Exploring the 'College of Weird': Academia and Creativity

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts

This week I speak with New York Times best-selling author and creative technologist Robin Sloan about the themes of his inimitable novel Moonbound, one of those reads that wrapped me in a vortex of wonder and synchronicity, and raises questions like:

Where is the line between technology and magic?What is a computer, really, and do humans qualify?How wrong might we be about the future?How do stories shape reality, and what happens when we have to make room for the stories of the more-than-human world?

A crucial point of note: this is “hard science fiction”, but it’s not the kind you’re used to. At a time when even the most square, prosaic suits are quick to quote Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, it is appropriate that sci-fi as a kind of thinking-through of our condition would reflect the cultural retrieval of premodern tropes like wizards, dragons, talking animals, and sacred swords.

What follows is a rich discussion of how Robin and I both enjoy traversing and interrogating those familiar boundaries between the lost and found, the sensible and the ineffable, wildness and city, born and created, sleep and waking, care and power…

Project Links

Learn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse the HOTL reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory work

Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser0:01:38 – Intro0:06:50 – Robin’s Story0:08:35 – The Care and Feeding of AI0:13:38 – Magical Technologies vs. The (Other) Powers of Nature0:21:46 – Persistent Wildness in The Post-Apocalyptic Future0:28:57 – Mapping Everything & Getting Lost0:32:30 – The City of Transformation: Ephemeropoli from Burning Man to Rath Varia0:37:48 – Tuning Longevity to the Duration of our Interests0:41:49 – The Loss of Self in Data & The Metamorphic Self0:49:02 – Beaver Governance is Better Governance0:54:23 – Living Robots & Sleeping Institutions in Liquid Modernity1:02:16 – How Do We Keep Healthy Rhythms While Scaling?1:10:35 – Life at The College of Wyrd1:18:01 – Recommendations for Good Discussion & Book Takeaways1:23:09 – Thanks & Outro

Mentions

Eliot Peper (Re: FF 47, 115)Eliot Peper’s interview with Robin Sloan, “Binding The Moon”Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBitsTim Morton’s Hell: In Search of A Christian EcologyThe Long Now FoundationKevin Kelly’s “The Expansion of Ignorance” (Re: FF 128, 165, 204)Star WarsTyson Yunkaporta (Re: FF 172)Adventure TimeThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of The KingdomMichael Crichton’s Jurassic ParkJack VanceM. John HarrisonHerbert SimonJames C. Scott’s Seeing Like A StateRichard Doyle’s Darwin’s PharmacyKim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Red, Green, Blue)Neil Gaiman’s Long Now talk “How Stories Last”Jonathan Rowson/Perspectiva’s antidebateThe Templeton FoundationZygmunt Bauman’s Liquid ModernityAlexander RoseJohan Chu & James Evans’s “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science”Michael Garfield’s “The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, and Economies of Scale”Erik Hoel’s “The Overfitted Brain”JF Martel (Re: FF 18, 71, 126, 214)Phil Ford (Re: FF 126, 157, 214)Erik Davis (Re: FF 99, 132, 141)The WeirdosphereBell LabsMagic: The GatheringComplexity Podcast 42: “Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West on Calling Bullshit”Inna Semetsky’s “Information and Signs: The Language of Images”The I ChingPhilip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass)Iain McGilchristClaire EvansJames BridleQuanta Magazine

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe