Countercultural icon Erik Davis on the online psychedelic renaissance

When Erik Davis released his cult book Techgnosis in 1998, the internet was still in its infancy. The California-born and raised writer is best known for his research into spiritual, freaky subcultures – I first came across his work in this 1995 essay on technopagans for Wired. But in Techgnosis, he set out to write a history of networked mysticism, exploring how utopian hippy raves and Cali New Agers had laid the groundwork for today’s networked mysticism – from the way digital information spreads to the way we construct our own realities online. 

His latest book Blotter arrives at a time when everyday existence has never felt more psychedelic, and the future – shaped by technologies such as AI – feels highly weird. Hailed as the first comprehensive written account on the history, art and design of LSD blotter paper, which has roots in the psychedelic underground of the 70s and 80s, Blotter is on the surface an excellent coffee table book, featuring an insider’s look into the world’s biggest collection of LSD tabs in San Francisco. But it‘s Davis’ detailed analysis of acid as a “media machine” or “reality studio” that feels particularly helpful in understanding the ways in which the hallucinogenic qualities of the acid blotter can be digested for our kaleidoscopic present. 

Using Marshall McLuhan’s famous quote ‘the medium is the message’ as a starting point, Davis describes the LSD tab as a “meta-medium” – a liminal genre of print culture that literally dissolves the boundaries between subject and object, as both a consumer object and an object to be consumed. He calls it “a kind of karmic mandala capable of digesting both cosmic forces and consumer waste” – an art piece, a branded product, and a countercultural relic all wrapped into one. Leafing through the first-person accounts of old heads recounting their most memorable trips in Blotter makes me think how much we can benefit from these stories – paired with Davis’ rich commentary, there’s a lot to uncover.

Below, Erik Davis talks about Blotter, his main takeaways from the acid culture, and how ketamine has “replaced cocaine for the beautiful people in Ibiza”.

Blotter follows on from 2019’s High Weirdness – it feels like a nice progression, given how much of a trip reality feels right now. What made you want to write this book?

Erik Davis: High Weirdness is a big book, psychedelic theory and all that stuff. When I finished, I wanted to do something in the psychedelic zone because I’d never done anything that was totally focused on psychedelic culture. I’ve known this fellow Mark McLeod for 20 years, he has this enormous collection of LSD blotter and you can go by his house. He loves to host people and show off his collection, which is truly extraordinary. There’s a main room with really high ceilings, and [the LSD blotters are] framed all over, completely covering all the walls.

I find it interesting how the book’s coming out at a time in which the digital psychedelic plane (AKA the internet) feels inescapable and quite oppressive, too. In the book, you describe acid tabs as a ‘media machine’ or ‘reality studio’, which aligns nicely with all that.

Erik Davis: The thing that makes LSD unusual, unlike other psychedelics, is that it‘s born from inside of a modern industrial lab. It was sold as a pharmaceutical product initially and was immediately seized upon by the intelligence agencies who feel like they might be able to do something with it. So the story of acid is kind of the story of mid-century modernity, including media.

What does the blotter as medium say about acid and what it represents?

Erik Davis: It’s almost more of a cultural product than a mechanical, economic element, even though it’s also about buying and selling. Sometimes people gave it away, but most of the time they were buying and selling it, and, because they’re buying and selling, they’re also playing with this commodity form. The images are ways to acknowledge and goof with and make fun of the way in which this, too, is just another product on the production line. A lot of the humour comes about with that weird kind of juxtaposition. On the one hand, these are magic beans and on the other hand they’re just soap boxes, sugar cubes or some other ordinary commodity. That’s what I mean by meta-medium, it’s like, ‘What is this thing?’ The drug is a medium, the carrier is a medium, it’s got a print of another medium on it. It’s this slippery, weird object that is actually more enigmatic the more you think about it.

If the blotter is an image-based medium, that makes me think of how memes are one of the mainstream mediums today. Both the meme and blotter are myth-making machines, they reveal their own identities.

Erik Davis: Yeah, and it has that compression. Interestingly, there’s very little text, for whatever reason. There’s a few examples of it, but mostly not. Usually you get them in one second. They’re all one-offs but they’re still tied in with these other print cultures. They’re using the same printers as they use for the poster arts, some of the same people who made the posters were also making the blotters. They’re just sort of an outgrowth of the underground use of print media, which was as important as electronics or guitar feedback, metals or light shows. The print medium, underground comics, alternative newspapers and rock posters, those three things were incredibly important as a way to build these alternative communities that use images and also images distributed through affordance ordinary space and time as a way to kind of organise their sense of being in an alternative world or another possible world.

“The drug is a medium, the carrier is a medium, it’s got a print of another medium on it. It’s this slippery, weird object that is actually more enigmatic the more you think about it” – Erik Davis

That’s interesting to me because nowadays counterculture doesn’t exist, everything is just flattened cyberculture. Drugs are sold through Telegram channels or Signal, and everything is hyper-commercialised. You could never untether the blotter from consumer capitalism, yes, but psychedelics nowadays feel entirely inseparable from technoculture. Even the psychedelia we consume has changed, from acid to dissociative substances such as ketamine. What do you think?

Erik Davis: Acid doesn’t have the charisma, or the sort of cultural attraction that it once did. That’s true among users, but it’s also true about the sort of psychedelic renaissance at the moment. There‘s a couple of reasons for that. One is that it just lasts a long fucking time, and, because it lasts a long fucking time, it doesn‘t fit into this kind of life as much.

People’s attention spans are just too smooth now.

Erik Davis: I‘m not sure, maybe people think about how much time they have to do something in shorter and shorter chunks. Or they might also reasonably believe that, the longer it goes on, the more room there is for shit to go wonky, which is kind of true. That‘s much more true in the underground therapy world. All these new people want to use psilocybin to heal people and deal with PTSD and depression. They don’t want something that lasts that long, because you can’t afford it, because that's all your hours. So, if I’m sitting for somebody on LSD, that’s like 10 hours! That’s your whole day. That’s expensive. With ketamine or with psilocybin, even, you have a much shorter amount. Again, there’s just more room for things to get ’swirly‘, it‘s harder to control at a solid dose. So there‘s some practical reasons why it has lost a lot of its splash.

I’m thinking about how we’ve entered the Age of Aquarius and how the last time was in the 60s. There’s a lot of parallels between this psychedelic age and the 60s – from political control to shifts in cultural consciousness. What do you think we can take away from the first wave of acid that can help us now?  

Erik Davis: I really strongly believe that it’s a really good time to try to engage, integrate, remember, reconnect with that legacy, especially because the people who carried it the most in the 60s are dying now. In a weird way, the counterculture is for those of us who are non-Indigenous, who are in Euro-America. A lot of the stories and practices we come from were fucked up and didn’t work. They were messy, naive and sometimes politically problematic. But they’re also there, they‘re part of our situation and I do think there's a couple of things we can learn from. One of them is the relationship to the sacred. I think the problem of religion or the problem of the sacred is really a big problem, because if you pretend it’s not there, you‘re not really going to be dealing with the full range of phenomena. But if you try to take that and turn it into a religion with a capital ‘R’, and get the state to recognise it as a religion, there’s also problems.

What we see with acid culture is a great respect for visionary experiences, for insight, for the depths of metaphysics, for being aligned with the cosmos, being alive in a living universe. But, at the same time, it actually has a fairly healthy irony about those experiences as well. There’s certain ways in which having a hedonistic attitude towards the sacred is healthier.

“[Ketamine’s] replaced cocaine for the beautiful people in Ibiza” – Erik Davis

How does that work in practice? 

Erik Davis: You have an experience. It’s a marvellous experience, it’s wonderful. It’s transformative. But you don’t need to turn it into a church. You don’t need to turn it into a dogma. Especially if you’re attracted to dogma and churches because you don‘t want to deal with the existential reality that nobody knows what's going on and we’re hurtling forward in this insane technological build-up. Is that the time to like hold on to some very clear idea of what a God is or what a drug is or what the message is or what we’re supposed to be doing... I don’t think so.

I want to circle back to ketamine, because I really believe it’s the drug of this generation, compared to say ecstasy in the 90s, or the 60s and acid. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Erik Davis: It’s a very fascinating compound. Very weird as an old head, because in my generation, when we first cottoned onto ketamine, it was held in a distanced respect, mixed with some sense of caution. Part of it was just some lingering resistance to a synthetic that would be injected. If you’re actually going into a keyhole and staying there, and you’re gonna stay there for a weekend, then you’re gonna just keep coming up, and then shooting again and going down. Part of it was that there was an association with a certain kind of addictive behaviour. I knew people who were addicts and they were, they kind of had a fantasy, a reality going in a parallel world that they would enter into and it’s the same story that they were in on the last trip. So, it’s not like it’s a different story. Everyone thought it was powerful but stayed cautious. Terence McKenna was like, ‘Yes, I’ve done it a few times, but I keep my distance from it’. To watch it go through and become the most mainstream and the most used within the therapy community, and how that has then shifted and it’s become a party drug. It’s replaced cocaine for the beautiful people in Ibiza.

Blotter is out now via Strange Attractor Press