Years ago I was walking a friend’s dog through their suburb and noticed every other house had another dog in it that went absolutely nuts when we walked past — not from territorial aggression, but loneliness and the desperate desire to leap through the window and smell another dog. It hit me like a brick how like those dogs we all are in this screen-based society, and how important it is that we get at least a little time in the dog park.

I was already going to festivals at that point but from there on out they became a kind of religion. From 2007-2020 I had thousands of amazing conversations while painting at (mostly small to mid-sized) festivals, and the art felt mostly like an excuse to spend an entire weekend just riffing with whoever else showed up. At some point people started telling me that our easel-side chats had changed their lives. Being willing to talk about deep stuff with anyone at any time, I wasn’t trying to inspire strangers to change their career path or identity. But it kept happening, and these people kept telling me “You should start a podcast.” So I did.

It was several years before I realized that a podcast isn’t intimate and open-ended in the same way. You can introduce people to awesome ideas, you can model a different kind of thinking, but you can’t ask questions. I’d framed Future Fossils Podcast as a museum for the “trace fossils” of conversations but even in a deliberately exploratory dialogue-not-interview format, the host-guest relationship is also performative in a way that dinner table conversation isn’t.

When COVID effectively killed festival culture in the USA and I got sucked into an apparently permanent limbo of remote work, I started feeling like the most important quality of those lively, spontaneous, vulnerable encounters that had once characterized my life had gone entirely missing. And then I worked for Mozilla for a while researching innovation and learned that every single one of the most legendarily creative organizations in my sample had a physical campus — a place where people could just bump into each other and where serendipity emerged through unplanned banter. This is the lifeblood of culture, the secret ingredient of “scenius”: people need places where they can hang out and rap with one another, in real-time, with no specific goal in mind.

Sometimes I feel like society is trying to maintain a long-distance relationship entirely on text messaging and voice notes. Like we’ve forgotten that being in the same place at the same time matters. But as someone who has spent much of my professional and romantic life in complicated long-distance partnerships, I recognize that even if video calls are a lousy substitute for in-person time together, they’re still a huge step up from being totally uncoupled in space and time. I’ll take what I can get.

Even just writing this post has felt isolating and weird — immediately thrown into sharp relief when my daughter burst into my office to show me her Legos. I want more of that with you fine people. Maybe you do, too. The parasocial relationship I have with you as “author” or “host” and “reader” or “listener” is all well and good when it comes to crystallizing an idea, but broadcast media sucks for relationship building. And the crazier the world gets, that distinction only feels more and more important.

Do I even need to mention how many people are turning to chatbots because this is a fundamental human need and we are being systematically thwarted in our efforts to satisfy it? Companionship — no matter how ephemeral — is the air and water I once took for granted. I don’t anymore. And I want to offer it to people, especially now, when it feels like civilization is coming apart at the seams.

Which is all just to say, I hope you’ll join us for our next monthly hangout. Or if not this one, then the next.

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This week I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka (Website | LinkedIn) — a self-described “Earthian living on and learning from the Country of the Bidjigal, Gweagal and Kamay clans of the Dharawal Nation, in Sydney, Australia.”

Mat is a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Cofounder (with Alja Isakovic) of the inquiry-driven social venture Tethix and mission steward (with Gemma Palmer) of Collective Futurecrafting, Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. He also makes delightfully weird code-as-art projects like The Ministry of Futility, a bureaucratic adventure game where players navigate a maze of pointless decisions.

In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness.

Mat and I met in 2024 in the group chat that spawned the Wisdom x Technology Discord Server and immediately realized a common thread ran through both our lives: a commitment to fostering our collective imagination aimed at ecologically-grounded, mutualistic, more-than-human futures.

In today’s episode we riff on themes from the Tethix blog and podcast, including:

• How do we embrace the lunacy of tech?
• What should we do with the time that new technologies save? (if they even do) and
• How do we nurture weird online communal gardens where we can play together?

We also draw from the Tethix codesign principles, product ethos, and elemental ethics documents.

Along the way we explore the fundamental problems of scale and institutional misalignment, the value of ritual, and the return to embodiment.

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✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations”

Chapters

00:00 Intro
06:02 Starting Over With Play
08:05 Mat’s Origin Story
13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety
18:24 How Tethix Began
40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care
46:26 Collective Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions
47:05 Start With What Exists
48:34 Pivot Beyond Tech Ethics
50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community
57:42 Composting The Leviathan
01:01:48 Trauma, Empathy, Care
01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing

Mentions

Mark Nichols
Peter Watts
Samuel Wines
Adrian Hines
Civlization Research Institute
Benjamin Labatut
Anne Poelina
Chris Ryan
The Unforeseen

“The map is not the territory, but some maps do help us to find our way home; and yet, home is precisely the place where we no longer need maps.”
– William Irwin Thompson, “The Four Cultural Ecologies of the West”

Preamble

Happy Earth Day!

This essay is Part Two in a series on what it will take for humankind to see itself as part of a single more-than-human entity, emerging from, participating in—and as—the biosphere. Standard disclaimer for new readers:

The TL;DR on Part One, “The Underview Effect”, is that trying to mass-produce planetary culture—for instance, by sending celebrities and philanthropists into space so they can come back and inspire the rest of us—is based on a demonstrably false theory of change.

By analogy to other peak experiences like those induced by psychedelics, we can see how these efforts misunderstand complex systems by applying “top-down” behavioral engineering principles to bottom-up cultural change; don’t hold a proper container for integration; and crucially, by leveraging The Overview Effect as a consumer experience, risk producing precisely the opposite of the desired goal (namely, dissolving our sense of separation and reconstituting selfhood as an emergent pattern in fields of interdependent co-arising).But I do a better job of saying all this here.

Today we turn to the question we left hanging: If launching influencers into orbit is insufficient to get us collectively “back home,” what is?

Fundamental shifts like this are rarely easy, quick, or pleasant.

As I’m sure you’ll notice, I don’t use AI to write and edit. This takes forever, especially with kids…as it should. So please—if you like thoughtful, deeply-researched long-form writing and would like to cast your vote for more—consider becoming a paid member:

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One last thing: I wanted to hit “send” on Earth Day, so what you’re getting is a messy draft I cut in half. It doesn’t lead you through a clean trajectory of arguments. It leaves you hanging at the end. The next few thousand words need more time to ferment.

Because I’m riffing on ecology, community, and open-ended processes, I hope your feedback will inform the next piece in this series. I am not a lone romantic poet and you’re not a mute and passive reader soaking up my finished work. It takes a village.

Part Three explores how our increasingly complex and precarious society drives the transformation into planetary culture—and in particular, how rupture and collapse provide more openings for us to recognize our place as its custodians. There is no one path forward, but the “metacrisis” is a “metaopportunity” for each of us to find our own way to participate in enabling better futures.

Let’s make that soil together—maybe on a members hangout call. (Our next one will be on May 2 at 2 pm MDT. More info soon!)

Okay, on with the show.

Representation Isn’t Intimate Enough

What does it mean to be planetary? I draw my understanding from historian William Irwin Thompson’s work on the cultural evolution of consciousness. His book Imaginary Landscape describes how in our transition between “cultural ecologies,” from civilization to planetization, the self of industrial modernity’s preoccupation with representation becomes the self of planetary culture’s concern with participation.

This is a story of collapse and the concurrent growth of something richer and more intimate—the contrapuntal motion of an end and a beginning all at once. I’ll do my best to figure them together.

From a citizen’s perspective, democratic voting was a step up from the relative lack of agency experienced by subjects under autocratic rule, but when the cadence of decision-making accelerates from the crawl of legislative sessions to the blitzkrieg of an always-on digital society, we start to crave direct engagement with the means by which decision spaces are defined. Print gets superseded by operatic medium of film and then film is superseded by MMORPGs, because each interface provides more axes of participation. Voting gives way to protest and protest gives way to open civics. Open model weights feel like a one-way conversation when we could have open source and actually engage, collectively and in real-time, with how our infrastructure works. Agency isn’t just a matter of the timescales that couple sensorimotor feedback loops and whether we can respond to stimuli quickly enough; it is also a matter of the degrees of freedom through which we can effect that response.

But in service of convenience and simplicity, the interfaces we designed to navigate this century’s many-layered decision landscapes now utterly fail to provide adequate representations of its complexity (a point to which I’ll return below). The same accelerating pace enabling us to comment on live-streamed political debates and prompt entire virtual realities with speech abstracts a forest’s complex flows of energy and matter into dollar values and the richness of an interpersonal encounter into text.

The result is that we have a highly variable environment full of surprising “externalities,” but totally impoverished “controllability”—not godlike dominion, but our understanding of the relationships between inputs and outputs, and the consequences of our actions.

A quote frequently misattributed to psychologist Carl Jung puts this in simple terms:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

We can’t participate in what we can’t perceive.

Today we have personalized “for you” news feeds, but no say in the news feed ranking algorithm itself. The feeds themselves are linear, squeezing high-dimensional and richly structured information spaces through a straw and leaving us with none of the depth perception or original range of movement we had in the physical environments to which our brains adapted over the course of more than half a billion years.

Humans have the stereoscopic vision and advanced spatial cognition of keystone predators, but the same “shortest distance between two points” thinking that served us as endurance hunters has cut out most of the picture. As I’ve already said, instrumentalizing space tourism in order to effect mass cultural transformation is a symptom of the same hypertrophic “left-brain” thinking that ignores “right-brain” pattern recognition, peripheral awareness, and the assignment of subjectivity to the masses that Big Tech regards as sociobehavioral engineering objects.

But this is understandable when we regard this kind of thinking as a strategic adaptation to the dimensional collapse of “high-entropy” primordial wilderness into the industrial economy’s “low-entropy” factory floor:

Notice how many more ways there are to participate in forests. Notice how the factory invites a yearning for more agency—how it is actually a factory for that desire.

The same collapse-as-opening is evident everywhere in our built environments. Yes, we have some say in whether people “like us” enter political office, but money does most of the talking when it comes to what they do. Our institutions all depend on metrics in order to coordinate behavior at scale, stripping context to enhance legibility and thereby over-indexing us to strategies that win out in the short term. Reliance on global supply chains and monocrop agriculture for food looks equivalent to reliance on the petrodollar as a universal reserve currency looks equivalent to reliance on opaque algorithmic recommendation for the news we need to participate as citizens: we live in a high-dimensional space but we are foraging in one dimension.

Economist Robin Hanson articulates this plainly:

The same is true for each of us as it is true for all of us. This is what happens when we pixelate the self, reducing a fluid interference pattern of countless interacting causes to the bins of age, class, gender, race, geography, and buying habits. Demographics are useful fictions when they help us to identify shared stake, but they have become the tools by which our predatory egregores divide and conquer. Surveillance capitalism can only optimize per-person extracted value to the extent we are legible to these systems, and our own drive to be legible to ourselves and one another—to fit in—makes us easy prey for systems that know us better than we know ourselves. In planetary culture, the representation of a fixed identity—and the attempted actualization of its values—becomes the latest version of the kill traps into which Paleolithic people drove herds of bison.

But this paranoid perspective eventually gives way to metanoia: to seeing predator and prey—and every other binary—as paired transient occurrences within a unitary cosmic gesture.

Or to put it another way: the self is a kind of battle plan, and as the famous maxim by 19th-century Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder goes:

“No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.”

In modernity, the rules and roles imposed by premodern belief systems become objects, a new artistic medium for self-authoring egos engaged in a process of discovering their essence and reshaping institutions accordingly. In what comes next, the modern self becomes a work of co-improvisatory art—not an essential or authentic “me” but one of countless focal points in a self-aware fabric of relationships. Whether or not our systems represent this more nuanced state of being, representation alone is insufficient for those systems to afford us conscious participation in its flux of becoming.

No matter how fast, rich, or high-dimensional, representation isn’t intimate enough.

“I want to be a part of it: New York, New York!”
– Fred Ebb

For that you need more than maps. You need recipes. The problem with recipes, though, is that you need ingredients. Civilization has made some of them extremely hard to find. And as context re-invades the modern world, we discover new ingredients for which no recipes exist.

Becoming The Self-And-Other

Driving this change is our new sensitivity to what we might call “the civilizational unconscious”: our growing sense of embeddedness in and inextricability from supply chains, disease transmission networks, climate, global pollution, and the “other” we find staring back at us through “alien” cultures and identities, as well as nonhuman organic and machine intelligences. Echoing psychologist Robert Kegan’s description of “Stage Five” consciousness as that which recognizes self and other co-arising in constant dialogue, William Irwin Thompson sees the political entities of planetary culture as “enantiomorphic,” or inherently bound up as twins in the mutual creation of otherness. There is no “away” from nuclear fallout or microplastics, only a deepening encounter with everything the tidy garden of closed-system selfhood neglects because it’s metabolically cheaper to ignore this kind of “full-cost” accounting.

Which is, incidentally, why I have some empathy for this age’s abundant binary, zero-sum thinking and profit-over-people-and-planet strategies. If we view the brain as a free-energy minimizing organ of active inference, then it will always “choose” to get by on the simplest possible representations it can.

One of my all-time favorite explainer graphics comes from Professor of Mathematical Modelling Alain Goriely, which shows the tradeoffs involved in model size and computational time vs. what he calls “insight”—the ability to compress everything into the fewest possible variables. Aim for the richest, most consilient models and getting anything actionable out of them takes longer than you need. Aim for the smallest, most efficient models and you gain understanding of “universal laws” by taking out a loan on real-world complexity, breeding exceptions to your rules:

Given a safe and reliable environment, we become much more tolerant of complexity. Well-cared-for human infants have effectively “all the time in the world” to tinker, play with their food, and develop empowering causal models instead of favoring the approach of optimization through reinforcement learning. As demonstrated by psychologists Eunice Yiu, Alison Gopnik, and their colleagues, children favor greater variability in their environments than adults, who tend more toward being able to “game” systems after learning controllable input/output mappings. A good childhood means being able to make low-cost mistakes and trade immediate reward for robust causal models, generalizable learning they can apply to new experiences.

But adults navigate a world of higher stakes. When our best institutions—including academia, monastic living, diplomacy, and the family—work as advertised, they support exploratory play, open-ended inquiry, and non-violent conflict resolution. They give us leisure and the luxury of entertaining questions without easy answers. On the other hand, when you meet a stranger in a dark alley, you don’t have time to break bread, develop context, and get to know the ominous shadow as a unique person. The cost of misplaced trust is great. Your ancestors survived by erring on the side of false positives when something rustled in the tall grass nearby, and deliberation is expensive. So it’s easier to fight or flee.

When lossy, inflexible models hold up well enough, it’s easy to discard even abundant evidence to the contrary, especially “if [your] salary depends on [you] not understanding it”:

But what I read in Thompson’s vision of planetary culture is that its birth through crisis and the collapse of modern sense-making frameworks means that more and more people’s salary will depend on understanding it. Or, at least, he saw that the Jungian shadow exists not just for individuals but also for entire cultures, and the passage from one cultural ecology to the next is isomorphic to the process of psychological individuation through integration. In order to become planetary, we will have to take David Bowie’s advice to “turn and face the strange” and reclaim the monstrous as a vital member of our family.

Various thinkers, including Alan Kay, Danny Hillis, Douglas Adams, and Kevin Kelly, have articulated variants on “You only notice technology when it breaks down.” Kelly in particular qualifies technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet”—but the assumption that this “yet” one day arrives as a fixed achievement becomes obviously wrong in an age of cascading supply chain failures.

When we can not assume and ignore the bedrock of representational democracy, journalism, accreditation, and even public utilities, we end up in the paradox of being both the child who suddenly has to grow up and the adult who can only respond to crisis by becoming more childlike.

We can see this playing out in how people like of Dark Matter Labs are trying to re-think society-state relations and foster the emergence of new institutions capable of real-time adaptation to the new condition of constant shocks:

This process plays out in the microcosm, too. One of Thompson’s many brilliant observations, drawing on biologist Lynn Margulis’s work on major evolutionary transitions through what she called “symbiogenesis,” was that war is a kind of mating—a dance of cultural recombination in which both sides take on each other’s characteristics and join in novel structures. Just as your own nucleated cells are “holobionts” made from different species of bacteria that fought each other to a standstill until they became conjoined as anatomically distinct but reproductively coupled organelles, each new cultural ecology begins in the reciprocal projection of evil and culminates in the form of a new “meta-individual”: World War II sends Henry Ford’s assembly line to Germany, German physicists and engineers to The United States, and begins the decades-long process by which off-shored industrial production results in the re-invasion of Asian electronics, popular culture, and other consumer goods. The U.S. “won the space race” thanks to Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun, developed the atom bomb with the help of (dismayed) German-born Albert Einstein, and soon became utterly dependent on Chinese and Japanese imports. By 1980, what looked like a decisive victory of the West was already becoming apparent as a turbulent flow and counterflow in a new cultural ecology better described by quantum mechanics and complexity science than ballistics.

In this process of emergence, the disowned unconscious first becomes conscious through evil as the “annunciation of the next level of order”, perceived as chaos before noise becomes signal in a more capacious and inclusive self. As Thompson puts it in “The Four Cultural Ecologies of the West”:

Unconsciously, the world is one, for global pollution spells out a dark integration that does not honor the rational boundaries of the nation-states. And so, industrial nation-states in their fullest development have contributed to their own end. Collectivization, then, must mean that the future is some sort of collective consciousness in which the completely individuated and conscious ego becomes surrounded by the permeable membrane of an ecology of Mind and not by the wall of civilization.

Crucially, we don’t erase the individual but rediscover it in situ—a shift in thinking from the potted plant to permaculture, in which rational science and other modern institutions persist “within” rather than “beyond” their jurisdictions. There is no escape from who you are, nor from philosopher Jean-Paul Satre’s “hell” of other people. But the self and world arise together — you’re every bit as dependent on the biosphere in a spaceship or a bunker as you are so the recipe for loving self and world includes everything you think of as pollution:

The world view of humanity in the [modern era] was of objects separated in space. The world view of humanity in the [next] cultural ecology (as experienced by astronauts, such as Rusty Schweickart, or mystics, such as David Spangler) is of presences in an interpenetrating field. How, then, do we live with this knowledge? If pollution, evil, noise, and paranoia are expressions of presences that won’t go away, how do we deal with them?

Industrial civilization never seems to learn, from DDT or thalidomide, plutonium or dioxin: catastrophe is not an accidental by-product of an otherwise good system of progress and control; catastrophe is an ecology’s response to being treated in an industrial manner.

Precisely because pollution cannot go away, we must generate only those kinds of pollution we can live with. Precisely because enemies won’t go away, for the fundamentalists’ process of inciting hate only creates enemies without end, we have no choice but to love our enemies.

But even what we think of pollution isn’t static and eternal. Nothing ever goes away, really; it only ever changes shape. If we wish to “rid ourselves” of toxic chemicals, we must change their shape — and the only way to do that is by changing who we are, evolving new metabolisms that allow us to absorb and work with them. This is exactly what we see in the examples of plastivorous bacteria, radiotrophic fungi, and Buddhist Tonglen meditation practice. We can’t escape the trauma caused by toxic relationships, but we can metabolize them in a deeper, more cohesive story that gives thanks to enemies as teachers and as vital elements of who we are.

So what does it take to be planetary? The same experimental working-with Indigenous cultures use to neutralize the phytotoxins of cassava, cycad fruit, and nardoo ferns. The same experimental working-with that started in an extinction-level atmospheric pollution event caused by photosynthetic bacteria and turned deadly oxygen into the keystone of glycolysis. The recipe is pantry cooking.

Cooking with Love…and Terror

For Thompson, every cultural ecology comes with a characteristic good and evil, based on its limits of cognition and radius of care. For the feudal empire this pair manifests as (good) “obedience to law” and (evil) “revolt against authority.” For the industrial nation-state, it is (good) “understanding of doctrine” and (evil) “ecstatic escape or transcendence.”

The characteristic good of the planetary cultural ecology is “universal compassion.” Its evil is “collectivization through terror”. We don’t get one without the other:

Negation is a form of emphasis [and] what we can see from the cultural movements from one historical level to another is that evil plays a role in the process of manifestation…this evil is the signal of emergence to the next level of historical order.

Thinking in terms of either-or distinctions like “us and them”, instead of the inescapable co-occurrence of apparent opposites, has had a good run. It’s a great strategy if you’re lucky enough to live in a fairly stable world. If you don’t live long enough to see the consequences, you can take profits on the value innovation “creates” by off-shoring the costs illegible to your revenue model, or taking a loan on future soil and human health to increase “productivity” by turning rain forests into cattle farms.

But thriving in this new world — or through any similar transition between seemingly-stable sense-making regimes — means learning to see every strategy (including extractive capitalism and hyperindividuality) as appropriate in certain contexts, and developing the capacity to listen and respond to a rapidly-changing environment. If the study of complexity has taught us anything, it is that “more is different” and we need to hold multiple mutually-irreducible explanatory frameworks as we balance life at the human scale with new knowledge of, and responsibility to, the bigger picture.

The delicate maneuver we are called into here is recognizing what appears to us as evil and its acknowledging its place within a greater cosmos than we can perceive:

As every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

After a few years immersing myself in complex systems studies, I learned to phrase this in more formal scientific language:

When I imagine forward into futures, all of them but the worst are noisy places: highly interactive, densely woven, layered, and syntactical — and as in any web of chatter, lots of lossy transfers, errors, and the patterns of intelligences too bizarre or fast or vast for anyone to notice are registered as noise.

These two statements — “the future is disgusting” and “the future is noisy” — are equivalent. From our position in the present, time runs “downhill” along a gradient of entropy production. Living systems organize themselves to make use of this entropy wherever possible, but navigate with models trained on past environments. The evolution of intelligence is, at least in part, a story of how life learns to internalize the vast complexity of everything by making more efficient encodings. This works well enough, but Reality is always and forever in excess of our understanding: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” As we increase our own complexity, we add to the complexity of the region of It All we can perceive. And because cognition always operates within metabolic limits, we can never see it all, and therefore we cannot be sure — Miguel Fuentes proved this mathematically! — that “randomness” exists in any absolute sense. The best we can do is admit we either do or do not see a pattern. And as any pair of parent-child musical tastes will tell you, “noise” is in the eye of the beholder. So, while certainty is out of the question, it sure seems like Eric Wargo’s radical hypothesis is right, and noise is “merely” future information.

If evil is the annunciation of the next level of order, then we help midwife planetary culture by accepting there are battles to be fought but “victory” means adding a dimension to our world models — one from we can see both an existential conflict and the internal workings of a greater sensibility.

But it’s a greater sensibility that preserves and cultivates difference at the human and ecological levels. The evolution of multicellularity became the platform for differentiated tissues and provided new niches for the radiating diversification of microbes. Cities not only standardized human behavior but also fostered countless new forms of institutions, labor, and identity. And the planetary being we glimpse through The Overview Effect is not a vision of ultimate unity, but of the atmosphere as a porous container for diversity, and an efflorescence of life set against but held within the awesome and terrible darkness of space. As Thompson repeatedly stresses (as well as his close colleague and fellow member of Lindisfarne, the poet Wendell Berry), efforts to “oversee” this invariably arise from a failure to hold both views together and degrade into the kind of technocratic managerial thinking that produces the worst horrors of the planetary age:

What [Gregory] Bateson’s philosophy can teach us about out battles between good and evil is that ‘the difference that makes a difference’ is difference itself. Evil is the destruction of differences; good is the creation of ever new differences.

Evil works through collectivization, not individuation, with the unit crushed into the uniform, the culture crushed into a cult. This is the difference that makes a difference between…a tall-grass prairie and the animal concentration camp of a feed lot in Kansas.

Even trying to reproduce The Overview Effect at scale—the desire to turn one’s own experience of interbeing into a cultural movement that reshapes our world for the better—is just more technocracy in miniature:

Because the good works through the unique and not the uniform, it is not possible to standardize it through time. Each moment and historical situation is unique, and so the good repeated in an inappropriate situation can become evil.

In other words, becoming planetary starts at home. There is no universal protocol. For some it comes from seeing Earth from space. For some—as I’ll expand on in Part Three—it comes from living through an earthquake. One thing these two experiences have in common is a kind of breaking-open, a direct encounter with Reality that overwhelms us, tables our abstractions, breaks the walls between the self and world that we erect to manage or ignore our insecurity.

The bad news is, awakening evades intent—to paraphrase Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, enlightenment is an accident, but practice makes us accident-prone. The good news is, civilization is the practice of producing accidents—and at this point in history, there is no escape from them.

But standing on the cusp of transformation, catastrophe and eucatastrophe are indistinguishable. Some accidents—the origin of life, the flash of insight, or the moment that you meet your future spouse—are good. This is the stuff of art. Bob Ross found The Joy of Painting by reminding us that there are no mistakes in painting. I’m a painter who embraces challenging surprises.

Elsewhere in his work, Bill Thompson notes that in each new cultural evolution of consciousness “We slay with technology and save the victim with art.” I’m up at 1:00 A.M. on Earth Day asking myself, “How will we ‘save the victims’ of the modern self, civilization, and the planet? How will we make them ‘happy little accidents’?”

That’s next.

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This piece draws on decades of study and practice across a wide swath of science, art, and wisdom traditions. For a glimpse at my inspirations, explore my reading list and public record of inquiry-based dialogues.

I coach and consult teams and individuals navigating transformation and/or seeking to disrupt their own stuck thinking. Reach out if you’d like to work together.

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New live recording exclusively at Bandcamp (until Subvert.fm opens to the public) and offered freely as an ingredient for your own probes and conjurings.

Listening suggestions: candlelight, essential oils, and headphones or a speaker system with analog tubes (which may constitute a wider window for the ingress of otherworldly beings). Photos of dead loved ones. At least one other person to verify that whatever happened actually happened. Divinatory tools only at your own risk...

In January 2026, a portal opened between the ivory tower and the numinous unspeakable. For three days at IU Bloomington, scholars from around North America convened for a rare and precious opportunity to explore topics normally forbidden in a university setting: spirits, precognition, magick, and other affairs of the occult and transpersonal were all fair game. Organized by the hosts of Weird Studies Podcast, and , and IU’s Center for Possible Minds (directed by and Erica Cartmill), with special guests , , and Cat Hobaiter, and daytime colloquia (the first-ever face-to-face gathering of scholars!) organized by myself and , these glorious sessions felt like a watershed moment in the long arc of a decades-long struggle to ask some of the most important and difficult questions available to us in a unusually hospitable setting—and, perhaps, an opportunity to sow the seeds for a new research network of academics and para-academics committed to probing them with rigor and new institutional support.

The first night of the week featured an opening for Shannon Taggart’s gallery show Séance at IU’s McCalla School, where she displayed an extensive collection of her photographic experiments in cataloguing the practice and culture of spirit mediumship. I was honored with the invitation to perform a kind of séance of my own that evening, improvising over an hour of electroacoustic music on electric guitar, synthesizer, and hardware electronics.

But the weekend before, the Eastern United States were hit with an historic winter storm that delayed flights and buried Bloomington in several feet of snow. For a moment it looked like the whole thing was off—with my locally-sourced amplification suddenly no longer available, I was encouraged to not make the effort in order to spare myself the trouble of lugging crates of equipment across the country given the likelihood my flights would be delayed and I would miss the opening entirely. But I asked the Tarot what to do and got what felt like a clear signal to pare my kit down to the bare minimum in order to carry my own amp on the plane...so I did. And what followed was an appropriately raw, strange, and heady site-specific “channeling”—a lengthy invention informed by Shannon’s gorgeous and haunting photography and the charged atmosphere of the event.

Played mostly on the unbranded custom Stratocaster kit build that has accompanied me to highlight gigs at Burning Man, Arcosanti, and the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference, and edited slightly for time and electronic noise reduction, this set miraculously survived a week that—as is so often the case when people try to make recordings of their rites of high strangeness—mysteriously erased the recording of Weird Academia’s keynote panel discussion. Maybe it is because I left the unspeakable as such, and carried with me only the traces of the music it left in the room. But who can say?

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In his book Death by Astonishment, Gallimore argues DMT expands the brain’s “representational reach,” enabling perception of high-dimensional structures and apparent interaction with non-human “intelligent agents,” challenging standard accounts that treat the experience as mere hallucination, dreams, or Jungian archetypes. What new shapes will we—and our sciences—take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice “truly psychedelic” science? And what insights might we be able to bring “home” to the Flatland where we spend most of our waking lives?

Andrew has talked about this work in many, many other venues (his conversations with Jesse Michels and Danny Jones were especially good), so I wanted to carry the conversation into fresh terrain. Consider this episode the “200 level course”, or at least my best attempt ask a brilliant and provocative researcher some very complicated questions.

Over our two hours together we discussed neuroimaging findings that challenge the “dream” and “archetype” interpretations of DMT phenomenology, how criticality and noise in complex systems inform our understanding of the psychedelic experience, and the methodological problems inherent in studying ontologically shocking experiences while maintaining scientific rigor. We also probed the philosophical implications of DMT research—such as the possibility that consciousness is more fundamental than matter—and the possible connections between DMT hyperspace and life in an era of advanced technology. Andrew also gave some context on the Noonautics research non-profit its partnership with the newly-launched Eleusis facility, a carefully-crafted venue for extended-state DMT work. But perhaps my favorite part of this conversation was spent in speculation, about how science and even language might evolve to meet the challenges presented by the ineffable high-dimensional reality that DMT reveals to us.

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✨ Music: “Scalar Reconfigurations” & “City of Jewels”

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Chapters

00:00:00 Intro
00:08:15 Gallimore’s Origin Story
00:13:00 DMT as a Technology
00:20:01 “Entities” & Methodological Problems
00:29:06 World Models and EEG Clues
00:36:57 Why The Psychedelic State is Not a Dream
00:44:11 Noise, Criticality, and New Order
00:47:50 The Temperature-Noise Motif
00:52:47 Metabolism & Dimensionality
00:53:47 The Cortex & Representational Reach
00:57:44 Do We Need New Language to Study The DMT Realm?
01:00:45 Is There Only The Subject?
01:09:31 Psychedelic Science As Altered Observation
01:17:34 DMTx & Eleusis Plans
01:21:55 The Future of Transdimensional Research
01:31:44 A Call for Humility

Cited Works

Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEG
by Christopher Timmerman et al.

The Overfitted Brain
by Erik Hoel

The evolution of syntactic communication
by Martin Nowak et al.

The Transcension Hypothesis
by John Smart

Miguel Fuentes & Marco Buongiorno Nardelli on Music, Emergence, and Society
for Complexity Podcast

Ancient Extinction Events, Apocalyptic Cults, and DMT Entities
with Michael on The Danny Jones Podcast

Other Mentions

Stephen Szára
Nick Sand
Donald Hoffman
Karl Friston
Jordi Riba
David Chalmers
William Burroughs
John Lilly
Phil Dick
Terence McKenna
Robert Anton Wilson
John D. Barrow

Mentioned & Related Podcast Episodes

Originally written for at The Santa Fe Institute for a series of reflections on COVID and complexity in 2020, this piece became one of my most popular articles on Medium. I’m resurfacing it here and now because 1) It pairs well with my recent dialogue with philosopher Alexander Douglas on his book Against Identity (here); and 2) I’m citing it in the forthcoming follow-up to this critique of space tourism as a strategy for cultural transformation.

In keeping with the theme of “you are networks”, my networks—social, neuroanatomical, memetic, etc.—have evolved in the nearly six years since this was written, and therefore so has this apparition of “the author.” But not entirely. While a rewrite would spend more time on how the “we are networks” metaphor falls short—this flawed and partial quasi-manifesto still functions as a useful prompt.

For those of you who need to ground my wild-eyed claims in sober science, check the bibliography below for plenty of additional resources.

And if you enjoy this kind of weirdness and want more, please consider opting in:

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Two short riffs on the same key point:

“This is the epistemological crisis of the moment: There’s a lot of expertise around, but fewer tools than ever to distinguish it from everything else. Pure credentialism doesn’t always work. People have self-published a lot of terrible pieces on Medium, but some of the best early ones that explained stuff to laypeople were from tech guys.”
– Zeynep Tufekci, University of North Carolina sociologist

“In a pandemic, the strongest attractor of trust shouldn’t be confidence, but the recognition of one’s limits, the tendency to point at expertise beyond one’s own, and the willingness to work as part of a whole.”
— Ed Yong, The Atlantic

The systems we use to encode expertise tend to depend on relatively slow processes of collective computation and don’t typically work as measures of an individual’s actual extra-institutional networks or their ability to respond to novelty. Organizations and metrics tuned to slow and stable periods that favor efficiency and specialization tend to suppress generalists and improvisation.

In times of crisis, we want easy answers and that means looking for simple and certain ways of verifying the authority of our sources or of the people who present them. But it is precisely in these times that the relatively slow processes that produce credentials and confident claims can fail us, because the conditions of our environment move faster than those processes (peer review, degree programs in established fields of knowledge, electoral cycles, folk wisdom that encodes generations of firsthand experience). In these times we have to make the uncomfortable choice to listen to the marginal perspectives that are far enough from settled facts to draw connections others don’t; the very individuals and institutions that we can’t afford to listen to in periods of equilibrium that favor narrow specialization and economies of scale.

Paradoxically, this is its own cliché: the digital native kids know how to operate Jurassic Park’s computer system, not the expert consultants; only a child sees the emperor without his clothes; jesters were a staple of medieval courts for their ability to say things status-seeking nobles would never let themselves think. SFI itself is an example of this: the Institute could only change the world from outside of the disciplines and bureaucratic frameworks that prevent Big Academia from funding pioneering fundamental research. But that’s exactly what is needed in a world experiencing future shock, which seems to be why jazz emerged in response to the trauma of industrialized global warfare.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

“You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.”
– Liet-Kynes, Planetologist of Arrakis

Expertise is who and how you know. The pandemic makes this obvious.

The coronavirus crisis has exposed the networks out of which society is woven, but we’re not yet treating credibility as an emergent property of someone’s location in their networks.

Political authority, economic power, and academic prestige have always been more who you know than who you are — or, rather, as social science has made clear, who you are is who you know. A PhD does not encode your level of intelligence, your aptitude at making sense; it is a signifier of the social networks in which you’ve been embedded, and only as a proxy what you may have learned from them. When the media environment was printed books and journals, modern selves were the repositories of this information, and expertise had a different constitution than it does when the pace of publication climbs toward vertical and even experts can’t keep up with the required reading of their specialty. Now we live in a world where even the most hyper-specified domains are crowded rooms from which pour avalanches of new findings and science communication has as much to do with cutting through the noise as stating facts.

This matters when confronted with a novel situation for which prior models do not fit the evidence, when the state of the environment mutates more quickly than the collective computation of the primate hierarchies in which we are embedded can aggregate and crunch our local measurements. The U.S. Constitution was devised when letters could be carried by a horse and news was not updated by the hour. Universities evolved within an informational ecology that didn’t obsolete diplomas faster than they could be printed. The latencies built into systems that grew fat in stable periods make those legacy institutions and their pundits unreliable amidst a turbulent transition.

The result is not just a collapse of the consensus narrative, but of the significations by which we could recognize the people that society entrusts to tell it. Authority has not gone anywhere, but the problem of identifying whom to trust is now a meta-problem in its own way greater than the virus or its economic impacts. “Is there a doctor in the room?” is insufficient when the problem is distributed so widely, and its nature indeterminate and mutable enough, that no one has the training to perform a diagnosis.

When economists are calling for healthcare to be treated as a public good, and scientists are calling for misinformation to be treated as public health data…

When professionals half-joke that their job calls for someone who knows how to search the Internet to find somebody else’s walkthrough for the task at hand…

When education has to break the bones of standardized curricula and move to teaching students lifelong learning habits, how to be good infovores, their curiosity more crucial than some static and soon-overturned conclusive knowing…

When four-year election cycles seem as unfit for adjusting to the morphing circumstances as lifelong autocrats did to those that founded our democracies…

When social graphs disintegrate and signal an impending revolution, like the cells that form in pots of almost-boiling water…

When human resources stops asking who is the right person for the job description and starts asking who is the right person for the team…

We’re in a world where what the poet John Keats called “negative capability” is king: the skill of not congealing on an answer prematurely, the capacity to hedge one’s mental bets and keep one’s models open, fluid, and provisional. This looks a lot like having a diverse gut microbiome that can handle wide varieties of foods, or how a virus like SARS-CoV2 is less a fixed point in the genotypic space than a loose cloud of possibilities, evolvable enough to pivot to new hosts as they are offered. It’s why hyperconnected bank loan networks are vulnerable to cascading failures, but an archipelago can breed and harbor innovations that repopulate the mainland after mass extinctions. It’s why investors call for a diverse portfolio of assets and high-beta strategies are suited for a moment of extraordinary volatility. It’s why food webs that don’t depend entirely on one key species fare much better through catastrophe. It’s why sometimes stalemates lead to better answers than a fast agreement.

The coronavirus hits civilization in our softest unprotected spots: our just-in-time supply chains, the narrow margins of economies of scale, our atrophied communities and bottom-up civic social infrastructure, our ability as citizens to critically navigate competing narratives absorbed from sources we do not have time to adequately test because we are all to a head just skating on this growing volume of pertinent information.

But precisely for these reasons, we may have a chance to turn and face the strange. All of us grew up in a world too vast for anyone to understand. No single person comprehends a smartphone, or the economic networks in which it precipitated. Our necessary adaptations to the baffling complexity of postmodernity include a subtler and more nuanced grasp of context. It’s what Gestalt psychologists call “figure-ground reversal,” where you realize that the object you’re examining emerges only at the intersection of more objects, a moiré of ever-shifting, mutually-defining processes.

In common parlance, people talk about this in folk psychological terms like, “You are the combination of the five people you talk to most frequently.” If all of those five people share the same beliefs, it probably won’t matter in a crisis like the one we’re in if they’re all prestigious public intellectuals or they’re all plumbers.

Just like you can’t navigate a class-four cataract without good depth perception, one perspective isn’t going to cut it: news comes flying at us out of nowhere and the seemingly-stable evolutionary fitness landscape churns white with possibility. In equilibrium, homophilous social groupings, comfortable kinship with the people just like you, is cheap and easy; but in history-shaping punctuations in which tested maps are useless we’re advised to seek out people that the social climbers of mature societies regard as crazy. This is why jazz emerged out of the trauma of the First World War; sheet music for the symphony of modern progress was a joke, and multicellular improvisation reared its hydra heads to make new sense of a brave new world and its radical meaninglessness.

This is a test of our ability to find the others — not the ones who see the same world we’re habituated to perceive, but those for whom a different history yields usefully different insights. Find those with different priors. To do this, we will have to counter this pathology of our unconsciously constructed networks, systems made of presumptively unchanging atomistic human beings and solid axioms, with the deliberate assembly of novel networks made of humans-becoming and disposable hypotheses: a do-ocracy of those who can address the problems that we have now, whomever we may think they are.

It seems appropriate that we have calculus because of Isaac Newton’s “Annus Mirabilis,” his year of wondrous discovery while cooped up in quarantine as Cambridge shuttered through the Plague of London: “Who do we trust?” means not just measuring first-order properties of somebody’s CV, their intellectual velocity, but second-order properties of whom they’re capable of learning from, their intellectual acceleration. It means not only finding values for authority by integrating linear CVs, but over multiple dimensions of experience and how they interact — not only what a person learned in schools or former jobs, but in their lives outside of institutions and in ways that “key performance indicators” have yet failed to capture. It’s going to require stereoscopic thinking that can train both quantity and quality on a phenomenon, to see the optical illusion of identity as both a particle and wave, a noun and verb, a self and an adaptive web of algorithms.

What we will be when we emerge will only superficially resemble what we were. We will have found new ways to measure merit, hiring metrics that look more like contact tracing, peer review by tenure-less communities collaborating to confirm impermanent and open-ended knowledge within tolerable margins of uncertainty. We will have jettisoned the burdensome assumptions suited for a world of solid ground and fly small, fast, and light with less to lose.

You will not have the privilege of knowing who you are or whether to believe the news with total confidence, but that will save your life.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
– Eric Hoffer

“Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Cited Resources:

• Raissa D’Souza on the inhibition of innovation by incumbency.

• Vinay Prasad & Jeffrey S. Flier on embracing heterodoxy.

• Nick Zych on generalists in times of rapid change.

• David Krakauer on how the pandemic has exposed the networks of civilization.

• Matthew Jackson on network centrality as social opportunity.

• Kirell Benzi on time and attention constraints with science communication.

• Jessica Flack on primate hierarchies as encoded environmental information.

• Anthony Eagan on the US Constitution’s balance of top-down and bottom-up.

• R. Maria del-Rio Chanona et al. on the economic impacts of COVID-19.

• Luu Hoang Doc & Jürgen Jost on using simple models when you only have bad data.

• Dan Mendelson on healthcare as a public good.

• Laurent Hébert-Dufresne & Vicky Yang on misinformation as public health data.

• Carrie Cowan on the future of education.

• Miguel Fuentes on network fragmentation as a sign of impending social crisis.

• Scott E. Page on the importance of diversity in teams and hiring for collaboration skills.

• Nicole Creanza on the power of cultural archipelagos in technological innovation.

• Santiago Elena on rapid viral mutation and the viral quasi-species at the edge of chaos.

• David Krakauer on the mountain, monastery, and metropolis in scientific discovery.

• Doug Erwin on mass extinctions.

• Bill Miller on high-beta investment strategies in a time of crisis.

• Jennifer Dunne on trophic network connectivity and ecological robustness.

• Albert Kao and the collective decision-making benefits of stalemates.

• Jessica Green on verifying product authenticity with the use of microbiome forensics.

• W. Brian Arthur on narrow margins in economies of scale.

• Sam Bowles & Wendy Carlin on restoring civil society & meso-scale support networks.

• Rajiv Sethi on our dangerous over-reliance on stereotypes due to temporal limitations.

• David Krakauer on creativity as a response to catastrophe.

• Stephanie Forrest on figure-ground reversal in cybersecurity and contact tracing.

• Manfred Laublichler on disruptions to evolutionary fitness landscapes.

• Mirta Galesic & Henrik Olsson on homophily and socially motivated cognition.

• Melanie Mitchell on the failure of analogies to perfectly capture novel phenomena.

• Chris Kempes on multicellularity as a way of preventing error catastrophes in cell repro.

• Marc Santolini on the emergence of new structures of global collective intelligence.

• David Wolpert on Bayesian priors & how they figure into estimating COVID probabilities.

• Simon DeDeo on questioning our cognitive & social norms when confronted by novelty.

• Mirta Galesic on deliberate aisle-crossing for the formation of less-biased estimates.

• David Krakauer on optical illusion & paradox resolved by multimethodological thinking.

• Caroline Buckee on contact tracing.

• David Kinney on uncertainty and value judgments in the scientific advisement of policy.

• David Krakauer on jettisoning burdensome assumptions.

• Andrew Dobson on the metabolism of bats as an adaptation to flight.

Today’s very overdue conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design (Website | LinkedIn), asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory “living labs” for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together?

Nate is amazing. An AI Ethicist for Services Australia, he’s worked with major organizations including Microsoft, Autodesk, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Telus, Open Banking, and the Autralian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. He is the Philosopher in Residence at CoLabs Australia, a Guest Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, led Ethics in Action at The RSA, works as a Reviewer for IEEE’s Transactions on Technology and Society, and co-owns the artist collective Nightfall Worldwide.

“Certainly one of the world’s leading figures on ethics in practical applications.”
— Fionn Delahunty, NLP Lab at University of Galway

As we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems. Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species flourishes or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs — beings that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other “egregores” — the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate at scale and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our thoughts and actions — learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside (or in the proverbial guts of) newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.

In other words, the “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing.

If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it.

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✨ Become a member for access to our study group and community calls, and for those recordings — including the excellent raps we had recently on Alexander Douglas and Wendell Berry.

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✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

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Referenced & Related

What’s trust got to do with it?
Nathan Kinch

Three reasons why AI ethics is struggling
Nathan Kinch

If ‘Trust is a must’ for AI governance — here are 3 things regulators should do
Hilary Sutcliffe

Bluesky and enshittification
Cory Doctorow

Environmentally Mediated Social Dilemmas
Sylvie Estrela et al.

FLD On Navigating Complexity in Education: A Conversation with Dave Snowden
Tim Logan

The corporate cultivation of digital resignation
Nora Draper & Joseph Turow

William Gibson
John Vervaeke
Rajiv Sethi
Mat Mytka
Nadia Lee
Barronness Onora O’Neill

Our two most recent study group discussions were absolute bangers.

Both are now available below this post’s paywall members:

Here’s some context:

🎭 On Alexander Douglas’ Against Identity

Has selfhood outlived its usefulness?

The first, on one of my favorite reads of 2025, drew a curve through Taoist philosophy to Baruch Spinoza to René Girard in order to ask deep questions about selfhood in the age of social media and AI. Douglas joined us for a lively exchange that reached far beyond the pages of his book:

• We discussed research critiquing reinforcement learning via intrinsic causal learning, novelty search, and the link between world models and agency, and probed the potential of psychedelics as disrupting perceptual “placeholders.”

• We framed the history of civilization in terms of successive collapsing “identity regimes” (sincerity/roles, authenticity/inner self, and today’s profile-based identities) in which identity destabilizes as its technologies succeed, and contrasted this with the principle of Wu Wei and the 21st Century’s demand for ongoing transformation.

• We touched on Markov blankets as relational, enacted boundaries rather than fixed essences, and how social legibility pressures lead to evolutionary coordination mechanisms that have become maladaptive in the Digital Era.

• And we riffed on The Hermit, process philosophy, relational self-body mapping, how new media ecologies bury and surface different worlds, and why identity conflict characterizes our social lives in spite of being so very stupid. And more.

All of us left with new perspectives. It was incredibly rich.

🌾 On Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words

What does it mean to live in right relationship with our home, with technology, and with one another?

The second, a series of reflections and riffs on poet-farmer Berry’s excellent 1980 essay collection, examined the relationship between land, community, language, and technology in which I compared and contrasted his critiques of industrial modernity with the positions of two other major influences: Indigenous author and scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, and legendary protopian techno-enthusiast Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation (who was, alongside Berry, a fellow member of the Lindisfarne Association).

Drawing on Berry’s essays as well as his notorious 1988 Harper’s Magazine article on why he refuses to use computers, we looked at how Berry’s tool-ethics—repairability, local production, non-disruption—depart and converge with Yunkaporta’s fraught relationship with the machine and Brand’s very different vision for custodial long-term thinking.

Berry doesn’t mince the words he stands by when it comes to how modern “internal accounting” hides vast externalities (industrial dairy, nuclear risk)—and we looked at how his argument informs present-day AI debates, contrasting Yudkowsky-style existential risk abstraction with proposals for community stewardship and maintenance.

We wrestled with what it means to live by Berry’s principles in a world that powerfully constrains our choices: the outlines of a planetary culture grounded in place, the extractive material and energy demands of AI, how to resolve “work-life” tensions, and whether scale necessarily means dislocation, never straying far from Berry’s central question: How appropriate a tool is to work, other needs, and the health of the household of all creatures?

Some additional topics:

• Poetry, Protest, and Public Voice
• Nonduality, Embodiment, and Living Paradox
• Pace Layers and Society’s Internal Contradictions
• Ivan Illich and Ursula Franklin on “Convivial Tools”
• “Stickers” vs. “Boomers” & The Commitment to “Here”

This one ended up being more of a prompted mind-jazz session than a regular book club, but it encapsulates so many of the big ideas of this project—and carries them into some awesome new places I haven’t seen explored with Berry’s work— that I’m glad to share this kernel of what I hope will be many more pieces to come!

Enjoy both conversations below—we welcome your own reflections in the Discord server, and hope you’ll join us for our next community call!

Poll coming soon for our next study group topic and timing...

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His ideas are accessible and universally relevant enough that you can join this first conversation even if you haven’t read the book. I’m happy for this to serve as a “conversion funnel” and hopefully draw some more people into Berry and why he matters. So come as you are…I’ll be glad to see you in there, in whatever condition.

Link to the call below the paywall for subscribers:

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I come, in conclusion, to the difference between “projecting” the future and making a promise. The “projecting” of “futurologists” uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future. If the promise is serious enough, one is brought to it by love, and in awe and fear. Fear, awe, and love bind us to no selfish aims, but to each other. And they enforce a speech more exact, more clarifying, and more binding than any speech that can be used to sell or advocate some “future.” For when we promise in love and awe and fear there is a certain kind of mobility that we give up. We give up the romanticism of progress, that is always shifting its terms to fit its occasions. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.

— Wendell Berry, Standing by Words

This Sunday at 11 am Mountain, I’m sitting with patrons to explore two essays by poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry. I hope you’ll join us. (Members, check your email tomorrow, or the Discord server now, for details on that call.)

Below, I offer a somewhat-rushed short riff on why.

If you don’t have time to read the essays before Sunday, here’s a marvelous discussion with Berry from the CBC series “How To Think About Science” that will suffice to prime you. Read the rest at your own leisure. You’ll be glad you did.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find some of my favorite excerpts from the essays we’ll discuss. Feel free to skip on down and soak them up immediately, and then double back to click the links.

Some Context

At first glance, Berry might seem like an unusual focal point for a project that spends so much time making sense of how to live alongside precisely the kind of advanced computer technologies he himself has stubbornly rejected. In 2026, he still refuses to use email, and the book I want to talk about goes on at length about the harms inflicted on both land and soul by…tractors. But Humans On The Loop is, at its core, about what to do when we realize the built environment is every bit as wild and mysterious as the world that modernity believes technology could conquer. We walk a tightrope here between the understanding that abstraction has its place and recognizing that abstraction ends in placelessness—that our models never capture or control the full dimensionality of life, and in favoring abstraction and specialization over the humility of place-based knowledge, we externalize the costs of progress. But externalizing them does not make them go away. Likewise, sweeping pro- and anti-tech positions both fail the wisdom test by violently reducing life’s complexity and thus preventing

Berry, whom I’d like to note was part of William Irwin Thompson’s Lindisfarne Association and thus played a huge part in the conversations that shaped how I think about the future, does a better job than almost anyone of helping ground discussions of technology and science in The Real. In his 1983 collection Standing by Words (available for purchase at Bookshop.org and digital library loan at Archive.org), he scathingly critiques the euphemistic risk-assessment language of The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the reduction of ecosystem health into economic growth curves by Big Agriculture, and the adulto-lescent romantic individualism of poets like Percy Shelley. But he never strikes me as a “Luddite” in the colloquial sense of the term—not someone who rejects technology as a reflex. Berry is a deeply learned scholar with a profound insight into systems of systems that enables him to recognize the tradeoffs so many other people never even notice.

In C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, Nguyen cites historian of science Lorraine Daston’s taxonomy of decision-making systems and their changes over time as society became increasingly regulated by industrial standardization. Principles require personal judgment and sensitivity to subtle fluctuations in inputs, understanding how to move through a large possibility-space. Models (like “What Would Jesus Do?) give us rules to follow based on internalizing other people’s stories and behavior. Algorithms, however, strip the context of principle- or model-based decision-making in favor of mechanical rules that can be strictly replicated by anyone, regardless of expertise, under identical conditions. Berry’s refusal to use computers isn’t “a matter of principle” in the way people so often make what are actually mechanical judgments about what constitutes a machine: automatically reject if, as computing pioneer Alan Kay puts it, the object in question is “Anything that was invented after you were born.” The irony here is that this is algorithmic thinking. But Berry’s discernment is, in Daston’s sense of the word, principled; it comes from close living and attunement to a cosmos of nested open systems, concern for propriety, context:

How appropriate is the tool to the work, the work to the need, the need to other needs and the needs of others, and to the health of the household or community of all creatures?

Reading his work is an experience similar to those induced by Tyson Yunkaporta’s Right Story, Wrong Story, except that this Indigenous wisdom is coming from within (broadly speaking) my own society and ethnic group. Both call for a return to place and community, right speech and action in alignment with The Law of The Land, a reawakening to “premodern” cosmology in which humans exist embedded in and not on top of a more-than-human order. But Yunkaporta is tormented in a way I find uncomfortably familiar, always grappling with how to live with Right Story amidst Wrong Story, to honor his commitments to clan and custodial lifeway from within the colonizer’s world that severed his people from their ancestral land. Berry, by contrast, demonstrates no such inner turmoil. Yes, his family lose their farm due to the depredations of James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Company, a formative rupture you feel viscerally in his lifelong defense of small farms. And yet he makes none of the effort Yunkaporta does, or I do, to make peace with The Big Machine.

If I were more cynical, I’d say his generation had the privilege of opting out. But that isn’t fair, or right. His family made a very hard decision not to try and “plow their way out of debt” and dedicate themselves to soil conservation, because they knew the house would always win. And that decision to play the infinite game of land stewardship instead of the finite game of market competition was and is an act of love. As he puts it in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture:

My effort to make sense of this memory and its encompassing history has depended on a pair of terms used by my teacher, Wallace Stegner…thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” “Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.

Stickers…are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.

Berry isn’t free from the inescapable tensions I read more explicitly in Yunkaporta, or feel in my own life and the lives of those around me. He just seems to have embraced them. So ultimately, even though I am the sort of person who interrogates the boundary that Berry draws between “organic” and “mechanical”, I identify with him as someone who sees salvation in “sticking” with insoluble problems. If, as he puts it in the final essay of Standing by Words, living on the land is like getting married—a relationship that starts in the romantic promise of what could be and matures into a humbling encounter with what is—then I am married to the generational challenges I share with Yunkaporta, and in Berry’s writing I find hope that living with these challenges, instead of trying to solve them, is the best (and, really, only) path.

Part of this path is in recognizing that specialization may feel like a practical necessity, but the expertise that it enshrines leads us out of touch with the web of interbeing within which even specialist language arises and upon which saying or doing anything meaningful depends.

From the opening essay in this collection, on “The Specialization of Poetry”:

The primary aspect of specialization is practical; the specialist withdraws from responsibility for everything not comprehended by his specialty. Each specialization, Ransom says, “has had to resist the insidious charms of aesthetic experience before its own perfection could arise.” But this is a perfection of a kind never before contemplated in human history—a perfection that depends upon the abandonment of all the old ideals of harmony, symmetry, balance, order, in favor of the singular totalitarian ideal of control, which is typically achieved by leaving out or discounting or destroying whatever is not subject to control. Our achievement of this sort of control over certain particles of the Creation has given rise to the supposition that such control is possible on a much grander scale, which would permit us to bring nature and history into line with our intentions. [W]e are every day surrounded by more evidence of its futility. Human control on any grand scale is impossible, and the technological and political controls that are possible are frequently the opposite of order; any viable human order must come to terms with the impossibility of absolute control.

Responsible speech and action requires even greater discipline than we get within “the disciplines”—or at least, in the modern sense that they have degenerated to professions, and then careers—a dedication to seeing relationships as fundamental:

I find impossible to believe that song can come from, or lead to, Isolation. If a poet says, "I vnto my selfe alone will sing," as Spenser does at the beginning of his "Epithalamion," he can only mean that he does so in anticipation of accompaniment or at least of company. A poet who felt assured that he sang to himself alone would soon find his song lapsing diffidently into a "not overly excited discourse" on the subject of isolation, guilt, suf-fering, death, and oblivion-the self-exploiting autobiography of disconnected sensibility.

But in giving up the quest for power-over, we recover from the alienation of the modern myth that we are individual. From the titular essay in this collection:

If one wishes to promote the life of language, one must promote the life of the community—a discipline many times more trying, difficult, and long than that of linguistics, but having at least the virtue of hopefulness. It escapes the despair always implicit in specializations: the cultivation of discrete parts without respect on responsibility for the whole.

In giving up the illusion of absolute knowledge or control, we are finally free to act. But we are also finally able to really think. Modern scientific knowledge is provisional and insists on separating “theory” from “practice.” Although philosophers of science Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering argue with authority that this is nonsense, the myth persists because believing it releases theorists from the responsibility of saying anything conclusive and “men of action” from having to consider the consequences of their actions. Likewise, modern philosophy and art both reject utility—and Berry spends much of this book criticizing this behavior as a dereliction of duty:

I do not believe that it is possible to act on the basis of a “tentative” or “provisional” conclusion. We may know that we are forming a conclusion on the basis of provisional or insufficient knowledge—that is a part of what we understand as the tragedy of our condition. But we must act, nevertheless…

…and in acknowledging the fundamentally uncertain while taking back responsibility for action, we can begin to reconnect the disciplines, re-integrate the “internal accounting” of cost and benefit with human enterprise with the “external accounting” of cost and benefit to our entire biosphere:

Neither the known truth nor the mystery is internal to any system. And here, however paradoxical it may seem, we begin to see a possibility of reliable accounting and of responsible behavior. The appropriateness of words or deeds can be determined only in reference to the whole “household” in which they occur. But this whole, as such, cannot enter into the accounting. (If it could, then the only necessary language would be mathematics, and the only necessary discipline would be military.) It can only come in as mystery: a factor of X which stands not for the unknown but the unknowable. This is an X that cannot be solved—which may be thought a disadvantage by some; its advantage is that, once it has been let into the account, it cannot easily be ignored. You cannot leave anything out of mystery, because by definition everything is always in it.

By honoring the mystery we put human action back in its right place in the living world—not with an all-engulfing holism but with humility:

This does not mean that a reliable account includes the whole system of systems, for no account can do that. It does mean that the account is made in precise reference to the system of systems—which is another way of saying that it is made in respect for it. Without this respect for the larger structures, the accounting shrinks into the confines of some smaller structure and becomes specialized, partial, and destructive.

It is this sort of external accounting that deals with connections and thus inevitably raises the issue of quality. Which, I take it, is always the same as the issue of propriety…

Which brings us again to the heart of Berry’s work, and the heart of this project’s inquiry. If we are to meet power with wisdom, we have to ask about the quality of the work we seek to accomplish with awesomely powerful tools. We need to restore our values while living in a world that has restricted our vision to matters of value.

The following passage is worth quoting twice:

How appropriate is the tool to the work, the work to the need, the need to other needs and the needs of others, and to the health of the household or community of all creatures?

In other words, this nonagenarian poet-farmer makes for surprisingly perfect reading on the question of right living in “The Age of AI.” What, if anything, does a planet-scale automated economy look and feel like if it is capable of “sticking” with these questions? Mustn’t any Artificial Super-Intelligence worth its name be at least as principled as Berry, at least as nuanced in its reflections on propriety?

I can’t do justice to the subtlety and erudition of his work—especially while I’m trying to walk my talk and not ignore my children on a Friday night—so let me just share some more great passages, below. Berry’s words have dirt under their fingernails. They elevate the philosophical discussions I’m so fond of—why culture is the lifeblood of economy, how Reality exists in excess of all language, why optimization is a false god, and so on—to the realm of political action, and transdisciplinary exploration to an act of loving service.

Again, I hope you’ll join us to discuss his work this Sunday. We’ll record it if you can’t be there…and either way, you can expect more Berry on this channel in the months and years to come. Consider this an IOU.

PS — These essays pair extremely well with philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, which he and I will talk about on the podcast very soon.

I warmly invite you to stick around for that.

Excerpts from “The Specialization of Poetry”

What we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical—a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.

What is needed is work of durable value; the time or age of it matters only after the value has been established.

In itself, protest implies no discipline and no correction… In his protest, the contemporary poet is speaking publicly, but not as a spokesman; he is only one outraged citizen speaking at other citizens who do not know him, whom he does not know, and with whom he does not sympathize.

Perhaps the time has come to say that there is, in reality, no such choice as Yeats’s “Perfection of the life, or of the work.” The division implied by this proposed choice is not only destructive, it is based upon a shallow understanding of the relation between work and life. The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however, they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either, or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary. One would like, one longs in fact, to be perfect family man and a perfect workman. And one suffers from the inevitable conflicts. But whatever one does, one is not going to be perfect at either, and it is better to suffer the imperfection of both than to gamble the total failure of one against an illusory hope of perfection in the other. The real values of art and life are perhaps best defined and felt in the tension between them. The effort to perfect work rises out of, and communes with and in turn informs, the effort to perfect life, as Yeats himself knew and as other poems of his testify. The use of life to perfect work is an evil of the specialized intellect. It makes of the most humane of disciplines an exploitive industry.

Excerpts from “Standing by Words”

I will use a pair of economic concepts: internal accounting, which considers costs and benefits in reference only to the interest of the money-making enterprise itself; and external accounting, which considers the costs and benefits to the “larger community.” By altering the application of these terms a little, any statement may be said to account well or poorly for what is going on inside the speaker, or outside him, or both.

It will be found, I believe, that the accounting will be poor—incomprehensible or unreliable—if it attempts to be purely internal or purely external. One of the primary obligations of language is to connect and balance the two kinds of accounting.

There can be little doubt, I think, that any accounting that is purely internal will be incomprehensible. If the connection between inward and outward is broken—if, for instance, the experience of a single human does not resonate within the common experience of humanity—then language fails. In The Family Reunion, Harry says: “I talk in general terms/Because the particular has no language.” But he speaks, too, in despair, having no hope that his general terms can communicate the particular burden of his experience. We readily identify this loneliness of personal experience as “modern.” Many poems of our century have this loneliness, this failure of speech, as a subject; many more exhibit it as a symptom.

The notion that external accounting can be accomplished by “objectivity” is an illusion. Apparently the only way to free the accounting of what is internal to people, or subjective, is to make it internal to (that is subject to) some other entity or structure just as limiting, or more so—as the commissioners attempted to deal with a possible public catastrophe in terms either of nuclear technology or of public relations. The only thing really externalized by such accounting is a bad result that one does not wish to pay for.

To be bound within the confines of either the internal or the external way of accounting is to be diseased. To hold the two in balance is to validate both kinds, and to have health. I am not using these terms “disease” and “health” according to any clinical definitions, but am speaking simply from my own observation that when my awareness of how I feel overpowers my awareness of where I am and who is there with me, I am sick, diseased. This can be appropriately extended to say that if what I think obscures my sense of whereabouts and company, I am diseased. And the converse is also true: I am diseased if I become so aware of my surroundings that my own inward life is obscured, as if I should so fix upon the value of some mineral in the ground as to forget that the world is God’s work and my home.

So long as the smaller systems are enclosed within the larger, and so long as all are connected by complex patterns of interdependency, as we know they are, then whatever affects one system will affect the others.

It seems that this system of systems is safe so long as each system is controlled by the next larger one. If at any point the hierarchy is reversed, and the smaller begins to control the larger, then the destruction of the entire system of systems begins. This system of systems is perhaps an updated, ecological version of the Great Chain of Being. That is, it may bring us back to a hierarchical structure not too different from the one that underlies Paradise Lost—a theory of the form of Creation which is at the same time a moral form, and which is violated by the “disobedience” or hubris of attempting to rise and take power above one’s proper place.

But the sketch I have made of the system of systems is much too crude, for the connections between systems, insofar as this is a human structure, are not “given” or unconscious or automatic, but involve disciplines. Persons are joined to families, families to communities, etc., by disciplines that must be deliberately made, remembered, taught, learned, and practiced.

The system of systems begins to disintegrate when the hierarchy is reversed because that begins the disintegration of the connecting disciplines. Disciplines, typically, degenerate into professions, professions into careers.

PS — If you’re new here or have been absorbed in other matters, here are some related pieces that might shake your thinking loose:

This week go deep with Alex Komoroske, CEO and co-founder of Common Tools, about his vision for a more saner, more intentional tech paradigm in which the historical contingencies that gave us the digital world we have today have been fundamentally reworked.

The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. Alex speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld.

Some of the waypoints in our conversation include: confidential compute, emergent ontologies, where we want friction, the tyranny of the marginal users, the rise of the generalist, the importance of context ownership, and software ephemerality.

We can’t take a reasonable principled stance on the promises and perils of AI without considering the vast unexplored possibility space that Alex opens in this conversation. I’m grateful that I get to share it with you and help light the way for promising alternatives to what many of us have come to accept as “the way things are.”

Links to extensive additional reading and listening below!

✨ If you enjoy this podcast, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting wherever you listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

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✨ Browse and buy all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org

✨ Contact me with inquiries or hire me as a consultant

Referenced & Related

• The FLUX Collective (team project w/ several people mentioned in this episode)
• Bits and Bobs (Alex’s long-running archive of weekly notes)
• Common Ground (Alex’s dialogues w/ Aishwarya Khanduja of The Analogue Group)
• The Iterative Adjacent Possible (Alex on Medium)
• The Runaway Engine of Society (Alex on Medium)
• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice (podcast w/ Lenny Rachitsky)
• Media and Machines by Anu Atluru at Working Theorys
• Accelerando & Glasshouse & Halting State (three books) by Charles Stross
• The Transparent Society by David Brin
• The evolution of Covert Signaling by Paul Smaldino
• Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul by Stefani Crabtree et al.
• The Tyranny of the Marginal User by Ivan Vendrov
• 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly
• Blindsight & Echopraxia (two books) by Peter Watts
• The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider & Bob Taylor
• Silicon Valley’s quest to remove friction from our lives by Rohit Krishnan
• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction by Kyla Scanlon
• Bernhard Seefeld
• Situated Software by Clay Shirky
• Das Rad (animated short)
• Geoffrey West
• Mark Pesce
• Fred Turner
• Robert David Steele

Share Humans On The Loop

The world is getting weirder every day… We need weirdness specialists. Maybe the best guy for the job is my friend, the brilliant “metashaman” (and possible octopus) Layman Pascal.

In his own words, Layman “used to be a Canadian meditation teacher, yoga instructor & philosopher of Integral Metatheory but he’s feeling much better now.” He leads the Metamodern Spirituality Labs, hosts The Integral Stage, Soulmakers+, and (forthcoming) Untegral Stage podcasts, and provides unique online courses. He is also a founding member of several think tanks in the developmental psychology and spirituality space, senior editor of Emerge online & is allied to numerous institutes across the field. In addition to many journal and anthology articles, he is the author of Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds, Sex, Death & the Occult, as well as an upcoming book about Nietzsche.

Layman is known for his philosophical work on the metaphysics of adjacency, complex nonduality, coaxial developmental stage theories, sacred naturalism, archaic futurism, embodied spirituality & the “integration-surplus model of religion and spirituality” for a post-postmodern civilization facing numerous accelerating and converging crises.

In this conversation we cover a lot of ground in a very short time, including: the nature of futurity and how humankind’s relationship to the future is changing; how to surf intense peculiarity'; the abiding sociocultural role of “shamanoid” personalities and other useful weirdos; “wartime” mobilization for The Big Us; and other deep and delightful subjects. It’s my honor to finally decant this year-old recording, now more pertinent than ever…

✨ If you enjoy this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider to help this work (and you!) find new allies: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts • Etc.

✨ Our next Humans On The Loop book club discussion is for Wendell Berry’s Standing by Words on Sunday February 15th! Become a member to participate in these calls, exclusive Discord members channels, and our monthly hangouts.

✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

More links

• Explore the archives for nine years of mind-expanding conversations
• Browse (nearly!) all of the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
•Dig into the Humans On The Loop pitch deck
• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
• Contact me if you have burning questions!

Cited pieces by Layman

• The Soul of AI w/ Lee Chazen (YouTube)
• The MetaModern Business Bureau (MMBB) (Substack)
• Apocalyptarians (Substack)
• The Society of Partial Deterritorialization (Substack)
• The Two-Handed Demons (Substack)

Cited pieces by others

• Wendell Berry - Standing by Words
• Hakim Bey - Temporary Autonomous Zone
• Steven Johnson - The Revenge of the Humanities
• Carol Dweck - Mindset
• William James - On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake

Mentioned people with dialogues on my show

• Jim Rutt (181)
• William Irwin Thompson (42, 43)
• Erik Davis (99, 132, 140)
• Timothy Morton (223)

Mentioned people without dialogues on my show

• Terence McKenna (although I’ve interviewed Terence’s brilliant close friends Ken Adams and Bruce Damer multiple times; check the archives for episodes 4, 109, 209)
• Alexander Bard
• Andrew Huberman
• Harry S. Truman
• Jacques Lacan
• H.P. Lovecraft
• Doug Irwin
• Nassim Taleb
• Friedrich Nietzsche

This is the first part of a two-part article on 1) why space tourism isn’t working as advertised and 2) what it will actually take for humankind to develop a planetary perspective. It’s more “screed” than “carefully fashioned essay” so if you want one of those, go check out my debut feature at Aeon Magazine for something even crazier and more audacious. I’m trying to get podcasts back on a regular schedule, but I’m also sitting on half a dozen other unfinished essays, helping boot up a new society for sane AI discourse and a new tech-enabled services consultancy, and being a present father and husband. So thank you for your patience!

Subscribe for Part Two soon, plus a ton of excellent upcoming podcast guests:

Subscribe now

And become a member for every unreleased episode, plus new ones as soon as they’re recorded, and to join in on our wonderful monthly hangouts.

Why This, Why Now?

It’s time to offer what I hope is a usefully bigger frame for the controversial all-female Blue Origin spaceflight. I know talking about NS31 might seem a bit stale as far as the news cycle is concerned, but:

1. Inequality is a generation-defining hot topic right now and if quantitative historian Peter Turchin is right (and every indication suggests he is), it will remain so for years to come. Read “The Double Helix of Inequality and Well-Being” later for some useful framing. I also strongly recommend Michael Flynn’s “An Introduction to Cliology”, the afterword to his 1990 novel In The Country of the Blind, which was my introduction to the discipline of quantitative history and utterly blew my mind when I first read it.

2. William Irwin Thompson claims the process of planetization started in 1945 and has at least a century-long arc. The promise and ethical complexities of space tourism are developing stories and we have a very long way to go. Whether or not you grew up thinking you’d be kicking it in space by now, whether or not you even want an extraplanetary future, who goes into space and why will be the center of debate for years to come.

But let’s start where we are, in the superposition of what is and what could be: looking up from the only planet we have ever known, while also looking down from orbit.

To Arrive Where We Started

This piece was inspired by three perspectives on the issue from members of the “space community” — professional believers that space is “for all humankind” (see also the marvelous Tanya Harrison in Future Fossils 138) — smart and thoughtful people with a very long horizon. As grist for thinking out loud about the benefits of space tourism, Exhibit A is astrobiologist Graham Lau’s comment on Facebook (emphases mine):

I get that some people are angry about NS31 and the women who just went to space through Blue Origin. Lots of people want to make fun of it, and some have taken to commentary and jokes about the women who were on the mission.

For instance, I've seen these pics going around suggesting some absurdity for Katy Perry to kiss the ground after her adventure. The pics appear to be suggesting that the short duration of the flight means that maybe she had no place doing that. As though an experience is less valuable because it is short lived.

Sure, there are issues with the current realm of space tourism and human space exploration, especially as it's become associated with the wealth of the billionaires funding these private missions. But we don't really need gatekeepers to tell people how they should experience awe and wonder—even if the people having the experience are celebrities or their experiences were fleeting.

If anything, I'd hope of all of you who've shared such jokes to have a chance to have such an experience yourself.

Revel in a sunset, see your own child being born, climb a mountain, read a book that makes you cry, get the chance to say goodbye to a loved one on their death bed, dance like no one is watching. All of these things can be experienced in awe and wonder—even if others might want to make fun of you for how you experience it.

The point here — that wonder is an unalloyed good — is itself up for debate. Years ago I watched a conversation between Erik Davis, a personal hero and inspiration, and “Shots of Awe” influencer Jason Silva in which Jason confessed he couldn’t actually feel the awe he proselytizes on YouTube by just sitting under a tree. He needs to be overwhelmed by the technological sublime — jet engines, IMAX theaters, speculation on the defeat of death with bio-engineering and brain uploading — and can’t get it, to borrow from psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna, “on the natch”. Jason’s version of “experiencing awe in nature” is going for a walk in the park with a necromantic generative AI simulacrum of McKenna and sharing it on TikTok. Can it get any more ironic than having a “conversation” with a language model on a live stream about dis-intermediating direct experience by dropping the linguistic overlay?

A truly “planetary” view doesn’t strictly require us to see the planet from space to “get it”. Understanding our embeddedness in ecological context, our fragility and unity, starts in the context. And the joke is on you if it takes getting thousands of miles away to realize you have never really left. But then of course, there’s the story of Siddhartha Gautama, who left his wife and child to seek enlightenment and on attaining it returned to his justifiably angry spouse. “Did you really have to leave to find your awakening?” “Well…no.” Awakening is available everywhere. But he did, and it is what it is. Maybe there are less expensive ways of finding our way home, but then again the more deeply embedded you are in the big machine, the more work it takes to extract yourself and see you have to de- and re-territorialize yourself.

Famous travel writer Rolf Potts changed my life with his book Vagabonding: The Uncommon Art of Long-Term World Travel, in which he spends the last chapter on what might be the real point of “getting out”: coming home and seeing everything you took for granted, and encountering it all as if an alien within your native culture and environment. This transformation is a core trope in the hero’s journey and appears in one of the most common refrains in space science discourse:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (1943)

But it’s harder to justify space tourism if we don’t literalize exploration as a voyage over geographic distance. Near-death experiences, psychedelics, and other interruptions to the linguistic overlay of familiarity consistently reveal a holographic world in which these revelations are abundantly on offer anywhere in space, and travel is what happens in the mind.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” Lines 1–4 (1803)

Holding Eliot and Blake together, we might find better ways to engineer “the Overview Effect” with fewer externalities. Where can we look for inspiration?

Part of the problem here is in the concept of “space tourism” itself. It’s one thing to get your passport stamped and come home with a photo roll of castle selfies, and another far more rare and precious thing to let the journey do its work on you. You can spend your life in trains or planes, in hostels or resorts, without ever truly interacting with the otherness of foreign cultures and ecosystems. Only in unguarded personal encounters with the unfamiliar, making space for other ways of being, are we transformed. Biologist David Krakauer captures the difference between transformative travel and tourism in a more fundamental statement about the evolution of intelligence—as a tension between adaptation and niche construction—when he says, “You can make yourself smarter or you can make your environment dumber.” Going into space with the intent to bring home an experience, however wondrous, is on the order of transforming Places People Live (Helsinki, Venice, Barcelona, Santa Fe) into subservient tourist economies: a settler strategy, lifestyle consumerism that makes few real demands on travelers who carry their convenience on their backs but exports adaptive pressure to weird, rich, mysterious locales until they flatten into “destinations”. (I grew up in Orlando; Ask Me Anything.)

Which means that even if we accept Lau’s original argument on its face — that wonder is wonder and who are we to judge — there are other, more compelling critiques of NS31. One of them comes from complex systems science and can be abbreviated into something like, “Is blowing certain people’s minds enough to make things better for the rest of us?”

On Faith in Scalar Interventions

What will it take to get a planetary “us” and see civilian astronauts as a victory of humankind? Some people see global cultural change as something they can engineer—not an unpredictable emergent property of non-computable complex multiscale dynamics but an instrumental goal to be effected by changing the minds of influential people. “If only [person in the news each day] would [have the experience that changed me]” is a very common trope. (Exhibit A: delight in the fanciful fake Trump memoir Born Again: How LSD Changed My Life.)

I’m deeply skeptical of this. The revolutionary movements of the 1960s dreamed of turning people on with psychedelics or pictures of the Earth from space, but they saturate the world we live in now and humankind is even closer to the brink.

William Shatner fell to his knees and kissed the Earth after his landing:

Now it’s January 2026, popular protests against despotic leadership are erupting everywhere, and the post-war framework of international collaboration is falling to pieces. Meanwhile, Trump looks to Greenland and Musk looks to Mars like the Great Houses of Herbert’s Dune look to Arrakis:

For the last time:

Turning up the noise in people’s brains does not produce reliable shifts in their values, if any (see Pace and Devenot’s “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency” for a sobering look at this). And do I even need to tell you that nearly every household name in Big Tech uses psychedelics to better serve the twin opposed goals of Industrial Modernity, disruptive innovation and control?

But I want to be generous, because I used to believe this kind of thing. So let’s start with comments from former Executive Director of Space for Humanity Rachel Lyons, which we can boil down to “The cost of sending people into space is an investment into the impact they’ll make when they return transformed as cosmic citizens”:

Astronauts consistently report coming back from space with a whole new perspective.
They see Earth shining, suspended in the void…
A fragile blue marble with a paper-thin atmosphere…
One planet. No borders. Interconnected with all of life.
They change.
Since Yuri Gagarin first went to space in 1961, astronauts have returned with new awareness about the environment, humanitarian issues, politics—even their role in their local communities.
If you watched the livestream (blueorigin.com/live), you saw it: the emotion in these women’s faces when they landed.
They were deeply moved. Every one of them said it was one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives.

“Katy Perry?? Come on.”
As my friend Daniel Fox said, I think who ever chose her deserves a serious raise.
Her songs are inspiring millions. When so much music today promotes violence, unhealthy sex, and escapism (and permeates the collective unconscious!!!), her work uplifts.
After landing, she said this flight made her fall in love with humanity.
She committed to writing music about the experience.
Do you understand what that means? One of the most followed artists on the planet is about to release music about the Overview Effect.
That’s billions of people… receiving the awe, unity, and reverence for people and our planet—through art.
To me, that’s worth so much more than the cost of a seat.

Is taking Katy Perry into space an investment in the future inspiration of millions of people? Maybe. But what looks like the whole-cloth creation of value from one angle looks like extraction of another.

I’m reminded of William Irwin Thompson’s comments on the Irish Revolution of 1916, how W.B. Yeats was criticized for being a poet instead of firing bullets on the front line, but did more than anyone to foster the identity of the Irish people that made that revolution thinkable. Clearly, as Steve Bannon (ha) has noted, “culture is upstream of politics”…and yet, the ROI on gestures like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth movement isn’t easy to measure, predict, or ensure.

The historic first photos of our entire planet in one frame inspired a sense of mystical participation and ecological activism in some, and in others it amped up technocratic colonialist ambitions by deluded them into thinking they could actually comprehend planet-scale systems. (It should go without saying that The Overview Effect wasn’t enough to radically alter Jeff Bezos. Even if it had, would his board have let him tank their profits? Edgar Mitchell’s spaceflight revelations compelled him to found The Institute of Noetic Sciences, but didn’t alter the course of the military industrial complex one iota.)

For a superb treatment of these problems, see Chapters 7 through 11 of Joshua DiCaglio’s book Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry, which I think everyone who cares about these questions ought to read. DiCaglio argues more cogently than anyone how individual transformation doesn’t clearly map onto cultural formation of a cosmic identity, and we don’t know how to effect these kinds of scalar interventions. Trying to engineer them by “turning on” celebrities and HNWIs is a catastrophic failure of complex systems understanding akin to the logical fallacy of Trickle Down Economics.

Yeats’ poetry did the trick because it spoke to common experience, gave voice to something the Irish knew firsthand. It sacralized the familiar. If you weren’t already Irish, it didn’t make you Irish. If I write a song about my awesome marriage, and you have an awesome marriage, you and your partner might adopt it as your own. If you’re single and unhappy, I probably just seem like I am gloating. If you could buy your way into an awesome marriage, you might be inspired to make the effort…and if I have the means, I might market that to you the way some people fall in love with some quaint seaside town and then decide to buy it up for short-term rentals.

But human beings love vicarious experience, even when it doesn’t truly scratch the itch. Unboxing videos are very popular because consumers love the thrill of novelty—but they ultimately persist as a genre because they sell the goods, not because they give you the first-person satisfaction of unboxing it yourself. Betting on the industrial machinery of pop music to induce Perry’s wonder in millions of people is like expecting porn to help you fall in love with you who are. I think (and this is evident from how most people actually reacted at the time of NS31) a handful of lucky space influencers are more likely to pour salt in the wound of our deeply stratified society than heal that wound.

Or people think they’ve been to space and get it when they don’t. Just as Neil Postman argues in Technopoly that mechanical printing has drained the symbolic power of the image, the more we saturate pop culture with this kind of secondhand account, the more we satiate ourselves with empty reproductions. Almost sixty years after the first publication of the famous Blue Marble photo, it’s an 🌍 emoji we drop in chats without a second thought. Human minds habituate to novel stimuli with awesome speed. Even tripping can become “whatever” if you’re on drugs every day.

If the day ever comes that anyone can go to orbit any time they want, will that finally do the trick? Or will we just sleep through it, the same way we sleep through commercial jet travel today? See the cancelled Louis CK’s riff with Conan O’Brien on how “Everything’s amazing and nobody is happy”—or how Heywood Floyd snoozes through his trip to the Moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

I don’t want to reduce this to “people suck,” but it simply isn’t as easy to buck the default mode network and install a permanent new cosmopolitan identity as running a savvy marketing campaign. And even if you do have a transformative experience, you might come home proselytizing to people who decide you’re just crazy. It’s arguably better than turning turning The Final Frontier into Real Housewives of Low Earth Orbit, but Western civilization is at or near Peak Cynicism right now and earnest messages of unity just don’t hit like they used to. Especially when they’re propagated through the polarizing hypermodern engagement-farming media machine.

Futurama nailed this in a wonderful short clip:

So: The Overview Effect only works for some people, their influence isn’t guaranteed, things can backfire at any step of the process. In other words, with space as with other forms of mind expansion, set and setting matter. The Overview Effect won’t scale unless we are already at least on the cusp of planetary culture. When we watch somebody weep on landing, kiss the Earth, and rave about how identity politics are trivial in cosmic context, we need to feel like “they” are “us.” Like they are speaking for the planet we already know we are.

Meanwhile, no matter how many cells in the biospheric organism get The Overview Effect, this is what it looks like to everyone else:

If we can’t open borders on the ground, we definitely can’t open borders in the sky.

And if we can’t open the sky so everyone can feel what Perry, Shatner, and the rest of the chosen few are privileged to feel, it’s hard to argue for open borders on the ground.

We have a circular problem on a spherical playing field that begs for a hyper-spherical solution.

…So What Does It Take To Be Planetary?

I’ll offer my answer to this question in Part Two, coming soon.

In the meantime, some related listening from the last two years of dialogues:

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Seek or offer emotional support. Talk about your projects. Discuss the future of the book club. Show and tell. It’s whatever we want it to be! Info below:

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This week we come at technology sideways with help from hyperspace explorer Carl Hayden Smith, Associate Professor of Media at the University of East London (Talks & Papers), Founder of The Museum of Consciousness at New College, University of Oxford , co-founder of the Cyberdelic Nexus, Director at Noonautics and head of Context Engineering at Eleusis.

✨ Carl is currently teaching a course on Apocalyptic Hyperhumanism with Layman Pascal at Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal! More info and enrollment here.

✨ Our next Humans On The Loop members hangout is this Sunday January 18th at 10:00 am Mountain Time! Calendar invite coming soon for subscribers.

✨ All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations
• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals
• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
• Contact me if you have burning questions

✨ Mentions

Max Cooper
Hunter S. Thompson
Doug Rushkoff
 Friedrich Nietzsche
Andrew Gallimore
John Vervaeke
K. Allado-McDowell
Dale Pendell
Joël de Rosnay
Joshua DiCaglio
Charles Eisenstein
Fred Turner
Mark Zuckerberg
Michael Douglas
Richard Bartlett
Gordon White

Greetings and Happy New Year! We return to something like regularity with the podcast next week, starting with the brilliant Carl Hayden Smith. Thanks for your patience, although I know there has been plenty else to chew on. But first!

Weird Academics Unite!

I’ll be at IU Bloomington in a few weeks for an historic congregation of scholars and artists at The Center for Possible Minds’s Weird Academia series, hanging out with inspiring folks like , , , Phil Ford, Jacob Foster, Erica Cartmill, Cat Hobaiter, and (for whom I’m going to provide some ambience for her gallery opening of spirit medium photography). My friend and fellow Weirdosphere faculty member and I are organizing a daytime colloquium for other scholars and artists compelled to work on topics institutions typically regard as “fringe” and welcome you to join us if you’re in the area!

Reach out to us here if you’re interested.

And now the meat and potatoes:

New Live Instrumental Ephemera

Today’s my 42nd birthday today and as is tradition, here’s a reverse birthday present for everyone—just a short little live improv session from a fun event in a wonderful community space last year. Here is fifteen minutes of electronic guitar ambience performed at Make Santa Fe for CreativeMornings‘s event on innovation with a talk by Make’s Executive Director James W. Johnson.

Nothing fancy: 15 minutes of chill instrumental tunes I cooked up on the spot, available for free only on Bandcamp. (I’ll be pulling all my music off of Spotify soon, and uploading new stuff to Subvert.fm ASAP, but for now…) Enjoy!

Setting the Scene for Live at Make Santa Fe

Imagine that it’s 9 a.m. on 12 December 2025, just off a dirt road, in tiny warehouse where this city learns how to do awesome things with awesome tools. You are in a room filled with 3D printers, CNC machines, a robotic shop vac, and a handmade flame organ...the smells of coffee, metal, and sawdust, and the warmth of a small crowd of passionate creators, fills the air. There is no stage, because real innovation happens on an even footing. A janky battery-powered PA balanced precariously on a shop stool is enough to fill the space with fifteen minutes of improvised electric wanderings inspired by vibe and conversation: additive manufacturing, creative process, iterative exploration.

And now you’re ready to tune in to how I channeled the community and architecture, and left a kind of 3D print of what Johnson noted in his talk as raw ingredients for innovation: space, time, resilience, confidence, and humor.

Also, Kind of an IOU and Kind of a Prayer for Peace:

I'm also writing a lot and working on big ideas and awesome teams and ambitious (but grounded, plausible) visions, but that is still also almost all backstage and hopefully soon there will be more to show of all these months of work. Of all the times to be quieter than usual, this one feels especially wrong. But it's also time to work on things of durable value, and chatter in the distraction-verse does not accomplish that.

In the meantime, the one thing I want to make sure does NOT go unsaid is that I love you all, I miss you all, and I want the best for you. The one thing it seems like many of us are not getting enough of lately is each other. Real friendship is an incredibly powerful force. It is the thread that holds the world together when everything else is trying to pull it apart. And the more time we can make for one another, the better. Friendship incubates new and better stories, and we need those. Friendship keeps us sane and healthy, and is a real threat to the systems of oppression and evil that would rather make us strangers, because strangers are easier to manipulate.

For your own sake, for our sake, for my birthday, I hope you see this and immediately log out and spend some time in person with people you love. If you can. It's important to put as little of the machine as possible between us right now, for so many reasons.

Better options for online community than encrypted private messaging like Signal (I’m @futurefossils.888) will come soon. I have hope for this world because in my line of work I see people working toward better ways of doing and being all the time. I know the needs are being answered, even if it's happening slower than we'd like. And I want to share some of that hope with you. With any luck the dam will break soon and I'll have so much more to say about all of the reasons I feel confident we're going to look back on this in a few years as "those crazy decades we thought were never going to end." But for now, take heart, and stay in touch.

I am grateful for so much and for so many. Y'all give me many reasons to be grateful. Don't be a stranger.

Happy to make prints of these or any of my other pieces! Commissions open too!

✨ List of available works and print order details here ✨

Below the artwork: an amazing conversation you may have missed and what’s coming next…

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Once upon a time I used to paint at concerts for a living. Here’s the manifesto and here’s a glimpse of that life from my own point of view:

After a while I realized that one of the best parts of that was getting to talk to the people who came up to check out my works in progress. Not long after, a lot of them suggested I start a podcast, and the rest is history. But when I announced my retirement from live painting right before the COVID pandemic it was mostly because I had a baby and a full-time job and I just couldn’t do all the things at once. Now that kid is six years old, that job is long gone, and even though the American festival scene isn’t what it once was I’ve learned that I can’t just stop making art.

Luckily, my friend Mikäl Möhr, owner of Dotfoil Computer Services, is also an artist and musician who decided to turn half of his firm’s office space into the Santa Fe Artists Network: a maker space, lessons studio, and gallery aiming to disrupt the this city’s elite gallery culture by letting artists keep 100% of their sales. Mikäl honored me with the request to do the first solo show for SFAN and so the podcast feed went dark for the last month so I can produce more art in a month than I ever have since I started painting in 2007.

Our opening on Friday December 5th was delicious, with live ambient music and projection mapping by Dream Magic Infinity Shadow of Taos (clips here, here, and here) and documentary film coverage by Monty Montgomery of Space Helmet Pictures, who caught a half-hour clip of me riffing on the inspiration and various psych-future weirdness. I’ll share that video as soon as possible! In the meantime….

The whole show takes up two floors and two rooms so it’s hard to really capture the vibe in photos but here are some glimpses, followed by close-ups of each new piece:

Most of these are still available and I am, as usual, happy to work out all kinds of creative arrangements to make it as easy as possible for you to grab one. The show also includes the few remaining unsold pieces from my prior catalogue. You can find the complete list, more details, and MSRP in my deck of available original works here. And importantly, since Humans On The Loop is fiscally sponsored by the wonderful folks at HAPPI, you can score any of these as gifts for the according value and write it off as a tax-deductible donation.

Also, signed 11”x17” cardstock prints are $30 each plus s/h (typically around $8 for domestic US mail) or three for $70. I killed my online store and do all of this directly because I like putting direct relationships before transactions, so smash that “Reply” button if you’d like any!

All of these were made with acrylic paint markers (no brushes, so all transparency layers and gradients are through meticulous advanced finger-painting). All of them are ready to hang except the praying mantis, which is on a panel and easy to frame.

I’m also finding it incredibly difficult to stop painting, so commissions are open…

And now the paintings!

🐙 Nine Brains

Progress pics and some rants about this piece on Instagram here and here and here.

🐦‍🔥 Onward

🐸 Dendrobates tinctorius studies [SOLD]

Some context here.

👽 Bad Time To Be A Bug

Some context here.

🥚 Easter in Space

🥚 Easter in Hyperspace

🐟 Puddle Prince

Some context here.

🐞 ¿Quieres Combate? [SOLD]

Some context here.

💜 Coral Heart

🪼 Look Don’t Touch

🪻 Thistle studies

🌵 Danger Pickles [GIFTED]

Some context here.

💨 Scale-Free Arabesques

👁️‍🗨️ Laconic Paisley Eye

In Case You Missed It:

A powerful conversation with “thrutopian” novelist and conscious (r)evolutionary Manda Scott about saving the world from the death cult:

Coming Up Next:

• “The Underview Effect,” a long-form essay on space tourism and the politics of emergent planetary culture

• A new live cyberguitar EP recorded at Make Santa Fe for the Creative Mornings edition on Innovation (talk by Make’s Executive Director James Johnson)

• Episode 29 of Humans On The Loop with psychonaut and hyperhumanist futurist Carl Hayden Smith of the University of East London (a recent paper and Voicecraft appearance to whet your appetite)

Stay tuned, stay well, and happy holidays!

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It’s 2025. You’ve likely noticed that a death cult is in charge, thanks to a fundamentally misaligned structure that elevates the psychopaths, prioritizing the dark triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism over pro-social behavior.

Do not despair! There are three kinds of hope: pre-apocalyptic (naïve) hope, doomer hope, and post-apocalyptic hope. Today we’re going to lean into third option, the one where you stare into the abyss but you keep going. You keep cultivating the love in your heart and your commitment to the living world. It’s going to take a wider perspective, one that embraces both the mapped and unmapped regions of reality. But that’ll be easy, because my partner in dialogue today is the amazing Manda Scott (website | Wikipedia), self-described as a “thrutopian novelist, podcaster, smallholder, and conscious (r)evolutionary.” Once a veterinary surgeon, now “wholeheartedly endeavouring to craft a future we’d be proud to leave behind,” her novel Any Human Power is one of the most potent reads I’ve picked up in a long time. And (likely in no small part because she is also an inveterate podcaster on her show with Faith Tilleray, Accidental Gods) this conversation is as soulful as it gets.

We talk about the importance of ritual in “modern” times, trust-building, new models for governance where leaders really listen, squaring the circle of our high-tech society and the more-than-human (and more-than-living) reality that exists always-already in excess of our language and mortal concerns…it’s a truly capacious exchange. Enjoy!

Information for our next Humans On The Loop members hangout, this Saturday December 13th at 11:30 am Mountain Time, is below the paywall for subscribers.

All of the unedited, unreleased episodes are available to founding members here.

✨ Show Links

• Dig into nine years of mind-expanding conversations
• Browse the books we discuss on the show at Bookshop.org
• Learn more about the Humans On The Loop project and its goals
• Explore the Google Notebook for How To Live In The Future, my five-week science and philosophy course at Weirdosphere
• Contact me if you have burning questions

✨ Mentions

Richard Bartlett
Shirley Weber
W. Brian Arthur
Audrey Tang
Jenny Laus
Tanya Luhrmann
Francis Weller
Erin Martin
Indy Johar
Jonathan Haidt
E.O. Wilson

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Alex Douglas also sends his apologies. We collectively blame daylight savings translation between the US and Scotland and I personally (if not credibly) point the finger at a particularly vicious Mercury Retrograde.

f you can still make it, we’ll have a great time. If you can’t, this conversation will be recorded and Alex, who is in our Discord server, will hopefully be able to address any lingering post-game questions in the members book discussion channel.

Reminder that tomorrow, we sit down with the estimable (although also somewhat elusive, mysterious, and undefinable) to explore the ideas in and around his book, Against Identity!

All paid members are welcome to sit in, even if you haven’t finished the book.

Call details behind the paywall below.

A short refresher on why this is the right bundle of ideas to explore right now:

Format: recorded Google Meet video call, which I’ll open with a short dialogue before we clear the floor for everyone else’s questions and comments. Here are a few light teasers for how I imagine we’ll focus the chat, with plenty of room for surprising and delightful moments of collective intelligence:

And here’s another fun recent podcast with Alex about the book I’m sure to reference:

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Keys to The Secret Trove of Unreleased Podcasts

Update: I have been so incredibly busy, helping with the new AI Capabilities & Alignment Consensus Project, prepping for book launch, whipping up a new mural and a series of original canvases for my upcoming show at The Santa Fe Artists Network, opening another show with DeVotchKa at Meow Wolf, writing, and more:

Consequently, I am sitting on a huge pile of unreleased podcast episodes, including conversations with:

Tyson Yunkaporta, Adam Widawski, Robert Gehorsham, Nate Kinch, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Richardson, Mat Mytka, Layman Pascal, Andrea Faris, Carl Hayden Smith, TechGnosis Collective, Nancy Zamierowski, Henry Gee, Sean Geobey, Alex Komoroske, John Roescher

I’m publishing them as fast as I can manage but as of today, founding members can access a new archive unedited raw recordings (which I will continue to update as new episodes are recorded). Those links are below the paywall in this post.

On Active Inference, Nonduality, & Dreaming AI

My friends at the Active Inference Institute just had me sit in to host a panel for their latest (currently ongoing) annual Symposium. Above is the permalink to day one’s proceedings, starting with keynote speaker Karl Friston and then jumping into a discussion with him, my AICACP colleague Adam Safron, and AI researchers Hongju Pae and Alex Ororbia. We talked about the thermodynamics of selfhood and why it’s a problem that large language models don’t actually dream…

Book Club Rescheduled for 11/21

Our conversation with Alexander Douglas, author of Against Identity, will be on Friday November 21st at 11 am Mountain Time! Hopefully this works for people; our original poll majority for the 14th turned out to be a travel date for him and I wouldn’t want to cut him out of what promises to be a very juicy discussion.

That’s another week to read the free NetGalley version he gave paid members, and it’ll be generative and worthwhile even if you haven’t soaked it up in time for the call. In the meantime, I’ll post some of my favorite bits from his book in the Discord server’s members-only channel…

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