Humans On The Loop

This week’s guest is Hunter Maats, host of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast and co-author of The Straight-A Conspiracy. We talk about the future of education and human collaboration – moving past a world of routine factory-worker indoctrination and the “insane cargo cult” of the academic system, and into a new model for the transmission of knowledge that suits a truly planetary culture. https://twitter.com/huntermaatshttps://medium.com/@huntermaats The value of myth, ritual, and other deeply-ingrained but often-maligned premodern human activities. How to make sense of authority, expertise, and accreditation in a world where the dominance of academia (and the legitimacy of so many other institutions) is losing hold. How do we structure a “global village?” What is post-academic education? What comes after the fall of the Ivory Tower? How do we recruit premodern impulses into the project of contemporary life without repressing magic, ritual, and myth? We also talk a lot of smack on Richard Dawkins for being the totally irrational pope of Anti-Religion. Hunter mentions my article on the evolution of creativity: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877 Quotes: “The walls of the Ivory Tower have been falling down for the last thirty years. There are now 60 million scientific papers, 130 million books. It’s literally too much information for a tiny cadre of individuals to try and make sense of. It’s going to take seven and a half billion people to really make sense and draw signal out of that noise.” “If you’re reading a blog post, you’re getting an hour or two of distilled thought. If you’re reading a book, then you’re getting hundreds or thousands of hours of distilled thought. The question is, what is your information diet, and what are you sharing, and what are you engaging with?” “You should structure a global village a lot like you structure an actual village…” “Biologically, we want ritual, we want myth, we want belonging, we want a sense of embeddedness. BUT, we have all this cool stuff now…” “People like [Richard] Dawkins, even though they bang on about reason all the time, are in my assessment not very reflective individuals.” “The flag of science has, for a really long time, been in the hands of narrow minded bigots who have drawn a line around their tribe and said that all other tribes, which they call ‘religion,’ or some kind of primitive savagery, are worthless. And I have no desire of living that way, and I don’t consider what they do ‘science.’ Because science is about changing your mind in light of all available evidence. It’s not about petty tribalism.” Mentioned: George LakoffRichard DawkinsMarie KondoAdam SmithYuval HarariKevin KellyRichard DoyleDavid LoyeCharles DarwinAlfred Russell Wallace 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 singer-songwriter and music therapist Marya Stark, whom I met at the Global Sound Conference in Los Angeles in 2008. We discuss the future of the feminine, relationships, and reproduction – and laugh a lot. • Linkshttp://marya-stark.comhttps://maryastark.bandcamp.comhttps://soundcloud.com/marya-starkhttps://www.facebook.com/maryastarkmusic • Topics- Long Distance Relationships in the Internet Age- The Pre-Trans Fallacy & Getting Back to The Land- The Future of Sex in the Age of Machines- Industrial Medicine & Birth Trauma- Terraforming & Artificial Wombs- Tradition vs. Innovation- Rudolf Steiner’s Lucifer & Ahriman- Artificial hormones in the drinking water feminizing songbirds- Intuition of Altitude- Dancing between the organic and digital: how can we hold both ends of this without succumbing to either?- Reclaiming the sacred traditions of premodern femininity- Bloodwork, Moon Lodges, and the revival of the Sacred Feminine- Adopting a “Bit Torrent” model to our mixed ethnicities and identities, as a response to concerns about cultural appropriation and “buffet-line” spirituality- Building a “Literacy of Empathies”- The moving target of “wisdom,” “experience,” and “adult” through the ages- Soul Retrieval 101- dealing with the emotions of the intuition of A sole connection from a parallel universe or alternative timeline & The perils of “astral polyamory” • Quotes“Just because the wisdom is ancient doesn’t mean it’s the most effective.”“Sometimes when we’re in a distortion paradigm, our strategies for wholeness create more distortion.”“Are we all going to have this magical Golden Age wake-up call? I’m still rootin’ for it.”“Honor the thousands of shoulders that we stand on to be able to host some of this information. Because they were committed to the lineage. They were committed to carrying it through, no matter what. They’d give their lives for it. I have meditation in my life because of those individuals. I’m not going to shit all over them because I think their cultural context or whatever doesn’t match my fucking modern idea and ideals. So how do I hold the complexity of that conversation in my heart while not spinning my ego into circles about how cool I am because I’m a meditator?”“I have to have a prayer for our species that we are connected to an evolutionary architecture…”“It’s as if the pain that everyone is in is the same. And it’s rooted in disconnection and distortion of what they’re capable of.” • Citations- Up From Eden by Ken Wilber- At The Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson- Alien: Covenant (film)- HR Giger and The Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century by Stanislav Grof- Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck & Christopher Cowan- “The Tower That Ate People” by Peter Gabriel (song)- Videodrome (film)- Homo Deus by Yuval Harari- Team Human Podcast with Douglas Rushkoff 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

“You were a paleontologist, originally.  I’ve always considered myself a ‘paisley-ontologist.’  A paleontologist will excavate the soil in search of fossils and a paisley-ontologist will excavate the present for fossilized perceptions.  So I’m always looking for these kind of nuggets, linguistic impressions or etymological traces that lead us from the present into this sort of timelessness, or this subconscious of words and symbols.  I look at the world as a sort of Rorschach Worship Workshop…”This week’s guest is “The Ungoogleable” Michaelangelo, who all-embracing creative life is as difficult to describe as he is to find via conventional web search.  The only person I’ve ever met – or could imagine – who could successfully pull off the marriage of “comedy,” “necromancy,” AND “rap” – and do it all in a convincing but false Scottish brogue as his alter ego Void Denizen – Michael is one of the wittiest, most hermetic guests this podcast’s ever had.  AND he has some thoughts about the show itself that take us down a labradorite rabbit hole and into underground auroras, where the riddles of the afterlife unfold before our very eyes. Even I learned new things about “Future Fossils” in this conversation!  Come with us on a trip into the Illuminated Unconscious and help us excavate the present in the new discipline of Paisley-ontology… • Michelangelo’s Website:http://www.voidandimagination.com/• MG interviews Void Denizen on Reality Sandwich: http://realitysandwich.com/321767/necromancing-the-philosophers-stone-void-denizens-psychomagical-hip-hop/ • Topics:- artificial intelligence- gaia theory- the anthropocene- the atmosphere as an artifact- mineral consciousness- “upgrade or perish”- flowers were a catastrophe- the importance of turning to face the strange- paisley-ontology- using natural fractals as an inkblot test or oracle- pareidolia- embodied cognition & conceptual metaphor- panpsychism & mind as process- the invention of and reason for sex- aliens & the archetype of the flying saucer- the soul and all its incarnations as a single four-dimensional organism- daimonic information- excavating the future out of the present- fossilized dinosaur brains- accidental summonings- The Mandela Effect & the possibility of changing the past- The Metaforest • Mentions:- How To Know Higher Realms by Rudolf Steiner- The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson- Francisco Varela- Neil Theise- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin- Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle- Crystal & Dragon by David Wade- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood- Wings of Desire & City of Angels (films)- Daniel Vitalis on Tangentially Speaking Podcast- Crossing The Event Horizon by Jonathan Zap- “Modern Things” by Björk- Interstellar (film) • Other Stuff:- View From The Horizon https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/view-from-the-horizon-perspectives-on-a-new-age-burning-man-2013  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

Support Future Fossils on PatreonReview Future Fossils on iTunesReview Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week is part 2 of our conversation with biohacking polyamorous geneticist and aspiring Australian politician Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry. Get ready for a chat so crazy you’ll think it’s 1999…we spend about 20 minutes arguing about modern art, 20 minutes arguing about the Singularity, and 20 minutes arguing about what’s in the box.• Meow Himself:https://www.facebook.com/meowludo• Biofoundry:http://foundry.bio/https://www.facebook.com/Bio-Hack-Syd-488627521201437/https://www.meetup.com/biohackoz/ • We Talk:- We compare campaigning for nuclear technology to bringing a stripper with a drug problem to family dinner;- IP as Art & The Shape of The Future;- Leveraging existing systems as scaffolding to transition back into a way of life more suited to our paleolithic environment;- Vantablack & the jerk who got an exclusive license to use it for art – and how the art community fought back;- What is GOOD art?- How “What is Life?” and “What is Art?” might be the same question…- What the next few decades will be like if we assume a Technological Singularity…- The social construction of identity- We argue for ages about whether godlike AI will be independent from the biosphere…. • Citations:- Common As Air by Lewis Hyde- Damien Hirst- Anish Kapoor- Alain de Botton- Marcel Duchamp- Michelangelo- James Gansfield- The Architects of Air- Stuart Semple- Andrew Despi- What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly- John Allen (Institute of Ecotechnics)- Shin Gojira- Teranesia by Greg Egan- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin- Bacterial Polyamory • Quotes:“If you say to ‘them,’ ‘I have fifteen girlfriends, how many of them should I bring?’, you’ll freak ‘em the fuck out.”“Artists have to be subversive. And why not be subversive within the system that exists? Because that provokes other artists to come and then challenge it.”“I’ve had enough wine to say this: everything we do now is meaningless. It’s playtime until the Technological Singularity.”“We are made of atoms, ultimately, but they’re our bitch.”“We’re talking twenty years from now, and I can’t even predict this year. If I could, I would have invested in Bitcoin in March!” • Read more about evolution as entropy: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-3-living-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-2a42538ee2• Read more about evolution as a remix: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877 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

Review Future Fossils on iTunes Review Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week’s guest is Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry whom I met at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Innovation Lab in February. Meow is a modern trickster-wizard par excellence, entirely too smart for his own good, and he loves to argue – this is one of the most wide-ranging talks on Future Fossils yet! Enjoy part 1 of a special double feature that continues next week… • Biofoundry:http://foundry.bio/ • Press about Meow: https://www.inverse.com/article/5887-australian-biohacker-meow-ludo-meow-meow-on-diy-biology  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/man-named-meow-ludo-disco-gamma-meow-meow-has-transit-pass-implanted-into-hand_us_5953b3eae4b0da2c732015e6 • We Talk: - Cryptocurrency- Biohacking- Getting Married on the BlockchainPolyamory & Relationship Anarchy- Intellectual Property- An Ecological View of Relationships- Plural Singularities- The Genetic Origins of Hominids (HARs)- Would God be considered an Organism?- Crystals Are COOL- Mass Extinctions- Asteroid Mining- An Ethical Debate on Eugenics & Nukes- Meltdowns, Solar Flares, & The Insecurity of The Electrical Grid Citations: • Common As Air - Lewis Hyde• More Than Two - Franklin Veaux & Eve Reichert• I Heart Huckabees (film)• The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster - Richard Brautigan• “Transcending Possessiveness in Love & Music” by Michael Garfield• Guns, Germs & Steel - Jared Diamond• Interstellar (film)• WALL-E (film) “Capitalism lends itself to models that are in crisis continuously…” 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

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on Patreon This week we talk about what the oldest fossils in the world have to teach us about life’s origins and destiny with Tara Djokic of the University of New South Wales. Tara’s a geologist and astrobiologist whose team and work just appeared on the cover of Scientific American for changing our ideas about the beginning of our story…  http://www.pangea.unsw.edu.au/people/students/tara-djokic https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15263 http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/09/527575457/australian-fossils-hint-at-where-to-search-for-life-on-mars QUOTES: “Thinking for humanity, moving forward and prospering as a global community – a lot of people in power aren’t thinking that way.” “We can only base what we know about life, and about intelligent life, on what we know here on Earth, because we’ve got no other sample. And until that happens, we can only make hypotheses.” “I can only speak for me. And when I think, okay, well, we all just came from goo, and maybe one day the universe won’t be here anymore, I find that pretty humbling. And that’s pretty much the reason I got into this field. Relationships come and go, friendships come and go, life changes and evolves…and the society we live in is so distracting, and we get caught up in trivial things…when you put that all in perspective and think, we all just came from goo, it just makes you a little bit HUMBLER. Because I do get caught up in the same stuff that everybody else does. We’re humans; we’re governed by our emotions and our biology…if I can look outside of that biological box as a human being and put things in perspective, then I’m going to. And that’s what I think astrobiology does, and that’s what I think studying the origins of life does.” “We’re really just a macro-sized version of a microbial community on the planet.” “We’re a community. But unfortunately, for some reason, humans all seem to think we’re individual and the pocket over here can do whatever they want and it won’t affect the pocket over there.” “The one saving grace we have for humanity is hope. Hope is what drives anybody to do anything, right? The hope to achieve something. The hope that they’re going to succeed.” “The key difference between science and religion is that science gives you the information and then you can make your own decision, whereas a lot of the time it’s, ‘This is the information; take it or leave it.’ For me the beauty of science and the beauty of education is that you’re able to make critical decisions FOR YOURSELF.” TOPICS: - What are the oldest fossils on the planet? - What was the environment in which life emerged on Earth? - Explaining scientific research to strangers. - The relationship between scholarship and leisure. - How she become an astrobiologist - Fermi’s Paradox & The Great Silence (or, “If life is so likely, why don’t we hear anybody?”) - Have we not encountered intelligent extraterrestrials because they tend to wipe themselves out, or because they’ve learned to encrypt all of their communication to look like radio noise? - The two kinds of scientists: concepts first, then hypothesis; or data first, then hypothesis. - The mystical experience of doing paleontological fieldwork in the Badlands. - How does this research help us understand where to look for life elsewhere in the solar system? - What the study of ancient life reveals about overarching patterns in every part of the cosmos. - The Great Oxygenation Event 2.4 billion years ago and what we can learn from this ancient catastrophe. - The importance of good science writing in an age of “alternative facts.” - The difficulties faced by science in an age when so much of discovery is made with the assistance of sophisticated machines. MENTIONS: - Edgar Mitchell - Bruce Damer & Dave Deamer - Paolo Soleri - The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter - Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Suess - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Ready Player One by Ernest Kline - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick 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 brought to you by Visionary Magnets, the refrigerator poetry magnets that turn your boring old kitchen appliances into the substrate for woke invocations, tantric pillow talk, and other occult goofery. Support their Kickstarter and "enlighten your fridge" today! Or tomorrow.  Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes Subscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher Join the Future Fossils Facebook Group This week is part one of a special double-length episode with Jon Lebkowsky, founder of EFF-Austin – one of the unsung heroes of Internet culture, whose tale stretches through the earliest web communities and reads like a list of landmark moments in the history of digital rights and culture.  http://weblogsky.com/ https://twitter.com/jonl https://www.facebook.com/polycot/ https://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/495/Bruce-Sterling-and-Jon-Lebkowsky-page01.html We talk about the early days of hacking in the Wild West of the 1990s, how the World Wide Web has changed since then, and the promises and perils of the Internet in the 21st Century. It’s a winding tale of pseudonymous keyboard-slingers and federal raids, roleplaying game empires and sci-fi visionaries, centered on the unsuspecting hippie cowboy outpost of Austin, Texas, Once Upon A Time. Enjoy this special conversation on the history of the Internet we know today, and a snapshot of the hopes and fears of life online in the dawn of our digital era… TOPICS: - The threat of Internet-empowered fascism and “participation mystique” (or maybe worse, a corporate plutocracy) eroding rational civil discourse and the dignity of the individual - The problems with “Net Neutrality” and how it makes more sense to focus on “The Freedom to Connect” - Connectivity vs. Interdependence (OR) Networks vs. Buddhism - Does the Noosphere already exist, and we’re just excavating it? - The History of Electronic Frontier Foundation-Austin and how it was connected to the secret service’s raid of legendary role-playing game designer Steve Jackson (GURPS) - The hilarious, troubled Dawn Age of e-commerce before secure web browsing - Jon’s work with a Gurdjieff group and his encounters with esoterica as an editor of the Consciousness subdomain for the last issue of the Whole Earth Review - Cybergrace, TechGnosis, and Millennial concerns about the mind/body split in the first Internet and our need to humanize technology with whole-body interfaces and MOVEMENT - Embodied Virtual Reality & Other Full-Sensory Immersive Media - Cory Doctorow’s new novel Walkaway as a banner book for the maker movement and a new form of cyber-social-liberation. - The movement of political agency back into city-states in a digital era - “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” - Shaping the future of wireless infrastructure in the early 00s of Austin - Getting our values right before we imprint the wrong ones into superhuman AI - Putting together diverse conversation groups to solve “wicked problems” - New forms of participatory open-source politics suited for an internet age SOME OF THE PEOPLE & STUFF WE MENTIONED: Whole Earth Provisions, Whole Earth Review, The WELL, Whole Foods, William Gibson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hakim Bey, William Irwin Thompson, Alien Covenant, Terminator, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Mike Godwin, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirkey, WIRED Magazine, Fringeware, RoboFest, Heather Barfield, Neal Stephenson, Terence McKenna, Church of the Subgenius, Mondo 2000, Erik Davis, GI Gurdjieff, The National Science Fiction Convention, Rudy Rucker, Greg Bear, Jon Shirley, Jennifer Cobb, Robert Scoville, Greg Egan, Ernest Cline, Octopus Project, The Tingler, Honey I Shrunk The Kids (Ride), Charles Stross, Glass House, Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow, Alan Moore, Project Hieroglyph, Arizona State University, Jake Dunagan, Plutopia Productions, The Digital Convergence Initiative, Chris Boyd, South By Southwest, Boing Boing, Make Magazine, Dave Demaris, Maggie Duval, Bon Davis, DJ Spooky, Forest Mars, OS Con, RU Sirius, Shin Gojira, Open-Source Party, JON LEBKOWSKY QUOTES: “The Noosphere can certainly have pathologies…” “The Internet was originally a peer-to-peer system, and so you had a network of networks, and they were all cooperating and carrying each other’s traffic, and so forth. And that was a fairly powerful idea, but the Internet is not that anymore. The Internet has, because of the way it’s evolved, because it’s become so powerful and so important and so critical, there are systems that are more dominant – backbone systems – and those are operated by large companies that understand how to operate big networks. That’s really a different system than the system that was originally built.” “SO FAR we’ve managed to keep the Internet fairly open…the absolute idea of net neutrality might not be completely practical.” “Science fiction is a literature of ideas, but a lot of those ideas do not manifest in exactly the way that they did in the book.” “I don’t have a real high level of confidence that anybody understands exactly what the fuck is going on.” “You couldn’t get a consumer account to get access to the Internet at that time. And in fact I think the first companies to do that were here in Austin.” “At the time, we were the only game in town for internet stuff…” “One thing I learned was, if you’re at the very cutting edge, it’s hard to make money.” “There are a lot of people who aren’t in touch with themselves internally. Because it’s hard. It’s hard to do that.” “I know that that’s sort of the goal in VR development: to give you a fully immersive experience where you’re really in a completely other reality, like in the Holodeck. But, you know. I’m still dealing with THIS reality. I don’t want another one.” “In an online community, people are always itching for ways to get into real human proximity with one another. They’re always looking for ways to meet.” “That’s my idea of what works now: is to have events that are experiences, you know, versus people just like, going to movies, or watching television, or going to a concert and watching a band play.” “I keep thinking that we won’t be able to solve our problems with bureaucracy or the kind of governance structures that we’ve been living with, but I look around me and see people who are doing just fine, and doing great work, and living their lives…and I’m sort of feeling hopeful and a little bit confident that those people will step up and do what they need to do to make things work, even if our so-called elected officials aren’t doing it.” 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

Support Future Fossils on Patreon Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group “I think we’re at a real crossroads. I’m an old guy, I may not live to see a whole lot more of the changes that are undoubtedly going to happen, but I would sure like to. I try to be an optimist. I’d like to hope that through education and science and clear thinking and good communication we come to sort of a passive understanding of the stuff we need to do – rather than having any ‘conspiracy’ organizations shoving it down everybody’s throats. We can have creativity and BETTER lives, rather than just more and more and more.” This week our guest is visionary artist Mark Henson, whose highly detailed and frequently erotic landscape paintings portray the full spectrum of human experience, our greatest dreams and most disturbing nightmares. Mark’s been a friend and elder to me since we met in 2010 and I was delighted to catch up with him at this year’s Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland – please excuse the background noise in this recording as you enjoy this festive and far-ranging conversation about art, life, and creativity! Mark's WebsiteMark's Facebook Page  TOPICS: - Viewing and making art as time travel. - Will artificial intelligence replace artists? - Can we understand the universe? - Altered sense of time self in dreams and psychedelic experiences. - How technology has crept into our memory and dream lives. - The necessity of Universal Basic Income AND Life Purpose in an automated post-work world. - “The Work” of ayahuasca users and telepathic post-humans (on social media) of being open to the intensity and burden of collective experience. - The importance of an intentional media diet. - How Mark got to collaborate with Jimi Hendrix as a teenager! - Mark’s thoughts on the history and evolving intersection of Street Art, Fine Art, and Live Music. - How different musical styles and intoxicants contribute to different media ecosystems. - How Mark and his stepson almost got one of his paintings into the White House. - Projected art as graffiti and political action; augmented reality graffiti as the future of dissent, and geospatial metadata as a new cyberpunk Wild West – metagraffiti. - Defacing ads and reclaiming public space, a polite How To. - The future of the family. REFERENCES: - The Golden Oecumene Trilogy by John C. Wright - Blood Music by Greg Bear - Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research - The Teafaerie’s Erowid Ibogaine Article - Ayahuasca Coloring Book artist Alexander Ward - Michael’s appearance on Comedy Central’s Problematic with Moshe Kasher - Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle QUOTES FROM MARK: “My overall project here is to create impressions of what life was like, in these days…” “By 2000, we were supposed to be flying around in little personal cars and live in a peaceful world where the big issues had been resolved. That didn’t happen, so I’m not going to hold my breath on a Singularity.” “Sometimes I have fairly vivid dreams where, if the dream is strong enough, later on when I’m awake I might confuse that reality with something that happened in my waking moments. Did I dream that, or did that really happen to me ten years ago. What about this little experience? Was that a dream, or…I can’t quite remember. Sometimes that happens to me, and I actually like that, because if I can blur the boundaries between that world and this one, I think it’s more interesting.” “Maybe if the Singularity happens, or Artificial Intelligence gets intelligent enough to be a frustrated, nervous wreck over wanting to express itself to the point of absolute fanaticism where it has to create something new in the world…I would love to see that, actually. See what comes out.” “Do I want to live in a Borg mind where I know what you’re thinking and you know what I’m thinking? No, I do not, because that’ll clog up my thoughts.” “Everybody is radiating self-expression some way or another. It’s one of our basic human desires. How do we not be swamped in all the static? It’s like we’re running 300 radios at one time. It’s hard to listen to one particular song. So somehow we have to filter things out. It’s sort of essential just to keep sane.” “The essence of our culture war is an economic war, in a sense…if you have a good psychedelic experience, you realize that the beauty of a sunset is of more importance than a pallet full of $100 bills.” “I think if the humans manage to manage ourselves, we’ll be able o accomplish managing nature so that nature can still be nature…and maybe we’ll have a few friendly helpful robots as well.”  Future Fossils Intro/Outro Music: "God Detector" by Skytree (feat. Michael Garfield & Dennis McKenna) 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

“I would love to see a world where 100% of the people on this planet, and all the other beings, believe their life is WAY worth living. Not just kinda okay, even, but WAY worth living.” This week’s guest is Mitch Altman, a hacker and electronics scientist whose life is the stuff of legend (here's his Wikipedia entry).Founder of Cornfield Electronics (“We Make Useful Electronics for a Better World”), co-founder of Noisebridge (epic hackerspace in San Francisco), inventor of TV-B-Gone.This episode’s title is pulled from Mitch’s talk by a similar name. In this Episode: Living in alignment with your dreams, working for yourself. Entrepreneurship as serving your own sense of the awesome and letting the resonant audience come to your own articulated personal meaning.The potential of full-cost accounting: how weaving every invisible cost (“ecosystem services,” mothering, etc.) into the economy could transform selfish behavior into good for all.Self-discovery and finding the place where your enjoyment and passion meets the needs of your society.“Helping me includes helping other people, which feels good. How can I NOT do this?”Getting through depression and loneliness to find creative fulfillment.Breaking out of habit to discover the life we CHOOSE with our sudden wealth of free time…The importance of boredom and leisure to the full development of the soul.The evolutionary fitness landscape and looking at our choices as moves across a geography of our adaptation to various environments.Making the hard decision to back out of something you’ve invested in and begin again as something new…Technological Unemployment, Universal Basic Income, and the rise of Hacker Spaces.The role of local currencies and minimum guaranteed income in the architecting a society of creativity and leisure.“All of this has to happen slow enough that things don’t collapse or become traumatic, but fast enough that we can survive as a species.”Open Source Digital Democracy and fractal structures in economy and politics – what comes after representative republics and printing-press-era legislature in the age of the Internet?Natural hierarchies (holarchies and do-ocracies) versus artificial hierarchies…and how to create a pocket of effective, fruitful anarchy within the right container.Chaos Computer Club and the future of meta human swarm intelligence (read also: social creatures living in community)“I try to not be pessimistic OR optimistic. I try to the best of my ability to see things AS THEY ARE.”The recent explosive proliferation of Chinese hackerspaces. Photo Credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom 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

New essays, music, talks, and writing coming soon for my Patreon supporters! Subscribe here and get everything I do for free if you haven’t already…This week our guest is Becca Tarnas, whom I caught up with at the 2017 MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland.Becca’s Websitehttps://beccatarnas.com/about/Archai Journal: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmologyhttp://www.archai.org/“Everything breathes together.” - PlotinusWe discussed:The imminent shift into an archetypal paradigm, in which we transcend naïve subject-object dualism and experience meaning as not merely something manufactured by the brain…Uranus-Pluto Alignments in the 1960s & the 2010sJupiter joining the revolution in 2016-2017 and magnifying thingsWhat will the world be like after all this revolutionary energy runs its course?Impending collective shadow work in our inherently psychedelic future circa Saturn-Pluto Conjunction, 2018-2021 (ish)How do we hold to our centers in a storm of history?How do you deal with knowing that most of your adult life is going to be spent navigating unprecedented social & personal transformation?“I think having the archetypal perspective helps me to ‘zoom out’ and see this as part of a larger narrative, and to feel myself participating in something that is SO much bigger than me. So that helps. I definitely feel fear, as any mortal person would, during this time. I also feel the wave of excitement of this very powerful revolutionary moment, recognizing that change really IS necessary in this time.”“…to just try and participate as fully as possible. Because it IS a remarkable time to be alive…”“I think being okay with the Mystery has to be a part of it. And, at the same time, it can’t be a part of it all the time. Sometimes we do have to just melt down and accept the utter chaos and fear of it all and then pick ourselves back up from that place and keep going forward.”#futureshock & #pastshockThe wonder of the holistic intelligence disclosed by archetypal cosmology.James Hillman is awesome and there are a lot of good scholars and academics working on archetypal astrology, these days…What is rigor in astrology? How does the community peer review?Science and Imagination.Books Mentioned:• Cosmos & Psyche by Richard Tarnas• Glass House by Charles Stross• Stages of Faith by James Fowler• Promethea by Alan MooreSubscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes:http://bit.ly/future-fossilsSubscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher:http://stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurefossils 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