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"What really got me started was the mystery of Ecstasy," she recalls.  "MDMA has been around for most of the twentieth century; it had  moments of popularity in the '60s,  but it never became a culture until the late '80s." Why this strange  time-lag, given MDMA's intense pleasures -- euphoria, hyper-tactile sensuality, overwhelming feelings of trust, intimacy, and affection?

Plant's answer was that Ecstasy was "waiting" for the right technology to arrive and "potentiate" it, to use the pharmacological term for the synergistic interaction of two  drugs. "There's something about the clean precision of the MDMA experience that seems to fit digital technology, the  same technology that enabled the creation of that very  precise rhythmic dance music." Beyond this, she sees  Ecstasy and rave music as training the nervous system and human sensorium in preparation for the Internet and virtual reality. In _Writing On Drugs_, she describes how ravers in the raptures of Ecstasy feel "overwhelmed by their own connectivity," merging not just with music and with  the crowd but with machines too: the sound-system, the dazzling lighting effects and lasers, and all the other  high-tech elements used to "engineer atmospheres." Melting what Reich called character armor, Ecstasy creates a kind of porous, permeable ego that's supple and open to connection and contact. It's a process that Plant describes as "positive self-destruction, a self-destruction without death-wish."
 
 
 

Plant sees drugs as cyborgizing -- inorganic elements "inserted" into the body and interfacing with the nervous system to enable perceptions and sensations inaccessible to the undrugged organism.

"Drugs are the perfect example of a subtle prosthesis,  working on the internal wiring of the body in a way that makes the traditional notion of becoming a cyborg through adding robotic attachments seem really quaint and archaic. And I'm sure there'll come a point where drugs themselves will seem very clumsy and dirty -- in that sense of being imprecise -- compared with future forms of enhancement."

"The Coca Cola company was the first big company to invest in mass advertising, and they did that in an attempt to keep the market they'd first acquired when they still had a substantial amount of cocaine in the drink. If you can't  hook consumers one way, you have to find another. Every commodity today tries to be as close to a drug as it can  possibly be without actually being a drug."

"Not only do the patterns of Turkish and Persian carpets have a striking resonance with those perceptible on yage and its relatives, but even the characteristic red dye used in these designs is extracted from harmel".

• Sadie Plant on Rhizomes
• authored _Ones And Zeros_
• 604 track _Ones And Zeros_ MP3 by Frequency Deluxe

According to Sadie Plant, in her book _Zeros And Ones_, Alan Turing commited suicide by eating an apple that was laced with cyanide (but this might have been unintentional as apparently he was notioriously bad at washing his hands after scientific experiments) and, he was found dead with an apple with a couple of "bytes" taken out of it, and since the rainbow is the symbol for homosexuality, which is why he was harrassed into suicide, the rainbow apple with bytes missing for the Apple Mac symbol is actually an homage to Turing.

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