One scribe’s misadventures with Ambien, the world’s freakiest sleep medication.  

Drawings and paintings copyrighted Damon Orion, based on his Ambien Visions. Use prohibited without permission.

All my life. Right from the word go. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been doing exactly what I’m doing right now — lying on my back, staring into the darkness as my mind chases its tail, feeling like everyone in this time zone is asleep but me.

Ah, verily does it suck. Hour after hour, I fight the urge to look at the clock, knowing that it would only bring tidings of sorrow …

… until finally, sunlight rapes my eyeballs, and the birds begin celebrating my defeat with their taunting song of joy.

Yes, I was born this way: an insomniac, a sleep idiot, doomed to spend a quarter of my life praying for dreams that never come, and many, many of my remaining hours dragging my numb bones around in deflated, life-hating exhaustion.

Sleeping is one of the most basic things a living being can do. Even friggin’ turkeys have it down, and we’re talking about creatures that will flee in terror from a windblown scrap of paper here. How the hell can I be so bad at it?

Not long ago, I thought I’d found the solution. With the aid of Ambien, the world’s freakiest prescription sleep medication, I was able to temporarily bribe the Sandman … until the cure started looking worse than the problem. Here, if my sleep-needy memory serves, is how it all went down.

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

My prescription for Ambien has come with a handful of warnings from my doctor: It can be addictive; it can lose effect over time; it’s recommended for short-term use only. I figure if it loses efficacy, I’ll be no worse off than when I started. What I’ve seen of drug addiction didn’t really look like a whole bucket of awesome, though, so as a safeguard, I’ve resolved to take Ambien only twice per week.

Somewhere around a half-hour after taking the drug for the first time, I learn something the doctor forgot to mention: This stuff is SpongeBob freaking SquarePants in a pill. As I lie there, skeptically waiting for sleep, an absurd, goofy-happy feeling seeps into me, and suddenly I want to put on a bunny costume and bounce around the house on a pogo stick.

The dopey feeling gets stronger … and without warning, I find myself experiencing the mind-blowingly bizarre reality of being wide-awake while, with shut eyes, I watch what I would be dreaming if I were asleep.

I’m not making this up: The face of Emmanuel Lewis, cuddly child star of the ’80s sitcom Webster, appears out of nowhere surrounded by several brightly colored concentric rings. Smiling, he pulls back a rubber band, using it to shoot a burning Satanic pentagram at me.

The pentagram expands several times in size as it travels toward me — by the time it reaches me, it’s larger than I am. There is no pain, only awe, as the flames envelop me, scorching my everyday consciousness and taking me fully into Ambien Land. All this happens within the space of a few seconds.

Now the flames melt away, giving way to an aerial view of an absolutely gigantic birthday cake. This thing is at least the size of a swimming pool, and it’s bubbling and warping like a slab of cheese on a hot stove burner.

And then … a miracle happens: I fall asleep. Just as the doctor told me I would, I sleep exactly six hours. Eight would’ve been better, but when you’ve got insomnia like mine, that’s like Danny DeVito complaining that he placed only fifth in People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People list.

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Hoping that the birthday cake was some kind of symbol of a rebirth into a new life of well-rested bliss, I cheerfully take Ambien again the following night, curious to find out if last night’s loopy feeling and wacky visuals were some kind of fluke.

In wordless answer, The Cupcake People appear before my closed eyes. That probably needs some explanation: The Cupcake People are four living, breathing cupcakes—a mom, a dad and their two adorable cupcake children—who are riding a roller coaster together. With their pink frosting, strawberry mouths and bright, rosy smiles, they’re the very picture of wholesome family fun except for the fact that they’re … you know … human cupcakes.

Naturally, I begin to look forward to the two nights a week when more gloriously idiotic short films will be projected onto my inner eyelids as I wait to fall asleep on Ambien: a ram with horns made of candy cane; Gene Shalit grinning obnoxiously as a Frisbee spins on his upraised middle finger; a huge, stupid seaweed monster stumbling blindly through an airport wrecking everything in his path as a tiny human family tries to guide his way; the Trix rabbit using a giant tobacco pipe as a golf club; a view through the eyes of a spider that a Mexican family is trying to crush; a buffalo dressed up as a superhero, looking incredibly pissed off about the whole affair; a black elephant with bat wings for ears, wearing diapers as he flies through the clouds; a statue of Boba Fett in the pose of Rodin’s “The Thinker” and many, many others, some of them too complex to explain in words. There are even visual puns, like a hippopotamus/platypus hybrid that is obviously named a “hippoplatypus,” or a large door with two knockers—and a plaque above them that looks like a female face.

It doesn’t stop with visuals, though. On Ambien, your head becomes a late-night surrealist radio station, broadcasting little snippets of songs, quick phrases (“rent-a-rhino”), poems (“And so I find the rodent signs that splitter-splat a kitty cat”) and just plain whacked-out noises. One evening, I am treated to a piece of an epic Wagnerian opera in which a male tenor sternly commands his buddy to buy him a beer. In the disoriented state that the drug brings on, it’s hard to discern that these sounds aren’t coming from outside sources; at times I think I’m inside some kind of chat room where people communicate in song and poetry.

One night, for reasons unknown, the Ambien hits much faster than usual, and as I lie there reading, I can’t help noticing that the tapestry on my wall is breathing. Mind you, I’ve only taken the recommended dose of Ambien: one pill.

As I continue to study the tapestry, I notice the moving face of a dejected-looking monster in a spot on the lower right. He has the sullen, ashamed look of a child who’s just lost the game for his baseball team. My attempts to cheer him up by making funny faces at him don’t seem to help. At this point, it occurs to me that my sanity is riding a giant kite to the lollipop factory, and I should probably hit the hay before I start trying to stick my toes up my nostrils.

GABA? GABA?? Hey…

The following day, my tapestry is back to normal, but my doubts about Ambien’s safety are at an all-time high. Google reveals that “Ambien” is a brand name for a hypnotic called zolpidem, which is in the same chemical family as Valium and Xanax. It works by potentiating gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an inhibitory neurotransmitter. (Rumor has it that the name Ambien is a cute way of saying “good morning”: a.m. bien.)

On the plus side, it seems that some recent medical reports have stated that zolpidem has been helpful in waking people in persistent vegetative state (PVS) as well as dramatically counteracting the effects of brain injuries. On the other hand, hallucinations (which, it turns out, are very common, and for some people, horrifying) aren’t the only weird side effects of the drug. Apparently it’s not unusual for people on Ambien to go on eating binges in their sleep. Raunchy junk food seems to be the snack of choice, but in extreme cases, Ambien takers have supposedly eaten stuff like buttered cigarettes, salt sandwiches and raw bacon. One woman recounts having gotten up at around 4 a.m. and fixed up a tempting mix of ranch dressing, milk, an entire tub of butter, some ham and cheese shreds and a full jar of mayonnaise. None of these people have any recollection of their eating binges the following day. An evil hypnotist couldn’t have devised a better prank … and again, Ambien is a hypnotic.

Mulling this over, it occurs to me that a number of my Ambien visions have involved food, some of it sugary (a skull with maraschino cherries sticking out of its eye sockets, a magic mushroom disguised as an ice cream cone, birthday cake, candy canes, cupcakes) and some not (a dragon made of lasagna, a dude with peas protruding from his flesh, a mask of the pagan icon The Green Man made of broccoli). Yeesh. How long till I wake up with a half-eaten shoelace quesadilla at my bedside?

More Internet entries tell of Ambien takers doing other unsafe and/or intensely weird stuff in their sleep: showering, having sex, making crazed phone calls in the middle of the night, walking almost nude into 20-degree weather, whizzing in public, whizzing into the oven, writing on apartment walls with nail polish, cutting themselves up, trying to jump out the window … one person claims to have been on Ambien when he tore off his shirt and threatened the passengers on a plane to England. Another says that the morning after taking Ambien, she woke up at the bottom of the stairs with head injuries that required 18 staples. Once again, none of these people have any recollection of their actions the following day.

Perhaps the scariest accounts, though, are those of people driving in their sleep on Ambien. As you can imagine, these tales don’t all end with “… and then the wise and compassionate Ambien Bumblebee appeared, using giant dandelions to point the beautiful dreamer to safety.” A driver on Ambien is considered to be many times more dangerous than a drunk driver, and after spending part of last night trying my damnedest to get a monster in my tapestry to look on the bright side of life, I’m gonna go ahead and give that assertion a double thumbs-up.

This is starting to look like grade-A horror movie material: Zolpidem Zombies terrorize the town, attacking bystanders, crashing cars, devouring pets, proposing to fire hydrants. And speaking of brain-eaters, what’s most troublesome is the thought that this stuff might be screwing with my brain chemistry… which, believe it, is not exactly a specimen of normalcy to begin with. It’s possible that all the images of brains that have shown up in my Ambien visions were distress signals, like when your car flashes an image of a battery to tell you that its battery is in trouble. (These images included a bald head with a tattoo of brains; the top of someone’s head opening like a lid, revealing a record being played on a turntable; a brain floating in the sky, letting out rain as if it were a storm cloud and, in a tidy union of the brain imagery and the candy motif, a brain made of swirling colors like the ones you’d find in a Gobstopper. One night I also saw a wicked-looking chef with a twisted green face stirring something very nasty in a pot, which, in retrospect, strikes me as dream language for, “Dude, this chemical: not good.”)

Besides, as the doctor warned, the drug is getting less reliable. More and more, I find myself waking up after two or three hours, and sometimes the stuff doesn’t knock me out at all. Potential addiction + lack of dependability + fear of waking up with peanut butter stripes where my eyebrows used to be = so long, Zombien.

Last Dance with Zolpidem

My decision to stop taking Ambien just so happens to coincide with the fact that I’m down to my last pill. I won’t be getting a refill, but for the sake of journalistic intrepidness, I pop my final tablet and jot down a few notes before bed as the drug hits (spelling errors included):

My perception is off—the back of my hand looks like the front of my hand facing the wrong way. The tapestry on my wall seems to billow and breath. Clarity oth thought is still with mu … or so I thought until writing that. Previously flat objects appear 3D. There is a sense of soothing friendliness, as if honey is being poured through my nervous system. Colors are exaggerated and translucent. Utterly indescribable sounds pass through my mind—whisked by pharmaceutical winds, flypapers of melody flap through my brain, picking up bits of mental grunge and emotional residue. Safe, happy feeling of child at play. Thought becomes music. D’naoajamasjamas. Pattern in wood seem to rise up out of wood. Level of movement in tapestry is now absurd—it’s like boa constrictors are playind underneath. It is my psychotropic toy, the puppet of my altered brain. I know these snakelike downward melting motions aren’t really happening—but is this tapestry a mirror for what the drug is doing to my brain?

Setting down the notebook, I take a quick look at a drawing I’ve recently made of my very first Ambien vision: Emmanuel Lewis and the pentagram. Seen through Ambien goggles, Emmanuel’s face appears to be moving—it contorts and sneers in a way that can only be taken as sinister. I’m aware that it’s a hallucination, but the movement sure as hell looks real. I can honestly say I never thought I’d see Emmanuel Lewis looking threatening, but his hardened gangbanger snarl warns that anyone can be threatening on the wrong chemicals.

And all at once, this image, which I once savored as the ultimate in random, is revealed for what it truly is: an impressionist portrait of Ambien itself—a devil in the disguise of a goofy, harmless little buddy; Emmanuel, false savior of the restless, smiling gently as he burns his followers alive with hellish fire.

Many of the other Ambien visions that I’d thought were so deliciously meaningless are now unmasked as the Demon Zolpidem himself, shape-shifting into his manifold manifestations: a leering death-skull hiding behind maraschino-cherry-red eyes; a dangerous hallucinogen costumed in ice cream sweetness.

Where Gene Shalit fits into all this, I’m not sure yet.

After the Fire

Hey, I know better than to push my luck with Emmanuel Lewis.

It’s now been a few months since I last took Ambien. Sometimes I miss the way the stuff turned my head into a boatful of mutant minstrels, but you know what’s even more fun than that? Knowing that I won’t be waking up nude at the top of the clock tower wearing ketchup as makeup.

And so the search continues for an insomnia cure. I’ve just started taking Lunesta. It’s supposedly non-addictive, and it doesn’t have that whole Oompa-Loompas-from-Hell thing to it that Ambien does, though I’m told that horrible nightmares can be a danger. So far no problem there, but I did have a dream that as a reporter, I was trying to get some dirt on Britney Spears by tracking down one of her ex-boyfriends, which I suppose qualifies as a bad dream.

If this were a horror movie, this would be the part where the container of Lunesta on my desk starts to glow deep red, and suddenly I realize that I’m trapped in a dream. Smoke creeps out from under the lid of the container, through which throbs the fiery outline of a pentagram.

BOOM! The lid flies off, spraying flames, and with an abruptness that makes the whole audience jump, the towering specter of Emmanuel Lewis appears in the cloud of fog billowing from the container.

“You think you’ve escaped me, boy?” he bellows in a guttural, demonic voice. “Dream on, schmuck! The nightmare is just beginning!! Hahahahaaaaaaa!!!!”

Roll the credits.

The first time I was ever in San Francisco it blew my mind. It was a city of freethinkers and artists who were “on the level” and “got it.” Sometimes it’s hard for me to accept that I was born in South Florida. The isolation and alienation was so severe that I literally believed I was another species. In San Francisco, there were crazy people everywhere and it was the utopian dream. For several years I was born again. The freaks were everywhere and I united with my people at last.

So what happened? I gradually started to notice that people in the mass counterculture were as blind as “the sheep” only they were conforming to a different set of social norms. I came up with the term anti-sheep-sheep to describe them. I felt myself longing for the initial alienation of identifying as a mutant and feeling like I was the only one. After all, meeting people like you is a lot more exciting when you feel like you are the only one. The people who truly influenced my life were the few counterculture people who I met in South Florida. They were as isolated and alienated as I was. They felt like they were another species too.

I remember how we would have all these exciting discussions. “What are we?” was the question. Everyone seemed to have their own answer. “We are an alien species that has been put here to study the human race.” “We are demons from hell and our job is to eliminate the homo sapien.” It seems quite silly to me now but back then it was my inspiration for creating art. It was my job to become a tribal leader. I was going to give “what are we?” the best answer possible.

One of the kids I remember from South Florida created an entire civilization on paper. Since he did not belong in the world of the suburbs he was intent on creating his own world. He showed me a map of his civilization that consisted of a notebook full of beautiful drawings and cryptic messages. “This is where people like us are from,” he would tell me. His civilization had its own language consisting of symbols that he personally designed. We took acid together and discussed the possibility of replacing their civilization with our own.

I met some others in Miami. Thor was the metalhead philosopher. He carried a scepter, recited street poetry, and ranted about how nothing around us was real. His mission was to show people that they were living in the matrix, by any means necessary. Jackie was the transgender shaman punk who did not belong on this planet. Her goal was simply to return home so she could be among her own kind. “I think you guys are from my planet too,” she once whispered to Thor and I. “But what are we?”

The suburbs were an alienating place but the conversations were the best. It was all about being the few. We had a sacred sense of tribal unity that related to our sheltered and conservative upbringings. We were the ones. In San Francisco people didn’t grow up like us. They didn’t grow up like us in Los Angeles or New York either. In major cities people grew up with the counterculture being a visible part of mainstream culture. They grew up homo sapiens.

I want to make the argument that the counterculture is actually better in the suburbs. The scarcity of artistic and eccentric thought forces people to create their own civilizations. It fosters an intense unity between people who do not fit into the mainstream and creates extreme connections among those on the edge.

In contrast, larger cities force marketers to be “on the edge” so they can appeal to the counterculture demographic. You cannot walk down the street without seeing punks, ravers, goths, or at the very least hipsters. There is an over-the-counterculture element of commercialization that makes being a freethinking mutant another fad. The anti-sheep-sheep run prominent.

If I grew up in San Francisco: surrounded by counterculture models on billboards: always having a record store to hang out in: there is no way I would be the person I am today. Being a natural freethinker I would have rebelled against the dominant liberal culture. I wouldn’t have gotten any tattoos. I wouldn’t have become an alternative musician. I wouldn’t have made my artistic goal to answer the “what are we” question.

People were always shocked when I told them I was from South Florida. I was way too “cool” to be from the suburbs and obviously must have been from New York or LA. When I met other kids from the suburbs we would talk about how much easier it was to meet people like us in these big cities. We shared a deep knowledge about alienation that people from New York and LA simply couldn’t understand.

Big cities are known for their thriving countercultures but I see counterculture at its peak when it is at its most obscure. When there are only 5 other people in your entire city who “get it” you tend to get creative, start a fantastic cult, and plot world domination. It is the sense of alienation that connects people in the suburbs and it is through this alienation that new subcultures, tribes, and species are defined.

Maybe it is better to grow up human. You don’t need to sit alone in your room and wonder why you have been put on the same planet as “the sheep.” You don’t need to cry and scream because everybody around you is stuck in the matrix. You don’t need to be the real life protagonist of the movie “They Live” because nobody will put on their glasses. Still, there is so much that you take for granted because you have been surrounded by counterculture your entire life.

Is big city counterculture actually counterculture? I am not so sure that it is. Listening to GG Allin in New York is great but it does not give you the same rebellious thrill as listening to GG Allin in the suburbs. The more taboo something is the more exciting it becomes. Something cannot, by definition, be both popular and edgy. In South Florida it is edgy to be against war. In San Francisco it is socially enforced to the point of banal conformity.

The counterculture is better in the suburbs. It is through the isolation of “being the only one” that your life changes the moment you meet a brilliant person to make art with. Some of the most eccentric minds in existence are currently stuck in these boring towns of nothing. They have “what are we” conversations until 6 AM and it never gets old. They represent us because the billboards refuse to.

photo by Stephen Sammons

The folks over at  the Leary Archives have just posted a fascinating historical document, a transcription of a conversation between Timothy and Rosemary Leary and John Lennon and Yoko Ono that took place during the Lennon/Ono’s famous “Bed-In For Peace” in Toronto, during which Lennon and surrounding friends recorded “Give Peace A Chance.”

As you’ll note, it’s very 1960s.  The loveliest bit is at the beginning where the counterculture icons talk about — in essence —  various ways to achieve an alert and aware and awake state of mind (live in a tent.. or try living blindfolded for awhile.)

Leary archivist Michael Horowitz provides fascinating memories and perspectives, including part of an outline for a proposed book by Leary about ’60s heroes (see below the link)

Link

“I vomited some of it, but still managed to keep most of it down. After watching me, the rest of the gang decided to take only half a tablespoon. I learned an invaluable lesson in drug experimentation that would stay with me for life: never go first.”

A segment from the MONDO 2000 prehistory part of the upcoming MONDO 2000 History Project Book, Use Your Hallucinations: MONDO 2000 and the Cyberculture of the Late 2oth Century

I consider my second qualification as World Mutant #1 to be my death at 15 from the witchy deliriant Belladonna.

It was early in the summer of 1968. Myself and my friends had heard stories about people taking this drug, Asthamador, that you could buy in the drug store that contained belladonna. Someone described spending the entire night picking bugs off of his skin. Nothing speaks to the weird reality of being fifteen than this fact – we all agreed that this sounded really cool! We decided to get some of this belladonna and take it that Saturday night for the Ronnie Dio (yes, that Ronnie Dio) and the Electric Elves show in downtown Binghamton, New York. Dio was our biggest local star.

The day of the show, bottle of asthmador in my hand, we walked down to the neighborhood store and bought drinks to wash down the medicine. I bought a Coke, and I can’t remember what the other guys bought, but the Coke would turn out to be important. We went into the alley behind the small grocery store where teens sometimes would hang out and smoke cigarettes. Finding it empty, we prepared to take our medicine. None of us really knew anything about dosage, so we just went with what we had, a tablespoon that my friend and upstairs neighbor Dave Waffle had grabbed out of his kitchen. I went first. I gulped down the tablespoon of asthmador, washing it down with the Coke. You do not know the meaning of the word bitter unless you’ve done this. It was like swallowing Satan’s fetid bowels, which should have given me a clue as to the kind of experience that was to follow. I vomited some of it, but still managed to keep most of it down. After watching me, the rest of the gang decided to take only half a tablespoon. I learned an invaluable lesson in drug experimentation that would stay with me for life: never go first.

Once we’d swallowed our poison, we decided to go into the store for some snacks to wash away the taste.  Things seemed pretty normal and I picked out a package of chocolate Hostess cupcakes that used to be so popular – the ones with the white squiggles down the middle. I reached out to grab it off the shelf, but the cupcakes jumped away, eluding my grasp. The little white squiggles had turned into eyes, nose and mouth. The cupcakes laughed at me.

Somehow I made it out of the store. I can remember walking for maybe two blocks, carrying my hippie mocassins. At some point I just winked out. Even today, I still have some sense, or recollection, of what my hallucinations were like – I experienced a flash of recognition a couple of years later. When I saw Munch’s The Scream, it resonated – not just the face and the distortion but the sense that one is surrounded by some unfathomably horrific presence that probably hides an infinity of other unfathomably horrific presences both within and beyond it, endlessly layered. I also remember seeing my father sitting in a chair and smoking his pipe, disappearing slowly from his feet to his head while asking me what was wrong. Two cops found me staggering down Main Street, eyes without irises – just big pools of black. I writhed and struggled and screamed and vomited as the officers tried to restrain me. One cop wanted to take me to jail, but the other one recognized the need to rush me to the hospital and he prevailed.

I entered Our Lady of Lords Hospital wrapped up in a straightjacket and was immediately given a shot of morphine.  Once they got me to stop flailing, they were able to find my wallet. They pulled it out to see who I was.  In those far less paranoid times, teenagers didn’t necessarily carry ID cards. But my friend Vinnie had found these sort-of IDs that had a space on them to write your name and address and phone number and we’d had some fun one night writing the names of our heroes, or of odd characters, onto the cards and sticking them in our wallets.  I had two cards on which I had written two different names.  Since the admission authorities knew I wasn’t Ho Chi Minh, they figured the other ID must be the correct one. I was admitted as Frank Zappa.

It took a few hours for the doctors to make their diagnosis – atropine poisoning potentiated by Coca Cola (which apparently potentiates the atropine several times over). Meanwhile, the rest of the gang made it to the Ronnie Dio show, but Dave Waffle never got to see the big finale.  At some point in the show, he hallucinated that he was back home but that the song on the radio really sucked.  Irritated, he walked to the radio and started twisting the dial which, unfortunately, was some girl’s knee (okay, it could have been worse.)  He was dragged out of the hall and thrown into the street.

Fortunately, a friend of his older brother saw that Waffle was out of control and decided to drive him home.  Once home, Waffle managed to make it up to his own house, but he went into his mother Gloria’s bedroom and started taking off his clothes.  She screamed at him but he thought it was another friend, Rob, yelling at him to open up the window to talk.  Waffle leaned out the window holding a conversation with the imaginary Rob while his mom called an ambulance.

The arrival of the ambulance got the attention of my parents. Gloria shouted something about an LSD overdose and as Waffle was rushed to the emergency room, my father thought to call and check regarding any other LSD overdoses. “No. No LSD overdoses,” a nurse reported. A few hours later, when it was well past curfew and I still hadn’t returned home, my father called again and the dots were connected.  Frank Zappa, who was in the emergency room after having his stomach pumped, had little chance of survival.

I woke up 36 hours later, looked up at the ceiling, noticed the blurry versions of my older brothers who were standing by the side of the bed. I asked them why they’d taken down the poster of Stokely Carmichael that I kept on my ceiling.   A cheer went up and one of them rushed into the waiting room to tell my mom and dad that I was still alive.

I remained in the hospital for about a week. (Those were the days, huh?) And while my first hallucinatory trip had not produced much insight, I learned that, throughout my coma, I had been waited on and mourned by crowds of crying teenage girls, some of whom had to be forced out of the waiting room when visiting hours were over. So I did learn that girls liked me – although I was still too goofy to take full advantage of the situation.

And was I full of contrition?  Were we contrite?  No, we were incorrigible.  Vinnie showed up at the hospital and left behind a cake that had some weak and improperly prepared marijuana baked into it. It was inactive, but hey, it’s the thought that counts. And when Mark Perone, my 14-year-old hoodlum rock guitarist neighbor left me a pack of firecrackers, I got a hold of some matches, opened the bathroom window and, lighting them one at a time, tossed them outside, until a nurse finally came running in.  Exasperated, she asked me why I wanted to make more trouble.  I didn’t, I told her.  I just didn’t want the firecrackers to go to waste.  All American teen logic at its finest.

When I’m feeling mystical, I start to think that I journeyed to a rare underworld and it was some sort of shamanic initiation. I emerged as a zeitgeist savant with a few neural circuits directly hooked into the dark matter of the universe. I’m intimate with emptiness in a very profound and scary sense — I’ll say that. But I have the decency not to impose it on anyone else.  Still, I’ll claim this as an initiatory rite qualifying me as the man who will bring about der final solution to der  human banality problem…

Previous MONDO History Entries

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

Gibson & Leary Audio (MONDO 2000 History Project)

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #3)

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988 — Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #4)

Smart Drugs & Nutrients In 1991 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #5)

LSD, The CIA, & The Counterculture Of The 1960s: Martin Lee (1986, Audio. Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #6)

William Burroughs For R.U. Sirius’ New World Disorder (1990, Mondo 2000 History Project Entry # 7)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 1 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

New Edge & Mondo: A Personal Perspective – Part 2 (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #8)

The Glorious Cyberpunk Handbook Tour (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #9)

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

FAIL! Debbie Does MONDO (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #14)

Paradise Is Santa Cruz: First Ecstasy (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #15)

William Gibson On MONDO 2000 & 90s Cyberculture (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #16)

Ted Nelson & John Perry Barlow For MONDO 2000 (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #17)

R.U. A Cyberpunk? Well, Punk? R.U.? (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry # 18

The New Edge At The New Age Convention (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #19)

 

Ridley Scott’s prequel set in the Alien universe, the detailed and evocative Prometheus, delivers a science fiction narrative rife with mythological and philosophical implications beyond the standard big budget sci-fi fare, a story that presents fringe speculations about the influence of alien contact with the origins of the human species and offers serious questions about the prospective future of humanity and technology. Upon considering the many mythic references in the film, the transhumanist in me began to wonder: is technology becoming a modern mythic force, a deus ex machina that we presume we can rely on for future salvation? Is it here that we find the greater cautionary message of Prometheus?

Peter Weyland, in the 2023 TED talk that was released as a viral video before the launch of the film, sets up this line of thinking when he tells us, “At this moment in our civilization, we can create cybernetic individuals who, in just a few short years, will be completely indistinguishable from us. Which leads to an obvious conclusion: we are the gods now.” This brazen statement causes a mild uproar in the crowd: is Weyland a foolish heretic? Or a prophetic visionary? Perhaps both.

The first scene where Weyland appears in Prometheus throws his motives into question. If Weyland has honest intentions, why does he hide the fact that he’s part of the expedition? The act of creating life in sentient robots has left Weyland with delusions of grandeur. Like King Gilgamesh and many others before him, Weylan plans to supplicate the alien “gods”, or Engineers, and pry from them the secret of immortal life. Weyland is withered and fragile, aged far beyond the normal capacities of the human body, to the extent that he must rely on cryosleep to survive, and a mechanical exoskeleton to augment his atrophied body. He has cheated death by artificial means, but to what end? His quality of life in this unnatural state does not seem very appealing.

“A king has his reign. He dies. It’s the natural order of things.” Weyland’s daughter, Meredith Vickers, offers as advice, trying to convince her father to abandon this quest. Weyland stubbornly disagrees, choosing to continue forward with his egotistical fantasy of immortal life. His philosophy may be more or less defined as a Transhumanist: Weyland seeks to gain immortal life (or an approximation) by using technology to extend his life as long as possible, with the hopes that the Engineers have even greater technology that could make him immortal, as the gods. Though, at face value, the purpose of the Prometheus mission is to make contact with humanity’s creators for the edification of our species, it becomes clear that the real primary purpose is for the aged industrialist to survive.

This is Weyland’s gamble, betting the lives of the entire crew of the Prometheus, including his daughter and android son, on the chance that he might win big. Which begs the question, if you could extend the length of your life at the price of others, is that morally acceptable — if you feel that you have something greater to give to the world than others might have?

Certainly Weyland feels that his life is more valuable than the lives of others. This is an important question for Transhumanists to consider, especially in the context of global economics; when the time comes that technologies for extreme life extension do exist, who will benefit from them? Wealthy individuals in the first world, at the expense of laborers assembling these technologies in the third world? What responsibility is there to provide access to technological innovation for all, when there are limited resources available? These issues will emerge as more pressing concerns in the 21st century.

Weyland’s less attractive personality traits are also on display in his daughter, Meredith Vickers. Many viewers who had seen Alien were likely questioning Vickers’ humanity up until the discussion with the pilot Janek when he asks her point blank if she is an android, a question to which the audience doesn’t really get a definitive answer. If she is human, she seems to have acquired some of the more inhuman qualities of the technology that she and her father have ensconced themselves in. Vickers’ dependence on technology, much like her father, is evident in her life pod, designed to cheat death and extend her life as long as possible by surrounding her with technological protections.

If anyone embodies the spirit of Prometheus the titan, it is “the closest thing Weyland has to a son,” the android David. Like Prometheus, David is an outsider to human culture but he wants to be helpful. Some of the most mundane yet fascinating scenes with David are towards the beginning of the story when the android watches old Technicolor movies of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and the audience is left to wonder about what implications there might be in the future… if intelligent machines look to humanity as role models, or god figures.

It is David who steals the “black goo” from the alien ship and gives it to the human scientists, though his intentions are somewhat difficult to discern. David is ostensibly giving the humans what they want, to have a divine transformative experience. The large human head sculpture in the room offers the implication that humans were genetically engineered using this substance. What the android does not anticipate is that the black goo is reactive to human emotion, as Elizabeth Shaw points out when the landing party is examining the alien murals. Very psychedelic!

Is the black goo a bioweapon or a lifegiving substance? Perhaps it’s both. The effect of exposure seems to accentuate a person’s existing traits. Before entering the alien sanctuary Shaw reminds the geologist Fiefield that they are on a peaceful mission of scientific discovery, but he will not give up his big metal gun or his aggressive attitude. One wonders if perhaps the crew of Prometheus had taken an opportunity to relax, take a deep breath and chant an Om or two, if their pilgrimage would have turned out differently. But we see a negative reaction/symbiosis, most pronounced in the angry geologist Fiefield who devolves into a rampaging zombie after being exposed to the goo. Even something as innocuous as meal worms can become extreme organisms when exposed to the black goo. The shiny green goo that David pulls out of the vials is a different substance. This might be the DNA of the Engineers race, that the “Gardener” released in the opening scene when he sacrifices himself to seed life on the planet. The black goo mutagenic catalyst plus the green DNA base is the volatile chemical mixture that can be used as a bioweapon.

Technology as a whole is also a tabula rosa of the human psyche; a gun without a negative human intention isn’t able to harm anyone. Surveillance technology isn’t inherently evil, but it can be used for evil purposes. Now, suppose you are part of the race of advanced aliens called the Engineers, in control of advanced technologies. What better form of weapon could there be than a biological weapon that you could drop on a planet and will transform aggressive species into monsters to kill each other? You could return hundreds of years in the future to check on the progress of evolution and if the species was still alive, presumably they would have evolved into a super-form.

The most pivotal scene of the film, particularly for transhumanists, is the moment of truth when Weyland “meets his maker.” Although the superior being — the translucent-skinned Engineer — is silent, we can draw conclusions about why his attacked his human progeny. The action occurs quickly. But in those few moments — watching the Engineer perceive us — we get a revealing glimpse into the microcosm of human society.

Weyland, the supplicant, annoyingly pesters the Engineer to grant him the boom of immortality. David relays Weyland’s selfish desires (or at least, we assume that David is in fact relaying Weyland’s desires) while Shaw, acting for the greater good of humanity, is physically suppressed with violence, brought to her knees by the fascistic domination of the dying patriarch. This simple act resounds with intense significance, displaying some of the more immature and uncivilized qualities of our species: how quickly we dominate each other for selfish gain. That the Engineer uses violence to display his distaste for human questions shows that the maker himself is not infallible. Like the humans creating androids, the Engineers creating humans are not “gods”, merely skilled technicians.

If our theoretical creators were to witness the state of our human society, what would they think? Would they want to help us perfect our many flaws, or would they be inclined to destroy us and start over, as God does in with the flood in the Old Testament? The moral of Prometheus’ techno fable may be that we shouldn’t latch on to the idea that machines or aliens or any other outside force is ultimately going to save us from ourselves. And if the quest for immortal life dehumanizes us, what is that life really worth?

While not a flawless film, Prometheus succeeds in tickling our immediate desire to experience the mysterium tremendum, that special kind of paralyzing fear that can only be inspired by a brush with divine cosmic powers. Prometheus also succeeds in presenting a mythic vision of the future, entwined with a cautionary tale about the possible selfishness of life extension technology, and the moral implications of seeding DNA and genetically evolved lifeforms into an environment. These are prophetic themes that engage in a meaningful cultural dialog, pushing the film to a level of art beyond the typical adolescent alien and robot fantasies that comprise a majority of big budget sci-fi.

Mythology and religion have traditionally served to provide answers to serious philosophical, existential questions. These days, many millions of people look to Google.com to answer immediate questions about the world around us. The assertion made in Prometheus with religious symbolism and the character of Elizabeth Shaw is that traditional religious faith can still be relevant in an age where human invention is approaching the ingenuity of the gods of legend. Is this true, or will the dated modes of religious faiths and miracles of old be replaced by new technological faiths and modern miracles: bioengineering, nanotech, data complexity, holograms, and advanced computing? Perhaps technology will be the source of future mythologies and religious quests.

If you are familiar with American Folklore, you probably recall the story of John Henry. He was a steel driver in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. If you don’t know what that means, it basically means he drove steel wedges into rocks to cut through them for railroads. John Henry was supposedly the best of them, and is famous for the tale of his competition against an early steam rock-cutter. He won against this prototype, barely, and it cost him his life. This story is often used as an allegory of the “Man vs Machine” meme, in which we are presented a choice – either Man or Machine – without any other options presented. In these arguments, the author is generally proposing to eliminate the machine in favor of the man, and advocate the abandonment or imposition of limits on technology.

Indeed, even one of the few books which I would consider positive on the subject of technological advancement, Martin Ford’s The Lights In the Tunnel frequently falls into this dualistic view, that man is in competition with machine, and that this competition inevitably will be won by the machine. In a recent blog post he links to numerous articles showing the ongoing replacement of humans in the workplace by machines. In the next most recent blog he shows examples of how many businesses are reaching a point where it is impossible for them to keep human workers and remain competitive. If we accept that the John Henry options, man or machine, are the only two that exist, then it looks very much like man is losing, and losing badly.

Yet I titled this article as I did precisely because this “choice” is a complete falsehood based on an underlying assumption: that the economy will always be one of scarcity. In an economy of scarcity, the assumption that individual humans need to compete against each other for scarce natural resources, and that this requires them to have “jobs” in order to acquire the means to survive, makes such a “choice” seem inevitable. If “machines” win, “humanity” loses.  Everywhere you turn, machines are taking away human jobs, replacing humans in the workforce in ever greater numbers, and invading jobs which once only humans could perform, from doing basic science research, to preparing legal paperwork, to financial trading, and even medical diagnostics. It’s a bleak prospect for the overwhelming majority of humanity about to rendered “obsolete” to the scarcity economy. Looked at from this perspective, it’s a possible future that makes William Gibson’s “cyberpunk future” look positively rosy. For a rather dark and disturbing look at the possibilities, Marshall Brain’s “Manna” is a highly recommended start.

There’s just one huge, gigantic, impossible to overlook flaw in this logic. “The Market” exists only so long as “consumers” exist to “purchase” good and services. Without people to supply a demand, it doesn’t matter how much supply exists.  A completely automated system of production will destroy the economy of scarcity by creating a mode in which supply becomes effectively infinite, and demand becomes so easily met that it can no longer be “sold” and thus becomes essentially “free”. For all the logical errors I could point out in the first part of Manna, Brain’s view of the possibilities full automation could bring about are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

Because the dichotomy presented by the John Henry choice is not merely false, it blinds us to the reality that we want the machines to win. As I pointed out in Adding our way to Abundance the 3d printing revolution is going to force the costs of manufacturing to plunge to below rock bottom. With the addition of robotic “resource gatherers” that can mine, refine, and process natural resources, and robotic drone delivery systems, the need for a human element in the supply chain vanishes, leaving only the demand side left. With supplies able to meet demand at effectively zero cost, the only remaining “jobs” left to humanity will be in creating “new” demand. Because until we create true AI, all of those machines will ultimately have only one single purpose. To give Humanity what it wants, because only humanity can have “desires” for those machines to meet.

So like John Henry, fighting the machines is the worst possible choice. If we “win”, we will only lose.

It was 260 years ago, that Franklin flew his kite.  In 1958, the modern day Lego was patented.  Put those 2 things together and you’ve got this.

The origins of the term “New Edge” may be under contestation.  I recall John Perry Barlow claiming the coinage and I’m sure Mondo Publisher Queen Mu has claimed it as well.   I think maybe Morgan Russell has also claimed it.  I have a fairly strong impression that its first usage was in Mondo 2000 promotional rhetoric, which would give the advantage to Mu.  In an interview for the Mondo book, Joichi Ito indicated that the Japanese professor and media philosopher Mitsuhiro Takemura and he coined the term for a Japanese magazine. But when I mentioned the other people who claimed to have coined it, Joi thought maybe they were just the first to spread it in Japan.

I secretly think I came up with it (yes, irony noted). Not that it matters much.  Changing Age to Edge is not exactly an accomplishment on par with feeding the poor and hungry or writing Crime and Punishment or “The Special Theory of Relativity.”

But what are — or were — the implications of the “New Edge.”   Was it the “new age” plus techno?  Was it the avant garde of the ‘90s?  Was it some Mondo hype that we only intended to feed to potential advertisers before deciding — what the hell — it’d be a good title for the book.  Or was it, as noted by Wikipedia, “a styling theme used by Ford Motor Company for many of its passenger vehicles in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”

The audio file below contains a brief talk I gave in 1990 at a Whole Life Expo titled “The New Edge” and gives my take on it at that time.  I opened with an audio collage that was organized by Don Joyce of Negativland, although I don’t remember exactly how that happened.   Those of you who saw the film Cyberpunk will recognize that much of it is appropriated from that blockbuster.  It’s included in the file and is pretty cool and fun.

Listen to the audio now:

To this day, you’ll hear people say that the film Psycho has left them permanently afraid to take showers, or that they’re still terrified of the ocean because of Jaws. But no tale of terror has made a longer-lasting impression on American minds than the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Nearly 2,000 years after John of Patmos penned this weighty prophecy of cataclysm and deliverance, adherents continue to anticipate the day of reckoning, simultaneously haunted by the fear of global demolition and elated by the promise of salvation.

There’s a strong case for the idea that Revelation’s Armageddon predictions were never intended for the present day—rather, John’s writing was very much a piece for its time: a redemption song for persecuted Christians awaiting the fall of an oppressive Roman Empire. Among the factors supporting this view are the text’s statements that its prophecies “must shortly come to pass” and the fact that the Hebrew transliteration of the Roman Emperor Nero’s Greek name, Neron Kaiser, adds to 666. (This, of course, is the number of an acutely ill-mannered beast in The Book of Revelation who enslaves humanity before being cast into a lake of fire.) The Roman Catholic Church and most Bible scholars contend that Nero, who was known for his brutal persecution and torture of Christians during or shortly before the writing of Revelation, was the very beast to which John referred. To avoid further persecution, John is said to have put Nero’s name in code rather than stating it outright.

The story adds up, but the majority of Americans ain’t buyin’ it. According to a 2002 TIME/CNN poll, 59 percent of the people in our nation believe that The Book of Revelation’s predictions will come true in the future. Various believers have fingered the likes of Ronald Wilson Reagan and barcode inventor George Joseph Laurer—both of whose first, middle and last names contain six letters—as the beast. Another theory holds that the beast is the Internet: The Hebrew equivalent of the letter W has a numerical value of 6; thus, www = 666.

Like cockroaches crawling on after a nuclear holocaust, doomsday predictions continue to circulate in spite of the fact that one apocalyptic prophecy after another has bombed miserably. It’s no stretch at all to say we could easily fill this entire article exclusively with failed apocalyptic prophecies. (See bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm.) Especially deserving of mention here are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, as of this writing, have made a total of nine incorrect end-of-the-world forecasts. No less memorable were the Y2K panic or, less whimsically, the actions of apocalypse cults such as The Manson Family, The Branch Davidians and The Order of the Solar Temple, which stand as grim warnings of the extremes to which End Times beliefs can be taken.

Our fascination with the apocalypse (from the Greek Apokálypsis: “revelation” or “lifting of the veil”) is, of course, inextricably tied to religion. (The concept can be traced back to ancient Persia’s Zoroastrian religion. End Times themes also appear in the Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Bahá’í and, of course, Christian faiths.) But at this point, the “end of the world” meme has saturated our civilization so thoroughly that even nonreligious people embrace Judgment Day predictions like diet crazes. The movie 2012 made $225 million during its first weekend, ultimately grossing more than $769 million worldwide, and there are more than 200 books about the 2012 prophecy on Amazon.com. The popularity of such apocalyptic literature as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’ Left Behind series stands as further testament to the enduring hold that eschatological ideas have on mass consciousness, as does the public’s undying interest Nostradamus, alien invaders, the New World Order, etc. The data is in: America hearts the apocalypse.

Black Hole Sun

The most popular doomsday forecast of the day is, of course, the 2012 prophecy. As this tale goes, December 21, 2012 will be the date of the worst pre-Christmas frenzy ever: Humanity will meet its doom, and lo, there shall be much pooping of pants and overturning of buses. A New Age remix of this prophecy holds that Winter Solstice of 2012 will not mark the annihilation of the human race, but rather the arrival of a paradigm shift that will radically alter life on Earth for the better.

The 2012 prophecy supposedly comes to us from the ancient Mayans: The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (often called the Mayan Long Count Calendar) is said to end on the Gregorian date of 12/21/12, which has been interpreted to mean that its makers believed the world was going to end at that time. Along with the movie 2012, predictions generated by the computer programs Timewave Zero and the Web Bot are helping promote anticipation of the end of the world on 12/21/12: Through means unrelated to the Mesoamerican Calendar, both of these programs have determined that massive and possibly catastrophic changes for the planet will take place in 2012. The ways in which Timewave Zero’s predictions intersect with the end of the Long Count Calendar are especially noteworthy: By using a numerological formula (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology) designed to calculate the ebb and flow of “novelty” (defined in this context as increase in the universe’s organized complexity), Timewave Zero inventor Terence McKenna (1946-2000) arrived at the conclusion that the most novel event in human history will occur on—yes—December 21, 2012.

Many experts on Mayan culture insist that the ancient Mayans never foretold any sort of world change in 2012. Rather, they claim that 12/21/12 is merely the day when the current cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (often called the Mayan Long Count Calendar) will end, only to be replaced by a new cycle. Mayan archaeologist David Freidel likens the end of this cycle of the Long Count Calendar to the moment when an odometer reaches zero and begins again. Mayan elder Apolinario Chile Pixtun and Mexican archaeologist Guillermo Bernal have both stated that the apocalypse—a distinctly Western concept—played no part in classic Mayan thought, and Mayan scholar Mark Van Stone has asserted that “the notion of a ‘Great Cycle’ coming to an end is completely a modern invention.” The claim that the ancient Mayans did not expect the world to end in 2012 is backed up by the fact that many of their prophecies foretell events far beyond that year. (One is set in the year 4772 A.D.)

Nonetheless, a good catastrophic forecast is too alluring for the public to resist. The Web teems with theories as to how the world will be destroyed in 2012: At 11:11 Universal Time, the sun will align with a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, bringing calamitous results; geomagnetic reversal (perhaps caused by a solar flare) will cause earthquakes, huge tsunamis and other such catastrophes; a planet called Nibiru (or Planet X) will collide with the Earth; there will be a new Ice Age; an explosion of gravity will pull the planet to the center of the galaxy, etc. (NASA refutes many of the most common 2012 doomsday theories on its Web site.

Nancy Lieder, founder of the website Zeta Talk, is the woman who first proposed one of the most widespread 2012 catastrophe scenarios: that of a hypothetical planet called Nibiru smashing into the earth. (The name Nibiru had previously appeared in the works of author Zecharia Sitchin, but Sitchin denies any connection between his writings and Lieder’s apocalyptic ideas.) To state the matter bluntly, Lieder is a lady who appears to have taken the brown acid: She claims to have an implant in her brain that allows her to receive messages from a star system called Zeta Reticuli and to have had encounters with aliens to whom she has given names like Slinky Man, Chicken Man, Bean Bag Man, Octopus Man and Pumpkinhead Zeta. She also once wrote at her Web site that when she reached into a cardboard box to find a piece of Starburst candy that was not individually wrapped in wax paper, she took it as a message from extraterrestrials to quit her job and move to Wisconsin.

On June 1, 2009—nearly half a year before the release of the movie 2012—NASA Astrobiology Institute Senior Scientist David Morrison stated that the website “Ask An Astrobiologist“ had received nearly a thousand questions about Nibiru and 2012. Morrison claims to receive between 20 and 25 e-mails each week concerning Nibiru’s imminent arrival. Some such e-mails express fear and panic, and others accuse Morrison of being a part of a conspiracy to bury the truth about the coming apocalypse.

You Say You Want a Revelation

It’s not surprising that the release of the film 2012 last year coincided with the fact that our nation was enduring the direst economic conditions it’s seen since the Great Depression. As Michael Molcher, editor of the magazine The End is Nigh, told BBC News Magazine in 2008, “What you get during times of particular discontent or war or famine or during general bad times is a rise in apocalyptic preaching and ideas.” Lending credence to that notion, Veronica Tonay, Ph.D., a licensed therapist and psychology teacher at UCSC, states that when her former UC Santa Cruz colleague Frank Barron (1922-2002) conducted studies about people’s end-of-the-world dreams, he found there was an increase in such dreams during the ’70s and ’80s, when fear of nuclear war was at a height.

Tonay notes that the public’s fascination with the apocalypse moves in cycles. The last spike in apocalyptic interest, she says, began at the turn of the millennium. “Although it may not seem like it to us, we’re still pretty close to the year 2000,” she offers. “It seems like at times of the cyclical change, all these millennial cults will pop up, and this idea that we’d better prepare for the end of time will come. We’re in one of those right now.”

With its oil spills, devastating natural disasters, economic hardships and threats of terrorism, global warming, fatal disease, etc. the present era offers no shortage of signs that “the end is nigh.” However,  writer and scientific researcher David Jay Brown believes that similar things can be said of any era. “During every period of history, there have always been people proclaiming that the end is just around the corner,” he states. “Now, what’s really interesting is that since the beginning of history, people have also been claiming that the beginning is near, that the illuminated New Age is coming.”

Brown, who explores this subject extensively in his book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, attributes this phenomenon primarily to a particular state of consciousness rather than to external conditions. “I think that it always appears that way if you’re in that state of consciousness: We’re always on the brink of chaos and the end of the human species, and we’re always on the brink of a new age, depending on how you look at it,” he ventures. “There’s never any kind of ultimate ending or ultimate beginning; I don’t think you ever reach a time where we say, ‘This is it.’ The universe is constantly evolving, changing, in flux. I think things have been getting worse and getting better for a long time, and those [apocalyptic] projections are just extensions of what we’ve believed for a long time.”

Tonay, too, sees preoccupation with the end of the world as the externalization of internal processes—specifically, a reaction to fear of figurative rather than literal death. “When people go through really major changes, they often start to have dreams, for instance, of the end of the world,” she explains. “It’s almost as though there’s so much change happening that the old self has died away. Everything the person has known has been obliterated, and they don’t yet see who they’re becoming.”

If apocalyptic ideas are primarily expressions of internal change, then the present popularity of such themes suggests that at the moment, a great many people are going through major personal changes simultaneously. In explanation of this, Tonay points to the recession that began in the United States in late 2007. “For many people, the idea of success was to make a whole lot of money,” she points out. “If you build your life on that foundation, then you’re very vulnerable, because it’s an external foundation, and it can always be shaken. Many of us don’t know what to believe in anymore. [We’re] losing our sense of what’s of value and feel shaky and insecure.”

At the same time that apocalyptic imagery reflects this instability, it is also telling of our hope for transformation. Our dissatisfaction with modern life, our disconnection from nature and from one another, fills us with the desire to tear it all down and start fresh. Tonay notes that our collective hope for societal transformation can be seen in another theme currently prevalent in popular culture: that of finding “a new world somewhere out in space, which is [symbolic of] the far unconscious.” Citing the film Avatar as an example, she adds, “Along with all that destruction, there is the creation of something new, or the finding of what has maybe always been there, but we didn’t see it.”

If, as Tonay and Brown’s statements suggest, the concept of impending world destruction goes hand-in-hand with that of the imminent discovery or creation of a new world, then perhaps this says something about the power of human perception to make things appear positive or negative and/or about the choices available to us as co-creators of this planet’s history.

In the early ’80s, when Prince vowed to party his ass off before the world ended in 1999, he helped set the tone for a decade steeped in cocaine abuse, material excess and self-interest. Here at the start of the ’10s, it might be useful to view the prophecy that 12/21/12 will bring the end of the human race—or, as the New Age version has it, the dawn of a more enlightened era—as a modern answer to “1999”: an anthem urging us to adopt saner values and practices as an alternative to self-annihilation.

That said, things are seldom as clear-cut in reality as they are in mythology. Rather than becoming a paradise or a wasteland on a specific date, our planet is likely to continue displaying aspects of both. As Brown puts it, “There’s always going to be a mix of light and darkness. It seems like right now, the light is getting brighter, and the dark is getting darker. And it may continue that way. It just may be part of the laws of physics, Yin and Yang, that there are always positive and negative forces. It may be that everything seems like it’s on the brink of chaos or the brink of a new order, but really, it just always stays perfectly balanced.”

It is the year 2014.

An unknown organization or group in the US assembles a fairly sophisticated drone from toy and radio shack parts. It’s basicly a smart “semi-controlled” RC helicopter with robot parts latched on. Nobody ever claims responsibility for this first act of weaponizing a private drone and even in 2020 nobody knows who started this ANON-ization of private drone vigilantism.

The first such device has a battery life of several hours and might easily mount a single high calibre rifle, a tampering proof directional communications beam, a smart programming (that gives it simple self-preservation ‘behaviour’ in case contact with base station is lost) and a HD camera.

This device takes to the air at an altitude that is largely inconspicuous to law enforcement and official authorities. The total construct is available online and costs less than 5000$, and is relatively easy with a mix of mail ordered and 3D printed parts.

Early models of this devices in 2014 are used to monitor and record law enforcement activities. Of course authorities are in a state of severe alarm about this sousveillance! Very soon after most law enforcement, security and intelligence officials in the US become indexed on non-US (and completely unaccountable) web sites outside the US. US law enforcement and intelligence communities (as well as organized crime, corporate security, mercenary forces who become likewise exposed and scrutinized) are in a state of disarray as their faces and biometric data because subject to constant public scrutiny.

The US state tries to crackdown against these “acts of domestic terrorism”, to no avail. Attempts are made to extradite those responsible for the non-US publications, to no avail. Those in charge can’t even find out who the hell is doing this documentation. As early of 2015 hundreds of thousands of police officers, IAD officers, FBI, NSA, CIA, immigration, narcotics, government, shills, politicians, military, seals, secret service, army intelligence, ATF etc etc agents are charted. The lest then expands to foreigners, chinese, russian, mossad, and so forth. In mere months the listing expands exponentially.

In 2015 the first confirmed vigilante kill occurs – a NY police officer found violently raping a teenage girl is shot through the head by one of these devices during the act. The device itself or those responsible is never retrieved, despite a national and international man hunt that burns through tens of millions of US dollars.

The act itself is recorded in HD format and publicized real time, causing massive riots and protest throughout the western world. The video of the rape and summary execution is called “collareral vigilantism” and watched by billions world-wide. Police officers (et.al) are held to close scrutiny by common people and met with outright hostility for months as a result, and vigilante killings of ‘feral cops’ become commonplace. In 2016 a full 300 “feral cops” are shot or wounded, many while committing these crimes and in the years following this incident a virtual ecology of garage drones take to the skies, or crawl on top of buildings.

By 2018 the number of private (rogue, vigilante, occupy, anon, terrorist, protest, copwatch, private blogger, journalist, etc) drones outnumber official drones about 20 to 1. By 2018 these drones become as small as a matchbox, can crawl in to homes with miniature appendages, are smart, camera equipped and many are deadly. These devices are then used to steal, burglarize, assassinate, spy, record video, hack home computers, read credit cards, blackmail, poison, spread diseases, troll, stalk, sexually predate on and far far worse.

By 2018 the authorities wish they never started this horrendous drone arms race. But nobody gives a flying hoot about what they think any more.