📝 New Essay on Sacred Data 🌸 Invitation to Collective Wayfinding 🐝 Riffing on Renaissance Thinking & Enhancing Human Agency
Juicy new collaborations with HUWD, School of Wise Innovation, and Tartle.
“As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand myself.”
– Friedrich Schelling
Greetings from the other side of the first real vacation I’ve had in seven years and the inevitable tending-sick-kids-and-then-getting-sick by which I paid my debts immediately after! Now that I’m done communing with Mother Ocean (and frogs!) every day and home in my desiccated high-altitude abode, it’s back to being Extremely Online. Duty calls! But hopefully you’ll feel a thin surface layer of relief permeate the next few months of dispatches from this perennial fish out of water.
Before the big shares, just a heads up that the next members hangout will be on Saturday, March 15th at 3 pm Mountain Time — a poetically perfect date to counter the “Et tu, Brute?” brutality of our current Zeitgeist with focused, supportive, and open-ended small-group inquiry.
This comes on the heels of finally shuttering the Future Fossils Facebook group in order to give more energy to high signal-to-noise, real-time, high-trust interactions with people who can develop context and understanding together over longer time scales. I used to have this by default in my festival culture days, but much of the West seems to be in a very long winter for IRL scenes, and these monthly calls help scratch that “third place” itch so many of us suffer. Hope you can join us!
These calls are for everyone supporting HOTL on Substack or Patreon, or — may I recommend — making monthly tax-deductible contributions at every.org/humansontheloop made possible thanks to my fiscal sponsors at HAPPI. Your call. Everybody gets the same perks, including more writing (like book and movie reviews, when I can make time for them) and pre-release music (this month!).
📝 “Sacred Data” at Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
In my new essay for Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, I explore the spiritual roots of Humans On The Loop — a commitment to decentralized curation and open-source collective wisdom — with a very deep nod to the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist.
• How is the tension between the bespoke boutique language models and enormous corporate chatbots like the tension between Protestantism and The Catholic Church?
• How is this era’s GPU obsession like ancient temple building?
• How does the bimodal structure of our attention both support and critique the longstanding culture war between the arts and sciences?
Dig in and find out, alongside nine other mind-expanding contributions, including:
Danielle Krettek Cobb on her spiritual friendship with Ram Dass
Lauren Bedal on sacred patterns, hand gestures and technology
Andrea Richards on the history of the Rhine Research Center
Aditi Khorana in conversation with The Pythia
Nika Simovich Fisher on the online community of Vlach magic practitioners
Jakub Fiala on a soul-searching journey in the Atacama desert
Suhair Khan on spiritual intelligence
Map Project Office and Father encode memory with Sonic Heirloom
Tom Morgan on why AI needs a heart
Read the whole issue here.
🌸 Join Me for Collective Wayfinding in The School of Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator
Very pleased to announce I’ll be part of The School for Wise Innovation’s Spring Cultivator faculty alongside a truly stellar lineup curated by my pals Andrew Dunn and Ryan Littman-Quinn. This promises to be very nourishing:
Spring will focus less on expert instruction and more on practice and peer project support, cultivating healthy soil for ourselves and our visions to flower through:
• Compassionately exploring the history of innovation to better understand the patterns that led to our conditions today
• Embodied sensemaking together around how to navigate tremendous change (individually, organizationally, ecosystemically)
• Clarifying the stories we are telling, sitting with elders and silence, and supporting each other through tensions on challenging yet rich paths of wise innovation
Opening circle is on April 3rd. Learn more and sign up here.
🐝 Riffing on Renaissance Thinking & Enhancing Human Agency with Alex McCaig of Tartle
I consider Santa Fe startup Tartle to be a standout in the sparse but lovely desert landscape New Mexico software companies growing outside of Los Alamos or the entertainment industry — a group that seems to have simultaneously solved the problems of protecting individual user data, helping people earn money with it, and end-run around the input-output Ouroboros that is poisoning LLMs right now.
Thanks to our mutual friend Christian Lemp I hit it off with their founder Alexander McCaig and ended up in a real barn-burner of a conversation about how we can apply better complex systems thinking to organizations, scientific research, and the design of technologies for human flourishing. Alex is a rare bird — an incredibly acute entrepreneur and
[We] dove deep into the intersection of technology, humanity, and systems thinking.
Key takeaways:
🧠 Balancing left & right brain thinking for innovation.
🤖 Rethinking our relationship with AI – enhancement, not replacement.
🌍 Using complexity science to solve global challenges.
🤝 Prioritizing relationships over transactions.
✌🏼 Parting Notes
• ICYMI: HOTL 10 with J.F. Martel on Machines vs. Fractals, Black Box Personhood, and Navigating The A.I. Fairy Tale was an especially juicy dialogue.
• Coming this Thursday: HOTL 11 with Andrew McLuhan is a crash course on how to think critically about how our media transform us, and what we can do about it.
Until then! Thanks and be well.
"It's hard to have an objective in a world that's changing faster than that objective can be fulfilled."
– Marshall McLuhan