A course by Stephen Reid · Original notes Original notes available on Google Docs · Event page

Technological Metamodernism

A four-week course with Stephen Reid and special guests

Telegram group: https://t.me/+4CC9lfZMBN04ZTdk 

Substack post announcing the open-sourcing of the notes: https://stephenreid.substack.com/p/technological-metamodernism-course 

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

You are free to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes, as long as you give appropriate credit to the creator, Stephen Reid.

Sources to integrate since course end:

Week 1 prep

Week 1: Introduction (Tuesday 17th September 2024)

Layers of the Civilizational Tech-Stack

The Technoskeptics

The Accelerationists

Critiques

The Decels/Doomers/Longtermists

Introductions to Metamodernism

Three Meanings of “Metamodernism”

Meaning 1: a cultural phase

Meaning 2: a developmental stage

Meaning 3: a philosophical paradigm

In contrast to modernism and postmodernism

Modernism

Postmodernism

Metamodernism

The Metamodern Paradigm, Condensed

Metamodern Stance Towards Life

Metamodern View Of Science

Metamodern View Of Reality

Metamodern Spirituality, Existence And Aesthetics

Metamodern View Of Society

Metamodern View Of The Human Being

5 things that make you metamodern

An Awareness of Allergies

A Belief In Development And Progress

An Understanding Of Hierarchies

Thinking 'Both-And’

Aiming At Reconstruction

Guests

Ellie Hain

Rufus Pollock

Week 1 recording

Week 2 prep

Week 2: Metamodern Takes on Technology (Tuesday 24th September 2024)

(Proto-)metamodern thinkers on technology

Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design

Tenets of Langdon Winner’s “Technological Orthodoxy”

Approaches to Design

Five Propositions Toward Axiological Design

Axiological design and inner development

Rediscovering value

What are values?

Development in Progress

Prudent Problem-Solving

Yellow Teaming

Synergistic Design

Social media

Regenerative Agriculture

Vitalik Buterin's d/acc

The environment, and the importance of coordinated intention

Defense-favoring worlds help healthy and democratic governance thrive

Cosmos Institute's "Third Way"

Guests

Hanzi Freinacht

Emil Ejner Friis

Week 2 recording

Week 3 prep

Week 3: Technological Metamodernism, Myth and Magic (Tuesday 1st October 2024)

Story & myth

Wetiko & Moloch

Egregores

Antidotes

Which stories inspire current tech titans?

So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, and other cautionary tales

Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand: new myths for the masculine

Fellowships, Guilds and Ethical Cults

Past

Present

Future

Guest

Michael Garfield

Week 3 recording

Week 4 prep

Week 4: Metamodern Tech Futures (Tuesday 8th October 2024)

Speculative fiction

Hyperstition & Imagination

Reality Switch Technologies: DMT, lucid dreaming and the jhanas

(5-MeO-)DMT

Lucid dreaming

The Jhānas

Technomancy & Technoshamanism

Wise innovation

Metamodern DAOs, metamodern AI

In-person Futurecraft gatherings

Guest

Alexander Beiner

Week 4 recording

That's a wrap!

Week 1 prep

Hi all,

Thanks for signing up to Technological Metamodernism! I'm really looking forward to seeing you all for the first session on Tue 17th September at 4pm UK/5pm Stockholm time.

I've collected some recommended pre-reading/watching below, about 2 hours total. The newer you are to this area, the more I recommend you try to digest before the session.

The Technoskeptics:

The Accelerationists:

The Metamodernists:

Our guests for the first week will be Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock.

You are welcome to join the Telegram group for course discussion.

Please feel free to reply with any questions.

Best wishes,
Stephen

Week 1: Introduction (Tuesday 17th September 2024)

NotebookLM-generated podcast summary (13 minutes):

Technological Metamodernism - Week 1.wav 

Layers of the Civilizational Tech-Stack

From Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design:

"Technologies are created and evolve together to form whole civilizations. It is important not to consider any technology as existing all by itself. Humans have come to live in massive networks of operationally related technologies, which have come to form whole ecologies and infrastructures supporting every aspect of conscious experience. Ultimately, this new human reality constitutes a technological epoch with distinct material characteristics and societal dynamics."

Consider the categories below as overlapping; this overall model is only a heuristic. There are a variety of comparable stacks proposed in the academic literature, many of which have influenced the model presented here. This is not proposed as definitive, but as a useful set of orienting generalisations.

Tools

Human-scale artifacts, found or made, which augment individual and social practices: rocks, axes, forks, writing implements, etc.

Technologies

The application of complex (scientific) knowledge to solving problems, embedded in intentionally designed artifacts that are complicated enough to require engineering: waterwheel; steam engine; light bulb; refrigerator.

Ecologies of technologies

Sets of technologies that are symbiotically related and co-evolving as nested functional units: e.g., light bulb/lamp/power lines/transformers/power station; and microchip/hard drive/screen/mouse/modem/broadband/server banks.

Infrastructures

Multiple different ecologies of technology embedded together to form a basic part of social coordination and material reproduction within a society: supply chains, transportation systems, markets, communication systems.

Technological epochs

A duration of historical time characterised by a specific suite of infrastructures that are interrelated as the foundation of a social system. Epochs are marked by discontinuous breaks from prior infrastructures, and the emergent social dynamics resulting from new ones: e.g. pre-industrial; industrial; post-industrial.

And technology isn't just material/exterior: see How Psychotechnology Changed Humanity Forever | Age of Awareness

Epoch

Date Range

Tools

Technologies

Ecologies of Technologies

Infrastructures

Psychotechnologies

Early Human

c. 300,000 - 10,000 BCE

Stone tools, spears, fire, bone tools, fishing equipment

Basic shelters, clothing

Hunting and gathering techniques

Nomadic settlements

Cave paintings, oral traditions

Agricultural

c. 10,000 - 3000 BCE

Ploughs, irrigation systems, pottery

Domestication of plants and animals

Farming communities

Permanent settlements, trade routes

Early writing systems, calendars

Classical/Axial Age

c. 3000 BCE - 500 CE

Iron tools, wheeled vehicles

Aqueducts, road systems, shipbuilding

Urban planning, metallurgy

Empires, long-distance trade networks

Alphabets, philosophy, organised religion

Print Revolution

c. 1450 - 1800 CE

Printing press, telescopes, microscopes

Movable type, mechanical clocks

Libraries, publishing houses

Postal systems, universities

Mass literacy, scientific method

Industrial Revolution

c. 1760 - 1970 CE

Steam engines, automobiles, telephones

Mass production, electricity, telegraph

Factory systems, railroads

National power grids, global shipping

Public education, mass media

Information Age

c. 1970 - present

Personal computers, smartphones, wearables

Internet, wireless communication, big data analytics

Social media, e-commerce, cloud computing

Global fibre-optic networks, satellites, data centres

Virtual reality, online education

AI/Transhumanism

c. 2010 - future

LLMs, brain-computer interfaces

AI agents, gene editing, nanotechnology

Augmented reality systems, smart cities

DAOs, global AI infrastructure

Direct neural interfaces, cognitive enhancement, AI-human symbiosis

The Technoskeptics

TECHLASH | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

"a strong negative feeling among a group of people in reaction to modern technology and the behaviour of big technology companies"

Focus on democracy, authoritarianism and surveillance:

Focus on economic inequality:

Focus on psycho-social impacts:

Focus on ecological consequences:

Big picture:

The Accelerationists

'e/acc from first principles':

Beff Jezos (Guillaume Verdon) - Thermodynamics of techno-capitalism | BioAcc Summit

e/acc founding documents:

"e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life… Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates…

Effective accelerationism (e/acc) in a nutshell:

Other key e/acc articles:

e/acc in the mainstream press:

@BasedBeffJezos:

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?

Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #407

Effective Accelerationism and the AI Safety Debate w/ Bayeslord, Beff Jezoz, and Nathan Labenz

Nick Land:

On Nick Land: The Weird Libertarian | Cybertrop(h)ic 

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in 

Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip 

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007 by Nick Land

Accelerationism, The Dark Enlightenment & The Strange Life of Nick Land

A Quick Rundown on Accelerationism

Nick Land On Accelerationism

NICK LAND | Ai as Xenodemon From the Future Pulling Our Strings | Miracles of Coincidence 

Books:

Left Accelerationism:

Critiques

Why Some Billionaires Are Actively Trying To Destroy The World

Effective Accelerationism: Nick Land for Tech Bros

"It makes sense to say that descriptively they worship entropy as they unironically argue that the purpose of the universe is to increase entropy as fast as possible and that it should therefore be our purpose as well. If you try to point out that this is the naturalistic fallacy and that just because this is what the universe does, it doesn't automatically follow that it is good, then instead of them addressing this argument, they start arguing that it is pointless to fight against the universe as you'll lose."

– What are some good critiques of 'e/acc' ('Effective Accelerationism')?  (Chris Leong, EA Forum, Jul 2023)

"Science can tell us about what is in the world, but it cannot tell us about what ought to be. The is/ought distinction cannot be bridged by scientific investigation; what is falls essentially within the realm of the third person, while what ought to be falls within the realm of the second (i.e. between and in concert with other beings). In the absence of guiding values to help us determine the “goodness” of a particular outcome, decisions tend to be made in a manner that prioritizes winning (and, of course, hedonism); in other words, operating within the world on the basis of what is but not what ought to be tends to result in choices being determined by the logic of game theory—what it takes to win (or to feel good), in a narrow sense, regardless of the costs. In other words, science can provide insights into how to achieve our goals more effectively, but it cannot tell us about the goodness of our goals. That knowledge comes from elsewhere. Determining which goals are good goals is largely what we consider to be wisdom, which is distinct from what is simply knowledge."

– Development in Progress - The Consilience Project 

The Decels/Doomers/Longtermists

– ‘I’m a Doomer’: OpenAI’s New Interim CEO Wants to Slow AI Progress Down 

"The doomers and accelerationists are just variants of [the same] movement. One is techno-cautious about certain advanced technologies like AGI, while the other is techno-optimistic. Both are part of the very same hyper-capitalist, techno-utopian tradition of thought that has roots in transhumanism and has become pervasive within Silicon Valley over the past 20 years. This is why the quarrels between these camps should be seen as mere family disputes."

– 'Effective Accelerationism' and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia (TruthDig, Dec 2023)

On Longtermism:

Doomers/decels vs Accelerationists:

Introductions to Metamodernism

Introductory videos:

Metamodernism 101: What Does 'Metamodern' Mean?

What is Metamodernism?

Maps:

Key books:

Three Meanings of “Metamodernism”

From The Listening Society. See also Metamodernism: The Conquest of a Term - Metamoderna 

The word metamodernism is basically a term that describes that which comes after modern society (and after the “postmodern” critique of it), a point in history when people begin to see through modern society, as well as beyond it; hence the word “meta”. There are three versions of metamodernism, three different meanings of the term, all three of which are employed here. A smart person will sometimes use one of the three meanings distinctively, and sometimes let the meaning of the word slide somewhat, so that you can cover more than one meaning at once. Either way, there is a profound interrelatedness between the three meanings.

Meaning 1: a cultural phase

The first meaning, the most commonly used in other sources thus far, is metamodernism as a certain cultural phase in matters such as art, architecture, media, philosophy and politics. In this sense, metamodernism is a certain kind of “mood” or Zeitgeist (spirit-of-the-time). In that sense “metamodernism” is comparable to things such as the Romantic period, the Baroque, fin de siècle, the Enlightenment, realism or naturalism or cubism and postmodernism. If you ever studied arts, philosophy or literature you are familiar with this way of thinking in cultural phases. Each epoch has its own mood, its own vibe based on a certain cultural logic that responds to circumstances and events of the period.

Meaning 2: a developmental stage

The second meaning, which is the one primarily used in this book, is metamodernism as a developmental stage. This is very different from a cultural phase. The idea of a phase, like Romanticism, which came after the Enlightenment, does not say anything about which one is “more advanced” or “more developed”. It simply states that this phase came after that one (for instance, because the German idealists wanted to distance themselves from French rationalism). Stage theories are different. They claim, for instance, that adulthood comes after childhood, which in turn comes after infancy, which comes after life in the womb—these stages are well theorized and empirically supported in developmental psychology. Or that industrial civilization comes after traditional, agricultural civilization, which comes after warrior societies, which come after tribal hunter-gatherer societies—each with their own corresponding form of information technology.

Stage theories make greater claims than phase theories. They hold that there is a much deeper qualitative shift between each stage and that there is a certain pattern or logic that describes the relationship between all of the studied stages, what I call a Realdialektik in chapter 10. Phases cannot be “ranked” as higher or lower, only as earlier or later. For instance, “old age” is of course a later phase than “adulthood”—but it is usually not a higher stage. There is a huge developmental stage difference between a newborn and a ten-year-old—but the same difference is not there between a 70- and an 80-year-old. In fact, in the latter case the developmental difference is more likely to be a negative one: The 80-year-old is likely to be on a lower developmental stage due to the burdens of ageing.

Meaning 3: a philosophical paradigm

The third meaning is one that is not yet established, but we are trying to establish in this and later Hanzi books. It is simply a term to describe the thinking of Hanzi Freinacht and related philosophers—and the worldview and politics that come along with that philosophy. To be clear, our claim is that Hanzi’s line of thinking represents a high developmental stage and a certain Zeitgeist of a new form of society that is being born. Because this line of thinking is both sophisticated and intimately connected with a wide and deep understanding of the dynamics of the new era, it is very useful for all manner of things. In this sense, metamodernism is a paradigm. A paradigm, as the word is used here, is a fundamental worldview with its own form of science, politics, market, culture and self-knowledge—just as the Enlightenment thinking is connected to the modern liberal democracy, capitalism (and state socialism), the individual person and modern science.

In contrast to modernism and postmodernism

From What is Metamodernism? - Metamoderna:

Metamodernism is the philosophy and view of life that corresponds to the digitalized, postindustrial, global age. This can be contrasted against modern and postmodern philosophies.

Modernism

Modern philosophy is the general mechanistic, reductionist worldview that is still today the common “mainstream” narrative people learn in schools and that has most adherents in Western societies and in other developed economies. The modern worldview first blossomed with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century (Newton’s physics, Descartes’ philosophy and Francis Bacon’s scientific method). It holds that physics is the basis of reality and that science and rationality set people free. It is tied to such things as democracy, capitalism, socialism and human rights. It corresponds to the living conditions of industrial society within the frames of a nation state.

Postmodernism

Postmodern philosophy is the critical perspective that has grown from social science and the humanities over the last century and it has taken a firm hold of universities and social movements during the last few decades. Postmodernism involves a critical stance towards knowledge and science, and holds that power structures, unconscious drives, cognitive biases and arbitrary social constructions enthrall human minds. We are not nearly as rational as we think. Hence, the story of science and progress is not necessarily true: viewed from the perspective of the oppressed and weak, the progress of civilization often amounts to little more than exploitation, smoke screens, excuses and a more systematized oppression. The postmodern mind grows from late modern societies in which mass media and cultural distinctions often cause more suffering in people’s lives than do direct economic inequalities.

Metamodernism

Metamodern philosophy enters the scene only once the Internet and the social media have become truly dominant factors in people’s lives and when many of us no longer partake directly in the production and distribution of industrial goods. It is a worldview which combines the modern faith in progress with the postmodern critique. What you get then, is a view of reality in which people are on a long, complex developmental journey towards greater complexity and existential depth. The metamodern philosophy is a whole world of ideas and suppositions that are counter-intuitive to modern and postmodern people alike. But since both the modern and postmodern philosophies are increasingly outdated, these metamodern ideas are set to develop, take hold, and spread. One day, they may become as dominant as the modern philosophy is today.

To sum up, one can contrast the metamodern ideas against the modern and postmodern ones:

The Metamodern Paradigm, Condensed

From The Listening Society:

Metamodern Stance Towards Life

  • To be exquisitely ironic and sincere, both at once.
  • To be both extremely idealistic and extremely Machiavellian.
  • To see that God is dead and humanism dying (humanism is the humanity-centered worldview originating in the Renaissance) and to accept and celebrate this by taking meaning-creation into one’s own hands.
  • To intellectually see, and intuitively sense, the intimate interconnectedness of all things: “The universe in a grain of sand.”
  • To accept and thrive in the paradoxical, self-contradictory, always incomplete and broken nature of society, culture, and reality itself.
  • To have a general both-and perspective. But note that it is not either “both-and” or “either-or”—rather, it is both “both-and” and “either-or”. In each case, it is still possible to have well-argued preferences:
  • both political Left and Right (and neither one!);
  • both top-down and bottom-up governance;
  • both historical individuals and social structures;
  • both objective science and subjective experience;
  • both cooperation and competition;
  • both extreme secularism and sincere spirituality.
  • To accept and thrive in both manifesting, systematizing philosophy (like Plato or natural science) and non-manifesting, process oriented, open-ended philosophy (like Nietzsche or critical social science).
  • To recognize the impermanence of all things, that life and existence are always in a flow, a process of becoming, of emergence, immanence and ever-present death.
  • To see normal, bourgeois life and its associated normality and professional identity as insufficiently manifesting the greatness and beauty of existence.
  • To assume a genuinely playful stance towards life and existence, a playfulness that demands of us the gravest seriousness, given the ever-present potentials for unimaginable suffering and bliss.

Metamodern View Of Science

  • To respect science as an indispensable form of knowing.
  • To see that science is always contextual and truth always tentative; that reality always holds deeper truths. All that we think is real will one day melt away as snow in the sun.
  • To understand that different sciences and paradigms are simultaneously true; that many of their apparent contradictions are superficial and based on misperceptions or failures of translation or integration.
  • To see that there are substantial insights and relevant knowledge in all stages of human and societal development, including tribal life, polytheism, traditional theology, modern industrialism and postmodern critique. In another book, I call this the evolution of “meta-memes”.
  • To celebrate and embody non-linearity in all non-mechanical matters, such as society and culture. Non-linearity, in its simplest definition, means that the output of a system is not proportional to its input.
  • To harbor a case sensitive suspicion against mechanical models and linear causation.
  • To have “a systems view” of life, to see that things form parts of self-organizing bottom-up systems: from sub-atomic units to atomic particles to molecules to cells to organisms.
  • To see that things are alive and self-organizing because they are falling apart, that life is always a whirlwind of destruction: The only way to create and maintain an ordered pattern is to create a corresponding disorder. These are the principles of autopoiesis: entropy (that things degrade and fall apart) and “negative entropy” (the falling apart is what makes life possible).
  • To accept that all humans and other organisms have a connecting, overarching worldview, a great story or grand narrative (a religion, in what is often interpreted as being the literal sense of the word: something that connects all things) and therefore accept the necessity of a grande histoire, an overarching story about the world. The metamodernist has her own unapologetically held grand narrative, synthesizing her available understanding. But it is held lightly, as one recognizes that it is always partly fictional—a protosynthesis.
  • To take ontological questions very seriously, i.e. to let questions about “what is really real” guide us in science and politics. This is called the ontological turn.

Metamodern View Of Reality

  • To see the fractal nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas, that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of understanding.
  • To be anti-essentialist, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like—but rather that all these things are contextual and interpretations made from relations and comparisons. Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an essence of the universe.
  • To no longer believe in an atomistic, mechanical universe where the ultimate stuff is matter, but rather to view the ultimate nature of reality as a great unknown that we must metaphorically capture in our symbols, words and stories. To accept the view of a world being newly born again and again.
  • To see that the world is radically, unyieldingly and completely socially constructed, always relative and context bound.
  • To see that the world emerges through complex interactions of its parts and that our intuitive understandings tend to be much too static and mono-causal. This is called complexity. It is the fundamental principle of not only meteorology but also of social psychology, where patterns (such as the “self”) emerge through the interactions of interrelated, interdependent dividuals.
  • To accept the necessity of developmental hierarchies—but to be very critical and careful with how they are described and used. Hierarchies are studied empirically, not arbitrarily assumed.
  • To see that language and thereby our whole worldviews travel through a much greater space of possible, never-conceptualized worlds; that language is evolving.
  • To look at the world holistically, where things such as scientific facts, perspectives, culture and emotions interact (this form of interactivity is called hypercomplexity, because it involves not only many interacting units, but interacting perspectives and qualitatively different dimensions of reality, such as subjective vs. objective reality).
  • To see that information and management of information is fundamental to all aspects of reality and society: from genes to memes to money and science and political revolutions.
  • To accept an informational-Darwinian view of both genes (organisms) and memes (cultural patterns) competing to survive through a process of developmental evolution that involves negative selection (that disfavored genes and memes go extinct, but continue to exist as potentials).
  • To see that Darwinian evolution depends equally on mutual cooperation and competition; that competition and cooperation are always intertwined.
  • To see the dynamic interplay of the universal and the particular, where for instance humans in more complex societies become more individualized, which in turn drives the development of more complex societies where people are more interdependent and more universal values are needed to avoid collapse.
  • To see that the world runs on dialectic logic, where things are always broken, always “stumbling backwards” as it were; that things are always striving for an impossible balance and in that accidental movement create the whole dance that we experience as reality. So the development of reality does have directionality, it’s just that we are always blind to this direction; hence the metaphor of “stumbling backwards”.
  • To see that reality is fundamentally open-ended, broken, as it were, even in its mathematical and physical structure, as shown in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and in some of the core findings of modern physics.
  • To recognize that potentials and potentiality, rather than facts and actualities, constitute the most fundamental or “more real” reality. What we usually call reality is only “actuality”, one slice of an infinitely larger, hypercomplex pie. Actuality is only a “case of” a deeper reality, called “absolute totality”.
  • To explore visions of panpsychism, i.e. that consciousness is everywhere in the universe and “as real” as matter and space. But panpsychism should not be confused with animistic visions of all things having “spirits”.

Metamodern Spirituality, Existence And Aesthetics

  • To take existential and spiritual matters very seriously; to view humanity, intelligence and consciousness as expressions of higher principles inherent to the universe.
  • To recognize that the esoteric, spiritual disciplines and wisdom traditions East and West relate to real insights of great significance—a recognition of the importance of mysticism.
  • To have a careful, unknowing and explorative mindset in matters of spirituality and existence.
  • To understand that elevated, expanded subjective states relate to higher existential and spiritual truths than do most of the experiences of everyday life.
  • To see that inner experience—and the direct development of the subjectivity of organisms—is crucial to all things, and is perhaps the main ingredient lacking in the perspective of the modern world; acknowledging inner experience is often the golden key to managing society’s problems.
  • To take philosophical, cultural and aesthetic matters very seriously, as they are seen as inherent dimensions of reality, not just “additional woo-woo” on top of physics.
  • To create art and architecture that allude to the depth and mystery of existence, without putting it “in your face” or trying to tell you what to think or what is real.
  • To support a democratic, intersubjective, participatory, scientifically supported, peer-to-peer created spirituality, rather than traditional paths, teachers, gurus or authorities.
  • To see that both a spiritual and non-spiritual life experience and worldview are fundamentally okay. Spirituality and non-spirituality: Neither is inherently better than the other.
  • To understand that people are fundamentally crazy, that our everyday consciousness is not a sane reflection of reality, but a bizarre, psychotic hallucination that is utterly contingent, made up and arbitrary.
  • To intuit that the central spiritual and existential insight is the perfection of absolute totality as it always-already is; that there is a pristine, serene clarity underneath all the chaos and contradiction; that there is an underlying elegance even in the often tragic, hell-like experience of life; hidden, as it were, in plain sight. This can be called the recognition of “basic goodness”.

Metamodern View Of Society

  • To see no fundamental divide between nature and culture.
  • To see that we live in a new technological era (the information age), and that human societies evolve through different developmental stages for better or worse.
  • To believe that history has some kind of directionality based on logic, but that this directionality can never be certainly known, only metaphorically and told as a story—playfully and purposefully.
  • To believe that we can always synthesize the knowledge we have about society to some kind of overarching narrative, a meta-narrative, but that this metanarrative is never taken to be a complete synthesis, but rather always a self-critically held, but necessary protosynthesis.
  • To have a nomadic view of social life; knowing that our “self” is part of a social flow, a journey—and that we are becoming more tribal and nomadic in the internet age with our virtual identities.
  • To celebrate participatory culture and co-creation of society through non-linear, interactive processes where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
  • To see the importance of collective intelligence (not to be confused, as it unfortunately often is, with collective consciousness, often associated with Carl Jung, etc., which is not part of the metamodern paradigm). Collective intelligence is simply the ability of a group or society to solve problems and respond to collective challenges.
  • To understand that technology is not neutral, not just “a tool in our hands”, but that it adopts its own agenda and logic, shaping and steering history.
  • To see sustainability and resilience as fundamental questions to all social life.
  • To see that sexuality and sexual development are a widely overlooked centerpiece in the mainstream understanding of all human societies. Sexuality has extraordinary explanatory, behavioral and predictive power.
  • To see “everyday life” as something that humanity can and should transcend in favor of a more actual and authentic form of life and community.
  • To take the rights and lived experience of all animals very seriously, human and non-human. Human society is just a cognitive category, and this category can just as well include all cultures, all deep-ecological entities (ecosystems, biotopes) and all sentient beings.

Metamodern View Of The Human Being

  • To see that humans are behavioral, organic “robots”, controlled by our responses to the environment, and that we are simultaneously subjective, self-organizing and alive—beings of great existential depth.
  • To see that my identity and “self” are not ultimately my body or the voice speaking in my head; or at least that my fundamental identity is not exhausted by that everyday conception of a self (my body plus the voice talking in my head), what is sometimes called “the ego”. The ego is just an idea, an object of awareness as any other created category that describes an object.
  • To adopt a depth psychology stance towards humanity, seeing that her consciousness is transformable by changing her fundamental sense of self and sense of reality. This is achievable through psychoanalysis (or “schizoanalysis”) and love relationships as well as athletic, aesthetic, erotic, intellectual and spiritual practices—where contemplative mysticism stands out as a very valuable path.
  • To see that every person has a three-dimensional view of reality of her own, consisting of an ontology (a strong sense of what is real), an ideology (a strong sense what is right) and a self (a strong sense of one’s own place in reality)—and that these three dimensions can be described in a pattern of sequentially unfolding developmental stages.
  • To see that different human organisms are at fundamentally different developmental stages and therefore display very different behavioral patterns.
  • To understand the transpersonal view of the human being, where her deepest inner depths are intrinsically intertwined with the seemingly rigid structures of society. She is not an individual—her deeper identity reaches through and beyond the individual, the person. The “person” is just a mask, or a role, dependent on context. It is not inherent to the individual—even if the human organism can of course be described with behavioral science.
  • To see that in the transpersonal perspective, individual people cannot really be blamed for anything. All moralism is meaningless. This translates to a radical acceptance of people as they are; a radical non-judgment that can also be described as a civic, impersonal and secular bid to love thy neighbor.
  • To see that the human dividual has many layers, that she is both animal, “human” in a multiplicity of roles, and that she has higher potentials within herself—and that she is born through the interactions, (or even intra-actions) of such layers within different people. This has some important implications:
  • The multi-layered psyche has both subconscious, conscious and supraconscious processes (where the supraconscious processes constitute higher and more subtle intelligence than our normal thoughts, such as universal love, philosophical insight, deep artistic inspiration and the like).
  • The higher layers of the psyche follow more general, abstract and universal logics, whereas the lower layers follow cruder, more selfish and concrete logics. But they operate simultaneously and interact with one another.
  • The multilayered nature of the dividual psyche means that we can often see unconscious and supraconscious layers in one another; we can often understand one another better than we understand ourselves. This is what makes practices such as psychoanalysis or psychiatry possible. It also means that my agency can originate from you and vice versa.
  • This transpersonal perspective holds that our selves, even our bodies, are not “sealed” or “autonomous”; we develop together in one great, multidimensional network. This network follows a logic that is often largely alien to our individual thought processes and agencies.
  • To acknowledge the inalienable right of every creature to be who she is.
  • To have a non-anthropocentric view of reality, where human experience is not seen as the measure of all things.
  • To accept the idea that humanity’s biology and fundamental life experience can and will change through science and technology, what is called transhumanism.
  • To stretch solidarity towards the highest possible universality: Love and care for all sentient beings, in all times, from all perspectives, from the greatest possible depths of our hearts.

5 things that make you metamodern

From 5 things that make you metamodern - Metamoderna:

An Awareness of Allergies

An allergy is an uncontrolled negative emotional response towards some idea or person. It’s the gut-wrenching feeling that a person you dislike provokes in you, or the feeling of anger and discontent certain ideas or concepts can spawn.

We all have these emotions, but the metamodernist has developed its mind (what researchers call metacognition) to keep these allergies in check, so as not to let them pollute the capability to make objective judgments and fair analysis. The wisdom is, just because something makes you feel bad, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

It’s not your feeling towards something that makes it right or wrong, no, determining the truth and value of something must be based on careful analysis. The trick is to know when your brain is bullshitting you, often one’s emotions will seduce reason to construct truths that correspond with that intuitive feeling. That’s ok if it’ll lead you towards good arguments, but you need to be aware that, that’s what’s going on – that your brain is biased and your emotions don’t tell the whole truth.

To be aware of your emotion’s impact on the way you’re thinking is a personal development stage towards a metamodern mindset. Don’t bullshit yourself; become aware of your emotions. For example, if you react negatively towards certain words, you have an allergy. Let’s try a few out:

Feminism, Capitalism, Marxism, Liberalism, Postmodernism, Profit, Religion, Efficiency, White males, Spirituality, Money, Conservative, Activism, Power, Justin Bieber.

If you suddenly get the impulse to explain why any of these words refer to something inherently bad, then you have an allergy. If you understand this point, that you are being subjected to an automatic allergic response, the allergy loses some of its power over your thought structures. You can reclaim responsibility for your own mind, your own thoughts, and your own truth. Because all of these examples are neutral terms referring to a great host of phenomena that can be considered both good and bad, then you’ve made the first step towards metamodern thinking.

A Belief In Development And Progress

The metamodern mind believes in progress and sees the concept of ‘development’ as a way of enriching an otherwise one-dimensional analysis of change.

The metamodern way of thinking is a reaction to the postmodern relativistic dogma that progress was an illusion and that all you can say is that things change, not that any kind of development takes place. It is not a return to modernistic uncritical praise of technological progress and belief that all development is good, but an attempt at redefining what appropriate progress entails, based on the postmodern critique, but without throwing out the hope that we can develop things for the better.

If you’re allergic to the concepts of development and progress, and you honestly believe everything keeps getting worse, then you’re probably postmodern. If you get irritated every time someone points out the drawbacks and potential harms of new technological developments, then you’re probably a good ole’ modernist. However, if you understand that all development has pros and cons, but that progress is inevitable and in the long run ultimately is a good thing, that cultural progress goes along technological change, and that it is your own personal responsibility to see to it that we as humanity get the most out of it, then you’re well on your way to become metamodern.

[Note: "If you’re allergic to the concepts of development and progress, and you honestly believe everything keeps getting worse, then you’re probably postmodern." – this is probably too simplistic a take. We will seek a more sophisticated understanding of the postmodern attitude towards technology in the next session when we consider nihilistic design]

An Understanding Of Hierarchies

The notion of development is a good model to perceive the past and form the future. Hierarchy is the needed framework to order entities into coherent systems and meaningful narratives. If you think all hierarchies are bad, then you’re probably postmodern, if you think we should just make away with them all, then you’re guilty of something we call game denial. If you think you can justify your own privileged status in the social hierarchy, then you’re guilty of what we call game acceptance which is just as bad.

Hierarchies are all around us. People are more complex than frogs; animals are more complex than rocks. Industrial societies more advanced than hunter gatherers, modern physics is more enlightened than dogmatic religion. And feminism is more in tune with current societal needs than Nazism.

There are hierarchies according to complexity, which is not to say that more complexity necessarily is better. But there are also things that can be ordered according to their ethical validity. Love is better than hate. Parental leave is better than child murder. If you’re a relativist and believe no such thing can be determined, then you’re probably postmodern, but then you cannot even justify that, that claim of yours should be more valid than another.

Metamodernism reintroduces hierarchies as a unit of analysis as a reaction against the postmodern relativistic attitude that all hierarchies are bad. But it is not a return to the old arbitrary dominator hierarchies (race, class, privilege, gender) that postmodernism acted against. The metamodern mind however, attempts to reorder reality according to non-arbitrary and well-founded hierarchies according to complexity and ethical value, by including the higher ethics discovered within postmodernism and beyond.

Why are hierarchies a sound unit of analysis? Well, not only can they tell us what’s better and what’s worse. They can also answer many of our current puzzles that the flatland perspective of postmodernism cannot solve. Many conflicts are between different stages of development: Religion vs. science. Autocracy vs. Democracy. Conservative vs. liberals. Postmodernism vs. everyone else. If we understand that people of opposing beliefs aren’t just wrong, but think according to certain stages of development, with different validity claims than our own; if we understand these stages – then we can more easily understand why we don’t agree and thus become more capable at solving conflicts.

Thinking 'Both-And’

The crucial tool to erect a new grand narrative is the ‘both-and’ thinking. It is not just taking the best from modernity and postmodernity, or finding a middle ground between these two poles, nor is it the ability to reach a compromise. No, it is the ability to synthesize apparent opposites and from theses and anti-theses construct new syntheses.

This is a way of transcending the apparent paradoxes not yet to reach satisfying answers by modernists and postmodernists. Objective science or subjective hermeneutics? Both-and. Heritage or environment? Both-and. Biological determinism or cultural adaptation? Both-and. Matter or spirit? Both-and, baby-doll. Wholes or parts, wholeparts! [cf: The emptiness of parts and wholes]

If you feel certain that things are mostly determined by physical laws and biological genetic conditions, then you’re a science obsessed modernist; if you on the other hand consider everything to be just social constructs, then you’re a blazing postmodern. Both positions bear seeds of truth, but only the metamodern mind knows how to construct feasible syntheses and understands the intimate relationship between both exterior and interior conditions, physical and social variables. That we are 100% biological animals and 100% culturally adapted beings, not 50/50.

If you shake your head and think “it’s both-and dammit!”, whenever discussions come to a full stop due to opposing opinions lack of reaching common ground, then you’re probably metamodern. And to that I congratulate you; you’re a rare breed and you’ll probably enjoy this blog.

Aiming At Reconstruction

A mantra of Metamodernism is that: Reconstruction must follow deconstruction. Where the postmodern mind restlessly aims at deconstructing the world of signs, the metamodern has grown tired of this endeavor and takes on the task of reconstructing our symbolic universe and reconnecting it to other aspects of reality.

The metamodernist stands in the smoking ruins of modernity’s once almighty grand narrative of rational thought, demolished by the superior forces of postmodernity, left to be rebuilt by posterior generations. This is the great objective of Metamodernism, to erect a new grand narrative by combining all known knowledge and wisdom, well aware that it is a never ending endeavor and that the only achievable synthesis is a proto-synthesis, forever subjected to critique and never without flaws.

The metamodern mind is never content with mere anti-thesis. The metamodernist gets no satisfaction from only describing the world, when actual explanations are just beyond the horizon. What is, is just as interesting as what isn’t. To the metamodern mind, saying what you actually believe to be the truth is of greater importance. This is different from the postmodern cowardice of explaining why others are wrong. The metamodern mind has the courage to be vulnerable by making mistakes and reach faulty conclusions.

"So after “deconstructing” and picking apart the many tricks played upon us, we can now “reconstruct” new tricks for the sake of magic and direction in our lives, and in the world around us. We can become our own wizards of Oz (and of one another), and begin to deliberately run the machinery of our own illusions, re-enchanting reality. Dorothy Gale found a little unassuming man behind the machinery that ran the smokescreens of the “great wizard of Oz”, and shouted accusingly “You’re a bad man!”, angry for having been fooled. To which he replied: “I’m not a bad man, just a bad wizard”. In the end, the wizard turned out to be (sublimely) mediocre, like the rest of us. But we can take up the mantle of all dispelled conjurors, and together co-create a more enchanted reality to live in. Dorothy could have stayed behind the curtains and learned a thing or two about running the machine herself. Would that prospect not lead us towards a more compelling open horizon than pure irony? We have worlds to construct, always finding new sources of magic. That is ultimately the reason I feel this stance, sincere irony, can salvage our souls and let us struggle playfully together towards beautifully impossible but tremendously important goals. Again, at the end of irony, at its omega point, when skepticism is turned even on itself, it brings that spark of the creative imagination that belongs only to the faithful."

– When Irony Saves the Faithful - Metamoderna

"The truth is that once we have travelled the long road to freedom, we are back at the very point where we started: at fear, at sheer terror. It’s just us and the blank page of our life that we must fill—the blank canvas of the artist staring right back at us, screaming, roaring: CREATE ME! It’s just you, all alone, defining and recreating reality itself. You turn away from the canvas, trying to do something else, but you find that society itself is a canvas, begging for co-creation. You hurry outside, restlessly pacing in the pouring rain, staring up at the grey skies, tears running from your eyes, washed from your face by the cold rain, but no mercy is found: reality itself is a canvas. Blank.

Blank.

Blank.

Bam, motherfucker.

Go create. No excuses. Ever. Because you’re free.

Suddenly, like on a bad trip, you find yourself lost in the hall of mirrors, with no be­gin­ning and no end of “the self” vis-à-vis “the world”. Just pure creation and full, unyielding respon­sib­ility for the uni­verse. This whole “crossroads of fact and fiction” business just got eerily real.

Is it so strange that we usually turn at the doorstep and escape back into the relative safety of whatever slavery we just struggled to shake off? Man, have I felt this before I began writing these books. Man, do I feel it every bloody morning. The terrible truth is this: freedom is struggle; free­dom is terror; it is the terror of facing pure chaos, the pristine meaning­lessness of reality, the vastness of potential, and the weight of the respons­ibility that follows."

– Narcissism, Envy and The Escape from Freedom - Metamoderna

Guests

Ellie Hain

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Ellie Hain is an artist, strategist and researcher working on a vision of the future centered on meaning and a (re)newed conception of ‘the sacred’. Her work bridges technology and spirituality, theory and feeling, transcendence and imminence.

She co-founded the Meaning Alignment Institute, an AI research lab working to create new technologies and institutions aligned with meaning. Previously, she researched theories of societal evolution, and played with internet memes as cultural vehicles. In her free time, she enjoys intense electronic music, Mediterranean sun, and exploring the mysteries of consciousness.

Rufus Pollock

About · Rufus Pollock Online

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He wants his child (and all children) to live in a world of love, abundance and wisdom.

He has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives (and some unsuccessful ones) including Life Itself, Second Renaissance, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age and has been translated into multiple languages. His next book “Wiser Societies” is about the cultural dark matter that enables societies be wiser (and weller). Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500 companies as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

Week 1 recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahZmxVPSRmI 

Chat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11mCs-IFDHlmZYTNDXTDmqUUI7s6kv9zE/view?usp=drive_link

Rufus' slides

Week 2 prep

Learn more about the work of our speakers from week 1:

Week 2: Metamodern Takes on Technology (Tuesday 24th September 2024)

NotebookLM-generated podcast summary (20 minutes):

Technological Metamodernism - Week 2.wav

In this session, we'll argue that The Consilience Project's Axiological Design constitutes a metamodern design paradigm for technology, and go on to suggest that Vitalik Buterin's d/acc is a basic contemporary instantiation of axiological design towards freedom/independence/sovereignty/autonomy, with a dose of democracy/coordination/collective action.

(Proto-)metamodern thinkers on technology

≤ 1940

1941-1950

1951-1960

1961-1970

1971-1980

1981-present

Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design

Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design 

Daniel Schmachtenberger: "A Vision for Betterment" | The Great Simplification 126

The Wide Boundary Impacts of AI with Daniel Schmachtenberger | TGS 132

Game Theory, False Narratives, Survival, Life Advice - Daniel Schmachtenberger | BSP# 20

"In this article, we propose that there are inevitable and unexpected impacts of technologies on both the human mind and society as a whole. For most of history, the process of tech design has either assumed that such second-and third-order effects do not occur or that tech innovation is net positive. This approach is called “technological orthodoxy”, and it views technology as neutral with regard to human values. This must change if humanity is to survive in a world of ever-increasing technological presence and complexity. At this moment in history, it is essential that we adopt an approach to design that accounts for how tech affects the way people think and behave. This is axiological design. Axiology is the philosophical study of value, including both ethics and philosophy of mind. Axiological design is the application of principled judgement about value to the design of technology. This is not a single approach, but a general model for design that focuses on how technology is inextricably linked to our view of the world and our activities within it. Tech affects power dynamics in society, forms ecologies and habitats, and shapes the thoughts, values, and relationships of those using it. We must start to take tech seriously, before it changes our world in ways that may not be easy to repair."

"The plow led eventually to certain forms of animal domestication, in the long run altering the relationship between humans and the natural world, and thus moving religious beliefs from animistic to theocentric. Normalization of animal-drawn plowing as the basis of agriculture made it difficult for humans to value animals as sacred and as equal or surpassing humans in worth. It is hard to worship the sacred spirit of an animal that must be beaten all day to pull a plow. Dominion over animals in this way justified the spread of a cultural narrative that humanity’s role is to control nature, rather than to be a part of nature, which laid the foundations for a mindset that eventually resulted in the industrial revolution."

"The development of the car, for example, had a profound impact on humanity’s perception of time and space. Cars made previously difficult journeys far easier, opening up new opportunities for both individuals and markets. This affected how we think, how we plan for the future, and what it is that we value in life. The car determined how we built our cities, and therefore which places were valued and which were not. Vehicles shaped how we distributed and accessed food, social interaction, and employment, which altered our relationships, families, and livelihoods. At the same time, they disconnected people from the local economy and community, generated harmful emissions, and had a major impact on health and well-being. There is almost no aspect of modern Western life that has not been impacted by the automobile."

"Smartphones were designed with the values of communication and access to information in mind. The smartphone has become central to human existence because humans highly value communication and information. But an inevitable result of enabling communication at a distance is a change in how humans value face-to-face interaction. Instant messaging and “Facetime” have come to replace in-person contact as the default modalities of communication. Easy access to nearly unlimited information also inevitably changes the value we place on skills such as memorization, information recall, and the ability to study and learn from books. A GPS device on your phone is designed to get you where you need to go, and it does that. It was not designed to weaken your sense of direction and make you dependent upon it to feel safe in urban or rural areas. Yet it also does that. What value is there now in having a good sense of direction or in being able to give and remember directions and locations?"

Tenets of Langdon Winner’s “Technological Orthodoxy”

Comprehension

Humans fully understand the technologies they create.

Control

Our tools are firmly under our control.

Neutrality

Technologies themselves are neutral. Technological benefits and harms depend on how humans use them.

Progress

Technological infrastructures require complex, large-scale, high-energy, highly resource-demanding systems; to continue building and perfecting such systems is itself a definition of ‘progress.’

Approaches to Design

Naively Optimistic Design (~ modern & e/acc)

Emerging during early modernism, this is design that assumes positive values are intrinsically encoded in all technology-human interfaces.

Luddite Design (~ early postmodern)

Reacting against the “machine age,” this form of design seeks to undo or roll back technological advancements, based on the assumption that negative values are intrinsically encoded into all technology-human interfaces.

Nihilistic Design (~ Technological Orthodoxy, late postmodern)

Resulting from the conditions of postmodernism, this is design that ignores or down-plays value as an aspect of technology-human interfaces.

Axiological Design (~ metamodern)

Responding to the multiple crises and challenging planetary conditions of late modernity—including existential risk—this is design that factors and leverages the intrinsic value inevitably encoded in all technology-human interfaces.

Five Propositions Toward Axiological Design

  1. Technology is created in pursuit of values, and results in the creation and transformation of values.
  2. Technology requires the creation of more and different technology; multiple new technologies evolve together as functionally bound sets, forming evolving ecologies of technologies.
  3. Technology shapes our bodies and movements as a human-created habitat, and thus is deeply habit forming, both for individuals and societies.
  4. Technology changes the nature of power dynamics in unpredictable ways, creating an environment that advantages some humans over others, setting up selection pressures that force personal adaptation to and adoption of new technologies.
  5. Technology impacts the kinds of ideas we value, the quality of attention we pay, and our conceptions of self and world.

Axiological design and inner development

Rufus Pollock suggests there's a sense in which  'wisdom makes technology more values neutral' i.e. the wiser we are, the more true Technological Orthodoxy actually is. For example, a wise user might (be able to) consciously limit their social media use to maintain real-world relationships, counteracting potential isolation effects.

While intentional value-aware design is important, developing human wisdom and wellbeing might be an equally crucial part of creating positive technological outcomes. Probably, we should adopt a both/and approach: both designing technology more thoughtfully AND working on improving human wisdom/discernment.

Rediscovering value

"Overcoming nihilistic design requires changes to frameworks, approaches, and methods at a fundamental level. This will necessarily involve a shift away from seeing engineering as primary and values and ethics as secondary. Instead, technologists might hold ethics as the fundamental priority in the design process, with engineering following its lead."

Digging deeper into why nihilistic design is dominant:

"Contemporary techno-optimists have continued with the ideology of the inherent positivity of technology, which is now further supported with a postmodern perspective (nihilistic design) that may be summarized as “skeptical of universal values in general.” The argument is that:

  1. Technologies are only as bad or good as the people who use them.
  2. Moreover, cross-cultural standards of value (good versus bad) are suspect in postmodernism—therefore considering technology in terms of values is itself questionable.

According to this view, technology is about what works for everyone—universal functionality—rather than what is good for everyone—universal morality."

" “Technological orthodoxy” entails a strict separation of values from technology. In part, this is related to understanding value itself as primarily socially constructed. This idea began with modernist scientific materialism. The assumption that physical matter constitutes all that exists leaves no room for “subjective qualities” such as value. This idea—that value is purely subjective—reached its climax with postmodernist expressions of skepticism towards all universal frameworks of value. The result has been a progressive deepening of the separation of technology design from considerations of value. Thinking about design in this way leads innovators to “move fast and break things” and focus effort on “disruptive” technologies. Whereas naively optimistic design made the assumption that technology could advance sacrosanct values, nihilistic design decoupled technological innovation from any serious considerations about value at all. The consequences of this approach are likely to be both far-reaching and difficult to understand completely."

What are values?

Contemporary work on values:

Uniqueness

Eros

Intimacy

Desire

Relationship

Evolution

Harmony

Personhood

Freedom

Story

Integrity

Development in Progress

Development in Progress

"The vast majority of the most consequential and difficult problems we face—climate change, nuclear war, species extinction—are the unintended outcomes of humans attempting to solve other problems… For many of our greatest problems, at some point in the past we designed technical solutions to address them, and in the time since the solutions have had other effects that we either did not predict or did not mitigate sufficiently in advance. The problems the world faces today are not caused by our inability to achieve our goals—they are a direct result of our success. They are a result of how destructive we are in the pursuit of our goals."

The paper argues that pervasive negative externalities of technology have been the rule, rather than the exception!

Prudent Problem-Solving

  1. Identify the problem (or problems) you are trying to solve and the needs or values that you are aiming to serve with a particular action. The action may involve the creation of a new technology, product, service, policy, law, solution, etc.
  2. Assess whether or not the problem you want to solve is really a problem in the external world that needs to be addressed, or whether it may be an aspect of reality that would be better served by a change in our way of thinking about it. There are many features of reality that involve some work, delay, or discomfort that are mistaken as problems for which a technical solution is needed, when in fact they may be better framed as essential features of reality. In their absence, we lose meaning, fulfillment, and the opportunity to grow and develop strength. Making the effort to walk rather than drive takes more energy and time, but will make a greater positive difference to health and well-being. Similarly, the human condition involves a range of challenging emotional states, including (for example) grief in response to a death. Increasingly, we choose to medicate the difficult emotional experiences that life offers, and although medication relieves pain temporarily, it also removes the opportunity for a profound experience that enables the development of greater compassion and love, as well as a deeper awareness of the value and fragility of life. Which approach leads to a healthier and more whole person?
  3. If, after considering steps one and two, there is a legitimate problem to solve in the world, then begin by exploring the causes. The first line of solutions should attempt, where possible, to remove the causes, particularly when they are anthropogenic. In many cases, the optimal solution is less of something already present rather than more of a new thing.
  4. If, after addressing the identifiable upstream causes, there is still a legitimate problem needing further resolution, investigate the following:
  1. Look for relevant situations in which the problem you are seeking to resolve does not occur, or is naturally solved, to learn about what prevented the problem from arising, or what kind of response was required to address it. Determine whether or not those insights could be applied in a way that addresses the problem at hand.
  2. In the absence of “evolutionary” or “natural” solutions, explore the potential for repurposing existing technologies, in which the interaction dynamics and safety profiles are already well established. In this case, the primary focus need only be on the new application of a preexisting technological solution.
  1. Only if a legitimate problem remains and no viable solution has been found after following all of the steps above, then begin to explore what might be involved in the invention of something new to address it. If the conclusion is that a new tool or product is truly necessary to address a legitimate problem that cannot be resolved with an existing approach or technology, the next step is yellow teaming.

Yellow Teaming

"The “yellow team” concept takes this idea in another direction, assessing a project and its implementation in the context of all other aspects of reality that it will touch over the full course of its lifetime. Where red teaming attempts to assure that a plan doesn’t fail, yellow teaming attempts to ensure it doesn’t cause unexpected harms or problems elsewhere. It aims to account for how our typical approaches to solution design tend to make problems worse in the long run, and provide guidance to address such issues in advance, thereby minimizing the risk of negative externalities…

Yellow teaming, as with synergistic design, are approaches to axiological design: design that is grounded in a consideration of values and ethics, and integrates the broader implications of a technology into the design process."

Some examples of opening higher-level yellow team questions (from which subsequent lower-level questions then emerge) include:

  • What must be extracted from the biosphere to bring your product into being, and what might the associated costs of this extraction entail?
  • Does your product make use of chemicals or substances with known impacts on organic life or biological systems, at any point in development or deployment?
  • At which points in its supply chain, development or continued operation, does your product contribute to pollution, deforestation, or cause environmental disruption or deterioration?
  • Does your product have any implications for larger scale ecosystems that transcend national boundaries (e.g. the oceans, the atmosphere, space, etc.)?
  • Does any part of the project have the potential to meaningfully empower particular people or groups in an asymmetric manner?
  • How does using this technology change human behavior and experience—what do users get more or less of as a result of its use? What does it attune users’ attention to, and what leaves their attentional focus?

Synergistic Design

"Synergistic satisfiers are solutions to problems that address multiple needs at the same time. This simple principle can be applied to how we design new tools and products. By looking for synergy between solutions to disparate problems—or approaches that give rise to multiple positive externalities from a single intervention—we can expand the breadth of our gaze to include more than just the narrow, product-focused pipeline of typical technology design.

The case studies of social media and regenerative agriculture referenced [below] are examples of synergistic design. In the case of social media, through the alteration of the platforms used by billions of people around the world, we could simultaneously improve individual and collective mental health, enhance users’ cognitive capacity for understanding the world, grow civic participation, heal family dynamics, and reduce radicalization, violence, disinformation, and polarization. This example encapsulates the spirit of synergistic design, which is all about many compounding positives flowing from a limited set of changes…

There are thousands of further examples similar to those provided above. Social media and permaculture are informative together because they span two very different realms of food production and the growing digital world."

Social media

"The current design of social media algorithms is based on its ability to keep people liking, sharing, and commenting on posts, and ultimately convert users to “ad clicks,” which happens to select for stimuli that downgrade our higher forms of cognition and upregulate our most automatic and instinctive responses. But how else might we design the algorithms, if we were aiming to upregulate the most worthy and holistically beneficial content? One possibility is to build (or retrofit) social media algorithms to upregulate content with positive sentiment across ideological divides. By upregulating content that inspires similar responses from generally opposing groups, we could begin to generate goodwill and a sense of commonality across many individuals previously thought of as having significant ideological differences. Positive feedback loops would develop alongside growing engagement. By upregulating content that previously opposing groups both view as positive, social media could become a force for synergy rather than division.

The concept described above is indicative of the type of design approach that may begin to generate positive rather than negative externalities—but there are many other ways we could alter the defining characteristic of social technologies that currently trend toward division. Other ideas include, for example: the recommendation of potential friends or contacts from outside your network cluster to increase exposure to a greater variety of worldviews; the promotion of content that is dialectical to your own current views; a slowing of the loading rate of the “infinite scroll” that increases the longer you have been on-site; and the use of software tools to detect and downregulate content that is modified with AI filters. Such approaches could begin to deliver the kind of social media that lowers the negative impact on our mental health and instead inspires a sense of unity between differing perspectives. It could also begin to expose people to different worldviews, help correct for biases, improve sensemaking and understanding of the world, reduce polarization, promote good faith dialogue, and minimize the impact of propaganda and information warfare. These are positive externalities that we could make the intentional choice to enable now. Instead, we prioritize near-term profitability, at the expense of a healthy population and a stable and functional society."

Regenerative Agriculture

"When we take action to improve topsoil, the plants that grow from the land are improved as a second-order effect—a positive externality. At the next “level,” the humans and animals consuming these plants benefit too, as they are no longer consuming the toxic residues from pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilizers. Greater micronutrient quantities lead to an improvement in health, fertility, vitality, and cognition, as well as a reduction in the burden of anthropogenic disease, the cost of healthcare, and a population-level reliance on pharmaceuticals. Composting and mulching allow many micronutrients (which are absent from NPK fertilizers) to return to the soil and replenish what was taken during harvest. As synthetic fertilizer use declines and is replaced by compost and other natural fertilizers, microbial diversity rebounds and soil health improves. Water quality is restored in the absence of chemical effluent; water retention in the topsoil improves, and waterways and dead zones in coastal regions gain an opportunity to heal. Taken together, this circular process of taking and then returning to the land is an instance of a virtuous cycle: a single set of actions opens a space for a chain of positively reinforcing outcomes, which feed back into the inputs to raise up the overall baseline of the system, allowing it to grow and improve over time…

The key point is that by focusing on a simple set of changes, we can begin to externalize positive effects, rather than the existing set of negative effects. This would be a real kind of progress—progress that does not simply turn away from damage inflicted elsewhere in time and space."

Vitalik Buterin's d/acc

My techno-optimism: outlines defensive/decentralization/democracy/differential accelerationism, designing for freedom/independence/sovereignty/autonomy, with a dose of democracy/coordination/collective action

Defensive acceleration & regulating AI when you fear government | Vitalik Buterin

"I'm trying really hard to see the good in people, and it does feel like my own role in a lot of this stuff has somehow converged into being this weird kind of diplomat."

d/acc | Vitalik Buterin | PROGCRYPTO 

"My own feelings about techno-optimism are warm, but nuanced. I believe in a future that is vastly brighter than the present thanks to radically transformative technology, and I believe in humans and humanity. I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare. However, I think that not just magnitude but also direction matters. There are certain types of technology that much more reliably make the world better than other types of technology. There are certain types of technology that could, if developed, mitigate the negative impacts of other types of technology. The world over-indexes on some directions of tech development, and under-indexes on others. We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically."

Vitalik's Bear

Daniel's Third Attractor (just a rotation!)

Images of London by Third Attractor (another of my projects)

The environment, and the importance of coordinated intention

"There is one important point of nuance to be made on the broader picture, particularly when we move past "technology as a whole is good" and get to the topic of "which specific technologies are good?". And here we need to get to many people's issue of main concern: the environment.

A major exception to the trend of pretty much everything getting better over the last hundred years is climate change…

To me, the moral of the story is this. Often, it really is the case that version N of our civilization's technology causes a problem, and version N+1 fixes it. However, this does not happen automatically, and requires intentional human effort. The ozone layer is recovering because, through international agreements like the Montreal Protocol, we made it recover. Air pollution is improving because we made it improve. And similarly, solar panels have not gotten massively better because it was a preordained part of the energy tech tree; solar panels have gotten massively better because decades of awareness of the importance of solving climate change have motivated both engineers to work on the problem, and companies and governments to fund their research. It is intentional action, coordinated through public discourse and culture shaping the perspectives of governments, scientists, philanthropists and businesses, and not an inexorable "techno-capital machine", that had solved these problems."

Defense-favoring worlds help healthy and democratic governance thrive

"One frame to think about the macro consequences of technology is to look at the balance of defense vs offense. Some technologies make it easier to attack others, in the broad sense of the term: do things that go against their interests, that they feel the need to react to. Others make it easier to defend, and even defend without reliance on large centralized actors.

A defense-favoring world is a better world, for many reasons. First of course is the direct benefit of safety: fewer people die, less economic value gets destroyed, less time is wasted on conflict. What is less appreciated though is that a defense-favoring world makes it easier for healthier, more open and more freedom-respecting forms of governance to thrive.

An obvious example of this is Switzerland. Switzerland is often considered to be the closest thing the real world has to a classical-liberal governance utopia. Huge amounts of power are devolved to provinces (called "cantons"), major decisions are decided by referendums, and many locals do not even know who the president is. How can a country like this survive extremely challenging political pressures? Part of the answer is excellent political strategy, but the other major part is very defense-favoring geography in the form of its mountainous terrain."

Is 'defensive v offensive' a meaningful distinction?

"There are inevitably going to be imperfections in classifying technologies as offensive, defensive or neutral. Like with "freedom", where one can debate whether social-democratic government policies decrease freedom by levying heavy taxes and coercing employers or increase freedom by reducing average people's need to worry about many kinds of risks, with "defense" too there are some technologies that could fall on both sides of the spectrum. Nuclear weapons are offense-favoring, but nuclear power is human-flourishing-favoring and offense-defense-neutral. Different technologies may play different roles at different time horizons. But much like with "freedom" (or "equality", or "rule of law"), ambiguity at the edges is not so much an argument against the principle, as it is an opportunity to better understand its nuances."

From Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design:

"Certain technologies have been considered as intrinsically decentralizing or centralizing. This means that some technologies tend strongly towards being used to centralize power (or not) by virtue of their design. But this is not true. Digital technology—the Internet as we know it—was thought to be intrinsically decentralizing, by its very nature. Yet China has managed to create a relatively centralized system that enables high levels of social coordination. This can be seen as simply a different version of America’s centralization of these same technologies, in which a few Big Tech players handle all the data-aggregation, surveillance, and cloud computing. In this case, centralized power is being used in the interest of profit rather than civics. Where China veers towards political control, America is veering toward chaos."

To the extent it makes sense:

"We need to build, and accelerate. But there is a very real question that needs to be asked: what is the thing that we are accelerating towards? The 21st century may well be the pivotal century for humanity, the century in which our fate for millennia to come gets decided. Do we fall into one of a number of traps from which we cannot escape, or do we find a way toward a future where we retain our freedom and agency?"

Cosmos Institute's "Third Way"

Existential Pessimism vs. Accelerationism: Why Tech Needs a Rational, Humanistic "Third Way": Part 1 and Part 2

"Our vision is rooted in three pillars–reason, decentralization, and human autonomy–drawing from the insights of thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Aristotle."

How ancient philosophers would shape AI | Brendan McCord

"Two hundred and fifty years ago, America’s founding fathers created a philosophy-to-law pipeline, turning abstract principles into a legal framework that still guides us today. Today, we urgently need a philosophy-to-code pipeline to embed crucial concepts such as reason, decentralization, and autonomy into the planetary-scale AI systems that will shape our future.

To build this, we’re proud to announce the founding of a groundbreaking AI lab at the University of Oxford. The Human-Centered AI Lab (HAI Lab) will be the world’s first initiative to translate the philosophical principles of human flourishing into open-source software and AI systems."

Guests

Hanzi Freinacht

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’, ’12 Commandments’, and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.

As a writer, Hanzi combines in-depth knowledge of several sciences and disciplines and offers maps of our time and the human condition with his characteristically accessible, poetic and humorous writing style – challenging the reader’s perspective of herself and the world.

Hanzi Freinacht epitomizes much of the metamodern philosophy and can be considered a personification of this strand of thought. He has produced a wide array of original, relevant and useful ideas for people in all walks of life. These ideas help you gain an upper hand in the new political, economic and cultural landscape of digital, postindustrial society.

Emil Ejner Friis

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not-so-metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead. Until recently he was living on a remote tropical island where he was swimming with dogs every day. He just moved back to his old university town Lund to pursue an academic career. We'll see how long that lasts.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

Week 2 recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=701w5X9aKv0 

Chat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pjgii6gkZGg8lhTn1I3PqrinfBotrO3m/view?usp=drive_link

Week 3 prep

By Michael Garfield:

'The bad guys', Wetiko and Moloch:

Week 3: Technological Metamodernism, Myth and Magic (Tuesday 1st October 2024)

NotebookLM-generated podcast summary (8 minutes):

Technological Metamodernism - Week 3.wav

Story & myth

Wetiko & Moloch

Seeing Wetiko (English subtitles)

"Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit that is driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption (in Ojibwa it is windigo, wintiko in Powhatan). It deludes its host into believing that cannibalising the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live. Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder."

cf. hungry ghosts (preta)

-> 'Wetiko capitalism', 'wetiko logic', 'wetikonomy', 'totalitarian agriculture'

"So what is this deep logic of the global operating system? It comes in two parts. First, there is the ultimate purpose, which we might call the Prime Directive, which is simply to increase capital, as the term capitalism would imply. We often dress this up in a narrative that says capital generation is not the end but the means, the engine of progress. This makes the idea of dethroning it feel dangerous and even contrary to common sense. But the truth is, we have created a system that artificially treats money as sacred. At this point in capitalism’s history, life is controlled by capital more than it controls the forces of capital. Then there is the logic for how we, the living components of this system, should behave, which we would summarise with the following epithet: Selfishness is rational and rationality is everything; therefore, selfishness is everything."

-> cf. 'techno-capital machine', 'superorganism'

Paul Levy:

"Undreaming Wetiko" - Paul Levy with Daniel Pinchbeck

The Wetiko Mind Virus & Quantum Physics As Terma - Paul Levy with Daniel Pinchbeck

Paul Levy - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

Paul Levy presents Wetiko in conversation with Andrew Harvey

Meditations On Moloch [Full Essay]

"Howl" read by Allen Ginsberg, 1975

"In the 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander extends Ginsberg’s understanding and reinterprets the deity as representing any ‘multipolar trap’, which he articulates as a negative-sum competition driven by game theoretic forces that undermine collective wellbeing and often leads to tragedy."

Who is Moloch and What is the MetaCrisis?

Moloch - AI & The Deadly Force Driving Us To The Brink

AI, Moloch and the Genie's Lamp

Daniel Schmachtenberger | Misalignment, AI & Moloch | Win-Win with Liv Boeree

Moloch & The Beauty Wars

Is the Media Moloch Driving Us Insane?

The Dark Side of Competition in AI | Liv Boeree | TED

Egregores

Wetiko and Moloch could be said to be egregores:

"Egregores are collective thought-forms, vitalized by human intention, that take on a degree of autonomy — they can become beings with their own agency, their own agenda."

What Are Egregores? Understanding the Demonic | Jordan Hall, John Vervaeke, Jonathan Pageau

Currents 090: BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan on Egregores

Swarms, Egregores, and Autocults w/ John Robb, BJ Campbell, Patrick Ryan, and Jordan Hall

Antidotes

Some alternative archetypes to call upon:

Gaia (interconnectedness), Ganesha (remover of obstacles), Athena (wisdom)

"For those of us on the outside, we can organise our lives in radically new ways to undermine wetiko structures. For example, the simple act of gifting undermines the neoliberal logic of commodification and extraction. Using alternative currencies undermines the debt-based money system. De-schooling and alternative education models can help decolonise and de-wetikoise the mind. Helping to create alternative communities outside the capitalist system supports the infrastructure for transition. And direct activism such as debt resistance can weaken the wetiko virus, if done with the right intention and state of consciousness.

By contracting new relationships with others, with Nature, and with ourselves, we can build a new complex of entanglements and thought forms that are fused with post-wetiko, post-capitalist values. We have to simultaneously go within ourselves and the deep recesses of our own psyches while changing the structure of the system around us."

-> Brave Earth, Culture Hack Labs, Closer, Global Ecovillage Network, Gathering Of Tribes 

From Slaying Alexander's Moloch:

 

"Scott is too pessimistic, and I’ll proceed to give him reasons to believe that niceness, after all, can triumph… Will we necessarily cooperate? No. Can we, in theory? Yes. Is it likely that we will? If we can envision and implement adequate rules and institutions, and if we care about others, yes, we will."

From Coordination Games - Christopher Coyne:

"How to solve coordination problems:

  1. Formal standards: Rules that are codified by certain parties/rules about how parties are supposed to act, and/or
  2. Social conventions: A regularity followed by people belonging to a group/a shared expectation of the correct way to behave"

(It seems to me this isn't really a binary, it's more a spectrum of formality. What's important is that there's communication and agreement on rules/conventions.)

From The Evolution of Trust, 'an interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other':

"Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly."

From Meditations On Moloch:

"The two active ingredients of government are laws plus violence – or more abstractly agreements plus enforcement mechanisms. Many other things besides governments share these two active ingredients and so are able to act as coordination mechanisms to avoid traps.

For example, since students are competing against each other (directly if classes are graded on a curve, but always indirectly for college admissions, jobs, et cetera) there is intense pressure for individual students to cheat. The teacher and school play the role of a government by having rules (for example, against cheating) and the ability to punish students who break them. But the emergent social structure of the students themselves is also a sort of government. If students shun and distrust cheaters, then there are rules (don’t cheat) and an enforcement mechanism (or else we will shun you). Social codes, gentlemens’ agreements, industrial guilds, criminal organizations, traditions, friendships, schools, corporations, and religions are all coordinating institutions [that aren't governments] that keep us out of traps by changing our incentives."

From Know Thy Enemy: Coordination Failures:

(See also The Infinite Garden | The Ethereum Foundation) 

"If only there was a technology that allowed groups of humans to choose to easily coordinate with one another! A transparent substrate for trust games where everyone knows where they stand and whose rules can’t be changed on you.

My belief is that this is the ultimate legacy of Ethereum [/smart contracts]. We can now program our values into our economic system—the final form of a stateful internet could allow us to coordinate the actions of multiple economic actors and therefore could solve coordination failures."

Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom:

From Reality Eats Culture For Breakfast: AI, Existential Risk and Ethical Tech:

"So what does a conscious universe have to do with AI and existential risk? It all comes back to whether our primary orientation is around quantity, or around quality. An understanding of reality that recognises consciousness as fundamental views the quality of your experience as equal to, or greater than, what can be quantified.

Orienting toward quality, toward the experience of being alive, can radically change how we build technology, how we approach complex problems, and how we treat one another…

Our strategies for changing the world are often inspired by a culture created by a physicalist metaphysics. That’s why I propose that metaphysics eats culture for breakfast. What we believe to be real and relevant is the most significant factor in the formation of culture, which in turn influences our thoughts and emotions, which in turn influence our values, which influence our institutions and political policies. The change has to happen at the deepest level if it’s going to have any significant impact on an issue as important as whether or not we go extinct."

Which stories inspire current tech titans?

What Mark Zuckerberg learned from Caesar Augustus

So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers, and other cautionary tales

More podcasts:

Cautionary tales:

Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand: new myths for the masculine

SOPHIE STRAND on Myths as Maps /312 

Rewilding the Sacred Masculine - The Flowering Wand  | Sophie Strand

Metamodern Spirituality | The Animate Everything (w/ Sophie Strand) 

"A deep exploration of the regenerative and magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths both ancient and modern… Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge"

"Who is the monster of today’s legends? Today, we see a surfeit of media coverage devoted to weather and climate events. Has the biosphere become the monster? Every attempt to create weather-or climate-regulating technology, rather than adjusting and halting our own abysmal behaviors, posits Earth as a monster and humankind as the “heroes” who must control her and tame her and save her. Technonarcissists are the new Marduk. The new Theseus. They want the myth of progress to subsume the older chaos of emergent systems and biospheric intelligence. Earth doesn’t know best, our cultures insist. We know best. And we must progress ever onward toward greater control."

Fellowships, Guilds and Ethical Cults

Past

The Eleusinian Mysteries:

Present

Who exactly has Sam Altman been drinking ayahuasca with?

"Wow a tech bro who did psychedelics and then decided he had it all figured out. Never heard anything like this before!" – Reddit

Future

The Grey Robes Present: BETWEEN WORLDS

Jamie Wheal on Ethical Cults:

Guest

Michael Garfield

Michael Garfield | Substack

Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield is devoted to helping navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and helping cultivate the curiosity and play we'll need to thrive in it. As host and producer of both Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast, Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers — a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary "mind-jazz" performances in the form of essay, music, and fine art. Refusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice, speaking and performing everywhere from Moogfest to Burning Man, SXSW to Boom Festival, Long Now's Ignite Talks to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

Week 3 recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pdvC8C16nA

Chat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OlMIRGVSr-cI-IxG2pyddGzDzt93Bq83/view?usp=drive_link

Week 4 prep

Optional:

Week 4: Metamodern Tech Futures (Tuesday 8th October 2024)

NotebookLM-generated podcast summary (14 minutes):

Technological Metamodernism - Week 4.wav

Speculative fiction

Metamoderna on eutopia, protopia and solarpunk:

"Protopia: the non-arbitrary pattern that connects the multiplicity of Eutopias; it is the search for the conditions that generate Eutopias — i.e. the “generative conditions” of Eutopia. This Metamodernist mode of seeing potentials in the world begins from studying the many possibilities, the Eutopias, each of which offers a unique perspective and critique of the status quo. But it doesn’t simply leave all of those Eutopias as disconnected fragments floating about in a larger void of meaninglessness. It lets the different Eutopias inform one another. It weighs and pits them against one another; it triangulates from their conflicting insights and ways of life — and as such it develops a context-sensitive form of utopianism, of dreamy faith."

(cf. visionary anarchist classic Bolo'Bolo by P.M., describing a global network of self-sustaining, autonomous communities)

Solarpunk:

What is Solarpunk?

How To Build A Solarpunk City

SolarPunk Cities: Our Last Hope?

How We Can Build A Solarpunk Future Right Now (ft. @Andrewism)

Why We Need More Than Solarpunk

What Does a Solarpunk City Look Like?

Thrutopia:

The Way Out is Through: On Thrutopia, with Manda Scott

How bad is it going to get? | Humanity Is Calling - Leadership Summit, Portugal | Rupert Read

Some of my favourite utopia/protopian sci-fi:

Hyperstition & Imagination

0rphan Drift Archive on hyperstition:

Hyperstition elsewhere:

Video/podcasts on hyperstition:

The 'Sci-Fi Feedback Loop':

Applied Sci-Fi | Ep. 1: The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop: Mapping Fiction’s Influence on Real-World Tech

Applied Sci-Fi | Ep. 2: Designing the Future with Applied Sci-Fi

Phoebe Tickell and Moral Imaginations:

"The core of the work of Moral Imaginations is about coming together to develop the embodied practice, deepened empathy and playful creativity to foster a human sensibility of who we are and what we are here to do. The work centres on ‘three pillars’ — which serve as portals to accessing our moral imaginations. These are:

 It is a practice and set of living methodologies that can be used to cultivate a renewed moral imagination."

 

Advancing Collective Intelligence | Daniel Schmachtenberger & Phoebe Tickell, Consilience Project

Imagination: A Way to Remake the World - Iain McGilchrist & Phoebe Tickell

Imagination Activism | Phoebe Tickell

Moral Imaginations w/ Phoebe Tickell

Imagination Activism to Create Systemic Shifts | Phoebe Tickell | IDG Summit 2023

#128  Imagination Activism: exploring radically better futures (and SolarPunk) with Phoebe Tickell

Rob Hopkins:

Rob Hopkins - From what is to what if

What If | Rob Hopkins | TEDxBologna 

Books:

"It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism"

Reality Switch Technologies: DMT, lucid dreaming and the jhanas

(5-MeO-)DMT

Qualia Research Institute:

A gentle introduction to Qualia Research | Andres Goméz-Emilsson

Andrew R Gallimore:

 

Psychonauts Are Now Mapping Hyper-Dimensional Worlds | Andrew Gallimore

Ground-breaking DMT Research, Entities & Alien Worlds | Neuroscientist, Andrew Gallimore

DMTx:

DMTX Participant Shares What Happened During The Trials (Alexander Biener)

An In-Depth Look At The Extended State DMT Trials w/ DMTx Participant Alex Beiner

DMTx Breakthrough Panel Moderated By Graham Hancock, Dr. Andrew Gallimore & Dr. Rick Strassman

DMTx & The Bigger Picture - Scientists and Experiencers at the Frontier of Psychedelic Research

Beyond DMTx: Conscience & Hyperhumanism | Carl Hayden Smith in dialogue with Tim Adalin

The Need for Hyperhumanism in the Age of AI with Carl Hayden Smith | Medicine Festival 2023

Transhumanism & Hyperhumanism w/ Cadell Last, Carl Hayden Smith & Tim Adalin

Lucid dreaming

The Jhānas

Technomancy & Technoshamanism

"Technomancy means performing acts of magic with modern technology, and people who practice technomancy are called technomancers… Although there are many modern technologies whose use in the magical arts may qualify as technomancy, Technomancy 101 focuses on computers and computational media because they are often implied in popular usage of the the word technomancy and related words such as technoshamanism, techgnosis, and technoetic; and because the computer is such a wonderfully versatile medium with which to explore the coniunctio of magic and machine. As computers are the primary technology through which I shall demonstrate technomancy, I could also call this cybermagic."

"Technology can bring us full circle back to the oldest form of religion on earth: shamanism. Shamanism is varied and globally diverse, but generally defined as the use of altered-state practices to communicate with non-human intelligences or spirits. Core to many shamanic cultures is the approach of ‘perspectivism’, a philosophical position that holds that you gain knowledge about something by becoming it. This is radically different to the Western notion that we gain knowledge about something by observing it. Shamans become different animals and plants and thereby understand the world more deeply.

ASI can usher in a return to the more animistic world that our ancestors inhabited. A world in which nature speaks to us and we speak back, in which we can transform into animals and sing to trees."

How artificial intelligence is helping scientists talk to animals - BBC News

Using AI to Decode Animal Communication with Aza Raskin

How Scientists Are Using AI Tech To Communicate With Animals        

Podcasts:

Wise innovation

School of Wise Innovation:

The Monastic Academy's Soryu Forall:

Buddhism in the Age of AI - Soryu Forall

AI & The State of the World | Soryu Forall | Ep. 1

AI & The Extinction of Humanity | Soryu Forall | Ep. 2

The Integral Stage's The Soul of AI series

AI: The Coming Thresholds and The Path We Must Take | Internationally Acclaimed Cognitive Scientist

Metamodern DAOs, metamodern AI

Vitalik's suggestions from Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell:

Imagine…

In-person Futurecraft gatherings

The next Futurecraft gathering will take place at Feÿtopia, France, Feb 2025: Futurecraft at Feÿtopia 

Guest

Alexander Beiner

Ali_Profile_Pic.jpg

Alexander Beiner is an author, journalist and facilitator focused on bringing new ways of seeing and being from the margins of culture into the mainstream. He does this through writing, and by creating transformative experiences that invite us to find ways to evolve and thrive in the chaotic times we live in. He is the author of The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world and writes a popular Substack, The Bigger Picture.

Alexander is also an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest-running conference on psychedelic medicine and culture. He was one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, a popular alternative media platform that ran from 2017-2022 and explored the cutting-edge of systems change and cultural sensemaking.

Week 4 recording

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEemWhAo3HM

Chat: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qaVnkmLCTEuNhWnY34_9thaGptDc_H7i/view?usp=drive_link 

That's a wrap!

Thanks for participating in the first Technological Metamodernism course!

You should receive a request for feedback tomorrow morning. Your feedback is much appreciated (the more honest and detailed the better).

I am keen to turn the course notes into a book. If you would like to sponsor me to do this, or if you know someone that would like to, please get in touch at [email protected]

I am also open to speaking and consulting opportunities.

If you'd like to leave a tip, you can do so via Ethereum/EVM networks to stephenreid.eth (0x72e1638bd8cd371bfb04cf665b749a0e4ae38324), or Stripe.

Finally, you can subscribe to my Substack and the Futurecraft Substack to hear about future courses and events.

Mettā,

Stephen

October 2024