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Sadie Plant
This nOde last updated November 18th, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(9 Muluc (Water)/7 Ceh (Red) ‐ 12.19.8.13.9)
"What really got me started was the mystery of Ecstasy," she recalls. " MDMA has been
around for most of the twentieth century; it had moments of popularity in the '60s, but
it never became a culture until the late '80s." Why this strange time‐lag, given MDMA's
intense pleasures ‐‐ euphoria, hyper‐tactile sensuality, overwhelming feelings of trust,
intimacy, and affection?
Plant's answer was that Ecstasy was "waiting" for the right technology to arrive and
"potentiate" it, to use the pharmacological term for the synergistic interaction of two
drugs. "There's something about the clean precision of the MDMA experience that seems to
fit digital technology, the same technology that enabled the creation of that very
precise rhythmic dance music." Beyond this, she sees Ecstasy and rave music as training
the nervous system and human sensorium in preparation for the Internet and virtual
reality. In _Writing On Drugs_, she describes how ravers in the raptures of Ecstasy feel
"overwhelmed by their own connectivity," merging not just with music and with the crowd
but with machines too: the sound‐system, the dazzling lighting effects and lasers, and all
the other high‐tech elements used to "engineer atmospheres." Melting what Reich called
character armor, Ecstasy creates a kind of porous, permeable ego that's supple and open to
connection and contact. It's a process that Plant describes as "positive self‐
destruction, a self‐destruction without death‐wish."
Plant sees drugs as cyborgizing ‐‐ inorganic elements "inserted" into the body and
interfacing with the nervous system to enable perceptions and sensations inaccessible to
the undrugged organism.
"Drugs are the perfect example of a subtle prosthesis, working on the internal wiring of
the body in a way that makes the traditional notion of becoming a cyborg through adding
robotic attachments seem really quaint and archaic. And I'm sure there'll come a point
where drugs themselves will seem very clumsy and dirty ‐‐ in that sense of being imprecise
‐‐ compared with future forms of enhancement."
"The Coca Cola company was the first big company to invest in mass advertising, and they
did that in an attempt to keep the market they'd first acquired when they still had a
substantial amount of cocaine in the drink. If you can't hook consumers one way, you have
to find another. Every commodity today tries to be as close to a drug as it can possibly
be without actually being a drug."
"Not only do the patterns of Turkish and Persian carpets have a striking resonance with
those perceptible on yage and its relatives, but even the characteristic red dye used in
these designs is extracted from harmel".
Sadie Plant on Rhizomes
authored _Ones And Zeros_
604 track _Ones And Zeros_ MP3
by
Frequency Deluxe
According to Sadie Plant, in her book _Zeros And Ones_, Alan Turing commited suicide by
eating an apple that was laced with cyanide (but this might have been unintentional as
apparently he was notioriously bad at washing his hands after scientific experiments) and,
he was found dead with an apple with a couple of "bytes" taken out of it, and since the
rainbow is the symbol for homosexuality, which is why he was harrassed into suicide, the
rainbow apple with bytes missing for the Apple Mac symbol is actually an homage to
Turing.