If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!
Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.
Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.
It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.
Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow
USGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SW
Earlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogue
Gregory Landua on Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill Podcast
MG on “value creation” as the export of externalities
Speaker John Ash on Cognicism
Speaker John Ash on Cognition & Conflict
Speaker John Ash on Spotify
An Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MG
Accelerando by Charles Stross
Glasshouse by Charles Stross
Rapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow
✨ Support The Show:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes
• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal
• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp
• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers
• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Related FF Episodes:
213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance
206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse
193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night
181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB
178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions
176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit
163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem
146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016
141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations
133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe
122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything
94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)
61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)
60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact
56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)
51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)
💻💶🌏 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet