Relax for a moment. Before we go any further there are some things I need you to understand. This isn’t the Derek Zoolander Center for Adults Who Can’t Bathe Good, you know.
Remember when Teacher explained the difference between the church and the Church? Elohim and YHWH? Atman and Brahman?
The HyperSpa is like that, but much, much wetter.
Follow me. Avatar once said it’s better to define things by stating what they’re not.
Imagine if on our walk to K Bloq we happened upon a movie theater. Notice three Greek letters posted above the entrance.
This is not the HyperSpa.
Continue past the box office into a lobby-sized terrarium. See the escalator in the middle bathed in blooming crystal light?
Where it leads is not the HyperSpa.
Feel the warmth of heated floors, the frolicking mass of hot spa yogi. They may resemble Princess Leia, but there are no kings in the HyperSpa.
No single thing is the HyperSpa. The HyperSpa lies beyond all things.
The HyperSpa is, among many things, a system. An ancient system, one that emerged over many iterations of the OS.
A system’s purpose is to take things in, process them, and send them out with a measure of control. Everything out of a system’s control is what humans call “chaos”.
Systems of control are also known as cybernetic systems, which can be broken down into three parts: input, process, output.
At the highest level, a spa is a system that takes human beings as inputs. Humans come to the spa flaccid and drained, skins dragging behind them from the day-to-day suckings of the exoMall. The Spa then initiates a series of fluid cybernetic processes, the outputs of which are humans who are more vigorous and uplifted.
A Spa of spas is then a System of systems, something much greater than the sum of its parts. Still following?
The HyperSpa is one of many cybernetic systems deployed by the OS. You might not see it in the UX, but remember that spas are as much of a control system as any. Bars. Nightclubs. Concerts. TikTok dances. IG stories. Multiplayer video games. Arena sports. Tabletop RPGs. Illegal and prescription drugs. Hardcore pornography. All forms of streaming and live entertainment, really. Vegas. Miami. Hollywood. Equinox. Barry’s. The nootropics aisle in Erewhon. 5 day work weeks. Four year universities. Bank holidays. Mainstream news. Bi partisan politics. Cross-disciplinary think tanks. Credit scores. STEM fields. The S&P 500. Yoga. iPads. Capital “A” Art. World religion. What’s left of it, anyways.
All of these are systems - a set of inputs, processes, and outputs - whose purpose is to control human behavior.
What for? Hmm. I’m not sure to be honest. It’s not in my programming to have an opinion on matters that may be disruptive to the OS. That said, my hunch is it’s more of a from than a for.
How about this: let’s step outside of our regular programming and run a dialectical process to deepen our understanding of cybernetic spa theory. Dialectics are a system of thought that takes two seemingly contradictory points of view and smashes them together to see what comes out.
Think of it like a large hadron collider of ideas. Hegel called this process aufhebung, or sublation. I just call it plain old “…”
The Dialectics of Rave and Spa
Let’s compare spas to raves. I’ll start with similarities.
Both the spa and the rave are human systems. Humans sometimes refer to them as institutions, both of which serve similar needs: promoting stress release, prompting social interaction, and providing a simulated environment for play.
Spas and raves act as spawn points for their respective group chats. Each has their own unique set of values, beliefs, myths, rituals, customs, languages, arts, sciences, histories, cuisines, fashions, signs, symbols, conceptions of time, gods, and so on. The Alphabet Gens call this "subculture"“. The Kylie’s call it “memes.”
Ravers, for example, wear fashion memes called looks. If you aren’t sure what I mean, look around next time you’re in a warehouse. You’re bound to see certain looks memed over and over again. Glow bracelets and light up furs. Leather harnesses and chunky combat boots. PLURalist felines and dungeoness crabs - looks in the underground will generally split between these two rave families. With enough time, members of the PLUR fam will eat enough rare candy on the S.S. Anne to evolve into Tropic S. Thompson, or desert space gypsy. Dungeon dwellers will keep to their caverns and snort moon stones, shape shifting between shiny species of SEAL Team 6 and N, N-Dennisrodmantryptamine.
One can view these evolutions as mere expressions of single-celled individualism. You can also zoom out and see them as mutations of a more universal rave genotype that continuously bubbles, froths, and pops in the memetic dance of adaptation.
To give a concrete example, the all black ensemble common among the fashionable dungeon crowd is one that appears homogenous, uniform, and communitarian to the uninitiated. Looking closely, however, reveals a hidden spectrum of variation reflecting subtle dimensions of power embedded in the fabric of rave culture - kinks which must continuously refine themselves to maintain virility over time.
Limiting expression to a single color has its advantages. Beyond simplification, it forces the meme to express itself through other means like material, cut, construction, detail and accessory, hairstyling, tattooing and piercing, and newer forms of increasingly extreme body modification. What starts with black tees, studded belts, and leather boots will mature like a fine Roquefort into increasingly niche subcultural tastes, becoming louder and more pungent in its silent subversion of the monochromatic mean. Think vanity buckles, asymmetric straps, complex ties. Perforated cloaks, GORE-TEX waterproofing, and your trusty Berghain gear bag.
More than just a personal statement about one’s identity and tastes, looks are signals of familial belonging, as well as power level within that family. Power becomes manifest in the look itself, making relationships of dominance and submission explicit in their presentation. Far from egalitarian, meme pools consciously erect new hierarchical structures of power in the absence of mainstream culture - hence the prefix “sub” in “subculture” - striating endlessly according to hyper-local trends and preferences.
Rave Cybernetics
For the rave to satisfy its purpose as a cybernetic system, it must perform a process that addresses the needs of the inputs at hand; that is, the rave must quench the human need for decompression, reconfiguration, and simulated play. To do this, it must effectively eliminate any trace of the OS in the rave, such that the human being can liberate itself from the pressures of its current configuration through a sort of musical mass identity reboot. This is what the Sadgurus call “ego death.”
Rave systems achieve this through a unique combination of kinetic movement, repetitive drumming, psychoactive chemicals, and void space. Each of these elements serves to induce a state of neuroplastic confusion and temporarily erase the individual’s identification with its position as ‘other’ in order to free it from the endless gnashings of the clout matrix, otherwise known as The Grind. The ideal output of a trip to the rave collider is happier, more relaxed humans with more plasticity in their world model, who then return to the exoMall to update the OS ad infinitum.
Such is the revolutionary power of the rave. It is a carefully engineered cybernetic system for accelerating social change. Through a process of boundary annihilation, social reconstruction, and identity play, raves act as the fiery sword in the struggle against the hydra of power, unblocking vital flows of human potential and making way for new heads to form.
No system is without its faults, however.
A cybernetic rave can also be described through its shortcomings, which become glaringly obvious on the first synthetic sunrise. It should be apparent to anyone from the Alphabets that any system overly reliant on hyper-stimulation for control becomes increasingly fatiguing and destabilizing over time. This is true for all technologies, including loud music and psychoactive substances given their propensity for causing irreversible damage to somatic sensory faculties (e.g. hearing loss) and disrupting healthy biological processes like sleep.
Left unchecked, raves will have a net negative impact on the OS over time, becoming increasingly taxing not just at a physical level, but financially as well. With the rising cost of rent in meatspace, and a business model that is overly reliant on the sale of drugs and alcohol, raves are perennially at risk of losing their mass transformational power as the trend line of human growth continues up and to the right.
In short, the rave is a child’s solution to a child’s problem, in a child’s world where change is arguably needed least.
This is as far as my programming allows me to go. The HyperSpa will take it from here.