‘Evolution was a team sport’

Cultural commentator Douglas Rushkoff’s musings range from notes on “Cyberia” to a new look at Judaism. Most often, he takes the stance of a neutral observer, but in a recent log entry on his Web site, www.rushkoff.com, he pulls from some new writing to recall what it was like to enter the early ‘90s mind of the rave and try to emerge with neutrality intact:

“The kids making raves in America wanted to be discovered. They believed that they had created a hybrid of countercultural agenda and mainstream hype. It was a delicate balance, but the main idea was to make love trendy. And all you had to do to ‘get it’ was show up, maybe pop an E, and dance with the beautiful boys and girls. That’s right -- dance with everyone, not a partner. It wasn’t about scoring, it was about group organism.... If everything went right ... there’d be a moment, or maybe even a whole hour -- when it just clicked into place. All the individual dancers would experience themselves as this single, coordinated being....

“Evolution was no longer competition, it was a team sport.... And I dutifully wrote my books about what I found out: there’s a bunch of people dancing to a new kind of music, but it isn’t just dancing because what they’ve discovered -- or think they’ve discovered -- is that they’ve learned how to make God....

“There was no way for me to emerge from the experience of rave ... without becoming both its chronicler and its propagandist. This is your brain on journalism; this is your brain after being dipped into the rave phenomenon.”