In the midst of incessant technological and social upheavals, ecological disasters, and capital excess a band of modern primitives are downloading designer wetware (another term for drugs) and cataleptically conspiring to save the planet on the dancefloor.

The modern barbarians are not only within the gates, but have penetrated the citadel itself,” proclaimed author Robert Anton Wilson on hearing unofficial estimates that in excess of one ton of grass/dope was (and is) smoked per day in Silicon Valley, the nexus of US-style global techno-capital. A heavy fog of cannabis vapor may well be circulating in the so-called “belly of the beast,” but everyone knows (or intuits) that citadels of techno-power like Silicon Valley no longer form the capitalist heart of command and control.  Should the ‘modern barbarians’ wish to usurp the mechanisms of state control, therefore, they would need to do more than destabilize the sedentary concrete and metal masses that once constituted the bases of power – they would need to permeate the nomadic electronic flows that now constitute the heart of global patriarchal control.   Of course right of entry to this roving power base is heavily restricted, but any cracker with good wetware can gain access …

As if anticipating the migration of power facilitated by the telecommunications and PC revolutions, the counter-cultures of the 60’s and beyond took to massive drug-rituals – electronic music festivals and be-ins.  At these events an entire flower-power generation “mimed the electric speeds and the externalization of nervous systems created by newly crafted electric circuitries.” These new rituals of frenzied drug-dance displaced the mind and body control mechanisms that digitized global capital (the ComTech universe) that had entrenched the absurdities of pre-electric job and gender systems.  Moreover, the mind-and-body altering effects induced by a whole new generation of ‘street-drugs’ gave successive new generations of ravers the means to contest the fragmentary and impersonal effects of the industrial work-ethic, the drunken flailings of the fast-collapsing ‘nuclear’ family and the excesses of the incendiary war against ‘nature.’  [Ironically the “psychedelic input” of colour television and the paced simulations of Hollywood and the media did nothing to discourage the new found inner-cinema of drug experimentation.]

As opposed to the hard-technologies of patriarchal mechanised production, the decades following the sixties gave birth to many soft-technologies (computer programs and interfaces) as well as wetware (advanced biotechnologies and designer drugs).   “We are beginning to see that drugs were always a kind of wetware technology,” writes Cyber-historian Sadie Plant. “On a molecular level this means that they literally engineer the brain from within.”

Increased drug usage has periodically accompanied periods of massive social change – to which the massive usage of opiates during the industrial revolution, the popularity of cocaine at the turn of the century, the ascendance of LSD in the sixties, and the proliferation of ecstasy in the 90’s stand as testament.  “The last best hope for dissolving the steep walls of cultural inflexibility that appear to be channeling us toward true ruin is through hallucinogenic plants and drugs,” proclaimed ethno botanist Terence McKenna, MC-ing at a rave in the early 1990’s.  According to McKenna, these drugs could give ravers a “new set of lenses,” through which they could see their way into the strange new world of the immanent future.  Simultaneously biologist and feminist historian of science Donna Harraway celebrated the onset of the age of the cyborgs in her seminal Cyborg Manifesto.  As morphogenetic hybrids, fluid amalgamations of human and machine, she postulated that only cyborgs - replete with all the requisite hardware, software, and wetware - would be able to “find their way out of the present maze of dualisms in which we have (disastrously) explained our bodies and tools to ourselves.”

The ecstatic and often bloody ravings of the Greek Dionysiacs and the medieval flagellants are not too far removed from the catatonic and brain-frying activities of contemporary ravers.  In the carnivalesque setting of a contemporary rave, these cyborgs-in-the-making ingest their wetware of choice and are (over)exposed to the boundary-blurring effects of sound that can be seen, touched, felt, and interacted with.  Such electronic events, observes Sadie Plant, “take music a long way out of the ambit of content-laden lyrics and even melody ...  the music extends its sphere of influence ... neurochemical effects and visceral vibrations take its impact into bodies, brains, buildings, city streets, local economies.”

Intuitively recognizing the need to transform their bodies (and minds) in order to “permeate the nomadic electronic flow” of power, today’s youth have taken on the age-old rituals of Dionysus and Orpheus (the ritual losing of control) and resituated them in the digital simulflow.