The following is a call-back, a response, to those that have distanced themselves from the Sibylline solar structuring of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, originally proposed by Iain Spence, and subsequently abandoned in the face of the apparent absence of a surfacing strength sub-culture. The author of this reply, one Zapoyo Washington, seeks to, first, refute that such a scene did not appear, offering evidence that the Stormer Generation was realized in the scattered style one must expect of our last (and even current) sun cycle, and, further, that the hypothesis has sustained credibility as a predictive postulate for use by those so inclined toward the Mysteries. We present it here, in mildly revised form, for you to read, discuss, and, as ever, judge the truth for yourself . . .
Sekhmet Hypothesis (“Stormer Generation and the Aeon of Sekhmet”)
Article by Zapoyo Domingo Washington (IKIPR)
October 3, 2011 edition — future revisions will be available via the Kook Science Research Hatch
“A study of the solar cycles at NASA’s Spaceweather web site gives us the following correlation of youth culture to the cycles:
May 1967 – Hippie culture took off one year before solar maximum.
January 1977 – Punk culture took off two and a half years before solar maximum.
May 1988 – Rave culture took off one and a half years before solar maximum.
1999 – playful hostile strength culture surfaces (via late gabber, The Matrix, flowering of Lee MacQueen, etc), prior to maximum. But interestingly no actual massive youth archetype takes off.“Iain Spence, “Introduction to Hare (Sekhmet) Hypothesis”
Stormer Generation
Iain Spence didn’t quite see the Stormers he expected. After the gentle scattering of broadcast media through the 90s, and its ultimate withering under the light of internet utopianism, the youth culture became even more fragmented, even more tribal, than it had ever been, but what it lacked in unifying avatar it expressed in common pattern. There was no lack of a “Stormer” generation post-1999, and what we witnessed, across disparate subcultures, was an undeniably militant mentality installing itself in the collective, the ushering in of a new technorder at the turning of the millenium.
No, it was not just the Matrix or the rise of first person shooters to a new height in popularity, but, shit, those taken alone are undeniable – what kid wasn’t a space marine ninja starship pilot in their fantasy entertainment life during those years? In fact, I want to believe “Doom” (1993) and even “Aliens” (released 1986, near the end of a Punk cycle) heralded at least one ever-present archetype of the solar cycle which began in 1999 — the Space Marine — and the tremendous popularity of “Halo” (2001) surely points to this, as does the later “Gears of War” (2006). XBOX Live sells countless subscriptions on their competitive “rise to the top of the rankings” consumer model, and Stormer kids were all too ready to eat up the “Army of One” myth. The New American wars were so played out against the backdrop of a grand co-opting of all forms of media, especially video games, which were first published by the Army overtly and then covertly, to further their agenda, masking virtual training as entertainment. Coupled with the Army insistence on participation in it’s depictions in Hollywood, one can readily trace the links.
Underground music trends of the Stormer decade gave rise to a nu-violence as IDM became Breakcore, and we heard a resurgence of Noise, unparalleled since the 80s. Xanopticon is the epitome of Stormer sound: cold, violent, technical, aggressive, conflicted, and futuristic. Remnants of Goth and industrial dance music are now rebirthed as Witchhouse. The Emo and Hipster crowd have co-opted a thrift-store form of punk style, stealing the sort of faux “lazy carelessness” to blend with love of flannel, inherited from their elder siblings in Grunge. The concurrent rise of pharmaceutical stimulants, particularly methamphetamine, during the decade seems on par with the advent of an unrelentingly aggressive undercurrent.
To find the pattern in other forms, one need not look any further than the rise of right-wing conspiracy doomsday culture and belief systems as they are re-contextualized into pop-culture. The playful paranoia of the X-Files manifested into grim reality as America found itself honed to a toxick edge, starting with Y2K bug paranoia, the fall of Enron and the bust of dot com, fully emerging in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Citizens made resentful of either their deceitful and underhanded government or some terrifying Other; distrust is the only consensus. Australia and Britain have struggled with their emerging police states, a total surveillance panopticon, while the seeds planted in America after 9/11 blossomed into our current regime, the criers of unending emergency, demanding we turn an eye from naked imperialism and corporate dominance, focusing all attentions on domestic monitoring efforts. The governments of the world obviously look at us all, left to right, with equal suspicion. The only reactionary move left to take may be a retreat to pacifism.
(It is interesting to note how the “Stormer” playful hostile ethic, bubbling under the surface for years, finally and fully revealed itself as Anonymous and Lulzsec as the decade closed, highlighting how everything has been cast into the stark “Elitist Military-Industrial complex vs. the Little Man” narrative. Certainly this self-militarizing cyberwar is in reaction to increasingly overt forms of oppressive governance.)
The protests in Egypt were fueled by an internet clamp down and resulted in removal of their local tyrant. The London riots and BART ops were fueled by social media. The previous riots in Oakland were a spectacle across the internet. The occupation of Wall Street and BART point anonymous toward a non-violent direction, possibly showing the attitude of the coming decade, while the London riots exemplify the Stormer influence. We were definitely Stormers by the end of the decade, if only out of necessity: our protest had been squashed by countless new “non-violent” crowd controls means which continue to blur the line between the police and army, reality and sci-fi.
Trending Sol
Two points must be made here. Firstly, there is no clean cut separation when studying trends; they move in sinewave gradients across temporality, not on/off switches, and the influence of one cycle feeds into another. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, these trends are not limited to popular culture, which is merely an indicator of the rhythm, a partial picture of the tone for each stage. This being said, there may be a technological map that falls in line with these cultural shifts. Let’s think of it in these terms: during the softer, “Hippie” polarity of these changes in the Sekhmet cycle we innovate new technologies, while during the “Punk”-esque eras we refine them.
1944 – Late War, New Hope (and Round We Go)
Let’s start with 1944 – Weird science triumphs in this atmosphere, and it is not hard to see why: everyone is working to innovate in ways virtually unprecedented in history. From the atomic bomb to new theories of computation, faster airplanes, better guns, long-range rockets, radar, sonar, and submarines, there seems to be little that we cannot do, few aspects of nature that cannot be mastered and brought into use in the last pitched battles against the Enemy — whichever enemy that might be. If this is all rather dreary and almost Stormer like, it is balanced in part by the undeniable unity and oneness, reminiscent of the hippies, manifesting in America. United in a war, everyone does their part — women working the factories, men on the front lines – everyone rations, everyone conserves, and we’re unified against common enemies.
It is the post-war continuation of the trend that sees the first major UFO sighting at Mt. Rainier, and an accompanying explosion of interest in all things strange science. Intelligence agencies finding their feet give us a gift in form of an almost mystic storage media when magnetic tape is first used to record computer data in 1951. LSD, first synthesized in 1938, is publicly marketed to psychiatrists as “Delysid” beginning in 1947. Bombs in the brain with bright flashes of the future lead us into the 50s. We begin to see an optimistic way forward, technologically augmented and dominated.
1955 – Cold Warriors and Beatniks
Flash forward to 1955, era of technological refinement, the proto-”Punk” era. The Korean War is over, and everyone is settling comfortably into an age of American prosperity. We’re being told we’ll have flying cars that drive themselves, and, if we tire of that, we can take out jetpack to work, all while the robot maid cleans up the house and auto-cooks the roast with one of those next gen microwaves. We still don’t have George Jetson’s (1962-63) utopic home in the sky 50+ years later. James Dean’s career is picking up, poets in New York coffee shops are gathering to talk about being Beat, and somewhere toward the end of this cycle Hunter S. Thompson is riding with the Hells Angels, seeking material he can use for a book he will publish around 1965.
I want to propose (counterintuitively) that a lowpoint of technology may fall somewhere in the 1955 – 1966 range. We’re coasting off developments from the Second World War, adapting them to new uses, studying and understanding just what exactly it was we did when the first atomic bombs blew up. In the background, IBM leadership is shuffling out in 1956, and the inheriting son seems to lead the company aimlessly until the early 60s when they receive a NASA contract. FORTRAN is invented in this era, but won’t really matter to most people for years to come. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was formed on July 29, 1958, but it wasn’t until 1965 that we had the Gemini 3, and we didn’t (supposedly) land on the moon until 1969, 3 years into the next cycle. Stephen Hawkings received his BA in 1964, but it’s not until 1972 that the accolades start rolling in.
It’s a slow haul toward a new cultural expression in the first atavistic youth movement.
1966 – Hippies
The rise of psychedelic drugs, civil rights, dreams of space travel and colonization, a war to unite against, a draft to dodge, novel concepts in physics, psychology, and the arts. Change is afoot, and television is signalling to us all in warm, bright, glorious techni-color:
Although introduced in the U.S. in 1953, only a few years after black-and-white televisions had been standardized there, high prices and lack of broadcast material greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. Although the first colorcast being the Rose Parade occurred in January of that year, it was not until the late 1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in some part to the introduction of GE’s Porta-Color set in the Spring of 1966 along with the first all-color primetime season beginning that fall.
We saw a re-circulation of occult titles, and people are actually stimulated enough to care. I believe that our magickal understanding gets retooled in the same manner as culture and technology alongside these cycles, and that the 1960s recaptured the works of the turn-of-the-century breakthroughs of occult orders like the Golden Dawn, the O.T.O., The Fraternias Saturni, and others claiming the Rose Cross as their legacy. The mere immortalization through preservation of these text and beliefs may be key to future cycles.
A new bandwidth is opened in terms of remote experience and meshed with its environment of volatility and drugs; it reacts in faded, neon, hallucinatory fashion trends. The god-father of the fantastic, Jack Kirby, is flipping lids and keeping tempo, matching the tone of the time with his “New Gods” family of comics in 1971, steps ahead of kook science that is turning radionics and radiesthesia into psionics, art on paper: “Who needs a black box when you have hash, mescaline, and a paper schematic? (but, really, who needs schematics when you have an LSD blotter?)” Half the world wants to travel to outer space, while the other half want to continue exploring the furthest reaches of inner space — the answers are just waiting, ripe to be plucked by eager young hands. The youth look upon themselves as a rising tide, come to wash out all the corruption and dead thinking of the old, and no one tuned in appears willing to, or even able to conceive of, surrender.
1977 – Punks
By the end of the eleven year period starting in 1966 it was clear things had changed. It was a post-Nixon world, and culture retreated into indulgence with cocaine and disco. Reagan and Bush Sr. soon slipped their way into office; we learned to love Wall Street, cigars, and fast cars with loose women with poofy hair. Punk was life.
On the technology end of things, Apple was established on April 1, 1976, and they would help usher in the era of personal computing – alongside Altair and gaming console-computers like the Atari and Commodore 64. Apple doesn’t push a GUI computer out until 1983, and it’s a failure when next year’s model triumphs with a lower price tag and awesomely oppressive superbowl ad for the Mac II. A GUI had been in the works for several years at this point and was pieced together from some level of technology stolen off Xerox. Jobs is forced to resign in 1985; the company needs a more solid grounding and they falter for quite sometime. DOS isn’t invented by Gates but bought by him and released in 1981:
“Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP’s new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named “QDOS” (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.”
Innovation wasn’t being rewarded, crafty underhanded business tactics drove industry everywhere, and Reagan smiled an oblivious grin, declaring the triumph of his doctrine of corporate prosperity.
Punk thrived because we had reason to be angry at this bummer of a dingy world. Manuel Noriega, Pablo Escabar, Oliver North, Margret Thatcher, illegal gun trading, VX nerve gas attacks, hostage situations, atomic tensions. Punk, with its ties to the Beatniks, both thriving in a period of low innovation and grimness. The beatniks were the surrealist’s children, grounded by circumstance, and they fit right in with where the punks found themselves, as no less than William S. Burroughs’s exaltation in the punk community reaffirms. Charlie Manson grew in popularity too, and has always claimed beatnik origins, not hippie ones. Alan Moore and Frank Miller are the king of comics with their gritty tones.
Goth despair rose in popularity with icons like the Sisters of Mercy and Christian Death (while Neil Gaiman makes a career out of it in comics), mixing with Punk culture and Genesis P. Orridge’s industrial music to take new forms in the angst of Skinny Puppy and Frontline Assembly, spitting cyberpunk battery acid in the face of desensitized New Wave aesthetics. Cocaine yields way to crack around 1985, the same year Skinny Puppy’s core members, Cevin Key and Ogre, opened for Chris Cosey of Throbbing Gristle. Had the torch been passed? Skinny Puppy, a new creature, foreshadowing the environmentalist comeback of the 90s: vegetarianism, ecological concern, gaia theory, and animal life. Grant Morrison’s “Animal Man” (1988) is perfectly timed in this equation. There’s an edge of technology to industrial music, hinting at the next decade’s innovations.
In 1984, “Neuromancer” didn’t really ring a dystopian bell, but we couldn’t help contextualizing the future as grim, coarsely painted scenery in our heads, and, meanwhile, “Akira” showed us the power dirty, cyberpunk motorcycle gangs could wield against the government in a time of strange, future technology accidents. Those visions would ultimately become brighter, flower-powered under the influence of MDMA, house music, and the burgeoning internet e-commerce world of electronic remote interfacing we had not fully foreseen. We were ready to plug-in and build what we wanted as a result of the technological death cries against a dead and stagnant solar cycle of oppression. We were ready for electronic telepathy in the form of BBS, chatrooms and IM.
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