STROBELIGHTS IN THE DARK FOREST
Friends With Benefits and the optimism of the "new internet" scene
Idyllwild is a small hippie town on the edge of the Sonoran Desert that is accessible only through winding mountain roads. There is a sense of retreat as you drive the two hours there from Los Angeles, as if the rocks crumbling off steep cliffs like giant white chocolate chips are bulwarks from harsher realities. This sense of isolation is perhaps why, in the 60s, Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love moved to this area to create a commune, living on a ranch where they manufactured tons of LSD. (It also seems fitting that the ranch is now owned by YouTuber Logan Paul.) Idyllwild’s hippie history offers visitors the sensation of partaking in a counterculture—a comforting feeling, even if it turns out to be a myth.
This August, I joined hundreds of hopefuls in the forests of Idyllwild for FEST—a three-day festival focused on forging a brighter future for internet culture. A precious optimism permeated the 700-person gathering, which was organized by the clout-heavy crypto collective Friends With Benefits. Offering more than just the typical debaucherous weekend of music and drugs, the festival was based on a tantalizing premise: bringing together “𝓪𝓵𝓵 𝓸𝓯 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓪𝓭𝓼 of the new internet” for an IRL meet-up, where perhaps—in between all the languorous lounging and passed joints—we might be able to figure out ways to terraform out of this technological hellscape we’ve found ourselves in.
Friends With Benefits is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a collective whose members are required to purchase a unique crypto token to make payments and cast votes on the collective’s actions. The group was founded in 2020 by Trevor McFedries, a digital entrepreneur perhaps best known as the inventor of virtual influencer Lil Miquela. It successfully recruited members by marketing itself as a space for creative professionals from the art and music scenes rather than Silicon Valley tech-bros; instead of hustle culture, it claimed its values lay in “community” and “collaboration.”
Perhaps the most seductive draw of Friends With Benefits was how it offered a reprieve from the “visual dogshit” aesthetics and corny culture forming around crypto in the 2020s. The positioning worked: by 2022, its numbers ballooned to 6,000 people, with celebrity members like Flying Lotus, James Blake, and Azealia Banks causing the New York Times to describe it as “a V.I.P. lounge for crypto’s creative class.” The vibe at the inaugural FEST in 2022 was sumptuous techno-decadence: tickets, which had to be bought on the blockchain, cost .5 ETH (about $927 at the time), and came with open-bar drinks and unlimited gourmet food. Friends who attended that year raved about eating free steak dinners while attending lectures centered on the promise of web3 to save the creative economy—including, as one homie put it, “Nadya from Pussy Riot talking about how crypto could save Ukraine.”
As dreams of a more prosperous future have crashed with the market, Friends With Benefits savvily pivoted away from too much talk of a crypto-fueled revolution. This year, the festival opened its gates to a wider swath of attendees by eliminating the need to buy entry with crypto, instead charging $400 per ticket in boring old fiat currency. It also booked buzzy musical acts like hyperpop gods AG Cook and Charli XCX, based-Bowie rock star Yves Tumor, and ethereal indie princess Caroline Polachek—while the daytime programming included galaxy brain lectures by the likes of social media savant Taylor Lorenz, downtown New York’s favorite flaneur Dean Kissick, and internet subculture researcher Joshua Citerella.
As a lowly Substack serf, I obviously couldn’t afford the $400 ticket, but managed to score a free pass through festival sponsor New Brew, a drink containing kratom and kava—plants known for inducing mild euphoria. It turned out that the bar carried many trendy sober-curious beverages, including a Friends With Benefits-branded yerba mate containing adaptogenic mushrooms that they called “Metaverse.” This de-emphasis on alcohol, coupled with the ubiquity of magic mushrooms, contributed to a wholesome atmosphere that pervaded the festival.
One afternoon, I zoned out to a meditative sound bath, before moseying over to a picnic table for a pop-up tea ceremony where attendees were sipping pu erh and trading tips on cannabis fermentation techniques. My friends ran off to a creek for a quick swim, while I drifted over to a zine-making workshop hosted by Metalabel in a room where paper, scissors, and magazine cutouts piled on tables, with not a single screen in sight.
In fact, for a festival targeted at the Extremely Online, the event felt remarkably offline. “TOUCH GRASS” commanded scattered signs sticking out of the soil, and I spotted many attendees unfurling their computer bodies on the ground, eyes closed while tapping their toes furiously to the music. Unlike many other festivals I’ve been to, the vibe was almost anti-hedonic, given that the music was mandated to end at midnight due to a local noise ordinance. (“Friends With Benefits?!” a friend overheard a local man grumbling at the local donut shop. “Is that a swinger’s party or something?”)
That evening, I caught myself nearly careening off a hilltop cliff after ingesting a combination of artisanal nicotine gum, a mild psychoactive flower called blue lotus, and off-brand ketamine—a woozy mix I’d miscalculated as ideal for chilling. Golden hour was draining out of the San Jacinto mountains, and I counted at least six shades of orange before my head started to spin. Scrambling on a nearby rock, I gazed around the crowd gathering to watch the sunset, and picked out familiar faces from the Dimes Square parties, LA art galleries, Bushwick raves, and Discord groups that I sometimes pop into. Under a charred cedar tree, a trio of musicians from the LA-based collective Floating were playing an improvised set, spinning webs of melancholy tones with a saxophone, flute, and synth. The sylvan scene was beautiful. I smiled and tried not to puke.
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