“They’re smuggling sound,” Clark says a half hour later. He’s directing the truck to an impromptu rave, part of the World Unity Festival, a grandly envisioned but rapidly disintegrating weekend gathering of spiritual seekers. “Those rangers overreached themselves and allowed the zippies to move in behind them.”
Welcome to the world of zippies, or “Zen-Inspired Pronoia Professionals” – pronoia is the sneaking suspicion that someone is conspiring to help you. The largely European movement is the brainchild of Clark, a 51-year-old hippie from Glasgow who espouses a philosophy that attempts to unite the spontaneous and flexible aspects of the hippie right brain with the logical, pragmatic left. Zippies live on the Internet, where they commune, philosophize and alert each oth-er to upcoming raves (all-night communal dances) by posting an 800 number. They also complain a lot about consumerism. As for the right brain, zippies like to dance all night to computer-generated rhythms, surrounded by colorful synchronized computer-generated images, until they reach a trancelike state. “It’s redefining the ancient tribal ritual for the youth of the 21st century,” says deejay Goa Gil, 42, one of a handful spinning three nights of raves on the mountain.
The 800 to 1,000 zippies were joined about 50 miles south of the Grand Canyon by as many as 8,000 refugees from the World Unity Festival, including Hare Krishnas, pagans, Native Americans and the mobile hippie commune known as the Rainbow People. The confluence of subcultures gave the remote area the aura of 21st-century tribalism: a dash of Mad Max mixed with a Robert Bly retreat in the midst of a hippie love-in. Twenty-four hours after its clandestine arrival, the system was up and the fat dance beat spinning. “This is an act of meditation,” says Gil. “There’s the ancient tribal feeling underneath and the cyberfuture on top.”
The center of the zippy universe is Clark’s club Megatripolis, which he opened in London a year ago last June. There he offered “smart drinks” (zippies do psychedelic drugs but not alcohol), the Parallel University (lecture rooms given over to philosophers), market stalls selling zippy fashions, and ambient rooms where tired ravers rest and spin out their trance-induced ideas. The club draws some 2,000 zippies a week, and a San Francisco Megatripolis is set to open on Oct. 1. Next: Seattle and Vancouver.
While zippies are gaining adherents on the Internet, they’re also dismissed by some online critics as another flash in the pan – “like the Shoemaker-Levy 9,” wrote one. But to J. P. Palamara, 16, from Westchester County, N.Y., the Arizona rave was a powerful experience. “I’m not sure many people get it yet,” he says. “It’s just a new way – finding spirituality through technology, you know?”
