![]() This was, quite simply, an awesome time to be a cultural critic. ![]() And while that fantasy radically distorted the street politics of the former and the technology-primed economics of the latter, it did announce that the old hippie divide between a computerized technocracy and an earthy analog underground had not only broken down but dissolved. Some wags joked that Hendrix had rightly prophesied, and that the sixties had turned out to be the nineties after all. Even cable access TV was getting pretty strange (at least in Brooklyn). At the same time - and with enormous effect on the weirdness to come - the zine ecology began colonizing the online hinterlands of BBSes, Usenet alt groups, and the Well (which was, well, a big BBS). The eighties zine scene continued to flourish, but new production tools allowed publications like Mondo 2000, Magical Blend, Gnosis, and the “neurozine” Boing Boing to catapult from the DIY zone onto the magazine racks. The ambient music designed to fill chill-out tents helped stage a return of a pop-tech mysticism, intensified by MDMA’s glowing body-without-organs and the return to serious psychedelia aided and abetted by Terence McKenna and other Internet-enabled psychonauts. Postmodernism slipped into newsprint, Burning Man moved to the desert, and raves jumped the pond, intensifying the subliminal futurism of American electronic dance music into a sci-fi hedonism that turned the DJ into a nerdy shaman and the nervous system into a launching pad. Hip-hop transformed the cut-up into a general metaphor for the mixing and splicing of cultural “memes” - a concept first floated by Richard Dawkins in 1989. Underground currents of electronic music, psychedelia, rap, ufology, cyberculture, paganism, industrial postpunk, performance art, conspiracy theory, fringe science, mock religion, and other more or less conscious reality hacks invaded the spaces of novelty and possibility that emerged in the cracks of the changing media. Pockets of alternative practices across the spectrum crackled with millennialist intensity in the early nineties, as if achieving a kind of escape velocity. It wasn’t just the technology that was going to change the mass mind itself was, in an au courant bit of jargon from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, going molecular. ![]() ![]() I was already working as a culture critic for the Village Voice, covering music, technology, and TV, and later that year I wrote an article in which I claimed that, in addition to dissolving the concentrated power of mass media outlets like ABC, the onrushing proliferation of digital content channels and interactive media was going to savage “consensus reality” as well. Plunging down Lynch’s ominous apple-pie rabbit hole every week, we caught astral glimmers of the surreal disruptions on the horizon ahead. ![]() Lynch’s darkside soap opera temporarily undermined that simulacra of psychological and social stability. Today, in our era of torrents, YouTube, and Tivo, it is difficult to recall the hold that network television once had on the cultural conversation, let alone the concrete sense of historical time. Recalling that vibe right now reminds me of the peculiar spell that fell across me and my crew during the brief reign of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which began broadcasting on ABC in the spring of 1990. There was a peculiar feeling in the air those days, at least in my neck of the woods, an ambient sense of arcane possibility, cultural mutation, and delirious threat that, though it may have only reflected my youth, seemed to presage more epochal changes to come. IT MAKES ME SLIGHTLY PAINED to admit it, but the most vital and imaginative period of culture that I’ve yet enjoyed unfolded in the early 1990s (with the last years of the 1980s thrown in for good measure). This “Afterword 2.0” was written for a new edition, just out from North Atlantic Books. Erik Davis’s TechGnosis is considered the classic text on the relation between technology and the occult. ![]()
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