The Launch of the Evolver Social Movement: A personal view

Today we officially launched the Evolver Social Movement. This has been quite a process for us, one fraught with anxiety and also an odd unexpectedly potent sense of enthusiasm and excitement. I find it is causing me to want to personally review what has brought me to this point. What follows is a look back into the distant past and then a consideration of what is now and what may be to come.

When I began the first iteration of Evolver with a company in Venice, California, I was truly a rube when it came to business. I had been working on my books and living like a grumpy urban hermit for quite a while. I was given a brutal lesson in the many ways to not run a business, as I watched a lot of money get squandered before there was a product or even a way of gaining revenue. This was really difficult for me, as I tend to be frugal where possible. Although I was one of the founders of that first Evolver, I was based in NYC while most of the staff and the other founders were in LA. I was also finishing my 2012 book at that time. I took considerably less in salary than the other people not because I needed the money less but because my main concern was that we would not have the capital we needed to succeed. My strategy sadly failed - nobody else seemed to think it was a good idea to economize on their own needs to give the project more life and take some of the weight over our main investor and CEO's shoulders.

Toward the end of that first effort, I brought Ken Jordan on board. Ken was one of my closest friends in NYC for many years. He had been working in publishing (following in the footsteps of his father, Fred Jordan, publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review), but was not enjoying it. I had proposed to him that he seek a job in the then-emergent web world, and he worked at SonicNet, which was run by friends of mine, and was eventually sold to MTV. Ken then worked at other independent web media companies and as a consultant. He also got involved with PlanetWork, a non-profit think tank created by Jim Fournier, to study how the Internet could be worked to support progressive causes. Ken helped develop a major paper on the concept of Augmented Social Networks, the ASN.

One of the main problems his PlanetWork group identified was that Internet users lacked a central place to hold their identity. The way the Net is now organized, we go to all of these different "walled silos" that take our data and make use of it or sell it. The ASN paper proposed the need for a new layer of the Internet, where personal identity information and transactions etc would all be stored for the user's benefit. The user could then determine what parts of their profile would be shared by any group or org they visited. This could also allow for different organizations or companies to collaborate effectively, as their users could let them know what other groups they were also working with. At the moment you have different NGOs reduplicating effort and even competing againt each other for the same members and sponsors.

Ken kept telling me about the ASN ideas for more than a year before I finally understood their importance (some similar ideas have been implemented such as Open ID but these do not approach the scope of the ASN vision). It sounds quite dry at first, but I think if you spend time considering it, you will see that this question of a lack of a way for people to maintain their own identity and control their own data is a massive problem, and also keeps progressive groups from collaborating effectively.

I brought Ken into Evolver because I thought he might have an opportunity to implement the ASN vision through our model of building a membership card program for the "cultural creatives," the most progressive and conscious subset of US consumers. We could have created a profile system that used the latest aspects of this developing protocol. Unfortunately, as the time ran out on that first Evolver effort, this did not happen.

In the wake of the collapse of Evolver, Ken and I realized that we still wanted to work together, and we considered what we could do for basically no money, which is all we had. From my discussion board for Breaking Open the Head, my first book on psychedelic shamanism, I knew there was a huge amount of amazing content and ideas that lacked a real media portal. Ken was able to get Civic Actions to build the platform for Reality Sandwich in exchange for future interest or equity in our company.

I always had an innate tendency to start magazines. In high school I edited our literary journal, Chimera. In college, I created my own literary journal with my best friends, Planetarium Station, which we xeroxed and then bound together. We actually featured some amazing writers who later went on to major careers including Mark Amerika and the poet Anne Carson.

When I dropped out of college, I launched a career in commercial lifestyle magazines, first working as an intern at Art & Auction, then as an assistant and associate editor at Fame Magazine (short-lived and unlamented) and Connoisseur Magazine (a ninety year Hearst magazine that died after my first year working on it). At the same time, I had become close friends with a tall, charismatic young fiction writer, Thomas Beller. Together we launched our literary magazine Open City, eventually finding a publisher in Rob Bingham, a short story writer and heir to a Southern newspaper fortune.

With Open City, we actually created a bit of a decadent, somewhat glamorous, scene, throwing parties in clubs and galleries and at Rob's humongous loft in Tribeca. We had various celebs passing through, such as Chloe Sevigny, Evan Dando, Parker Posey, and so on. I was no longer working full-time and I spent altogether too much time at Rob's loft playing pool and lounging about. While my pool game improved, my life was stagnating. I was working on fiction but experiencing little success with it, while I wrote freelance magazine articles to make a sort of living. For various reasons I began to feel increasingly alienated and depressed - as I discuss in my books. Eventually I began to spiral deeper and deepr into a massive spiritual crisis and depression, often feeling I was on the verge of going crazy.

I simply couldn't understand what the point of any of it was as it seemed we lived in a nihilistic universe, a secular materialist prison. In my social set at that time, to open up big philosophical questions about the nature of reality and the soul was only to invite sarcasm and hipster dismissal. My friends conceived literature as a way of seeking the proper pose or stance in relationship to a world that had no meaning outside of one's personal style and ability to see through it with a perfectly jaundiced eye and finely-turned phrases pitched just right.

I became interested in psychedelics as a way out of my spiritual crisis, recalling early college trips. These substances were scorned by my peers, but I became fascinated by them again. I went to Gabon for an initiation using iboga, becoming a member of the Bwiti tribe. I wrote about ayahuasca and Stan Grof for The Village Voice. As I was exploring this area, Rob Bingham our publisher was found dead of a heroin overdose in his loft, with the page proofs of his first novel spread across the desk in his extraordinarily chaotic office.

I had already begun to distance myself from the literary culture of my peers, but Rob's death pushed me further away. I increasingly felt that literature as well as much contemporary art had become distraction mechanisms, ways of contemplating the degraded and fragmented state of our world from a safe distance instead of making active efforts to change anything in it. Eventually, I bowed out of Open City, which was continued after Rob's death by his family out of a desire to honor his memory and support his legacy. While Open City still publishes today, I have not been involved in many years, and can't make myself look at it, for the most part. Still I think the enterprise has validity as it has given many writers their first publications and launched a number of careers.

Over the next six or so years, I published my first two books, Breaking Open the Head in 2002 and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl in 2006. I then resumed my peculiarly inveterate habit of launching new magazines with Reality Sandwich in 2007. Both Ken and I were quite astounded by the flood of content that was quickly offered to us for Reality Sandwich, much of it of a surprisingly high quality. It was clear that there was something important happening here - some nexus between psychedelic and mainstream political and ecological thought that needed to happen. We also noticed that some articles got hundreds of comments, and that the commentators often wanted to find others in their area.

This project has had quite an organic flow since its inception. Once we saw the demand, we realized we wanted to create a social network that could bring together our growing community. On initial investments that came in, we developed and then launched Evolver.net, built on Drupal, an opensource publishing platform. The shift from simply running another virtualized social network to developing off-line real world communities also happened organically: Jonathan Phillips -- one of the four people who initially founded the company along with Ken, myself, and Michael Robinson, our brilliant creative director -- had a strong background in community organizing and began, quite naturally, to guide groups coming together in other cities as well as the US. We quickly realized that developing these nascent connections into vibrant communities was one of the real goals of our project.

I have felt from the beginning that the crossover between professional media and a community-derived social network could be extremely powerful. In fact, I personally feel that so many of our ideas with this project are fairly obvious and could easily produce enough revenue over time. Unfortunately, no investors have appeared to give us a lead time of even six months to a year, to see if we could develop a successful revenue-generation model. We have, therefore, been in a constant semi-starvation mode of scrambling and scratching for bare resources. At the same time, we have been lucky enough to find a handful of investors who did see the value in what we were doing, and gave us some capital to get us to this point.

I find this extremely frustrating when you consider the deep pockets of so many companies that advertise, promote and distribute toxic crap and things that are absolutely detrimental to our lives and the biosphere. In the past, it seems there was a pool of people with considerable resources who understood the bottom line was not the only determining factor in whether certain projects were successful. These people would be patrons of the arts or endow a magazine or other type of cultural venture – they recognized that championing a vision or fighting a cause was a form of value, and created its own type of reward. This type of patronage seems to have disappeared, for the most part. While ventures like the Grove Press or The Village Voice were given many years of support before they broke even financially, today most independent media start-ups are forced to compete in an unfair arena, and are quickly shut down or dissolved if they don’t measure up financially to the high yields produced by more bottom-line oriented companies.

We have been delighted with the growth of the project and gratified by the intense loyalty and enthusiasm it has evoked. The main thing holding us back from developing it has been a lack of operating capital. We have started a number of projects and been forced to put them aside. We were able to shoot for one day in a studio with a green screen, and recorded the silhouettes of a professional dance troupe for an Evolver.net promo video. Unfortunately, we have never had the resources we need for the post-production. Similarly, we developed a marketplace platform so that Evolvers could sell and trade their goods and services, and to feature companies that accord with our value. Due to lack of funds, we have been unable to launch this site so far.

My research for my last book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl convinced me that this is indeed a time of intense transition – that humanity has to either evolve its consciousness and take individual and eventually species-wide responsibility for its effects on the planet, or we won’t have a future here. Evolver – and now the Evolver Social Movement – are the best way I have been able to conceive to contribute to this transformative process, by helping to build a viable alternative culture in local communities, and by producing media that spreads the word.

In New York City, where I live, I find that most people are not able, at this point, to understand that the way of life to which they and the multitudes have become accustomed is soon going to end. This will come about through some combination of possibilities that include a much deeper crash of the economic system, shortages of fossil fuels and other necessities, an intensifying series of disasters like the earthquakes that recently wracked Haiti and Chile, or civil unrest and tax rebellion. I am pretty sure this will be the case at any rate – although, admittedly, I am not a fan of our current civilization, and look forward to seeing it give way, though I hope this happens through some process that doesn’t cause too much death or misery. People are so locked into the matrix, its narrow rewards system, that they are incapable of looking beyond it.

Recently, I held a public dialogue with the filmmaker Abel Ferrara, known for dark underworld fables like The King of New York and The Bad Lieutenant, at Collective Hardware on the Bowery. Ferrara understands that our society has become untenable and unsustainable. Yet he seemed unable to realize that this situation requires an active response, an effort to build the new society and value system on the slow motion collapse of the old. I find this to be the case for most people from his generation, and even younger. There is a tendency toward fatalism and almost a romanticization of our current society’s horrible state. I believe that this is due to a cultural indoctrination by a media that makes people feel passive, cynical, and alienated. The media has a large role in producing and framing the type of consciousness that can be expressed at the time. Therefore, I believe we have a real need for “interdependent media” that expresses a different viewpoint, recognizing that the fall we are already experiencing is necessary to bring about a shift into a different form of society.

The idea that we should go to our community and ask them to support what we are already doing, instead of creating some new extra thing for purposes of revenue, came from our investor Rob Velez. Our first reaction was to reject the idea. Given a few days to think it over, I realized that this was, actually, the best and most natural thing to do. Since investment is either scarce or potentially requires us to sacrifice autonomy, and advertising revenues have plummetted, our best hope for Evolver.net is to simply ask our community to consider what we have been providing for them, and see if they find it worth the effort to join with us, paying whatever is comfortable for them.

As far as I am concerned, this is an elegant, egalitarian solution. We are letting the people choose. And if you do choose to keep Evolver.net going, we intend to solicit you participation at a deeper level as the project goes forward. If the support isn’t there, I can let go of this project with a clear conscience, feeling I gave it my best shot.

There’s a part of me that enjoys salesmanship, marketing, and promotion. When 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl was published, I relentlessly pushed the publicity department to pursue every lead I could find. I intend to be relentless about the Evolver Social Movement for the next few months. I honestly don’t mind if we lose a part of our community, at least for a while, as we make our needs and priorities clear. The anti-capitalist reactions we have gotten from some of our membership makes sense in some respects, but simply doesn’t leave any room for this project to continue. I believe that instead of leaving the system – turning in to drop out, as Tim Leary proposed – we should seek to make use of it while we have it, creating media and off-line communities that serves the purpose of elevating, evolving, consciousness.

There’s much more I could say, but wanted to share at least this much tonight.

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Community Note: Due to the importance of having members sign up for the Evolver Social Movement and keep Evolver going, we are going to leave Daniel's post on the main page for a few days. Thanks for understanding -- Jonathan Talat Phillips