Humans On The Loop

In this discussion, Erik Davis, a renowned journalist and author, delves into the captivating themes of his new book, 'High Weirdness,' exploring 1970s figures like Terence McKenna and Philip K. Dick. He examines the transformative culture of the era, including its interplay with consumerism and paranoia. Davis articulates the evolving concept of weirdness in today's context, stressing interconnectedness in a shifting world. He also critiques contemporary mindfulness and urges a flexible mindset to navigate modern challenges.

It’s a deep and wide investigation of decentralized networks of many kinds this week, drawing on the insights and wisdoms of five very different panelists in a discussion held at the legendary experimental city-under-construction Arcosanti, Arizona. Like it’s a rainforest, I don’t even know how to start talking about this conversation – too many points of entry, too many species living in it! Here are this week’s fabulous guests:Emaline Friedman of Holochainhttps://herlinus.com/Sarah Johnstone, COO of The NuMundo Projecthttps://numundo.org/aboutJacob Devaney of Unify http://www.culturecollective.org/about/“Raven” Mitch Mignano, loosely “of” Reality Sandwich & Institute of Ecotechnicshttps://facebook.com/mitch.mignano.77––Support this show, and Michael's many other awesome projects, on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe on any platform you desire:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossilsJoin the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsRecommend a sponsor:futurefossils@protonmail.comWe Discuss:The three forms of decentralization (architectural, logical, and political);The historical centralization of human culture around resources;Why technological decentralization is insufficient to achieve the goals of a more humane and equitable society;Decentralization of civilization through the emergence of digital nomadism and the ecovillage movement;The transition from a value of ownership to a value of access;Decentralization as an adaptation to the unscaleability of imperialism and colonialism;How the free market capitalist ideology rewards success and punishes failure, even though those are largely dependent on luck;How can we make planetary culture NOT a pyramid scheme?Distributed trust and trustless transactions, and their political consequences;Data ownership, data security, and the vital importance of restoring our ability to communicate through “unenclosable carriers”;How can we divest from abusive and exploitative giant tech companies?How decentralization as an ideology can conceal the ways that enforced consensus is a kind of “shadow centralization”;Who is affected by this decision? Who has stake in the outcome of this issue?How can we avoid #algocracy when technological literacy is a constant challenge?Incentive structures and incentive landscapes: What kind of behaviors are we encouraging?Why Facebook and Google will be seen by history as a humanitarian crisis (and what we can do about it);Market-driven shifts in consciousness;The limits of crypto-economic governance;William Irwin Thompson - At The Edge of HistoryJoshua Ramey - The Politics of DivinationJustOne OrganicsFairBnBArcade CitySteemitTrybeScuttlebuttMiVote Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s guest is Dr. Zak Stein, an author and educator whom I met as fellow students of the work of philosopher Ken Wilber over ten years ago. Zak took the road of serious high academic scholarship while I was learning the less laudable and messier way through immersion in the arts and entertainment world, but here we are converging to discuss one of the most important issues of our time: the need for a new human story that includes both modernity’s rigorous scientific inquiry and postmodernity’s revelation of how everything we know is framed by language, culture, and perspective. Without some clever, soulful balance of the two we’re stuck in a “post-truth” era where our need for answers to our fundamental questions leads us backwards into “isms” instead of forwards into something more good, true, and beautiful than what has come before.Zak’s answer (like so many other guests on Future Fossils) is to get MORE rigorous about the scope and limits of the world disclosed by science, MORE honest with ourselves about the context-bound claims we can make on knowledge, and MORE open to how all “reality” starts in direct experience, as conscious subjects – where we meet to make new, open-ended, ever-more refined, evolving answers to the questions:What is human? What is love? What are we here to do?Read Zak’s new paper, “Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern ‘Return’ to a Metaphysics of Eros”:http://www.zakstein.org/love-in-a-time-between-worlds/‘Where modern scientists often critique the claims of metaphysics as unverifiable and thus untrue, postmodernists critique both science and metaphysics for making truth claims in the first place. Either way, to call an idea or theory “metaphysical” has become another way of saying it is unacceptable. Often with comes with some implication that the theory is a kind of superstition, which means metaphysics is taken not as an attempt to engage the truth but rather as a kind of covert power play or psychological defense mechanism. I argue the opposite: metaphysics is what saves us from a descent into discourses that are merely about power and illusion. Believe it or not, there are metaphysical systems that survived postmodernism and popped-out of the far end of the 1990’s with “truth” and “reality” still intact. These include object oriented ontology and dialectical critical realism, among others.’Zak is also the Co-Presdient and Academic Director at the Center for Integral Wisdom:https://centerforintegralwisdom.org/…and on the scientific advisor board at Neurohacker Collective:https://neurohacker.com/— In this episode we discuss:Lewis Mumford, Ken Wilber, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Jurgen Habermas, Seth Abramson, Timothy Morton, Rudolf Steiner, Alfred North Whitehead, Hanzi Freinacht, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Greenhall, and many other luminaries.Right-wing and authoritarian political thought is resurgent today because of the absence of reasonable discourse about metaphysical realities during a time when exactly these realties are being put in question due to the apocalypse of global capitalism and the accompanying planetary transition into the Anthropocene .The way we answer questions like, “What is the human?” will determine the next century because of the emerging power of new technologies that render the human mailable in unpresented ways, which has been made clear by writers like Yuval Harari.“The difference between metaphysics and science is not about what you can see and what you cannot see. It is about what you are paying attention to when you are seeing.”“What we call postmodernism is just modernism with the volume turned WAY up.”The difference between modern, postmodern, and metamodern views on science and the realities disclosed by science.What does it mean to cut a definition of the human out of our education systems?The relevance of Rudolf Steiner’s metaphysics and pedagogy in 21st Century education – especially its attention to subjectivity and interiority.How fundamentalism, nationalism, racism, and other regressive movements in society are symptoms of a postmodern assault on consensus reality.“In the absence of metaphysics, there’s a vacuum of meaning…what can step into that is not always pretty.”“After postmodernism, we can’t return to some pat, totalizing answer for everybody. After postmodernism, when we begin to build a new coherence, it’s always going to be a polycentric and dynamic and always renegotiated coherence. And that’s what science ought to be, which is to say, knowledge building, and not knowledge finding. Period.”“Ideas matter – and right now, we live in a context where ideas matter only insofar as they can be leveraged for clicks on websites that generate advertisement revenue.”When did we start gladly giving our decision-making powers over to others? And who do we trust now when we know that expertise is so contextual and frequently abused?Making the Earth into a giant building is the beginning of metamodern history – the Anthropocene signaling our deep relationship with the ecosphere.Michael reveals his vision of an Eclipse Station & Black Madonna University as a nobler motivation for a second “space race.”We’ve succeeded in making mega-machines out of people but need to reframe what it means to be IN relationship…Hyperobjects and a metamodern investigation of synchronicity and time…the objectivity of time is tricky.“Animals do not build sundials, even though they would benefit greatly from them. And so you’ll notice that one of the things that sets humans apart is their ability to make metaphysics – that they relate to things that are objectively real, like time.”The eternal and the everlasting – two different things.“Who gets to decide, and how do we get to decide, on these deep questions?”“To reify a false and truncated metaphysics – for example, to say that love doesn’t exist, that free will doesn’t actually exist – to really try to build institutions based on that, which would result in a radically authoritarian society – these things have been done. But never with the technological power that we now have to, for example, to build a school around that hypothesis. Or an army. And so there’s this very sincere need to make sure that as we move through this period, we’re keeping the voices who want to simplify and reduce and return to modernity and the monological at bay. So applaud, the postmodernists, but we also want to get beyond the postmodern critique, and the whole spirit and emotion of critique, and somehow move into a space where we’re reconstructing a new metanarrative, instead of taking potshots and deconstructing anyone who steps up to offer a metanarrative. After postmodernism it needs to be provisional, polycentric, built iteratively through collaboration. But there needs to be a project in good spirits in that direction. Because the regressive tendencies on the right who want to drive us toward racism and nationalism are having questions about, ‘What is the human?,’ and answering them irrationally. We need to have VERY reasonable and profound answers to questions like, ‘What is human?,’ ‘What are we here on Earth to do?,’ ‘What is a relationship?,’ ‘How important are relationships?,’ ‘What is love?,’ ‘Is love real?’, ‘What’s the significance of love?’…these things are part of what it means to be human.”How do we build a just and humane, “post-tragic” culture on the other side of the Crisis of the Anthropocene?We are all dependent on unjust and ecologically devastating supply chains…now what?“Hate creates externalities. Love creates no externalities.”The logic of the metamodern system has to be one in which there are no externalities.Support this show on PatreonJoin the Facebook GroupSubscribe on Apple PodcastsSubscribe on Google PodcastsSubscribe on StitcherSubscribe on SpotifySubscribe on iHeart Radio Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s guest is the intriguing, talented, and amazingly well-organized Malena Grosz, who is currently traveling across the United States to interview party culture professionals for her multimedia thesis on community-led party culture to gain and share their perspectives on best practices and shared challenges in cultivating better life through celebratory gatherings – and to tackle the corporate commodification of “nightlife” and its dangerous side effects.Her website-as-thesis-project will eventually be live (circa May 2019) at:http://partyprotoolkit.comWe Discuss:Gentrification and corporatization of nightlife versus community-led celebration, What urban nightlife can learn from Burning Man and festival culture, The disavowal of mundane time in spaces of celebration and how party culture does and does not need to accept the realities of our organic rhythms,Mentorship, moderation, self-control, personal agency, Reconciling the nomadic and sedentary strains of humanity,Taking responsibility for your own education (and life in general),Getting kicked out of the School of Art for consent-based body painting,Harm reduction versus the nanny state,Learning to speak party to Academia,The extraordinary importance of cognitive liberty and the freedom to imbibe,The economics of big festivals and their scaling problem, and how it turns people into cattle,Alternatives to alcohol (like tonics) and how parties can stay solvent without depending on encouraging dangerous levels of intoxication,Learning how to empower people by delegating decision-making authority as an event producer,Everything in moderation, even moderation,The importance of safe spaces within every party (like Camp Soft Landing at Burning Man),Rest stops at festivals and rests in music, quiet places where people can connect to contrast against losing yourself on the dance floor,What party culture can learn from the intensely structured environment of academia,“Festival referees” - good idea or disaster waiting to happen?,Deputizing “Knights of the Dance Floor” and empowering people to be guardians of collective space,Festival sheriffs and Night Mayors and the successful interfacing of mainstream culture and the needs of revelry populations,The New York Nightlife Advisory Board and other official groups representing the needs of party culture in city and state governments,Other promising international developments in the progress of human understanding of what safely integrated party culture looks like,Figuring out how to measure the contributions of everyone involved in an event, not just the headlining acts.And more!Support this show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s episode is the conclusion of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons – both for our present on Earth and our future in space…www.ecotechnics.eduwww.synergiaranch.comWe Discuss:“Learning to Live Intelligently, Coming of Age in the Anthropocene – This is the Challenge of Our Life.”– Why did Biosphere 2 get so much attention?– What is the legacy of Biosphere 2? Biosphere J and The Eden Project and Q Gardens…the proposed but never-built, polluted Russian Biosphere 3…“I think that optimism is a yoga. You want to do your hatha yoga and keep in shape. Despair is like screwing off and not meditating, and forget the physical exercise. Optimism is important psychologically, because it tells you, ‘I can make a difference and this is all going to work.’ Now it may be irrational, but if you give into despair, all of the hormones and emotions are going to tell you that it doesn’t matter. So forget about separating the recycling.”– Living in the small tight loops of controlled ecosystems.– Empowering ourselves with new senses so we can see the impacts of our actions at the planet scale.– Pollutants from different countries where they are not banned yet as a kind of “living fossil” in the flesh of world travelers.– The Anthropocene and The Noosphere. Human activity (and thus human cognition) as geological force.“It’s not rocket science to redesign our technosphere.”“There are consequences to the type of technology that we permit to operate on Planet Earth.”– Solacestalgia.– What’s wrong with Modernity and what Modern People suffer.– Wastewater gardening in Mexico in exchange for cultivated coral.– Using the soils to purify the air.“Our farm was the most productive half acre ever run by humans! Of course, we had some advantages.”– The four great taboos of science broken by Biosphere 2.“To get into space, we’re going to have to be superb ecologists.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s episode is the first of a special two-part conversation with Dr. Mark Nelson, one of the eight “biospherians” who lived for two years inside the closed ecological network Biosphere 2 – one of the most ambitious experiments ever performed, the reproduction of five distinct biomes inside a building in the Arizona desert. Mark is the author of the newly-published history of his experience in Biosphere 2, called Pushing Our Limits – he’s also the author of The Wastewater Gardener, which applies the same closed-loop, full-system ecological thinking to more easily attainable forms of agriculture. I know Mark through my lucky acquaintance with Synergia Ranch just outside Santa Fe (where I am right now, editing this episode) – the home base for The Institute of Ecotechnics, the group that pioneered the discipline of “Biospherics,” and the hub for a planetary network of brilliant, passionate, eclectic individuals whose stories never cease to blow my mind. Mark’s tale of his two years living under glass with seven other brave souls is powerful, inspiring, and full of potent lessons for both life on Earth and life in space.www.ecotechnics.eduwww.synergiaranch.comWe Discuss:– How theater can save a tight team from decaying into “kill the leader” reflexes and the importance of drama to living a full human life;– Gerard O’Neill and the Space Studies Institute, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, and how space exploration went in, then out, then back into fashion;– Biospheres are materially closed but energetically open;– The study of comparative biospheres;“If anyone’s running the show, it’s the microbes. It’s a reality that’s actually quite joyful to realize. You are NOT an island. We are totally enmeshed biologically in the biosphere.”– Carrying around the trauma from the Great Oxygenation Event in our intestinal microbiota;– Biomes as the building blocks of a biosphere;– The Research Vessel Heraclitus, the Institute of Ecotechnic’s rehabbed Chinese junk, exploring the World Ocean;– How they designed “lungs” for the building to enable pressure differences inside the building;“Life transforms the planet. And in fact, when we look out, we’re looking at the by-products of life. And even a lot of what used to be thought of as mineral deposits – these huge deposits of iron, for example, used to be considered to be ‘natural’ formations, ie, geologic ones. No! In fact, [it was the work of] ‘slime’…juicy, fecund with life.”“I think we need a whole new generation of creative people to give us the storylines for new outcomes. I kind of borrow from William Burroughs, who said, ‘We need a new mythology for the Space Age.’ And he further said that we’re going to judge heroes and villains by their intentions toward the planet.”– Synergy (popularized by Buckminster Fuller) and synergy in life and love;– Saving his sanity with “Hallucinogenic Outback Comedies” and using original plays and dances to communicate nonverbally around the world“In the negative news stories, they would say, ‘These aren’t scientists, these are recycled actors from New Mexico.’ Well, Biosphere 2 was an in-life production…I have some friends who say that Biosphere 2 was John Allen’s greatest theater production. We really thought it was going to be a quiet research facility.”“Thinking is hard. But PRETENDING to think, I can do that really well.”“The opposite of an actor is a RE-actor.”– Theater as a way of escaping the person you are at 7 AM“I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting quite a number of astronauts and cosmonauts…and they’re all changed men.”– The first and second Inter-Biospheric Festivals“Our culture, I think, and it may have a malevolent intent in doing so, tends to diminish people’s expectations of what they personally can do.” Support this show on Patreon Join the Facebook Group Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Google Podcasts Subscribe on Stitcher Subscribe on Spotify Subscribe on iHeart Radio Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s guest is one of my favorite living musicians, acoustic guitarist Andreas Kapsalis. We linked up at the magical experimental city of Arcosanti, Arizona last year during their Convergence event, at which we both performed, and talked about life as itinerant musicians drawing on a wealth of world cultures and traditions. This is a humbler and more human episode of Future Fossils – hope that you enjoy it!http://www.akguitar.com/https://www.facebook.com/Andreaskapsalisguitar/Watch a video of Andreas playing his composition, “Ethnos”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnogdfXyWIoWe Discuss:Being raised in a musical family and how being musical changes one’s experience of time.The cultural influences of Greece and Andalusian musics and their vocabulary of odd time signatures and harmonies and energies.His love for the Old West and Arizona’s cowboy movie landscape…and the “freaking weird mutation” of Arcosanti’s aberrant European retro-future architecture in the desert.Why is the West Coast of anywhere like the West Coast of anywhere else?Living off-grid and the importance of getting away……but silence is awkward!Cultivating a relationship with plants.“You don’t really matter. Being reminded of that is really important.”The integration of nature and city living, architecture as biology, the legacy of Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti.Touring is amazing. People are amazing.“Well, yeah, there is something to be said about stability.”Nomads and nomadism.Empathy and Introversion.“Two handed tapping has allowed me to take a leak and fill a glass of water at the same time, and they say that that’s not good for you…”The spiritual practice of multi-tasking.The future of musical communication.Support this show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s a treat – not one, but FOUR amazing guests, in Future Fossils Podcast’s first live taping at EFF-Austin, 10 July 2017. Heather Barfield (Head of EFF-Austin Digital Arts Coalition and Director of Development, Vortex Theater); Maggie Duval (Chief Experience Liaison, 7th Generation Labs & Senior Developer, Polycot Associates, LLC); Paul Toprac (Associate Director of Game Development at UT, RTF Department, and Senior Lecturer); and Kevin Welch (President of EFF-Austin, Fullstack Web Developer at Texas Legislative Council) joined me for one of the most visionary conversations this show’s ever published – and certainly the most politically aware episode to date, as well.Yes, this is about “The Pre- and Post-History of Virtual Reality, Surveillance, and Swarm Intelligence” – and a lot more else, to boot. Just strap in and enjoy…The whole event was streamed live if you’d rather watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN2hNX9eM6kFull bios for each panelist and more info about EFF-Austin:https://www.meetup.com/EFF-Austin/events/240796194/We discussed:How for Maggie, growing up at Guantanamo Bay as a form of preparation for living in the 21st Century.The psychological and moral implications of living in a simulated reality.What is the humanest human? What are we aiming for?Challenging the colonizer narrative of space as a “frontier.”Narrative collapse!Pernicious, ubiquitous, intelligent and coercive, ambient AI manipulation as the nexus of this talk’s three topics.Guest spot from Jon Lebkowsky on emergent democracy.Guest spot from an audience member who grew up in communism.What is it about our internet as it is now that is keeping a global swarm intelligence from emerging?Let’s not just talk about making NEW things…let’s talk about MAINTENANCE.The side effects of automation.“I’m a technologist that makes social media software. So it’s all my fault…we knew when we created the net as a publishing medium that we did not think through the human connections or other values that should have gone into it. We broke the community; we broke the BROADER community. I think the fact that a Trump voter doesn’t think they can talk to me is part of my sin. The wrongness isn’t their Trumpism; the wrongness it that they don’t think they have a connection to me as a human. And the technology that I built has failed them. So I’d like the panel to talk about, ‘How do we fix it?’”- Random Audience Commentator“The future is messy technology that is aggravating to deal with. We don’t spend our days in paradise or dystopian hell; we’re trying to get the dang computer to work. And maybe the problem is in the stories we’re telling. Maybe we’re setting up false narratives and false expectations for how to live and how to communicate with each other. Maybe we need to be telling better stories again.”- Kevin WelchStable background levels of deceit in the system.The way we teach history is a mistake because it doesn’t make history palpable and thus unrepeatable.Topher Sipes of Sound Self chimes in.Heather challenges the assumption that virtual reality will solve any humanitarian issue.(Cover photo taken from http://www.iaacblog.com/programs/swarm-intelligence/)Support this show on Patreon: https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week’s episode is an experiment in science fiction storytelling – the author-read short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality.’” Originally released to Patreon supporters (without the intro or musical soundtrack) last November, this story brings together many of the core themes of Future Fossils: the challenges of navigating overwhelming and contradictory information online; the new literacies that will emerge in response to AI-assisted “deep fakes” that make conventional evidence inadmissible in courts or scientific journals; the thinning veil between our physical senses and the ethereal realm of data; and the experience of time in a future when possibility, prediction, and recording stretch out in all directions (but unreliably).My first adult foray into the world of science fiction, this piece was inspired – nay, made necessary – by the recent news about new vocal synthesis AI that lets consumers edit audio and video and manufacture wholly new, convincing forgeries that sound and look exactly like "the real thing." We all grew up in an age when our recordings are the evidence of something. It was certainly a step up from the hearsay that we once relied on, but it's not enough these days – and as technology gets more and more sophisticated it may be impossible for us to tell the difference between "what's really there" and what is just a digital illusion. Trip with me down this vertigo-inducing psychedelic tunnel to a world in which invisible and discarnate agents speak to you in lovers' voices; in which algorithmic AI pop stars outcompete real artists and our thoroughly-mapped world returns to demon-haunted wilderness; in which we all become half-monks and half-forensics-experts as the new obsession is attempting to determine if we can believe our senses... This piece is planned as the epilogue to my forthcoming book, How To Live in The Future. It's a rare weird bird among its influences: one part literature, one part psychedelic beat screed, and the first time I have managed to combine the metanoia, vision, and poetic flourish that inspires me to write. (I also wrote it all by hand in a delicious Clairefontaine "Flying Spirit" journal that I bought in Montréal this summer, and took with me to the Global Eclipse Gathering and Burning Man. I have to say, that had no small effect on how this all came out. Real pen and paper leads to very different writing.) If you’d like the PDFs of the original handwritten manuscript, you can find them here:https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/an-oral-history-of-the-end-of-realityRead all of my publicly-available draft chapters of How to Live in the Future, the companion essays to this story:https://medium.com/@michaelgarfieldAll of the music in this episode is from my album, Love Scenes & Field Recordings, which you can download for any price here:https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordingsCover Image © Giacomo Carmagnola and reused with permission. Check out his work and help him support his aging mother: https://facebook.com/giacomocarmagnolaarthttps://instagram.com/Gore_XVSpecial thanks to Transhumanity.net for being a featured sponsor of this podcast! Their concerns about the ethical deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) are perfectly aligned with this episode’s rather chilling speculative futures, and I’m glad to know that there are people working on a world where AGI improves the lives of every person, not just the very rich.Support this show on Patreon:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/ Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

This week we chat with science writer (and former laser physicist) Kate Greene, whose writing explores everything from Big Data to boredom to brain scans, and whose fascinating and eclectic life is brightly punctuated by the four months she spent living inside a Mars base simulation on Hawaii.http://www.kategreene.net/about/We Discuss:How she became a scientist, and then a science writer.The importance of good teachers and mentorship and encouragement along a person’s developmental journey.“Everything that I’ve done is the result of network effects.”Her time as a guinea pig in a simulated Mars colony on Hawaii…Why astronauts love hot sauce.Knowing your purpose - feeling the intuitive hit that lets you know you’re on the right path.Princeton Engineering Anomalies Lab and the scientific evidence for the influence of intention on the outcome of random events.Kate’s fascination with brain scans.“I often wonder, what the hell is my brain doing right now?”Terence McKenna’s vision of posthuman, cephalopod skin telepathy…and Twitter as a form of that same ambient telepathy.“Never in the history of humanity have we had such extensive communication prosthetics.”How do science journalists and scientists alike keep up with the “info quake” of modern life?Big data and AI – can we preserve and evolve critical thought and rigorous investigation when our research is done in collaboration with machine intelligences using logical processes we ourselves don’t understand?“Science is so HUMAN. It’s performed by humans that have all of these biases and blind spots…the fact that there’s so much information points to the fact that there needs to be new ways to sift through it.”“A lot of people think that AI is just going to replace people in a lot of ways, but I feel like it is going to be one of the most intimate symbiotic relationships that we have in the future. I mean, this technology will become as close to human as anything humanity’s ever created, and it’s not going to be able to do it on its own. It will be a symbiosis. We will be learning from each other and training each other.”The problem science journalism has with reporting real science, not just sensationalist headlines based on science…and how social media has made it worse.What you would miss about Earth if you moved to Mars.“Earth is SO wonderful. And I don’t think I knew it – I kinda knew it, but I didn’t ACTUALLY know it – until I couldn’t be a part of it for four months.”Cooking “on Mars” in a simulated colony on Mauna Loa.Aromatherapy in space!What Kate learned from teaching creative writing in a women’s prison.“This is modern day slavery: there are more people incarcerated in the United States than in any other Western country, and it’s because it’s profitable. Something needs to change…one thing that you can do is realize that people in prisons are still part of your community, and that you still have a responsibility to them. To give what you can, to make sure that their lives are better, that all of our lives are better.”Cory Doctorow’s short story “The Man Who Sold The Moon” in ASU’s Project Hieroglyph compilation.The crossover between the Burning Man crowd and the space exploration crowd.Other mentioned science journalists to follow:Ed Yonghttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/Kenneth Changhttps://www.nytimes.com/by/kenneth-changNatalie Wolchoverhttps://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/Join the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2 Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-google Subscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossils Subscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5v Subscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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