held together by a hopeful view that decentralized and pirated technology can be
adopted in the quest for spiritual advancement, self-development and wider cultural
change: ‘what we have here is a major player in the premillennial cultural meme pool,
and a loose-knit movement of folks who aim to change the world—while having the
best time of their lives’ (Marshall 1994:79).
While Clark believed that the zippy phenomenon would stimulate the quickening
of the ‘new new age’, promoting the rave-millennium, he was often perceived as
little more than a media-wise hustler of youth culture, little removed from other
marketeers selling the millennium. As had been noted by Sarah Ferguson, ‘the
Zippy pitch—combining the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppie with the spiritual
indulgence of the hippie—sounded dangerously close to a Fruitopia commercial’
(1995:54). Since the approach seemed long on enthusiasm and short on efficacy—
Clark was never one to spoil a grand vision with fine details—he was rebuked and
dismissed by cultural radicals and anarchists. Yet, for one thing, the zippy
‘programme’ deviated from the tech-dependent libertarianism harboured by
Extropians. As cyberpunk critic Vivian Sobchak commented, ‘A zippie feels the
terror and promise of the planet’s situation and is prepared to use anything short of
violence—magic, technology, entrepreneurial skill—to create a new age in as short a
time as possible’ (Sobchak, in Marshall 1994:79). Moreover, the intentional
consciousness-raising party is a lasting zippy legacy. While Megatripolis became
London’s edutainment capital, San Francisco’s the Learning Party—where events
like ‘Envision the Eco-village’, held in October 2001, are themed with guest
speakers, DJs and VJs—may well be the US equivalent.
Global trance-formations: children of the sun and moonWith its reputation as a countercultural hotbed, San Francisco became a laboratory
for the 1990s cross-pollination of techno-eco-spirituality. The Bay Area became a
crucible for technospiritual trends sampling New Age and Neo-Pagan lifestyle traits
using accessible and alternative technologies. Trance, trance dance or psytrance—
which, at the hands of a ‘digital shaman’ like Goa Gill, had been incubating on the
beaches of Goa between the mid-1980s and early 1990s and later percolating in
domestic clubs like London’s Megatripolis and Return to the Source—carried the
weight of an expressive spiritualism adopted by a community harnessing new
electronic media in their simultaneous return to tribal roots and ascension to the
stars. Desmond Hill declared that, from 1991, San Francisco was home to ‘the most
vibrantly conscious House Movement in the world...[with] an energetic enthusiasm
and sense of togetherness that is sadly lacking in the gray wastelands of England’s dark
Albion isles’ (Hill 1999:105).
In the early 1990s, buoyed by the dot-com boom, and filled with a growing
awareness of the global environmental crisis, techno-millenarians seemed to be at
their highest density in San Francisco. Many of the young tech-savvy populace
believed they were at the head of a new information revolution, and members of the
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