Previous trips have brought me into contact with the nightlife nationalism of Taipei, Singapore’s neo-pagan rave renaissance, and the “indie” era of Thailand’s fledging legal weed industry. This year I tacked on a trip to China, aka “the mainland”—a place that, when I lived there in the late-2000s, was defined by late-night lamb skewers and cheap cigarettes, tacky clubs buried in towering skyscrapers, and the ambient threat of police raids and piss tests, which never seemed to lessen the Chinese appetite for sketchy drugs and raucous fun.

My partner and I were there for a wedding, and unfortunately, our schedule didn’t allow for a detour into cities like Chengdu or Shenzhen, home to newer clubs like .TAG and Oil that have ascended into the global club pantheon and are have a reputation for multi-day benders of hardcore hedonism. Instead, I scoped out the happenings in Beijing, which has become the “cleanest” city in China, in many senses of the term.

My China dispatch will be dropping soon, but in the meantime, I’d like to make use of my current Asia-Pacific timezone to convene a virtual meetup for all the subs in the Eastern hemisphere. I’d love to chat with more readers in Asia, Europe, and Australia—although people in other places should also be able to make this work!

As a reminder, these virtual hangs are for paid subscribers, and take the form of informal, small-group conversations where I share some of the things I’m currently writing/thinking about, and get to hear what you guys are doing out in the world. It’s a chance to connect with me, and each other, and I find that they tend to generate new insights and leads into the underground ecosystems we’re all operating in. For this edition, I’d especially love to hear about your experiences in China and Asia, especially in the countercultural zones. Info + link to RSVP/join is below the jump. Hope to see ya there.

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This week’s post contains audio clips from my interview with sort of awkward but extraordinary interview with Rick Perry, as well as all the gossip and pontifications that couldn’t fit into the New Yorker story. If you’d like to read past the paywall, subscribe to Rave New World—or forward this to a few friends to get a comped sub.

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As many Lhooq supporters and simps already know, I debuted in the New Yorker this month, with a piece about the coterie of conservative cowboys who’ve charged to the forefront of psychedelic legalization. You can catch up on it here, listen to me gab on the Political Scene podcast, or—for the truly attention challenged—watch the highlights over on IG.

As a New Yorker neophyte, I thoroughly enjoyed the exotic experience of old-school journalism, particularly working with the fact-checker, a middle-aged woman named Bea with a full-throated laugh who compared her job to being a “janitor” who cleans up after everyone else. While I’ve worked with fact-checkers elsewhere, the density of this story’s reporting resulted in an unmatched intimacy. Bea reviewed all the recordings, notes, and videos I’d taken over the past six months, and the feeling was like she was holding my hand as we backtracked through a winding path I’d thwacked through a thicket, scrutinizing every stick and stone.

I didn’t expect this granular fidelity to the truth to also be so life-affirming? I mean, this is a job that AI could never. Because it’s not about Googling a bunch of shit to discern fact versus fiction, but all the different degrees of truth, and how to focus a story’s aperture to the sharpest version. As Bea told me herself, it entails calling up sources and asking them, “is this what you really meant?”

God bless the fact-checkers, the last bulwark against the postmodern combustion of objectivity.

I started writing this story from a place of deep ambivalence. My consciousness has been shaped by the progressive-left values of the dancefloor, and I found it difficult to reconcile how the so-called “enemy” had orchestrated this historic win for the psychedelic movement, moving the political needle and bagging millions of dollars for much-needed research. I didn’t know if I could trust them. Even more confusingly, many leaders in the space celebrated the news as win for the greater good, instead of a devil’s bargain. In the months since, I’ve started to see more pointed critiques from the anarchist left, like this op-ed written by underground practitioner Dimitri Mugianis.

I felt compelled to go behind enemy lines, fly to Texas, and put on some cowboy boots. Which is how I found myself in almost comically strange rooms, like a health club in Austin run by a MAHA supporter that was full of crypto-libertarian merch that said “GOD IS DECENTRALIZED.” At this Americans for Ibogaine fundraiser, proudly redneck ranchers told me about their ibogaine trips in between bites of brisket. But I also ran into an LA weed guy I knew from my days organizing Weed Rave, chatted with an activist who helped pass Colorado’s psychedelic bills, and met the CEO of a biohacking company that is doing some truly sci-fi, gene-hacking shit. It became clear that the ibogaine movement was pulling in all kinds of demographics—not just trad Republicans. Instead, these people often classified themselves as some undefinable third thing—an alternate positioning that may be the end point of the political horseshoe moment we’re living in.

“I do not think about left and right. I think about simplicity versus complexity as the real political spectrum,” the host of the event, a self-identified philosopher named Dean Berlinerblau, told me. “It’s the difference between those who are overly rigid with their perspectives and come to simplified conclusions, and those who can hold complexity and integrate contradictory perspectives.”

Well, when he put it that way, I wanted to be on the side of pro-complexity too! To escape from the numb-brained dialectics of performative politics, and expose myself to challenging perspectives that might broaden my worldview. The question was where the threshold lay between openness and self-betrayal—how much difference I could accept before losing myself into the grey. I also wondered if this kind of pseudo-centrist language might be just a cover-up for conservative contrarianism, in that Bari Weiss bullshit kind of way. The only way I could figure it out was to keep going.

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Two weeks ago, a 33-year-old resident of Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood posted a four-second video to Instagram. “Whhhhat am I looking at?” she said, filming a raccoon scampering across a lawn with his short, round body, long limbs and loping gait—the result of a rare congenital deformity called short spine syndrome. The woman named him Jimothy. The post went viral, and caused everyone in my city to lose their minds.

When I saw the video, I experienced what I thought was an appropriate amount of brief delight at an oddly shaped, scrappy animal creeping around like a cryptid. But mysterious forces seem determined to keep Seattle’s rare meme moment alive beyond its usual life expectancy. The Seattle Mariners will host a Jimothy night next week with novelty shirts and rookie cards. Seattle City Council members officially declared the next few months “Jimothy Summer,” and hosted a Jimothy art competition where the top masterpiece was put on display at City Hall. At the Seattle Art Fair, I saw a Jimothy painting on sale for $1,250 by an artist who is 83 years old. I keep finding myself an accidental participant in the Jimothy cultural production complex: on the same day I got roped into hosting a Jimothy-themed members’ social at my ceramics studio, Michelle asked me to go to a cursed Jimothy-themed party for Rave New World.

The Jimothy Rave took place last Sunday afternoon at Nectar Lounge, a live music venue not far from Jimothy’s known habitat. It was organized by What the Dance, a San Francisco-based event production outlet. Among their offerings: “CRASH THE COTTAGE: A BRATTY RIVALRY DANCE PARTY” and “PREVIOUSLY ON…THE NOSTALGIA SOUNDTRACK DANCE PARTY.” The Jimothy event description promised EDM, throwbacks, something called “raccooncore”— and that “LIFE-SIZED JIMOTHYS WILL BE ROAMING THE VENUE.” My husband optimistically suggested this could be a dog whistle for Seattle’s thriving furry community—would they come through? I bought a single ticket for $16.63, a dollar of which went to a wildlife rehab center.

As the party approached, I felt nervous about showing up alone and kept texting my Seattle raver friends, begging one of them to be my Virgil. “lmao” and “ew no” was the general response. Nobody wanted to spend their Sunday afternoon at a viral meme party listening to cheesy EDM and pop edits in a crowd that would probably skew normie and bro-y (fair). Some people I knew in the underground scene were actively against the concept of a “Jimothy-themed rave.”

One friend told me, when I met them at a bar on Friday night, that theme parties quash individual expression in favor of consumerism. “Sometimes the lowest hanging fruit is the most rotten,” they said, adding that Jimothy fans would likely exterminate Seattle’s short-spined mascot if they actually saw him in their backyards.

Maybe I was feeling defensive. Jimothy mania couldn’t be evil if I was participating in it! I also had a contrarian impulse to argue with my friends. Maybe they were just being elitist about EDM! Maybe there were opportunities here for earnest, stupid fun, which I realized sounded no more sophisticated than “LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS.” I told myself it would be better to go to the party alone. This way, I could wrap my paws around the event without my friends’ judgment.

On Sunday afternoon I went home after work and nibbled a weed edible before I showered. I bravely ingested about 2mg, which is a 3x higher dosage than I would usually take as a pathetically anxious, infrequent user, but I thought I should at least try to loosen up. Michelle told me that she would cover the cost of any chemical lubricants and that my assignment was to try to have fun.

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I’ve just returned from a short trip to the Bay Area, where I’ve been chasing a yen to cover the freaky/cringey fringes of the tech scene. (Could this be a new pivot for my countercultural reporting, or am I delulu for thinking psychedelic tech parties will be anything…

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My friends in New York have been telling me that Dimes Square is cooked—that last little triangle in lower Manhattan where you could fuck around and catch a vibe is now running on ashy fumes like a bong that’s been cashed. I was told that the outdoor tables by Clandestino where Eckhaus-clad art hos used to get drunk have been conquered by the Alo Yoga l…

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I’ve spent a lot of this month in Texas—stuffing my face with steak, rubbing shoulders with Big Oil executives, and comparing Oura Ring scores with ex-governor Rick Perry while reporting on conservative psychedelia. I’m excited to share these surreal scenes with you soon.

A big driver behind Republicans’ recent embr…

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I don’t remember how I first came across DoubleBlind magazine, but when I did, it felt like a revelation. In today’s media landscape, there is nothing quite like it: wild tales from the esoteric fringes next to portraits of wisened indigenous elders, musings from mystics and poets, and deep investigative reporting on drug culture’s shape-shifting faces—all accompanied by lush photography that could have been plucked from the pages of National Geographic… if the art editors were on mescaline. It was nothing short of a full-spectrum exploration of contemporary psychedelic consciousness, each issue like a feast of the subcultural stew that it emerged from.

Eventually I started writing for the magazine and its newsletter, and even served a stint as a contributing editor. DoubleBlind co-founder Shelby Hartman became a good friend, and we’d spend afternoons co-working at her Victorian cottage, taking breaks to do yoga under a lemon tree, or sample some of the many psychoactive products that were constantly showing up on her front porch. While I always admired Shelby’s sharp editorial eye and grueling work ethic—traits made it possible to publish a magazine amidst a dying industry—I also began to see her as something deeper: a psychedelic lore keeper, and a critical node in the mycelial network behind today’s psychedelic renaissance.

This spring, Shelby and her DoubleBlind co-founder Madison Margolin (also a notable psychedelic journalist!) published The DoubleBlind Guide to Psychedelics: A Road Map to Tripping, Microdosing, and Beyond. Ostensibly, it’s a Psychedelics 101-style primer that covers the basics of substances like mushrooms, LSD, DMT, and MDMA, including how to prepare for and integrate the trip, proper dosages, and harm reduction tips. But what makes this book go far beyond a basic guide is their inclusion of indigenous issues, drug policy, psychedelic elders, and headier cultural practices—with their writing on these topics deeply informed by seven years of reporting in the magazine. It’s as if Shelby and Madison wanted to say: if you’re going to do psychedelics in 2026, it’s not enough to know how to microdose a mushroom. You should also know how to be a psychedelic person.

On a recent evening, DoubleBlind hosted a book launch party in the hilly canyon of Topanga in Los Angeles, where a small group of friends and fans sat on cushions in a living room to listen to live sitar and Indian classical music. A few hours before the event, Shelby called me to ask if I’d host a Q&A with her about the new book. “Michelle, I know this is last minute, but I feel like we could do this conversation high, while sliding off our chairs!” Below is an edited version of our rather spontaneous chat—the book is also out now, cop it via Hachette.

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Sup fam!

It has come to my attention that many of you are interested in (or at least munching whimsically at the idea of) starting your own Substack and would like some advice. When I launched Rave New World in 2019, all I knew is that trad media was dying and I needed a new platform to write about raving and drugs—in my own crazy gonzo style. Over the years, it’s become a lifeline, opening up horizons that I couldn’t even imagine—and at the same time, presenting all kinds of challenges and annoying shit I’ve had to work around.

So many writers (and non-journalists) are now flocking to Substack, which has moved from the periphery to the center of the media ecosystem; as the space gets more saturated, I think it’s important to consider whether this is really right for you.

While this newsletter is such a powerful tool for reporting on subcultural subjects, I think starting your own platform is a big shift that requires new ways of thinking about engagement and the dissemination of (sub)cultural information—especially if you’re interested in writing about the underground. This Friday, I’ll be hosting our next virtual hang for subscribers, where I’ll do a brief presentation on my journey as a Substacker writing about “alt” subjects, and then take any of your questions.

The meeting will last about an hour, and is open to all paid subscribers. Everyone is welcome, even if you’re just curious or bored and want to gab. The video link is after the paywall—hope to see you at the hang!

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SXSW might be the best festival ever for scoring random free shit—and I’m saying this as a professional swag bag schemer. The music, film and tech gathering has been gradually cannibalized by corporate interests since it began in 1987, going from a scrappy showcase of Austin’s music scene to a networking bonanza for tech founders and angel investors rai…

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Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

Techno Wizard Jeff Mills beamed into the simulation known as “Earth” on a laser, piercing through the clouds through a hole in the sky and taking in the possible utopia surrounding him with unblinking, amphibious eyelids. Perhaps the DMT entities who watch over this god-forsaken realm sensed that the earthlings needed something different amid the dust of collapse. So they gave us techno, an immaculate technology manufactured at the nexus of the ancient-future, and appointed The Wizard as one of its storied keepers. At least I think that’s how the mythos goes.

Even as he coasted through 80s Detroit on a skateboard, raising his fist with Underground Resistance, and absorbing the synth disco, cosmic funk, and proto-electro on The Electrifying Mojo’s airwaves, The Wizard hovered in a threshold outside of time. While peers looked to submerged civilizations and cybernetics for inspiration, The Wizard spoke to the stars, his antennae permanently tuned towards the frequencies of the future, his mind spinning through the rings of Saturn. Here was a man with an extraordinary talent: the ability to jump between timelines and intercept otherworldly transmissions.

Listen to Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, enshrined as the greatest DJ mix of all time. In that seventh-floor club under the seedy neon of Shinjuku, The Wizard flexed with a raw manic energy so pure that he had the crowd on their knees as records flew to the floor, scratching and twisting and teetering on the verge of collapse as he tore open wormholes in search of communion with the machines. As the needle slid across the surfaces of the discs, motorik rhythms driving against whiplash backspins, propelling forward before bringing it all back, the precarity of it all became a metaphor for the frailty of information transmission—and the insistence that we persevere when it all goes wrong. The Wizard’s undying desire to go beyond merges sci-fi and fantasy to conjure sounds we’ve yet to feel—if you wanted to believe in something, why not believe in this.

But even as he probed the impossible, the Wizard gazed into the dark halls where he presided night after night, and saw inside the dancing bodies a decay caused by wanton hedonism without direction—a rigidity of the mind that needed to be further coaxed open, towards the limitless possibilities beyond the decadence of the dancefloor. The membrane between this world and the next was thin, but few dared to walk in. Instead they shuddered at the thought of it, closed their eyes, or held up their phone screens. Still, the Wizard refused to retreat into the gilded memory palace of nostalgia, or the bloated inertia of success, ascending into his role as an elder statesman without ever losing his cool. He stretched the elastic skin of techno over new forms—orchestras, spiritual jazz, psychedelic scores to silent films—and never stopped preaching his prayer of techno-optimism.

But as Big Tech’s oligarchs tightened their grips of enslavement by algorithm, some wondered if The Wizard had become an avatar for a future forestalled. Can the speculative Afrofuturism of the techno elders still be a counterweight to the grim reality of digital feudalism? How quickly have the instruments of our promised liberation turned into the tools of our surveillance. Even the machines know we are lost. As I wandered through the mist wondering how to download the reality upgrade, a disembodied voice suddenly emerged from a black screen. From behind the veil The Wizard granted me a few moments to hack his mind, and learn how he’s thinking about some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

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🎙️ As a bonus for paid subscribers, the audio version of this interview is available at the bottom of this post! Also a reminder that our first subscriber hang is today at 4:20pm PST, details here.

Michelle Lhooq: Hi Jeff, I wanted to start with kind of a fun question. Whether it’s through dreams or mind-expanding psychoactives or spirituality or even direct experience, I was wondering if you’ve ever had a compelling alien encounter?

Jeff Mills: [laughs] No, no… I’ve never had a compelling encounter.

Not even in the subconscious mind?

Well, in my youth, a few strange things happened. But… I think that those were more dreams than anything else.

[laughs] I believe in dream visitations.

Well, actually, a few years ago, I’ve seen something quite interesting on a flight. You know, looking out the window, something clearly was at an angle going up into the atmosphere, not that far from our plane, that was a brownish, grayish color. And it was at an angle that was definitely not an airplane. But I think that’s kind of common now, right? I think that many people are seeing things like this, even more so now.

Well in the age of SpaceX, I think it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish.

I mean, if you run the numbers and you do the calculations, chances are great that we’re not alone. That’s for sure.

So I was watching Metropolis the other night and it struck me that the speculative vision of the future that the film presents has in many ways already arrived. I’m curious, as so many advances that once seemed like science fiction become real, how has your vision of the future shifted from back when you were thinking about this in the 80s and 90s?

I’m getting more and more excited, actually, as time moves on. I like to look back to compare say, 100 years ago, 1926 to 2026, looking at similarities between what was happening then and what’s happening now, in order to be able to have some type of idea of what may be happening in 100 years from now, and how we’ll get there. And it’s kind of interesting to look at the signs, you know, the signals and the signs.

The signs of what?

Well, 100 years ago, we were in the Industrial Age—that ended around 1950 after the war and the Computer Age started. It’s looking very likely that the same thing is going to happen. The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy. I think that either our senses will be enhanced, or we will gain more [senses]. Or technology will allow us to be able to do things in those types of directions, with that type of skill. So reading someone’s thoughts and reading someone’s mind and feeling and sensing and understanding things non-verbally and things like that, I think might have something to do with the latter part of this century.

“The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy.”

That’s fascinating. So you think we’re going into a post-verbal paradigm.

I see the signs of it now, with AI and what we may need advanced technology for. So, protecting ourselves from nature, and making ourselves live longer, and be more healthy, and learning more, and experiencing things that we physically would not normally be able to experience.

Right now, if you want to go to Chile or Italy, you have to get on a plane to do that, and you have to experience it [by] walking around. But I think that by [the latter half of the century], the simulation of it will be so advanced that basically you’ll be able to experience and feel everything that you would normally feel if you were physically there.

That shift that you’re talking about is one that’s based from language to feeling, right? Telepathy implies some kind of intuitive sense, rather than direct communication. It’s the realm of psychic connection and feeling.

I think that either by consequence or by choice, we will have to change as well. My sense is what’s coming is going to require us to change the way that we think about certain things, in order to be able to go a bit beyond history, and go a bit beyond mathematics, and go a bit beyond science, into things that we probably never thought that we would be thinking or exploring. But I see the signs of that now, actually.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about AI. It’s obviously been such a mind-bending shift for all of us in this era, and it’s making a lot of people think about things like the consciousness of machines, the ethics of machine-human relationships, and things like that. I’m curious how this AI era has altered your thinking on our relationships to synthetic consciousness, or synthetic agents?

The creation of AI isn’t something that just popped up. We have been thinking towards this type of existence for quite a long time. In this film Metropolis, the character creates the robot, and the robot transforms into an unrecognizable form, and people are fooled by this robot. I think that we’ve been wishing to have this for a very long time. So I think that AI is something that we’ve all worked towards: technology to the point that it becomes our best friend and our helper and our assistant. It can solve problems that we can’t solve, and can see things that we can’t see. I’m actually quite optimistic about it. The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing. Because no one figured out how to make the dates change or something like that. So this panic is valid, but I think that the benefits and the rewards of how it’s going to help us outweigh and overshadow the fears that we have now, right?

“The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing.”

I guess the big difference though is that when the Y2k thing happened, everyone could see that it was much ado about nothing, whereas we’re already seeing examples of real world harms that are being caused by AI. But I’m curious—

—I just have to add, it’s not like we did not have opportunities and chances to create safeguards so that people can save their jobs, right? And still, for some reason, we’re letting it evolve in this direction where people are going to be allowed to fire massive numbers of workers, and the society—we are letting this happen. So like I said, we have been working towards this for quite a long time, and there are things that we can do: we can really press our politicians and our government to actually do something about it. But I don’t know. In my opinion, we’re a bit too passive about it. So I just have to assume that we’re on some course [that] everybody is wishing to have.

There’s a big debate right now within the music world, too, about working with AI. Obviously Bandcamp caused a lot of drama by banning music that uses AI. Have you experimented with using AI and producing music? Or are you interested in doing that?

No, I haven’t. I haven’t made an effort to, really. The way I produce music is still very… it’s the old way. It’s connecting one machine to the next machine. There’s no computer in my studio. It’s very old fashioned, and it’s very hands on. But I’m waiting for the moment where, even in my small little studio, I can have this assistant that can do things for me and work on things while I’m working on other things, and and someone that I can speak to and throw ideas at, and those ideas could be kicked around. I look forward to situations like that. But yeah, I like options when I’m in the studio. I don’t record music really in one particular way. So for very complex things, for instance, if I’m working on a conceptual album and it’s on the subject of something that is just a bit beyond my knowledge, or just beyond understanding it, AI might be able to rationalize certain things to make sense [of it]. I might be able to sit down and compose music, for instance, [about] traveling through a black hole, and what that could feel like physically—if that were possible. You know, thinking about things like that. So I can see myself using [AI] at some point.

I love your optimism around all of this, but sometimes I find it a little bit hard to connect with, because I think that as people living in this technocratic hellscape that seems to be the present, there’s this feeling that the system is really closing in, and that the scale of technological greatness that’s so magnificent to behold is also being gate kept by the elites. Even the counterculture of raving and these tools of our liberation, like psychedelic drugs, they’re all being co-opted and commercialized and used against us.

You know, I hear you. But I just understand that the people have the power. The power is with the people. It’s not what politicians or…

It’s all so lethargic, and it feels like what you said before: there’s barely any pushback. How do we reclaim some of this agency?

I don’t know. But we have the power, we can change things when we want, and I think that the world is the way it is, because we allow things to happen. When we don’t want things to happen, we change them. I think people are thinking maybe more about the consequences of what it may take to be able to change things, and put things in the right direction. Maybe that is creating the reluctance to get out into the street and shut the country down and shut it down, right? We have what we have, because this is what we’re allowing ourselves to deal with. But I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like—trillionaires and billionaires controlling everything. But they can’t do anything without people, right? That’s just how I feel, and I don’t know why we don’t shut it down. At times I think we should, I think it’s necessary, but I don’t know why.

“I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like.”

Well, I think partly it’s a crisis of imagination. And you’ve spoken about this a lot: about how the techno scene suffers from this lack of imagination, to come up with a vision of a future that isn’t based in hedonism and nostalgia and escapism. Do you feel like the rave can come up with the new vision of the future that fits the needs of today?

Sure, sure. I think so, and I think that there are enough people thinking in that direction to make it happen. But will they do it? Will they say, OK, enough is enough. We want something that we can really be proud of, and we can hand down to generations, and they can practice this art form and and be able to live a normal life, and send their kids to college. I mean, we can do that. It’s always been this possibility to have discussions about certain things that we could be doing to make things better for us in the music industry. But people would prefer to go to Ibiza instead, and just party and not think about things like that. So I hear what you’re saying, but in the back of my head, no one’s controlling what I do with music. I have an incredible amount of freedom of what I can do in my own studio. I just need electricity and a little bit of time and ideas and dreams, and that’s all, really, that I need. Everyone that produces music in this industry has the same situation.

So it raises the question, why don’t we have a large variety of different types of ideas, and reasons why we were making this music is? It’s by choice. People are choosing to not do certain things, not use music for certain reasons, by choice. We’ve been working for this world that we’re living in right now for quite a while. And many of us, like myself, are shocked to see the way that it is, and how people are getting away with doing all these crazy things. But we definitely have the override switch. The people have that. I don’t know why we don’t use it. It’s a mystery.

Thank you for the reminder that we have this override switch and it’s time for us to push the button. All right. Thanks so much, Jeff. I’ll talk to you later.

Thanks, Michelle

🎙️ Wanna listen to the silky smooth baritone of The Wizard as he fields Michelle’s questions? Subscribe to Rave New World!

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Hey everyone <3

It’s been six (!) years since I started Rave New World, and the community meetups for this newsletter’s readership have taken many forms: mushroom parties, early morning ambient performances in the park, weed raves on Zoom, group microdosing journeys… it’s been an amazing ride.

Moving ahead into 2026, I’m excited to engage with the suppo…

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In June 2023, I attended Psychedelic Science, the largest psychedelic conference in the world. The five-day event took place in a sprawling convention center in downtown Denver, attracting 12,000 attendees from 52 countries, including not just the biggest scientific experts, but also random celebrities, politicians, and billionaires who’d decided to attach their brands to tripping.

On the main stage, nepo baby Jaden Smith, NFL player Aaron Rodgers, and Boomer rockstar Melissa Etheridge yapped about how much ayahuasca had changed their lives, while in the side rooms, wiley entrepreneurs hustled to raise Series A funding while the money spigot from deep-pocketed investors like soap mogul Dr Bronner and tech bro Christian Angermayer was still flowing. In the fluorescent-lit, carpeted halls, briefcase-toting Pharma investors sipped kava mocktails next to rat-tailed hippies, while buttoned-up therapists snapped selfies with feathered shamans, and DMT-vaping psychonauts swapped esoteric trip reports with galaxy brain researchers. Even though direct sales of psychedelics was still illegal in Colorado, vendors in the exhibition hall still hawked pounds of shrooms wrapped in giant plastic bags, while offering samples of LSD microdoses to passersby.

It was a surreal scene that spoke to the power of MAPS—the influential psychedelic advocacy organization behind the conference—as well as its charismatic, 69-year-old founder Rick Doblin, who I would often spot heading out to the Burner-inflected afterparties as I returned to the hotel at 2am, joint dangling from his lips. The psychedelic industry had hit a high point in the hype cycle, buoyed by early clinical trial results in the 2010s that demonstrated how psychedelics are effective for mental health disorders such as depression and PTSD. Emerging from the shadows of prohibition, these substances were quickly shedding their reputations for decadence and delinquency—instead being cast as a paradigm shift in mental health care. Everyone expected that Lykos, the for-profit Pharma arm of MAPS, would fulfill its promise to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy within the next year or two. In this window of time, it was like the industry was holding its breath, and everything felt possible—as long as you believed.

In the summer of 2025, I returned to Denver for the next edition of Psychedelic Science. Only 8,000 people were in attendance this time, and the previous edition’s atmosphere of frenzied excitement had dissipated from the building. In the two long years, since the last conference, the dream of psychedelic legalization had been dashed after the FDA rejected Lykos’ application for MDMA-assisted therapy, citing insufficient data, issues with clinical trial design, and a host of other concerns—including whether the drug’s euphoric effects could lead to addiction. Sexual misconduct by a pair of therapists who participated in the trial also led to intense public scrutiny on the ethics of psychedelic therapy, and Psymposia, the leftist watchdog group that aggressively amplified these concerns, was blamed for torpedoing MAPS/Lykos’ efforts and sowing division.

As legalization stalled, funding dried up and stocks collapsed, leading to several high-profile psychedelic startups like Field Trip Health and Silo Wellness to shut down and file for bankruptcy. Industry-wide turbulence seemed to suggest cracks in the dominant systems that were struggling to integrate these powerful tools. Was it even possible for clinical trials to measure the totality of the psychedelic experience? As companies tried to turn these slippery substances into ordinary medicines backed by insurance and co-pays, it seemed like they were also revealing the contradictions in capitalism, as well as cultural fears around pleasure and dependency.

At the conference, founders of psychedelic companies spoke candidly on panels about their failures, including how they had overestimated the public’s desire for expensive psychedelic treatments—leading to the closure of luxury ketamine clinics once hyped as the future of medicine. Some of these CEOs also admitted that investing in social reciprocity programs with indigenous communities were “distractions”—mistakes that detracted from their profit-seeking goals. Many conversations, both on and off stage, revolved around the dark side of ketamine, with the lack of proper regulatory oversight and potential for addiction leading many to wonder if ketamine clinics were a preview of what could go wrong if other psychedelics are commercialized too quickly.

Even the exhibition hall that previously felt like an open-air drug market had been cleaned up, with vendors no longer openly selling psychedelics; indigenous shamans offering sniffs of hapé (sacred tobacco snuff) even got in trouble with security. While the adrenaline rush of unadulterated hope had been neutered by the collective comedown, in many ways, the atmosphere also felt more grounded and connected to reality.. There was no longer a sense that anyone could start a psychedelic company with a pitch deck and a dream.

Now that MDMA was no longer the frontrunner for FDA approval, the industry’s attention shifted towards ibogaine, a South African shrub known to be particularly effective as a treatment for addiction. Just a few days before the conference, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed Senate Bill 2308, allocating $50 million in public funding to study ibogaine as a treatment for opioid use disorder and other mental health conditions. Seemingly overnight, Texas became the biggest government funder for psychedelic research, with conservative politicians like ex-governor Rick Perry now these drugs’ biggest proponents. War veterans, who suffer from suicide and addiction at outsized rates, were now the moral center of the psychedelic movement’s more militarized and MAHA direction—strategically highlighted in fundraising, lobbying, and PR efforts because of their bipartisan appeal. Who could be so heartless as to deny life-saving care to vets?

I wandered around the conference in a miasma of increasing confusion and dread. Psychedelics have historical ties to the hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-war movement, but in this befuddling new era, they were being championed by Navy SEALS, Republican legislators, and military vets who spoke about healing the trauma of warfare as a patriotic duty. Meanwhile, MAPS’ attempt to legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy had seemingly failed in part because they failed a leftist group’s purity test, but the companies poised to become the new front-runners, Compass and AtaiBeckley, are venture-backed biotech companies with ruthlessly commercial and IP-driven strategies that leave little regard for public benefit. Psychedelic legalization seemed closer than ever to gaining bipartisan, institutional support—but at what cost?

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The Rave Discourse™ is always shifting as it percolates through the after-dark antechambers and digital echo chambers where the raveheads gather to gab. Over the past few years, it feels like the collective consensus has been complexifying, as the conversation turns from celebrating rave culture’s radical potential, to mulling over the limits of raving as a political force—a shift that mirrors the culture’s increasing co-optation and commercialization in the age of Burning Man hegemony and Instagram DJs.

Most of my pontifications on The Sorry State of the Dancefloor happens on this very platform (shoutout to the subs!), but I was recently invited to speak in an ongoing conversation series between psychedelic writers and artists, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, titled Poetics and Plant Medicine. Held in the cozy confines of Bathers Library—a super cute members-only library in downtown Oakland—the inaugural event that I participated in was called “States of Euphoria,” and centered on rave culture. As Young wrote in the event description:

“The liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits?”

My fellow panelists were Hannah Baer—a writer, psychoanalyst and meme lord whose barbed insights on raving and revolution are sharpened from sweaty experience as a New York nightlife party girl; as well as Arun Saldanha, an academic whose canonical book Psychedelic White examined the Goa trance scene through a critical race theory lens (the book was also an invaluable source for my essay, “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”)

Our conversation with each other, and later with the audience, ended up circling many of the most pressing questions and concerns facing rave culture and psychedelics today—it was like a hive mind took over, and everyone was relieved to have the chance to work some shit out, together. I’m excited to share it with you guys below.

(Bay Area folks, don’t miss the rest of the series, which includes upcoming conversations and reading groups on psychedelic tourism, time travel, and Black/indigenous healing practices. More info here!)

Hannah Baer: I was curious how both of you hold this complexity around parties as liberatory experiences, in contrast with more difficult, objectionable, or hegemonic parts of these spaces.

Michelle Lhooq: People look towards raving for the same reason they look towards religion: we’re all looking for some kind of compass. Raving is a way to imagine a more utopian way of being. But I feel the same way about rave culture as I do about psychedelics, where I’m having a personal reckoning over the realization that they are not inherently liberatory. I drank the Kool Aid for a really long time about both, so the trough of disillusionment has been quite intense, and even more so by what we’re seeing today with the militarization of both psychedelics and raving, which complicates a lot of the epistemics that allowed me to go full force into these subcultures.

Arun Saldanha: Maybe this is a cop-out because it’s a little too neat, but I follow Alain Badiou, a Marxist philosopher, and he has these four true procedures. There’s art, politics, science, and love, and all four of them are equally important for human beings to experience. But you can’t expect one to be substituted for another. So in that way, the rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium. But whether it allows for people to prefigure something like communism is a political question. It would be great if everyone going to rave becomes a communist, but it’s definitely not stamped with the experience.

“The rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium.”

ML: Arun, you said something earlier, referencing Guattari’s concept of microfascism1, about how the “againstness” of counterculture, and the intensity of it, can be co-opted to make the culture more saleable. That reminded me of how the right wing is now the counterculture, and they’re using psychedelics to engineer some kind of self-healing. These politics confuse me, because the conservatives are also interested in environmentalism and psychedelic therapy… and yet! Their values seem so reactionary.

AS: There’s a very masculinist, eugenic way of thinking about the enhanced body—kind of like Robocop—where drugs have become like a technology to expand, on a superhero level, the capacity to control and to also have self-control. That goes together with this whole reinvention of stoicism. Of course, stoicism doesn’t sit well together with hedonism, but it all becomes this macho post-human mishmash.

HB: Raving, or ketamine therapy, is like a technology that can be used, but doesn’t have an intrinsically political quality to it. Having been in a political moment where it was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary. I’m attached to an idea that there could be an intrinsically radical social form, and then I’m like, oh, but the Nazis loved nudity. You can always find a right wing person who has a whacked out left wing-coded thing that they love. Maybe it’s actually that the aesthetics are always arbitrary. And actually the Badiou distinction is, the clarity of it is also quite true. But it’s sad for me to be like post-modernism is right and all of your aesthetics are kind of arbitrary.

“Having been in a political moment where raving was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary.”

ML: There’s an interesting relation between stoicism and raving. Both raving and psychedelics engender this sense of estrangement, and I feel like having this possibility of escape, of otherness, also allows you to kind of hold yourself in a non-reactive state to the world, in a time where we’re being asked constantly to escalate and react to endless meme-driven warfare. There’s something to being cool and unflappable as a stance that raving engenders.

AS: Gilles Deleuze has a line that he picked from Henry Miller, where he says that he loves to get drunk on water. There’s a radicalization of the whole Timothy Leary thing of set and setting, where you agree that an altered state is beneficial to enlarging your subjectivity, and perhaps, forcing a hinge point in your life, but it’s not necessarily through the drug itself. You don’t have to actually ingest something to feel the changing power. LSD really changed visual culture and music, and not everyone was doing LSD to feel that creative pulse.

HB: You said something, Arun, about euphoria itself being a state with borders that could be policed with an in-crowd or an out-crowd. It made me wonder whether the ideal liberatory space would be a space where there was no power differential or authority.

AS: This goes to the old question of anarchism versus communism. Capitalism is a global system, so it is possible to create what Hakim Bey famously called Temporary Autonomous Zones. But capital is intrinsically globalizing, and the power of money is such that it can just be scooped up again for further commercialization. It sounds super pessimistic, and I have a lot of respect for the anarchist tradition, but I don’t think a space without hierarchy is possible. It’s very clear that there’s always going to be incipient state formations in any kind of social situation. So any countercultural or spiritual movement will have something like a desire for a state coming up. That’s just part of how human culture works. But that shouldn’t stop people from trying, I guess!

ML: During the pandemic, I actually went to a lot of autonomous zones that were springing up in places like Minneapolis and Seattle, and I was attracted to them because people kept telling me that they felt like music festivals. I noticed over and over that the euphoria that people were having in these spaces—the fact that people were drinking and doing drugs—was constantly used to belittle them, and to reduce their political seriousness [in the media]. It reminds me of how recreational psychedelic use is also really frowned upon in the psychedelic industry, and it’s this hypocritical double standard. It’s like, “euphoria for me, but not for thee.”

Dig into Rave New World’s past reporting on temporary autonomous zones in Minneapolis, LA, Seattle, Philadelphia, and more:

After the paywall: Hannah, Arun and I chew into some meaty questions from the audience about where the next wave of psychedelic culture is going, the function of narcotic states in today’s attention economy, and how to expand counterculture into new modes of subversion…

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All photos by Peter Tomka / via New Theater Hollywood

On a rainy Sunday in January, anti-ICE activists with walkie-talkies and megaphones slung from their hips patrolled the sidewalk outside New Theater Hollywood, squinting into the mist. The 49-seat black box theater usually stages experimental and one-off shows; its founders Calla Henkel and Max Piteg…

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The freaks in Singapore are lying low, explained a friend, smoking a cigarette outside an Italian deli fronting for a champagne bar speakeasy in Chinatown. It was my last night in town, and he’d met me in a suit from his corporate job—a grind that allowed him to throw parties that were like gifts to the scene. While we stood in an alleyway, under a horizon of twinkling skyscrapers, he gestured to the shophouses around us, which stood silently in the shadows with their hatches batten down. “A few years ago, right after the pandemic, man—these streets were full of club kids going from one party to the next!” he said, listing the short list of venues that make up Singapore’s underground nightlife circuit. He took another glum drag and continued. “People just aren’t going out like that anymore. The financial anxiety you guys have been feeling in the States, it’s just starting to hit us here now. And if people like me are starting to give up, man… I just don’t know.”

At these parting words, I felt a profound hopelessness. Stories like this are too familiar, and I was unable to envision a way for the Singapore scene to prevail against the forces mounting against it: the real estate squeeze, closures of spaces that once felt like home, lack of late-night public infrastructure, the soaring costs of everything, police crackdowns, increased surveillance, and a general anhedonia borne from the anxieties mentioned above. Even though I know that nightlife ebbs and flows in cycles, it was as if the way forward was narrowing into a dead end. I had an overwhelming sense that the dominant system of capital and order was once again tightening its grip.

Electronic music has always looked at a world in flames, and in the burning horizon seen the inevitability of radical change. When I first started chronicling this subculture in the Obama years, a new wave of techno-feminism and post-Black Lives Matter political consciousness infused dancefloors with an exhilarating sense that collective liberation was just around the corner. This was music “that brings the hardest hit of futurity, the most jolting break with tradition,” as critic Simon Reynolds put it in Futuromania. But these days, a real rave revolution has begun to seem to me like a lie—or more like a vision that shines brilliantly for a brief burst, before it collapses under the weight of its dreams.

Just two years ago, I had been enraptured in the Singapore underground’s dream of blasphemy, as I witnessed—and then chronicled in a short documentary—a new wave of queer parties popping up in abandoned tunnels, movie theaters, and bank buildings across the island, fusing noisy, technofuturistic sounds with Southeast Asian folklore and spiritual traditions. A yearning for a tropical rave tradition connected to the soil of my ancestors had been answered by an incoming generation bold enough to build altars in the blind spots of global capital, and the satisfaction I felt moving next to bodies that looked like kin was distinct. I wished the story didn’t always go like this: a revelatory moment that turns out to be a flash already fading; maybe I would have danced harder if I’d known.

Earlier in the trip, I’d stopped by a cute bar frequented by artists and musicians. The rave circuit had been quiet during this trip, and I was hoping to run into some friends. The bar sometimes hosted DJ nights and was a good place to pick up local gossip; about a year ago, while chatting with a local chef in the smoking zone, I’d first heard about blackmarket drug vapes called “kpods” that were being sold on Telegram. “You never really know what’s in them because it’s usually a mix of stuff, including ketamine,” he said, explaining why they were called kpods. “What does it actually feel like?” I asked. But he’d never tried it, and neither had anyone else I spoke to in the electronic music scene.

I learned that k-pod’s typical consumers were not from the underground club world; rather, they tended to be teenage students who got into vaping from candy-flavored nicotine, as well as hardcore drug users who might also be into meth or heroin. Sprinkled into this spectrum were adult professionals with stressful jobs, “uncles” who typically crush beers at karaoke bars, and other random normies. It was shocking to discover that such a wide swath of Singapore’s population was flouting the country’s strict drug laws—the relative accessibility of vaping, and the veneer of safety around this mode of drug consumption, had created a rift in the sober social order through which they had fallen in.

When I walked into the bar this time, the CDJs in the DJ booth were missing. The speakers were pushed against the wall, like silent witnesses of better days that lingered in the imprints of the plush velvet sofas. A handful of people sipped beers on the patio, but I recognized no one except for a DJ-friend in his 30s who sometimes worked there. We sat down at a table, and he proceeded to tell me about the bar’s recent misfortune: police officers had recently raided the place in search of people smoking vapes—the latest crackdown in an all-out War on Vaping that the government had launched earlier this year.

The kpod loophole in the country’s zero-tolerance drug prohibition had been discovered, and etomidate, the main psychoactive substance in kpods, was reclassified as an illegal drug, meaning that dealers were now jailed and caned. Nicotine vapes have actually been illegal in Singapore since 2018, but in the past, the police tended to look the other way. These days, owning any type of vape resulted in steep fines, and possibly getting shipped away to a mandatory “rehab” program in jail-like conditions. Vaping, in effect, was now criminalized as a drug offense.

I asked my DJ-friend if people were smoking kpods at the bar, and he shook his head. “Nobody lah! But people were stuffing their vapes down their bras and underwear, trying to hide them,” he said. “A few unlucky ones got caught, and they kena $700 fines.” The War on Vaping also led to the bar catching some stray fire: when the cops saw the DJ booth, they warned that spinning records was considered “live music,” which required a permit. Other venues in the circuit had been given the same warning, resulting in a general hushing of the electronic music scene, which had already been under strain. In a way, the crackdown was working. “No one is vaping anymore,” my friend said, taking a drag of his cig. “We’ve all gone back to analogs.”

There were more signs that Singapore’s anti-drug efforts are intensifying. A public hotline has been set up, with citizens encouraged to record videos of people vaping in public and report them to the police—even if they are underage teens. Throughout my trip, I’d also noticed the posters blanketing MRT stations, bus stops, park billboards, and other public spaces that warned about the dangers of vape addiction. In addition to advisories about the higher penalties, the campaign questioned if vapes are really a safer alternative to cigarettes, arguing that many users get addicted to both.

I went home from the bar and started reading everything I could find about etomidate, the main synthetic chemical compound in kpods. The popularity of etomidate vapes, I learned, was not limited to Singapore—the internet was full of concerned media reports from across Asia, where the drug has been given various street names like “space oil” in Hong Kong, and “zombie cigarettes” in Japan. Much of the online reporting highlighted how the legal grey area that etomidate has so far existed in has accelerated its spread as authorities scramble to catch up. The reports also frequently mentioned a particularly disturbing side effect of the drug: erratic physical behavior that one woman in Okinawa compared to “an insect writhing after being sprayed with insecticide.”

This explained the videos I found on TikTok of people purportedly fucked up on etomidate: a teenager falling sideways to a train station floor like a felled tree; two men staggering across a plaza, limbs swinging at sharp angles, heads collapsing toward their knees. Shot from a distance by strangers who’d seized on their bizarre behavior, these clips were often folded into news segments warning of the drug’s dangers. There was something lurid about this “gotcha” footage that filled me with voyeuristic fascination and second-hand shame as I consumed the familiar spectacle of public debasement, reframed through the increasingly normalized practice of citizen surveillance. Even as I resisted the media’s scaremongering, it was hard not to feel like the drug’s effects had crossed into something supernatural and truly zombie-like.

The stuttering, mechanical motions also reminded me of the “tranq walk” associated with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer saturating the United States opioid supply. The resemblance suggested that these were not typical recreational drugs, but poisons of last resort. In these videos, users seemed to stumble past the threshold of weird-but-harmless intoxication into some disturbing hinterland—an unholy place of oblivion the body visibly resists. What, exactly, was going on with this new drug of the moment? And if the side effects were this brutal, what was drawing so many people into its grip? The further I went down this dark rabbit hole, the more I realized that zombie vapes aren’t just a weird trend. They represent a broader shift in drug culture—a shift that’s already been happening for decades, and whose deadening effects are really starting to hit.

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Consider the wook: a much-reviled dance music archetype that first emerged, in a snarl of matted dreadlocks, in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows. Dressed in drop-cotch harem pants, wire-wrapped crystal necklaces, and hooded hemp ponchos, wooks wander barefoot, trying to trade shroom chocolates for free concert tickets. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, many wooks migrated to the dubstep scene, replacing their devotion to jangly guitars with a love for the wub. Festivals like Lightning in a Bottle, Desert Hearts, and Shambalah are now festering grounds for the contemporary wookie, and where you’re most likely to catch them six tabs deep, spinning poi to “sacred bass.”

In the 2000s, wook culture became the hairy butts of endless memes in the dance music scene. Our distaste for their feral, drug-addled lifestyles might stem from a deeper wound: wooks force us to confront the long shadow of psychedelia—its anti-capitalist spirit boiled down to opportunistic mooching, psychonaut experimentalism devolved into brain-fried stupidity, countercultural resistance cross-faded into pseudo-spirituality. These grimy drug goblins particularly plague festivals on the North American West Coast, where the underground often cannot escape the twin blades of New Age cheese and Burning Man cringe.

I was skeptical when I first heard whispers in the rave network that something interesting was happening in Oregon. The granola-ass state is the perfect petri dish for wooks to self-replicate, and has a hard time shaking off its reputation for whitewashed woo-woo. Then friends told me about Osmosis, a psychedelic music festival connected to Portland’s electronic music scene. I was curious about the West Coast network that Osmosis is both drawing from and actively building; many of their DJs come from Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area—cities with vibrant but chronically under-documented rave undergrounds.

It was at Osmosis, surrounded by horses and pot farms as cybernetic basslines shook the pines, where I first heard the term: neo-wook. The phrase was circulating around the festival like an inside joke, because it so perfectly captured the subcultural flavors converging there into something familiar, yet new. “Neo-wook” forced me to contemplate questions that had never before crossed my narrow, wook-hating mind: What if the wook psyche holds a secret to resisting the logic of late-capitalism? Can wooks mutate from goofy caricature to an updated psychedelic archetype that fits this era of global club culture, post-ironic memes, and cybersigil spiritualism? Wait—am I a neo-wook too?

Osmosis happens deep in Oregon’s weed country, in an artist colony called Takilma nestled on the edge of the Sisiyou Mountains. Locals consider this region the northern tip of the Emerald Triangle, where the nation’s best cannabis has been cultivated for generations. Takilma’s original pot farmers are earthy, back-to-the-landers who fled cities like San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, in search of an Eden far from the surveillance state. These hippies were the spiritual predecessors of the wooks—staunchly anti-authoritarian, and a little rough around the edges—and the bassbin ravers of Osmosis are the latest pilgrims seeking escape from technofeudal hell.

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Today’s hot tips include: new wave weed drinks, soft clubbing at LA’s ambient tea parties, the rebranding of ketamine as a lifestyle cheat code, and decoding the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.

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Everyone in LA is gabbing about a polarizing new theater performance called The Cortege. Ads for the show created by artist Jeff Hull and his team of collaborators are blanketing our feeds, promising a “festival funeral” that weaves together folklore, pageantry, and ritual in service of communal grief. On the surface, it looks sick. The soundtrack features titans like Jean-Michel Jarre, Air, and Andrew Bird, and trailers reveal snippets of mysterious characters in billowing beige robes, towering monsters that resemble giant mops, and a swarm of drones twinkling against the night sky.

Unfortunately, after watching the show last weekend, I regret to inform you that The Cortege fails to live up to the sum of its intriguing parts, serving up instead an empty spectacle thread together by an almost comically confusing storyline.

The constellation of concepts and artists The Cortege reaches for are part of an emerging zeitgeist in today’s darkening world. In the early 90s, rave culture’s favorite psychedelic sage Terence McKenna famously prophesied the “archaic revival”—a return to ancient knowledge systems to address the contemporary existential crisis. As it becomes increasingly evident that we are living in the worst possible version of the reality simulation, the mainstreaming of psychedelics, ritual practices, and other ancient knowledge systems are evidence of humanity’s last-ditch attempt at self-healing. The Cortege is drumming up excitement partly because it responds to the palpable urgency for communal experiences that process our deteriorating conditions. I especially resonated with its tagline, which positioned public grief as a form of renewal. It read: “Before we are able to welcome a new era, we must mourn the loss of the world we knew.”

So how did this show, with its grand ambitions and bonkers production budget, ultimately fall flat? A lot of ya’ll have been asking for the tea, so let’s get into what fucked—and what flopped.

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Thank you to everyone who responded to our first reader survey! You guys are funny and smart :) Building out Rave New World outside of social media has become even more critical in light of the events below. Please take a moment to fill out the survey if you haven’t already! Then come with me as I descend into into the liminal space of Instagram and Facebook suspensions, where we will encounter digital ghosts, a therapist specializing in online grief, and thousands of desperate people whose accounts have been chopped by the bots.

TELL ME WHATS GOOD

Something strange happened to me recently when I woke up and popped open my Instagram —a hard-to-break habit as reflexive as yawning. Instead of the usual bubbles of messages that reassure me that I am indeed a desired person, my eyes, still soft from sleep, slowly settled on a white screen. “We suspended your account,” read the voice of the Meta God. “You have 180 days to disagree or we’ll permanently disable your account.”

The room around me disappeared as my physical senses withdrew into the data vacuum where my digital avatar once lived. I read and re-read the stern pronouncement, whose cruelty was sharpened by the scarcity of information about why, exactly, I had been banned. The peepholes into my friends’ lives had snapped closed, and out of fondness and weakness, I desperately wanted to cling to the content I had been cut off from. All those messages, memes, posts, and photos that had constituted my online life—poof! Gone in an instant, banished to the invisible realm of the unarchived self.

Worse of all, there was no way to tell everyone that I had departed from our shared space in a premature demise akin to cyber necrosis. Suspended in the bardo between digital death and rebirth, I felt like a powerless and pissed-off ghost, shocked at how much of my life I had given up to the whims of these motherfuckers.

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