"SWIM" Team: Trip Reports, Anonymity, and Discursive Freedom during Psychedelic Prohibition

Today, the current US secretary of health and human services promotes the psychedelic brew ayahuasca while suburban moms microdose LSD. The New York Times and other major publications regularly publish articles declaring psychedelics to be the cure for everything from major depression to PTSD, and legal psychedelic therapy (though delayed in the case of MDMA) appears to be around the corner. Despite their growing popularity, psychedelics and other mind-altering drugs remain illegal in most parts of the world, with the threat of severe punishment looming for those who choose to alter their consciousness. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, “trip reports” (written accounts of psychedelic experiences) came to represent the psychonaut community’s grappling with the paradox of discursive freedom within the landscape of prohibition. This paper will argue that the early dissemination of trip reports on the internet is intimately tied to the general public’s turn to the public forum as a source of informational authority. More specifically, trip reports demonstrate that psychonauts desired information, both practical and spiritual, to come from people “just like them.” I will also analyze the role of anonymity in drug forums, embodied by the acronym SWIM (“someone who isn’t me”), arguing that anonymity gave psychonauts the freedom to discuss taboo experiences while paradoxically representing the limits of their literal freedom due to fear of persecution.

Since the 1990s, self-identified explorers of consciousness, or psychonauts, have used internet forums to disseminate experience reports, safety information, speculative theology, recipes, and more. The misinformation spread by governments and other institutions during the War on Drugs has been displaced by freely available information – and a great deal of it. This rapid proliferation of information may be due to the fact that psychonauts are a talkative bunch. Richard Doyle, one of the first scholars to take trip reports seriously as data, has referred to psychedelics as “eloquence adjuncts,” claiming that they "[cause] us to speak out about the ineffable until we exhaust the capacities of our language unto silence, [taking] language to its limit and encourag[ing] its innovation” (Doyle, 103). In the 90s, psychedelics’ ability to generate language-based activity dovetailed with the internet’s implicit encouragement of informational exchange. Early drug forums, particularly the “experience vaults” of Erowid.com, acted as autonomous zones in which the psychonaut community could collectively explore landscapes beyond the legal boundaries that delineate sanctioned forms of consciousness. 

Tired of institutional misinformation about psychedelics and other drugs, psychonauts turned to each other as a collective source of more accurate information. This phenomenon represents what media theorist and psychedelic enthusiast Doug Rushkoff identified in his 1994 work Media Virus as a shift in public trust in media. From the mid-1980s onward, the public forum became a more authoritative source of information to the general population than news outlets or politicians. Growing distrust of authorities meant that people wanted to acquire information from “normal people” like themselves. Rushkoff identifies the Esalen Institute as an inconspicuous precursor to the public forum, noting that Esalen creator Michael Murphy explicitly stated that he and his community “set out to create an open forum” (Rushkoff, 58). Strongly associated with psychedelic culture, Esalen operated on an ethos of discursive freedom that anticipated the activity of psychonauts on Erowid.com and other websites. If public preference for the epistemological value of the forum signaled a shift in perceived informational authority, what implications did this have for early online communities of psychonauts? I argue that the rise of drug forums is related to the increasing popularity of the public forum; rather than entailing a shift in the consumption of news media, however, the rise of psychedelic forums signaled a shift in religious authority, which was passed from traditional religious institutions to the anonymous collective self. 

In Media Virus, Rushkoff focused on the talk show as the primary vehicle of the public forum. In stark contrast to the talk show format, which is predicated on the viewer seeing themselves as part of the in-the-flesh studio audience, online drug forums thrive on the anonymity they offer. The significance of anonymity is exemplified by the tongue-in-cheek acronym SWIM (“someone who isn’t me”). SWIM is regularly employed in place of first-person pronouns (e.g. “SWIM ingested 100µg LSD…”), ostensibly to protect the poster from any legal repercussions. To the e-psychonaut, then, SWIM becomes a mythological figure, a composite of tens of thousands of experiences shared by the anonymous “other.” Through repeated encounters with this digital, rapidly growing entity, psychonauts gain the ability to navigate their own psychedelic experiences. At the same time, the influence of SWIM’s experiences on the psychonaut’s mindset (the “set” of “set and setting”) co-creates the phenomenological contents of individual psychedelic experiences, transforming the psychedelic landscape itself.

Trip reports are an integral component of a larger feedback loop. Psychonauts undergo a personal psychedelic experience, which they put into words and post online. The resulting trip report is read by others, which influences their personal experiences, which they in turn share online. This iterative process would not be possible without the discursive freedom afforded by drug information sites like Erowid, which act as repositories for the experiences of SWIM, the anonymous psychonautic collective. At the same time, the very fact that this anonymous collective exists speaks to the limits placed on the freedom to explore one’s own consciousness. If the rise of authority of the public forum in the 1990s indicated a growing mistrust of news media, then, for psychonauts, the concurrent rise of drug forums represented a shift of spiritual authority from traditional institutions to the anonymous collective. By jumping off the deep end and analyzing the role of SWIM in online psychonautic culture, we can gain a greater understanding of how the internet, and the public forum in general, has played a role in the continuing evolution of fringe spiritual communities.