Humans On The Loop "Future Fossils 101" with Michelle Shevin & Michaelangelo
This week's guests are two of the most limber and insightful minds I know, futurist Michelle Shevin and actor-artist "The Ungoogleable" Michaelangelo. Since this is episode one of a whole new hundred episodes – and since I'm a sucker for ceremony and round numbers – this week we're taking a whirlwind tour of this show's recurring themes: how life, mind, culture, psychology, art, and science all change in the Internet Age, and how to live the best lives that we can amidst these transformations...
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Michelle Shevin
Michaelangelo
We Discuss:
• Kronos & Kairos, revisited
• Re: JF Martel – Episodes 18 & 71
• The information science of innovation and why Terence McKenna’s Timewave Zero may not be TOTAL hogwash
• Book: Geoff West - Scale
• Re: “An Oral History of the End of ‘Reality’” – Episode 91
• IS our time unique at all?
• WJT Mitchell paraphrase: “We’re all constantly feeling as though everything is about to happen, or perhaps it already has and we just haven’t noticed it”
• #presentshock
• Did we miss the singularity?
• Trapped in the present
• MA: “chronopractic adjustments” of pulling your past and future into alignment
• MA: “I feel like all expression is a form of deception…I try to look to the deception closest to the truth.”
• Plato: “Writing is a step backward from Truth.”
• Biological evolution as machine learning and the domestication of humans by technology
• MA: “I took a hit of GPS / got lost within the endlessness / gave up the compass in my chest / and oriented to the West”
• Michaelangelo – Episode 37
• Evolution’s bias toward paedomorphy / neoteny
• MS: “What happens when DNA becomes the substrate for all this information?”
• Storing data in the organic cloud
• The zone of proximal evolution and how “We can’t invent what we don’t have the parts lying around for”
• Every new technology is a remix
• David Krakauer – Episode 75
• Dennis McKenna - Episode 88
• Toxoplasmosis mind control and how nobody actually things if “my brain made me do it”
• MS: “If we are midwives to new myths, then part of the project is to litter the landscape with the right raw material, so that in the future, the right raw material is just lying around for people to pick up and build the tools with.”
• MA: “meme-ifying” (vs. “mummifying”)
• Book: Sam Harris – Free Will
• Film: Upstream Color
• Film: Primer
• Book: Peter Watts – Blindsight
• Book: Peter Watts – Echopraxia
• Re: The Teafaerie – Episode 100
• Re: Erik Davis – Episode 99
• Re: Doug Rushkoff – Episode 67
• Weird Studies Podcast is amazing, their Episode 32 on Eyes Wide Shut
• MG: “At the dusk of civilization, our eyes are adjusting to the darkness.”
• The digital dark age
• Book: Stewart Brand – The Clock of the Long Now
• Richard Doyle on Philip K. Dick and the evolutionary arms race of cameras and blind spots leading inexorably toward paranoia and then beyond into metanoia (see also, “The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast”)
• An entropy-driven metabolic arms race inevitab fractal Argus, coated in eyes
• When it comes to living through a Dark Age, MA suggests, “I think it comes down to learning how to glow in the dark. The agents of deception are our greatest teachers, in that sense.”
• MA: “Increased surveillance creates more performative personalities.”
• Re: Mitch Mignano – Episodes 57 & 98
• Elon Musk on Joe Rogan (of course that guy believes in simulation theory)
• Song: Yeasayer’s “Under The Glass of the Microscope”
• Linear, Circular, Helical time
• MS: “Planning often disguises itself as prediction”
• What is causation, anyway?
• Possibility as a fractal branching lightning bolt from potential to actual
• MA: “Scrye-ogenic Future” in a crystalline model of time
• MA: synchronicities vs. “synchroniceties”
• Book: Julian Jaynes – The Bicameral Mind
• Daniel Dennett’s “software archeology”
• The origins of divination
• Morsels of bicamerality reinstated by our digital ecology, with someone’s agenda in it
• MS: “The arrogance is in thinking that it was only ever us.”
• The Neurological Explanation for Imaginary Friends
• The Microbiological Explanation for “Self-Transforming Machine Elves”
• Swing Low, Eukaryote, coming for to carry me home
• David Pearce – “The Antispeciesist Manifesto”
• Are Laboratory Burgers Vegan?
• Empathy is a human (but not uniquely human) super power
• Rebranding the human species (eg, “Dog Friends,” “Cat Friends”)
• Book: Alejandro Jodorowsky - Where The Bird Sings Best
• Expertise is knowing the right search terms
• DNA as a language; microbial ecology as a language
• Introspection as an escape hatch from history and “profane time”
• And more...
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