Beware the Psychedelic Metaverse: Primitive Accumulation, Productivity and Mind-Altering Plants

Across contemporary psychedelic counterculture, ‘plant medicine’ is celebrated as healing and spiritual in association with indigenous ritual use, yet also imagined to be optimized in Silicon Valley—by splicing ayahuasca and psilocybin, for example.  In the 1990s Ketamine was a ‘horse tranquilizer’ or ‘designer drug’, yet is now also celebrated as a ‘psychedelic’—and semantically continuous with indigenous healing as a consequence.  My ethnography explores New Age youth culture at massive psytrance parties across Europe, where I am positioned as a popular educator and interact with psychonauts, “chaos magicians” and other techno-utopian “digital nomads” who smoke synthetic DMT sprayed on plants and tell of “machine elves”.  I explore primitive accumulation in relation to the legalization and medicalization of mind-altering plants, and how participants in the neoliberal “psychedelic renaissance” shift between celebrating nature and its improvement, wherein indigenous knowledge is referenced and displaced in the marketing of psychedelics for workplace use.