🎢🎡🦖 "Science Proves A Dangerous Toy..." Jurassic Park Book Club Pt 1 Recording + Reflections (Plus Riffs on A.I., Art, & Consciousness)

On Privatized Science, Hyperstitions, Children vs. Adults, The World As Theme Park, Living Systems vs. Models, & Considerably More

📝 A Note (& Riffs) Before We Start:

As of today, I’ve restructured my Patreon reward tiers in an effort to make this labor of love sustainable. My goal with Future Fossils and in my career generally has been to serve the most people possible and make my work available to everyone I can. In practice this has meant giving away almost all my labor since I graduated college, and I can’t continue letting my ideals get in the way of my ability to feed my kids.

The change is minor: Patreon supporters at the $2 tier still get the patrons-only archives, Facebook group, some special channels in the Discord server, and my gratitude — as well as extra stuff each time I publish to this blog, which after fourteen years I am finally acknowledging is work.

Keeping some of every entry free will help me reconcile my dedication to the commons with my goal of making sure 1000 true fans get some special treatment.

So moving forward, plenty of new art and music, book club call recordings, secret episodes and study groups will be reserved for folks supporting me with $5/month or more on Patreon or $70/year on Substack.

For those friends and fans, I plan to serialize my first draft of Jurassic Worlding, a book-length “paleontology of the present” on complex systems science, biotech, computers, science fiction, and the digital transition’s breakdown of the boundary between the “real” and “virtual.” I want writing this to be a social project and I know I will be far more motivated if I don’t just keep it hidden. Book publishing just isn’t what it used to be and I would rather flesh this out with all of you right now than wait until these thoughts go stale.

Speaking of which, here are some recent rants on language models, science, art, philosophy, and economics from my Twitter feed this week. I welcome your replies:

Anyway, about the book:

The first riff that I have to share with you — on “children vs. adults” in Jurassic Park and how our thirst for entertainment drives the systems failures of Our Complex Century — is down below along with the recording of the first of four live calls.

This research is immensely fun. I’m more committed to The Work than I have ever been and feel great urgency to help make sense of what we’re going through. This needs support…and that support can come through other channels, like reviewing Future Fossils on Apple or Spotify or helping me find grants to fund this work so I’m not leaning on you all for subs so hard. But I feel truly called to be a tour guide to our world’s accelerating weirdness, and hope you want to help me balance that responsibility with the stability I owe my family.

Had they Patreon in 1989, maybe Malcolm, Grant, and Sattler wouldn’t have been so quick to accept John Hammond’s invitation to consult “120 miles off the coast of Costa Rica.” For all I know you’re saving me from dinosaurs with your support!

And now, the main attraction:

🦖 Audio & Supplemental Notes:

I’m sorry that this took so long, but it required surgery in post-production. Once again my browser-based recording service botched the multi-track recording, so some tracks straight-up disappeared and volume levels varied wildly. I’ve done my best to piece it back together. Here is the recording of a deep and lovely chat with listeners Katy Kelly and Timothy Haire. Hopefully I’ll see some more of you on the next call!

Chapters:

00:00 — Children vs. Adults + Creator vs. Created
18:32 — The World As Theme Park + Biosphere 2/The Glass Age
34:39 — Weird Computing + Island Innovation Incubators
48:16 — Jurassic Park Predicted 2023