So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

We need to mature into a post-growth adulthood, in which we can find comfort and grace in a long slow recession—otherwise we will be the only species to move from adolescence to senescence with no maturity in between.

Trust Dale Pendell to forge a metaphor that’s both obvious and unexpected… revelatory common sense. Could the maturity of the species, the only alternative to live-fast-die-young, be anything different from the maturity of the individual? A long slow recession…

At first it was a part of a talk given early this year at Metageum in London. Then I thought I’d develop it into an essay. Then it seemed long enough to print as a nice pamphlet. It’s ended up being a slim book.

It’s my effort to analyze and contribute to the recent debates about the “Noble Savage”. Are pre-civilized cultures more peaceful than we are? Do they live in greater harmony with the environment? Of late, people such as Steven Pinker, Lawrence Keeley and Steven LeBlanc, who aren’t overt bigots—indeed, who generally seem to be fine, well-meaning liberal folks—have been answering these questions with a resounding “no”. In War & the Noble Savage I’ve surveyed this recent literature, and tried to dig beneath the polarized surface of the debate using some less popularized anthropological and historical scholarship.

It went to the printers just today, and should be ready to send out by the end of next week. I’m taking pre-orders now if anyone wants to dive in. (Please note that I’ve also revamped my PayPal integration, and I’ve included options to buy different Dreamflesh publications together and save money on postage.)

October Gallery talk

Coinciding with the release of the book, I’m pleased to have been invited to speak in the October Gallery‘s ‘Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness’ lecture series on Tuesday 27th October. For more details and booking information see the October Gallery website. I’ll be presenting the book’s main ideas there, and leaving plenty of time for discussion—please bring your questions and ideas along! Copies of the book will of course be on sale, at a specially reduced price.

Review copies

If anyone’s interested in reviewing this, please get in touch.

Related material

At the bottom of the book’s page you’ll find a compilation of related material—my book reviews and blog posts covering similar area, plus a collection of links to the websites, articles, and videos I drew on in my research.

Feedback

If anyone who reads the book wants to respond to anything in it or ask questions, please use the comments here…

Anyway, if you’ve not decided to be completely numb to the perils of climate change, this post by Alex Steffen is worth a read. Coming from such an avowedly positive-thinking source, this sort of news makes it crystal clear exactly how dangerously in denial politicians and the culture at large is.

Two important points. Firstly, there’s no easy way out:

There’s enormous pressure here in the U.S. on environmental groups, scientists and public officials; pressure to play ball, to support targets that are politically safe, to be moderate. But this is not a situation where such gamesmanship will help our cause. Incremental and limited gains in this situation are in fact disastrous losses.

Secondly—and this is mostly why I’ve posted this here—a call to all “cultural workers”. I’m sure I’m mostly preaching to the converted here, but it’s clear that there’s a vast responsibility on the shoulders of anyone communicating with larger, currently less engaged demographics.

We need to talk with people where they’re at on the issue, not where we wish they were. Somehow we need, in the next couple years, to guide millions of Americans through the progress of emotions—awareness, horror, despair, resignation, engagement, chosen optimism—that most of the people reading this site have gone through… and we have to do it in the next few years.

Such counselling or therapy is a mercurial prospect even on an individual level. We’ve got to do it en masse, quickly. And I’d expand on Alex’s optimism by adding that such wide-scale cultural action will be necessary even if we don’t turn this ecology-destroying economic juggernaut of ours around in time. Most things short of the miraculous aren’t going to be pretty, and we need to mitigate the ugliness with bold thinking, courage, and compassion.

An Interview with Jason Louv

by Gyrus

Gyrus: What was your awareness as a teenager of youth cultures, their cycles and histories?

Jason: I was extremely self-aware on this topic to the point that my determination to not identify with any social group probably prevented me from truly fitting in with any. I was a goth at the ages of 13-15 like most people who end up in my, er, “line of inquiry,” but at the time I was the only goth in my school and it felt like assembling an arcane tradition out of cast-down fragments from previous generations—Joy Division albums; black trench-coats, hair dye and nail polish; William Burroughs books; the tail end of Mondo 2000; drinking weird green booze in the back of math class—the usual suspects. It was tacky, but a proud and individual kind of tacky, and fully surpassed by the horror of the onslaught of Marilyn Manson, who made goth into a major trend. By 15 I was a bitter old man of the goth world at my school, waving my fist at the new kids popping up everywhere who had (gasp) never heard of Arthur Rimbaud but did really like when Marilyn Manson carved evil Satan stuff in his chest. So of course I had to hide in the anonymity of white t-shirts and jeans rather than be associated with these upstarts who had ruined my fun. Which may have been for the best since it’s really hot in Southern California all the time and the trench-coats were a bit much. By the time I was ready to graduate, Columbine happened and the whole thing was put into a very very unfortunate context. By that point I was all into chaos magic and determined to become completely invisible from the social order while doing my utmost to erase my own tenuously-constructed and barely-born identity. Which didn’t stop me from being frisked by the authorities, but still…

Gyrus: We talked about Columbine a bit when we met last year, specifically in relation to cycles of youth culture. Pete Carroll wrote about sunspot cycles a bit, and I published a piece by Iain Spence in Towards 2012 where he maps 22-year solar cycles onto youth movements. The idea is of an evolution in the Transactional Analysis grid, from friendly weakness (Hippy), to hostile weakness (Punk), to friendly strength (Rave), to a (then, in ’97) projected hostile strength current (he terms it “Storm”). [Readers might want to check out Iain's site, where he's updated and evolved his theories.] There was no coherent “movement” of this nature, but certainly a lot of aspects in youth culture—albeit scattered and refracted through commercialism and millennial confusion. Columbine certainly expressed it, horrifically. You were the same age as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—how did the incident affect you at the time, and how did it feed into your cultural and magical awareness at the turn of the millennium?

Jason: I was pretty aware of that hypothesis at the time and was trying to play my life into it. I had it pegged for 1999 which was what Grant Morrison was talking about at the time. Peter Carroll called it for 2001, but I think 1999/2000 was when it seemed to be the most noticeable.

I think almost all that energy got sucked into the Internet because the kids at the time who would have been most affected by it were in many cases working out their identity crises in online forums instead of in a more physical realm, so there was no unified “look” or music or anything like that. I think the anti-WTO movement focusing around the Battle in Seattle was the most visible manifestation though. Columbine happened around the same time and that was another one. Actually, somebody on Barbelith at one point had the theory that the 1999 energy went into radical fundamentalism, which was certainly interesting if maybe disturbingly accurate. I hope that Generation Hex is a document of that “surge” hitting and some of the people who were affected by it, at least in the realm of magick. It took us all a few years to really process it.

Around the time that Columbine occurred it seemed like there was another big school shooting every week in the US. Columbine was just the biggest and most dramatic. I don’t really know where to lay the blame for all that other than to say that in the moment it seemed obvious to me that the whole institution of American public schooling was outdated and pretty good at producing uneducated, sociopathic (sometimes psychopathic) consumers and not much else, and it couldn’t handle a generation of kids raised in an ultramodern media sphere, and that this was the result—though I’m not sure if Columbine was representative of much more than a couple of absolute idiots being absolute idiots. It was, however, one (comparatively early) incident in a LONG string of “terror” events that have been used by both ends of the political spectrum to completely lock down the country, so in that it really did represent a swinging point away from the tail-end of Clinton-era optimism and towards Bush’s Death Race 2000. It only took the dot-com crash and the election steal to transition from “friendly strength” to “hostile strength” but I didn’t see that acted out too much in youth culture per se. Maybe we have to entertain the idea that “youth culture” may be an artifact of the late Twentieth Century, an outdated marketing strategy from a less fragmented time.

On a personal level, when Columbine happened I was automatically seen as “the enemy” by my school’s administration because I wore black a lot and was moody. At one point I got dragged into the office and forced to change my clothing because I was wearing a Taxi Driver t-shirt; some of my friends who wore trench-coats every day (peaceful nerd types) got pelted with rocks by other students (in speeding SUVs) on multiple occasions and were all strip-searched by the administration at one point, and were just constantly harassed by students and administration alike. We had one teacher who started wearing a black leather jacket every day out of solidarity which was very nice but in general every sensitive goth type in the school was now expected to kill everybody. The entire thing had the effect of polarizing me completely even from the “rebel” stance of the nonconformist student and leading me to feel truly unwanted and completely disassociated from my life. At this point I was heavily into chaos magic and trying to get an “outside” perspective on everything anyway. It helped fuel that stage of initiatory crisis in a way, through complete disassociation.

Gyrus: Obviously detachment and an “outsider” perspective is an essential part of the initiatory process, but it seems clear that many people in our society have problems with getting attached to this—both because of how unattractive the idea of “rejoining” society currently is, and how rebel stances have been codified and rigidified by consumer culture. But part of contemporary magic that is evident in Generation Hex (and on discussions on Key23.net) is the desire to connect with communities, to earth the abstractions and postures of post-modern occultism back into social awareness and activism. How has that tendency touched you, and what are your observations of it unfolding around you?

Jason: Yes, I think ultimately it’s impossible to be an outsider, and I think there really is a tendency right now to want to reconnect magic with communities, which I think is a manifestation of what Frater Achad first identified as the Aeon of Ma’at in the 1940s.

In the US that’s very prevalent with Burning Man. I’ve never been to Burning Man so I can’t say too much about it, but I’m less interested in a once-a-year dress-up and more interested in actually putting these things to use in the unglamorous daily grind of mundane life, and using them to slowly but surely improve our lives and the lives of the people we’re close to. In New York there’s a lot of that centered around Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, which is great. I think that’s a great model for a community center, and something that all cities would benefit from immensely.

The internet’s also been great for bringing people together but to be honest I’m sick of the internet, and the problem, especially with discussions about magic, is that it can be hard to separate out the people who have actually practiced magic in any kind of deep or meaningful way, and those who just like to talk about ideas. Both are great but for those who are just getting started and are looking for actually useful and meaningful information it can be a real mess. But I suppose that’s how it’s always been with magic, anybody looking to get some proper information has always had to sift through small landfills’ worth of charlatanry. Internet discussion forums and even books like Generation Hex are just puffery really when compared to the experience of sitting down or going out in the world and actually doing magic, so the most I can hope for in the current occult “climate,” even my own little corner of it, is that hopefully people will take away enough of a sense that there are other people out there doing this stuff and that helps it become OK for them to actually take that first step and do some experiments without having to feel like they’re completely alone or crazy.

Gyrus: The standard view of tribal societies sees the shamanic vocation as the province of the very few; yet there are examples, like the San in southern Africa, where practitioners are numerous, up to half the population, and healing ceremonies are highly communal. How do you see modern occultism relating to communities in the near future? And how do you see the role of the contemporary magician in relation to the tribal shaman? Healing in service of the community is perhaps the prime function of the shaman, but both healing and community seem to minor elements in the western occult traditions.

Jason: That’s very interesting about the San, I hadn’t heard that before. Certainly I have huge amounts of fun and have often felt at my most human when doing magic with large groups of people who are all experienced magicians in their own right, so I hope those types of experiences can be more accessible for people. Of course finding out where the party is, or organizing your own, is definitely its own initiation.

As far as the community view, I certainly wanted to prompt that with the book. Healing is something that’s a bit more overlooked though. There can be a lot of emphasis on healing in the occult but it’s often of the practitioner him or herself; i.e. healing the division from spirit or healing the damage one is assumed to have incurred from a “materialist” socialization. On the other hand, once you look beyond the occult ghetto, homeopathic medicine and forms of healing based on magical thinking are now big business in the West, which is another facet of what I was expressing in the introduction to Generation Hex, that magical thinking is now everywhere.

Stephen Grasso is somebody who talks a lot about the role of the magician as being the person in the community who sorts out people’s problems that can’t be sorted in other ways. That’s close to the experience of shamanism I had in Nepal—shamanism is a form of healing that people seek out when they don’t have access to Western medicine. Of course in the West forms of healing based on magical thinking are the ones you go to when Western medicine isn’t enough.

Robert Anton Wilson said that out of any hundred people, one will be the shaman or trickster figure. That’s the widest angle to view the phenomenon from, a lot wider than looking at who’s read the right books or who’s got the right tattoos or whatever, or who calls themselves a magician. In a lot of ways standing up and calling yourself a magician or shaman seems to automatically disqualify you from being such, so I guess I’ve invalidated myself and everybody else in Generation Hex in a way!

Gyrus: What’s the plan with the idea of “Ultraculture” and the associated website?

Jason: Well it was originally going to be a kind of cross between an occult order and a social networking system along the lines of Indymedia or even MySpace, but after weighing it for over a year I think that the potential pitfalls of directly networking people together and taking on that responsibility outweigh the potential benefits.

As I’ve just left Disinformation, I’m going to be putting a lot of time into retooling the Ultraculture site into something useful. At this point I want it to be kind of an open artistic collective which people are welcome to participate in, and I hope to use it as a kind of goad for activating people and prompting further magical renaissance.

There are some Ultraculture-related projects that are going to be upcoming in the next few months which should give people a taste of what’s going to happen.

Gyrus: What other things are you working on, and how are your recent (or not so recent) experiences of magic informing them and the Ultraculture ideas?

Jason: Right now most of my focus is going into Tantra, incorporating what I’m learning there with my previous learning. When I was developing Generation Hex I was fully into Crowley and that kind of mad, racing sense of urgency that goes along with his writing. My focus has been all Western Esoteric Tradition so it’s good to have some change. I tend to kind of hover on the balance of doing lots of ritual magic and just going out and seeing life as a magical process. Right now I’m back in the laboratory refining my ideas and my approach to magic, trying to break up some of my assumptions and get further into the core.

I have had some fairly bizarre experiences in connection with the Ultraculture eidolon, though, which suggest that it’s already operating as a slipstream within the morphogenetic field. I suspect the complete crassness of the idea is a kind of smokescreen for something much more involved and intelligent. Developing rituals to contact it might be of use to anybody with interest in the concept, but I suspect it may be much bigger than I or anybody else previously suspected…

I’ve just got back from a visit to Ilkley, a town in West Yorkshire, just northwest from where I live in Leeds. This bit of writing has been welling up for a while, and I’ve got down to it now because of what’s just happened.

I’ve been exploring the area around Ilkley, mostly the neighbouring Rombald’s Moor, for a while now—generally roaming around but especially getting into the prehistoric rock art carved onto over 250 stones across the moor. During the 19th century, when a lot of rock was quarried on the moor to build houses, there were thankfully some people around who respected the value of these ancient carvings, and saved some important examples from total destruction. The most famous example of this is the Panorama Stone. When building was due to take place in the region of the Panorama Woods, on the north edge of the moor, Dr Fletcher Little, a physician at the nearby Ben Rhydding Hydropathic Establishment, took action and bought the stones from the landowner for £10. They were relocated in 1892 and placed nearby in an enclosure opposite St. Margaret’s Church on Queen’s Road, where they can still be found. I’d already explored many of the rocks across the moors, but had never visited this enclosure, so today I went to take a look.

Approaching it from across the road, I could see some coloured objects on the stones, which I guessed might be flowers or similar offerings (Imbolc was last week). Getting nearer, I saw the objects were actually smashed Lucozade NRG bottles. What a shitty mess. A board within the enclosure informs the visitor that these rocks were ‘decorated’ in the Bronze Age, about 3,500 years ago. And they were decorated once more today, in a style characteristic of the late 20th century school of environmental embellishment. After sitting down and dejectedly pondering the situation for a bit, I climbed over the spiked railings and cleared the shards of glass up.

While I was clearing the glass up, an old guy with a dog walked past, looking at me. I explained what I was doing and he agreed that such littering was out of order. He then went off into an incomprehensible ‘kids these days’ rant, saying they ‘get hooked on these drugs’ and all that, and carried on to bash communism (not sure of the connection myself). I’ve got no interest in slagging ‘kids’ in general off—especially kids raised in a society that systematically crushes their souls and offers no joy, only frustration. Also, I doubt that many reading this are lazy enough to not bother taking their litter to a bin, so any admonitions made here are falling on converted ears. Are they?

This may seem like a petty issue to harp on about. But often we’re so concerned with ‘wider issues’ (particularly in publications like this) that we’re neglectful about all the ‘petty’ things that actually make up everyday life, i.e. real life. I know no perfectly integrated people free from all forms of hypocrisy, and it’s always good to really look at how your wider ‘ideals’ actually relate to what you do in everyday life.

Speaking of the people who got the Thatcher government into power and kept it there so long, anarchist occultist Ramsey Dukes wrote in the preface to Thundersqueak:

[...] those who most support [the Tory government's] "individualist" policies are those who would most like to cower behind the protective nuclear umbrella, and who are most eager to delegate personal responsibility to the strong arm of the law. These are the people who bolt their doors and call the police when they hear hooligans raging without—they would not consider going out to chat to the hooligans and suggest other forms of diversion. These are the people who do not stoop to pick up litter as they walk through public places—they leave it where it is and write angry letters to the press demanding stiffer penalties for those who first left it there.

Now I live in an urban area, the streets of which are regularly littered with decaying crap like chicken carcasses and student vomit. I don’t lose sleep if I’m not clearing this up all the time as I walk the streets. But when I walk across landscapes relatively untouched by the detritus of civilization, I’m a bit more prepared to do a bit of litter-picking. It’s just basic respect, which I quickly learned is the first step in forming any type of relationship with whatever you consider a sacred landscape. Take your waste home with you. When you have the time, and the space in your pockets (or carry a plastic bag with you…), try and dispose of some of the waste of those less mindful.

This is really the tip of some much deeper issues. I’ve recently got into a debate with a fellow amateur rock art researcher about the conservation of rock art sites. He’s incurred the wrath of some professionals because of his web site, which shows some carved rocks from the North Yorkshire moors, the carvings of which he has ‘chalked in’ to highlight the eroded grooves. Some American researchers are up in arms about this, apparently because of the detrimental effects the chalking might have on dating methods. He’s asked what exact harm is being done, and says that his accusers are unforthcoming with details, which suggests that they’re just being over-precious and haughty. I’m not familiar enough with archaeological dating techniques to really know what’s going on here. These carvings have so far eluded physical dating, because they’re on the top of element-swept moorland and all datable matter has been blasted away. I think some researchers are living in hope of more and more advanced techniques, and the idea is that we shouldn’t do anything to the carvings because we don’t know how this might affect as yet undiscovered methods of dating.

Anyway, the dating argument aside, I came to the conclusion that I don’t think his web site should show chalked-in carvings. Any individual may miss grooves, or chalk in grooves that are actually natural. It’s a pretty subjective affair, and I favour the idea of presenting the stones as they are, or doing tracings. For me, chalking the carvings turns the stone into an interactive art piece, a joint venture between archaic and modern humans. It’s not a good way of presenting ‘data’. But it may be of use in ritual activity based around such relics.

This last point touches some very uptight nerves in our culture and its attitude to its prehistoric heritage. The contemporary ritual use of ancient sites is a really contentious area, which isn’t limited to intellectual debate. This very issue resulted in a massive police operation and many atrocious examples of police brutality in 1985, when travellers heading to Stonehenge for summer solstice celebrations were stopped and forced into what became known as The Battle of the Beanfield (see Jim Carey’s article ‘A Criminal Culture?‘ in the last part of Towards 2012). Stonehenge has now become a fenced-off piece of history experienced from a distance by hordes of tourists, for whom the site is no longer alive.

The self-appointed ‘guardians’ of our heritage think, no doubt, that they’re acting in everyone’s best interests, preserving sites from vandals, or just from the general wear-and-tear of those eager to get close to the stones. And to an extent they are. There are people whose stupidity is a threat to sacred sites.

They could be just lazy and mindless like whoever it was who threw Lucozade bottles at the Panorama Stone. They could be active and mindless, like whoever it was who decided to inflict their ego on everyone else at Avebury, summer solstice 1997. A few of the stones that form part of the West Kennet Avenue processional pathway into the henge had been daubed with symbols in black paint. I looked at these ‘symbols’ myself, and they didn’t resemble anything I’ve come across in my research into magickal symbolism. So it was either a really dumb and uninformed act of vandalism, or some idiosyncratic chaos magickian, possessed by the type of reckless egotism that’s all too easy to fall prey to when Nothing Is True and Everything Is Permitted. Remember folks, Uncle Bill himself, referring to this maxim, said it first: "[...] not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behaviour." (Dead City Radio) Or perhaps the culprit was someone who’s let a healthy hatred for ‘New Agers’ get out of hand, and was trying to give the solstice celebrants a bad name? Or (for the more conspiracy-minded out there) maybe it was an English Heritage agent who wants Avebury to become another fenced-off ‘object’?! Whatever the case, as well as the damage caused to rare lichen on the stones, acts like this simply impose one ego’s trip on everyone else. Very few people, if any, can be sure that their ancestry reaches back to those who constructed a certain megalithic monument, so if these monuments are anyone’s ‘heritage’, they are everyone’s.

Will our culture’s ‘museum-consciousness’ never stop? Are we so pissed off at managing to alienate ourselves from our environment, our art and our sense of the sacred that we’re going to make damn sure that no evidence of less cut-off and boxed-in cultures escapes becoming an ‘exhibit’. Is the whole landscape of this country to be infected by our self-divided civilization, turning us all into ‘observers’ and ‘visitors’ whether we like it or not? This has already happened to a large extent. I can’t get my head around those signs that are put up in the countryside saying stuff like ‘Site of Natural Beauty Ahead’. People need to be told that? Like, shit, I might have missed that vast, gorgeous mountain if it weren’t for the sign.

Important rock art sites in America are now being fenced off, preventing even serious amateur researchers exploring them. I’m dubious about the possible collusions, even unconscious ones, between archaeologists and the tourist industry: are sites being fenced off due to scientific interest and conservation, or to rake in money—or both? Well, I accept that painted rock art sites, which are found all over the world but not in Britain, are inherently more fragile and precious than carved rock art sites. Paint is very ephemeral, and is also more amenable to dating techniques.

But I still find myself questioning the basic drives behind the ‘museumification’ of human-landscape interactions like rock art and megalithic monuments. How important is conservation? I want to conserve these sites, but how far should we go? Even if everyone going to sites is respectful, some ‘damage’ is done by human presence, as in the erosion of Silbury Hill in Avebury, caused by people going up it (including myself). Here I think we need to ask ourselves a big question: do we want to preserve these sites absolutely as long as possible, but experience them from a distance (unless you’re a scientist); or do we want to accept a slightly increased rate of erosion and decay and actually experience them? How does conservation and the acquirement of increasingly accurate scientific information weigh up against the right to experience ancient sites as they were intended (i.e. without a bloody great fence between you and them)? Do scientists see this right as applying to anyone but themselves? I don’t undervalue scientific research, but why is it so often assumed that this takes precedence over all other factors? Do we value data over experience? And has Christianity left us with a few too many illusions about the world? Are we still trying to fight off the fact that, in the end, nothing is certain and everything is finite?

I don’t believe in polarizing the argument into an ‘us against them’ situation, because I know full well that archaeologists today are acutely aware of these issues. I’m not so sure how much the potential value of ancient sites to us today is really recognized, though—value in terms of direct experience, that is. If this value isn’t recognized much, it could well be due to a lot of the rubbish believed by the popular end of the ‘earth mysteries’ community. It could also be due to a lot of the rubbish left lying around sacred sites, and the people who (sacred intentions or not) think that it’s a good idea to take to megaliths with spray cans. I say to these people, direct your street-art energies more intelligently: "Vandalize only what must be defaced." (Hakim Bey, ‘Poetic Terrorism‘) Physical violence in political protest seems to be a bad tactic in our society, not because it’s naughty and we should all behave, but because it’s counterproductive; it just leads to increases in police and state powers (and besides, they’ve got bigger guns). Similarly, careless treatment of sacred sites will only give the ‘heritage’ authorities another excuse to fence them off. And in the end, as I said before, basic physical respect for a site is the baseline from which to form a bond with it.

I’ve heard rumours of plans to fence off some of Rombald’s Moor. The Swastika Stone, a unique rock carving in this country, has long been spoilt by spiked iron railings around it put in place to stop it being spoilt by vandals. The idea of whole areas of this moor being restricted horrifies me. Wandering freely around it, exploring the stone circles, standing stones and carved rocks, has been a great source of inspiration for me and many others. Inspiration is too weak a word, really. It’s the type of inspiration you get from loved ones, intense music, sex and dancing. It’s life-affirmation. Unless we do our best every step of the way to create a cultural climate in which these places are treated with care by all of us, they may be taken away from us. We’ll fight to keep them whenever and wherever this happens, but in the meantime let’s prove ourselves worthy of them. Let’s try and bring the wasteless economy of nature into our culture, not spread the shit of the city over the land.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996
• ISBN: 0340672021

This book’s cover—culturally dated Mandelbrot art and ‘holographic’ lettering—should, with the exception of J.G. Ballard’s high-praise quote, be totally ignored. Though he keeps his prose snappy and accessible, Dery’s work here shines with a lot more intelligence than implied by the cover’s mid-nineties rave-flyer design.

First impressions aside, it must be said that this work has aged very well. Apart from some scattered internet references that betray the book’s age (5 years—a long time in technoculture, even longer on the web), Dery’s cultural survey focuses on writers, books, performance artists, films, thinkers and trends that are still hugely relevant. A large part of this, though, is due to the analysis he interweaves with his reports and descriptions. His perceptions are sharp and admirably balanced, teasing out what seem to me to be most of the interesting and vital arguments about evolution (genetic and memetic), consciousness and identity that our perpetual collisions and marriages with technology engender.

While the author makes no claim to offer a coherent political critique of cyberculture, it’s refreshing to read a popular work on technology where social conscience isn’t paid mere lip-service or just ignored. While the upbeat optimism of the Mondo 2000 crew is given room to jump up and down exuberantly, it’s fully countered by a recognition of its privileged, white, moneyed background. And the startling, undoubtedly pioneering technological body-art of Stelarc doesn’t astound Dery into forgetting his critical faculties. He’s fully prepared to give space for arguments that the Australian posthumanist’s fantasies of space-faring, context-free, lone robotic entities are pathological—"extreme, narcissistic fantasies of complete isolation."

Dery’s introduction, where he first brings in some of the issues he deals with, is relatively easy-going and simplistic. His subsequent gleeful plunge into the discussion of concrete subjects such as the roots of tech-culture in 60′s America, cybercultural music, and machine performance art, demonstrates how at home he is writing about material culture, and led me to believe he was less at ease navigating the tricky abstract spaces of cultural theory and wider philosophical issues. Not true. The book builds, weaving in more and more intellectually stimulating concepts and debates, up to the final discussion of the fate of our status as embodied beings in a culture finding more and more ways to disengage from the biological matrix. Touching on many of my favourite reference points in this arena—J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Videodrome, William Burroughs—Dery’s summary shines one perspective on another, again and again, illuminating some of the most fascinating intersections in modern culture.

At once exciting and cautionary, this pretty close to being the essential introduction to our current cultural interactions with technology.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 24th-26th June 2004
• Venue: The Forum, Bath

It emerged on the last day of this eclectic 3-day conference that its genesis lay in Christian Rätsch’s observation at Psychoactivity several years ago that the UK seemed to lack the kind of coherence in its psychedelic scene that resulted in conferences. A brave attempt to address this curious deficiency, and simultaneously to broaden the agenda, to embrace other perspectives, avoid any psychedelic ghetto – to learn from diversity – Exploring Consciousness could have resulted in much more conflict and confusion than was evident. What resulted was surprisingly fruitful and wonderfully stimulating: a heady, convivial mixture of days spent mainlining information in half-hour bursts, and evenings spent allowing this new data to percolate and recombine amidst socialising, beer, boating and dancing. Speakers may have disagreed violently about whether gods and spirits reside in our brains or in some hyperdimensional otherworld; but wherever they were, they were fully behind this event.

The first morning wasn’t too auspicious, finding William Bloom and Susan Blackmore arguing the toss over various dualistic cat-fights about mind, body, reality and causality. Talking later to fellow occultural dilettante Mark Pilkington about Nicholas Mann (a speaker on the third day who pitched into the same muddled scrap), he pegged this arena of philosophy as the domain of teenage acid-heads. There’s truth in that, and perhaps less time and paper would be wasted in academic philosophy if the more professors had once been teenage acid-heads—you know, been through the stage where it seems crucial to really know whether the chicken or the egg came first, and emerged into the maturity of seeing the conundrum as a playful cycle, or a mystery to be respectfully left alone. That’s not to say I think we should all ape some earthy mystic stereotype and dismiss all such debate as so much verbiage; we may apply Hakim Bey’s position on the apparently anchorless nature of language to these specific topics, and allow a sense of overflowing play into proceedings, letting these essentially groundless but fascinating old philosophical chestnuts loose in the world without the kind of gravity that traps us in their infuriating orbits. Each of these speakers had something to say, but fundamentalisms such as Blackmore’s strident Darwinism (rivalled in the conference only by Christian Rätsch’s claim that LSD is "the Holy Grail of western civilisation") often crush valuable ideas in the dualistic clashes they engender.

My own reaction was that these people haven’t read enough Alan Watts. When Susan Blackmore related a reductionist view of the mind to the Buddhist doctrine of no-self, she was incredily engaging as a speaker; but at the conceptual level she was, in a way, treading very old ground, revisiting (presumably unwittingly) Watts’ lecture ‘The Individual As Man/World‘ from 40 years ago – with far less elegant conclusions. Max Velmans fared a little better, with his "reflexive monism" critique of the "Cartesian theatre" model of consciousness, but there was the sense that perhaps his linguistic toolbox, from the professional disciplines of psychology and philosophy, wasn’t equipped to vividly express the subtleties of his approach—certainly not within his allotted half-hour.

On this first day I also caught Sheri Ritchlin, who fell foul of the half-hour limit in a different sense, and didn’t really get to talk much about her ideas regarding 2012. She was the first, but not the last person I heard mentioning the 2012 date—this confluence of McKenna-motivated trippers and broad-minded astrologers was bound to bring this "end-date" to the fore, especially given the very recent Venus Transit, and its partner in this rare temporal region, the Venus Transit in June 2012. Even more interesting was the fact that Ritchlin’s theories pointed towards 2012 with both Mesoamerican and Chinese evidence, apparently independent of Terence McKenna (whose mushroom-fuelled imagination fashioned a signpost to 2012 from the I Ching before he encountered the Mayan calendar). I’ll certainly be tracking down Ritchlin’s book on her I Ching studies, One-Ing, and her Venus Transits study, Fields of Light: The Heart of Quetzalcoatl Becomes One with the Heart of Heaven (she advised people to email her if interested in this study).

Next I intended to go to a talk about MDMA research, but ended up in the wrong seminar room listening to astrologer Bernadette Brady expounding Complexity Theory. Deciding to go with the flow, I was very pleasantly surprised. I’ve never had much time for astrology—more out of a lack of personal resonance with it than any reasoned dismissal. But Brady’s entertaining and stimulating talk, while obviously not able to fully unravel her theories, certainly went some way to framing it with concepts that make it more attractive to my mind. The gist of her position seemed to be that anti-entropic phenomena occur in the slim "phase transitions" between systemic stability and systemic chaos, and from these evolve patterns, cycles and rhythms, in both physical and psychic systems, that mediate between "structure" and "surprise" in the life of these systems. Hence emerges an information model of myths and archetypes, and possibly a more sophisticated framework for astrology’s pluralism. It seems that that other woolly pseudo-science with a bad rep—economics—is getting wiser through Complexity Theory, with a major difference: economics has money. If astrology piggy-backs on this research, with eloquent proponents like Brady, I might be spreading zodiacal memes before long.

Rick Doblin, founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, gave a succinct overview of his work with MAPS and their vision for the future. It’s easy to forget that something similar to Doblin’s model of worldwide clinics distributing licenses to use psychedelics was originally propounded by the chemical trickster himself, Tim Leary. Of course, his excited, expanded consciousness got bored with this idea and he opted for mass proselytizing. Doblin—with sound reasons—advocates a return to a steady chipping-away at monolithic opposition to psychedelics, and "change from within the system". He naturally got heckled by the more extremely libertarian psychonauts, but once he reassured them he was advocating his current model as a cultural stop-gap, not as some "ideal" situation of state-sanctioned altered states, the audience united in applauding his obviously groundbreaking efforts to integrate these substances into our society.

Serena Roney-Dougal spoke lucidly enough on her "yogic parapsychological perspective on consciousness", but not with enough novelty of approach to leave much of an impression in my mind. The final speaker, author, lecturer and architect Charles Jencks, was another kettle of fish altogether. His blazing, effortless intellect was (when I wasn’t having trouble keeping up with it) a joy to behold, as he unravelled the ideas embedded in the project he details in his book, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. From the slides he shared with us, this conceptual landscape (located in Dumfries, Scotland) looked stunning, a magnificent balance between earthy expression and abstracted refinements. Conceived as "a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory", its sculptured installations and moulded topography form a series of meditations on our conceptions of the origins and destiny of the cosmos. My notebook from that day bears no trace from his talk; I was totally occupied with following his ideas. I’m just left with a clear mental Post-It note: "Look further into this guy’s work".

That evening some of us gathered for a leisurely boat trip on the River Avon, a great chance to break any remaining first-day social ice, and to eat, drink, and merrily dodge low bridges. I ended up chatting to one of the speakers whose talk I missed, Reverend Kevin Tingay, whose open-minded faith was as refreshing as the night air. Considering that the wonderful Art Deco venue for the conference, The Forum, is owned by the Bath Christian Trust, and that many speakers dealt unashamedly with the occult, the conference added greatly to my sense of health in west country Christianity, a sense initiated a while ago by the Bishop of Bath and Wells’ traditional, and usually well-received sermon at Glastonbury Festival.

The next morning, Ann Shulgin regaled us with a frank discussion of her highly bizarre, non-drug altered states—or, more precisely, state—that recurred throughout her early life, until the age of 25. The singular visionary experience of embracing infinite space, which she came to call "The Spiral", obviously affected her profoundly, and bore witness to the strangeness of human consciousness as well as any of the trip stories that emerged through the conference. The subsequent presentation, Philippa Berry’s exploration of recent continental philosophy and its conception of "the event" (Heidegger’s Ereignis) couldn’t have formed a sharper contrast to Shulgin’s personal anecdotes. Looking at mass (rather than personal) consciousness, and approaching it academically (rather than informally), I have to admit that I was left at the end with not much more than "9/11 was a shocking event". Another half-hour victim, Berry’s obvious intelligence couldn’t give any real background to those like me who have yet to wrestle with any philosophers (in the strict sense of the word) past Wittgenstein, and subtleties that other people explained to me later were lost.

Next up was Julian Vayne on "The Magickal Art of Drugs". I’ve always harboured regret for encountering psychedelics in a profane context, one with some concessions to seeing past the "just for kicks" paradigm, but essentially providing no real framework for processing the psychic materials they fish out of the mind’s depths. Vayne was luckier, experiencing his first acid trip—one of scarily/hilariously misjudged dosage—after 4 years of occult practice and meditation, and was able to navigate the ensuing chaos using the Qabalistic Tree of Life. This synergy of energy and form could be sensed underpinning his talking style, which is both enthused and clear. He gave a good potted history of magickal models for the uninitiated—from Levi’s Will to the Golden Dawn’s Imagination, to the Belief and Trance that comprise the toolbox of Chaos. He made a compelling case for occult techniques and chemical aids being fruitful partners, pointing out, for instance, that the discerning mind fostered by occult training is of great use in dealing with the tricksterish "plant teachers" that one may meet in mushroom or ayahuasca visions.

Chas Clifton‘s subsequent rummage through the minefield of European witchcraft scholarship in search of the fabled "flying ointments" gave us a good critical baseline: you will find what you want in this arena. Obviously Clifton’s own conclusions—that these ointments had other more mundane medicinal uses, and that their use as psychoactives was probably more analagous to contemporary recreational codeine abuse than any form of organised religious sacrament—need to be subject to his own caveat, but he came across as an engaged, honest inquirer, one who had been through a period of "believing" in the reality of the Old Religion, but had emerged with a more reserved, critical appraisal.

As I learned through accidentally catching Bernadette Brady, it’s often wise to go for talks you might not be immediately interested in. It’s learning, remember? But I sorely regret missing both David Luke and Andy Letcher on various psychedelic topics in favour of Nicholas Mann. At the end of this day, down the pub, a Tasmanian guy piped up with an idea I’ve cherished for a while now: getting rid of the word "just", when used in the sense of "Consciousness is just a product of the brain". At this level, nothing is just anything. I chipped in with my observation that this kind of linguistic avoidance of complexity is usually only encountered in materialist reductionism. Spiritual reductionism is equally philosophically repugnant to me, but there seems to be a healthier attitude involved. People who reduce the world to matter very often belittle matter—and thus reveal their contempt for the world—with "just". Those for whom the non-material is the fundamental ground of being usually, at least, have some sense of awe and respect towards the world they (mistakenly, I think) apprehend. Nicholas Mann falls clearly into the latter group; but as his focus was directly on his spiritual ontological foundations, his reverence for spirit came across to me as an annoying exaggeration of his fallacy. The dynamic of his argument would be familiar to anyone who’s taken the several milliseconds necessary to see through the "two-party" political system. He rightly and ably demolished the opposition’s stance, ridiculing it as "Frankensteinian": put all the bits of matter together, jam loads of energy through it, and hey presto! Consciousness! Demonstrating the absurdity of this extreme segues swiftly (and deceptively) into advocating its rival, expressed with deliberate, awed tones that connote authority, appealing to people’s dualistic pleasure in finding the exact opposite of an established position to be true. "Don’t you see?! Not the chicken, the egg!" (For me, George Clinton settled the debate a while ago: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Depends on who’s gettin’ laid.")

The bona fide psychedelic luminary Alexander Shulgin—just closing in on his eightieth year—injected some much-needed verve and colour into the afternoon, and although he struggled throughout with his dentures, he was entertaining enough for everyone to give him plenty of leeway as he intermittently cursed and fumed. A true explorer, he raised questions rather than offered answers. He related a fascinating incident where a schizophrenic identified his own brain’s PET scan from the patterns formed by the trace substance (he knew the shape from his hallucinations). And naturally tales of his famed self-experimentation emerged, detailing bizarre experiments in using psychedelic consciousness to manipulate matter and time. Then Amanda Fielding, famed for her self-trepanation, presented her overview of human evolution. She took a prudently diverse approach to the origins of consciousness, citing the "Aquatic Ape theory" (the idea that human ancestors once adopted a semi-aquatic lifestyle, accounting for attributes such as our lack of hair and upright posture), dietary factors involving fish oils that are especially nutritious to neural tissues, and psychedelic plants, as all contributing to our current capacities for awareness. Her grand arc across the development of consciousness led to her introducing The Beckley Foundation, a charity set up to promote research into the neurophysiology of consciousness. This, along with Rick Doblin’s mention of American pot-head billionaires putting good amounts of financial backing towards psychedelic research, and the small but significant "corporate training" contingent at the conference, gave the encouraging impression of vital issues around consciousness getting at least some of the attention they deserve from the sectors of society with tangible leveraging power. The anarchist in us will leap around wildly with impassioned words of caution at this prospect, but the picture painted here was cause for some optimism.

TechGnosis author Erik Davis rounded off the second day with a compelling update on his ongoing investigations into the convergence between consciousness and technology. Psychedelics are frequently envisioned as technology, as tools, but Davis advocated a slight but significant shift in viewpoint, to see them as media—information tools. He related chats with experienced 20 year-old psychonauts from the west coast rave scene, who, he was fascinated to discover, talked of their experiences with new designer compounds with unselfconscious audio-visual tech metaphors. They seemed fascinated by the "gimmicky" surface sheen of the visionary realm, and related it to their experiences of manipulating sound and light with technology. Many people would turn off at this point, dismayed at the banalisation of gnosis. But Davis held true to his generous vision of the ambiguity of both spirit and technology—their Trickster nature—and, looking back to Baroque theatre, with its lavish use of "special effects" to convey the supernatural, suggested that postmodern culture’s collision of styles and techniques, with the gnostic rush of Hollywood f/x, multimedia psychedelic events and vital borderlands between the sacred and profane, maybe be seen as a development of "neo-Baroque". Further, he reminded us that the earliest forms of art, palaeolithic cave art, contain various geometric motifs (zig-zags, dots and grids) that many believe signify the pre-visionary motifs of shamanic trance. The implication is that as a culture we may well be a little too transfixed by the preliminaries of gnosis—the "special effects"—but this at least indicates our collective orientation, teetering on the tricksy brink of genuine visionary breakthrough.

It’s fitting that Davis conducted the last interview with Terence McKenna before his untimely death. There’s no real successor to McKenna, with his unique combination of swift humour, grandiose/absurd vision and linguistic alchemy. But Davis certainly shares with McKenna a rare facility that combines the complexity and playful paradox of psychedelic perception with the accessible vividness of metaphor that arises from a constantly active, imaginal intellect. Volleying perspectives back and forth over beer with Erik was one of the more memorable and pleasurable aspects of this conference for me.

A well-earned lie-in meant I missed the first couple of speakers on the Saturday morning, though I met Graham Harvey at lunch, and was pleased to hear he had been flying the Wattsian flag of open-ended dialectics, as opposed to the pantomimic back-and-forth of dualism so much in evidence. The first talk I caught was by former Director of Strategic Innovation at Saatchi and Saatchi, Stephen Fitzpatrick, on ‘Social Dreaming: A Practise in Search of a Theory’. Fitzpatrick peppered his rapid-fire talk with quotes from key surrealists, to provide some points of reference, but, as the title asserts, the foundation for this new phenomenon is the practice. A group of people gather and, supervised by a facilitator, share their dreams. There is no therapeutic intent, so people’s past and personal (waking) lives are not directly related to. Rather, through free association, the facilitator encourages participants to weave connections between each other’s dreams. A working hypothesis is that this process provides access to "the ‘substratum’ of feelings, thoughts and emotions that are integral to all social relations and social groupings which are not readily available for considered exploration and discussion in social groups, as they are unattended and not acknowledged." In any case, Fitzpatrick testified that astonishing things seem to occur as this process deepens, with people discovering potent insights into their lives in other people’s dreams, thus exposing the (as yet unexplained) social nature of deep psychic processes. Repeated sessions tend to generate bizarre synchronicities, and leave some ill-prepared participants on the verge of breakdown (naturally this is one of the aspects that warrant a trained facilitator). I have to say that it was this talk that introduced the most fascinating new concepts to me. Just before the conference I started personal dreamwork, using techniques of analysis that treat the dream as a self-consistent whole, avoiding (initially, at least) any reference to my waking life, to interpretive theories, mythologies, or other symbol systems. This process in itself reveals the astonishing internal logic of dreams, forming a basis for associations with other dreams, and eventually "real" life that is much more faithful to the dream itself. Social Dreaming seems to be the natural and obvious (though initially perplexing) extension of this methodology into the social sphere, showing the way for potentially incredible new ways of integrating the non-rational into our collective being.

The idea of dreams as hermetic, revelatory creative expressions from the unconscious is powerful. "My God! It’s a work of art!" I thought to myself as I broke a dream of mine down as a literary critic might tease apart the deep structures of a poem. Psychologist Benny Shanon, author of The Antipodes of the Mind, a major recent study of ayahuasca experience, propounded a similar thesis regarding the ontological status of the visions induced by this jungle brew. He began with one of the burning questions that any inquiring person will bring up on surveying even a moderate number of records of ayahuasca visions: "Why are the motifs so idiosyncratic, and at the same time common to people from diverse backgrounds and cultures?" Jaguars, coloured snakes and fabulous jewelled cities are, he rightly argued, not the type of obviously universal experience that might take up residence in the Jungian "collective unconscious". So what’s the deal? Well, I can only assume Shanon addresses this issue in his book, because he managed to leave that key question wholly unresolved in his talk. His argument about the visions being imaginal artworks was interesting, but it begs that very question about thematic consistency. It should be noted, though, that he was very careful not to fall prey to the reductionist attitude. He refused the indigenous position of postulating an independent "spirit world", not out of any lack of respect for these cultures, but out of fidelity to his own, which I can respect. Further, he stressed that he had no intention to reduce the mystery—he was merely saying he thought this great mystery was in the human mind. But regarding the question he set himself at the beginning—no cigar.

Robin Matthews‘s talk on mysticism, game theory and consciousness was sparsely populated due to the (I imagine) fascinating presentation being given by Jon Atkinson on Salvia Divinorum and Piers Gibbon‘s (I imagine) fun seminar on the use of sound and song being given at the same time (we heard the raucous noises emanating from the latter!). Attention paid to Matthews was well rewarded, though, as he vocally meditated on mysticism as a "search for a meaning that exists beyond the language we use to find it", and knowledge of death as the basis for authentic life. Claudia Müller-Ebeling was a dynamic speaker, but in her presentation on aphrodisiacs she didn’t manage to fit in much that went beyond her slides of wonderful obscenely-shaped plants that serve, in the morphocentric worlds of the indigenous cultures that use them, as multi-faceted sexual stimulants. But I did love her idea of ingesting psychoactive substances as some form of somatic yoga, in that one’s anticipation of their effects forces one into a very direct focus on the here-and-now of your body’s internal sensations. Claudia’s partner Christian Rätsch then took us on a spirited trip through his ethnopharmacological experiences (he said that Shulgin defined ethnopharmacology as "taking strange drugs in strange places"). We were treated to a re-enactment of his transformation into a panther on his first acid trip, and a passionate affirmation of the value of being "a stranger in a strange land", as he evoked the transformative, often painful isolation induced by his fieldwork.

Nick Campion, a tutor from the Sophia Centre that co-organised the event, obviously felt a need to frame the appearance of the eminent astrologer Liz Greene in his introduction to this final speaker. He got some mild heckling for doing more than just saying, "Here’s Liz Greene" (perhaps from some Greene devotees eager for their guru), but his emphasis on the sky—specifically its axial Pole Star in the Northern Hemisphere—as the foundation of the western esoteric tradition, resonated strongly for me (the Pole Star is the one stellar phenomenon that I’ve ever been obsessed by), and seemed to contribute to an important current in this final day. We’d already heard Benny Shanon’s contested but admirable refusal to adopt Amazonian Indian ontology; and later, Christian Rätsch, for all his exoticism, eloquently espoused the importance of seeking our own spiritual roots, citing Odin’s drinking from the Well of Remembrance as evidence of a European tradition of divine intoxication. This was in response to a Brazilian woman’s concern over the growing popularity of ayahuasca in the West, and its possible impact on South America. It seemed important that while the conference gave due respect to the indigenous cultures whose traditions have opened up so many doors for us, we were reminded of Jung’s assertion that wholeness and healing for Western culture will only come about through recovering and integrating our own spiritual roots. Ayahuasca is the "vine of the dead", the ancestors; if we are to learn anything from it, we must look deeply back into our history.

Liz Greene‘s oddly soporific delivery may not have gone down too well with those of us flagging after this hectic few days of information overload, but it couldn’t disguise the depth of her thinking. Narrating Neptune’s cycles through the past 50 years, she offered some shrewd observations as she associated its passage through the zodiac with various cultural icons that she saw as exemplary of our collective yearning for transcendence: Elvis for Scorpio, the Maharishi for Sagittarius, Thatcher for Capricorn, Princess Di & Blair for Aquarius. Again we saw a hint of 2012: Neptune’s next 14-year residence in a zodiacal sign will commence when it enters Pisces in 2011, apparently signifying the channelling of our thirst for transcendence through the imagination. This kind of generalisation will always stink of sloppy thinking to the literal-minded, but to me Greene exuded more than enough subtlety of thought to scent these insights with a sweeter, more complex aroma.

The final panel discussion was a satisfying conclusion. Much talk of animism led to the plants that had graced the stage throughout proceedings being personally introduced, Psychotria viridis, Ipomoea violacea and Lophophora williamsii being presented as if they were special guests on the panel. Piers Gibbon was encouraged to repeat part of his seminar with the whole audience—the part that involved a round of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ being sung as a collective western icaro. And a Mexican woman in the audience offered her profound thanks to all involved for the healing experience, the encouragement to speak her mind that the conference had given her.

I was a little disappointed when the post-conference party initially seemed to be quite a mundane acid techno affair, but some great chats with new acquaintances, and the gradual emergence of funk and disco slowly woke my body up, and I was grateful to earth this information overload in drunken dancing. An obscure favourite track from my teenage years (Parliament’s ‘Come In Out Of The Rain’) got me, and everyone else left, dancing at the tail-end of the night, followed by some spontaneous balloon frolics that were a fitting foil for this mostly intellectual feast.

There was a call for the conference to become a regular event at the final panel discussion, which was met with hearty applause. I’ll second that. Roll on ‘Exploring Consciousness 2005′…

BURN YOUR KARMA IN THE FLAMES OF SPIRITUAL POLYFIDELITY!

In August 1994 I attended PEPCON’s 8th annual conference at Harbin Hot Springs, California. PEP stands for Polyfidelitous Educational Productions and their conference was subtitled "Loving More: Transforming Relationships". Transforming relationships from monogamy and an often toxic family environment, to polyfidelity, which they propose offers "more love, more growth, more intimacy, more commitment".

Ryam Nearing of PEP has written: "Monogamy may be a valid choice for some people at some times, but we also need other legitimate options for intimacy and family life. Our goal is new kinds of relationships based on unconditional love, continuing spiritual growth, respect for our diversity, equality among partners, telling the truth about our deepest desires, and accepting personal responsibility … together we explore the total transformation of love, sex, and the family".

I had been exploring responsible non-monogamy for a while and wanted to meet others living this in their communities. The term "non-monogamy" is prefaced here by "responsible" to distance it from swinging. Honesty, communication and consciousness were obviously very much prized by those I met, and it seemed that many attendees had experienced living in an extended sexual family of some kind. There were a number of people from well known group-living projects such as Kerista (now defunct) and ZEGG (of which more later). We attended workshops on cross-cultural and sociobiological precedents for poly living; gender balancing; how to build a polyfidelitous family; queers in family; relationships as a vehicle for personal/spiritual growth; techniques to facilitate a transparency of communication (the need for honesty); financial options in group marriage; tribal Tantra; "coming out" as poly, and much, much more. It was enlightening.

Poly Philosophy

The basic premise of polyfidelity propagandists seems to be that most humans feel attraction to a number of people and that to bring this to its logical conclusion of being sexually intimate with more than one person, and have them all get on as a family, has the potential to clear many blocks in the individuals’ paths to growth (many issues will have to be dealt with for it to work!), and also to build intimate, caring and therefore strong communities. Strong communities are also developed by those who share an interest in this way of living as we come together to share our experience and practice the technologies for growth often deemed necessary to this kind of relating. One of these technologies would be meditation/self knowledge. Dr. Deborah Anapol states in Love Without Limits: The Quest for Sustainable Intimate Relationships that she sees some kind of energy practice like Tantra as most necessary in dealing with both the emotional and physical aspects of multi-partner sexual relating. A spiritual practice, especially one that focuses on conscious relating and channelling sexual energy (such as Tantra, Taoist sexual alchemy or the Native American Quodoushka) will also increase overall health, stamina, equilibrium and happiness; hopefully bringing greater trust and acceptance of yourself and others.

Ryam Nearing’s polyfidelity primer Loving More states that studies are steadily shattering the myth of monogamy. "The number of mammal species believed to be monogamous is now down to 2%". Birds do it, elk do it…. Monogamy is going the way of the nuclear family in that it was held to be the norm, but in fact is the exception. Strictly speaking monogamy means one sex partner for life; which is manifestly uncommon. What most people do is serial monogamy—or what Deborah Anapol calls serial non-monogamy (lots of partners separated by linear time).

One of Deborah’s most powerful quotes is "We have as a people grown afraid to love when the Spirit moves us". While many people profess to monogamy, a very large number do have intimate and/or sexual relations outside of their primary relationship—and then lie about it! The clinched possessive partner does not allow their partner to have close friends, of any sex, because of their pathological jealousy. Most of us recognise that this is more than a little warped. The overwhelming characteristic of monogamy is dependancy/ ownership/ limitation/ repression of self and partner—often enforced by threats of abandonment and/or violence.

Modern "love" often proves to be an addiction, and one which bolsters the economy to boot. The relationship between sexual repression and authoritarian conditioning is clearly delineated in The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Dr. Wilhelm Reich (it’s no accident that communard groups like MOVE and the Diggers, and free love sects like the Adamites and Brethren of the Free Spirit have been ruthlessly, violently suppressed). Responsible non-monogamy demands that we recognise our profound connection to other people and truly honour it. To be able to do so we must heal ourselves. Shared loving accelerates this healing and close bonding of individuals. If we are to contribute to the planet’s clean-up, as we must to survive, this can only be an advantage.

It is natural to regard cultural conditioning as natural—however, that does not make it true. First off, we must realise that monogamy is not "natural". Over half the world’s population practice polygamy or other non-monogamous forms. The enlightened view might be that monogamy was enforced by men to keep track of "their" offspring; that it stems from patriarchal control processes instituted after male priestcraft had cracked the feminine mystery of conception (á la Riane Eisler’s The Chalice & Blade). It can also be regarded as a control process by the church and state, designed to contain the naturally chaotic energies of Eros. Other cultures enjoy different norms which work for them—for example the famous Eskimo tradition of offering hospitality sex to visitors, or the less well known Greek version of this custom which involved the husband orally stimulating visitors in anticipation of the wife’s delights. So, we can’t really be expected to take seriously the mantra that monogamy is normal.

Multi-partner sex appears to make good genetic sense too. It has become a pop psychology truism that many men rear children not their own, and that women are more likely to seek out "adulterous" liaisons when they are ovulating and most likely to conceive. On the surface it may appear that monogamy serves the cause of social cohesion, but surely it would be a better society that could accept the reality of our capricious freewill and freeform pleasures.

Communal Sexuality

Many people interested in multi-partner relationships choose to live together and have pioneered experiments in shared property and wealth to the great advantage of others—monogamous or otherwise—interested in living together. The variety of arrangements is limited only by the imagination. At PEPCON I learned of a journal devoted exclusively to sharing the results of experimental finance/property arrangements so that experience is pooled and mistakes don’t have to be repeated! Communal living usually differs from whatever the alternative is called by promoting shared resources as opposed to private ownership. Responsible non-monogamy is in continuum with this aim. While direct experience must be regarded as having the greatest content, there remain valuable lessons to be learnt from the experiences of others. Not everyone will wish to explore this avenue personally, but for those who want to find out more resources are listed on these pages.

There is a wealth of data here which is not easy to come by so I will limit myself to providing a brief summary of a few of the larger polyfidelitous communities.

The nineteenth century Oneida community (1848-1881) in America is an example of a commune devoted to the practice of non-possessive love styles. Believing marriage to be oppressive and sex liberating, exclusive pair bonding was here forbidden in favour of sexual freedom. Children lived in a Children’s House and exclusive attachment to their biological parents was strongly discouraged (as in the early Israeli Kibbutzim). Housework and other work was collectivised and performed equally by both genders. "[T]he Oneida Community … practised the interchange of husbands and wives as a magickal practice, to give a greater unity and spiritual strength to the entire community group. This was excellent magick. The climax was forbidden in these "agape unions" to avoid offspring complications. Because this congress was held under both the rules of communal love and religious aspiration, there was no resultant frustration because of the absence of climax." (Louis T. Culling, Sex Magic). By the time Oneida closed they had two hundred and eighty-eight members and ran a highly successful business.

That sex and other intimate behaviour is a powerful bonding mechanism is recognised by the profusion of centres dedicated to training people in the tradition of Osho (a.k.a. Bagwan Shree Rajneesh). Here the ideal is to create a therapeutic and loving environment where rejection and jealousy are easily handled or cease to become an issue. This is because; first, one is given the space and emotional freedom to fully express and work through any considerations that do come up and second; one can bond deeply to such a number of people that the temporary "loss" of a lover is no great hardship.

The above is a vision of an erotic community dedicated to self knowledge and self expression. This model is also used by the "Actions-Analytical Organisation for conscious life praxis" or AAO who defined themselves thus: "an important social experiment with common property, free sexuality, common economy, direct democracy, collective children and spontaneous emotional self expression. The AAO is not a utopian vision of an ideal society, it is an existing model for a new social life praxis. The AAO is the practical proof that it is possible to live together without aggression and the use of violence, without sexual repression. the AAO has been in existence for 8 years and at the present [1977] 500 people live in the 12 AAO groups in western europe and the states" (The AAO Model).

One of the AAO’s slogans was "death to pairbonding!". Of course, even the AAO are not free of value judgements and ideology. They were (in 1977 at least) self-consciously identified with Reich and took on board much of his Marxist ideology. They also exhibit a degree of homophobia in some of their literature. However, in their prime the AAO were a radical and exemplary experimental community. Like the Oneida Community, the AAO were eventually shut down due to outside pressure, ostensibly relating to their policies of sexual freedom for children (see ‘The Night Before Charisma’ in HEAD 7 for more in-depth details of the AAO’s imprisoned founder, Otto Muehl).

If everything is to be put into question, this everything will include childhood, where much programming/ imprinting occurs, and sexuality, which is often a vehicle for programming, and concern for a society which can only envisage child sexuality in terms of abuse should not necessarily prevent this. Equally, we should not be surprised by society’s predictable response. Humans are sexual beings, be they babies, children, adolescents or adults. This is obviously a contentious area—however, we should never forget that each individual is to be regarded as their own supreme sovereign and sole authority over their own bodymind—a concept trampled on by knee jerk moralists and abusers alike.

The positive pioneering communard aspect of the above ventures is presently being vigorously expressed in Germany and elsewhere in the shape of ZEGG (Centre for Experimental Cultural Design). ZEGG is a commune of 88 adults and 12 children that has been developing for the past 15 years. "We need to find the main causes of fear and violence between people, understand them, and develop a way of living together on a new basis. At ZEGG, living together itself is a process of research and development, where new social structures are put to the test. Anything can be tried that might make life more interesting, more lively, more sensual.

"There cannot be peace between nations as long as there is war between the sexes. We are not free, and no society is free as long as love and sexuality are surrounded by so much pretence, phoniness, silence, and lies. No one is free as long as our greatest longing is permanently linked to our greatest fear. A person is free when he or she is able to love and allowed to love freely. In fact. there can be no such thing as ‘unfree’ love. Love is always free and everything else is a misunderstanding."

An American project which has developed out of ZEGG is called Balthiel, "named after the angel Balthiel from the Testament of Solomon; the only angel of the 7 planetary angels to overcome the entanglements of the evil genius of Jealousy" and ZEGG have named their newsletter "compersion" after the word coined by the Kerista community meaning the opposite of jealousy.

As well as focusing on issues of personal growth, transparent communication, open sexuality and innovative community building, they research areas of energy physics; healing; resonance technology; they have designed their own non-polluting heating system; water treatment facility using marsh plants; and a "non-chemical self-powered antennae swimming pool cleaning system". They keep an organic garden and have a dolphin research ship which explores human-whale-dolphin communication off the west coast of Africa. Thus ZEGG is not a "single issue" concern in the way some places of sexual healing/experimentation are; unless that single issue be wholism.

ZEGG provides an excellent model of free sexuality working harmoniously in a community, itself developing and at the same time providing energy and incentive for development of other related areas of human experience. In this way free sexuality can be a powerful source of individual and group empowerment.

The energy of the 1970′s may have led to groups like the AAO being quite pushy, as in the Osho commune’s extensive use of catharsis and highly confrontational encounter therapy. Most Osho centres (especially at the commune in Poona, India; less so at the Holland & UK Multiversities) now concentrate on energy work and meditation. It remains to be seen whether we have got over the absurd inadequacies that led people into authoritarian structures like guru worshipping.

Of course, the situations we are most likely to encounter will probably not be in communes dedicated to sexual freedom, but between a small number of voluntary acquaintances. I really think that before we can get on with others with less of the trips, ego and unconscious programmes, we need to have a sense of not NEEDING them; which comes down to self reliance and self knowledge. I suspect that groupings of people where things go badly "wrong" are groupings of people who are afraid of and fleeing self knowledge. Personally, I’m less into organised communities and more into an organic/ fractal/ chaotic model which accepts that what happens happens (although functional communities may form therefrom). Where ideologies and interpretative frameworks are dropped as far as possible in favour of direct experience. Where beLIEf, morals, expectations etc. are recognised as occasional operational necessities to be pared down to the minimum so we can come as close as possible to what is.

However, whether polyfidelity is practised in an organised group or amongst more disparate individuals; whether it is followed as a lifestyle choice or as one option out of a range of lovestyles which are adopted as and when appropriate; responsible non-monogamy can empower us as individuals and communities, promoting a sense of love, security and personal empowerment.

Personal Experiences

Living this lifestyle has brought much learning, pleasure, healing and ecstatic sex. Like any life path it has also brought a fair deal of pain and disappointment.

I find social conditioning & the monogamy virus strong in myself. But when I try to live monogamously I notice my reality shrinking. I become defensive and insecure, I lose my self-reliance and become unhappy and despondent—even tho’ I may think monogamy is what I want. I don’t think I’m reducing everything to a sexual level, because it’s more than that for me. Feeling open and relating sexually can be present without necessarily manifesting physically. Feeling sexually open to other people is, for me, a metaphor of feeling open in other ways, of feeling free to be myself without limits on how that openness may manifest; just as for the possessive partner, non-sexual intimacy can trigger their feelings of sexual jealousy. I see these levels of intimacy mirroring each other.

Sometimes when I’m seeing more than one person sexually I feel jealous, anxious and/or guilty. The only way I know of dealing with this is by focusing on my here & now experience of what’s happening, as opposed to mind-fucking about possible outcomes which may never happen (but which I could manifest by obsessively worrying and giving them energy!). Jealousy can be a reality, but there’s no reason to make it all-important and give it power over one’s life. I do have a fear of abandonment and have to push through that to be myself; a constant process which ebbs and flows like the tides. I can usually keep sight of the fact that it’s better for someone to "leave" me than for me to make myself miserable by limiting and sacrificing myself to fit in with what they want or my interpretation of their expectations—which could be misinterpretations anyway.

People often seem very attached to their limitations and/or pain, and would rather avoid responsibility for this by blaming others. So if their partner/lover performs actions that remind them of their hurt (i.e. fear of abandonment), they blame the other person for "hurting them" and often avoid dealing with the flipside of why it hurts. While it may be true that the other person has some responsibility, it’s also likely that the present situation is resonating with something inside/in the past, the resolution of which could be profoundly healing. Sometimes I see myself & others avoiding these hidden treasures by forming (usually unspoken) agreements based on denial, to avoid anything which brings up pain. A truly partial approach. In my experience things work best when I’m willing to risk losing everything for the sake of being honest. Especially to risk losing the picture I have of myself, and the expectations I’ve built up of someone else and the reactions I think they’ll have to things I say or do.

I like to see pain, like jealousy, as a wake up call showing where to bring more consciousness-awareness. Where it hurts is where it needs healing. For example, a disappointment can lead to identifying the unspoken expectations that led to that specific hurt. Being involved with multiple partners means there’s more intensity so, with honesty and awareness, problems surface quickly and can be quickly cleared. This path can be hard work, and it’s definitely worth it. Deal with it, innit. If I’m not dealing with it; if I’m using relationship(s) to avoid myself, it doesn’t work. Which is how it should be, methinks. I get the feeling that I’m articulating the obvious, but these are things I keep having to remember and relearn.

I don’t really want to say all monogamy is bad (do I?). If we choose monogamy consciously sometime, it should be fine, of course. The key issue for me is choice. Are we really choosing our sex lives, or are we being run by programmes as usual? How much choice can we create? If jealousy or fear is running your or my life—why? I like to raise these questions for myself by experimenting and seeing what comes up. After all… I have little idea of who I am, what I want, where I’m going etc. Might as well play!

"People doing it say ‘There is something magical about this lifestyle to me…because it is living an alternative, it’s living a contradiction to all the standard programming and the way that everyone expects you to be. Whenever you are doing something that is different from the norm, there is a magic to it, a freedom and a sense of power. I always have a feeling that if we can do this thing that is so delicate and complicated, even for a few years, we can do anything.’" (from Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer).

Happy lovin’ now!

Books: Essential Reading!

• The AAO Model, trans. Brooke Skopik (AA verlag, Nurenberg: 1977). See also Ottoismus in Holland by William Levy @ The Invisible Language Society, Fokke Simonszstraat 28-1, 1017 TH Amsterdam, Holland. An updated version appears in HEAD 7.
• Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett (Habitat/10 Speed Press; 1989). £23 from: Head, BM Uplift, London, WC1N 3XX.
• The Devil & The Goddess: Meditations on Blood, Serpents and Androgyny, Gyrus (Norlonto; 2000).
• Diggers & Dreamers: The Guide to Co-operative Living 96/97, Ed. by C. Coates, J. How, L. Jones, W. Morris and A. Wood (D&D; 1995) £10.50 from: Edge of Time Ltd, PO Box 1808, Winslow, Buckingham, NK18 3RN.
• The Irrational in Politics: Sexual Repression & Authoritarian Conditioning, Maurice Brinton (See Sharp Press, AZ; 1993) $6 from PO Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702-1731; or £4.95 from: AK Distribution, PO Box 12766, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH8 9YE. Tel# 0131-555-5165.
• Love Without Limits: The Quest for Sustainable Intimate Relationships—Responsible Non-Monogamy, Dr. Deborah Anapol (Intinet Resource Centre, CA: 1992). $16 from I.R.C, above; or £12.95 from The Private Case, POB 23, Royston, Herts, SG8 8DT, U.K.
• Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer, Ryam Nearing (PEP Publishing, Captain Cook: 1992). $12. Contact: PEP (see listings).
• ‘Pasiphae: The Woman Who Fucked Bulls’, Will Tracy in Ritual Sex (RhinocEros: NY, 1997), ed. by T. Taormino & D. A. Clark.
• Sex Magic, Louis T. Culling (Llewellyn, MN: 1988) £8 from: Head, BM Uplift, London, WC1N 3XX.
• Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture Of The Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology And Celebrating Life, Dolores LaChapelle (Kivaki Press, CO: 1988). $25 from/ enquires to: Kivaki Press, 585 east 31st Street, Durango, CO 81301, USA.
• Safer Planet Sex: The Handbook, massive listing of everything to do with sex, in Britain & worldwide. Directions, playing, travelling, shopping, performing, looking, reaching, talking. £8 from Tuppy Owens, PO Box 4ZB, London, W1A 4ZB.

An Interview with Douglas Rushkoff

by David Kendall

David: How did you get into this?

Douglas: I was a theatre major in college. I went to Princeton, which is a very traditional kind of school, and the theatre people, the music people and the weird people in general hang out together. We were the sort of psychedelic crowd. I moved out west and a lot of the people, the most involved in alternative culture, were also deeply involved in computer software, computer programming, doing high level stuff up in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to find out if all these computer people were like that. I’d remembered computer kids in school, as you know, pocket protector wearing nerds.

David: We have the same image here. You must have picked the most interesting and the most literate specimens of their kind. [The same with] Role players, over here they’re dorks obsessed with power. You don’t get kids saying, "I’m into another hyperspatial reality," interconnecting with another world.

Douglas: You don’t think so? Dungeons and Dragons?

David: Oh yes, they don’t mind a bit of rape and pillage but that’s basically feudal economics.

Douglas: Right, but they don’t have to understand what they’re doing to be doing it. They’re involved in a non-linear reality. They’re involved in roleplaying, without knowing, "Oh, we’re experimenting with other fields of reality."

David: Mmm, I sort of expect that from McKenna and Leary. I read Food of the Gods and enjoyed it. After reading your book I was a bit more sceptical. How did you find him?

Douglas: I think he’s a brilliant guy but he’s got a kind of fundamentalism that bothers me. What he talks about is that there’s a bottleneck effect at the end of time, and that humanity’s going to take this leap into hyperspace. First, I think it’s going to happen but it’s going to be much more subtle than that. It’s not like zoom, we’re out of the physical reality, and two, the problem is, he says that if you have the DMT or psychedelic experience you’ll make it, if you haven’t had that experience you won’t. That’s kind of fucked up. Because that’s exclusionary. To me what the psychedelic experience says to me is that All is One, either we all make it or none of us make it.

David: Yeah, like in Cyberia, a technophobe’s nightmare. If you’re not on the Net, without a computer you can’t get a job, effectively you’re not literate. I’m not sure if it will become like that, any new medium finds its niche. Literacy was an exception, it took over completely, I don’t know about computers. You could become dependent on the Net for all information, all support.

Douglas: But if what you’re saying is true, and the Net becomes the overculture, then the counterculture will go onland. Right now the counterculture’s online and mainstream culture’s in space. And what will happen is the counterculture will be people doing real things.

David: Reading Cyberia, I thought there was a bit of a time lag. Britain seems to be more Pagan than Techno.

Douglas: Well House comes to San Francisco and we incorporate the Pagan thing into technology, it comes here and you guys incorporate technology into the Pagan thing.

David: Yet the way you put it over in Cyberia, it seems much more passive than say Chaos Magick in Britain, which exercises more will than that needed to turn on a computer or drop an acid tab. Plug into the Net and surf Chaos, click your way around the world, and you’ve got "freedom of information," that’s just crap. That’s just an excuse to lay back and enjoy what’s been given to them by sixties radicals.

Douglas: Fine. Even Genesis P-Orridge talks about the ‘bliss’ response. You know, to get the kid into the club you don’t have to let him know he’s coming to a Pagan thing, that he’s coming to unlearn his Christian ethic, question his parents, the Queen and the Pope. The music’s cool, the girls are pretty, everybody’s wearing black make-up or whatever. They come in and they have the bliss response, after they’ve had that I think a different set of desires emerge. I think it’s OK for a first stage. You drop acid for the first time you’re thinking…

David: …mystical thoughts.

Douglas: Yeah, you’re thinking Wow!, but then after the fourth or fifth hour when you’re starting to come down some people get a desperation, how am I going to bring the reality of the state, how am I going to bring all this one consciousness into reality. In the United States that did get downloaded as the environmental movement, the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement.

David: But it wasn’t just acid that did that though.

Douglas: Not just acid, no.

David: By itself what is in Cyberia is not going to produce a revolution [of thought]. I really think it’s another cog inside a wheel that’s turning slowly. [...]

[We shift onto Mayan time.]

Douglas: He [McKenna] sees 2012 as the end of Mayan time, then we go out of history into chaos. We’re in this small intermittent period of control in this vast period of chaos and we’ll go back to it. I think when there’s a fundamental shift in the way people perceive what’s around them, it creates the environment where the sort of changes we’re talking about can happen. It is passive in that sense, feminine whatever. All these people are doing is tilling the soil. They’re not activists in that sense. They’re creating a state of readiness. I mean Rupert Murdoch and the corporate control machine, consumer whatever, they’re the ones who put the wires out there. They’re the ones that created television, telephones, all of that. They had no idea that people were going to start talking out through these things. So you can even look at consumerism, or even the patriarchy, feudalism, all those horrible things. You can look at all of these as the build-up to the release from all that stuff.

David: Mmm. It’s also an escape route for thousands of would-be students who would like to be would-be rebels, by latching onto this they feel they’re rebelling without actually having to go on the streets. A lot of this seems to be to do with image, it’s very important to have the right image—whether that’s all part of a big scheme and in the end our individual worries will be proved groundless, this new reality will appear and we’ll have been shitting ourselves all the way through it and yet it comes about whether we want it or not. I hope it does.

Douglas: In America it’s tricky, because the media reality, the simulacra, and the physical reality are intertwined. People have a hard time telling the difference between the two, people believe that if I buy products from a company that supports a ‘sustainable’ land thing, then I’m supporting the environment. That may not be true but on the other hand I had a journalist talking about just this, people fixing the rainforests and how the rainforests were the lungs of the planet, how they were being destroyed, how we should be down there standing in front of bulldozers and if you’re on the Internet you’re not doing that. Meanwhile, she’s sitting there chainsmoking cigarettes, and I said to her, "If you want to take a fractal approach on the whole thing, I would say, you stop smoking, and the rainforests’ lungs will take care of themselves." Who’s right? I don’t know.

David: Is that enough?

Douglas: From my point of view, from the Cyberian point of view, if the world is a self-similar, fractal kind of thing, then her smoking a cigarette is bulldozers chopping down rainforests. It’s one and the same. Not just in a visible tangible this-cause-leads-to-that-effect. We live in a world where, if our intellectuals are smoking cigarettes, then they are powerless to stop the destruction of the rainforests.

David: Fair enough, but to move to cyberpunk and the computer culture, do you not think there’s a tendency to see the whole world as a binary organism? Using the computer metaphor is OK but it seems people are getting confused between the map and the territory. It’s like Newton’s ‘clockwork universe’, a way of looking at the world, but it’s not the ‘real’ world.

Douglas: I think this is in Cyberia. You know the argument between a surfer and a cartographer, the cartographer would say where are you, above or below a certain degree of latitude, the surfer would say, "I don’t know, I’m on the wave." I would say the surfer is right but he’s using a different map, the chaos map.

David: But a map isn’t the same as the actual environment itself. The computer is just one in a progression of hopefully more accurate maps of the world.

Douglas: Maybe, but there’s what the computer maps and there’s what the computer does. I think what’s valuable about the computer is that it allows people to have a very non-linear experience, allows what feels like a very ancient/psychedelic/pagan experience through technology and in a very safe way. When you log on you really travel.

David: Yeah, but surely nothing in paganism is completely safe.

Douglas: But is it safe? It’s safe to you as a biological organism, but it’s not safe to culture as a discreet control operation. I mean they’re making raves illegal, what’s this called?

David: Criminal Justice Bill.

Douglas: And the right to silence has gone.

David: So do we surf this cultural wave or get out and protest?

Douglas: Is going out on the Internet sitting back, or is it extending out in a way that’s extremely dangerous for those who would control the information we get?

David: For the Cyberian image, they have to believe they’re dangerous to maintain that. There aren’t that many people in England on the Net. Some people can barely afford the phone, so on a purely economic level it seems only a small minority will get it. The Net has to have everybody linked up to be effective.

Douglas: The thing about the Net is that, unlike people who got television sets, they didn’t think, "I want everybody to have a TV so they can all watch this programme," when they get online, they really do want to reach out to other places, so in a way, the way that Rupert Murdoch or whoever is providing this service is going to provide a better and better service. You can talk to people in Somalia, you can talk to people all over the country. If it’s where the money’s to be made, and I don’t know what you’d call me, a libertarian anarchist or something, if it’s where the money is to be made then the Rupert Murdochs of this world have to be there.

David: So it’s going to get cheaper and cheaper and everybody can get linked up.

Douglas: In the States they’re giving away computers.

David: The Net is a displaced power to some extent but you have very little control over it.

Douglas: You don’t want control. You want access.

David: Yes, but your access is limited by factors you can’t control, the phone companies whatever, until you have control over the entire system, when it’s free to use and free of censorship, then you have something approaching a free network. At the moment you’ve got a Net with very few people on it. There’s no guarantee of an intelligent conversation just because you can phone America.

Douglas: I see the Net as very, very new right now. It’s certainly a cheaper way for me to have a conversation with you than on the telephone.

David: Yeah, but I’d just write to you.

Douglas: You could but it’s slow.

David: Yes, but writing gives you more time. My phone conversations are relatively boring, you don’t have the time to create something really interesting like you do in a letter.

Douglas: I’ve heard literally hundreds of arguments against the Net, parents saying, "My kids can go online and get pictures of naked women, get molested by someone virtually or something."

David: That’s true of any technological advance. The first thing that gets printed is pornography.

Douglas: There’s a lot of possible very bad trips that can be had, but there’s also tremendous potential with this stuff. It’s actually pretty cheap, and what I think our responsibility is to envision the way in which this can work to society/civilisation’s favour and then enact it. [...] I think it comes down to two questions: is human nature changing, and if so, is it changing for the better, or is human nature essentially good but worth moving forward? If it’s not, then no amount of cybernetic movement is going to change that. [...] Cyberia is aimed at Middle America and whatever Middle England is. People who have never gone online, who think that kids going to raves are crazy, would never touch a psychedelic in their lives, and think that the Internet is for weird nerds to talk to each other about Star Trek. My purpose is to say; it’s not. This is a vibrant community of people with some very interesting bright aspirations for the future. While they may sound off the wall and overly optimistic, I spent a couple of years with them, and I like them. There’s something worthy that they’re trying to communicate to us. If nothing else they do have a inkling of a new way to organise reality, to organize the way we look at things that might be better than what we’re using.

David: Maybe it’s because I come from up North, I always felt some sympathy for the Luddites. I don’t really like machines that much.

Douglas: That’s good. You see, I think there is a natural evolutionary force against change and there should be, if human beings changed too quickly they wouldn’t recognise themselves.

David: Well the Luddites lost. If they’d won, change would still have come but technology might have been subservient to people needs, rather than the other way around. Will we need the equivalent of the Luddites now, or will the change come gradually, allow people to acclimatise themselves? [...] Being able to confirm or discount a newspaper article about Somalia, say, by contacting someone on the Net out there, is a nice idea, but it doesn’t remove any of the power bases, it simply spreads them out a bit.

Douglas: As I see it, the reason we have powerbases, controllers, people in charge, is because we as a people ask for it, we want it. As a civilisation we are a civilisation of children, who like parent figures to set boundaries for us because we’re scared to make decisions and choices on our own.

David: Is that conditioning or would you say that it’s inherent?

Douglas: It’s both. It’s inherent and we have people condition us because that’s the way we want to grow up. I like to think we are on the brink of our societal adolescence.

David: That’s not too good a prospect.

Douglas: It’s rough, there’s a lot of raging hormones. There’s a time when a kid listens to his parents, he doesn’t like girls he thinks they’re gross, has his own stuff, my this, my that. Finally because he wants to contact another person he breaks down some of his barriers, he reaches out, and I think that’s what happening on a cultural level, people are going, "Well, I’d rather reach out to other people than just take it from up there."

David: But in reaching out down a phoneline or whatever, it gives people confidence, they can be someone else, but in the end they’re going to have to meet them, have social contact.

Douglas: Yeah, this is play, this remedial help for a society that has lost the ability to communicate with itself.

David: I find that easier to believe; that it’s therapy we all need rather than The Answer.

Douglas: It’s not the answer. It’s a stage. As any good pagan knows, this is something we could be doing anyway. We don’t need a fucking computer to contact the entire Gaian mind, all we need are the right drugs, the right ritual or the right state of mind. But I think we have to convince ourselves of that, through a kind of play period.

David: So in a way the computer is a toy, a learning toy like giving a kid a toy to help them read.

Douglas: And that’s why it’s alright now that only the first world has them, because as far as I’m concerned it’s only us that need to learn this. I don’t know if people in Somalia need to learn the same lessons as we do.

David: Only problem is, it’s people in Taiwan or wherever that are making the damn things. The Internet is going to be supported by more exploitation of other worlds, it needs the cheap labour.

Douglas: Every silver lining has an awfully big cloud. [...] It’s a slow process.

David: What sort of reception are you getting in America?

Douglas: Fear but different fears, not fear of Somalia not getting computers. Not fear of there not being enough intention. I get fear that kids are going to get addicted to teledildonic sexuality online, they’re not going to listen to their teachers anymore, they’re not going to listen to their parents anymore, that rather than watching public television getting their stories that way, they’re going to talk to some weird radical person and find out about world events through people who’ve no right telling them how they are.

David: Sounds reasonable.

Douglas: Yeah. These are the parents’ fears for themselves.

David: I can see the Net as a good tool to bring people together but there needs to be something else. Travel used to be considered a good thing, you travel the world and you become this wonderful mature person. Now it’s lovely and cheap to travel, people whizz around Europe, station to station, they come back and they’ve learnt nothing; to learn a culture you have to experience it, that’s why I think the Net is too easy, just click your way around the world, no face to face contact. I’m not sure that matures you.

Douglas: I’m not either but it is training. Some person living in a remote region who doesn’t have anyone to share his opinions with, who can’t find anyone to agree with him, he’s reading Noam Chomsky or something. If he gets online he’ll be able to find a community of people who can say, "If you like Chomsky, read this." If a person begins to get positive feedback to their point of view, for what seems like radical wayout ideas in the country they’re living in, then I think they’re more willing to go to the pub or caf� and say, "Well you know, this is the way it is."

We live in bedroom communities in America. We’re so desocialised. So many people have opinions but they’re too scared to speak out against conformity. It has to be the first step to something else. It’s not an end all.