🛠️ Exciting Open Source Tools & 🎊 Cool Things I’m Doing Soon (With You?)
A miniature year-end manifesto for re-embracing the gift economy, some super fun upcoming courses and events, and three software tools I wish I'd had ten years ago.
I’m trying something new with this one. For the last few years I’ve shared most of my interesting finds directly to the Future Fossils Facebook group, where most of you will never see them. As part of my growing emphasis on boosting signal and consolidating effort, I’m playing with publishing infrequent digests like this issue.
If you like this and want more, please let me know!
Next up for patrons: 📚 Illuminating Reads on Tech, Society, & Mind (A Link Dump)
In This Newsletter:
🌊 Swimming Against The Currents of Extraction
🛠️ Exciting Free & Open Source AI Tools
🎊 Cool Things I’m Doing Soon (With You?)
The first episode of Humans On The Loop, with my mentor and inspiration Richard Doyle on AI and nonduality, comes out this week! Now is a very fine time to subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks to fiscal sponsorship from HAPPI.org, you can also set up a recurring tax-deductible donation (of which more goes to me than your Substack patronage) at this link. If you want to do things that way, email me to let me know you’re interested in membership access!
🌊 Swimming Against The Currents of Extraction
Öxarárfoss at Þingvellir, Iceland, right on the Mid-Atlantic rift. Kind of a metaphor for now.
A note on what it means to start Humans On The Loop next week:
It is my extremely deliberate decision to finally stop selling you my art and music. While I technically still have my print shop open because I paid for a year, I’ll deactivate it when my subscription ends and it’s a huge relief to feel like I don’t have to hustle paintings in the noisy lek of desperate artist bids for your attention. I’m also putting out all my music for free, and committing myself entirely to the provision of public knowledge resources for the foreseeable future.
I’m doing all of this because the future that I foresee is and always has been one in which we back what we want to magnify… And what I want to magnify is a world in which our most valuable resources — our attention and our imagination — flow into the outcomes that we want and we believe are possible. This is why I left my job last spring. I used to try and model following’s one passion, but as Elizabeth Gilbert notes, passion is a kind of privilege. It comes and goes. Curiosity, however, whispers always. And by following our curiosity we pledge ourselves to the ongoing journey of discovery, an antidote to fear.
I’m curious to learn how to get back to that inspired, optimistic person I was before having kids convinced me that I had to sell myself to buy their safety. I’m curious about what happens if I live as an example of the person I wish more of us could be. So here we are, together, learning as we go about tech ethics, wise innovation, and how to wield magical computing superpowers.
In short, I think art should not be a commodity…but I want to dedicate my life to art…but I still have kids to feed…and so I’m putting my faith back in living as a gift and trusting that support will come.
Humans On The Loop is the fruition of everything I learned from my years at SFI, Mozilla, and Long Now, three of the most estimable non-profits I've ever encountered, and it's heavily infused with their mission-driven DNA. But I also grew up in the shadow of my father's 43-year career in travel and entertainment. I cannot but help muse on the bright and dark sides of technology (and leaning hard on the bright side as a matter of emotional hygiene and moral inspiration) thanks to growing up on the back end of Universal Studios, Disney, and state-level travel boards.
I've seen every angle of The Big Machine, and want to make the wisdom of my social networks and my own experience as a child inside the metaindustrial magic complex as legible to you as possible. That's a different goal than his was but it's motivated by the same common underlying impulse he reported from people everywhere he went around the world: to ensure a better life for our children. There are many kinds of magic, after all…and all of them are more available to us than we’ve been taught.
This is my commitment now and for years to come: to help us keep our hands on the wheel and wonder in our eyes even as we gaze unflinchingly into the storm of all that could be...
If you care about this too, we are allies. Let's have fun making the world a better place for those who follow. I’m back to doing what I can to promote a gift economy. If this inspires you, here is info on how you can support or contribute in 2025.
I suppose that was an advertisement. Thanks, and moving on…
🛠️ Exciting Free & Open Source Software Tools
Fun photo I took in 2015 of an iPhone 6 and a two-million-year-old hand axe. Time flies!
Here are three pieces of software I’ve wanted for years:
E2/F5 TTS is voice cloning made stupid simple through a web interface, democratizing access the deepfake “fluent and faithful speech” I’ve imagined as an on-tap service saturating society since 2017’s “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”. Don’t waste money on box voice simulation services if you can count on the proliferation of great open-source models and easy interfaces like this one! Works for both English and Chinese.
Storm is Stanford’s fascinating new AI-based generator for Wikipedia-style articles, crawling the Web to find balanced perspectives on a topic and produce reasonably neutral and balanced introductory summary and synthesis.
Twitter Semantic Search is another toy I’ve wanted to see for years and years. Thanks to my Twitter buddy @DefenderOfBasic, you can now take ANY tweet and find the twenty closest threads in semantic space. Look for things like “the meaning of life” on your Twitter archive and it’ll pull the relevant bits. This is a project based on Community Archive, an open database and API anyone can build on and may, one day, form the substrate for all kinds of amazing interpersonal discovery. He and I (and many others) are already talking possibilities about how to transform the way we learn about ourselves and one another. Stay tuned!
Relatedly, I just recorded an episode of Cool Tools’ Show and Tell podcast with Kevin Kelly that will be out soon. This show is very different from my usual fare but I’ve come to love it for Kevin’s no-nonsense practicality, for being a trove of interesting objects, and for showing me how other people navigate our build environment. Huge back catalogue worth checking out…!
🎊 Cool Things I’m Doing Soon (With You?)
Free RSVP
El Sailon’s mission is to bring together AI leaders, enthusiasts, users, business leaders, creative minds, and educators from the Santa Fe and Albuquerque area to foster discussion and increase AI adoption and AI literacy.
I’ll give one of five TED-style lightning talks on my lessons from and predictions for generative language models, heavily inflected by the subversive discussions I’ve spent the last year recording for Humans On The Loop. Being that this is a business event I suspect I’ll stand out as someone focusing on AI’s potential as a tool for personal inquiry and the transformation of our priorities…
Tickets | Facebook Event
Sqwerv is a very fun Colorado jam band kicking ass in a familiar tradition but bringing their own weird flavor. Bush League from Tucson brings a considerable dose of clav/sax/bass funk into a gumbo with country, rock, soul, and gospel. I don’t know how I’m going to rise to this danceable occasion, but I’m hyped to be on the bill and back at Tumbleroot! I’ll be painting, too.
Join This Course
Inspired by material from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, this course brings together an all-star team of artists, musicians, poets, and community stewards to help you recover your senses of safety, identity, power, integrity, possibility, abundance, connection, strength, compassion, self-protection, autonomy, and faith. Join us to unlock your creativity and visionary inspiration in a supportive environment made up of some of my favorite people and cultivate magic together!
Teaching, in order of presentation: Chris Dyer, Alyssa Gursky (Future Fossils 136), Nick Schendzielos, Kamau Abayomi, Olivia Jane, Mark Henson (Future Fossils 32), Kris Davidson (who inspired me to start painting in the first place and whom I interviewed before I was even doing podcasts), Michael Garfield, Izzy Ivy, Miles Toland, Stella Strzyzowska, and Amanda Sage, with bonus workshops from Martin Wittfooth and Marya Stark (Future Fossils 38)!
Organized by the wonderful Daniel Shankin (Future Fossils 173), Jake Kobrin (Future Fossils 49), and John Robertson. This promises to be amazing.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
