The MauveZone Project

Cognitive warfare discourse arose in the sixties, in a rash of anxiety about the brainwashing capabilities of the Eastern bloc. It’s ironic, then, that the triumph of World Capitalism has led to the most astounding technologies of cognitive capture, a terrible and able new neuroscience to exploit the individual and collective cognitive makeup of the culture, to hold attention, to extract energy, to control.

Known in proprietary research contexts variously as behavioral design, persuasive technology or “captology,” this intellectual project has worked at a steadfast pace to degrade the public discourse, raise the suicide rate among teenagers, reduce the IQ and reading comprehension level of children and generally fuck with people’s minds.

Marx proposed an industrial class antagonism; the technologies of the past 20 years allow us to look back at 2000 years to see the neurotechnic antagonism: cognitive sovereignty of individuals and communities against advanced technologies of covert and coercive neuromodulation.

The latterday control neurotechnics may look quaint, but imagine the entrancing power of a Roman gladiator spectacle, a public execution, a fire and brimstone sermon. Imagine that you are chronically famished, drunk for lack of potable water, poisoned by lead and ergoted grain, traumatized. Imagine your vulnerability before those forces of cognitive coercion.

But imagine when those vectors of destabilization took you too far; a stream heard underground, an analogy in the thicket, a subversive constellation. Imagine you constructed a polycenter, a dissident lodestone for a new gravitational pull beyond the power of the church or the empire, into cognitive self-possession. These excesses were the germ of the first wave of dissident neurotechnics.

That craft evolved1 into a set of heretical technologies for auto-neuromodulation of the self and the collective; trials of extreme neuroplasticity could be induced rather than endured, their neurotechnic consequence held lucidly before the experiencer themselves. Modern practitioners refer to these as states of gnosis (often divided into inhibitory — meditation, death posture, fasting, gazing — and excitatory — sex, rage, ecstatic dance, glossolalia). Magic, ritual, ecstatic practice are a democratization of the neurotechnic arsenal, self rule: if day to day life depends on deep structures of assumption — ontological structures or forms on the magickal plane that establish and animate our behavior — gnosis offers write access to these structures. Who’s doing the writing?

There are tumultuous periods where quiet stalemates of the neurotechnic antagonism are dislodged: the Roman Bacchanalia, the London coffeehouse, and that foundational subversion at the heart of our current moment, the psychedelic revolution, the consequential rise of LSD and psilocybin. The evolution of these neurotechnics are an unfinished story and the most urgently adjacent to our current moment of algorithmic neurotechnics. Terence McKenna’s line prophesies the convergence: “The drugs of the future will be computers. The computers of the future will be drugs.”

If the time is here to launch a new front in the neurotechnic antagonism, we have a long legacy to draw from. We have the hermetic and magickal tradition to understand gnosis and auto-neuromodulation. We have the psychedelic renaissance (and especially the long reparative reflection of the 70s) to borrow frameworks of hazard and elaboration.2 We have the open source and commons-based peer production movements, and nodes of free knowledge like wiki and Erowid, to understand what it means to build a community of practice, harm reduction and intellectual production at scale. We have the DAO movement and the social justice wave of the twenties to understand the limits of utopian ethics and horizontalism.

We have the foundations for a spontaneous order of social production on this front, all in the context of an unprecedented flattening of technological access that we can’t expect to last. The time to build is now.

The Mauve Zone is a term for the realm of hypnagogic gnosis named by Kenneth Grant. It is a space where entities both dangerous and divine dwell; where old worlds dissolve and new worlds are born. Here, it is shorthand for the landscape of neuroplastic suggestion that is our front line.

The Mauve Zone Project is an open research initiative into working techniques of ethical and autonomous neuromodulation, from psychedelic and psychopharmaceutical to algorithmic and computational.3 Distinct from a scientific initiative (only in the sense that Erowid or the Subjective Effect Index sacrificed Authority and institutional sanction for the wisdom of the publics), it will be an open community of practice, welcoming in folk wisdom and renegade projects alongside large data sets and peer reviewed research. The archive provides a basic framework for dissident neurotechnics; the rest is an exercise in peer production.

Techniques that grant write access to deep neural structures are immensely consequential and even dangerous; we ask that those who participate internalize the gravity of this project, and the real potential that any tool created for self-modulation and emancipation be used for predation and terror.

(If that’s the case, why do we broach this premise at all? For one reason — it’s far too dangerous to leave to the institutions.)

Long live the publics.The Open Machine