enthusiasm of Rave with the eco-wisdom of Festival Culture to produce a mix
of meltdown proportions.^21Clark’s trans-Atlantic missiology was born. ‘Rave Culture’ was ‘the end of the word
as we know it’, and the cross-hemispheric zippies, harmonizing rationality and
mysticism, fusing practicality with idealism, and technology with ekstasis, were the
inter-subcultural intercontinental vanguard of the end-times. Emerging from the
1960s counterculture, influenced by Gurdjieff and witnessing the possibility of new
technology, Clark considered ‘the System’ to be collapsing under its own weight of
contradictions, and anticipated rave as the next and last ‘breakthrough device’. In
1987 the Epi predicted that a cooperative cultural virus reproducing within the new
dance culture would ‘infect the whole planetary culture’. The coming ‘renaissance
of sixties idealists and end-of-the-millennium techno-shamans’ was prophesized in
Clark’s The Book of RavElations to be humanity’s last chance.^22 Rave was to be the
final carrier of the inclusive, cooperative ‘meme’, constituting the critical mass
necessary to get everybody ‘out of their heads and purely mental processes and into...
their bodies and hearts’.^23
For the man who came to share the mantle with McKenna as ‘the Timothy Leary
of the 1990s’, possessing distinct millenarian possibilities, the acid house
phenomenon was more than a mere simulacrum of the 1960s. Indeed, in a later
prediction a ‘Global Summer of Love’ was expected to blossom in 1997, when the
‘Raver children’ would continue the ‘Beautiful Revolution’—the task of changing
the world unfinished by hippy forebears 30 years before.^24 To this end, Clark had
founded the London dance club Megatripolis. The meaning of the name can be
inferred from Clark’s postings on the WELL in February 1995.^25 Megatripolis was
an evolved biographical concept raised from Clark’s unpublished science fiction
novel ‘Megatripolis Forever’.^26 ‘After centuries leading right across the short hairs on
the very cusp of System Disaster’, he wrote, ‘WoMankind finally made the necessary
evolutionary leap to collective consciousness long foretold, escaped the illusion of
Time itself and camped permanently in the FUTURE PERFECT STATE which
they named Megatripolis.’ But only a few ‘escaped the illusion’, evolving ‘beyond
time’ and capable of ‘balling’: wandering through the past, obsessed with ‘researching’
why things had remained wrong for so long amongst their ancestors. We also learn
that the utopian dreams and visions universal to human societies are actually ‘future
memories’ of the Megatripolitan Utopia, of ‘how things already are beyond this
absurdly thin veil of time’.^27 Thus, as was announced in his speech on 4 November
1993 at Megatripolis, zippies were starting to pick up the pieces of the future: by
remembering it (because ‘we’ve lived there so long in the future’), and since the
citizens of the future perfect state keep dropping hints in our time as they travel
through.^28 In Clark’s techno-organic science-futurism, Megatripolis (which in 1995
opened for a while in San Francisco as Megatripolis West) was a this-worldly
accelerated learning model for the long awaited mass mutation to the Future Perfect
State. The ethno-trance club offered ambient lectures (‘edutainment’) in the early
evening, with ‘Parallel YOUniversity’^29 talks delivered by the likes of McKenna,
218 GRAHAM ST JOHN