agrifuture:

Do you think the machine elves do anything other than hang out and wait for people to do DMT so they have someone to chill with? They just fly around the world like santa? I mean, they’re real, that’s a moot point. But what do they do when no one is doing DMT?

My original thought was “intramural volleyball with the ketamine mantids” but just now I went to look that up

and got nothing

like just how you can look up “machine elves” and get all this stuff about fractal beings seen on trippy drugs, trip reports on Erowid and The Lycaeum in the late 90s/early 2000s of people using the disassociative Ketamine used to consistently report contact with praying mantis-like forms

and now nothing

On the one hand this is a story about how transcendent ego-death psychedelic experiences are as culturally conditioned and subject to trends as anything, “set and setting”, some of the early LSD experimentation was a Canadian guy trying to cue people with images of the Virgin Mary or Sacred Heart of Jesus as a pathway to Catholic revelation

On the other hand it’s a terrifying demonstration of the memory hole effect of outsourcing our knowledge base to Google, that there’s this thing I know happened and used to be able to trivially establish but now leaves me looking like a loon