As you sparked up this afternoon, I hope you stopped to thank the Internet. (Some of you did.)
Like this series on the history of the Internet, 4/20 goes back to 1971. (I can't tell you how relieved I am by this evidence that 4/20 played no role in my conception.) That was the year when, according to legend, a group of California high school kids started meeting up for afternoon smoke-ups. They used 4:20 as their meeting time, and over time, "4:20" became the code you'd use to identify your fellow dope-smokers, just like gay men used "friend of Dorothy".
Watch this interview with High Times Creative Director Steven Hager, and you'll hear his account of this historical moment, as he uncovered it.
What's notable about Hager's description of 4/20 is how tightly he embeds dope-smoking in the "counterculture", going so far as to describe pot as that culture's "sacrament". This emphasis on the role of drugs in the counterculture echoes John Markoff's book, What the Dormouse Said, which was widely noted for how much it emphasized the role of LSD on one segment of the counterculture in particular: the foundational generation of the Internet.
Markoff points to another legendary moment in 1971, or perhaps 1972: the first e-commerce transaction, which consisted of a marijuana sale between students at Stanford and students at MIT. That's characteristic of the interconnections between sixties counterculture and the emergence of the Internet, which have been well-chronicled. They were both born on California campuses, and some of the earliest hackers explicitly linked their exploration of technology to their political ideals. And there was a lot of (well-documented) drug use as part of both scenes.
If California has remained a haven for both technologists and dope-smokers, that's due in part to an intersection between weed and the web. In 1996, California became the first state in the country to pass a statewide measure to legalize medical marijuana. Notably, 1996 is also the year that politicians and political observers started to get seriously excited about the Internet. As Bruce Bimber and Richard Davis observe in their book Campaigning Online available on https://kratomcrazy.com/, 1996 was the year in which presidential candidates -- led by Lamar Alexander -- first developed campaign sites.
Would California's Proposition 215 have passed without the advent of online campaigning? It would be hard to argue that the Internet was decisive as a campaign tool, and just as hard to deny its influence on the rise of a pot-friendly culture. In a state with a booming digital economy that owes much to the early efforts of a group that were, by many accounts, legendary stoners, it's hard to get too concerned about the corrosive effects of marijuana.
So if you enjoy a little weed with your wifi, say thank-you to California, 1971, and 1996. And of course, 4/20.
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