Psychedelics & The New Media Landscape

The Years Ahead

When I entered the University of San Francisco Media Studies department as a wide-eyed freshman in 2007, we were still using tapes in the state of the art Panasonic video cameras that we shot our class projects with. The first iPhone had just debuted, sporting a 2-megapixel camera that was extremely impressive at the time. No one I knew had a camera capable of recording HD video & uploading it to a platform - in fact, I donā€™t recall ever seeing anyone pull out their camera phone to record any portion of the 4 years I spent on ā€˜the hilltopā€™.

Social Media and the digital world as we know it today was brand new in the fall of 2007. I finally caved and got a Facebook to keep in touch with my newfound friends and peers over the winter break between 2007 - 2008. In our classes, we were catapulted into the cutting edge new media landscape as it rapidly evolved throughout my time at USF from 2007 to 2011. Twitter had just launched in 2006 and was not yet widely in use. In October of 2007, Radiohead challenged the traditional business model of the music industry with their stunning ā€œIn Rainbowsā€ pay-what-you-want album release. Instagram launched in 2010, and was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012 - the same year that analogue camera manufacturer Kodak declared bankruptcy. Next came Snapchat in 2011, by which point the digital media landscape had transformed the world into something close to what it is today.

My senior year at USF, I participated in a protest supporting the deposition of then Egyptian head of state Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Mubarak stepped down as a direct result of the Jasmine Revolution, a peopleā€™s uprising that swept the Arab World starting with a Tunisian revolution in 2010. This revolution was largely coordinated through social media, and was the first notable example of how technology and social platforms have drastically changed power dynamics in the 21st Century.

Throughout my four years at USF, the global media landscape changed in an extraordinary way - and we had front row tickets for this evolution, alongside ample access to extremely potent and rare psychedelic molecules thanks to our proximity to the Haight and the Silicon Valley art and tech scene. Substances like DMT, ketamine, 2C-B, Mescaline, LSD, and of course psilocybin mushrooms were widely available. 

For the decade following my graduation from USF in 2011, public conversation about psychedelics was largely bottlenecked and ostracized from mainstream society. It was as if some of the most powerful tools on the planet were deliberately rescinded into a cultural blindspot, and no one was comfortable jeopardizing their personal & professional future by advocating for them or speaking about their relationship to these substances outside of highly exclusive echo chambers. That all changed in 2020.

Psychedelics have catapulted into the public dialogue over the last two years, and are currently running wild across the new media landscape. Thousands of content creators and ā€œPlant Medicine Influencersā€ have appeared across numerous mediums, to varying degrees of information accuracy and legitimacy. Dozens of new media platforms have popped up to chart the psychedelic renaissance and to educate clinicians, therapists, investors, activists, and the general public about the emergent opportunity that psychedelics present.

Amidst this bewilderment, Iā€™ve carved out a platform that draws from my unique combination of experiences as a student of the first wave of new media business models and social platforms, and as a veteran psychonaut. The Mycopreneur Podcast has evolved considerably since the release of the first episode in January 2021- from successfully running a week-long in person incubator for fungi entrepreneurs in January of 2022, to moderating a panel on the Future of Business & Psychedelics at the California Psychedelic Conference in April 2022 (and subsequently publishing an article about it for Honeysuckle Magazine), and most recently, with a detour into psychedelic satire thatā€™s found a sizable audience ā€”

and now Iā€™m actively considering where to take the Mycopreneur Platform next.

The next few years will see an increasingly unpredictable and uncertain media landscape challenged by misinformation, disinformation, trolls, and calculated moves coming from the top-down and the bottom-up - not to mention the rise of Deep Fakes. Extremism on one side will be countered with censorship and de-platforming on the other side. This will continue to shape the emergent psychedelic ecosystem as a wide array of stakeholders jostle for legislative control, representation, and market share.

And the forthcoming American presidential election is poised to be one of incredible societal disruption, if the last election cycle was any indicator.

I am actively soliciting feedback and ideas about where to take this platform, as Iā€™ve built something that cannot be easily established - trust with a highly concentrated audience of psychedelic activists, founders, and entrepreneurs who hold key positions in this unfolding psychedelic new media landscape - as well as an academic and professional background in the study and production of new media. 

Thank you for subscribing to the Post-Truth Post, and please let me know what type of content you want to see here in future iterations of the newsletter and on the Mycopreneur platform.

Dennis