It was also an era before the paranoid security of the appartus of the state slammed down hard post-9/11. By which I mean we could do "illegal" raves in abando

It was also an era before the paranoid security of the appartus of the state slammed down hard post-9/11. By which I mean we could do "illegal" raves in abandoned warehouses or spontaneous outdoor spaces and not end up (generally) in holding cells. After 9/11 the consequences of perceived deviancy became far more extreme. That and the absolute wave of decentered distraction of social media hadn't arrived yet. There was still some sense of shared common cultures, rather than a bazillion fractured windowless monads fed through social media and Spotify feeds