appropriate for ‘recolonizing the psyche-space of the entire superstructure of society’
(Dei 1994). It was time, according to Dei, ‘to use our newly won tools-of-the-gods
or Deity Devices as true extensions of our being...for the creation of a perfect and
beautiful deep green world’ (ibid.). This strident narrative taps into a sense of hope
amidst crisis, an idealism at odds with the dominant historical trajectory of war,
environmental disaster and famine. Heralding novel technological developments
deemed necessary for consciousness revolution, the idealism echoed that of the
techno-utopian Peter Russell, who regarded new communications media as critical
in achieving inward development, triggering the shift from personal to global
consciousness. In The Global Brain Awakens (1995/1982), Russell indicated how
the history of humanity demonstrates a tendency toward greater interconnectivity
With the internet and the worldwide web, Gaia was speculated to be ‘growing
herself a nervous system’. Drawing upon the message of self-maintenance and
responsibility in Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, the mounting crisis was itself
considered to be ‘an important evolutionary drive’ pushing us into new levels of
cooperation, with human cells self-organizing into ‘a rapidly integrating global
network, the nerve cells of an awakening global brain’ (Russell 1995). And, since
many of the advocates and emissaries of the IT-led global consciousness revolution
were also electronic-music enthusiasts, as Rushkoff conveyed in Cyberia (1994), the
sentiment was perhaps more accurately ‘rave-olution’.
Timewave Zero and the Alien DreamtimeTerence McKenna (1946–2000) was the principal spokesperson for the raveolution
—his body of work on technological ‘ingressions into social novelty’ becoming
prominent amongst techno-millennialists. A student of the ontological foundations
of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation, McKenna
championed psychedelic consciousness. Discovery of a complex fractal ‘timewave’
encoded in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, led McKenna,
together with his brother Dennis, to found Novelty Theory. Rooted in Chaos
Dynamics and Complexity Theory, Novelty elaborated Alfred North Whitehead’s
notion of novelty into a mathematical speculation concerning ‘the fundamental
architecture of time’.^3 The ultra-novel event McKenna called ‘Timewave Zero’
models the world as we know it, achieving ‘congrescence’, the apogee of infinite
complexity, on 21 December 2012.
Discovering the quantum mathematical ordering principles of the ancient
Chinese oracle, the McKennas were able to plot waves of ‘habit’ (conservation) and
‘novelty’ (strangeness) transpiring over the course of history, observing that the last
1,500 years reveal an acceleration of novelty which will culminate in ‘a complex
attractor that exists ahead of us in time’—pulling us towards it, determining and
terminating history. In Alien Dreamtime, a live spoken word performance recorded
with ambient Space Time Continuum at San Francisco’s Transmission Theatre on
26 February 1993,^4 McKenna stated that ‘something is calling us out of nature and
sculpting us in it’s own image’. ‘You can feel’, he elaborated, ‘that we’re approaching
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