Forget the ’60s, Let’s Talk about the ’90s: Reframing the Utopian Imagination

The authors argue that both digital and psychedelic cultures have lost their earlier radical, queer, and collectivist potential, having been co-opted by neoliberal individualism and commercial interests. They trace this shift from the utopian promise of 1960s counterculture to the 1990s, where DIY subcultures and ecstasy-fueled sociality offered alternative forms of connection and solidarity. In contrast, today's medicalized and microdosed psychedelics, along with platform-dominated digital culture, promote productivity and atomization rather than collective transformation. The authors propose looking back to the 1990s—exemplified by Gregg Araki's film 'Nowhere' and José Esteban Muñoz's concept of queer ecstatic communism—as a model for reclaiming risk, play, and mutual care outside of instrumentalized frameworks.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Something queer is haunting the digital and the psychedelic. Though it is now hard to remember, there was a time when digital culture was abundant with utopian potentialities around identity play, proliferations of difference, and social experimentation. Today’s digital culture, however, strikes many as a resolutely dystopian space that never forgets, that holds you accountable, and that is all business. Psychedelic culture, too, was once more capacious in its hopes for the social, particularly in ways that we recognize as queer. This queer psychedelic consists of corporealities that resist categorization and confound expectation, and collectivist practices of mutual aid and solidarity. It tends toward the transformation of normative arrangements of space and time, and away from the utility and individualization of identity and labor under neoliberalism. In contrast, we see the contemporary pharmacological instrumentalization of psychedelics and dissociatives to cure trauma and alienation, and the cultural Goop-ification of microdosing to enhance productivity as requiring a rejection of the radical affects and politics of the 1960s.Notable for us is that this politically neutered and commercially friendly vision of the ’60s is reinvigorated in the 1990s through the countercultural capitalism of early Silicon Valley. As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron noted in “The Californian Ideology,” digital technology industrialists centered in the San Francisco Bay area sought to “promiscuously combine the freewheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.”1 Rejecting an ethos of collective freedom, this ideology instead forwards an anti-statist and neoliberal technological utopianism grounded in individual liberty through the market freedom of economic choice. The “boy kings” of social media reared in this techno-utopian Valley have now grown up and continue to promote a digitally inflected notion of identity and desire as an all-you-can-eat consumerist buffet.2 In today’s world of artificial intelligence and the blockchain, eerie echoes of the Californian Ideology continue to reverberate, privileging consumerist white individuals working toward some phase change in the future after the singularity.While it is tempting to return to the ’60s for a model of both psychedelic experimentation and collectivist notions of the social, we suggest instead a strategic abandonment of the decade as a frame of reference. Overdetermined by a nostalgia that serves to sell the legacy of this era as a Halloween costume, glossy review, or compilation album, we instead look to the unfulfilled promise of the ’90s as the last decade before the social was taken over by a Silicon Valley vision of atomism, networks, and dissociation, where “work itself has become the main route of self-fulfillment,” and psychedelics are mobilized to return us to the “freedom” of productive consumption.3 As the media industry dies and streaming makes creative work unlivable, could the present moment tip back and drag forward ’90s DIY (do-it-yourself) investments? This would entail the return of an intentional and pleasurable dropping out that is also a dropping in(to) the unschooling, unbuilding, and demonetizing of institutions, identities, and abilities.We are interested in the rise of ketamine as a pharmaceutical treatment for depression and as the drug du jour of contemporary youth culture for its reflection of a post–COVID-19 pandemic retreat into disconnection and dissociative social media. If ’90s MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine, a.k.a. “ecstasy” and “molly”) is a sweaty, messy, collective rave where bodies without identities come together with “PLUR” values (peace, love, unity, and respect), then today’s ketamine is a clean bubble of disconnection from the social world with no sweat, no sex, no worries.The attempts during the ’60s to move beyond individualism are now typically seen as a warning, as culturally driven collective politics have rebounded into an obsessive focus on the self and the breakdown of bottom-up structures of care. Mark Fisher, in his posthumously published Acid Communism, seeks to recuperate that legacy, framing its radical potential as always threatening to break out from behind the caricatures:Fisher is right that beneath the tie-dye gloss are histories of collective imagination and material reorganization that have been undermined through both violent suppression and cultural erasure. Our intention here is not to dismiss the legacy of the many revolutionary political movements that proliferated in that era or the cultural experimentation with forms of collectivism, consciousness raising, and intentional community. In the contemporary moment, the increasing dominance of aesthetics and vibes in how we understand history buries the potential reinvigoration of the political legacy of the ’60s under the suffocating weight of cliche.The primacy of the ’60s in the collective imagination of the psychedelic looms large enough that potentially more compelling temporal frames threaten to wither under its shadow. For example, in Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (2024), Benjamin Breen seeks to refocus our attention on Mead’s work with psychedelics in the 1950s as an underexplored and more generative reference point for utopian thinking on and through the psychedelic: “Timothy Leary and the Baby Boomers did not usher in the first psychedelic era, they ended it.”5 While we, too, look to decenter the ’60s in our narrative, we turn instead to the ’90s as an era rich for rediscovering a more interesting moment in both digital and drug culture, and their complex interconnection.We suggest that an alternative to a ’60s-referencing, pre-Gay Liberation, hallucinatory acid communism could be found in José Esteban Muñoz’s description of a ’90s empathogenic and ecstatic queer communism.6 Considering religious and philosophical conceptions of the ecstatic, he remarks, “Ecstasy and jouissance [thus] both represent an individualistic move outside of the self” and that, “Individual transports are insufficient. We need to engage in a collective temporal distortion.”7 Through the lens of the 1994 Magnetic Fields song “Take Ecstasy with Me,” Muñoz proposes how we might do so: “let us take ecstasy together.”8 This is a notion of the ecstatic that is drug-induced (but not hallucinatory or dissociative), temporal, and embodied.This style of psychedelic sociality came in the wake of HIV/AIDS, assimilationist multicultural pluralism, neoliberal economics, and arts defunding, accompanied by attendant concerns around obscenity, censorship, and contagion. This was also the last breath of robust, materially grounded subcultures, a time when it was still possible to sell out, and to do so was derisive and not aspirational.9 Worth highlighting here is the slacker, a figure with whom we might take ecstasy.Counterposed to contemporary digital team-working platforms like Slack, which can induce anhedonia through overwork, the acedia of the slothful slacker evolved from draft evasion in the ’60s to a more general anti-work sensibility, with spatial ties to the suburbs and to third places like the shopping mall and coffee shop.10 The slacker was queerly portrayed in Gregg Araki’s 1997 conclusion to his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy, the film Nowhere (1997). The central character, Dark, describes the “stand[ing] out of time together” characteristic of Muñoz’s queer utopia: “LA is like nowhere. Everybody who lives here is lost.”11 In the trailer to the film, voiceovers are cut with intertitles that almost provide a recipe for queer ecstasy, reading, “No parental supervision, no gender discrimination, no limits.” Dark’s mother expresses the ire that the slacker inspires: “I have to rot my life away in a 9-to-5 hellhole to support your lazy, juvenile delinquent ass.” What was once a nascent digital culture’s Warholian tendency toward total documentation—“I take my camera with me wherever I go”—is now synonymous with the total surveillance of Slack.Alternately titled Ecstasy Generation, reviewer Jasmyne Keimig reported, “Watching Nowhere feels like taking MDMA—the bright colors and strobing lights, the urgent press of bodies, the intense emotions. The quick camera cuts in each scene mimic those weird eye twitches of the molly come-up.”12 As Keimig suggests, the film offers less meaning or representation than it does performative affect; it feels like taking MDMA. This feeling of being lazy, nowhere, and lost, interpolates Ram Dass’s 1971 psychedelic proclamation to “be here now.”13 Being-Nowhere is not an experience of hopelessness, but one in which polymorphous embodiments experience ecstasy together. This is particularly underscored by the filmic structure of hyperlink cinema, in which the diverse narratives of individual characters intersect and eventually conjoin with each other. In this case, this structure is heightened by the networked horizontality of Los Angeles. The slacker is not doomed here, but like their surfer and skater progenitors, must coordinate, cooperate, and collectivize for a shared purpose.14 In Nowhere, this shared purpose is to play an ecstasy-fueled game of kick-the-can at the third place of the school baseball field at night and to ultimately arrive at the greatest party of the year.Attendant to this collectivized ecstatic sociality, ’90s digital culture is imagined as a space of direct action and play. Despite (or because of) the low-fi quality of the early internet, there was a sense of possibility and newness that was profoundly titillating. Today’s digital culture, in contrast, feels overwhelmingly dampened by a fundamental boringness punctuated by moments of hyperawareness, like when you are jostled out of a hazy Wikipedia hole by a startling encounter with the anxious semiotics of digital communication, such as the ellipses of an iMessage or the alarming sound of a push notification.15 In his book Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection (2022), Tung-Hui Hu writes about the shift in internet art from the ’90s to today as one in which the use of “error, noise, or feedback as ways to create potentially liberatory channels of communication within an information system” is usurped by a contemporary scene where “an onlooker’s participation changes nothing” and a “clear distinction between the user and the system of digital control has all but eroded away.”16 Today’s dissociated digital monoculture offers no anonymity and no escape.The shutting down of the maneuverability within and outside of digital systems is paralleled by the evacuation of the political potential of psychedelics. Our concern is that the domestication of psychedelic experimentation misses essential elements of the experience, namely those of corporeality and affectivity, ego death, and risk-taking. In other words, without truly fucking with the self and re-forming the subject, the psychedelic experience remains only skin-deep.Compared to the unsupervised, nondiscriminatory, no limits ecstasy-taking of the lazy, juvenile delinquent asses in Nowhere, these days, white-collar office workers and suburban parents are likely to encounter psychedelics in so-called safe, virtual, and/or institutional contexts. One article notes that VR-simulated psychedelics could allow one to “reap all the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy in a safe and controlled setting without worrying about the risk associated with illegal substances.”17 Another popular risk-free shortcut to these purported benefits has been microdosing. In a 2023 Nightline report, titled “Growing number of moms microdosing on magic mushrooms,” the women involved insist on the compatibility of mushrooms with normative motherhood. One mom insists that microdosing is not a way for her to check out, but to engage more fully, since “Mommy is present and aware and showing up, maybe for the first time ever.”18 While medicalized and digital engagement with psychedelics has unevenly expanded access and perhaps paved the way for the larger cultural acceptance of these substances, it also instrumentalizes and segments the psychedelic experience.Psychologists Patric Plesa and Rotem Petranker have argued that the ongoing attention to the set and setting of contemporary medicalized psychedelics has been divorced from a trifecta that originally included the sociocultural matrix.19 They note that, “our current matrix of neoliberalism, with its cultural assumptions of individuality, self-sufficiency, and materialism, is flying in the face of the mechanisms underlying the putative effects of psychedelics by undermining possibilities for connectedness.”20 Instead of third places where subcultural underworlds germinate and flourish, both contemporary digital and psychedelic cultures are less utopian collectivist and more productive individualist. In other words, the goal of medicalized psychedelic therapy is not to help us imagine new forms of care and solidarity, but to make our atomized and disconnected lives a little more bearable.The possibilities for connectedness that we associate with the queer uto-pian ’90s sociality of ecstasy have been supplanted by the ubiquity of ketamine. What McKenzie Wark has described as “Ketamine Femmunism” (notably theorized through/with/in spite of COVID-19) shimmers with the most vibrant possibilities of K, a trans effervescence away from a fucked-up world, a “sideways time [. . .] without history.”21 Rather than an intersecting of self and world, with ketamine both spheres vanish into the chill-out room,22 the once adjacent-to-the-party space of “generation ecstasy,”23 that is now potentially everywhere. While Wark is enthusiastic about K-time as a temporary balm for trans ravers by allowing them to dissociate from their dissociation, ketamine’s layers of detachment suggest to some a dance floor where you may as well be the only one there.24As Wark notes, molly’s messy, extended temporality is a problem when the party might get busted by the cops. In contrast to molly’s ongoing, embodied vulnerability that extends even to the next day, ketamine’s relatively tidy timeline works well in a world that increasingly feels fraught. While going to work the morning after taking ecstasy is deeply unpleasant, ketamine’s recent increase in popularity is at least partially related to its attunement to office culture. Providing a hangover-free experience, the drug’s antidepressant qualities can allow you to go to work the next day feeling a bit better about your humdrum routine. If the aftercare of ecstasy requires a soothing, collective moment of easing each other back into the world, it’s notable that the care recreational ketamine users might need is initially hidden by its anesthetic effects.25The “dissociation from a fucked-up world” vibe that ketamine can provide feels particularly resonant with the increasingly bad affects of digital culture. Scams, threats, and trolls loom large, while posting on social media is increasingly becoming reputationally dangerous, with little reward except for the professional influencer. It’s little surprise that contemporary youth culture is increasingly reviving the DIY legacy of the ’90s, where house shows and zines provided relief from the stultifying effects of mass culture. While contemporary discourse around safety too often seems to suggest a space without risk, our interest in the subcultural containers of the ’90s is in their creation of a context in which risk can be taken without total devastation.A new generation of digital theorists, sometimes organized under the moniker of the Dark Forest Collective, has begun to write and advocate for “tiny underground burrows [. . .] that offer shelter and respite from the aggressively public nature of Facebook and Twitter.”26 Young people are increasingly turning to Discord servers, group chats, message boards, and newsletters— what Venkatesh Rao has termed the Cozy Web27—to find safe spaces in which to experiment, tinker, and create outside of the opaque and frenzied logic of the algorithmic. Caroline Busta, for example, suggests that, “to be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”28 If posting on mass public social media increasingly functions as “proof of life,” as an obligatory but joyless experience of maintaining your relevance to the larger world,29 the ephemera of our cozier digital spaces is where we increasingly find liveliness online. Consequently, a roadmap to reinvigorating psychedelic and digital cultures might come from experimenting beyond the gazes of the platform and pharmacological instrumentalization, and by reclaiming sociality from careerism and algorithmic capture.If the promise of liberation in the ’60s has been tainted by the individual liberties of free market capitalism, what would it mean to reperform the queer utopianism of taking ecstasy with one another, as the friends in Nowhere do? We suggest it might look something like DIY culture in the ’90s, where unique forms of expression and styles of being-together took root outside the regulatory glare of the mass public. Divesting from the isolated and isolating performance of your public online self might leave you less sure of your identity and less certain of how to monetize its representation but it also might help you understand that such a self is epiphenomenal to its creation in a network. An ecstatic queer utopia the individual as with the ecstasy together would be to when it to the work of digital identity expression and instead to outside and experience as a that is