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straight up to reach the sun.
You won’t find a vine that grew

“Nothing is plumb, level or square.”

You won’t find a single organic object
on this Earth that traces a perfect line.
line was the best path to the open sea.
You won’t find a river that decided a straight
Th e whol e point is to bring

order
of humanit y JACKSON POLLOCK PIET MONDRIAN to exist ence
 Modernism pioneer Le Corbusier’s 1925 plan to demolish and
remake the center of Paris, disposing of the current architecture
in favor of large cruciform towers.
Le Corbusier dreamed of “cleaning and
purging cities of disorder” with “calm and
powerful architecture.” His plan for Paris was
never realized, though his ideals are took root
worldwide. Disembodied architecture reflects
disembodied reasoning.
 s
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ANDY YEUNG
 We are
A thousand years ago, we imagined we
bored could prove the existence of God using the
laws of logic. From there it was a straight
in the city. shot to Descartes’ “I think therefore I
am,” and on to the Enlightenment and
Modernism. Then the logical positivists
Th ere is of the 20th century — freaky, anal
pipsqueaks all — committed one
no long er of the biggest blunders in human
history. They invented the rigorous
and mathematically “exact” science
an y temp le of economics. Efficiency above
all! And in that rude and arrogant
leap, sent humanity down the path
of the sun. of total destruction.

ANDY YEUNG
 Thinking only in
the abstr act,
existing only in
the theor etica l,
the disembodi ed
intellect ual becomes
the destructi ve force
of authoritarian
capitalism .

LOOPNET

blago bung
(1917)
Hugo Ball
Th at Sm el l

Black mold and condensation on the windowsill.

Urine, dried cum and sweat the morning after.
Stale backwashed beer in the bottom of a warm can
sitting on top of a wall heater.
Crisp stench of sticky coagulated blood on the bottom
shelf of the fridge.
Wet tamarack drying on an old broken down cardboard
box next to the raging fire in the wood stove.
Bottom of an ashtray coated in thick cemented ash.
Sour of dirty clothes in the bottom of an overflowing
torn plastic bag.
Smell of FREEDOM.

— Candace Martin
JENNY WOODS // BUNNYJENNYPHOTO.COM
 Instrumen tal
Rationalit y — the
calcu lation of the
most efficient ways
to fulfi ll our desir es
— has overwhel med Western
Thinking over the past 300
years, generating a cold,
unfeeling mindset.
 RY
V E
L A
S

co lon ia l p lun der

e
n
d
l
e
s
s
w WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

a
r
s
 We were standing in the street,
DMYTRO KOZATSKY @KOZATSKY_D
half-way home from the day job and momentarily
distracted by a good-looking parking cop, when
it happened. It happened. And everything in our
life – jobs, relationships, pastimes – was instantly
suspended. It felt as if something beneath us was
shifting in a fundamental way.
Yet the feeling was oddly familiar, too. It was
the same feeling we’d had after running into the
babbling hobo in the park, the refugee with the
photo album. The horror was similar, followed by
empathy: sorrow, hurt, fear. There was a profound
sense of injustice that seemed to demand a response
somehow deeper, broader, stronger than ever before.
We scrambled to make some sense of it all. How
were the people around us reacting? Surely they
had seen what we had seen. Had they experienced
the same flash of insight? We felt we should speak
out, raise the alarm. To fail to condemn this
injustice with all of our passion seemed tantamount
to surrendering to it, to allowing it to be accepted
as a customary part of life.
We imagined, however, that such a primal
reaction would put us in the same category as
street-corner preachers and incomprehensible
protesters. This prompted us to pause. Maybe there
was more to this. How, exactly, had this remarkable
event come to pass?
Returning home, we began to consult trusted
sources – family members, thoughtful friends,
our old sociology professor. A favorite newspaper
columnist had some wise words that touched on
the subject. But what we had experienced was
personal; no one could offer a completely adequate
explanation. In fact, our investigations quickly
complicated matters. It seemed as though the
possible factors worth considering stretched across
the world, arced back through history and reached
deep into countless people’s minds. There was even
a vague intimation that we ourselves could have
been responsible in some way for the developments
leading up to what had taken place today.
Our thoughts became divided. The difficult
process of understanding was weakening our
resolve to rise to the challenge of the moment; at
the same time, it seemed immoral to act on a fading
sense of certainty. We still had a long way to go to
fully understand all the dimensions of this problem
at its roots. But how long could we stand around
and analyze and re-analyze? We felt as though we’d
been walking around in a dreamworld, and that
the shock today had shaken us awake. We could see,
now, that we were living in the middle of a crisis.
Self-doubt seemed like a form of surrender. Even if it
meant acting with limited knowledge, we had to do
something. Shadows were even now spreading across
the streets.
From this point on, fear of the imagined future
would be the foundation of our actions. We would
have to trust ourselves. We quickly reviewed the facts
and opinions we had been putting together. Ideas
that fell too far outside our norms were dismissed;
the potential consequences were too extreme to
imagine. The most honorable plan seemed to be
to find a middle ground consistent with our past
opinions and actions – it was these, presumably,
that had led us to our insight in the first place.
Abandoning the pattern of beliefs that had guided us
through life to this point would be self-sabotage.
We prioritized. We promptly put aside those
lingering questions that could take days or even
years to fully explore. We threw out ideas that we
knew would isolate us in our community, or that
might get us fired. We simply ignored any insights
that required more consideration or baffled our
sense of rationality; the most compelling ideas were
those for which there were well-known, pre-existing
arguments and easily understood rationales. Internal
cohesion and commitment were vital.
Even as we moved towards a sense of certainty,
however, we felt simultaneously anxious about
the time it was taking and distraught about the
haste with which we were cutting off our internal
debate. At the same time, other issues – the need
to get winter tires on the car, and to feed the
crying baby – began to press in on us. Irritability
began to outweigh earnestness. We had to figure
this thing out.
Finally, we settled on a reaction – or at least a
preliminary position. We had a case that we could
argue and defend in the coffee room or a letter-
to-the-editor; we had a starting point for personal
change, maybe a little more volunteer work.
At exactly this instant, without confessing it aloud,
we remembered the astounding openness of our
initial reaction, its almost infinite sense of possibility,
and saw how quickly we had spiralled into impotence
and murk.
The whole world had changed. And we had
returned to life as usual.
– Rob Wipond
 On November 19, 2005, in the Iraqi town of
Haditha, members of the First Division of the US
Marines massacred twenty-four Iraqi civilians,
including women, children, and elderly people.
After a roadside bomb killed one US soldier and
badly injured two others, marines took five men
from a taxi and executed them in the street. One
marine sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz, later testified
that he urinated on one of the bodies. The
marines then entered nearby houses and killed the
occupants — nine men, three women, and seven
children. Most of the victims were murdered by
well-aimed shots fired at close range.
The official US press release then falsely claimed
that fifteen of the civilians had been killed by the
roadside bomb and that the marines and their
Iraqi allies had also shot eight “insurgents” who
opened fire on them. These claims were shown
to be lies four months later, when Tim McGirk
published an investigation in Time magazine. When
McGirk initially put the evidence — both video and
eyewitness testimony — to the marines, he was told,
“Well, we think this is all al-Qaeda propaganda.”

Dmytro Kozatsky put these

photographs online, free
for the whole world to use.
@Kozatsky_D
LISA LINDVAY // LISALINDVAY.COM

FELIPE DANA // FELIPEDANA.COM.BR

 It’s not easy for us to grasp that an idea
held dear in the West — namely, that
individual rights and freedoms matter most
— isn’t shared by the rest of the world.
In fact, that idea is repugnant to the
ideals, aims and orders of life of the
majority of people on this Earth.
 In the age of disinformation, social media
isn’t merely pushing your weird uncles and
fringy friends into believing batty conspiracy
theories. It’s deciding the outcomes of
elections and shaping the course of world
history, often to anti-democratic ends. In
some countries, would-be autocrats are
so deft at wielding the power of online
untruth that they’re capturing the minds
of the masses and reweaving the fabric
of reality at will. The consequences
are enormous — not just for those over
whom they hold sway, but for the future
of all humanity. Copy-cat movements can
crop up literally overnight: all it takes is
a crackpot creed’s gaining influence in
one locale for it to spill over and catch on
elsewhere — or everywhere. So be warned,
and know your enemy. What follows are
some of today’s most fertile hotbeds for
lies and propaganda.
 Nearly forty years after Ferdinand Marcos’s
dictatorial regime came to an end, another Marcos
is poised to lead the Philippines. The onetime
president’s son has recently ridden a wave of
popular support to secure a landslide victory over
his closest rival, the incumbent vice president. His
winning strategy? A history-erasing disinformation
campaign waged on Facebook, TikTok, and other
social-media platforms. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.
(who goes by Bongbong, his childhood nickname)
has sought to sanitize his father’s murderous two-
decade reign, portraying it as an era of growth
and prosperity for ordinary Filipinos. Millions
bought these lies — just as they did six years ago,
when previous president Rodrigo Duterte (whose
daughter, Sara, is set to be Bongbong’s vice) ran
on a similarly truth-eliding platform of bravado
and bloodlust. Duterte’s wrecking-ball style of
leadership is still massively popular, as shown
by his successor’s rapid rise to power. Did the
efficacy of Bongbong’s digital demagoguery deliver
him the win? Or was it a matter of autocracy ’s
organic appeal? Amid the fog of untruth lying over
the island nation — made all the thicker by the
government’s recent blocking of more than two
dozen left-leaning websites for trumped-up links to
“terrorists” — it’s frighteningly difficult to say.

RAPPLER.COM
It’s no secret: China is a wasteland when it
comes to the freedom of information. The ruling
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) keeps a tight
grip on everything that can be said, and who can
say it, with a deadly serious policy of censorship.
Dissidents who contravene this policy are swiftly
and decisively punished — made to publicly
renounce allegiances, give forced confessions, and
worse. Across the Great Firewall, the digital bulwark
closing off the Chinese internet from that of the
rest of the world, hundreds of words and phrases
are banned. What’s more, the CCP has its thumb
in every social-media app native to China. Twitter
and Facebook are outlawed, but made-in-China
substitutes are among the most widely used in
the world; meanwhile ByteDance, TikTok’s parent
company, also owns the original, highly popular
Chinese version of the video-sharing platform.
This is all to say that if you, as a hypothetical
citizen of the People’s Republic, so much as try
to make a post containing a forbidden term, it’s
likely to disappear literally before your eyes. That
is, if you don’t disappear first. Welcome to the
epitome of digitally enabled, twenty-first century
totalitarianism. Succumb, or be silenced.
 Brazil’s rightward (re)turn under Jair Bolsonaro
came about thanks to South America’s favourite
social-media platform: WhatsApp. With a spate
of vicious disinformation, the former army officer
and congressman drew in legions of followers
on the platform, harnessing their ferocity to
propel him to the presidential palace. Pumped
up with piles of shadowy money, Bolsonaro’s
online campaign ushered in a perilous new
period for the young democracy in which untruth
reigns nearly unconstrained. As another election
approaches this autumn, the risk is that Brazil
has its own January-6th moment. There are
rumblings already that Bolsonaro intends to follow
in the footsteps of his American counterpart by
questioning the integrity of the voting process and
refusing to concede, no matter the outcome. It’s a
fragile situation for the fraught republic, where the
military dictatorship is less than four decades dead
and “corruption” is both a poisonous dog-whistle
and a perennial reality. WhatsApp, despite do-good
promises, is still fumbling to staunch the spread of
lies. Meanwhile the capture of the country’s mental
environment is proceeding unhindered. In the
words of Brazilian journalist Patricia Campos Mello,
“It’s like a slow-motion coup” — and no one is quite
able to stop it.
 First the junta took over of the flow of information.
Then it took over the country. Officers of Myanmar’s
army took out the phone lines, the TV stations, and
finally the internet. They rounded up members of the
National League for Democracy (NLD) mere months
after it won a majority in parliament (which previously
shared power with the military) and just one day before
elected representatives were to be sworn in. Among
those jailed were President Win Myint and State
Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, the legitimate civilian
leaders of the country. Three NLD party officials
died while in the custody of police. Thousands
more have been arrested, and hundreds killed, in
crackdowns on dissent since the coup d’état of
February 1, 2021. Crucially, it all took place while
under cover of social-media darkness. Facebook,
Instagram, WhatsApp, and later Twitter were shut
down during the height of the repression, stifling
efforts to organize protests as well as appeals
for condemnation abroad. When things came
back online, distrust and disinformation spread
like chickenpox. Accounts nominally belonging
to NLD officials were suspected of being hijacked
by the junta. None of it would be out of keeping
with the military’s practice of sowing hate
and lies online, often translating to homicidal
violence — not least against the Rohingya people.
Until the next heave for freedom, democracy in
Myanmar remains offline.
Alongside an explosion in the use of smartphones
came a veritable mushroom-cloud of murderous
disinformation. In just a handful of years, India has
become the country with the largest number of
Facebook users in the world, at over 300 million and
counting; WhatsApp has seen a similarly massive surge
in uptake. From the start, the conditions were ripe for
malign interests to make quick work of the chaos.
Indians on Facebook use 20 of the country’s 22 official
languages to communicate with one another, only
half of which the platform monitors for false information.
Limited familiarity with the digital world also means that few
have the resources to make sense of the muddle of truth
and lies. This all has proved a boon to religious extremists,
many of whom hold significant cachet with mainstream
political parties — not least PM Narendra Modi’s Hindu-
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In recent years,
tensions within Indian society have spilled over into
sectarian conflict with greater ease thanks to social media.
In the weeks leading up to the Delhi riots of 2020, for
example, when street violence led to the deaths of three
dozen Muslims and over a dozen Hindus,
the incidence of “inflammatory content” —
hateful rhetoric — shot up to three times
above normal, according to an internal report
from Facebook. Much of the strife plays into
the hands of the BJP, for which online threats
of bloodshed have the power to intimidate
its critics into silence. With social media as
its mouthpiece, the BJP is a step away from
remaking the country in its image: bullying,
intolerant, and verging on fascist.
Viewers of Soviet television must have known
something was up when, in the summer of
1991, regular programming was interrupted
by a performance of Swan Lake. Hardline
communists had kidnapped the reformist leader
Mikhail Gorbachev and launched a coup d’état —
developments too embarrassing to mention on state
TV. Days later the coup had failed and Gorbachev
was freed, but by the new year the collapse of the
Soviet Union was complete. It was in reference to
this moment that, in March of this year, the news
channel Dozhd (a.k.a. TV Rain) — among the last
independent outlets in Putin’s Russia — broadcast a
film of Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet on YouTube
before calling it quits. The station had already been
smeared by the Kremlin as a purveyor of “deliberately
false information” for covering the invasion of
Ukraine critically, and its editors forced to register as
“foreign agents” as part of a wider effort to discredit
dissidence. Many of its staff had fled the country out
of fear not only for their jobs but for their safety. Then,
two days before it went offline, access to TV Rain and
its social media was set to be throttled on the orders
of Russia’s prosecutor general. Why? In an absurd
twist of truth again calling back to Soviet times, the
channel was accused of “calling for extremist activity”
and fomenting “violence” — this for taking a staunchly
anti-war stance. TV Rain is far from alone. Since the
start of the invasion, a government-led crackdown
on its opponents, both on the airwaves and online,
has all but strangled an already stifling environment
for free expression. Yet the message, along with its
champions, remains resilient: in June, having escaped
Putin’s grasp and relocated to Latvia, TV Rain began to
stream once more.
The Israeli state and its media toadies want you to forget
about, to never think about, to lose the ability even to
fathom the humanity of Palestinians — except, that is, as a
uniform mass of foamy-mouthed terrorists. For the most
part, social-media platforms are all too happy to go along
with it. When longstanding residents of Sheikh Jarrah, a
Palestinian neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem,
faced forcible removal at the hands of Israeli authorities
last May, for example, the likes of Instagram, Facebook,
and Twitter swiftly censored the outcry. On Instagram,
images and videos were flagged, posts removed, accounts
disabled, and hashtags suppressed, all under the guise of
“content moderation.” The Facebook group “Save Sheikh
Jarrah” was taken down for “going against community
standards.” Meanwhile, Twitter attributed the
suspension of an account belonging to the Palestinian
journalist Mariam Barghouti to an unexplained “error.”
But it’s not just social-media execs: the wider Western
mainstream is, as a rule, eager to toe the Israeli line.
A telling instance involves the killing of Shireen Abu
Akleh, champion of the Palestinian cause and veteran
correspondent for Al Jazeera. By the time word of
her murder got out — which took place in May, as
Abu Akleh was reporting on an Israeli Defence Forces
(IDF) raid on a Palestinian city in the occupied West
Bank — the waters were already muddied. Despite
much evidence to the contrary, the IDF claimed the
fatal bullet may well have been fired from a Palestinian
weapon. Major media outlets consistently parroted this
falsehood, until independent probes by the UN as well
as the historically pro-Israel New York Times found it
baseless, both concluding that Abu Akleh had been
shot in the head by an IDF soldier. Israeli institutions
have yet to relent and admit responsibility. Yet this
should come as no surprise. After all, the basis for 75
years of occupation, oppression, and apartheid rests on
just such an evasion of accountability, repeated again
and again. And again.
Readers in the US: How often do you watch Fox News?
If you find yourself anywhere left of centre, the answer is
likely never. This typifies the unbridgeable gulf dividing
the two hemispheres not only of American opinion but of
American reality. Each half operates according to its own
logic, its own facts, its own truth: right is right, and left is
left, “and never the twain shall meet,” as old Rudy once said.
But the danger in letting the tension between these two
sealed-off, mutually hostile worlds mount unchecked is that
it risks snapping — and with explosive violence, bringing
down democratic society along with it. “Without facts, you
can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust,” said
journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa.
“Without these, we have no shared
space and democracy is a dream.”
It’s an outcome becoming less
unthinkable with each passing day.
What’s more, given the scale of the
planetary endgame looming before
us, there’s little hope for survival if
history’s guiltiest culprit is caught
up in consuming itself in endless
culture wars, leaving survival (let
alone democracy) to the realm of
dreams and fantasy. If we’re going
to have a shot at making it through
the climate emergency alive, the
American people will have to
reprioritize — even re-sanctify — the
ultimate shared space: the earth
beneath our feet, the very sky above
our heads. It all starts with getting
back to what really matters: truth,
lies, and the prospect of extinction.
— Staff
JOAN CORNELLÀ
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PHOTOGRAPHY
ight holders for images and text
DMYTRO KOZATSKY Every care has been taken to trace copyr
r& ed anyone we apologize and will, if
Dmytro is an Azov Regiment fighte in this issue. However, if we have omitt
photographer in Ukraine. Before his informed, make corrections.
social
capture he posted his pictures on
this or any Adbusters magazine, as
media, asking that they be shared
as DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in
not necessarily reflect the views
widely as possible. well as Adbusters online presences, do
s past, present, or future creative
@Kozatsky_D
held by all of Adbusters Media Foundation’
actor s, sponsors, or community.
or administrative staff, affiliates, contr
SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
THEO TRIANTAFYLLIDIS // SLIMETECH.ORG
there are no
wild beasts
there.
No running
water. no
mosquito bites.
no skin to touch.
no real
sex to
have.
It’s all
just
ones and
zeroes.
 straight line
thinking is
taking us into a
post-truth
era of
ecological
LISA LINDVAY // LISALINDVAY.COM
collapse and . . .
 the
mental
breakdown
of the
whole
human
race.

GABE GINSBERG/GETTY IMAGES

 pix els can’t
ca ptur e th e
dyn amism o f w h a
t
you’d see in prin
t.

For the full

experience,
get a physica l
copy of this
issu e at
adbusters.org
or loo k for
us on your loca l
n ewsstan ds.
 Rather than
estab lishing a set
of rigorous habits,
we may need to
rethin k our approach
to life in general.

— Jia Tolentino

HAMED DARZI VIA UNSPLASH

 “What does the sonnet mean?”
he asked abruptly, and paused, his eyes searching the room
with a grim and almost pleased hopelessness. “Mr. Wilbur?”
There was no answer. “Mr. Schmidt?” Someone coughed. Sloane
turned his dark bright eyes upon Stoner. “Mr. Stoner, what does
the sonnet mean?”
Stoner swallowed and tried to open his mouth.
“It is a sonnet, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said dryly, “a poetical
composition of fourteen lines, with a certain pattern I am sure
you have memorized. It is written in the English language, which
I believe you have been speaking for some years. Its author is
William Shakespeare, a poet wo is dead, but who nevertheless
occupies a position of some importance in the minds of a few.”
He looked at Stoner for a moment more, and then his eyes went
blank as they fixed unseeingly beyond the class. Without looking
at his book he spoke the poem again; and his voice deepened
and softened, as if the words and sounds and rhythms had for a
moment become himself:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourisht by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

The last and only time I had an epiphany...

SVian a

SILVIA VIANA
 In a moment of silence, someone cleared his throat.
Sloane repeated the lines, his voice becoming flat, his
own again.

“This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Sloane’s eyes came back to William Stoner, and he

said dryly, “Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you across
three hundred years, Mr. Stoner; do you hear him?”
William Stoner realized that for several moments
he had been holding his breath. He expelled it gently,
minutely aware of his clothing moving upon his body
as his breath went out of his lungs. He looked away
from Sloane about the room. Light slanted from
the windows and settled upon the faces of his fellow
students, so that the illumination seemed to come
from within them and go out against a dimness; a
student blinked, and a thin shadow fell upon a cheek
whose down had caught the sunlight. Stoner became
aware that his fingers were unclenching their hard
grip on his desk-top. He turned his hands about
under his gaze, marveling at their brownness, at
the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt finger-
ends; he thought he could feel the blood flowing
invisibly though the tiny veins and arteries, throbbing
delicately and precariously from his fingertips
through his body.
Sloane was speaking again. “What does he say to
you, Mr. Stoner? What does his sonnet mean?”
Stoner’s eyes lifted slowly and reluctantly. “It
means,” he said, and with a small movement raised
his hands up toward the air; he felt his eyes glaze
over as they sought the figure of Archer Sloane.
“It means,” he said again, and could not finish
what he had begun to say.
Sloane looked at him curiously. Then he nodded
abruptly and said, “Class is dismissed.” Without
looking at anyone he turned and walked out of
the room.

TY VALLIES
— from Stoner by John Williams
 In 1926,
an Irish designer named Eileen Gray built a shiplike villa
on the south coast of France that drove the famed architect
Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had declared that a house was “a
machine to live in,” but Gray thought, No: a house is a person’s
shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start
designing, she studied how she and her housekeeper moved
through the day and made diagrams of their motions and those
of the sun to reveal natural patterns—loops in the kitchen,
deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room.
The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this
organic choreography. A mouthlike entry pulled you
in; screens and mirrors unfolded from walls; windows
and shutters opened in all directions for the right air,
light, or view. On plans she drew lines showing how
you could move, look, and live in this house: natural
pathways transformed to design.

I love how Gray made this house, and really love

how much it maddened bombastic Corbu.
Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is
carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it
deforms the letters and outputs new design variations — Jane Alison
that are captured annually. The project explores what
it means to design with nature and on nature’s terms.

- Bjørn Karmann, bjoernkarmann.dk

On the weather report, another
record-breaking hurricane is
chewing up the coast. You drive
out through the suburbs and
discover a shantytown, the kind
you’ve always associated more with
Somalia or Haiti than your own
hometown. One more overtime
shift at work, and your company
health plan will automatically sign
you up for Prozac. On TV, there’s
another war.
Around and around and around. Even the most people. In his Holotropic Breathwork technique,
entrenched believers in the new global order a combination of intense breathing, expressive
have a mounting sense that some fundamental music and focused bodywork causes dramatic
mindshift is needed. The contradictions of late- psychological transformations in most people.
capitalist life put increasing pressure on our Within minutes, those who try it begin to
psyches to synthesize the data, yet insights experience things more acutely (much the
come only in fits and starts. They appear like way people often say they do in the midst of
desert mirages, dazzling us with their promise abrupt life changes). Colors look brighter,
and then dissolving into sand. memories appear more detailed, symbols and
words provoke pluralities of interpretation.
And suddenly we are all wondering: What would
Sensitivity to sensations in the body and brain is
it be like to drink deeply? Can we in the First
heightened; old patterns are suddenly seen in a
World have a revelation? Would we recognize
new light.
one if we had it?
For serious explorers, this is only the beginning.
A few pioneers have been working with these
questions. In the past, political radicals have As their sensory experiences evolve, mind
been as quick as reactionary conservatives to explorers frequently find that the psychological
dismiss maverick consciousness researchers. and the physical become intertwined, and
But suddenly, the discoveries of mind explorers watch amazed as each influences the other.
like Stanislav Grof, Jean Houston and the Incorporeal presences may seem as real as the
recently deceased John Lilly, seem to have a walls, walls may seem permeable, or normal
penetrating cultural significance. The currency material reality may dissolve into flowing energy
of the times is revelation and epiphany. fields. The mind’s and body's instruments of
perception come to be understood as critical
Grof, a former Johns Hopkins professor and
components in constructing a sense of reality.
chief of a Maryland psychiatric research
(What is music without our eardrums conveying
center, has scoured ancient and modern
it, our memories labeling it?) Even if such
methods of consciousness change in order to
experiences are discounted as “hallucinations,”
develop techniques that can trigger revelatory
there is a lingering sense that normal reality
experience rapidly and in a broad spectrum of
itself could be one of those illusions – the
ultimate meme, prolonged interminably by its
social infectiousness.
Even this is merely one stage. As revelation extends, “time” as a psychological
process can stop; explorers report a sense of intense connection to their body’s
internal cellular activities, to collective memory, or to other beings or the entire
human race. Some feel the inextricable unity of good and evil, oppressor and
oppressed, or find themselves dissolved into a universal consciousness.

It all sounds wild and chaotic, and yet, for
many of us, oddly familiar as well. Under the
pressure of stress, despair or confusion, more
and more of us are peering over the brink of
breakthroughs of this type. Grof suggests it’s
“archetypal” – as the human crisis deepens,
our consciousness tries to promote healing by
uncovering repressed truths.
We resist the shift: Who wants to lose their
grip on everyday life? We dread an exile from
so-called “consensus reality,” imagining
an impoverished, eternal loneliness of
insanity. But in fact, those who’ve gone all
the way down the rabbit hole of epiphany
come back with a view of a world that has
truly and profoundly changed. Grof alone
has compiled records from thousands of
such people. Without any coercion, the
overwhelming majority emerge with a
non-violent attitude, reverence for nature,
anti-materialistic values, a keen interest in
spiritualism (though not organized religion),
a holistic approach to health, and an intense
desire for social change.
Why? Because one common effect of these
non-ordinary states is pure awe. Even a
faint glimpse beyond the spectacle and into
the vastness of existence transforms into
breathtaking experiential reality. This almost
invariably creates deep humility before the
infinite complexity of nature. Unsurpassed
levels of compassion emerge from the
intimate identification with other people,
creatures and things. Visceral immersion in
the entire human collective makes it almost
impossible not to consider the effects of every
personal action on the global community and
future generations.
Often, the end result is confusion. But
rather than growing depressed or anxious
or paralyzed by it, revelatory explorers tend
to become irrepressible skeptics. For them,
no moral perspective, dominating mood or
intellectual conclusion can pass for absolute
“fact” or “objective truth” very easily, or for
long. Revelation is a radical deconstruction
of the senses of self and reality. It allows
entirely different impulses to influence your
actions; it shortens the distance to spontaneity
and authenticity.
As long as revolutionaries have existed, they’ve
sought ways to fundamentally change how people
think and see the world. Frustrated, they fall
back on reform: the attempt to persuade people
to follow prescriptions for change. Consciously
or not, most people resist. But when someone’s
whole sense of reality shifts – say, when they
realize that death is closer than they had allowed
themselves to think – radical new decisions
come effortlessly.
The First World is a culture preparing for
revelation. We are watching, alarmed, as rips
appear in the fabric of our reality. At the same
time, we are quick to forget, ignore, or send in
reinforcements. How many are ready to step
through the hole?
— Rob Wipond
ESTHER SWEENEY
 In early 2020,
as the pandemic shut down the world and drove
everyone deeper into cyberspace, word began to spread
online about a massive and sinister cover-up. One that
ought to have every every freedom-loving American
very afraid. Had you heard? Birds aren’t real. Those
feathered things in the sky are actually government
surveillance drones. The CIA wiped out all the real birds
in a secret military mission starting in the Sixties, and
replaced the birds with bots to spy on Americans. They
assassinated Kennedy because he refused to go along
with it. You wanna go deeper? How much time ya got?
The whistleblower remained in the shadows until
the New York Times finally smoked him out – a very un-
Deep Throat-ish twentysomething graphic designer from
Memphis named Peter McIndoe. Soon the young truth-
teller was appearing on nightly news programs looking
like a latter-day Abbie Hoffman: bed-headed, unshaved,
t-shirt and jeans. He had the air of someone who got a
phone call and had ten seconds to flee the premises.
Speaking softly, torquing up the sense of menace, he laid
out the whole conspiracy in granular detail. How birds
were systematically killed with poison gas launched from
high-altitude bombers over Area 51. If he met skepticism,
he doubled down. Online, believers leapt to his defense,
eager to unmask the inquisitors as part of the real
conspiracy: “This is a psyop to discredit the Birds Aren’t
Real movement,” one poster on Twitter put it.
Meanwhile, over in the UK, another merry prankster was
spreading FUD on the streets of Birmingham. Foka Wolf — a shadowy
public artist in the Banksy mold (identity unknown; m.o.: in-and-out-
before the wheatpaste dries). Unlike Banksy’s, his creations aren’t visual
poems; they’re straight-up visual bullshit. Wolf is an apostle of the post-
truth apocalypse, just like McIndoe. For these artists, misinformation is
their currency and their canvas.

Tang ping (lay flat)


One morning not long ago a series of political ads
appeared on London tube trains. In one, the Conservative
Party promised to “erase all disabled people by December
2020.” In another, the party pledged to “cut all homeless
people in half by 2025.” The ads seemed legit if you glanced
at them quickly. But they were of course Foka Wolf creations.
Just like the other sharp looking fake ads around town. The
vacant-lot billboard announcing a coming condo development
(“Erasing History to Maximize Profit”). The PSA giving drivers
of Jeeps and other 4x4s the good news that they “may be
eligible for a free penis enlargement.” Every one of them is
Instagram bait. Every “risograph,” as Wolf calls them, an
NFT-in-the-making. The target here isn’t some identifiable
corporate villain, like in the fake ads of yore. It’s the culture
itself — confused, gullible and chasing its own tail until
it no longer knows what’s true and what isn’t, and isn’t
at all sure it cares.
Culture jamming didn’t die —
it just skip ped a gen eration.
The new Gen Z jammers weren’t even a gleam in
their parents’ eye when the Situationists were papering
the Continent with their official-looking “Real Report
on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy.” They
weren’t yet born when the Yes Men, posing as George
W. Bush supporters, urged Americans to sign a Patriot
Pledge promising to keep nuclear waste in their yard.
They were still in diapers when Adbusters was getting up
to speed, and when No Logo was published, and when
Reverend Billy started trooping into Starbucks to perform
exorcisms on the cash registers. Yet the residue of that
old resistance still greases these new gears.
Culture Jam ming 2.0
isn’t new because the
jam mers have changed.
It’s new becaus e
th e world has ch an ged.
As Abbie Hoffman threw handfuls of dollar bills onto the
floor of the New York Stock Exchange, it was crystal clear what the
jam meant: he was disrupting the sacred ritual of institutionalized
greed. You didn’t need a playbill to recognize the actors, the
audience, the message of the pantomime back then. Now it’s not
so clear. Black-and-white has faded to grey. We can’t agree any
more what on we’re even talking about. Consumer capitalism
was the fat target for years, but in the post-truth era, the jammer’s
wedge is aiming deeper, into the root system of the giant bullshit
generator of the Internet. How do you fight misinformation? By
making even more of it. By sowing confusion. Turns out this works
against any argument you want to undermine.
Last May, after the Texas abortion ban, a protest erupted
on the campus of the University of Cincinnati. The pro-lifers
and pro-choicers were nose-to-nose. It looked like it might get
violent. Then the Birds Aren’t Real brigade showed up. They
too were pissed. And they too had their chants and their signs.
If It Flies, It Lies. And: Bird Watching Goes Both Ways. People were
flummoxed. The pro-life protest immediately lost steam, and folks
soon started drifting home. Surveying the scene, a Times reporter
remarked: “I think Birds Aren’t Real accidentally invented a new
form of counterprotesting.”
One that apparently scratches an itch deep within the
psyche of Gen Z.
Some of the young followers who took up arms for Birds
Aren’t Real talk of how therapeutic it’s been for them to go all Joey
Skaggs at a time when everything feels massively unstable, and
facts crumble at a touch. “I think a lot of people feel the madness,”
McIndoe told the Times, “and don’t really have a way to express it.”
Here’s something else that’s new. These days, even when the
ruse is so outrageous it’d make Jonathan Swift go, “Whoa, pray dial it
back, bro,” people just aren’t getting the joke. Doesn’t matter if we’re
being sold a bill of goods by corporations, conspiracy theorists … or
pranksters. It’s as if the satire filters are kaput — because the truth
filters are, too.
In one campaign Foka Wolf cooked up, official-looking signs
went up on the doors of the washrooms in McDonald’s: “This restroom
is currently out of order. Please use the children’s ball pit.” Instead
of folks taking a second to process, going “Eww!” and laughing, they
simply turned around and left. At a time when everything is in
doubt, many of us have lost the muscle to critically appraise the
messages that hit us — especially if they look official. “People
will believe anything if it’s packaged and polished a certain way,”
Foka Wolf told a filmmaker. “That really troubles me.”
Jamming is an edge activity, by definition. But there is
always the chance that if the conditions are right — the center
isn’t holding and revolution is in the air — it could seize the
imagination of a whole culture. It’s just that no one thought it
would happen in China.
 In Beijing, during the pandemic, Xi Jinping appeared on state
television to deliver the stirring message that “China’s hope lies in youth.”
Look at the fight in them! Whereupon a fair number of China’s youth
replied by collectively … rolling over and pulling the covers over their
head. Tang ping,” the move was dubbed. Literally, “lying flat.”
It seemed Chinese youth had their own message for the “great
leader and helmsman”: this dog-eat-dog culture is kicking the crap
out of us. For years we accepted the bargain: no gain without pain. But
lately there’s been too much pain — and frankly we’re not seeing the
gain. The rewards are not as advertised. Where is the gain? Please
explain. We can wait, we’re not busy.
When working harder isn’t getting you any closer to your goals,
the workaround is obvious: just lower your goals. Eventually you can
reach them without even getting out of bed!
As the pandemic eased, Chinese officials were relieved. They
would shake out the cobwebs, surely. This is what people do when
they’re feeling cut off and isolated: they join wackadoodle movements.
Now that everyone’s emerging into the real world again, no doubt that
would end the strange, oh-so-un-Chinese behavior.
It wasn’t. The resistance just shifted into a new phase.
Tang ping gave way to bai lan.
Which translates to something like: “let it rot.”
This is more serious cheese.
The phrase bai lan is actually borrowed from
professional basketball. There comes a point in a losing
season when you say, Fuck it, it’s over. Let’s basically give
up and be first in line for a high draft choice next season. In
the West we’d call it “tanking.”
The difference is, tanking in sports is strategic. You
raise the white flag today so that you can roar back stronger
than ever tomorrow. But this economic bai lan of the young
Chinese seems to have no such endgame. The message
is, We refuse to co-operate with the official narrative … until
the narrative changes.
If tang ping was a cry for help on a personal
level — a rebuke to the constant urgency, the
exhausting, socially mandated drive to work and work
and scratch and claw for status — bai lan is a more
global yawp. It’s a verdict against a whole system — a
judgment that go-go capitalism is an idea on the wane.
As bai lan bites in, another Chinese phrase keeps
coming up that conveys the depressing fatalism:
“Dead pigs are not afraid
of boiling wat er.”
In China, the greatest urban migration in history — and the
biggest mass movement of poor to rich — clearly didn’t deliver on its
promise. Instead, a lot of young Chinese believe they were led into the
temple to pray to a false god.
The Guardian quoted a 29-year-old creative from Beijing
named Sal Hang. He’d been a flight engineer but moved to the city
to pursue his passion in the music industry. It didn’t pan out. Which
made him wonder if, now, such a dream can ever pan out. “We cannot
make any long-term plans for our lives any more,” the young man said,
“because we do not know what is going to happen to us even five years
down the road.”
So this is culture jamming in 2022: a chameleonic response to
a shifting landscape. The resistance is comical, it’s absurd, it’s cryptic.
It’s as forceful as the turn of a monkeywrench and as passive as a
protester gone limp in the grip of a cop at a forest blockade. Success
is measured by the volume of smoke blown back in the eyes of the
spreaders of lies. And the amount of fun the jammers are having. And
the fact that we are all still here.
Last spring, a dozen elephants were spotted walking out of
a game reserve in China’s Yunnan province, their ancestral home
for generations, and heading for the city. People began tuning in for
live, real-time news feeds of the rogue elephants of Yunnan. Night-
vision cameras caught them tromping moonily across the landscape,
through car dealerships and people’s back yards, casually flattening
clotheslines and barbecues, crossing major highways, oblivious to
bylaws, road signs, property boundaries hundreds of kilometers
behind them now. Motive: unknown. Destination: unknown.
Scientists were divided on what exactly was going on.
Something had awakened these animals’ wild instincts. Or maybe
the elephants were detecting man-made changes in the landscape
— plantations just over the horizon — and the olfactory rush was
drawing them out.
Whatever the reason, young Chinese watched, rapt.
The breakdown of order was intoxicating.
“You can watch the world change in front of you,” one
commentator said, “if you have enough battery life to stream it.”
— Bruce Grierson
 BIRTH OF A NEW
PROTEST VIBE:
WE GO DEEPER
SHIFT PARADIGMS
HEAVE
CULTURES

SPARK
REVOLUTIONS
WILLIAM DAVIES
 Up from the grassroots come the three kinds of
people who make every revolution go.
First, a few free spirits start breaking their
old patterns, embracing what they love (and
in the process discovering what they hate),
daydreaming, questioning, rebelling.
And their energy is so damn infectious that a
second group is naturally drawn in. And this bigger
group, the champions, doubles down on what’s
happening, and they add new gestures, shaping
this new narrative, unencumbered by history.

And now the third group jumps in. They are the
superspreaders. And the meme goes viral.

It won’t take millions

of us to drive the
revolution home.
All we need is five
thousand passionate,
fuck-it-all fire-
starters.

WILLIAM DAVIES
JOEY
MALB
ON
Every Friday we go rogue.
We claim a People’s Day . . .
opt out of the world system.
Kids bug out of school.
Office workers don’t report.
Mechanics lay down their wrenches.
College students fan out
into the cities.
We jump the wall and
head to open sea.

And there we play.

Each one of us, in our own
sweet way, we ask ourselves:
“What will I do today to help
win the planetary endgame?”
And by going out into the
world and doing something,
we rediscover what it means
to be truly alive.
We the people of the world
demand that you get rid
of all tax havens
by the end of the year,
or we’ll bring your
corrupt system to a
sudden, shuddering halt!
 Biking home from work the other day, I was in the pits
of despair. This job, sometimes . . . I don’t know what
it was, but being on social media all day, it weighs
on you. There’s so much going on that we’re entirely
powerless to change. So many forces bigger than us.
And no one is doing much of anything.
Protest marches are so boring. The same old signs,
the same old chants, the same old people. 🥱
What happened to revolution?
We’ve forgotten that protests are powerful. A medium to
change the world. So why are all the placards we see
right now so fucking dull?
On that day I biked right into an Extinction Rebellion
march. There was a throng of people dancing beneath
a sign the size of some rooms, quivering in the breeze.

It read:
ACTI ON IS THE ANTIDOTE
to DESPAIR
And in that second I thought, “Fuck yeah!
Of course it is!”
That was an epiphany moment. A good protest
sign has the power to change your mood from
dreary to delighted. And it might just change the
right person's mind.
 Giggl e and snor t and
cack le and howl and
chuc kle and huff
and puff and grin;
and blow the hous e
down .

— Honey Badge r

BRUNO BARBEY
 To find a form

that accommodates
the mess,

that is
the task of the
artist now.

— Sam uel Beck ett

JOEY MALBON
JOEY MALBON
JOEY MALBON
JOEY MALBON
JOEY MALBON
 For peo ple
who want
their str aight lines
to be straight,

life itse lf
is the problem.

— Nata lia Ilyin

VLAD CIOPLEA
I was knee-deep in a documentary
on the global economy for Canada’s National
Film Board, gallivanting around interviewing
the world’s most esteemed economists and
growing more disillusioned by the day. The
economists claimed they’d discovered laws
within their discipline as solid as the laws
of physics. We can micromanage growth,
engineer prosperity and keep the economy
humming with few or no ill effects, they said.
It was such arrogant bullshit. And Hazel
called them on it.
She wasn’t an economist herself; her
husband was. After years of breathing his
and his colleagues’ second-hand smoke at
dinner parties, she knew where these boys
were messing up. They were tallying the
wrong numbers, recommending the wrong
paths, and relying on models that bore
only a passing resemblance to how people
really behaved and the world really worked.
Neoclassical economics, she said, was “a
form of brain damage.”
Few listened to her — at least at first.
Because she was just “a housewife,” standing
outside the clubhouse, listening through the
keyhole. (Of course that’s often the best place
to be. You know what’s going on, but you
didn’t drink the Kool-Aid.)
J.K. Galbraith cast a longer shadow, out
there with her on the Left, but he wasn’t
nearly as radical. To me, Hazel was the
first person who truly drove home the
idea that economists were mis-measuring
progress. Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
as the master metric? Come on. Things like
literacy rates and the health of children are better
indications of whether a country is thriving than
GDP — which also glosses over the damage, the
“externalities,” left in the system’s wake. JFK
was swayed by her message. A year after meeting
with Hazel, Kennedy on the campaign trail had
this to say about the GDP:
“It measures neither our wit nor our courage,
neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our
compassion nor our devotion to our country. It
measures everything, in short, except that which
makes life worthwhile.”
The sustainable alternative model Hazel
proposed — based on renewable energy sources
and biomimicry — was so ahead of its time that
the old guard couldn’t even see it over the curve
of the horizon.
Hazel could have been, maybe should have
been, the Jane Jacobs of economics. Jacobs, too,
was uncredentialed and dismissed as a mere
homemaker meddling in the old boys’ network
of urban planning, favoring such nonsense as
diversity and locally driven solutions.
The two women had this in common too: they
talked of the coming of a New Dark Age if we
don’t get our shit together.
— Kalle Lasn
Suzi Gablik was never one
for straight lines. As a collagist, she took
pieces from everywhere and synthesized
them into a greater whole, an aesthetic
metaphor for ecology and her vision of
collective abundance.
Gablik was one of those visionaries who are
dismissed in the prime of creative life. Their
work vilified as too deviant, too radical,
too extreme for the mainstream to handle.
But then they die, and suddenly they’re
the future. Obituaries line up to describe
their worldly contributions with the fervor
of a disciple.
Gablik fluttered around New York and
London’s art scenes in the 70s and 80s,
before eschewing the plastic world of modern
art for the soft Appalachian mountains.
During her wild and colorful life, she
lived in René Magritte’s attic for a year,
describing him in her first book as “the son
of boredom.”
Despite never making it big, Gablik
stuck to her convictions, railing against
the commercialization and exploitation
of the art industry in her 1984 book,
Has Modernism Failed?
In it, she called for the moral rearmament
of the artist. She longed for a rejection of
scientific rationalism and a revival of the
ritualistic, the primordial, the divine. She
rebelled against modernism’s straight line
thinking by embracing tradition. She wrote,
“modern art has always implied a loss of
craft, a fall from grace, a fraud or a hoax.”
Her vision of art as social practice was in
stark opposition to the modernist construct
of art as radically individualistic. She
wanted to liberate art from economics and
consumerism, to become essential to the life
of communities. This was the 80s: the decade
where art suddenly became more valuable than
stock market trades. The artistic elite of the
time did not care for this hippie intellectual
more concerned with the world as a whole than
money or fame.
As a Taoist she saw herself more as a speck of
dust than as a towering rock star. She wrote of
“a new kind of art that can help realize needed
change in the world.”
She told an interviewer in 2007, “Our primary
task at this point is to come out of denial and
bear witness. To really confront the sheer
deadliness of our present circumstances. It’s a
moot point as far as what the human race can
do about all this now, since too many genies
are out of the bottle and we can’t put them
back in. The human race has proven itself to be
deeply dysfunctional.”
In contrast to the ruthless secularism of the
time, she delved into apocalyptic mysteries on a
blog site dedicated to her alligator muse, Virgil.
Her last book, a memoir titled Living the Magical
Life was a step too far for mainstream publishing,
and, like her first book, wasn’t published until
years later. But rejection from the establishment
did little to dim her spark.
“When you learn to stop struggling and
do nothing, everything is possible,” she said.
“Submit, surrender, become an embodiment of
the feminine principle. Don’t assume you know
the right answer in advance. We are simply part
of the vaster design that is unfolding.”
— Chiara Milford
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am waiting and I am anxiously waiting
for a religious revival for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
to sweep thru the state of Arizona by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored for the storms of life
and I am waiting to be over
for them to prove and I am waiting
that God is really American to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting and I am waiting
to see God on television for a reconstructed Mayflower
piped onto church altars to reach America
if only they can find with its picture story and tv rights
the right channel sold in advance to the natives
to tune in on and I am waiting
and I am waiting for the lost music to sound again
for the Last Supper to be served again in the Lost Continent
with a strange new appetizer in a new rebirth of wonder
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day

I am waiting for my number to be called
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting
and I am awaiting retribution
for the Salvation Army to take over
for what America did
and I am waiting
to Tom Sawyer
for the meek to be blessed
and I am waiting
and inherit the earth
for Alice in Wonderland
without taxes
to retransmit to me
and I am waiting
her total dream of innocence
for forests and animals
and I am waiting
to reclaim the earth as theirs
for Childe Roland to come
and I am waiting
to the final darkest tower
for a way to be devised
and I am waiting
to destroy all nationalisms
for Aphrodite
without killing anybody
to grow live arms
and I am waiting
at a final disarmament conference
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
in a new rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

—L
 awrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting” from
A Coney Island of the Mind
 After a few hundred thousand years,
as the universe continued to expand and
cool, the first neutral atoms formed and
a great darkness began, broken perhaps a
billion years later by the appearance of
the first stars. These pioneers are thought
to have been much more massive than their
descendants in today’s night sky, each
several hundred times the mass of the Sun.
They would have been short-lived, as the
enormous temperatures at their cores drove
nuclear fusion fast enough to exhaust their
reserves of fuel in less than a million
years, finally exploding in brilliant
supernovae. Extreme conditions during the
explosion would have stimulated further
nuclear reactions, producing carbon,
oxygen and a rich variety of other
elements which, scattered throughout
a nascent galaxy by the power of the
explosion, were incorporated into
subsequent generations of stars. Though
their lives were brief and their existence
solitary, with perhaps just one forming
per galaxy, the first stars have a long
legacy. The Sun, the Solar System and the
Earth, not to mention our bodies and much
of what we see around us, probably include
material that was produced in the dramatic
death of the Milky Way’s first star.

- Chris Lintott, The London Review of Books

SPL/BARCROFT MEDIA
 The questions of God
– meaning in Milton’s phrase “The
god who hung the stars like lamps in
heaven” – I don’t think psychedelics
can address that definitively, but
there is another god, a goddess, the
goddess of biology, the goddess of
the coherent animal human world, the
world of the oceans, the atmosphere,
and the planet. In short, our
world! The world that we were born
into, that we evolved into, and
that we came from. That world, the
psychedelics want to connect us up
to… Our individuality, as people
and as a species, is an illusion of
bad language that the psychedelics
dissolve into the greater feeling
of connectedness that underlies
our being here, and to my mind
that’s the religious impulse. It’s
not a laundry list of moral dos
and don’ts, or a set of dietary
prescriptions or practices:
it’s a sense of connectedness,
responsibility for our fellow
human beings and for the
earth you walk around on, and
because these psychedelics
come out of that plant
vegetable matrix they are the
way back into it.

- Terrance McKenna

MOLLY SAMPSON
 Maybe over the

nex t thousand
years

(with the help of a bit of

wob bly thin king )

we will
learn not to
fear the
other?

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE