It’s a regular Friday afternoon and a crowd of us has gathered one hundred meters underground at the entrance of the largest particle-collider in the world, at CERN, Geneva. It’s the year of quantum, according to the UN, to mark a century since the first quantum revolution, which conceived of an unpredictable universe where multiple realities exist everywhere, all at once. 2025’s Art & Science Summit is titled “Uncertainty,” which, technically, would be true of each year. But there’s something about today’s zeitgeist that feels particularly up in the air – like we’ve reached a narrative climax of some kind, with what we call Westernized modernity on a collision course that will irrevocably change our societal orbit.
We move through the tin-foil machinery and stacks of colored wires. “Wait, wasn’t this place meant to open up a portal to hell?” I overhear an artist ask his friend, in reference to a common e-urban legend. They both laugh. In truth, there is something kind of unsettling about the site, but it’s less to do with demonic disturbances than with knowing that you’re standing on the border of the big unknown, beyond the artificial limits of modern science. It reminds me of a t-shirt I saw on Redbubble that week that read, in all-caps: “I HAD MY ASS EATEN BY THE LIZARD PEOPLE AT CERN.”
Yet, even without the Deep State conspiracy bait, there’s a sense of fact blurring into fiction, where the rational and technoscientific paradigms disintegrate – a freaky collision of accelerationism and psychedelic renaissance that, with Pluto entering the constellation last year, I’m calling the internet’s Age of Aquarius. It’s the dawn of a new cosmic age, marked by a cosmic leap in technological advancements, mass unrest, and, perhaps, human consciousness. The specifics, of course, are indeterminate, not least because the developments are already happening so fast that Western science – or, at least, the technologies supporting it – appears to be on a spiral path back to its mystical origins.
Later that day, I open up an ISOLARII reprint of “How To Build A World That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978). Raising the question “What is real?” its author, Philip K Dick, writes that “unceasingly, we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.” In today’s neural media landscape, pseudo-realities seem to blitz us from every angle, growing increasingly absurd as technology becomes more interwoven with self and relation. Think the sense-warping effects of social media, fake news, the meme warfare of the alt right, the mainlining of conspiracy theories, a neo-feudal Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, mass images have taken command of our screens and our attention, as tools that mobilize fiction to influence reality.
Psychedelia is hardwired into these technologies: In machine-learning, generative AI models “hallucinate” probability distributions of real-world phenomena. (In Google’s earlier DeepDream experiments, convoluted neural networks inadvertently produced the same psychoactive effects as DMT.) As the conditions of digital existence become more unreal, hypnagogic even, it’s getting harder not to believe that we’ve entered a period of mass psychosis. Where claiming to see things once got you charged as crazy, fake images are coming to form our collective folklore. All Eyes On Rafah, Donald Trump cat memes, the “Enough Is Enough, Kanye” video – viral images made using AI melt into each other like a bad trip.
Per Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, what we understand as reality depends on what society says is possible to imagine; he describes it as a continuous act of mass-scale world-building. Onscreen, narratives emerge, unverifiably and therefore conspiratorially, like fractals out of a memetic hivemind. Further, the tech-industrial complex has broken down our experience into platforms, meaning that many competing realities are playing out simultaneously. When a structural change occurs, it's as if a planetary shift has taken place. These changes, however subtle, reorientate our online behavior, whether through tweaks in the algorithm that censor out certain words, or rectangular grids that incentivize Reels over static images – which, in turn, informs the way we perform ourselves online.
There’s a pattern-seeking that naturally occurs as we contextualize, filter, and sort through content, real or imagined, that recalls pareidolia – once considered a symptom of psychosis, but now recognized as a natural tendency to see patterns everywhere, including in inanimate objects. Navigating among neural networks, the human user searches for machine patterns, like a shaman might observe symbols to better infer the spirit realm. Newtonian spacetime seemingly melts away amid this warp between magic and science, past and present.
In the first AoA era – the 1960s and 70s – American society was fueled by a similar mixture of conspiracies (the JFK assassination), political warfare (the invasion of Vietnam), tech acceleration (the space race), and magical divination (drugs). AoA 1.0 came about from a countercultural attempt, in societies structured as communes (see: Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog), mass political protests, and the widespread usage of mind-altering drugs, to return to magical thinking (though the distinction was never so clear, with the CIA dabbling in LSD and mind control, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding the birth of the internet itself). Perhaps epitomized by the resemblance of acid tabs to memes – as Erik Davis points out in his latest book, Blotter (2024), both are meta-mediums that literally dissolve the boundaries between subject and object – weird parallels between then and now abound, as it is today’s psychedelic renaissance that presents itself as dreaming up new models for organizing society. The main difference being that, now, it’s less about mind expansion and progressive values than techno-capitalist profiteering – way less groovy.
In 1940, Carl Jung saw the meridian of the first star in Aquarius and took it to mean the early signs of a long-lasting psychic change in the collective psyche – he associated it with the symbol of humanity as the Water Bearer, writing of “a godlike power that has fallen into human hands.” A year later, Jorge Luis Borges made an account of quantum reality in his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941), which describes an infinite series of diverging, converging, and parallel timelines. It sounds much like being online, how logging on distorts your perception of space and time, the psychedelic nature of many realities happening all at once. This web of space-time, as Borges sees it, “embraces every possibility,” paralleling quantum phenomena such as entanglement and superposition, which themselves necessitated a move away from a Newtonian model of reality and towards an altogether nonlinear understanding of the world. Both authors were writing at the high point of Nazism, which spun esoteric spiritual beliefs to rewrite the official version of reality – a roundabout blueprint for the magical fascism of the IDF’s e-girl warfare, no less than Extropian immortality projects, multi-billion dollar expeditions to Mars, and start-up-run network states off the Mediterranean coast.
Today, science and tech seem to be spinning like a cursed mandala capable of absorbing both cosmic forces and hyper-capitalist extremes. The great irony being that the same commune hippies who built the first computers are now the neo-reactionary tech bros hanging out at Mar-a-Lago. When Google launched Willow, its first quantum chip, at the end of last year, Hartmut Neven, the company’s Quantum AI founder, declared it proof of the existence of parallel universes. Cosmos, a “multiverse simulation” platform from chipmaker and AI hardware firm Nvidia, can predict every possible future at once. Besides the scientific establishment, these news are effective marketing for the internet’s many woo-sayers and conspiritualists – DIY quantum oil, anyone?
What it highlights to me is the need for story-making capabilities that run counter to the dominant ones, like Mike Kelley’s myth-science, using artistic practice to deconstruct dominant social myths – and perhaps even replace them with new ones. In Kelley’s recent show at Tate Modern in London, for example, the late artist uses countercultural myths of alien abductions and urban legends to imagine alternative versions of reality. Similarly, British artist Suzanne Treister’s “HEXEN 5.0,” just launched at Annely Juda Fine Art in London, presents each card of the tarot as part of an entangled system to help imagine futures outside the current late capitalist paradigm. Sometimes I think about what the world could look like if we lean further into the psychedelia that surrounds us, to use it as a tool for disruption instead of a distracting force. To think outside the limits of our reality is the biggest unknown out there.