🫠 Who Am I?
Michael Garfield is a writer, artist, and award-winning futurist committed to fostering vital conversations on human-technology evolution and emerging planetary culture.
Trained in evolutionary biology and integral philosophy, his career has carved a singular path through paleontological fieldwork with "dinosaur heretic" Robert Bakker, complex systems science communication at The Santa Fe Institute, innovation research at Mozilla, community management at The Long Now Foundation, and twelve years of performing and speaking on the international festival circuit. The founder and host of the Future Fossils, Humans On The Loop, and (formerly) Complexity podcasts, he has also produced over a hundred hours of original music, illustrated more than four hundred scientific papers, and written for dozens of publications including Aeon Magazine, Big Think, H+ Magazine, and Reality Sandwich. Browse this site for more info on his writing and speaking, art, and music, or visit MichaelGarfield.net for his social links and a rotating menu of choice cuts.
🔮 What Is This?
The modern world thinks of technology as leverage: “How can we do more?” But when the veil between imagination and physical reality is thinning, I want to ask:
“If anything is possible, what is worth doing?”
We can’t even ask this well without a better understanding of who we are in the first place. Everyone I speak with (and that is thousands of people!) feels the need to find new ways of being, new narratives and scientific theories, and/or new possibilities for art and culture. I’m doing what I can to help satisfy that need by modeling the intrinsic satisfaction of curiosity and playful exploration of the unknown.
Humans On The Loop is an independent research, writing, and art project promoting:
• Imagination and attention as our greatest “natural resources”
• Transdisciplinary knowledge art as an adaptive strategy and its own reward
• The formation of “wizard schools” for more-than-human intelligence
• A repository of open protocols for better dreaming together
• The playful exploration of agency in an automated society
• New approaches for engaging this century’s wickedest problems
As of spring 2025, it’s also the #2 futurist podcast in the world according to Feedspot and #6 for both futurism and evolutionary biology according to MillionPodcasts.
This project is fiscally supported by HAPPI and accepts tax-deductible donations. Set up a recurring contribution at every.org/humansontheloop to get all of the same perks as you would on Substack. I’m also available for consulting.
🎉 Subscribe For:
An ongoing series of explorations and creative experiments at the frothy edge of the known and knowable, and access to my brilliant community of fellow adventurers exploring our ever-weirder world. Join me for bold, playful, provocative forays into:
• The psychedelic future of human-technology co-evolution
• The philosophy of complex adaptive systems
• AI as an adjunct for the transformations of consciousness
• Deep time, the nonhuman turn, and extended cognition
• Reality ruptures and weird ontology, hyperstitions and hyperobjects
• And the ongoing generative remix of our categories
In other words, science poetry for a transdisciplinary age, to help you navigate a future stranger than we can suppose.
🏆 Paying Members Get:
An ongoing stream and extensive back log of members-only writing, course recordings, music, and conversations; inspiring monthly community calls; cozy private channels in my Discord server; and a front-row view of independent research that moves much faster than I can ever hope to share through the public feed.
Plus, choose-your-own-depth direct participation in work that is incredibly difficult to fund by conventional means: vital conversations on the future and an ever-evolving portfolio of boundary-crossing projects to help us flourish amidst the transformations.
