🦑 How To Live In The Future: Syllabus & Recordings
A DEEP trove on time, human-tech co-evolution, and the future of the self and society
The arcane repository has been opened…
Earlier this summer I taught How To Live In The Future, my first course at Phil Ford and J.F. Martel’s wonderful online learning platform Weirdosphere. Over five weeks, a few dozen brave souls and I explored the relationships between time and embodied metaphor, thermodynamics and evolution, the emergence of planetary culture and catastrophe, technology and prophecy, ecology and contemplation. And more.
The conversations were rich and insightful. The talks were ambitious and maybe a little unhinged. As it is with the best of trips, it was bigger on the inside and left us all with plenty to digest and integrate…and it generated nearly 20 hours of recordings.
Access the entire archive here for the reading materials and course recordings, the edited transcripts, and the Notebook LM folder where you can query those transcripts self-directed, for half what it cost students to participate in real-time.
As promised, founding members of this Substack can waltz right in for free as a gesture of my gratitude. (Link below the paywall.)
To give you a sense of the ludicrous scope of this class, or to send you on a years-long quest of from which you may return illegible to your loved ones, here is a list of the books from which we pulled readings. Many more articles, videos, podcasts, and other items were cast into the attractor of our collective attention, and I drew from many more for the talks, but this is enough to keep anyone busy for a while.
If this list piques your interest or speaks to your abiding obsessions, dig in here.
Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness
by William Irwin Thompson
Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness
by Diana Reed Slattery
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
by Neil Postman
On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing
by Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch
Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious
by Eric Wargo
Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry
by Joshua DiCaglio
Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents
by Federico Campagna
Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants. and the Evolution of the Noosphere
by Richard Doyle
Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life
by Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan
Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science
by William Irwin Thompson
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
by James Carse
Pharmako-AI
by K. Allado-McDowell
Jurassic Park
by Michael Crichton
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
by Timothy Morton
Distress
by Greg Egan
(I linked to Bookshop.org and Internet Archive wherever possible because supporting indie booksellers is obviously preferable, but sometimes the only way to get ahold of these esoteric volumes is by making gray-hat deals.)
And with that! Those of you who dive into the course, I’ll gladly reply if you want to write me with your reflections or to ask about what it stirs up.
Here’s the link for founding members: