—The rise of the commercial rave also compromised the very real but unstated ethic of the gift economy that had ruled until then. Rave promoters, initially forced to raise their prices to pay for venues, learned that a few more dollars added to the price of ticket could yield tremendous profit. Promoters who were used to breaking even found themselves tens of thousands of pounds or dollars richer by morning. This drew new legions of would-be promoters into the ring, whose glossy flyers would compete with one another for attention at the record shop.
—What had been a spontaneous expression of community turned into good old-fashioned American free market competition. With five or more separate clubs competing for the same audiences on the same nights of the week, distrust and ill-will between rave posses ruled. D J's who used to be anonymous became headliners, who performed on stage under spotlights. The number of gigawatts of bass became an advertising pitch. Promoters worked hard to prove through their graphics and slogans that they were the exclusive purveyors of the 'original' integrity that defined the great raves of '88. But no matter how good the sound, the lights, the DJ or the drugs, the commercial parties were missing the ingredient that used to hold it all together: community.
—By reducing its participants to mere consumers, rave lost its claim to the sacred. As economic and business forces became the driving force of the culture, the imperative to have profound experiences was replaced by a financial imperative to sell more tickets in less time to more people. We no longer took weeks to prepare both practically and mentally for the ritual. As with psychedelics, this lack of preparation reduced sacred experiences to mere entertainments - appropriately listed alongside concerts and movies in the weekend newspaper.
—In retrospect, what made rave so revolutionary was its economics. The reason we felt so removed from the workaday reality is that we had disconnected ourselves from the cycle of consumption and production that degrades and dehumanizes so much of the rest of our daily experience. Just as Wired magazine reduced the community-inspiring Internet to a shopping mall called the World Wide Web, commercial interests reduced of the rave movement to an Mectronlca' category in the record shop.
—It was not our existence outside the law that made rave so special, but our separation from corporate culture and the market economy. Like a Sabbath, the rave was a holy day during which no one bought or sold anything - and if they did, it was in a manner absolutely at odds with the gross national product.
—The absence of an agenda was not our agenda at all. We were positively striving towards a celebration of the sacred Instmctually, we realized that this sacredness would be compromised by business and politics as they were currently being practiced. Government made our chosen rituals illegal and business made us pay for sacred space.
—Business used the power of government's enforcers to drag our parties indoors, and while we managed to hold onto our stashes, we didn't hold onto much else. We simply didn't know enough about what we doing to fight for the part that mattered.
—Make no mistake: there are still parties and posses doing it right and who care more about the process than the profit But it s up to us to find them, support them or, if we can't ' find them, become them.
Nowhere to Run: Y2K Survivalists 12/1999
-"They'll come at night - especially if you've got an electric lamp glowing somewhere, a dead giveaway," warned one member of an online survivalist conference.
—"I've got an order in on a 500 gallon water tank " explained another, "I'll give you the UBL."
—"Won't a tank that large be visible from the road?" asked the first.
—"No. I'll be keeping it underground."
—I had intended to spend the week finishing research for a column about the Millennium bug - that software and hardware glitch that will prevent computers from successfully recognizing the year 2000. But a vast majority of the information and speculation I found has little to do with fixing the problem. No, most people appear more concerned with surviving an inevitable crisis of biblical proportions, by any means necessary.
—Although fans of apocalypse have always looked for any excuse to expect the worst, the millenium bug has provoked an unprecedented amount of doomsday scenario planning from otherwise sane people. And this time they have a technological rationale for their rantings.
—The millennium bug does pose two distinct threats. Many operating systems and programs, from the COBOL code running giant databases to most copies of Quicken in use today, cannot calculate four-digit dates. The year SOOO will appear simply as '00', leading the program to treat any post-millennial date as a repeat of the 1900s. While teams of engineers are busily combing key software - like the programs running banks and stock exchanges - for such problems, the likelihood that they will find and correct every line of code within the next twenty months is fairly remote.
—Even if they do, however, there's another potential problem: embedded chips. Unlike software, the microchips running everything from nuclear power plants to offshore oilrigs cannot simply be rewritten. Like the chip inside your VCR or microwave, these devices are not accessible. The commands are physically burned onto the chip. The only way to update a non-compliant power plant or robot-filled automobile factory floor is to determine which chips will malfunction and then replace each one individually. In the case of an offshore refinery, it means sending divers hundreds of feet under the ocean surface. StiU, there's some disagreement about whether or not most of these chips use date functions at all.
—The Central Intelligence Agency has accepted the fact that there will be numerous failures of such systems around the world But instead of focussing on the technological side of the crisis the CIA is already collecting data on what their ^ 'Y2K' chief calls the "social, political and economic tumult that could result. That is, the agency is evaluating individual societies to determine how disruptions in electric power, banking and other essential services might affect them.
—The CIA predicts that newly developed nations, like those in Asia and Latin America, will be the hardest hit. While the US, Britain, and Australia have had enough time to head off the worst disruptions, as well as a fairly stable social fabric many other nations who only recently adopted computer technology do not now have the money to invest in diagnosing all their systems, nor the political climate to insure public safety.
—But many Americans, who have always had something of a penchant for bomb shelters and militia compounds, are busy preparing for the temporary paralysis of the technological infrastructure. They send me email telling me I better leave Few York 'before it's too late'.
—In his new book, Strategic Relocation: Worth American Guide to Safe Places, security consultant Joel Skousen outlines instructions for storing food, creating alternative power, as well as building secret hiding places and storage facilities to thwart hostile intruders and hungry neighbours
—Unlike Skousen, who believes neighborhood support groups and food cooperatives would crumble under the pressures of a real crisis, a number of more community-minded survivalists are already developing 'safe haven' real estate. In South Dakota, Colorado, and Virginia, several firms are offering leases on plots of land within larger year-2000 collectives, all with access to private generators, fresh water and farmland. We can only imagine the measures that will be taken to defend such installations when the clock strikes
—In truth, the Y2K crisis - if there is one - will probably be fueled more by this sort of panic than lapses in technology Even if the banking system were to shut down for a week most everyone could survive on what they have. An extra' trip or two to the cash machine before New Year's Eve is all it would take. But the fear of such a disruption could easily lead to a rush on the banks and a collapse of the savings and loan system. Likewise, the hoarding of water, gasoline and other fixed resources would lead to far worse calamity than a day or two of power outages in scattered districts.