Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

✨ About This Episode

If you’re wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain’t easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the door. This week I speak with professional organizer, single mother, and badass independent public intellectual (in no specific order) Alyssa Allegretti (Website | Substack | Facebook) about making one’s way in the Wild West of the digital realm as someone balancing the seemingly-opposed responsibilities of parenthood and philosophy.

Herein we discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age, particularly for those navigating non-traditional career paths, parenthood, and the search for authentic connection.

This conversation touches on the themes of invisible labor, particularly the often-unrecognized contributions of women and caregivers; the limitations of traditional institutions in recognizing and supporting diverse voices and lifestyles; and the importance of finding the sacred in the mundane aspects of daily life. We also grapple with the complexities of online communities, acknowledging both their potential for fostering connection and their tendency to amplify social divisions and reward performative behavior. Ultimately, my riffs with Alyssa underscore the importance of personal responsibility, self-awareness, and strong relationships in navigating the ever-evolving liminal zones of our metamorphic century.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

✨ Support This Work

• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Episode Breakdown (Provided by NotebookLM)

Chapter 1: Introductions and Invisible Labor (0:00:00-0:10:01)

Alyssa’s Background: Alyssa discusses her experience as a “Facebook Intellectual” and the limitations of traditional paths to intellectual and creative pursuits for women, particularly mothers.

Sacred Domesticity: Alyssa introduces her work, which focuses on “sacred domesticity,” viewing housekeeping and homemaking as a microcosm of larger social issues and a valuable space for personal growth.

Alyssa’s Work: Alyssa details her work as a professional organizer and house cleaner, emphasizing its therapeutic aspects, particularly for women and those struggling with executive functioning.

Chapter 2: Marginalized Voices and the Liminal Web (0:10:01-0:20:00)

Michael's Story: Michael shares his personal journey to becoming an independent scholar and the challenges of navigating financial instability while pursuing non-traditional intellectual work.

Value of Marginalized Perspectives: Both speakers acknowledge the unique insights offered by individuals outside traditional academic and professional structures.

The Liminal Web and Gender Imbalance: Alyssa recounts her experience with a perceived gender imbalance in online intellectual communities, using the “liminal web” as an example.

Chapter 3: Work-Life Integration and Alternative Spaces (0:20:00 - 0:30:00)

Motherhood and Intellectual Pursuits: Alyssa describes the difficulties of pursuing a career in intellectual fields as a young, single mother. She highlights the inherent unfriendliness of these spaces to parents and those with marginalized identities.

Alternative Solutions: Alyssa argues that viable solutions for work-life integration are emerging in female and queer-dominated spaces, like the coaching industry, that prioritize alternative education and self-employment.

Critique of Traditional Institutions: Alyssa critiques the inaccessibility of traditional academic institutions for individuals facing socioeconomic barriers, neurodiversity, and past trauma.

Chapter 4: The Sacred in the Mundane (0:30:00-0:40:00)

Domestic Realm and Personal Growth: Alyssa discusses the importance of recognizing the domestic realm as a legitimate space for personal growth and mental health support, regardless of gender.

Blurring Boundaries: Alyssa highlights her efforts to integrate her work life and home life, finding inspiration in the mundane aspects of parenting and domesticity.

Seeking Community and Authenticity: Alyssa expresses her grief over the separation between the “best parts of life” and her children. She desires more inclusive and accepting spaces where individuals can be their full selves.

Chapter 5: Intergenerational Knowledge and Societal Fragmentation (0:40:00 - 0:50:00)

Invisible Labor and Gender Roles: Alyssa and Michael discuss the concept of invisible labor, particularly within the context of traditional gender roles. They acknowledge the complexities and nuances of labor distribution in modern families.353637

Reconciling Parenthood and Personal Pursuits: Alyssa shares her personal approach to balancing her writing with the demands of motherhood, emphasizing the importance of presence and self-awareness.

The Loss of Intergenerational Transmission: Michael laments the fragmentation of families and the loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer due to the separation of work and family life.

Chapter 6: The Planetary Layer and Rethinking Community(0:50:00-1:00:00)

Online Communities as Extensions of Family: Michael discusses his transition away from generic online communities towards local groups, emphasizing the importance of grounded, real-world connections.

The Unhealthy Influence of Globalist Thinking: Michael critiques the tendency of globalist thinking to prioritize abstract ideals over the needs of individuals and communities.

The Trad Wife Phenomenon and the Moralization of Domesticity: Alyssa and Michael discuss the rise of the “trad wife” phenomenon and the dangers of romanticizing and commodifying domestic life.

Chapter 7: Embracing Imperfection and Domestic Liberation (1:00:00-1:10:00)

Domestic Liberation: Alyssa challenges listeners to envision “domestic liberation,” reclaiming home life from external pressures and embracing its inherent value.

Finding Inspiration in Imperfection: Alyssa acknowledges the limitations and imperfections inherent in both online and offline communities, advocating for a more compassionate and accepting approach to social change.

The Power of Difference: Alyssa believes that true social progress relies on acknowledging, accepting, and integrating differences, rather than striving for unattainable ideals.

Chapter 8: Vulnerability, Transparency, and Digital Identity (1:10:00-1:20:00)

The Paradox of Online Domesticity: The speakers discuss the paradoxical nature of online platforms like YouTube, where individuals are encouraged to commodify their family lives for financial gain.

Counter-Narratives and Authenticity: Alyssa highlights emerging counter-narratives in the online domesticity sphere that challenge the romanticized and idealized portrayals of home life.

Transparency as a Tool for Healing: Alyssa shares her personal experience with using online platforms to challenge societal expectations and de-stigmatize taboo subjects.

Chapter 9: Navigating the Digital Age with Children(1:20:00-1:30:00)

The Impact of Technology on Parenting: Michael and Alyssa discuss the challenges of navigating technology's influence on family life, particularly the potential dangers of online exposure for children.

Teaching Digital Literacy and Boundaries: Alyssa highlights the importance of teaching children digital literacy, helping them understand the complexities of online spaces, and setting healthy boundaries.

Modeling Self-Awareness and Responsibility: Alyssa emphasizes the need for parents to model self-awareness and responsibility in their own online interactions, demonstrating healthy ways to engage with digital spaces.

Chapter 10: Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Accountability (1:30:00-1:42:49)

The Burden of Being the “Reasonable Adult”: Michael and Alyssa discuss the emotional labor involved in maintaining composure and promoting healthy discourse in online spaces, particularly given the lack of external validation for such efforts.

Redefining Accountability in Relationships: Alyssa advocates for a shift from externally imposed accountability to personal responsibility, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with individuals who prioritize self-awareness and growth.

Finding Sustainable Ways to Connect: Alyssa emphasizes the importance of strong friendships and chosen families in navigating the complexities of modern life and creating a more sustainable future.

Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

✨ About This Episode

This week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh (LinkedIn), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and author of over ninety peer-reviewed publications as well as the book The Science of Channeling. Our main course: a recent review in Frontiers of Psychology entitled, “What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models”.

In this conversation we take a thirty-thousand foot view of the history and future of the science of consciousness, the socioeconomic impediments to unflinching consciousness research, and the overwhelming weight of transcultural experience that make this such a promising domain for fundamental investigation.

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

✨ Support This Work

• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP

✨ Related Episodes

Dig into an extensive back catalog of consciousness-research-flavored episodes (psi phenomena, non-ordinary states, psychedelic neuroscience, oracular praxes, time and consciousness, etc.) at the Future Fossils Consciousness Research Spotify playlist or through the following Substack links:

03 Tony Vigorito05 Mitch Schultz20 Joanna Harcourt-Smith27 Niles Heckman and Rak Razam30 Becca Tarnas37 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo45 Kerri Welch57 Conner Habib and Mitch Mignano58 Shane Mauss69 Tim Freke78 Archan Nair88 Dennis McKenna99 Erik Davis100 The Teafaerie103 Tricia Eastman112 Mitsuaki Chi113 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens117 Eric Wargo119 Jeremy Johnson124 Norman Katz125A Stuart Kauffman (patrons only)126 Phil Ford and J.F. Martel127 Cory Allen131 Jessica Nielson and Link Swanson132 Erik Davis150 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens156 Stuart Davis170 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo171 Eric Wargo176 Sophie Strand and Richard Doyle and Sam Gandy179 Scout Wiley 186 Solo: A Manifesto for Weird Science218 Neil Theise222 Andrés Goméz Emilsson

This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges.  And the time for this work is definitely NOW.  As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet.  This is the century — and the decade — in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another.  And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism.  In the 1940s, the message was “Loose lips sink ships.”  Perhaps the message for the 2020s is “Cognitive biases spread mind viruses.”

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together.  We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard.  2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense:  fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality.  I’d be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology:  a sane and healthy global brain.

Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I’ll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.

✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)

✨ Support My Work:

• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!

This week’s guest is living legend, transdisciplinary scientist-philosopher Stuart Kauffman, whose pioneering work on self-organization and the emergence of order helped launch the field of complex systems science and has brought us to the very edge of understanding the origins and nature of life. Over his 50+ year career and six books, including this year’s The World Beyond Physics, Stu has done more than almost anyone to restore the historic union of science and philosophy, articulating a new spirituality for our secular age of systems thinking, and filing numerous patents on technologies of chemical synthesis and quantum mechanics.

It's an epic conversation with a bold and boundary-less mind. In this episode we drive right to the heart of one of humankind’s biggest and most persistent mysteries: What is life?

Stuart Kauffman’s EXTENSIVE & ILLUMINATING Google Scholar Page:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yoPM0F8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

This week’s vocabulary word: “ergodic”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ergodic

Become a Patreon supporter to listen to Part 2 of this conversation, on quantum physics and consciousness:

http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

the adjacent possible

the origins of life

niche construction & niche propagation (which i initially conflate, but he re-differentiates)

exaptation

the incomputability of the list of all possible uses of a thing

why are there hearts in the universe?

“the universe is non-ergodic and most complex things will never exist”

“there are no laws whatsoever for the evolution of the biosphere”

contingent, or inevitable? enabled, or caused?

the economy creates the possibilities into which it is sucked

Terence McKenna’s strange attractor at the end of time

constraint closure and the release of energy in fewer degrees of freedom

abiogenesis and the protocell as a model of its environment

are there constraints without work?

the number of cell types in an organism is roughly the square root of the number of genes

“information is precisely the release of energy into fewer degrees of freedom”

Paul Davies & Sara Imari Walker

Johnjoe McFadden

Giuseppe Longo

the system will spend more time in macrostates in which there are more microstates (Boltzmann)

Supplemental Materials:

Stuart Kauffman’s essay, “No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf;alsoseeGiuseppeLongo

Stu’s co-author Wim Hordijk on autocatalysis at Orbiter Mag:

https://orbitermag.com/how-did-life-begin-part-3/

Michael’s essay, “The Future is Exapted/Remixed”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877

Michael’s extensive notes on the ideas of this episode, “Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm”

https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022

Original intro music by Michael Garfield, “Birds Waking Up In Trees”

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Show outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Norman Katz, aka Dr. Blue – a lifelong practitioner of hypnotherapy and the impresario of 3SidedWhole, nine acres of magical weirdness in the desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve known Dr. Blue for nearly a decade and he’s deeply enriched my life over the years with his amazing stories, empowering mind hacks, and community of soulful southwestern weirdos. In this episode, he regales us with stories of psychological research into UFOs, past lives, fractals, and flow states; the history of hypnosis, his study under hypnotherapy pioneer Milton Erickson, the psychophysiology of laughter yoga, and – more broadly – the importance, and the surprising ease, of choosing the trance you want to be in…

Dr. Blue’s Website:

http://www.normankatzphd.com/curricula-vitae.html

3SidedWhole Website:

http://www.3sidedwhole.com/

“We were doing LSD as the patient and the therapist simultaneously…it was quite interesting.”

“There still is no study that verifies that hypnosis is a particular brain state or neurological constellation. Hypnosis is not a brain state. It turns out to be a skill and an aptitude that’s based on combining attention, and fantasy, and a predilection for dissociation.”

“Our perception of reality is at least half constructed by what we expect, what we imagine, and what we pretend. In fact, it’s really hard to teach people new things, because most of the time they’re trying to match new things to their old models.”

“It was the only lecture I’ve ever seen where 300 psychotherapists stood up afterward an gave him a standing ovation. And his theory was, bascially, individual psychotherapy is not only ineffective, it’s wrong, and it disconnects people from their community. He said, the biggest mistake in Western Civilization was when Descartes said, ‘Cognito ergo sum,’ ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And what he should have said was, ‘Convivo ergo sum.’ ‘I celebrate in community, therefore I am.’”

“At any point in time, ask yourself this question: ‘If I had been hypnotized to be doing what I’m doing right now and having this experience, what would I have been told?’”

“Erickson used to tell his students, ‘Pretend, and pretend you’re not pretending.’”

“In the West, most people breathe too much.”

“I had a formal psychology training at Harvard. Most of that turned out to be nonsense. Learn to unlearn. Learn to forget. Learn to be innocent. Let yourself continue to reinvent yourself and discover who you are, because you are more than any of us think you are.”

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Intro Music: “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up From K.O.” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Outro Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Appendix: 51 blackbelt hypnosis skills, a partial list of course

(the master skill is to perceive a coherent reality in one frame ignoring the 27 other timelines)

instant time travel, to past, present and future. multiple timeline realities possible like in string theory in quantum physics

humor, ability to tell self joke and beginning laughing, and see humor and paradox in all situations

increased creativity as needed, transcend functional fixedness, and create new uses for objects, tools, situations 

ability to reframe anything

ability to create synthesis to create positive action altered states of consciousness

ability to make pain disappear

ability to increase pleasure to ecstatic levels

ability to shift mood instantly 

ability to tap into higher consciousness, both neurologically and to source (the universe)

ability to become WISE without thinking (i.e. go into no trance trance in which wisdom flows)

abilities to see life as movie within movie within movies and change the stories

ability to profoundly relax and melt, both physically and mentally

to be comfortable both inside and outside shared realities

ability to balance two nervous systems, sympathetic and parasympathetic, i.e. hypno-autogenics master

ability to come out of shell and act immediately, go fast or slow

ability to tell stories within stories within stories with threaded key meanings or concepts

ability to create useful symptoms as necessary e.g. lust for reading certain materials, exercise, etc.

ability to create amnesia or hyper recall memory (memory palace)

ability to be in the now in slow motion

ability to enter mystical states of oneness or everything-ness and transition through the infinity loop

ability to create and radiate happiness, joy and energy

ability to avoid the DARK SIDE of hypnotic hexes, vengeance or negative energy and to recognize when others are doing such and intervene

ability to do hypnotic shamanic ceremonies to invoke sacred space

ability to intervene in disease or create disease

ability to discern the "truth" or "lies" of self and others trance states

hypnotic protection of self and others, use of attention filters

sensory awareness enhancement (Charlotte Selver) both internal and external

mastering use of breathing

peak performance, for self and others – golf example, 2 holes in one in a row

ability to direct and choose trances for self and others (magic number in psychology 87 plus or minus two)

ability to completely let go

ability to experience and create compassion through mirror neurons

ability to alter blood blow: for healing work, pain control, sex therapy

ability to have too much fun

ability to create and use posthypnotic suggestion for self and others

ability to create health through medical interventions for surgery,

psychoimmunology and general well being

ability to will to live and to enjoy life

ability to find meaning and purpose in any situation, circumstances, and life challenge

ability to control altered states of consciousness both from plant guides, extreme circumstances and as training and for emergency interventions

ability to tap into special energies

ability to erase self and know nothing and be the fool

ability to deal with death, dying, and transitions

ability to hallucinate and now what is not real simultaneously

ability for extreme selective attention

ability to shift identity, archetypes AND PERSONALITY CONSTELLLATIONS

ability to deal with change, both small and large

ability for discernment: what to pay attention and listen to

ability to keep evolving

ability to recognize that we not are the healing force, only the gateways

ability to have supreme confidence

ability to balance

ability to recognize synchronicity and act on it

ability to shift energy, both physically, metaphysically and also medically

ability to recognize when less is more (homeopathy) – see Andrew Weil, The Marriage of the Sun and Moon

ability to see through culture and its assumptions in different cultures

ability to contact the ancestors and invite their presence and wisdom

ability contact DNA wisdom and ancestral memories

ability to do fractal healing

ability to stay open and curious

(note this does not include classic hypnosis suggestions on the Stanford hypnosis scales, which are elementary)

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week we’re joined by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Technology exploring the effects of technology on how we think. David’s led a fascinating and nonlinear life, studying Heiddeger as a young philosopher, working in marketing for high technology, working as a journalist, and authoring four books on technology, creativity, and knowledge. His new book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, explores what changes for us in the age of machine learning.

I have to admit, I was worried this was going to be just another technocratic puff piece when I started. Certainly it’s a Harvard Business Review Press volume, speaking largely to a business audience; but this is a book that doesn’t flinch at the weirdness of a world in which we know things we don’t know how we know. David’s argument is for a creative embrace of the complexity and mystery that has always surrounded us – that we are in fact made of – and that is becoming much more obvious in light of superhuman but opaque machine intelligences that rehab us from the delusions of our modern pretense that the world is knowable, transparent, and controllable. But unlike the doomsayers of the AI conversation, David has an enviable peace about the fact that we never actually had a lock on what is really going on – and argues eloquently for a fresh encounter with a world of wonder, possibility, and the unknown.

David at Harvard:

https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/dweinberger

David on Medium (“Machine Learning Might Render The Human Quest for Knowledge Pointless”):

https://onezero.medium.com/machine-learning-might-render-the-human-quest-for-knowledge-pointless-5425f8b00a45

With open APIs, open access journals, game modding, and other empowering information technologies, we are purposefully making the world less predictable.

Laws are not necessarily the most accurate way of describing reality.

The death knell for the theory of everything - letting go of unifying universal frameworks.

“It’s not really a three-body problem. It’s an every-body problem, because everything with gravity effects everything else.”

“Everything - EVERYTHING in our lives we basically don’t know, and can’t predict. But the picture of our lives has been, until recently, ‘It’s simple and law-like.’ The chaos, this is our lives. The laws, they are real, they are helpful, but they don’t govern as much as we like to think.”

“We think out in the world with tools. There’s no shame in this, but it does mean we’re not locked in our own heads. And now we have new tools.”

“…it depends on what you count as an explanation.”

“We need to leave room for the accidental, because that is the stuff of our lives.”

“I don’t know what a transparent algorithm is.”

Are we willing to trade a thousand auto deaths a year for the explicability of autonomous vehicle safety algorithms? Or fuel efficiency?

“An explanation is a tool. It’s not a state of the world.”

• Relatedly, we just read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem in the Future Fossils Book Club:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/book-club-3-body-29353389?cid=26063131

• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).

• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Magenta Ceiba, Executive Creative Officer (ECO) for the Bloom Network, a worldwide constellation of regenerative design hackers working in ecology, economics, civil engineering, software design, restorative justice, organizational development, and more. Bloom is hosting Pollination, an “unconference” or immersive in-person hack-a-thon, this coming weekend in San Francisco – a place for this amazing extended international network (including you, potentially) to convene for design sprints for new practices and systems to restore the health and value of our world.

I hope you’ll treat this episode as a gateway into an amazing profusion of awesome ideas and people, just the very tip of a very deep and well-furnished rabbithole.

Here are some leads to get you started: 

• See the Pollination 2019 program on Bloom Network’s website.

(If you have friends in the Bay Area who might like to come, here’s a promo code for a $50 discount: BLOOM50 so they can join for just $195. The Bloom Network also has low income/scholarship tickets available: please fill in the form here. I am not an affiliate and get no reward from this, other than knowing that you attended and got to participate.)

• Magenta’s personal website.

• Another excellent conversation with Magenta (plus copious resource links) at Abundant Edge Podcast.

• Mark Heley interviews Pollination 2019 MC (and Future Fossils guest) Maya Zuckerman.

These three quotes came in Rob Breszny’s email newsletter today and couldn’t be more appropriate:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

—Buckminster Fuller

“We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.”

—Bill Joy

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

—Dan Millman

Related Episodes:

• Episode 46 - Magenta Ceiba’s first appearance on Future Fossils.

• Episode 56 - Sophia Rohklin on the inter-relationship of ecology & economy.

• Episode 61 - Jamaica Stevens on crisis, rebirth, and transformation.

• Episode 98 - Decentralization Panel at Arcosanti w/ members of NuMundo Project, Unify, & The Institute of Ecotechnics.

Credits:

• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).

• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield.

• Episode Cover Image: Concept Art for The Fifth Sacred Thing by Jessica Perlstein.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we dive into the troublesome, urgent, and underdiscussed issue of space ethics with planetary scientist and artist Divya M. Persaud. Can we transcend the traumatic conflict and exploitation that characterize human history, come together in compassionate mutual understanding and respectful discourse, and leave our children with better and more interesting problems? Or are we doomed to transmit the legacy of violence we inherited into fractured futures even more disparate, tragic, and unequal than our own time? A deep dive into the real stakes of space, and a preliminary exposition of the ethical discussions we will need to get there…

Divya’s Website:

https://divyampersaud.wordpress.com/about/

Selected Writings:

https://phdvolcanology.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/space-and-time-for-diversity/

https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2018/02/talking-about-tesla-by-emily-lakdawalla.html

https://twitter.com/Divya_M_P/status/1080310839465467909

Intro Music: Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Outro Music: Divya M. Persaud, “Orogenesis” for Voice, Violin, Saxophone, and Piano

https://soundcloud.com/divyamp/orogenesis-for-voice-violin-saxophone-and-piano`

Additional reading on the ethics of space exploration:

https://www.bmsis.org/the-ethics-of-space-exploration/

https://theconversation.com/eight-ethical-questions-about-exploring-outer-space-that-need-answers-98878

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/bioethics/resources/articles/articles-on-the-ethics-of-space-exploration/

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2017-business-and-economics-of-space/Documents/John%20Rummel.pdf

Support Future Fossils on Patreon to get access to our science fiction book club calls, secret episodes, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Join the daily conversation in the Future Fossils facebook group:

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This week we surf the fun-gularity with the brilliant artist, standup comic, and podcaster Ramin Nazer! This episode is significantly less a heady philosophy-of-science discussion than usual and significantly more a wank-fest of two people who love each other’s shows going on about all the mind-blowing visionary notions contained therein. Kick back, light some incense, and prepare for a juicy conversation about where we stand in the Cosmic Order and what to do with all of our creative possibility…covering everything from universal basic income to celebrity schadenfruede, visionary art and science fiction to to the psychological impact of trying to stay original in the midst of a tech singularity. If you’re anything like I am, Ramin is going to inspire the hell out of you. Enjoy…

Ramin’s Website:

https://rainbowbrainskull.com/collections/prints

Michael on Ramin’s podcast, Rainbow Brainskull:

https://www.raminnazer.com/blogs/rainbow-brainskull-hour/michael-garfield

Mentioned:

Archan Nair, The Teafaerie, Nikola Tesla, Onyx Ashanti, King Raam, The Rock, Andrew Yang, Yuval Harari, Bill Gates, Star Trek Discovery, Charles Stross’ Accelerando & Glasshouse, Black Mirror, Esperanza Spalding, Duncan Trussell, Richard Florida, Jeff Bezos, William Irwin Thompson, Terence McKenna, John C. Wright’s Eschaton Sequence, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Eric Wargo’s Time Loops, Colin Frangicetto, Who Built The Moon?, No Man’s Sky, An Oral History of the End of Reality, Ariana Grande, Jimi Hendrix, Amazon Alexa, Life in the Glass Age at Burning Man 2013, Dadara (Daniel Rozenberg), The Mirage Men, Jason Silva, Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Michaelangelo, Slavoj Zizek, Marshall McLuhan, Chuck Palahniuk, Jordan Peterson, Aziz Ansari, Louis CK, Julia Cameron, Alan Shelton, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Zappa, Mortal Kombat, Roko’s Basilisk, Norman “Dr. Blue” Katz, Joe Biden, Awake Aware Alive Podcast, Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, Rak Razam, Adam Dipert, Giant Leap Dance Company, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Greg Parkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Weird Studies, Brave Browser

Support this show on Patreon and score a zillion awesome perks:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Subscribe to our monthly creative explosion of a newsletter:

https://michaelgarfield.substack.com

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“The human being is actually this kaleidoscope of different ways to relate to time and space. And to be present with it all, to be awake with it all, is what we’re doing.”

Jean Gebser mapped the mutating structures of human consciousness, the topology of mind from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral. His work inspired generations of inquiry by authors like William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber. Now Jeremy Johnson’s latest book for Revelore Press expands into the truly visionary and unique “amensional” reality that Gebser posits as the next mutation for our planetary culture.  

“We’re not just going to have an ‘archaic revival’ and dump what we’ve been doing with the nightmare of history. There’s something that’s been achieved in this kind of coalescing of the self and the emergence of spatial linear time that’s true, as well.”

“The endgame of perspectivalism and the mental world…is eventually breaking down to the point where everyone has their own little perspectival ‘reality tunnel,’ where nobody’s able to talk to one another and everybody’s in this sense of cultural warfare and fragmentation and social isolation.”

“You should know by now that things are ever-present.”

Jeremy’s Book:

https://revelore.press/product/seeing-through-the-world/

Jeremy’s Podcast:

http://www.jeremydanieljohnson.com/mutations

Discussed:

James Joyce

Marshall McLuhan

Martin Heidegger

Sri Aurobindo

Grant Morrison

Timothy Morton

Doug Rushkoff

Eugene Thacker

Graham Harman

Support the show on Patreon for an avalanche of secret episodes, writing, art, music, and the Future Fossils Book Club:

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Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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“I want to break the idea that housing is an investment vehicle. I mean housing is a f-cking HUMAN NEED.”

This week’s guest is Australian futurist Nathan Waters, whose vision for a mobile, modular mashup of apartment living and driverless cars offers a solution to a trifecta of wicked problems in affordable housing, cost of living, and enjoyable work. We’re talking about a mature and equitable sharing economy that goes asteroid-to-dinosaurs on the exploitative systems of corporations like Uber and Airbnb…this is an episode for anyone who dreams of a fairer and funner world, a world that reconciles the yearning for flexibility and adventure with the desire for a nice place to call your own:

Nathan’s popular essay on “driverless hotel rooms”:

https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1?gi=cecb64856db9

Nathan’s blockchain-based skill-sharing economy website:

https://www.peerism.org/

Nathan’s futures-oriented social media channel, Futawe:

https://twitter.com/futawe?lang=en

Nathan cohosts this YouTube talkshow about the singularity, Hive45:

https://www.youtube.com/user/hive45com/videos

Somebody either ripped off his driverless hotel rooms idea or just stumbled on it independently:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2018/11/27/self-driving-hotel-room/2123668002/

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/autonomous-travel-suites/index.html

From this episode:

“A job is a terrible, terrible concept. I think of jobs as modern-day slavery. It’s a bunch of wasted mind and human capital.”

“We have material abundance because of capitalism, but now it’s almost an existential threat. And we need to transition quickly to something else.”

Most of the housing space and vehicle space we own is unused most of the time.

We can’t legislate affordable housing because the incumbent politicians are real estate speculators.

Modular hotels made of autonomous vehicle components (adding a z-axis to the not-a-trailer-park for hip young professionals).

A new resolution for our age-old dialogue between sedentary and nomadic communities, wanderers and people of place.

How to fit 9 billion people into 100K apartment buildings; see also: Paolo Soleri’s Lean Linear City.

Building a blockchain-based, decentralized skill-sharing economy.

A/B testing modular cities to find the optimum layout for human happiness.

Mark Lakeman of City Repair and restoring streets to a safe commons.

Can we handle constantly fluctuating and re-organizing architecture?

Geophysical filter bubbles.

Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon and get access to dozens of secret episodes, book club calls, live concert recordings, and more:

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Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week’s guest is Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. 

Contrary to your most likely first impression based on the title of the book alone, this is a supremely carefully constructed argument that anticipates its critics, understands statistics and their abuse, appeals to our desire for simplicity in scientific explanations, and single-handedly reorganizes the entire field of parapsychological research beneath a new and rational umbrella that allows for major weirdness without sacrificing mechanistic causation or parsimony. Telepathy and spooky action at a distance, Jungian synchronicity and many worlds quantum physics all get re-evaluated under Wargo’s tesseract-brain model, in which there’s no such thing as entanglement, but living systems co-opt quantum post-selection to “steer” toward evolutionarily significant events. 

If you have ever dreamt of something that then happened in your waking life, this episode’s for you. And if you think that time’s an arrow and this all sounds like high nonsense, this episode is also for you.

I can’t possibly attempt to cover all the subjects we discuss in these two hours, but here are books and essays that we reference (some of which I haven’t read):

Eric Wargo - Time Loops

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Loops-Precognition-Retrocausation-Unconscious/dp/1938398920

J. Scott Turner - Purpose & Desire

https://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Desire-Something-Darwinism-Explain/dp/0062651560

(I have to make a personal note that without having read this book, I’ve read enough reviews to caution anyone against taking it as legitimate science. I’ve argued for the importance of beauty and desire, purpose and effort in the evolutionary process – and I’ve argued evolution in general does have a kind of direction. So I’m sympathetic to the author’s desire to re-introduce these ideas into the discussion. But from everything I can tell this particular book misrepresents evolutionary theory in its attempts to get where it wants to go, and I can’t support that.)

Paul Davies - The Goldilocks Enigma

https://www.amazon.com/The-Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Right/dp/0713998830%

Matthew Fox - “The Return of the Black Madonna”

http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-century

Seth Lloyd, et al. - “The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615

Eric Wargo - “Dream Paleontology”

http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4215

Eric Wargo - “What Lies Under The Skin”

http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3198

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Additional Music: “It All Turned Out All Right” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/it-all-turned-out-all-right

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes (and the last ten minutes of this conversation):

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week is a watershed moment for Future Fossils Podcast: the show’s first guest host! My friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut is an engineer who creates occasional one-shot podcasts of fiction and nonfiction, and (according to him) worries about the future too much. We met at InterPlanetary Festival last year on the visit that inspired me to move to Santa Fe, and ever since we’ve had a rich correspondence of mutual far-future fiction recommendations and armchair philosophy chats.

Kevin sent me his very cool readings of two essays with the same name, each portraying very different version of “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and both so provocative I felt like sharing them here on the show’s main feed – with my own commentary at the end, on blind spots in imagining deep time and our own psychedelically weird future.

You can find Kevin active in the Future Fossils discussion groups at Facebook and Patreon.

Professor Ugo Bardi blogs at https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com and http://chimeramyth.blogspot.com. You can read his essay here.

John Michael Greer posts longer works at https://www.ecosophia.net and shorter works at https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org. You can read his essay here.

Outro reading excerpted from Michael Garfield’s “How to Live in the Future Part 2: The Future is More of Everything.”

Cover Artwork by evolutionary robotics researcher Andrew Lincoln Nelson.

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

Additional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael Garfield

Additional Music by http://www.daikaiju.org & http://www.evanbrau.com

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!

Merry Christmas, Future Fossils!  This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214 of the podcast that explores our place in time — and as demonstrated in the Dr. Who and Aliens franchises, Blade Runner 2049, and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas — a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters.  In other words, perfect timing for this episode’s conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel.  

Lecturer in Media and Information at University of Amsterdam and Phd Research Fellow at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt who writes trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, circuit bending, and surveillance capitalism.  Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice.  J.F. is an author, film-maker, and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magick, who runs Dungeon and Dragons campaigns on the side.  Together, J.F. and Phil host the delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the Holy Grail of podcast affective listener programming: namely, that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions.  Luckily, I’ve had that opportunity before, to talk about my writing on the material agency of glass in our scientific era…and both of them have been on Future Fossils also, both alone and together.  But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing — and now’s the perfect moment to rap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of numinous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries *should* melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them.  

You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks — and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and  a work of art. When everything’s connected, politics is an aesthetic act and art acquires moral force. Advanced   technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image…but “life finds a way” and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs, and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden. 

So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live?  What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?    

But before we dive headlong into this recording of a conversation so good our first attempt was erased by trickster intervention, let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and Future Fossils through a year of (what I hope remains) extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquys as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity…and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidily as possible so we are pre-chewed for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks. If you’re listening, chances are a friend told you about this show — I’d be surprised if you just found it randomly, and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started Future Fossils under pressure from my friends but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer.  However it might seem, it’s lonely work — but every now and then I find I’ve reached somebody where it counts, that I’ve inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic.  That’s why I keep this going.  Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with a Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp sub, it makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment.  I’d like to make this work sustainable in 2024 but I’m still very far from that…so thank you, each and all, for everything you do to help me run this ultramarathon.

New patrons I would like to thank include Ian Benouis, EGH2128, Lynn Amores, Robert Cummings, Katie Teague, Slow Dancing Fool, and Brian Mapes.

Thank you!  And thank you to EVERYONE who chips in every month, or who has left or will ever leave a good review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or who shares this show with your friends…and a special thanks to Suzy Lanza of Ahara Rasa Ghee for shipping me a sweet little care package with her delicious ghee as a gesture of appreciation for this show — she’s not a sponsor but I do endorse her work and recommend you check out iloveghee.com. Lastly, thanks to Noonautics.org for inviting me to join their advisory board and for their continued support of efforts to explore and map and understand the realms beyond.

And now onto the main course!  Let’s start somewhere else: in the “trash stratum” of a dirty manger, in the mess of our kinship and identity with the nonhuman (animal, vegetable, AND mineral). In the revelation of our contiguous, nested, and modular interbeing — we begin our conversation…guided here by visitations from a higher realm in which communication and control are aspects of some secret third thing that transcends duality. The information age is one in which we cannot separate the bomb from the computer from the drug and in this way, in spite of all the grimy cyberpunk and body horror of our media environment, the trillion-eyed panopticon the Web became appears to us like the archangel Gabriel: “Be not afraid,” dear listeners. Enjoy this awesome conversation, and enjoy your holidays!

✨ Support My Work:

• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨ Related Weird Studies Episodes:

26 - Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield

42 - On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O’Brien

131 - Knocking on the Abyssal Door: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute

151 - The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

153 - Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

157 - Long Live the New Flesh: On David Cronenberg's 'Videodrome'

160 - The Way of All Flesh: On John Carpenter's 'The Thing'

✨ Related Future Fossils Episodes:

18 - JF Martel (Art, Magic, & The Terrifying Zone of Uncanny Awesomeness)

65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)

71 - JF Martel (On Sequels & Simulacra, Blade Runner 2049 & Stranger Things 2)

117 - Eric Wargo on Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

126 - Phil Ford & JF Martel on Weird Studies & Plural Realities

157 - Phil Ford on Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel

212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere

✨ Additional Mentioned & Related Media:

Megan Phipps — “Soundscapes of Possible Minds: Meditation Cybernetics in Brian Eno’s Ambient Music”

Zygmunt Bauman - Liquid Modernity

Mitch Waldrop - The Dream Machine

Michel Houellebecq – The Elementary Particles

William Shakespeare – Othello

Mark Fisher – Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction

Ezra Klein interviews Erik Davis — “The Culture Creating A.I. Is Weird. Here’s Why That Matters.”

Richard Brautigan – “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”

Megan Phipps interviews Erik Davis — “New Cybernetic Psychedelia”

Brian Eno – “The Studio As A Compositional Tool”

Michael Garfield’s “Reader’s Rig” pedalboard teardown feature at Guitar Moderne

Michael Garfield – “Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement”

Phil Ford waxes poetic about Wagner’s Ring Cycle on the Brute Norse Podcast

Dror Poleg on the future of a highly automated economy on Infinite Loops Podcast

Erik Wargo – “The Passion of The Space Jockey”

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)

Man of Steel (2013)

Digibarn.com 

Jeffrey Kripal

Michael Levin

Dada

Sam Arbesman on Coding As Magic and The Magic of Code

Thank you for listening and for your support!

Eliot Peper (Episode 47) is back on the show this week to talk about the themes around and within his Analog trilogy of very adjacent and believable sci fi novels (Bandwidth, Borderless, and the new “conclusion” Breach): that is, about the complex interactions between people and technology, both the layer cake of deep utilities we take for granted and the new affordances that disruptive tools produce – and how we shape our lives within them.

https://www.eliotpeper.com/

“One of the most fun things for me as a novelist about writing fiction is that it is very much about the questions, rather than the answers…if the answer’s obvious, I don’t need to write a book about it.”

“You can’t really tell history without the history of technology.”

“Congress writes laws about what’s going on, not what might be going on ten years from now. Policymaking is largely a reactionary measure.”

“We haven’t figured out the new societies we want to build, given the new realities we’ve already invented.”

“If you start thinking about the entire internet as an AI, then Google is not a company that is building what could be in the future some kind of AI program. Rather, Google and its status as a corporation, all of the corporate hierarchies that exist within it, and all of the people working on teams there, are actually just one part of that AI.”

“I’m not a big believer in unitary self as an idea. I think we are all made up of MANY selves. We have these competing elements within us, and part of what it means to be human is to stitch these together into a coherent narrative. And we do that on the fly all the time.”

“Your solution is going to create new problems, and the best way to best way to deal with that knowingly is to try to keep an open mind, try to maintain your beginner’s mind, maintain your state of awareness about the world and continually challenge your own assumptions.”

“We are living in an age of acceleration – and yet, we have ALWAYS been confronted by a universe that defies our limited ability to make sense of it.”

“My hope is that by using it like reasonable, mutually respectful people, we can turn the digital world into a place that is still gonna have some of the nasty stuff, but is gonna have a lot of the good stuff.”

Mentioned: Kevin Kelly, Geoffrey West, Douglas Rushkoff

Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)

https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield

Additional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael Garfield

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/on-higher-ground

Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Bernie Taylor, whose novel interpretation of ancient cave paintings suggests an overlooked and deeply significant alternative take on the subjective experience and world-space of prehistoric human culture. Finding animals hidden in the interplay of paint and rock forms unnoticed by other archeologists, and corresponding with a diverse array of experts over decades (including legendary animal researcher George Gamow), he argues that these murals depict a heroic journey across continents, the crossing of the Iberian Peninsula, an ancient rite of passage coded in time and story that, if accepted by the scholarly community, would transform our understanding of our ancestors.

Bernie’s Website: beforeorion.com

We Discuss:

• How Bernie noticed an entire parade of African and European animals in the El Castillo’s Cave of Disks that no one had seen before;

• The ancient animal versions of the constellations that became the modern ones (crocodile > Draco, great auk > Cygnus, etc.);

• The prehistoric origins of the Twelve Trials of Hercules and the origins of the monster from misinterpreted shamanic lore;

• Did the ancients really use cave art to track the precession of the equinoxes?

• How Bernie reconstructed the ancients’ mapping of the annual calendar to various animal life cycle markers and visible stars;

• Was the El Castillo mural testing for the ability to find hidden images - evidence of a shamanic apprentice’s ability to think differently?

• The role of neurodiversity in prehistoric AND modern human society, and how that may relate to the function, not dysfunction, of dyslexia and autism;

• How this initiatic journey is the earliest record we have of the heroic monomyth, which modern secular artists like Billy Joel continue to express even without knowing why these archetypes persist in human dream and story;

• What we might learn from these ancient stories, and the minds of those who made them, to inform our strategies for an(other) era of massive change on Earth;

“Modern art isn’t even modern art. It’s a recreation of paleolithic art.”

Future Fossils theme music: “God Detector” by Skytree (ft. Michael Garfield)

Additional music: "On Higher Ground" by Michael Garfield

Join the Future Fossils Book Club and get secret episodes, free art and music, and more: Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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My graduate advisor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the most consistently inspiring and refreshingly different thinkers I’ve ever met. In our first Future Fossils conversation, we discussed his work to apply a profoundly “meta” and pluralistic philosophy to the everyday work of organizational development and social impact. In this discussion, we turn over the rock and examine his decades of inquiry into some of the world’s most puzzling and confounding phenomena – namely, those surrounding the UFO and its aura of science-challenging incursions into mundane reality. 

Might “Exostudies” be the locus of a transformation in how we understand reality? This is not your normal New Age conversation about aliens, but a rigorous look into the persistent weirdness and problematic implications of one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. As Phil Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If UFOs are here to stay – with all of their attendant provocations to our oversimple categories (self and other, artificial and natural, hallucination and perception, physical and immaterial) – then we are overdue for a new definition of “reality.” In preparation for his Exostudies online course this fall, we look at how to make sense of the stubbornly ineffable – an evolutionary call to take up higher-dimensional logic and more nuanced understandings of What Is…

http://www.exostudies.org/

“When you go into the UFO field, at least with an open heart and mind, you come across some really crazy shit. It is a freakshow. There are so many bizarre claims being made by standup citizens who are quite believable in what they are saying, even though what they’re saying just does not map onto our general view of reality.”

“The truth is stranger than science fiction. Not just fiction, but science fiction.”

“The phenomenon is subjective and objective; it’s subjective and objective simultaneously; and it’s neither. So I think what it’s asking us is to re-examine the relationship between mind and matter, and how do we relate to subject and object, and how has our current scientific methodology failed us horribly in having a more sophisticated answer or framing or understanding of how these two aspects are related.”

“There are really good, legitimate photographs, and trace evidence, and all kinds of physical evidence for UFO craft and other otherworldly realities…and yet, there are so many fakes. And how do you sift through all that? You almost can’t.”

“We’re entering into an augmented and virtual space that’s going to be ontologically fragmented, and highly pluralistic, and solipsistic. So how do we navigate that culturally? I don’t know, but I think we’re largely unprepared.”

“We’re not that far from discovering some form of mini-life elsewhere. And as soon as that happens, then the floodgates are going to open in considering the implications of that.”

“So many UFO or ET enthusiasts often want to put everything in one box, like ‘they’re all bad,’ ‘they’re all good,’ ‘they’re all future versions of ourselves.’ I think it’s much messier than that.”

“I think one of the core strategies is hermeneutic generosity. A sense of critical thinking, but from a place of generosity, where we stay open. Postmodernism has been so jaded – the hermeneutics of suspicion – I think when we approach these phenomena, we need a different orientation.”

“To really bring any kind of justice to this inquiry, we need to draw on the best thinking from as many kinds of disciplines as we can – because the phenomenon is that big, and that mysterious, and that paradoxical. So anything short of a meta, integrative approach – and even that – is going to fail.”

Mentioned:

Diana Slattery, John Mack, Avi Loeb, Ken Wilber, Jeff Kripal, Whitley Strieber, Arthur Brock, George Knapp, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Stuart Davis, Jeff Salzman, Richard Doyle, Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, DW Pasulka, Eric Wargo, Jacques Vallee

Sean’s appearance on the Daily Evolver Podcast:

https://www.dailyevolver.com/2019/02/taking-aliens-seriously/

If you liked this episode, check out Episodes 60 & Episode 91:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/60

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/91

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is professional psilocybin retreat host, long-time practicing Buddhist, and general good guy Mitsuaki Chi of Amsterdam. In this episode we get into the practices and benefits of psychedelic community, his unusual path from hardcore meditator to mushroom trip facilitator, and how he understands his life and purpose in light of a mysterious intelligence none of us can fully comprehend…

trufflestherapy.com

tripsitters.org

“Even after so much time in meditation, I was still falling back into my patterns…”

Coming to our senses.

Going Buddhism-to-Psychedelics (instead of the usual other way around). How does meditation prepare you for tripping?

Control? Renunciation? Acceptance? Grief?

How does psychedelic healing as spiritual practice interface (if at all) with science and medical institutions?

“More circles, less stages. Which is more important, direct experiences from a hundred people or one scientist who has been studying this stuff in a laboratory?”

What are the longitudinal benefits of practice in a psychedelic community?

“I think the two things people want more than anything are purpose and community [and] I think people are realizing how poisonous social media can be.”

SUPPORT FUTURE FOSSILS on PATREON:

patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Android Jones is one of the world’s hottest digital artists – even if it’s kind of a mistake to label him this way and limit his creative action to the digital. A master portraitist, designer, and explorer of new tools, Android made concept art for video games in his early years before becoming the creative consultant for the best-in-class Corel Painter software, touring the world while doing live visuals for huge musical acts, collaborating on epic dome projection shows, and ultimately pioneering the possibilities of VR with his latest project, Microdose. But arguably his most vital and illuminating evolutionary edge as an artist has been with his two children, learning to raise the next generation of curious and creative minds. This week on Future Fossils, I sit down for a three-year-overdue discussion with one of the most objectively inspiring people I can call a friend – to talk about our hopes and our concerns for Those Who Come Next, and what being a creative parent means in our Age of Transition.

https://androidjones.com

https://microdosevr.com

Join my community of patrons and receive exclusive perks (like book club membership):

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Join the daily discussions erupting like psychedelic flowers in our Facebook Group:

https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils

We Discuss:

• Electromineralism & medium as material agent lending its qualities to your identity
• Tools as extensions of the body, and the most modern tools we have are still so ancient
• Reimagining truths that have real legs on them, not praising absolute truths
• Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse
• Being a part of the six thousand year plus art history conversation that we have
• Drilling down to making deeper and more universally relevant art to “provide a greater reflective surface” for viewers
• Visionary Art, (a different take on)
• What psychology teaches about making (real) art *for* people
• How fatherhood changed his art and life and everything
• Making art with kids – both digital and analog media – and how the forms differ as learning experiences
• What VR has that other media do not, and Android’s first breakthrough moment in Microdose VR
• When Android met Robert Venosa at Art Hardware in Boulder at age 16
• There are too many things to learn
• The future of visual performance is WHAT? (!!!)
• THE ART SCHOOL
• Going Icarus to Daedalus
• Apprenticeship
• The transformative potentials of VR as biofeedback
• What scares Android Jones?
• What comes next?

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Erick Godsey was almost my roommate in Austin, and even though I trust our destinies I still consider it a bummer that we didn’t. He is a nobler beast than I. He’s also the host of The Myths That Make Us, which is an excellent program for reasons that have nothing to do with my recent appearance on his show, but that’s nice too…

What Erick IS is devoted to helping people live the absolute best stories that they can, which means first figuring out why we’re living the stories we already ARE.

Notes are slim for this episode but that’s because just go listen to it right now.

Erick’s website:

https://erickgodsey.com

“A great idea reconstructs your map. It’s one of the most painful things you can go through, but it’s beautiful.”

“I was an atheist but I prayed. At night, I would pray to a thing I didn’t understand and say, thank you, because all the people who were asking for things were stupid, and I was self-righteous.”

Don’t read Gödel, Escher, Bach and then take 5 grams of mushrooms. (Psychedelic Conservatives.)

“If you tell a twenty-eight year old, ‘Your story is an illusion,’ it f-cks more people up than it helps…especially in Western culture, it’s not the right medicine at the right time.”

Our stories are not useful for as long as they used to be. Are they no longer serving us in the “infoquake” of life online? How long will our evolutionary drives and archetypes persist amidst this metamorphosis?

Spiritual Bypass. It’s all perfect. There’s a season for bullshitting yourself. Or no, you shouldn’t ever do it. Don’t resist your own psychodynamic forces.

Most adaptive story: you are not a noun; you are a verb. Least adaptive story: you are a noun; you have to endure; the world is happening to you.

What to do about being disempowered in a global landscape of tragic news, in our own personal lives, to do anything about anything?

Is it better to be good or great?

How to be good ancestors.

Can we bring our full selves to work at our “day jobs”? What does it look like when we do? (AKA, What’s it like working at Onnit?)

What are your coping mechanisms and how can you channel them to make the world a better place?

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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Bruce Damer is a living legend and international man of mystery – specifically, the mystery of our cosmos, to which he’s devoted his life to exploring: the origins of life, simulating artificial life in computers, deriving amazing new plans for asteroid mining, and cultivating his ability to receive scientific inspiration from “endotripping” (in which he stimulates his brain’s own release of psychoactive compounds known to increase functional connectivity between brain regions). He’s about to work with Google to adapt his origins of life research to simulated models of the increasingly exciting hot springs origin hypothesis he’s been working on with Dave Deamer of UC Santa Cruz for the last several years. And he’s been traveling around the world experimenting with thermal pools, getting extremely close to actually creating new living systems in situ as evidence of their model. Not to mention his talks with numerous national and private space agencies to take the S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. asteroid mining scheme into space to kickstart the division and reproduction of our biosphere among/between the stars…

I find it amazing that anyone as potently psychedelic as Bruce gets the focused listening attention of audiences at NASA, Scientific American, Google, and numerous esteemed academic communities around the world. A late-career PhD who spent his early years designing software that changed the world and going on adventures with his dear friend Terence McKenna, talking to Bruce is an inspiration and reminder that the big questions really DO take the dedication of a lifetime – and that dedication DOES bear fruit.

(Appropriately to the McKenna link, there were some connectivity issues during our call that stretched out Bruce’s voice in a way very reminiscent of the Shpongle grain delay remixes of Terence’s talks. I left these in because I think they’re funny and in keeping with the good doctor’s trippy ideas, but apologies regardless.)

Bruce was the second guest of this show way back in Episode 4, but that was three years ago and his work (and my ability to discuss it with him) has developed considerably since then. Enjoy this high-level update about one of the deepest questions we have on the table, right now…the profound implications of this new model of life’s origins for everything from business and politics to the strategies for thriving through an age of worldwide turbulence and transition…

Bruce’s Website:

https://damer.com

We Discuss:

• Updates on Bruce’s efforts to recreate the conditions of the original “progenote,” a living system before the invention of cells;

• How modern life prevents a second “Genesis” from happening on the Earth;

• Why life must have started in a wet-dry cycling pond, and not in the sea or on land;

• The three properties of life: crowding/containment; networks; and information storage – or P,I,M: Probability, Interaction, Memory;

• The origin of life as a niche-construction process;

• The origin of life vs. the origin of individuality and competition – likelihood that started as integrated consortia, not free-living cells in resource conflict;

• Scaling up the progenote origin of life hypothesis to human systems and the origins of human civilization with “social protocells”;

• Does life require organic molecules, or is it primarily an informational process?

• Are memes even a real thing? (Compared to genes, we can’t point to one…)

• Working with Google to simulate the origins of life with a chemistry-modeling deep learning system;

• The increasing evolvability of (some) genomes in ever-more complex environments leading to a transition from genetic to cultural inheritance;

• How evolutionary networks can bump themselves off local fitness peaks and into novelty to prevent becoming over-adapted to tiny niches;

• Cycles of federalism and fragmentation in both nature and society;

• The possibility of a global plan to build sea walls – to make it an issue of national defense, and a better use of our time than border walls;

• What can we learn from the origins of life about the future of planetary culture and the ongoing evolution of our “progenote planet?”

SEE ALSO:

Bruce on Future Fossils Podcast Episode 4:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/5a85dca3144c44bd2557158b

Michael’s Version 1.0 Mind Map & Bibliography of research on major evolutionary transitions in self-organizing systems:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022

Evolution Evolving Conference:

https://evolutionevolving.org/

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Nadja Oertelt – research scientist turned film-maker and founder of Massive Science, a science communication community that cares about restoring care to the storytelling of scientific discovery. Not only is the website wonderfully both rigorous and easy on the eye, the writing takes you on a journey. Clearly she and her colleagues are doing something right by teaching scientists it’s not just okay, but vital to the meaning-making of their work, to have a story and not just solutions.

Here’s her amazing publication:

https://massivesci.com/

And an interview she did with Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/catescottcampbell/2017/04/10/the-limit-does-not-exist-nadja-oertelt-has-a-massive-take-on-science/

Super cool short film series Nadja did for HarvardX Neuroscience:

https://vimeo.com/channels/972301 

We Discuss:

How working with scientists was a revelation into the social process of knowledge production and translation.

Anna Wexler & DIY brain interfaces.

http://www.annawexler.com/

David Cox, Director MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ibm-David.D.Cox

The erasure of the subject in academic writing.

Integral psychology and the application of psychometric information to the addressing of truth claims.

How do psychedelics change the way we understand and practice science?

Alex & Allyson Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

https://cosm.org

https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/technologists-of-attention-at-the-chapel-of-sacred-mirrors

The Fundamentalism-Zen Continuum in the thermodynamics of computation.

Creating a new neural ecology of science by including more kinds of people in the investigations.

“We’re approaching some sort of memento mori for reality.”

The “black box” of AI is not as big of a problem as the “black box” of why we feel the need to create these technologies in the first place.

The human reality and personal sacrifices of science and knowledge production.

The pain of becoming a storyteller for so many who have been trained as scientists.

How social media has changed the subjectivity of young researchers.

The importance of care in all of this.

Allison Parrish - artist & programmer.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/itp/853082171

Irreversible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing & Science - Steven Meyer

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=750

This episode is backed by Mike Schwab of KnowYourMeme.com, a fascinating living document/community exploring memes and their effects.

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week’s guest is Epiphany Jordan of Austin, Texas – a nurturing touch professional whose therapy sessions help triage the crisis of loneliness and touch-hunger facing billions of tech-immersed but intimacy-stranded people. In her new book, Somebody Hold Me: The Single Person’s Guide to Nurturing Human Touch, Epiphany explains how to get your basic touch needs met – consensually – outside of romantic relationship. In our conversation we talk about why this is such a widespread issue, how people are fumbling their attempts to connect with one another, and what to do about it.

Her Website:

nurturinghumantouch.com

Printed Book:

amazon.com/gp/product/1732879206?pf_rd_p=c2945051-950f-485c-b4df-15aac5223b10&pf_rd_r=VGPWK0WEF50A2TD8YA3T  

E-Book:

amazon.com/Somebody-Hold-Me-Persons-Nurturing-ebook/dp/B07MM6FFBD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=somebody+hold+me&qid=1550610978&s=gateway&sr=8-2

Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

Join the (lively, interesting) Facebook Group:

https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils

Subscribe on any platform you desire:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils

We Discuss:

The internet has not replaced human intimacy; it has only convinced many of us that it can.

“Because our culture identifies sex with touch, if you’re not in a romantic relationship, you’re not getting your touch needs met.”

“Nonconsensual touch is like a starving person stealing a loaf of bread, or something.”

When hugging someone is their worst nightmare.

Is not wanting to be touched something that should or should not be seen through the lens of trauma-induced disorder?

The future of getting touch needs met by nonpersons: heavy blankets, hugging machines, womb simulators, intimacy robots…

Eliza Schlesinger’s Elder Millennial standup special and how women in their 30s start displacing mother impulses onto their pets.

Why don’t we extend the same rights we give people to other nonhuman beings? (e.g., nonconsensual touch of animals…)

Is professional cuddling a symptom of a tragic dehumanizing trend in the evolution of civilization?

“Paleo-cuddling”

Tips for effective, safe, consensual, non-sexual cuddling.

The tribal joy of the pseudo-anonymity of cuddle puddles.

The double-edged sword of oxytocin.

Teaching touch to teenagers.

Touch deprived, or touch illiterate? Multicultural societies and trouble navigating overlapping rules about intimacy.

“Part of what I’m trying to do is have people write another story about what it means to be human and how humans treat them. There’s so much distrust and fear of other humans, and humans can be nice to each other, and kind and gentle and look out for each other. I think it can help us be more of a global village…”

“I don’t want to be a part of the revolution unless it has to do with people being nice to each other.”

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

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This week it's a deep dive into futurist Stowe Boyd's research on Social Scaling, Boundless Curiosity, Deep Generalists, Emergent Leadership, and other major features in the metamorphic landscape of the 21st Century workplace.

We live in an age when our human cognitive limits are being tested against a proliferation of possibilities in the digital space – and we zealously rush into always-on internet work, open office co-working spaces, enormous distributed online collaborations, and other novelties that seem to be more about the infinite capacity of our electronic tools than the finite reality of our minds and bodies.

Stowe Boyd has been studying and reporting on the future of work for over a decade, and his blog Work Futures is one of my cherished news sources for understanding how “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Talking with him is a blast of cool reason and warm humor about the insanity of the modern work environment and the impossible demands that it makes on us – pointing toward more lucid, grounded, manageable, and yes productive new modes of labor in the dizzying technological milieus to come.

Learn More:

StoweBoyd.com

WorkFutures.org

Check out a recent edition of his Work Futures newsletter:

https://workfutures.substack.com/p/work-futures-daily-the-human-spring

Support Future Fossils on Patreon and get access to secret episodes, our sci fi book club, and more:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

Invented the term “social tools” and founded the Work Futures blog.

How do we live in an unstable landscape in which new platforms are constantly replacing the ones where we’ve established merit and earned currencies?

The return of publishing to human scale as a response to ubiquitous weaponized advertising.

Book: Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock

The modern era of social networking isn’t about social concerns but business concerns…human curation returns to the fore in its primacy: newsletters, list management, etc.

Why is it that certain tools and practices “work” for work, and some don’t?

How certain ill-conceived collaboration software recreates the scaling problems of cruiseship tourism’s effects on local economies.

Anywhere-ism and “The horrible sameness of the places we’re working these days”

The paradox of blocking out open-office distractions with recordings of people talking in cafés.

“If you want to be creative, turn the lights down. You are more creative if you have high ceilings and dark. So if you take all that away, which is usually what they do in open offices…”

>>> Ten Work Skills for the Post-Normal Era

Laszlo Bach at Google using a data-driven approach to correlate skills with work success…not Ivy League degrees, not ability to solve certain IQ test type problems…

“BOUNDLESS CURIOSITY is the #1 skill for the future. The most creative people are insatiably curious. They want to know what works and why. And so that’s the skill you should seek. If you’re not naturally insatiably curious, then you should learn the techniques and skills involved with that and practice that so that you’re acting as if you’re insatiably curious, even though it’s a learned and not innate characteristic.”

How curiosity leads to unexpected second-order insights in at-first “unrelated” areas.

Bill Taylor, founder of Fast Company Magazine: four styles of leadership useful today.

The leader as a learning zealot.

The posthuman workplace: collaboration with radically other entities, be they AIs or transgenic persons.

The future of work looks like freestyle chess.

How and why to be a “deep generalist.”

“There’s still a lot of the Bronze Age in how typical companies are run…Bronze Age thinking is still 70% of companies.”

Emergent Leadership 21st Century Management, and Liquid Democracy.

AI and technological unemployment – a kind of “tragedy of the commons” as we each try to do the best thing for our organizations and race to the bottom.

Book: Amy Goldstein, Janesville

The collision of AI, climate change, and the collapse of globalist neoliberalism.

Book: William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order

“You have to start thinking about things at the watershed level. When you’re thinking about geography, it can’t just be the outlines of nation states, which are the remnants of old empires and other kinds of craziness. It has to have some logical relationship to the actual world, and that means city states, watersheds, and so on. And when you have that mindset and start to see through that lens, well, the desire of the Catalonian people to have their own state – it seems like an inexorable direction, and the notion that the EU is resisting that, fighting it, well…they’re fighting the future.”

The end of trucking and the inevitable riots.

Book: Project Hieroglyph, edited by Neal Stephenson

Using science fiction instead of futurist scenarios to make different futures truly palpable.

Three Visions of the future: Humania, Neo-Feudalistan, & “Just Horrible.”

“You can’t talk about the future of work without talking about the future in general, and the future in general is not just more of what we have today. It’s certainly not what we had in 1970.”

––

Cover Image Photo Credit: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

✨ Subscribe and review at Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify. Unborn archaeologists thank you!

This week I speak with two of the most thoughtful people I know in tech, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and systems engineer Michael Zargham (Founder & CEO of BlockScience) — who work together on tools for building trust between tech users and tech companies at the Superset DAO and each contribute diverse value to society through myriad creative projects in their own right (like Amber’s totally fabulous music group Glo Torch!). Thanks to the generous invitation of Regen Foundation CEO Gregory Landua, I met Amber and Michael for an in-person recording at the Regen Summit — easily one of the most inspiring Web3 events I’ve ever attended — in between jam sessions with a few dozen others working at the intersections of regenerative finance, ecosystem stewardship, distributed ledgers, and civtech.

This episode only catches a tiny sliver of the awesome conversations that we had while gathered face-to-face, but it’s a potent morsel nonetheless. We talked about the market’s perverse fascination with talking appliances as a failed attempt to reboot animism, how good design empowers and bad design deprives by making choices possible or not, and why it’s time for a new kind of terms-of-service agreement that allows users to migrate en masse from platforms that have violated people’s trust…along with much else. A very lucid and articulate, yet very playful, trialogue on matters that deserve sincerity but also benefit from childlike curiosity and warmth!

Enjoy…

✨ Support My Work As A Public Good:

• Subscribe on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a insiders-only discussion group and extra channels on our public Discord Server.• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work).• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify).• Buy the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page.• Make one-off donations directly at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Save up to $70 on an Apollo Neuro wearable from 12/1-12/31 with my affiliate code.

✨ Related Links For The Intellectually Voracious:

Amber’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium.

Michael’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Google Scholar.

Citation Statistics from 110 Years of Physical Reviewby Sidney Redner

How Design is Governanceby Amber Case

We Need More Control Over Our Own User Databy Amber Case

The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputeesby Michael Garfield (on technology as an other-controlled prosthesis and the vulnerability of cyborgs)

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”by Harlan Ellison

✨ SOME Upcoming Episodes:

• Jingmai O’Connor, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Chicago, on her singular life and work.

• J.F. Martel & Phil Ford of Weird Studies Podcast and Megan Phipps of The University of Amsterdam on Weird Cybernetics.

• David Jay Brown and Sara Phinn on their field guide to the entities of DMT hyperspace, published next year by Inner Traditions.• Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on social science and collective intelligence tools for a memetic immune system.

• Michael Skye of VisionForce on his work to help confront the crises faced by contemporary boys and men.

• Neil Theise, professor of pathology at NYU, on complex systems science and his new book, Notes on Complexity.

✨ Related Archive Episodes:

211 - Adam Aronovich on A Cultural Anthropology for The Psychedelic Internet

207 - Tech & Community LIVE at Junkyard Social Club with Evan Snyder, Ryan Madson, Roger Toennis, Aaron Gabriel, & Juicy Life

204 - Jamie Joyce on The Society Library and Tools for Making Sense Together

197 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Lost Civilizations, and The Singularity (Part 1)

180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend

177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan

176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit

141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations

106 - Stowe Boyd on The Future(s) of Work and How to Thrive Amidst Accelerating Change

80 - George Dvorsky on Strange Days Ahead: Ethics for Autonomous Machines

29 - Sara Huntley (Raising Robots Right)

✨ Thanks to Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

This week is part two of the intense, bizarre, and wonderful roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we discuss the puzzling connection between clowns and DMT; John’s voyage into the strange realm of mediumship; and Michael’s life-altering series of UFO encounters right after college. Among other things…

The Guests:

Michael Aaron Kamins

https://twitter.com/michaelaaronk

John David Ebert

https://twitter.com/johndavidebert

Ikkyu Sojun

https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue

Subscribe to Future Fossils on any platform you desire:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils

Support this show on Patreon. It’s good for you and makes you feel good:

https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

We Discuss:

How everyone gets their own language once we invent the universal translator.

Addressing the question of hyperspace “entities” from nonduality and landscape agency.

Clown/Harlequin Theory in the psychedelic realm.

JDE:

“Now I don’t wanna do DMT. You’ve ruined it for me, because I don’t wanna see a clown.”

Ikkyu:

“Imagine Meow Wolf…but a thousand times more.”

The Joker is a floating signifier.

Ikkyu talks about an extremely potent and disturbing N,N-DMT trip.

The Mantis-Clown connection, vis-a-vis Michael’s Peruvian ayahuasca experiences.

The clown in Eastern philosophy as Lao Wonton, the childlike “crazy” old man in kung-fu movies.

Michael’s ONE critique of William Irwin Thompson (hint: “Lindisfarne,” what’s in a name?).

What is the difference between the techno-optimism of Buckminster Fuller and the techno-optimism of Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, and Jeff Bezos?

Trump the Clown, the Magician, the Alchemical Fool.

Ikkyu:

“What if I were like Duncan Trussell or Joe Rogan but I interview ideas, rather than people?”

JDE interviews Rudolf Steiner through a medium, Shruti Campbell. He tells us of his love affair with Steiner.

JDE explains how he become convinced that there are in fact legit mediums who can communicate with dead people.

The theme of confinement in world myth.

Exoteric lab institution science and esoteric wilderness field prospecting discovery science.

Michael goes into unprecedented detail about his UFO sightings in 2006.

Sufjan Stevens’ song “Concerning the UFO Sighting…”

Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Pope about UFOs.

Book: Who Built The Moon?

Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” music video (feat. Kate Bush)

Michael’s eternalist/quantum-democracy theory of our self-fulfilling origins/histories.

Dan Larimer vs. Vitalik Buterin on the limits of crypto-economic governance.

The connections between alien abductions and shamanic initiations.

Searching for metaphors complex enough to allow us to inhabit and dwell in hypermodernity.

Carl Jung

Crowley’s Thoth Tarot

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

James Hillman

Nassim Taleb

The Flying Spaghetti Monster

Rupert Sheldrake

John C. Wright

Sam Harris

Stephen Hawking

Erik Davis

Zechariah Sitchin

Westworld

“The Moon” Tarot Card

Greg Egan’s Distress

Finnegans Wake - HCE (“Here Comes Everyone”)

Blade Runner 2049

Charles Stross’ Accelerando

Jeff Noon (Vert & Pollen)

Steven Greer & CE-5

Jacques Vallee

J Allen Heinich (sp?)

Prometheus & Atlas

Mircea Eliade

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This week, we have a rad roundtable conversation with The Hypermoderns – John David Ebert, Michael Aaron Kamins, and Mimetic Value/Ikkyu Sojun) where we talk Snow Crash, Linguistic Entropy, and The Metaphysics of Video Games; spoil Meow Wolf and Annihilation (warning!); and go deep on the origins of Hypnotherapy and NLP. It’s just part one of an intense three-hour hoedown with some of the sharpest minds I know…

The Guests in Order of Appearance:

Michael Aaron Kamins

https://twitter.com/michaelaaronk

John David Ebert

https://twitter.com/johndavidebert

Ikkyu Sojun

https://twitter.com/mimeticvalue

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We Talk About:

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“Shigiro Miyamoto is the Dante of the Hypermodern Age.”

Mario is a shaman, Link is Percival of the Round Table…

NextNature.net, the Anthropocene, and the Wood Wide Web

Are videogames more effective than books as a form of storytelling?

John David Ebert likes Grand Theft Auto:

“Video games aren’t the problem; they’re the SOLUTION to the problem of living in these bizarre cosmopolitan cities, these huge megalopolitan cities that we’re constantly stressed out by.”

Narrative collapse in the shift from the serialized dramas of print-era TV and the reality shows of web-era TV

Michael Aaron Kamins:

“What does the hero’s journey mean in a world where we have to work 9-to-5 jobs?”

Skeumorphism in digital spaces:

Video games that mimic office life seem inevitable…

…but unlike in Snow Crash, we don’t want to walk everywhere in VR.

Lists, Explosions, & Flows

Why Michael Aaron Kamins disagrees with Daniel Pinchbeck about UFOs.

If Jordan Peterson is our Confucius, who is our Lao Tzu?

MG:

“History is a thing that you make.”

JDE:

“We’ve lost the metaphysics. We have to bring back the metaphysics.”

Why and how civilizations disintegrate.

MG:

“If you’re going to upload me, at least upload me in HD.”

JDE:

“It’s gotta get more fractal.”

Meow Wolf is The Shimmer in Annihilation

Archangel Michael & Garuda, archetypes expressed across the world in time and landscape

Michael and Michael talk about the dragon fighting St. Michael meteor-dinosaur connection thing.

Everybody tries to guess MG’s sign.

Dr Blue aka Norman Katz, student of Milton Erickson

Jungian vs Ericksonian psychotherapy and the importance of combining the two.

We talk smack on the sociopathic founders of NLP.

Mimetic theory.

Evolution, entropy, and the Tower of Babel.

Shout-Outs:

RadioLab

Douglas Rushkoff

Pac Man

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Carl Jung’s Red Book

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

Google Glass

Kevin Kelly

William Burroughs

Meow Wolf

Rudolf Steiner

“The Fighting Dinosaurs”

Paleontologist Robert Bakker

Houston Museum of Nature & Science

Timothy Leary

The Fourth Turning

History, Big History, and MetaHistory by SFI Press

Being John Malkovich

Gilles Deleuze

Peter Sloterdijk

The Joseph Campbell Foundation

Robertson Jeffers

Jon Steinbeck

Buddha Bomb

Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects

Tom Hui Hu - A Prehistory of the Cloud

The Square in the Tower by Neil Ferguson

The Architects of the Internet Apologize - New Yorker Magazine

Jeff Van Der Meer

Tool & Alex Grey

Parvati

Scott Adams

NLP

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Happy holidays! This week’s guest Tricia Eastman helps people find the holiness in every day by facilitating legal ceremonies in which ordinary membranes in between the different areas of thought and non-thought relax, and new or somehow ancient greater selves emerge appear whatever.

It’s a solid conversation with a fascinating person doing very crucial work. I hope you get as much from this dense hour of passage, insight, integration…

Tricia’s Sites:

psychedelicjourneys.com

instagram.com/psychedelicjourneys

We Discuss:

How she became a plant medicine practitioner through the festival psychedelic harm reduction underground

Leaving a husband, four houses, and all of her possessions to be of service to humanity

Overcoming her severe, debilitating eating disorders with ibogaine, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO DMT

How to smuggle the sacred into the global shopping mall

Reviving the ecstatic mystery schools and other lost spiritual traditions

Coping with the aftermath of collectively “waking up in a burning house” as we make last-minute moves to steer the planet out of further catastrophe

“A lot of the decisions that we make are based on false structures of safety, things that make you FEEL safe - like locking your door. Does locking your door really actually make you safe? If someone wants to get into your house, they’re going to get into your house. The truth is, we are all walking around with a lot of trauma. And if we can understand that that is actually an aspect of us, that it is NOT us, then we can get into a space where we can start interacting in a more peaceful way.”

Bringing back the rites of passage

Moving as a culture into responsibility for the decisions that we make

Growing up in a Christian family while experiencing “entities”

“I was like, ‘If I drink this bottle of wine, this ghost cannot f-ck with me.’ Until I started understanding was that all they wanted was to be shown to the light.”

Metamodernist science takes on the psychedelic Other(s)

A psychedelic facilitator’s advice on how to behave with ghosts

The gods and spirits as messages from the somatic unconscious

Integrating indigenous practices into the modern world

Replacing hierarchical teacher-student models with networked and facilitated group learning models

“We are the medicine. We don’t necessarily need to take medicine.”

How do we come up with something better for a world of proliferating trauma than “Accredited Facilitator from Iboga University”?

Shout-Outs To:

The Zendo Project

Plant Spirit Healing

Café Gratitude

The UDV

Rick Doblin & MAPS

Burning Man

Philip K Dick

Blue avians

Rudolf Steiner

Carl Jung

Terence McKenna

Richard Rudd * Gene Keys

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This week we sit with Bill Pfeiffer – deep ecologist, shamanic guide, and spiritual coach – whose life carried him from nuclear protests on the US East Coast to citizen diplomacy to Russia, where he first encountered Siberian shamans and became immersed, over decades and dozens of visits, in their traditions of ecstasy and communion, with realms and intelligences deeper than the world of identity and politics. A friend of Joanna Macy’s, founder of the Sacred Earth Network, and leader of hundreds of spiritual ecology workshops, Bill has dedicated his life to being a bridge between Native American & Siberian cultures, between alienated humans and the wisdom of the Earth, between heart and mind, future and past.

https://billpfeiffer.org/bio

http://www.sacredearthnetwork.net

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In this episode, we discuss:

Reconnecting to nature, to the body

How political activism for nuclear disarmament changed his whole life and perspective

“I began to feel like I could make a difference…like you can make a difference…in how things play out here on Planet Earth.”

How Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs was appropriated from the Blackfoot tipi, and what we lost in the translation

“We’re all indigenous to land if we go back far enough in our ancestry, and we have a blueprint of a balanced existence.”

“Mystical experience is a birthright, if we’re open to it, or grace is there for us.”

Book: The American Replacement of Nature by William Irwin Thompson

How can we differentiate healthy and unhealthy solutions to our human need for belonging?

“There’s a lot of people who are spiritually inclined, and I’m like…I’m sorry, man, you gotta vote. It doesn’t mean you have to go crazy, it means you have to PAY ATTENTION.”

His journey from citizen diplomacy to Siberian shamanism, through connecting Siberians to Native Americans

What he learned about being human from the Siberians

Book: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

“To reclaim our power is to reclaim ourselves as cosmic beings, not just beings. It’s that big.”

“It’s not that I didn’t get rejected or that people weren’t angry with me at times, or copped an attitude because of what I was doing. But largely, I have felt embraced by both of those cultures as being a bridge, of serving a bridge-building function. I feel like I know how to love people, and how to receive love, and that is the currency that gets the job done.”

Episode 60 with Sean Esbjörn Hargens

Episode 65 with John David Ebert

The possible revival of a circumpolar shamanic tradition in the latter 21st Century after global warming

“I was an amateur futurist and then I just gave up, because there were far too many possibilities, and I was wasting my time getting afraid of imagining.”

What did he learn from the Siberians that were not lessons living in the Native American legacy he encountered?

“The relative success that me and my cohorts have had with native people is all about listening and respect. If that’s cliche, I want more of it.”

The ongoing resurrection of Native American ecstatic traditions

Book: Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal

Joanna Macy

How to co-opt ecstasy for money, and how not to

One of Michael’s craziest sober experiences ever

Conscious sexuality

And more…

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This week's guests are two of the most limber and insightful minds I know, futurist Michelle Shevin and actor-artist "The Ungoogleable" Michaelangelo. Since this is episode one of a whole new hundred episodes – and since I'm a sucker for ceremony and round numbers – this week we're taking a whirlwind tour of this show's recurring themes: how life, mind, culture, psychology, art, and science all change in the Internet Age, and how to live the best lives that we can amidst these transformations...

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Michelle Shevin

medium.com/@michebox

Michaelangelo

voidandimagination.com

We Discuss:

• Kronos & Kairos, revisited

• Re: JF Martel – Episodes 18 & 71

• The information science of innovation and why Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero may not be TOTAL hogwash

• Book: Geoff West - Scale

• Re: “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” – Episode 91

• IS our time unique at all?

• WJT Mitchell paraphrase: “We’re all constantly feeling as though everything is about to happen, or perhaps it already has and we just haven’t noticed it”

• #presentshock

• Did we miss the singularity?

• Trapped in the present

• MA: “chronopractic adjustments” of pulling your past and future into alignment

• MA: “I feel like all expression is a form of deception…I try to look to the deception closest to the truth.”

• Plato: “Writing is a step backward from Truth.”

• Biological evolution as machine learning and the domestication of humans by technology

• MA: “I took a hit of GPS / got lost within the endlessness / gave up the compass in my chest / and oriented to the West”

• Michaelangelo – Episode 37

• Evolution’s bias toward paedomorphy / neoteny

• MS: “What happens when DNA becomes the substrate for all this information?”

• Storing data in the organic cloud

• The zone of proximal evolution and how “We can’t invent what we don’t have the parts lying around for”

• Every new technology is a remix

• David Krakauer – Episode 75

• Dennis McKenna - Episode 88

• Toxoplasmosis mind control and how nobody actually things if “my brain made me do it”

• MS: “If we are midwives to new myths, then part of the project is to litter the landscape with the right raw material, so that in the future, the right raw material is just lying around for people to pick up and build the tools with.”

• MA: “meme-ifying” (vs. “mummifying”)

• Book: Sam Harris – Free Will

• Film: Upstream Color

• Film: Primer

• Book: Peter Watts – Blindsight

• Book: Peter Watts – Echopraxia

• Re: The Teafaerie – Episode 100

• Re: Erik Davis – Episode 99

• Re: Doug Rushkoff – Episode 67

• Weird Studies Podcast is amazing, their Episode 32 on Eyes Wide Shut

• MG: “At the dusk of civilization, our eyes are adjusting to the darkness.”

• The digital dark age

• Book: Stewart Brand – The Clock of the Long Now

• Richard Doyle on Philip K. Dick and the evolutionary arms race of cameras and blind spots leading inexorably toward paranoia and then beyond into metanoia (see also, “The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast”)

• An entropy-driven metabolic arms race inevitab fractal Argus, coated in eyes

• When it comes to living through a Dark Age, MA suggests, “I think it comes down to learning how to glow in the dark. The agents of deception are our greatest teachers, in that sense.”

• MA: “Increased surveillance creates more performative personalities.”

• Re: Mitch Mignano – Episodes 57 & 98

• Elon Musk on Joe Rogan (of course that guy believes in simulation theory)

• Song: Yeasayer’s “Under The Glass of the Microscope”

• Linear, Circular, Helical time

• MS: “Planning often disguises itself as prediction”

• What is causation, anyway?

• Possibility as a fractal branching lightning bolt from potential to actual

• MA: “Scrye-ogenic Future” in a crystalline model of time

• MA: synchronicities vs. “synchroniceties”

• Book: Julian Jaynes – The Bicameral Mind

• Daniel Dennett’s “software archeology”

• The origins of divination

• Morsels of bicamerality reinstated by our digital ecology, with someone’s agenda in it

• MS: “The arrogance is in thinking that it was only ever us.”

• The Neurological Explanation for Imaginary Friends

• The Microbiological Explanation for “Self-Transforming Machine Elves”

• Swing Low, Eukaryote, coming for to carry me home

• David Pearce – “The Antispeciesist Manifesto”

• Are Laboratory Burgers Vegan?

• Empathy is a human (but not uniquely human) super power

• Rebranding the human species (eg, “Dog Friends,” “Cat Friends”)

• Book: Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where The Bird Sings Best

• Expertise is knowing the right search terms

• DNA as a language; microbial ecology as a language

• Introspection as an escape hatch from history and “profane time”

• And more...

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This week’s guest is The Teafaerie, my amazing friend and a true one-of-a-kind psychedelic superhero.

The Teafaerie writes stories, poems, movies, plays and essays, makes videos, organizes flash mobs, and is one of the founders of Prometheatrics, a big beautiful Esplanade camp at Burning Man. At various times she has been a writer, nanny, actress, flow arts teacher, childbirth doula, homeless person, aid worker, live-action storyteller, toy inventor, app designer, street performer, and party promoter. She is a frequent contributor to the worlds most excellent psychedelic information site Erowid.org. She also regularly volunteers as a festival trip sitter with the Zendo Project and RGX medical.

Her most recent essay on Erowid:

https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2016/05/17/mapping-the-source/

My favorite of her essays:

https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/page/18/

More about psychedelic harm reduction:

https://www.zendoproject.org/

We Discuss:

• Why it’s okay that the Elon Musk will get (to beta-test) immortality first (for the rest of us)
• The intimately cybernetic world of brain-machine interfaces and Life After Advertising
• “I’m just a coward. I TRIED despair and I can’t TAKE that shit.”
• How parenthood changes your decision to be or not to be an optimist.
• Simulation Theory
• ~ ”We need to stop stressing the system and offload our consciousness offworld to L5 or VR”
• …or is that some whack pseudognostic transmania?
• “I believe the universe is art, because…”
• We’re the children of god, but most people act like we’re the pets of god or the toys of god.
• The child of a sheep grows up to be a sheep. The child of a god grows up to be a god.
• Mass manifestation and the Global Consciousness Project
• How to make wishes come true by getting god’s attention
• Partner yoga for engineered miracles
• Burning Man is a manifestation engine
• What Are You Playing For?
• What evolution looks like to DNA
• Designer Babies & THE ETHICS OF Designer Babies
• “Do you know The Silmarillion?”
• Olaf Stapledon is the man
• Black Mirror’s episode “Black Museum”
• Autonomous by Annalee Newitz and robot AR architecture
• Greg Egan’s Permutation City (and Diaspora)
• “Any sufficiently advanced 3D printer could tattoo you.”
• ~ “If the universe is determined, it’s offensive to me, it devalues my art.”
• Getting your wishes fulfilled is of evolutionary benefit
• How many things had to go right? ALL of them.
• “Maybe THIS is the shortest path, and it’s JUST LONG.”
• 5-Meo DMT
• The burden of publishing to an enormous audience on Erowid
• Fangirling about my sci fi, “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” (Episode 91)
• 
  

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This week’s guest is Erik Davis – one of my great inspirations, someone who has influenced me and this podcast in immeasurable ways since I first encountered his amazing criticism, histories, and “seen it all” visionary cool – I still recommend his first nonfiction book (Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information) on a near-daily basis, and his show Expanding Mind has got to be my number one most-listened podcast of all time.

Erik is a native Californian Gen X mystic who played no small part in the explosive West Coast visionary cyperpunk scene in the 1990s alongside folks like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, RU Sirius, Doug Rushkoff, and Jaron Lanier. But he’s taking a profoundly different stance these days, with a Religious Studies PhD in hand and a new book at the printers, drawing on his thirty-plus years experience investigating modern life’s weird marginalia to help us navigate a world in which the weird’s no longer marginal.

https://techgnosis.com

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-weirdness

High Weirdness Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies by Erik Davis

"A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality— but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality."

"Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, and counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica."

We Discuss:

Enacting the weird through media

The 1970s understood as the sort of beginning of our darker, weirder time - capitalism, consumer credit, surveillance, paranoia, density, historical dread…

“The occult, conspiracy theory, a dark dreamlike character…is now central…the way fictions become operational as quasi-truths to navigate the post-truth environment…the popularity of psychedelics…”

Key literacies for navigating Our Weird Future

Slender Man as operationalized fiction, as a kind of “tulpa” or thought-form activated into quasi-life

The intermarriage of reality and the hoax

HP Lovecraft’s modern distance from his horrors vs. Phil Dick’s postmodern intimacy with his horrors

The Coming Age of DNA Monsters and Routinized Weirdness

“We are called upon to analyze our resistances to all variety of shifts, mutations, couplings – and unless we want to go reactionary and hold onto certain ideas we have about how humans should be, or how the world should be, we’re in a situation of a strange kind of embrace with the other.”

Distrusting the Apocalypse

Figure-ground collapse in the impression of planetary hyperobjects into our immediate awareness

Neuroplasticity and neoteny – becoming childlike in order to surf accelerating change

Future shock and getting drawn into (right-wing, fundamentalist, fear-based, racist, boundary-defending) stories as a bid for solid ground

“Not knowing who we really are is part of the game. In fact, it’s one of the great opportunities of our moment.”

Plasticity vs. Flexibility ~ Will or Flexibility 

The discipline of transforming subjectivity - religions as practical algorithms for self-transformation, not as collections of beliefs

Everything you do is a self-engendering practice

“I look at the 20th Century, and the most important thing that happened in the 20th Century is cybernetics – both the concept and the operationalism of creating communication feedback loops that begin to generate their own processes.”

“The further I go into a cybernetic model, at least for me, it needs to be ground out in a deepening relationship with animals, with weather, with food, with plants, with plant wisdom, and definitely with those peoples – in whatever traces, in whatever mutations we can encounter them now – those groups, those societies, that had a very different relationship that’s not really mediated by the machine.”

The return of the nonhuman, cultural retrieval, the archaic revival, “reanimism”

Intelligence is Everywhere

Present Shock & the collapse of history & Jurassic Park

The future of time - metaperspectival time

Zizek’s critique of Buddhism and how mindfulness has been coopted by neoliberal surveillance capitalism

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It’s a deep and wide investigation of decentralized networks of many kinds this week, drawing on the insights and wisdoms of five very different panelists in a discussion held at the legendary experimental city-under-construction Arcosanti, Arizona. Like it’s a rainforest, I don’t even know how to start talking about this conversation – too many points of entry, too many species living in it! Here are this week’s fabulous guests:

Emaline Friedman of Holochain

https://herlinus.com/

Sarah Johnstone, COO of The NuMundo Project

https://numundo.org/about

Jacob Devaney of Unify 

http://www.culturecollective.org/about/

“Raven” Mitch Mignano, loosely “of” Reality Sandwich & Institute of Ecotechnics

https://facebook.com/mitch.mignano.77

––

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We Discuss:

The three forms of decentralization (architectural, logical, and political);

The historical centralization of human culture around resources;

Why technological decentralization is insufficient to achieve the goals of a more humane and equitable society;

Decentralization of civilization through the emergence of digital nomadism and the ecovillage movement;

The transition from a value of ownership to a value of access;

Decentralization as an adaptation to the unscaleability of imperialism and colonialism;

How the free market capitalist ideology rewards success and punishes failure, even though those are largely dependent on luck;

How can we make planetary culture NOT a pyramid scheme?

Distributed trust and trustless transactions, and their political consequences;

Data ownership, data security, and the vital importance of restoring our ability to communicate through “unenclosable carriers”;

How can we divest from abusive and exploitative giant tech companies?

How decentralization as an ideology can conceal the ways that enforced consensus is a kind of “shadow centralization”;

Who is affected by this decision? Who has stake in the outcome of this issue?

How can we avoid #algocracy when technological literacy is a constant challenge?

Incentive structures and incentive landscapes: What kind of behaviors are we encouraging?

Why Facebook and Google will be seen by history as a humanitarian crisis (and what we can do about it);

Market-driven shifts in consciousness;

The limits of crypto-economic governance;

William Irwin Thompson - At The Edge of History

Joshua Ramey - The Politics of Divination

JustOne Organics

FairBnB

Arcade City

Steemit

Trybe

Scuttlebutt

MiVote

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This week’s guest is Dr. Zak Stein, an author and educator whom I met as fellow students of the work of philosopher Ken Wilber over ten years ago. Zak took the road of serious high academic scholarship while I was learning the less laudable and messier way through immersion in the arts and entertainment world, but here we are converging to discuss one of the most important issues of our time: the need for a new human story that includes both modernity’s rigorous scientific inquiry and postmodernity’s revelation of how everything we know is framed by language, culture, and perspective. Without some clever, soulful balance of the two we’re stuck in a “post-truth” era where our need for answers to our fundamental questions leads us backwards into “isms” instead of forwards into something more good, true, and beautiful than what has come before.

Zak’s answer (like so many other guests on Future Fossils) is to get MORE rigorous about the scope and limits of the world disclosed by science, MORE honest with ourselves about the context-bound claims we can make on knowledge, and MORE open to how all “reality” starts in direct experience, as conscious subjects – where we meet to make new, open-ended, ever-more refined, evolving answers to the questions:

What is human? What is love? What are we here to do?

Read Zak’s new paper, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros”:

http://www.zakstein.org/love-in-a-time-between-worlds/

‘Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place. Either way, to call an idea or theory “metaphysical” has become another way of saying it is unacceptable. Often with comes with some implication that the theory is a kind of superstition, which means metaphysics is taken not as an attempt to engage the truth but rather as a kind of covert power play or psychological defense mechanism. I argue the opposite: metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. Believe it or not, there are metaphysical systems that survived postmodernism and popped-out of the far end of the 1990’s with “truth” and “reality” still intact. These include object oriented ontology and dialectical critical realism, among others.’

Zak is also the Co-Presdient and Academic Director at the Center for Integral Wisdom:

https://centerforintegralwisdom.org/

…and on the scientific advisor board at Neurohacker Collective:

https://neurohacker.com/

— In this episode we discuss:

Lewis Mumford, Ken Wilber, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jurgen Habermas, Seth Abramson, Timothy Morton, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, Hanzi Freinacht, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Greenhall, and many other luminaries.

Right-wing and authoritarian political thought is resurgent today because of the absence of reasonable discourse about metaphysical realities during a time when exactly these realties are being put in question due to the apocalypse of global capitalism and the accompanying planetary transition into the Anthropocene .

The way we answer questions like, “What is the human?” will determine the next century because of the emerging power of new technologies that render the human mailable in unpresented ways, which has been made clear by writers like Yuval Harari.

“The difference between metaphysics and science is not about what you can see and what you cannot see. It is about what you are paying attention to when you are seeing.”

“What we call postmodernism is just modernism with the volume turned WAY up.”

The difference between modern, postmodern, and metamodern views on science and the realities disclosed by science.

What does it mean to cut a definition of the human out of our education systems?

The relevance of Rudolf Steiner’s metaphysics and pedagogy in 21st Century education – especially its attention to subjectivity and interiority.

How fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, and other regressive movements in society are symptoms of a postmodern assault on consensus reality.

“In the absence of metaphysics, there’s a vacuum of meaning…what can step into that is not always pretty.”

“After postmodernism, we can’t return to some pat, totalizing answer for everybody. After postmodernism, when we begin to build a new coherence, it’s always going to be a polycentric and dynamic and always renegotiated coherence. And that’s what science ought to be, which is to say, knowledge building, and not knowledge finding. Period.”

“Ideas matter – and right now, we live in a context where ideas matter only insofar as they can be leveraged for clicks on websites that generate advertisement revenue.”

When did we start gladly giving our decision-making powers over to others? And who do we trust now when we know that expertise is so contextual and frequently abused?

Making the Earth into a giant building is the beginning of metamodern history – the Anthropocene signaling our deep relationship with the ecosphere.

Michael reveals his vision of an Eclipse Station & Black Madonna University as a nobler motivation for a second “space race.”

We’ve succeeded in making mega-machines out of people but need to reframe what it means to be IN relationship…

Hyperobjects and a metamodern investigation of synchronicity and time…the objectivity of time is tricky.

“Animals do not build sundials, even though they would benefit greatly from them. And so you’ll notice that one of the things that sets humans apart is their ability to make metaphysics – that they relate to things that are objectively real, like time.”

The eternal and the everlasting – two different things.

“Who gets to decide, and how do we get to decide, on these deep questions?”

“To reify a false and truncated metaphysics – for example, to say that love doesn’t exist, that free will doesn’t actually exist – to really try to build institutions based on that, which would result in a radically authoritarian society – these things have been done. But never with the technological power that we now have to, for example, to build a school around that hypothesis. Or an army. And so there’s this very sincere need to make sure that as we move through this period, we’re keeping the voices who want to simplify and reduce and return to modernity and the monological at bay. So applaud, the postmodernists, but we also want to get beyond the postmodern critique, and the whole spirit and emotion of critique, and somehow move into a space where we’re reconstructing a new metanarrative, instead of taking potshots and deconstructing anyone who steps up to offer a metanarrative. After postmodernism it needs to be provisional, polycentric, built iteratively through collaboration. But there needs to be a project in good spirits in that direction. Because the regressive tendencies on the right who want to drive us toward racism and nationalism are having questions about, ‘What is the human?,’ and answering them irrationally. We need to have VERY reasonable and profound answers to questions like, ‘What is human?,’ ‘What are we here on Earth to do?,’ ‘What is a relationship?,’ ‘How important are relationships?,’ ‘What is love?,’ ‘Is love real?’, ‘What’s the significance of love?’…these things are part of what it means to be human.”

How do we build a just and humane, “post-tragic” culture on the other side of the Crisis of the Anthropocene?

We are all dependent on unjust and ecologically devastating supply chains…now what?

“Hate creates externalities. Love creates no externalities.”

The logic of the metamodern system has to be one in which there are no externalities.

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This week’s guest is the intriguing, talented, and amazingly well-organized Malena Grosz, who is currently traveling across the United States to interview party culture professionals for her multimedia thesis on community-led party culture to gain and share their perspectives on best practices and shared challenges in cultivating better life through celebratory gatherings – and to tackle the corporate commodification of “nightlife” and its dangerous side effects.

Her website-as-thesis-project will eventually be live (circa May 2019) at:

http://partyprotoolkit.com

We Discuss:

Gentrification and corporatization of nightlife versus community-led celebration, 

What urban nightlife can learn from Burning Man and festival culture, 

The disavowal of mundane time in spaces of celebration and how party culture does and does not need to accept the realities of our organic rhythms,

Mentorship, moderation, self-control, personal agency, 

Reconciling the nomadic and sedentary strains of humanity,

Taking responsibility for your own education (and life in general),

Getting kicked out of the School of Art for consent-based body painting,

Harm reduction versus the nanny state,

Learning to speak party to Academia,

The extraordinary importance of cognitive liberty and the freedom to imbibe,

The economics of big festivals and their scaling problem, and how it turns people into cattle,

Alternatives to alcohol (like tonics) and how parties can stay solvent without depending on encouraging dangerous levels of intoxication,

Learning how to empower people by delegating decision-making authority as an event producer,

Everything in moderation, even moderation,

The importance of safe spaces within every party (like Camp Soft Landing at Burning Man),

Rest stops at festivals and rests in music, quiet places where people can connect to contrast against losing yourself on the dance floor,

What party culture can learn from the intensely structured environment of academia,

“Festival referees” - good idea or disaster waiting to happen?,

Deputizing “Knights of the Dance Floor” and empowering people to be guardians of collective space,

Festival sheriffs and Night Mayors and the successful interfacing of mainstream culture and the needs of revelry populations,

The New York Nightlife Advisory Board and other official groups representing the needs of party culture in city and state governments,

Other promising international developments in the progress of human understanding of what safely integrated party culture looks like,

Figuring out how to measure the contributions of everyone involved in an event, not just the headlining acts.

And more!

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This week on the show I speak with physicist Geoffrey West (SFI) and evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler (ASU, SFI) about the transformations that our geosphere, biosphere, technosphere, and noosphere are undergoing as the “extended phenotype” of human innovation runs rampant across the surface of Planet Earth.  These two distinguished scientists are some of the most profound thinkers I’ve ever encountered, helping midwife a new understanding of what it means to be human and a planetary citizen. I have wanted Geoffrey West on Future Fossils since well before I even started working for SFI in 2018, so this episode is the consummation of a years-long journey and I cannot be more excited to share it with you!  It feels a little like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, but we live in an increasingly-intertwingled world, so let’s make the best of it!  I wouldn’t be where I am today without these two fine minds and their important work.  Enjoy…

“The consequences of the Anthropocene are the product of innovations, and yet somehow we think the way out is through EVEN MORE innovation. This is a predicament…Innovation has to be looked at critically. One of the interesting things in the history of life is the OPPRESSION of innovation.”– Manfred Laubichler

✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music:  “Sonnet A” from my 2008 Double-Edged Sword EP (Bandcamp, Spotify)• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify

✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org & Gregory Landua of The Regen Foundation for supporting both the show and pioneering research to make the world a better place!

✨ Your Anthropocene & Technosphere Syllabus:

More Is Different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.Phil Anderson

Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine' that's changing the planetManfred Laubichler

Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolutionJaeweon Shin et al.

Policies may influence large-scale behavioral tippingKarine Nyborg et al.

Teaching the Anthropocene from a Global Perspective (2014!)Manfred Laubichler & Jürgen Renn

More from them:Seminar: Co-Evolutionary Perspectives on the TechnosphereAnthropocene Campus | Technosphere / Co-Evolution, presented by Jürgen Renn and Manfred LaubichlerThe Growth and Differentiation of Metabolism: Extended Evolutionary Dynamics in the Technosphere

SFI Community Event - Panel discussion on the Past, Present, and Future of the AnthropoceneSander van der Leeuw, D.A. Wallach, & Geoffrey West, moderated by Manfred Laubichler

Welcome to the Future: Four Pivotal Trends You Should Be Aware OfEd William on the work of Dror Poleg

The Future is Fungi: The Rise and Rhizomes of Mushroom CultureJeff VanderMeer, Kaitlin Smith, & Merlin Sheldrake, moderated by Corey Pressman

Does the Ecology of Somatic Tissue Normally Constrain the Evolution of Cancer?John Pepper at SFI

The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and NightmaresRe: TESCREAL, coined by Timnit Gebru & Émile Torres

Complexity Literacy for a Sustainable Digital Transition: Cases and Arguments From Transdisciplinary Education ProgramsGerald Steiner

Relevant episodes from my past life as the host of SFI’s Complexity Podcast:

Olivia Judson on Major Energy Transitions in Evolutionary HistoryMelanie Moses on Metabolic Scaling in Biology & ComputationChris Kempes on The Physical Constraints on Life & EvolutionThe Future of the Human Climate Niche with Tim Kohler & Marten SchefferScaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Geoffrey West on Scaling, Open-Ended Growth, and Accelerating Crisis/Innovation Cycles: Transcendence or Collapse? (Part 2)Reflections on COVID-19 with David Krakauer & Geoffrey WestMichael Garfield & David Krakauer on Evolution, Information, and Jurassic Park

This week’s episode is the conclusion of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. 

Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. 

Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons – both for our present on Earth and our future in space…

www.ecotechnics.edu

www.synergiaranch.com

We Discuss:

“Learning to Live Intelligently, Coming of Age in the Anthropocene – This is the Challenge of Our Life.”

– Why did Biosphere 2 get so much attention?

– What is the legacy of Biosphere 2? Biosphere J and The Eden Project and Q Gardens…the proposed but never-built, polluted Russian Biosphere 3…

“I think that optimism is a yoga. You want to do your hatha yoga and keep in shape. Despair is like screwing off and not meditating, and forget the physical exercise. Optimism is important psychologically, because it tells you, ‘I can make a difference and this is all going to work.’ Now it may be irrational, but if you give into despair, all of the hormones and emotions are going to tell you that it doesn’t matter. So forget about separating the recycling.”

– Living in the small tight loops of controlled ecosystems.

– Empowering ourselves with new senses so we can see the impacts of our actions at the planet scale.

– Pollutants from different countries where they are not banned yet as a kind of “living fossil” in the flesh of world travelers.

– The Anthropocene and The Noosphere. Human activity (and thus human cognition) as geological force.

“It’s not rocket science to redesign our technosphere.”

“There are consequences to the type of technology that we permit to operate on Planet Earth.”

– Solacestalgia.

– What’s wrong with Modernity and what Modern People suffer.

– Wastewater gardening in Mexico in exchange for cultivated coral.

– Using the soils to purify the air.

“Our farm was the most productive half acre ever run by humans! Of course, we had some advantages.”

– The four great taboos of science broken by Biosphere 2.

“To get into space, we’re going to have to be superb ecologists.”

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This week’s episode is the first of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture.

I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons for both life on Earth and life in space.

www.ecotechnics.edu

www.synergiaranch.com

We Discuss:

– How theater can save a tight team from decaying into “kill the leader” reflexes and the importance of drama to living a full human life;

– Gerard O’Neill and the Space Studies Institute, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, and how space exploration went in, then out, then back into fashion;

– Biospheres are materially closed but energetically open;

– The study of comparative biospheres;

“If anyone’s running the show, it’s the microbes. It’s a reality that’s actually quite joyful to realize. You are NOT an island. We are totally enmeshed biologically in the biosphere.”

– Carrying around the trauma from the Great Oxygenation Event in our intestinal microbiota;

– Biomes as the building blocks of a biosphere;

– The Research Vessel Heraclitus, the Institute of Ecotechnic’s rehabbed Chinese junk, exploring the World Ocean;

– How they designed “lungs” for the building to enable pressure differences inside the building;

“Life transforms the planet. And in fact, when we look out, we’re looking at the by-products of life. And even a lot of what used to be thought of as mineral deposits – these huge deposits of iron, for example, used to be considered to be ‘natural’ formations, ie, geologic ones. No! In fact, [it was the work of] ‘slime’…juicy, fecund with life.”

“I think we need a whole new generation of creative people to give us the storylines for new outcomes. I kind of borrow from William Burroughs, who said, ‘We need a new mythology for the Space Age.’ And he further said that we’re going to judge heroes and villains by their intentions toward the planet.”

– Synergy (popularized by Buckminster Fuller) and synergy in life and love;

– Saving his sanity with “Hallucinogenic Outback Comedies” and using original plays and dances to communicate nonverbally around the world

“In the negative news stories, they would say, ‘These aren’t scientists, these are recycled actors from New Mexico.’ Well, Biosphere 2 was an in-life production…I have some friends who say that Biosphere 2 was John Allen’s greatest theater production. We really thought it was going to be a quiet research facility.”

“Thinking is hard. But PRETENDING to think, I can do that really well.”

“The opposite of an actor is a RE-actor.”

– Theater as a way of escaping the person you are at 7 AM

“I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting quite a number of astronauts and cosmonauts…and they’re all changed men.”

– The first and second Inter-Biospheric Festivals

“Our culture, I think, and it may have a malevolent intent in doing so, tends to diminish people’s expectations of what they personally can do.”

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This week’s guest is one of my favorite living musicians, acoustic guitarist Andreas Kapsalis. We linked up at the magical experimental city of Arcosanti, Arizona last year during their Convergence event, at which we both performed, and talked about life as itinerant musicians drawing on a wealth of world cultures and traditions. This is a humbler and more human episode of Future Fossils – hope that you enjoy it!

http://www.akguitar.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Andreaskapsalisguitar/

Watch a video of Andreas playing his composition, “Ethnos”: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnogdfXyWIo

We Discuss:

Being raised in a musical family and how being musical changes one’s experience of time.

The cultural influences of Greece and Andalusian musics and their vocabulary of odd time signatures and harmonies and energies.

His love for the Old West and Arizona’s cowboy movie landscape…and the “freaking weird mutation” of Arcosanti’s aberrant European retro-future architecture in the desert.

Why is the West Coast of anywhere like the West Coast of anywhere else?

Living off-grid and the importance of getting away…

…but silence is awkward!

Cultivating a relationship with plants.

“You don’t really matter. Being reminded of that is really important.”

The integration of nature and city living, architecture as biology, the legacy of Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti.

Touring is amazing. People are amazing.

“Well, yeah, there is something to be said about stability.”

Nomads and nomadism.

Empathy and Introversion.

“Two handed tapping has allowed me to take a leak and fill a glass of water at the same time, and they say that that’s not good for you…”

The spiritual practice of multi-tasking.

The future of musical communication.

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This week’s a treat – not one, but FOUR amazing guests, in Future Fossils Podcast’s first live taping at EFF-Austin, 10 July 2017. Heather Barfield (Head of EFF-Austin Digital Arts Coalition and Director of Development, Vortex Theater); Maggie Duval (Chief Experience Liaison, 7th Generation Labs & Senior Developer, Polycot Associates, LLC); Paul Toprac (Associate Director of Game Development at UT, RTF Department, and Senior Lecturer); and Kevin Welch (President of EFF-Austin, Fullstack Web Developer at Texas Legislative Council) joined me for one of the most visionary conversations this show’s ever published – and certainly the most politically aware episode to date, as well.

Yes, this is about “The Pre- and Post-History of Virtual Reality, Surveillance, and Swarm Intelligence” – and a lot more else, to boot. Just strap in and enjoy…

The whole event was streamed live if you’d rather watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2hNX9eM6k

Full bios for each panelist and more info about EFF-Austin:

https://www.meetup.com/EFF-Austin/events/240796194/

We discussed:

How for Maggie, growing up at Guantanamo Bay as a form of preparation for living in the 21st Century.

The psychological and moral implications of living in a simulated reality.

What is the humanest human? What are we aiming for?

Challenging the colonizer narrative of space as a “frontier.”

Narrative collapse!

Pernicious, ubiquitous, intelligent and coercive, ambient AI manipulation as the nexus of this talk’s three topics.

Guest spot from Jon Lebkowsky on emergent democracy.

Guest spot from an audience member who grew up in communism.

What is it about our internet as it is now that is keeping a global swarm intelligence from emerging?

Let’s not just talk about making NEW things…let’s talk about MAINTENANCE.

The side effects of automation.

“I’m a technologist that makes social media software. So it’s all my fault…we knew when we created the net as a publishing medium that we did not think through the human connections or other values that should have gone into it. We broke the community; we broke the BROADER community. I think the fact that a Trump voter doesn’t think they can talk to me is part of my sin. The wrongness isn’t their Trumpism; the wrongness it that they don’t think they have a connection to me as a human. And the technology that I built has failed them. So I’d like the panel to talk about, ‘How do we fix it?’”

- Random Audience Commentator

“The future is messy technology that is aggravating to deal with. We don’t spend our days in paradise or dystopian hell; we’re trying to get the dang computer to work. And maybe the problem is in the stories we’re telling. Maybe we’re setting up false narratives and false expectations for how to live and how to communicate with each other. Maybe we need to be telling better stories again.”

- Kevin Welch

Stable background levels of deceit in the system.

The way we teach history is a mistake because it doesn’t make history palpable and thus unrepeatable.

Topher Sipes of Sound Self chimes in.

Heather challenges the assumption that virtual reality will solve any humanitarian issue.

(Cover photo taken from http://www.iaacblog.com/programs/swarm-intelligence/)

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This week’s episode is an experiment in science fiction storytelling – the author-read short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality.’” Originally released to Patreon supporters (without the intro or musical soundtrack) last November, this story brings together many of the core themes of Future Fossils: the challenges of navigating overwhelming and contradictory information online; the new literacies that will emerge in response to AI-assisted “deep fakes” that make conventional evidence inadmissible in courts or scientific journals; the thinning veil between our physical senses and the ethereal realm of data; and the experience of time in a future when possibility, prediction, and recording stretch out in all directions (but unreliably).

My first adult foray into the world of science fiction, this piece was inspired – nay, made necessary – by the recent news about new vocal synthesis AI that lets consumers edit audio and video and manufacture wholly new, convincing forgeries that sound and look exactly like "the real thing." 

We all grew up in an age when our recordings are the evidence of something. It was certainly a step up from the hearsay that we once relied on, but it's not enough these days – and as technology gets more and more sophisticated it may be impossible for us to tell the difference between "what's really there" and what is just a digital illusion. 

Trip with me down this vertigo-inducing psychedelic tunnel to a world in which invisible and discarnate agents speak to you in lovers' voices; in which algorithmic AI pop stars outcompete real artists and our thoroughly-mapped world returns to demon-haunted wilderness; in which we all become half-monks and half-forensics-experts as the new obsession is attempting to determine if we can believe our senses... 

This piece is planned as the epilogue to my forthcoming book, How To Live in The Future. It's a rare weird bird among its influences: one part literature, one part psychedelic beat screed, and the first time I have managed to combine the metanoia, vision, and poetic flourish that inspires me to write. 

(I also wrote it all by hand in a delicious Clairefontaine "Flying Spirit" journal that I bought in Montréal this summer, and took with me to the Global Eclipse Gathering and Burning Man. I have to say, that had no small effect on how this all came out. Real pen and paper leads to very different writing.) 

If you’d like the PDFs of the original handwritten manuscript, you can find them here:

https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/an-oral-history-of-the-end-of-reality

Read all of my publicly-available draft chapters of How to Live in the Future, the companion essays to this story:

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield

All of the music in this episode is from my album, Love Scenes & Field Recordings, which you can download for any price here:

https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings

Cover Image © Giacomo Carmagnola and reused with permission. 

Check out his work and help him support his aging mother: 

https://facebook.com/giacomocarmagnolaart

https://instagram.com/Gore_XV

Special thanks to Transhumanity.net for being a featured sponsor of this podcast! Their concerns about the ethical deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) are perfectly aligned with this episode’s rather chilling speculative futures, and I’m glad to know that there are people working on a world where AGI improves the lives of every person, not just the very rich.

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This week we chat with science writer (and former laser physicist) Kate Greene, whose writing explores everything from Big Data to boredom to brain scans, and whose fascinating and eclectic life is brightly punctuated by the four months she spent living inside a Mars base simulation on Hawaii.

http://www.kategreene.net/about/

We Discuss:

How she became a scientist, and then a science writer.

The importance of good teachers and mentorship and encouragement along a person’s developmental journey.

“Everything that I’ve done is the result of network effects.”

Her time as a guinea pig in a simulated Mars colony on Hawaii…

Why astronauts love hot sauce.

Knowing your purpose - feeling the intuitive hit that lets you know you’re on the right path.

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the scientific evidence for the influence of intention on the outcome of random events.

Kate’s fascination with brain scans.

“I often wonder, what the hell is my brain doing right now?”

Terence McKenna’s vision of posthuman, cephalopod skin telepathy…and Twitter as a form of that same ambient telepathy.

“Never in the history of humanity have we had such extensive communication prosthetics.”

How do science journalists and scientists alike keep up with the “info quake” of modern life?

Big data and AI – can we preserve and evolve critical thought and rigorous investigation when our research is done in collaboration with machine intelligences using logical processes we ourselves don’t understand?

“Science is so HUMAN. It’s performed by humans that have all of these biases and blind spots…the fact that there’s so much information points to the fact that there needs to be new ways to sift through it.”

“A lot of people think that AI is just going to replace people in a lot of ways, but I feel like it is going to be one of the most intimate symbiotic relationships that we have in the future. I mean, this technology will become as close to human as anything humanity’s ever created, and it’s not going to be able to do it on its own. It will be a symbiosis. We will be learning from each other and training each other.”

The problem science journalism has with reporting real science, not just sensationalist headlines based on science…and how social media has made it worse.

What you would miss about Earth if you moved to Mars.

“Earth is SO wonderful. And I don’t think I knew it – I kinda knew it, but I didn’t ACTUALLY know it – until I couldn’t be a part of it for four months.”

Cooking “on Mars” in a simulated colony on Mauna Loa.

Aromatherapy in space!

What Kate learned from teaching creative writing in a women’s prison.

“This is modern day slavery: there are more people incarcerated in the United States than in any other Western country, and it’s because it’s profitable. Something needs to change…one thing that you can do is realize that people in prisons are still part of your community, and that you still have a responsibility to them. To give what you can, to make sure that their lives are better, that all of our lives are better.”

Cory Doctorow’s short story “The Man Who Sold The Moon” in ASU’s Project Hieroglyph compilation.

The crossover between the Burning Man crowd and the space exploration crowd.

Other mentioned science journalists to follow:

Ed Yong

https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/

Kenneth Chang

https://www.nytimes.com/by/kenneth-chang

Natalie Wolchover

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/

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This week we have a roundtable discussion (which took place around an actual table in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, José Soler, and Jacob Aman, the hosts and producers of Future Primitive Podcast (600+ episodes and going strong!). Joanna, as you may remember from episode 0020, has been a psychedelic raconteur for her entire adult life, famously snuck LSD into prison for her lover Timothy Leary, and wears her age with an incomparable flair and zest that ought to be an example to all of us. She’s joined with her current partner and Future Primitive co-founder José Soler, as well as our mutual friend and Future Primitive co-host Jacob Aman (who is also close friends with Future Fossils guest and friend Bruce Damer).

It’s a conversation about…well, everything, really. But mostly breakdowns and breakthroughs, and what it’s going to take for us to steer civilization toward the better of those options. Enjoy!

https://futureprimitive.org/about/

We Discuss:

Intergenerational communication & listening.

Documentary: Wild Wild Country

Documentary: The Unforeseen

“Anybody that wears all the same clothes…I mean…I’m sorry, but, WHY…”

- Jacob

“These days, I look at everything from the #metoo point of view.”

- Joanna

Mansplaining and unconscious mammalian social power struggles.

How social media rewards harmful and divisive behaviors.

Book: Ralph Abraham’s Chaos, Gaia, Eros

“If sweetheart doesn’t go with brilliant…by the time you get to seventy…you can go to a home for old people. I say, it’s either grateful or bitter.”

- Joanna

Lack of intergenerational dialogue in the Occupy Movement…

Protest fatigue.

Richard Doyle on Third Eye Drops Podcast.

Fascists and Gurus.

How are the high school age protesters of school gun violence getting it wrong?

Where does Joanna see us making progress, not merely recreating the mistakes of the 1960s, in this latest wave of upheaval and social change?

Joanna (and also Charles Shaw on Future Fossils 0058) about child abuse by traumatized parents after World War II.

“Do you know why the rich abuse their children? Because otherwise they would give all the money away.”

Cognitive dissonance between drone pilot detachment and the violence of the modern world.

Daniel Schmachtenberger on Future Fossils 0051 on the disconnect between our overwhelming input and our underwhelming ability to act.

“As the years go by, you have to be more and more humble about the difference you are making. And the joy of that humble difference is enormous. The joy of that feeling of having a purpose…that joy is like the smoke of a wonderful incense.”

- Joanna

Jose weighs in on the the Catalonian populist uprising.

“We can do better. We can initiate a new narrative, a new dreaming."

- Jose

Disabusing ourselves of the notions of empire. Can human beings govern ourselves at scale?

The nightmare of intersectional identity politics and Sam Harris putting his foot in his mouth.

Documentary: Ai Wei Wei’s Human Flow

“We have to be magicians. I don’t use the word ‘shaman’ anymore because it has been commercialized. I’m magic and I observe it every single day, and I believe there’s a reason why this Harry Potter thing attracted…look, she’s richer than the Queen of England, which is not a small thing. There’s a reason that erupted in your generations, because inside it’s there but history and the stories have suppressed that. It’s all over the place, in faerie tales and everything - the story of the suppression of what magical beings we are.”

- Joanna

Podcast: Weird Studies with JF Martel & Phil Ford, on Aleister Crowley (Episode 9)

Real magic is connnection, not narcissistic control.

“We’re downloading a different future than the one that is broadcast to us constantly.”

- Joanna

Book: The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu (recommended translation: Brian Browne Walker)

“This body is an incredible spaceship. I mean, would you let your spaceship fall apart?"

- Joanna

“We need hot, ecstatic magic. The sun in our chest! We need to bring more burning in the chest and give that breath into the daily life.”

- Jose

Bringing the practice of everyday ecstasy into our lives and relationships.

Book: Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind

Talking about psychedelics with your parents.

Podcast: The Psychedelic Salon with Lorenzo Haggerty

The tragedy of Terence McKenna on anti-depressants.

“I believe it’s possible to have the right relationship with any chemical that you take.”

- Joanna

What is transformational sobriety?

Intuition is full-body listening.

Joanna asks the whole group: “What’s next?”

Comedy: Steve Martin & Martin Short on Netflix

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This week we’re blessed to chat with living legend, ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna – one of the most rigorous scientific intellects working with psychedelics in the modern era, responsible with his late brother Terence for popularizing the techniques for cultivation of psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms, co-author of numerous books on psychoactive plant and fungal medicines and their curious effects on consciousness, and an outspoken advocate for cognitive liberty psychedelic research.

(Dennis has appeared, subliminally, on nearly every episode of Future Fossils – one of his talks was sampled by my original co-host Evan "Skytree" Snyder for his track “God Detector” – in which I also appear as a guest guitarist – which I still use as the intro and outro music.)

In this conversation we push into a DIFFERENT kind of conversation about psychedelic science – not the science of psychedelics as a tool for therapy, but science using psychedelics the way we use telescopes or MRI machines – to let us see in ways we ordinarily cannot, and maybe answer some of the most pressing and persistent questions about human consciousness and the nature of reality.

I hope this episode will magnetize the worldwide community of people interested in the possibility of psychedelic science…if you have a story you would like to share in confidence, feel free to email me at futurefossils@protonmail.com where we can talk encrypted! I’ve been thinking about this stuff for my entire adult life – we discuss some of that in this episode – and would love to have more conversations with people who have been thinking similarly…

Dennis McKenna’s Links:

https://espd50.com

https://twitter.com/dennismckenna4

https://facebook.com/dennisjonmckenna

We Discuss:

How can the psychedelic experience in all of its weirdness inform deeper, more rigorous experiments and scientific paradigms?

Meet (and then disrupt) the source of all your problems: the default mode network.

“The ego…thinks it’s controlling everything, which of course it’s not, but it helps the delusion to think that it is.”

Disabling the filters to find aspects of reality you’ve never noticed.

The necessity of GROUP psychedelic research from within the altered subjectivity of non ordinary consciousness.

The ontology of entities, as studied by the scientific method.

What kind of QUESTIONS and what kind of FACTS come out of a psychedelic science for which “real and unreal” is insufficiently nuanced?

Crossing the boundary between the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.

Book: On Becoming Aware by Varela, et al.

Michael’s initiation into psychedelic science.

UFOs.

Synchronicity & Coincidence.

The Internet is a psychedelic substance.

Book: Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton

Are waking life and psychedelic consciousness closer now than they used to be?

Novelty.

The Simulation Hypothesis, The Drake Equation, The Copernican Principle, Occam’s Razor (is fractal)

How do you step outside the box?

Telepathy & Meta-Individuality

Book: Nexus by Ramez Naam

Egregores.

“Our cleverness is out of synch with our wisdom.”

The wise deployment of technologies.

The difference between the past and the future. (???)

Concerns about the specter of the collapse of the biosphere.

“I’m a science fiction fan, so I assume our destiny is in the stars, right? If we leave the Earth, it would be nice to leave a garden and not a toxic waste dump. There’s no reason why that can’t be so.”

The history and future of the ESPD, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. (!!!)

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This week we continue the ecstatically futural mind-jazz duet with cyborg performance artist and body-machine interface master hacker Onyx Ashanti, exploring the frontiers of new meta-languages emerging at the intersection of the born and manufactured, and creative possibilities thereof. 

Onyx Online:

http://onyx-ashanti.com

http://youtube.com/onyxashanti

http://twitter.com/onyxashanti

Anyone who enjoys this episode will also like these essays from my upcoming book:

“The Future is More of Everything”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-2-the-future-is-entropic-2faa4aa6f433

“The Future Is Disgusting”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-disgusting-911379af30fe

“Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78

In this episode, we discuss:

Fractal Sonocybernetics & The Future of Language

The neurological and experiential differences between speaking and singing, between continuous movement and discontinuous speech.

“The English alphabet is created of embedded Fibonacci relationships…there are five vowels; all five of those vowels are odd numbers…between A and E is three letters; between E and I is three letters; between I and O is five; O and U is five; and between U and the end of the alphabet, wrapping around to the A, is five letters…two 3s and three 5s is also one of these relationships. There are twenty-one consonants in the alphabet, and twenty-one is one of these Fibonacci values.”

Book: Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle

Reaching beyond language to communicate the ineffable psychedelic experience…only to create new (insufficient) languages.

Violent counter-reactions to the sudden is-ness of black swan events (like the election of Barack Obama OR Donald Trump).

“Those of us that get it and CAN talk about it, it is necessary for us to talk about it. But then to reinforce what we’re talking about with action.”

The moral imperative of people with a vision to communicate it. The ethical necessity of artists to create and share.

Music as an irreplaceable core module of an n-plus-one-dimensional future language.

“We’re like some kind of ant, or bee, and our honey is technology.”

With respect to the Singularity: The end of the world? The end of WHAT world? WHAT DOES “END” EVEN MEAN?

What happens to identity politics in an age of exponential change and its metamorphosis of “baseline” human identity into something plural, mutable, and ineffably always-evolving?

“We have to burst out of identity politics in a way such that it is BORING, that it is MUNDANE, that our perception of identity politics is that it is no longer [the house-sized thing that I am within], it is [identity politics, this thing I am holding in my hand and I can examine like I would examine a grapefruit].”

“One’s reality is limited by their ability to comprehend complexity.”

If we act from the understanding that our brains are harmonically organized, our thoughts and actions can begin to take on that harmonic organization…

Gamma brainwaves as the lubricating medium of harmonically coherent brain activity, just as blockchain-enabled microtransactions enables a fluid economy and liquid democracy in the global brain…

How to become resilient in a networked society by using failure to inform the design of new evolutionary systems.

“Bitcoin…it’s unstoppable. Right now. And when it IS stoppable, we will have a new version that is vastly less stoppable than this one. And then it will get attacked mercilessly…and then maybe someone brings the quantum chain down. And then we create something we can’t even imagine at this point…”

“I feel that Bit Torrent begat Bitcoin.”

“The interesting thing with the Bitcoin community is that we’re all working for a company that…there’s nobody working for that company!”

Is crypto the cathedral of planetary culture we’ve been waiting for?

Onyx waxes rhapsodic about the blockchain.

Open-source space program.

Book: Project Hieroglyph (containing Cory Doctorow’s short story, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”)

Onyx uses Sun Ra and the afro-futurist mythology that he created repeatedly to make a point about legendary creative badassery.

“You have to share it in such a way that each person feels that they are absorbing it. And want to. ‘How can I get involved?’”

Pay No Attention to The Realm of Loud Dumb Shit

What a bad example of a good future cyberpunk is… (Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, etc.)

Story/Film: Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson

Imagining a Crypto Pride Parade with everyone wearing reflective Face ID spoofing masks

What it takes to turn a work of art into a movement: resonance.

“If you [lawmakers and IP holding companies] can’t stop a five megabyte file [mp3s], good luck stopping crypto.”

And more for those with time to listen!

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This week’s guest is the one-of-a-kind, ever-evolving Onyx Ashanti, a cyborg performance artist of world renown, who is as busy as anyone I know (in the words of Terence McKenna) “immanentizing the Eschaton” with his intensely futuristic machine interfaces as an extension of his cymatic, fractal, exponentiating, indomitably cool and strange philosophy. Onyx is one of the most inspiring and creative people in my network and even though this episode was recorded in December 2017 – and is in some ways just a little dated – it’s still 99% WAY, WAY in our future. A paradox! Just how we like it, around here…

http://onyx-ashanti.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/onyxashanti

https://www.facebook.com/onyxashanti

“We have access to technologies and information that are only limited by our abilities to comprehend them.”

The creative potentials of encrypted distributed ledgers “that aren’t just about holding until I’m a millionaire.”

Marshall McLuhan: “The future of the future is the now.”

The uncontrollability of new technologies.

When we talk about “THE” future, whose future are we talking about?

“The past and the future all exist as constructs in your mind. The past is no more real than the future.”

How choosing our story of the past determines what possibilities become probabilities in our future.

“When I think about polarities like good and bad, I think about it in an electronic sense. It’s modulation of the relationship between positive and negative that gives you computers.”

Physical and spatial computing exercises and how movement in space can help dislodge us from stuck perspectives.

“We have to have more art that plays with the malleability of exponential expressions.”

Book: Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse

“There’s a lot of people who think that if they get the right president, or they get the right representative, or they buy the right car, then it’s all going to be alright. That is not the case. It is very, very not going to be alright. There are evolving and exponentially complying streams of possibilities that can collapse into probabilities – IF you understand that possibility collapses into probability.”

We spoil the movie AI.

“American media culture likes to wrap everything up in a happy ending, a happily-ever-after scenario. And I think that makes us retarded.”

Book: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Tutting (for those who don’t know what tutting is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbBqtuYvags) vs Breakdancing

Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, as an example of the crazy wizard kids these days, “spoon benders”

Berlin and Detroit and the collapse of industrial centers as the mulch in which great artistic movements bloom…

“If everybody were able to express themselves properly, we would be something else, and it wouldn’t be controlled by the people it’s controlled by. And that something else would be, I think, grander, but at the same time would have a whole other set of problems.”

How do you keep the golden moment of a temporary autonomous zone or a bohemian urban revival going for as long as possible before it’s gentrified, coopted, integrated, and extinguished?

“Innovation and institution: I won’t say that they’re oxymoronic, but the modulation is going to be different between them. I don’t look to institutions [for innovation]. I don’t believe the college education system is relevant anymore.”

“The first thing that should happen is, everyone learns how to learn.”

“There is no limit to synaptic connectivity that anyone has observed. There is no brain that is so full that it cannot process one more thing.”

Onyx’s favorite nootropics (racetams).

Co-evolving brain-machine interfaces for a constant flow state of cyborg immersivity.

How would AI perceive information? Likely as music…

Book: Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon

Book: Xenolinguistics by Diana Reed Slattery

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This week on Future Fossils we pierce the veil with Adam Aronovich, cultural anthropologist and psychedelic integration therapist, to talk about the strange brew of web-connected healing and web-inflicted paranoia and delusions of grandeur, conspiracy epistemics, how people are being treated as robots, and robots are being treated as people, and engaging reality directly versus engaging through the manipulation of symbols. Among other things! It’s a perfect treat for tricky times…

Adam’s Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Re Precision Health Page

✨ Support Future Fossils & Feed My Kids:

• Become a patron on Substack, Patreon, and/or Bandcamp for MANY extras, including a members-only FB Group and private channels on our Discord Server• Donate directly: @futurefossils on Venmo • $manfredmacx on CashApp • @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Browse my art and buy original paintings and prints (or commission new work)• Buy (NEARLY) all of the books we mention on the show at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page• Show music: “Autocatalysis” (Live Extended Remix) coming this Friday to my Bandcamp!• Follow my music and awesome, eclectic playlists on Spotify

✨ Special thanks to my friends at Noonautics.org for supporting both the show and pioneering research!

✨ A mostly-but-not-entirely-complete list of references:

An Oral History of The End of RealityMAPS Psychedelic Science 2023“A general model for the origin of allometric scaling laws in biology” by Geoffrey West, James Brown, Brian EnquistNew Religions of the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari’s Google Tech Talk)The Matrix (franchise)A Glitch in The Matrix (documentary)Doug Rushkoff “fractalnoia” (FF 67)Stanislav Grof“So You Want To Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers?” on The Emerald PodcastWilliam Irwin Thompson - The Borg or BorgesJorge Luis Borges - On Exactitude in ScienceJean Baudrillard - Simulacra and SimulationsChatGPTDouglas Adams - The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (Encyclopedia Galactica)Simon DeDeo on plural epistemology (interviewed by MG on Complexity Podcast 72)Erik Davis (FF 132)Bruce Damer (FF 109)Ken Adams (FF 209)Shane Mauss (FF 58)What the heck happened to Reality Sandwich?Mondo 2000 + R.U. Sirius

This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.

Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:

Subscribe on Patreon to watch the uncut interview:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20618842

Our New, Better Life?

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/

Why I Am Afraid of Global Cooling

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/

Discussed:

• What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.

• The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”

• What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?

• When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?

“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”

• What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)

• Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”

“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”

• Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.

• Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments…

• …and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.

• How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.

• Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.

• Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violence to talk about time and evolution having a direction?

“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”

“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”

“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”

• What metaphor for mind/life/nature is set to replace “the computer,” just as “the computer” replaced “the steam engine,” which replaced “the geared watch?”

• How black box AI solutions restore the mystery and magic to the technosphere, replacing reason with blind faith.

• Kevin Kelly, Stephen Pinker, William Irwin Thompson, Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Brock,

“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”

• Can we be TOO empathic?

“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”

• The boundaries we draw between our selves and the world, between one organism and another, also evolve.

• The healing power of grief.

• Purge-aholics Anonymous.

• The evolution of service as a continuously shifting, molting thing that changes, that requires careful listening. No moment is the same.

• The sacred disquiet that attends our new perspective as we learn to see a bigger (ever-bigger) picture.

“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”

• Did money invent science?

“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”

• Why cryptocurrency (wants to, but) can’t replace human agreement with code.

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7y8qr5yz

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Former NASA-JPL Mission Architect and founder of the Exploration Institute, Armin Ellis helps people think big and execute visionary projects for a living. He’s also now the Mission Architect for the Arch Mission Project, a group committed to getting long-lasting civilizational archives carried into deep space by other missions. Armin is exactly the guy to talk to if you want to think the future’s somewhere you would like to live…

Watch the entire uncut video on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/20404177

Armin's projects:

http://exploration.institute

http://pioneerscircle.com

https://archmission.org

“I really do believe that the future is pretty bright for us.”

A rallying cry to not let our amygdalae rule us, to not succumb to fear and desperation.

How working on a Mars rover mission helped him develop a humility and appreciation for complexity.

“Ego slows us down. It makes us stupider, you know? I’m not sure there are too many intelligent people out there. I think there are people who embrace intelligent practices; that allows them to have intelligent outcomes.”

And also: in defense of egotistical people who perform a vital function in the ecosphere by making sure we Get Things Done.

How the limitations of each of us as individuals can align with others’ limitations and assets to form a functioning team.

Diaspora by Greg Egan

How do you craft communications to reach everyone on a neurologically diverse team?

“When opinions aren’t backed up by empathy, then you’re necessarily going to run into problems.”

“I can’t remember a day in my life when space wasn’t this burning passion, something that REALLY mattered to me…I remember I was eight years old when I decided I wanted to work at JPL.”

Idea To Implementation Method

How to recognize when the processes in an organization are out of alignment.

How he got involved in space entrepreneurship and space exploration as a young man.

The vital importance of a frontier, of curiosity, of exploration…

Why the quest for certainty leads us astray and the quest for meaning leads us true.

“Being able to influence it is a fundamentally different premise than being able to control it.”

Ikigai

Would somebody please build an Ocean Roomba already?

Trying to make Star Trek’s Federation happen.

The Arch Mission Project, an awesome and ambitious endeavor to leave engraved nickel civilization archives at the ocean’s floor and on the Moon, and with every deep space mission…

The importance of emotional mastery (again, not control…) if we are to become the kind of species we could be…

And more!

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One third of American adolescents are on medication – half of that number, on psychoactive prescriptions. We have an educational system that not only can’t prepare young people for the rapidly evolving future world we’re creating for them to inhabit – it traumatizes people by attempting to squeeze every kind of human through the same twelve-plus-year sentence of indoctrination and obedience training. 

Are damaged and addicted mind control slaves really who we hope we’re shaping? Obviously not! That’s where the radical (yet common sense and plainly reasonable) ideas of Michael Strong come in. Michael has devoted his life to establishing new education systems that prepare young people for a lifelong learning process, to think for themselves and find their self-esteem in cultivated excellence, not rote memorization or decontextualized performance. Civilization might mean domesticated people…but do want to live in the Calcutta Zoo?

In this week’s episode, I speak with Michael Strong – about how he sees the future evolution of education and learning – starting with a “narrative collapse” about our consensus standardized testing hallucination and a departure from the “factory-worker factory” model that dominates the US public education system now – and growing into an ecology of different styles and possibilities more suited to the future: early-entry programs that restore apprenticeship, train young entrepreneurs, link “un-schooled” families into a learning network, and rebuild the independent and creative minds we’ll need to thrive through the next hundred years of exponential change.

About Michael Strong:

https://thoughtandindustry.com/about

https://thepurposeofeducation.wordpress.com/about-michael-strong/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelstrong1/

https://www.edreform.com/edspresso-shots/why-we-dont-have-a-silicon-valley-of-education-michael-strong/

We Discussed:

“I think creating better ways of living is the most exciting, fun task for the 21st Century…[and] middle and high school is more or less prison for 80% of students.”

• How to create happy, positive, creative experiences for young people by reimagining the education system

• How do we unwind a system that pressures everyone to conform, and establish a system that encourages the vast (and USEFUL) diversity of human personality types, talents, and learning styles?

“School is a very narrow band for people who are good at tasks…that doesn’t do justice to the diverse count of moral beings, but also there’s this moral chaos, where I think a lot of the consumerism and addictive behaviors of young people is that there is no sense of virtue or excellence.”

• Why mental health and behavioral disorders are at an all-time high, and getting worse, and what to do about it.

• The tragicomedy of Socratic process versus fundamentalists in the schools, and taking a pragmatic stance to the chaos and complexity of our time.

• Crafting your own sense of meaning and independent moral authority in stark contrast to our legacy of hierarchical thinking.

• How to individuate in an era of increased networking – how to tell the difference between pressure to conform and desire to connect?

• Technology addiction versus relational meditation and deep nature communion.

“One of the things I love about the San Francisco Bay Area is that no matter how weird you are, somebody is weirder.”

• Individualism versus political correctness.

• The dissolution of established job categories and the beginning of totally unique, distinct purpose and meaning for individuals.

• The proliferation of new aesthetics and the emergence of new freedom and openness in the human experience.

• How grateful should we be for living in the modern era?

• How do we prepare young people to think independently?

• What integrated educational curricula look like, exploring ideas across subjects rather than demanding the learning of specific facts.

• How to measure success for students in nontraditional systems so they can still win at the university admissions game.

• And more…

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