Pleasure and spirituality in Israeli psychedelic trance culture are not opposed to militarism but instead express the disavowed settler-colonial fabric of the state. Reflecting on the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli ravers by Palestinian militants, the essay argues that the countercultural specificities of psytrance—its hedonism and spirituality—articulate rather than resist the violence and catastrophe structuring Israeli society.
Computer interfaces, like allegory, blend mimetic symbols with magical ones that open onto operations or information. Early virtual spaces such as the text-based fantasy game Adventure exemplify this allegorical mode, encoding abstract functions within magical imagery. This magical metaphor persists in later virtual environments like MUDs and Vernor Vinge's Other Plane, where magic jargon serves as a natural way to manipulate data space. The allegorical fusion of imagination and systematic coding also connects to cryptography, as secret codes and encryption schemes echo hermetic traditions like Gematria and Temurah, where power resides in hidden codes rather than mere knowledge.