syndrome, the BoM have taken on the role of ‘artists and madmen and trypsters and
children [and] all God’s Fools’, divined to ‘pass on the new awareness to the rest of
the race’. Just as it took 1 per cent of humanity to ‘make that SHIFT in
consciousness, as happened about 50,000 years ago when we fell into language and
history...[w]e have to lock in the harmonic upload opportunity synchronizing
through local spacetime Dec 21st 2012 and reel in the 5th dimension!’^12
CyberTribe Rising: anarcho-spiritual techno-tribalismThe writing of anarcho-mystic Hakim Bey (a.k.a. Peter Lamborn Wilson) was
heavily implicated in forging the primitivist-extropian alliance at the heart of the
Alien Dreamtime. His Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991), or TAZ, became poetic
inspiration for cooperative, consensual, non-commodified dancescapes amplifying
re-enchantment and the liberation of desire. Outside the surveillance of the state
and the incursions of the corporate world, the free outdoor rave-TAZ became a tech-
savvy anarcho-liminal utopia wherein inhabitants claim to achieve that which
resembles a peak-experience, or union, with co-liminaries and nature. As ‘a means to
maximize autonomy and pleasure for as many individuals and groups as possible as
soon as possible’, the TAZ is also an effort to ‘reconcile...wilderness and cyberspace’
(Bey 1995). While it accommodates efforts to attain the ‘palaeolithic’, the
immediate insurrection is optimized and orchestrated through the internet. Hosting
promiscuous utopics, the TAZ would give birth to mutant offspring carrying
primitivist and extropian genes. And while gatherings became humanist laboratories
hosting techno-shamanic experimentation with unpredictable results, the
‘downloading [of] political expression and reverie learnt on the dancefloor and
inside the webs of networked mainframes INTO the OUTSIDE geography of LIFE
AS WE KNOW IT’ (Dei 1994), was a practice widely assumed in the global dance
community throughout the 1990s (cf. Razam 2001).
The popularity of McKenna’s psychedelicism, the Mayan Sacred Calendar and the
TAZ idea amongst the ‘digerati’ illustrated disenchantment with the conventions of
radical opposition. As the idea of socialist revolution was eschewed, there grew an
optimistic belief that ‘disappearance from the grid’ in the form of networked
‘communities of feeling’ would, with the assistance of technology and
deconstructionist spirituality, stimulate the evolution of the Global Brain—thus
giving rise to psycho-cultural transformation. This trajectory was exemplified by the
social formation given character in Geoff White’s influential ‘CyberTribe rising’
(1993). In White’s view, a new horizontal ‘cybernetic model’, which he called ‘C5I2'
(or ‘Community, Consensus, Cooperation, Communication, Cybernetics,
Intelligence and Intuition’), and its concomitant technology, was mutating from the
post-World War II vertical-control model which, he conveys, was often referred to
in military circles as ‘C3I’ (or ‘Command, Control, Communication and
Intelligence’). With C5I2 technology, ‘[i]nformation passes from small groups to
other small groups through what some call the Web, an interconnected
communications network made up of mail, word-of-mouth, phone-trees, VCRs,
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