The drive to Black Rock City from San Francisco leads through the Nevada flatlands, past the jittering neon sadness of Reno.

Electronic culture created soulless replacements for connective rituals- television supplanted tribal legends told by the fire; 'fast food' consumed in distraction took the place of a shared meal. We substituted matter for Mater (feminine principle), money for mother's milk, objects for emotional bonds.

Deep down, nobody wants a job to occupy his or her time. We want a mission that inspires us.

My personal, metaphysical belief is Vedanta, which is that ultimately there is a singular consciousness. It's like a Hindu metaphysics, that basically we're all like characters in a play that consciousness is putting on to discover its own creative capacities.

I grew up in a very artistic, cultured home, but without any kind of spirituality. My parents were secular materialists, so I saw art as having an alternate value.

People used to make their own clothes, now they buy clothes. People used to take care of their own kids, now they pay other people do it. And that was because capitalism requires more and more things being turned into money - being turned into profit. But that has reached this absurd limit where there's nothing left to turn into money, and the capitalist system is breaking down.

If you step back from it and really think about what the mass media does on a global scale, the most significant thing it does is coordinate behaviour.