🤯 The Web as Psychedelic Yoga • MG on The Jim Rutt Show • New AI Music Videos • Upcoming Shows in Boulder + Denver + Santa Fe
Surf global weirding like the cyborg psychedelic superhero that you are!
Meet me in Boulder, Denver, or Santa Fe over the next two weeks! More info below…
🌊 Re: Surfing (and Rewilding) The Singularity
Can you feel it? I’ve never been more convinced that as everything accelerates and our technological superpowers continue to expand, we are all being called into the engagement of a kind of psychedelic yoga as a core praxis in an emerging wisdom economy. I spoke about this at the CBA Innovation Lab and (at greater length) at Burning Man’s Palenque Norte series in 2017, and have been ranting about it on Twitter lately — specifically, why we need to learn more care and intentionality, more flow, and better executive function in order to navigate the “new normal” of uncertainty and constant surprise.
This is, of course, the thesis of both How To Live in The Future — the psychedelic futurist book manuscript I’m now shopping around for publishers — and Jurassic Worlding — the book I just started researching and drafting with the help of a very smart flock of Future Fossils subscribers.
(Speaking of which, the next live call we’ll have about Jurassic Park, complex systems science, and tech ethics will be at 2pm Pacific/5pm Eastern on Tuesday June 13th, and you’re invited! More info posted soon in the Facebook group and Discord server.)
It’s also the meat and potatoes of the conversation I just had with Kevin Kelly, and of the upcoming episodes of Future Fossils with Jamie Joyce, Greg Thomas, and Stephanie Lepp (all of which I expect to be out by the end of the month).
And it’s what I want to be doing with my life.
So please let me know if you are or know anyone who wants to work with me as the wave and need keeps growing. It’s time to get multicellular. I’m over the age of loner philosopher-influencers and want to devote my experience and social capital to helping flocks of people doing impactful work to actively midwife the best-case futures.
I suspect I’ll have more exciting updates to report on this soon, but first…some fun:
🎧 My “Everything” Chat with Jim Rutt
Direct Podcast Link • Posts on Twitter + LinkedIn + Facebook for sharing pleasure
Jim has an extremely wide-ranging discussion with Michael Garfield. They discuss the upcoming book Michael is drafting in public, the exponential scaling of information production, Jurassic Park, mass distributed computation, a new topology for social connectivity, info agents, stereotyping & police violence, a dehumanizing pace of human interaction, Charles Stross’s prophetic visions, heuristic induction, strong vs weak social links, restoration of the mesoscale, from the geographic polity to the noetic, the importance of the ground layer, semi-permeable membranes with commons inside them, Pokemon Go & behavioral control, generative AI & intellectual property, creating a commons to benefit culture, circular economies, dividend money & usury, high-temperature search, a future of childlike play, and much more.
Michael will be hosting an interactive course with Jeremy Johnson, titled “Jurassic Worlding,” beginning on July 18. Those interested should keep an eye on NuraLearning.com.
Join the Jurassic Park book club and help Michael research and workshop his next book, Jurassic Worlding: A Palaeontology of The Present, at Michael’s Substack.
👁️ Three New Technodelic Music Videos on Transformation, Zelda, & Dinosaurs
As I round the final bend and wrap up work on The Age of Reunion — the LP I started writing in 2008 and recording in 2016 — I’ve been experimenting with new tools to mix my lyrics with the epic iconography of Pamela Colman Smith’s Tarot card illustrations (known widely as the Rider-Waite deck)…AND the visual lexicon of Zelda.
You can read about my motivations for this giant project here. (Spoiler: it’s about the way that symbols help share complex information in ways words cannot…)
Dig into the full and swiftly-growing playlist of AI music videos on my YouTube!
🥳 Upcoming Events in Boulder, Denver, & Santa Fe
I can’t be more excited to return to my old stomping grounds in Boulder for this show on Friday at THE COOLEST VENUE! Tell your friends and bring your kids — it’s going to be a joyous family-friendly congregation with a lot of great surprises.
Here’s the link for tickets and here is the Facebook event so you can spread the news.
And then on Sunday I will play a lengthy instrumental set at a GORGEOUS regenerative farm in Santa Fe in celebration of my friend Autumn Leiker’s new climate futures anthology, Into The Unknown, Together. Dozens of diverse New Mexican perspectives on the intersection of global warming and the desert Southwest come together in this volume. I will be one of two musicians (the other being Matthew Andrae) helping lubricate an evening of picnics, poetry, and juicy group activities:
And then! While I retired from twelve years of live painting back in 2020, it’s time for a glorious return to form. My old friends Papadosio and Cloudchord are back in Santa Fe with Dirtwire, another of my favorite live acts, so I’m kitting up again to paint alongside homie Kevin Vigil at The Bridge. I hope to see you on June 17!
Lastly, I’ll be at the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver and mixed up in as many ways as I can manage: showing art in and live painting for the Tribe 13 Gallery, playing music in Oshan’s Tea Temple, recording Future Fossils episodes, helping Uniphi Studio film the sequel to DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and generally doing what I do to matchmake people and ideas to midwife best-case futures.
Let me know if you’ll be in attendance and I will send more info on my schedule!
🏔️ Last, An Avalanche of Fascinating Links & Psychedelic Futurist Commentary for Paying Supporters
This is a new regular feature for folks helping me feed my kids with a Substack or Patreon subscription — and it’s probably worth more than anything above the fold.
I’ll collect my notes and thoughts, share all the cool stuff I’ve been reading, music I’ve discovered…and presented in bouquets that I hope will help you stitch it all together meaningfully. (Think Michael-as-curator more than Michael-as-creator, just as Brian Eno called it in his interview with Kevin Kelly back in 1995!)
Hope you all enjoy my latest finds and framing: