Rightwing Psychedelia
It is becoming readily apparent that the so-called psychedelic renaissance is nothing less than rightwing psychedelia; extraction capitalism clothed in the garb of Ram Dass and Alan Watts; the technicolor robes of psychic enlightenment swaddling the vampire angel of speculative finance. Meanwhile the wholesale appropriation of these substances by venture-capital laboratories is the continued erasure of indigenous psychedelia by colonization (corporadelic interests); these plant medicines—psilocybin, ayahuasca, mescaline, DMT—are local knowledges that native cultures have developed and practiced for many thousands of years and that the west is only now becoming aware of (after millennia of enforced Christian prohibition) and that will now be branded with a logo and copyright and given a tiktok platform. But even as the techno-feudal overlords of silicon valley seek to get more rich by touting the healing nature of the newly patented wonder-drugs, native persons get arrested for possession of schedule 1 substances. The inherent contradictions of free-market modernity delivers you a psychic wound and then tries to sell you band-aids in the form of sugar, processed foods, whiskey, SSRIs, opioids, and now a pre-packaged mystical experience: But while the old 60s counterculture imagined that we could turn on, tune in and drop out, the new psychedelic culture wants you to turn on, tune in and get back to work maintaining our catastrophe. This is rightwing psychedelia in a nutshell.
