional space. The '60s may not have been technology-friendly, but psychodelia and cyberdelia share an interest in mind- and consciousness-altering devices in the broadest sense. What drugs were to psychedelia, computer systems are to cyberdelia--the promise of a mind-expanding experience, of an alternate space for body and mind, an extended nervous system. The hunger for digital data, more and faster, can reportedly become an addiction. Hippie culture emphasized the spiritual, which could be defined as the intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied--a definition that also accurately describes the virtual and digital. It's no surprise then that Timothy Leary became a familiar figure in cyberculture. In 1990, Timothy Leary declared in "Pataphysics Magazine":
Today the role of the philosopher is to personalize, popularize, and humanize computer ideas so that people can feel comfortable with them.... The fact is that a few of us saw what was happening and we wrestled the power of LSD away from the CIA and the power of computers away from IBM, just as we rescued psychology away from the doctors and analysts. In every generation, I've been part of a group of people who, like Prometheus, have wrestled with the power in order to hand it back to the individual.
You may not subscribe to this idea, but it is still amazing how seamlessly the romantic hopes of empowering the individual are transferred from one object/substance (LSD) to another (the computer). The reincarnation of '60s "sunshine" on the Web makes you wonder if technologies develop faster than the rhetoric applied to them--a wicked twist of history?
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