Simultaneously, raver and Burner culture grew alongside the tech industry, populated in part by those who worked in it, throwing events that increasingly required digital expertise for promotion and the creation of multimedia environments. To LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, it was clear why the new hippies were pro-tech: the digital realm had “inherent spiritual characteristics.” Some even believed that virtual reality might make language obsolete, inviting a state of spiritual telepathy. (In 2018, Brand complained to The New Yorker that he’s often blamed “for everything,” from the sexism of back-to-the-land communes to the monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Apple.)īy the 90s, scholars began documenting what they dubbed the “high-tech New Age” or “New Edge,” the phenomenon of Silicon Valley types invested in “cyber-spirituality.” As virtual reality and the web developed in the Bay area, so too did a spiritualist hope that placed utopian thinking in line with altered states and digital avatarism. The Catalog promoted a variety of products for those interested in self-sufficiency and holism, as well as publishing articles and essays that were read widely throughout the Bay area by communards, hippies, arcology advocates, and engineers alike. The best-known example of this synchronicity is the Whole Earth Catalog, published from 1968–71 by Stewart Brand, who, from his beginnings as a writer and photographer, became something of a Bay Area luminary. The two camps, if not one and the same, overlapped culturally. But Burners and billionaires are not such unlikely bedfellows, for techie appeal is woven into the very fabric of the $425-a-ticket festival’s ethos.ĭespite revisionist depictions to the contrary, 1960s hippies were not necessarily neo-luddites who just happened to occupy the same geographical space as proto-tech workers in northern California. “A mirror to Earth lovers,” its fundraising site called it.īurning Man, some say, has changed: once an alternative solstice ritual it has become the domain of celebrity private-jet setters and the newly minted mega-wealthy who stay not in ragtag tents but opt instead to “glamp” with AC and hired staff. The artwork, the architects explained, was a 1:500,000 double of the planet it hovered above (as if every sphere could not claim some similar relation). big.dk’s big ball, the ORB, designed by BIG’s founder Bjarke Ingels and the firm’s special-projects head Jakob Lange, was covered with polyethylene film, the same stuff used for NASA weather balloons. Spiked onto a 100-foot-long steel mast, a giant reflective sphere loomed above the “playa” at 2018’s Burning Man. Installed in Nevada's Black Rock Desert for Burning Man. Time, for techies, is not a line or a curve, but a circle, a sphere, an infinite loop.ījarke Ingels and Jakob Lange, ORB, 2018. How can believers remain committed to such concepts of growth? To be a futurist, don’t you need to ensure there’s a human future? The delirious commitment to never-ending growth, the religious fervor in it, reveals not an “accelerationist” cynicism but a comitragic optimism. But, for true believers, corporate tech growth is not a bubble but our future ripening, our future arriving.įaith in indefinite growth in the face of dwindling resources, a warming world, rising conflicts, and raging disease seems delusional at best. Another tech bubble about to burst, according to some economists. In September 2021, Amazon announced a plan to add 55,000 employees globally. Over the past year, many tech companies’ share prices have doubled, while Tesla stock has risen sevenfold - for the first time, Elon Musk’s electric-car and solar-energy company turned a profit that didn’t involve government credits. Within their pentagonal hexecontahedrons, 40,000 plants from across the world bloom, some extinct in the wild. Realized in glass and steel, webbed in “biophilic” patterns, they were designed by American architects NBBJ for Amazon. In downtown Seattle, three bubbles float above Lenora Street.
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