Author: RU Sirius

R.U. Sirius is the former co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the 1990s cyberpunk magazine MONDO 2000. He is author or coauthor of 11 books including Counterculture Through The Ages, Cyberpunk Handbook, and Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity. In the early 1980s, he was lead vocalist for Rochester New York’s second most popular punk band Party Dogs and has been recording music as lyricist, coproducer and occasional vocalist then. He is currently involved in a project building immersive virtual environment in collaboration with PlayLa.bZ around the theme “R.U. Against NFTs/MONDO Cyber” An early version of the environment was unveiled at Mozfest on May 20. The next iteration will be available some time this year.

How Many Illuminati Masters Does It Take To Find the Light Switch ?

Posted on by RU Sirius

This is Part 2 of my two-part interview with Gabriel Kennedy, author of Chapel Perilous The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Chapel Perilous is Kennedy’s first book.

Gabriel Kennedy (aka Prop Anon) is a multimedia artist concentrating on the written word, visual art, music, and film. His writing has appeared on BoingBoing.net, Mondo2000.com, and thetonearm.com, and on his websites Chapelperilous.us and Prop-anon.com. He interviewed Robert Anton Wilson in 2003 and was an original member of Wilson’s remote learning website, the Maybe Logic Academy. 

As Prop Anon, Kennedy has created visual street art, video art, and hip-hop music. He also released a stoner rock album, F*ck Satan, Hail Eris! with his band, Hail Eris! As an actor, Gabriel was trained by Billy Lyons at the Wynn Handman Studio in New York City. He later co-starred in the season finale episode of Hawaii 5-0 (season 9; episode 24: ‘Hewa ka lima’) as Tim Aquino, directed by Peter Weller (best known as Robocop). Kennedy moved to Los Angeles during COVID and attended the film program at Los Angeles City College

In part one of this interview we covered Robert Anton Wilson and the influence he took from Alfred Korzybski and Aleister Crowley. In this interview, we look at his life, as well as other philosophic ideas and influences. 

RU Sirius: Continuing with one more philosophic influence, there’s Timothy Leary. It’s interesting how Bob was already interested in how various scientific and mathematical theories could be applied to neurological and psychological issues, and how they intersected immediately around these points when Bob first went to interview him at his famous Millbrook New York estate in the mid-1960s. It seems almost inevitable that they would later unite around Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness and other theories about the nature and future of human consciousness. Please comment.

Gabriel Kennedy: Yes, I agree. Bob and Timothy Leary were kindred spirits. They had a bond that ran deeper than their shared views on developmental psychology. They first met in 1964 when Bob interviewed Leary at the Millbrook mansion where Leary and his crew were conducting their psychedelic explorations. Both Bob and Arlen believed that Leary was really onto something in 1964, and Bob continued to believe so for the rest of his life. 

In 1964, Leary had not yet created the 8-Circuit model of intelligence. At the time, Leary was fascinated with the valuable language that Game Theory and The Tibetan Book of the Dead offered for understanding the mind-blowing effects of entheogens like LSD and psilocybin. One could conceive of those spaces where ‘no-self’ exists through a framework provided by Game Theory (or so thought Leary and RAW.) 

When Leary did come up with the 8-Circuit Brain Model, he asked Bob to help him co-author a book about it, which Leary was calling The Periodic Table of Energy. They created something quite magic(k)al. [RU: Much of this material wound up being used in Leary’s future history series, some of which had Wilson credited as a contributing author.] Leary had conducted his own in-depth studies of Crowley, Gurdjieff, the Kabala, and, of course, a ton of western psychology. He was thrilled that Wilson could not only keep up but also suggest new insights about his psychological systems.

I write in my book that Bob was fascinated with a fourfold understanding of the psyche dating back to high school when he first read Philip Wylie’s An Essay on Morals, which unpacked Carl Jung’s ideas on personality attitudes and types. There are two attitudes: extroversion and introversion. And there are four ‘functions’ or types of personality: thinking, sensation, intuition, and feeling. A careful study of the Leary-Wilson 8-Circuit Brain Model immediately reveals these influences. Then again, Jung influenced a whole lot of people. 

Wilson took the four functions seriously as a teenager. He used that model of the psyche to analyze himself, and determined that he was more a thinking type than an intuitive and sensational type. So he made it an early life mission to develop these other areas of his psyche, which is what eventually got him interested in magic(k), as that system demands practitioners to study their intuitive natures. 

There are a number of instances where Wilson collated information on human psychology into this fourfold matrix, and he did so mainly because he observed other systems utilizing the fourfold structure, from Christianity’s four gospels to Buddhism’s fourfold path.

It was Wilson’s early study of General Semantics, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, however, that I believe allowed him to think laterally in such an effortless way. His mind was trained early to find isomorphisms in comparative structures. He then clashed ideas together and synthesized as much as he could into he and Leary’s 8 Circuit Brain Model (8CBM). I have written more about all this in Chapel Perilous.

RU: One thing that always impressed me about Bob is that, although he was best known for his ideas about meta-agnosticism, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and his fictional playfulness with conspiracy theories, Discordianism, and for this research in the nature of consciousness, he could nevertheless veer off and write about any aspect of art, music, culture, politics etc. What were some of Bob’s interests and obsessions that might surprise some of his readers and fans?

GK: This is actually a tricky question as Bob was pretty open with his readers. He pretty much seemed to write about everything that interested him. Let’s see… he told me when I interviewed him in 2003 that he liked hip-Hop music. Bob loved watching TV. Law & Order was one of his favorite shows. I think people who knew him knew how much Bob enjoyed television. In researching my book, I came across a great segment from a public access television show featuring Wilson and his friend Scott Apel where they are analyzing episodes of The Prisoner, the legendary TV show created by the equally legendary Patrick McGoohan. 

What else? He loved dogs. I did not write much about his dogs in Chapel Perilous, but Bob had a dog growing up in Brooklyn, and as soon as he and Arlen started their family in the late 1950s, he got dogs again. 

I remember, during a class I was taking at the Maybe Logic Academy, an interactive remote learning website that RAW and Lance Bauscher created in 2004, Bob wrote that he thought he may have had Asperger’s. I don’t think I mention that in the book because I wanted to steer clear from any sort of psychoanalyzing of him. Asperger’s is on the autism spectrum, and I fell down a small rabbit hole researching autism and artists while writing my book. I came across a book called Writers on the Spectrum by Julie Brown which makes an argument for how Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and other great writers had autism and/or Asperger’s. So, Bob wondered that about himself. If you look into aspects of Asperger’s, one is an extreme attention to detail. Bob was able to use that in his writing, especially his fiction work, to create countless reasons to read the page again. But, who knows, maybe Bob was just a genius.

RU: This seems like a good place to switch over to talking about RAW’s personal life. He embraced optimism, and it was a hard-won optimism. It was not an easy life. What were some of RAW’s challenges, and how did he maintain a positive spirit?

GK: I think the most enduring quality of RAW’s optimism was that he learned as a child to use optimism as a tool for existential survival. I think Bob embodied what Viktor Frankl, the Jewish Holocaust survivor and founder of Logotherapy, called ‘tragic optimism,’ meaning that over the course of his life, Bob was very familiar with pain, guilt, and death. These qualities comprise the foundation of tragic optimism, and Bob remained cheerful in spite of such things. If one can remain optimistic about life and one’s fellow human after enduring horrible and traumatic events, one has earned a noble wisdom of the heart. I think this resonates in most of Bob’s work. 

Some examples of this are his experiences as a child in South Brooklyn with polio. Later there was his response to almost committing suicide in his 20s, his response to his daughter Luna being murdered, and other difficult events throughout his life. He practiced this optimism in his 70s when he had post-polio and  his body was slowly failing. Bob’s optimism was all about activation, engagement, and stretching. It’s quite a yogic mindset, and he arrived there through his own wonderfully meandering path.

Bob grew up in a poor neighborhood on the southernmost shores of Brooklyn during the Great Depression. That early life alone would be enough to drive some young men into a life of crime. Through his experience of being relatively cured of polio by the Sister Kenny Method, he learned that there is always hope for achieving medicinal relief, even if others say there is no hope. 

In his 20s, he nearly jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge in a drunken stupor after his girlfriend dumped him through a letter. But before he jumped from the bridge, he saw a plaque dedicated to the family who built the bridge; and he saw how long it took them and the sacrifice it took for them to do so. That awakened him and he realized that if he wanted to make something of lasting value like the Brooklyn Bridge then he had to be tougher on the outside while also being kinder to himself. Through the help of psychotherapy, and through orgone therapy – the therapy based on the ideas and practices of Wilhelm Reich – Bob healed himself from some of his childhood trauma. Again, he was learning early in his life that one can transcend depressed mental states.

Many years later, as I write in my book, Bob utilized such far-out things as magick, LSD, marijuana, the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (minus his Übermensch theory), and creative visualization to not only see far-out things but also to maintain a relaxed state of homeostasis as his world became increasingly stressful. There was no shortage of reasons Bob could have picked to become and remain a miserable person. But he recognized the value in optimism, literally, as a way to stay alive.

RU: He was also a techno-optimist. How did he interact with technology or technological developments during his lifetime, either hands-on or philosophically?

GK: It’s true that RAW was a techno-optimist. Some of his prognostications made about radically extending human lifespan within decades could be seen now as overly optimistic, but he allowed himself to be a visionary, meaning that he dedicated much ink to what could be if large segments of the population become enthusiastic about ideas like living forever. When it came to communication technologies, he was optimistic that once the Global South got online and everyday people from there shared their experiences with those in the Global North, then true world governance… not to be confused with government… could be achieved. 

Wilson grew up in a house where there was no phone – only newspapers, magazines, and books for entertainment. Then his family got a radio. Soon after that, he started going to movie theaters. His engagement with communications media continued until, years later, Bob was leading a pioneering remote learning website called The Maybe Logic Academy. He saw firsthand how communication technology can bring everyday people together. He believed that humanity would keep creating better forms of communication tech that will help achieve a more just, peaceful, and equitable planet outside of the reach of governments and corporations.

When it comes to his personal uses of technology, Bob was more of an ideas-man. I came across a number of stories about his clumsy ways with modern tech. He and Arlen’s daughter Alex recounted how Bob never learned to drive a car because of his polio. The first and only time he tried to drive, he crashed the car hood-first directly into the only light pole on a vast empty stretch of road. Or there’s the story from his friend Scott Apel about a night when Bob stayed in Apel’s guest room. The next day, when Scott asked Bob how he had slept, Bob replied that he slept very well except he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights in the room. So instead, he figured out how to sleep with the lights on. This left Scott perplexed because he knew that it was a simple procedure to turn off the lights in his guest room.  So here was, in Scott’s estimation, the smartest man on the planet unable to figure how a light switch works. There’s another great story like this in my book, but I’ll leave that for the reader to discover.  Overall, Bob was shockingly bad with the technology that he loved so dearly.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: I’ll ask you to channel a little RAW now. I know it’s impossible, but you’ve studied his thinking closely for your book so let’s give it a try. What would RAW have to say about our present moment? What might his thoughts have been about the weird chaos of MAGA? And what about the new excitement around AI (this being an AI-oriented webzine)?  Feel free to add your own opinions.

GK: Working within the parameters that you just set, while also acknowledging that it’s absolutely impossible for anyone to know the thoughts of a dead man, I will base my answer more on extrapolations of what Bob’s did say, while further acknowledging that the world has changed drastically over the last 17 years and he could have changed too. I mean Dennis Hopper and Eldridge Cleaver both died as Republicans, so ya never know.

One thing is clear, and I illustrate this in the last chapter of my book. It’s the chapter that opens with RAW appearing at the now legendary Disinfo.com conference at Hammerstein Ballroom in 2000. At that stage of his life, Bob truly was RAW, in the best sense of the word. There are so many stories about old folks becoming more conservative in their golden years, but Bob went the opposite direction. Like I write in the book, Bob was laying it down that night. He said that the reason many countries hate America is because we are bombing them. If we stopped bombing them, they would stop hating us. In that talk, he also said that there are two tiers of justice in America, those for the rich and those for the rest of us. Both these things are, of course, true, but Bob was stating such things with a more direct fiery tone than in previous years.

When I interviewed him in 2003, he told me that in the ’60s he called himself “an atheist, an anarchist, and a witch.” Then in the ’70s, he said he “softened it” to calling himself “a libertarian, a pantheist, and a neopagan.” Later, he started calling himself “a decentralist, a pragmatist, and proponent of Maybe Logic.”

Bob stated in an interview from the early ’90s – and he may have mentioned this in Cosmic Trigger Vol. 2 – that he saw the usefulness of third parties in political systems, based on his time living in Europe in the 1980s. He was in favor of strong third and fourth and fifth parties in the American political system, beyond Democrats and Republicans. I don’t know if he voted in 1988, because was still in Ireland during the summer of that year. However, he stated in a later interview in 2001 that he let a friend convince him to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992. However, Clinton was running against George Bush, who was the former director of the CIA, so Bob was not into an “ex” CIA man becoming President of the United States.

I am unsure whether he voted for Clinton in 1996 or whether he voted for Ralph Nader, but Nader and the Green Party were the third party that Bob had once wished for in America. Nader made the decision to run outside the political duopoly because he saw them both as unable to properly address the real needs of the American public. 

By 2000, Bob was drawing voters’ attention to the donors of the political candidates, and he was calling the presidential nominees, George W. Bush and Al Gore, the “two lying bastards”. The donors, argued Bob in one of his last books TSOG: The Thing that Ate the Constitution, were the ones the POTUS is really looking out for. 

In the interview series Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, which was published in 2001, he said that he believed America was an Oligarchy. He also said in that interview that he saw hope for humanity with more people getting online from the Global South. Lastly, Bob was very clear on the impact of colonialization from his study of the imperialism Ireland faced from England for hundreds of years. Wilson did the historical research and saw the impact of the British Empire’s legacy of violence. 

I could see RAW being an outspoken critic of the neocolonialist system that exists, where American oil companies and the American government have colonized oil-producing countries since World War 2. RAW may have followed that logic all the way through and applied it to the current situation.

He may have supported Bernie in 2016. I think that’s actually a no-brainer. But also, he may have just said “fuck it” and stopped voting in general. This is why it is difficult guessing what he may or may not have done. 
 
As far as MAGA and Trump goes, there’s footage on YouTube of Bob’s calling Trump “fucking crazy,” so he saw what time it was with ‘the Donald’. I can’t imagine he would think too highly of MAGA.

I think that Bob would have provided information about who the major financial donors of Trump’s campaign were, and he would urge his readers to look at that, and to keep in mind his position that U.S. Presidents put the needs of their donors over the needs of their voters. I think RAW would raise more questions than provide answers. Same goes for Kamala and Biden: who are their major donors?

Lastly, when I interviewed Bob in 2003, he told me that he’d prefer it if U.S. politicians were trained in science more than in the law. So as far as the 2024 election went, there was only one Presidential candidate in the race with that qualification: Dr. Jill Stein. Stein was an actual physician before becoming involved in politics, and she is an on-the-ground activist, like Bob was. And she is in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. I think Bob would respect her for all those reasons. Would he have voted for her and not Kamala? Who knows? Again, he’s dead and he would be pissed off to no end if we somehow contacted him on the other side just to ask him about U.S. politics. He may start haunting us just for doing so!

RU: And AI?

GK: As far as Bob and Artificial Intelligence goes, I think it’s far easier to guess what he’d think. He’d be into it. He’d be absolutely fascinated, I think. He’d probably be interested in the development of Artificial General Intelligence, and the work of Dr. Ben Goertzel, especially Goertzel’s notion of the importance of programming AI in such a way that it will value humanity. If we teach AI only how to murder people en masse, how’s that gonna play out?

He probably would be an experimenter with ChatGPT and ask it all sorts of interesting questions just to see what it says. It’s funny though: in all of Bob’s writings, I never really came across a direct reference to AI, even though his work appeals to people who are very much into the study of Artificial Intelligence. The notion of using a human-made “intelligence” that gets exponentially more intelligent, until, as Goertzel talks about, it’s AGI becoming an ASI, an Artificial Super Intelligence… I think Bob would be interested in all this through the lens of Tim Leary’s S.M.I2.L.E. scenario. What will help humans behave and act more intelligently with one another and themselves?

Wilson gave a great interview with WBAI, the listener sponsored non-commercial radio station in New York City, in the mid-1960s about the promising potential cybernetics had for decentralizing power and control while promoting greater autonomy in individuals working in conjunction with one another. In that respect, I think he’d support the Decentralized AI Society and others promoting these uses of the technology.

Lastly, even though RAW never wrote about specific AI programs, like the ELIZA AI program you mentioned in your interview with Jeremy Braddock, one can make the argument that FUCKUP, which stands for First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultra-micro-Programmer, from Illuminatus! is an AGI, and it becomes an ASI when it falls in love and merges with Leviathan.

RU: Lastly, did how you think & feel about RAW change as the result of your research? What did you learn in your deep exploration of his life that you feel will stay with you?

GK: I do not know if there was a change in my thinking about RAW from writing this book. But authoring the book was itself an extremely deep education in the humanities for me. From studying the life of a man and his world – his ideas – I could not help but be constantly confronted with the human experience. I feel like I know this person now at a level I didn’t before. However, I also feel like Bob Wilson is even more of a mystery to me than ever before. Bob, in his writing, makes it clear that knowledge-of-self is an initiation that never ends. He remained open to surprising himself and, as such, was extraordinarily complex. He reminds readers of the mysteries that lie within oneself. 

I would also say that learning about his elderly years was educational. He never had a lot of money, and I am not sure what sort of healthcare he had then, but he had a support network that was huge. Hearing about all the people who hung out with him towards the end, it truly was a Sangha, a sacred community of love and support that surrounded him as he aged. I think society as a whole can learn from that.

Hmmm. Maybe one thing that stays with me was how much he spoke out and went to protests throughout his whole life. Bob didn’t just write about everyone living in harmony. He was engaged in activist protest. He put his body on the line, which is admirable. Also, learning about his constantly moving with a whole family and with pets… and how he managed to produce constant copy while living like that. One needs an intensely strong power of concentration to do this. Also, when I think about how much acid he took and how much weed he smoked, that level of laser-like focus is remarkable. While he and his family traveled, he had to carry loads of papers, his typewriter, and his books. 

I bounced around Los Angeles for over three years like this, only at a much higher velocity, with boxes of books and files needed for Chapel Perilous. To be able to move like this and hop right into writing requires Herculean amounts of mental muscle. Bob did it though. He was disciplined in his craft. He was disciplined in general. He gave himself so many exercises and meditations to do over the years, and learning more about all that was amazing and inspiring. So I gained a deeper appreciation for his level of concentration. Also, he never became bitter or full of resentment from the harsh tragedies that crashed into his life. He walked the talk and was able to utilize magic(k), psychology, drugs, and art to remain a joyful person till the day he died. And that’s a lesson I will never forget.

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter. 

Robert Anton Wilson, Leary, Transhumanish Meta-Agnosticism, and Chapel Perilous. (Part 1) With Gabriel Kennedy

Posted on by RU Sirius

The Illuminati. Discordianism. Operation Mindfuck, Reality Tunnels. Model Agnosticism. These memes are part of the vocabulary of contemporary culture because of one man: Robert Anton Wilson. And should I mention to Mindplex readers that he was also an early transhumanist, even if he did not necessarily use the word?

Over the last month, the counterculture has been celebrating the release of the long awaited biography Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson by Gabriel Kennedy. There follows a two-part interview with Gabe. 

But first I want to explain the Leary/Wilson paradigm to Mindplex readers who may be unfamiliar with it; Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson were transhumanists decades ahead of the thinkers later called transhumanists (except for F.M. Esfandiary).

Let’s take a look at the vision that was put out into the world in the mid-1970s by this pair.

The theory – developed by Timothy Leary in the mid-1970s and then expanded upon by Science Fiction writer and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson – proposed that there are ‘circuits’, or neural patternings, or potentials for intelligence and experience, residing inside the human skull
waiting for the time when they will be useful for human or posthuman survival and/or enjoyment. It was a sort-of evolutionary psychological system that presumed that human evolution didn’t end with unaltered 20th century humans, but rather that we were going to become posthuman and post-terrestrial in some interesting, exciting and pleasurable ways.

 In simplistic terms, Leary/Wilson proposed that – both as individuals and as a species – ordinary pre-mutant humans have always evolved through four stages of development dealing with – 

  1. Approach or avoidance
  2. Territory and power
  3. Language and physical dexterity
  4. Socialization

When a civilization becomes advanced enough to offer some of its privileged members leisure time, this provides them the opportunity to open somatic potentials and experience the brain and body not merely as an implement for survival, but as something one can derive pleasure and increased intelligence from, to enjoy sensual, visionary, playful, fluid and creative mind-states. And some survival value ultimately comes from this: as human societies grow more sophisticated around an increasing need to satisfy desires for aesthetic and sensual experiences and insights. They called this the 5th brain circuit. 

Naturally, with Leary involved, each higher circuit could also be opened up by a drug or drugs: in this case marijuana.

The next circuit or potential Leary theorized was the 6th ‘neuro-electric’ or ‘metaprogramming’ circuit. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Some texts list the neuro-electric circuit as the 6th and the neuro-genetic as the 7th; others – such as Prometheus Rising – invert this order. The correct ordering is left as an exercise to the reader.]

Here the being begins to experience the body and brain as something one can drive and control, and reprogram. Leary/Wilson theorized that these evolutionary potentials in the brain would open up under evolutionary conditions brought on by communications media and brain technologies (and, of course, they could be – and had been – opened up temporarily and prematurely by using psychedelic drugs).

The next circuit – circuit 7 – has to do with experiences of collective consciousness. Here the individual is understood not just as an individual but as a branch of the great tree of life. Mastering this circuit would open us up to biological intelligence: genetic engineering, biotechnology, the ability to control our biology and alter and enhance ourselves in ways that would have seemed science fictional and superhuman to average 20th century humans. (High dose psychedelic experiences were said to open us up to genetic intelligence.)

This was the idea of shared minds; minds hooked up, speeded up, linked up – what would become the networked, online world, perhaps ultimately extending out to direct mind linkups and borg-like collectivities of mind. 

Finally, the eighth circuit promised molecular (nanotech), atomic and ultimately quantum control over matter, the universe and everything. (Only the most powerful drugs, like DMT, Ketamine and high dose LSD were said to open up visions of these realms.) With the acronym SMI²LE,

Leary/Wilson also proposed that the goal of 1970s humanity should be Space Migration Intelligence Increase and Life Extension.

Only RAWilson Remains

The mindshares of the great counterculture celebrities of the 1960s and 1970s, even including Leary (as compared to a mediocrity like, say, Joe Rogan), shrink into the distance, Robert Anton Wilson’s legend continues to grow. Now we have the first and only lucid and highly detailed biography of this working-class writer and compassionate family man who was the unlikely spreader of extravagantly puckish and anarchistic tropes.

What comes across in the bio, aside from the amount of energy it must have required to do what Bob Wilson did against the physical and financial obstacles he faced, is the essential kindness of the man, a kindness that radiated outward to family and friends (daughter Christina is a major source), and to the esteemed author Gabriel Kennedy, who organized and wrote this entire effort while often unhoused but unbowed. He deserves a lengthy holiday in Chapel Marvelous! 

I’ll let Gabriel tell the story in this two-part piece. In part two, we may learn the answer to the eternal question – how many writers does it take to find a light switch? 

Note: Friends and fans of Robert Anton Wilson often referred to him as RAW or as Bob

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

R.U. Sirius: We can catch up on Bob’s private life in a while, but let’s start with philosophy. After all, the story of Bob’s life is largely that of an inveterate reader and thinker; and of someone who sampled a lot of philosophic tendencies and movements. One influence that remained with him throughout his life was the work of Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics. Can you give our Mindplex readers a brief summary regarding Korzybski and his influence on Robert Anton Wilson’s philosophy and writings?

Gabriel Kennedy: Sure. RAW discovered Science and Sanity, Korzybski’s most famous book, while roaming the stacks of a New York City Library as a teenager. He became immediately fascinated by everything Korzybski discussed in the 800-plus-page book. He wrote that he became so intrigued that he read that giant book in one weekend! He was smitten with the question Korzybski raised, which is “What is reality?” In answering that, Korzybski lays down a framework for applying the hard and soft sciences to get at the notion of perception. 

It’s been 91 years since Science and Sanity was published, so science, especially neuroscience, mind-body science, and psychoneuroimmunology, has progressed since then. However, at the time, Wilson thought it was revolutionary information. Korzybski loved calculus and thought that math was a more efficient way of communicating information than linguistic languages, and he aimed to make the English language, at least, as efficient as calculus. Bob loved math at the time so he immediately locked into Korzybski’s style of writing and expression.
 
Besides Korzybski’s style, Bob found instant value in the content of Science and Sanity. For instance, the phrase “the map is not the territory” was introduced to Bob in Korzybski’s book. The phrase essentially means that there are events happening outside of our perception and our knowledge of the world outside of us, and this is true for every human. Therefore, no person will ever be able to create a map that perfectly replicates the living breathing moment of any location or space; it’s impossible. With that as an axiom in Korzybski’s system, General Semantics then becomes about recognizing how often we mistake our maps of anything with the living breathing manifestation of matter we are encountering. 

To me, General Semantics is based on another Korzybskian phrase that RAW loved, which is “organism-as-a-whole-interacting-with-environment-as-a-whole.” Korzybski came up with this around the time that the term ‘ecosystem’ was coined, but it’s pretty much the same thing. The last important part of Korzybski’s system that Bob loved was K’s rejection of Aristotle’s logical system. Korzybski believed that Aristotle’s principle of the excluded middle, which states that for every proposition, it is either true or false, was inaccurate. Wilson agreed with Korzybski and dedicated his career seeking to prove the number of ways things can be both/and instead of either/or. 

Korzybski also wrote a bit about stagecraft magic in the book. He wrote about how people willingly let the stage magician fool them, because they want the magic. The insight here is twofold. One, people crave magic. Two, people will willingly hypnotize themselves into believing in someone of something that tells them to do so. For Wilson, Science and Sanity and General Semantics, was also a tool for achieving psychological liberation from the litany of authoritarian systems that exist in the world, from religious cults to countries.

RU: Continuing on the philosophical influence tip, Aleister Crowley figures large in RAW’s very influential original Cosmic Trigger book. I see this as similar to his early tendency to embrace individualist anarchism as also discussed in your book. Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” was a slap in the face of centuries of religious repression and guilt. It allowed for the emergence of the kind of bold ambitions represented by the transhumanist tendencies of this site, a tendency that Bob also embraced. Please say a little about how Bob interacted with Crowley’s philosophy and practices and how you see it relating to some of the bold attitudes in late 20th century counterculture.

GK: Wilson became enamored with Crowley’s work after being introduced to it through a biography called The Eye in the Triangle by Israel Regardie, the English-American Occultist and writer. In a few short years, RAW worked his way through much of Crowley’s magical system and developed his own insights. There is an anti-authoritarian appeal that Wilson found in Crowley’s work, as well as the use of sex and drugs to attain states of magical consciousness. These are two brief examples of Crowley’s influence on later 20th century counterculture. 

I spend a lot of time in my book unpacking two major Crowleyian ideas that had an influence on Wilson. First was Crowley’s notion of Scientific Illuminism. Wilson believed that Crowley synthesized the Western Esoteric Tradition with Yoga, in which an empirical practice resides, and skepticism. Crowley essentially updated the Magic(k)al map for Wilson, and he spoke about Thelemic rituals in an analytical cross-cultural pan-scientific way. In his work, Crowley created, or revealed, a tradition of Scientific Illuminists, magically-infused scientists, who are the ones creating the really big ideas in history. Wilson added Jack Parsons, the inventor of the first rocket engine and a leader in the Los Angeles O.T.O., to the list. He also put Timothy Leary on the list. Maybe he added John C. Lilly to the list. I would. And I would add Wilson to the list, too. 

Ultimately, RAW loved the idea of synthesizing the spooky a-causal connections found in magic with the proven methods of science to craft a new science of understanding for humanity.

Perhaps the most enduring influence of Crowley’s work on RAW was the British scoundrel’s obsession with the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel. Of course, Crowley did not create the concept of a Holy Guardian Angel, nor did he create the ritual that supposedly puts a magician in touch with their HGA, but Crowley made it his stated purpose in life to turn people on to their Holy Guardian Angels. I find this amusing to no end because Crowley was the Great Beast… Mr. 666 himself, but this relation to the HGA may reveal that at the core Crowley was a Christian mystic. Some will contest this, but I think RAW would agree. I dedicate more than a few pages in my book to Wilson’s own views on the Holy Guardian Angel, and how one can contact him, her, they, them, or it!

Tune in next week for more of this discussion about Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, with Gabriel Kennedy.

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Firesign Theatre: The Greatest Satirists of 20th Century Media Culture and its Techno-romanticism were… Not Insane! An Interview with Jeremy Braddock

Posted on by RU Sirius

If you were a college student or Western counterculture person in the late 1960s-70s, the albums of Firesign Theatre occupied more space on your shelf and in your hippocampus than even The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you were an incipient techno-geek or hacker, this was even more the case. Firesign was the premier comedy recording act of the very first media-saturated technofreak tribe.

In his tremendously informative and enjoyable history of Firesign Theatre titled Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums, author Jeremy Braddock starts by giving us the roots of a band of satirists that started out (to varying degrees) as social activists with a sense of humor. He shows them slowly coming together in Los Angeles while infiltrating, first, the alternative Pacifica radio stations like KPFK in Los Angeles, and eventually, briefly, hosting programs in the newly thriving hip commercial rock radio stations of the times, before they lost that audience share to corporatization. 

Braddock takes us through the entire Firesign career and doesn’t stint on media theory and the sociopolitics of America in the 20th century that were a part of the Firesign oeuvre. 

For those of us out in the wilds of the youth counterculture of the time, without access to their radio programs, it was Columbia Records albums that captured our ears and minds, starting with Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him in early 1968. Their third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers sold 300,000 right out of the gate and, in the words of an article written for the National Registry in 2005, “breaking into the charts, continually stamped, pressed and available by Columbia Records in the US and Canada, hammering its way through all of the multiple commercial formats over the years: LPs, EPs, 8-Track and Cassette tapes, and numerous reissues on CD, licensed to various companies here and abroad, continuing up to this day.” As covered toward the end of the book, they have been frequently sampled in recent years by hip-hop artists.

My introduction to Firesign came as the result of seeing the cover of their second album How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All in the record section of a department store in upstate New York. It was the cover, with pictures of Groucho Marx and John Lennon and the words “All Hail Marx and Lennon” that caught my eye. 

It was the mind-breaking trip of Babe, as he enters a new car purchased from a then-stereotypical, obnoxiously friendly car salesman, and finds himself transitioning from one mediated space to another, eventually landing in a Turkish prison and witnessing the spread of plague, as an element of a TV quiz show. 

The album ends with a chanteuse named Lurlene singing “We’re Bringing the War Back Home.” This was all during the militant opposition to the US war in Vietnam. Probably few listeners would have recognized “Bring The War Home” as the slogan of The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but Braddock gets it, like he gets the seriousness of Firesign’s satire. Indeed, Braddock notes that several reviewers, writing with appreciation about one of their albums, averred that its dystopia was “not funny.”

Most fans would agree with me that the peak of the Firesign run on Columbia Records was the exceedingly multivalent Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and the futuristic, AI-saturated I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus, which I note in this interview predicted the future better than any of the self-described futurists of the 1970s. But to apprehend the richness of those two psychedelic assaults on the senses and on the idiocracy of its times, you will need to read the book and listen to the recordings or at least read this interview. 
Jeremy Braddock is, in his own words, a literary scholar and cultural historian specializing in the long history of modernism. (What? Not postmodernism!?) He teaches literature in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I interviewed Braddock via email.

RU Sirius: This is not light reading for people who remember the Firesign Theatre as a silly comedy group with a few lines they like to quote situationally. You hit us right up front with references to the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin (heteroglossia) and with a series of left counterculture and avant-garde theater references that were part of their history. These made me swoon (partly with nostalgia.) But all this might not appeal to the old boomer stoner who might by now be pretty reactionary. Your thoughts?

Jeremy Braddock: I get where that question is coming from, because I like the joke about the erector set as much as anyone. The version of that question that someone of my generation would ask is, “Why are you asking us to think that these four old stoners are actually major thinkers about media, technology, and culture, and among the most interesting artists of the late 20th century?” (Which – spoiler – is what I’m saying.)

I definitely don’t want to be policing anyone’s enjoyment, and folks like the “reactionary” person conjured in your question might prefer to read Fred Wiebel’s Backwards into the Future, which is a big collection of interviews he did with the four Firesigns in the ’90s, or just listen to the albums again. But one thing that was very striking to me as I researched the music mags and fanzines of the 1960s and 1970s was that they understood that the Firesign albums were great art and they took them very seriously – they knew that the records were both the White Album and Gravity’s Rainbow, if you like. They also tended not to see a contradiction between being a stoner music fan and being intellectually engaged and reading books. The Creem reviewers especially were way more likely to understand Firesign albums as more frightening than funny, and that is because like so many others they saw the bigger frame that the albums created, and they knew that shouting, “what is reality?” at the principal from the back of a high school gym in the context of Kent State and the Vietnam War was not only hilarious but a very good idea, and even in its way profoundly political, if you think about all the things ‘reality’ might mean.

I wanted to honor that seriousness, and to put as much thought into the book as Firesign obviously did making their records. But I also wanted for my writing to be in tune with the albums’ multilayered playfulness, so I wanted it to be weird and even include some jokes, and at the same time I did not want only to be writing for academics. That might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is what the Firesign albums sound like to me. Firesign knew that the key to a good record was to include things you might not appreciate until the third or tenth listen, and I think that’s true of a good book – fiction or nonfiction – too.

RU: While Dwarf remains my choice as the group’s crowning achievement, it was Bozos that made Firesign’s reputation, as you note, in Silicon Valley and with the tech geeks. There’s such complexity to the history of that album. I like to tell people it’s the most accurate prediction of the future from the 1970s (with the possible exception of the title of Gary Numan’s Are Friends Electric.) But for Firesign, it was very much about the present and even about the past. I was stunned to learn from you about the influence of the Chicago Century of Progress Worlds’ Fair 1933 official guide book (and about its slogan “Science finds – Industry Applies – Man conforms.” It’s shocking, to put it mildly). Please say a little about how the various expositions romanticizing technological progress collided with the social and cultural realities of 1971 as understood from the countercultural perspective of Firesign to form the composition of Bozos.

JB: I’m glad you appreciated that, because it’s part of what I try to signal through the book by using the term “media archaeology,” which is a relatively new strain of scholarship in media studies that looks at old technologies – working with the devices when possible – and thinks about, among other things, how things might have developed otherwise. The Firesign Theatre were, without a doubt, media archaeologists. They knew that the Hollywood studio they were recording in was originally built in 1938 for radio and used for antifascist propaganda broadcasts. They thought about what it meant to be using the same microphones and old sound effects devices in the age of Vietnam.

As to Bozos’ conceit of the Future Fair, there’s no doubt that Disneyland (and Disneyworld, which opened in 1971) was one of the things they were riffing on. But they had the Guidebook to the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair with them in the studio, and they took a lot of ideas from it, as you noticed. The background of the World’s Fairs was useful to them because of their history as events that were used by governments to communicate messages about political culture, promote commerce, and exhibit new technologies. The first demonstration of stereo took place at the 1933 Chicago Fair; famously, television was introduced at the 1939 Fair in New York. I don’t think Firesign deliberately chose the 1933 Fair over the others – probably they just picked up the Guidebook at a used book shop – but it was a key moment in the development of World’s Fairs because it was the first time that corporations had pavilions alongside those for different nations, and that comes through subtly in Bozos where the “model government” and the President himself (itself) are exhibits at the Fair, and not the other way around. 

As the ominous “Science Finds – Industry Applies – Man Conforms” slogan implies, it institutionalized the idea of technological progress as all-powerful and unquestioned good. I think we’re seeing that play out now in the techno-utopian discourse about the inevitability of AI. Despite the fact that Century of Progress is not as well known as the 1893 or 1939 fairs, I was happy to see that Shoshana Zuboff cites the 1933 slogan in the introduction to her important book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

And yes, I agree that Don’t Crush That Dwarf is more amazing than Bozos, but I have grown to really appreciate that album, especially the sound design.

RU: The early text-based conversational AI program ELIZA was another big influence on Bozos that added to their cred among both early and latter-day tech freaks. Bozos is, in a sense, a collision of AI, VR (the funway is clearly some kind of simulation or partial simulation) and a totally surveilled entertainment space that people enter into voluntarily. It all feels very contemporary. And one of the Firesign’s had some direct engagement with ELIZA, if my reading is correct. Say a bit about how their understanding of ELIZA led them to make something that was and is related to by hackers and other techies and maybe about some of the problematic or complicated aspects of that relationship.

JB: Yes, Phil Proctor interacted with the original chatbot ELIZA at a work fair in LA in 1970. It was entirely text-based, of course, and he took a sheaf of the printouts into the studio as they wrote the album. But they imposed a lot of changes along the way; instead of private psychotherapy (which is what ELIZA emulated), they used it to portray the fantasy of citizens’ access to politicians; they used their presidential chatbot to foreclose conversation, whereas ELIZA is all about keeping the conversation going (which is why it was so popular). 

I understand that they had access to other computer culture, too, because according to my friend Herb Jellinek – a Lisp hacker from back in the day – some of the nonsense noises that Dr. Memory makes as Clem hacks into the backend of the ‘President’ are terms that come from the DEC PDP-10 (a computer that would have run ELIZA), but are not found in the ELIZA script. So they had some other source, but I don’t know what it is. 

But to answer your question, I think that the Clem character was easily understood by the early Silicon Valley generation – and Proctor has endorsed this reading, too – as a kind of heroic early hacker, and the fact that he succeeds in “breaking the president” would surely have appealed to a strain of political libertarianism that is not necessarily in step with the left counterculture from which Firesign came, but became and remains influential in Silicon Valley.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: There’s a note in the chapter about Bozos that indicates that people used to see Clem as the hacker hero of the narrative, but that is no longer the case. I wonder why and how you see that as having changed. The narrative, I think, can be pitched, so to speak, as twisted, very surreal early cyberpunk humor.

JB: This sounds like a question that I’d like you to answer. But I would point out that one trajectory out of Clem and Bozos would be toward something like Anonymous (which appears to be no longer with us) while another is with the hackers who became powerful tech innovators like Steve Jobs, who was a fan of Bozos, according to Proctor. It seems important to stress that Firesign were definitely not Luddites – they were always eager to experiment with new technologies and would certainly have thought more about AI – but they were always skeptical and thought critically as they worked.

RU: Like Firesign’s albums, there are so many thematic streams running through your book, I wonder how you organized the flow. Was it difficult?  It’s funny that what they did sort of demands a multivalent response.

JB: Yes, it was difficult. I decided to write the Bozos chapter first, thinking that the album’s linear storyline would be the easiest one to deal with. It was easy to write, but I was not overjoyed with it and ended up substantially revising that chapter when I’d finished everything else. 

Writing that chapter helped me realize a couple of things. First, that I wanted to write a book that would interest people who hadn’t heard of the Firesign Theatre, people of my generation who might get interested in what the Firesign Theater did if I drew them in as readers, even if they were never going to listen to the albums. And second, I also wanted to write not only for an academic audience but for a smart general audience too, which included old heads like you, who do know the albums well. 

I decided to make the book roughly chronological, so that it read like a history of the group and the times they were working in. But I also chose to give each chapter the organizing theme of a particular medium – book, radio, cinema, AI, television – which showed a second kind of organization that allowed me to weave in other themes, as you said.

What bothered me about the first draft of the Bozos chapter is that it was pretty much a standard literary reading, and kind of boring. It didn’t really convey what was special about the albums, so I decided to try to make my writing weirder and see what happened, hoping that at some level it could convey the experience of hearing the albums for those who had never heard them. So I then turned to Dwarf, deciding to let it rip and see what happened. That chapter took about a year to write and included a lot of material that ended up getting excised – such as a huge long detour about what Allen Ginsberg was up to in 1965 and 1966, which I will not belabor now other than to say that it’s totally fascinating but good that I cut it – but it gave me the confidence that going down other rabbit holes was totally appropriate to the way the Firesign albums worked. Hence the excursions into rock operas versus concept albums, the MGM auction, Firesign’s Zachariah script, and the introduction of Dolby into the recording studio (and Dolby’s uneven history in cinema versus sound recording), which Ossman had insisted was critical for what they were able to do on that album.

RU: One example of a thematic stream is your generous recounting of Firesign’s use of the tools of the recording studio and other aspects of recording technology.  Their mastery of the studio should be at least as legendary as Brian Eno’s or any of the other esteemed record producers. I hope your book rouses some attention around that. What surprised or intrigued you most about their uses of recording technology?

JB: Yes, I thought this would be really important if I could get it right, because anyone can see that the sound they are able to get on those Columbia records is a kind of miracle. They did plenty of good work after 1975, but none of it sounds as good as those early albums. I spent a couple of weekends with David Ossman as I was starting work on the book, and this was one of the things I was hoping he would talk about, or find evidence of in his papers, and both those things ended up being true – although sadly the engineers that they worked with at Columbia had all died by then, which might have been a goldmine had I thought to track them down earlier.

Firesign’s tenure at Columbia coincides with a period of massive change in technology and in recording practices, and listening to the records in order can stand in for a history of those changes. Waiting for the Electrician is recorded on 4-track machines, just like Sgt. Pepper was; In the Next World You’re On Your Own is recorded on 24 tracks at the Burbank Studios with the guy who had just engineered Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats.

Ossman stressed that Firesign was able to do something different every time they went in to record, and that they used whatever new device or technique as inspiration for what they were going to write. At the same time, though, they were also learning the radio techniques of the 1930s and ’40s and were excited to discover that Columbia Square still had all the old RCA ribbon microphones which were useful for the kind of spatial effects that are so much a part of the Firesign albums. Ossman talked about “working the mic” as if it was a kind of instrument. All of which is to say that they were swimming in the same water as the pop groups of the time, and apparently doing something quite different. But focusing on Firesign also made me realize the way so many pop acts – the Beatles and many others – were using the recording studio in theatrical ways, like the nonsense in Yellow Submarine and many other places.

RU: I’m glad you brought up media archaeology. Nearly all the Firesign albums are utterly immersed in media, particularly the media that were active during their time. One of the ideas that I believe is contained in your book is that a medium isn’t just the radio, or TV, or record player, and the content that’s available through it – but it’s also the humans who participate in it, even just as consumers. Also, there was a lot of Marshall McLuhan going around during the ’60s and ’70s. What would you say about how Firesign’s work reflects, intentionally or not, any theories of media, and then, specifically, how much did McLuhan influence their work?

JB: Yes, I’m borrowing that idea from Jonathan Sterne, someone who has really charted a new path in thinking about technologies of sound. His first book The Audible Past is about 19th century technologies like the stethoscope, while his more recent stuff is about contemporary things like the mp3 and machine listening. 

One point he makes in The Audible Past is that especially at the moment of a technology’s invention, there are many ways things might go. There’s no inherent reason that the technology underpinning radio meant that it should be mainly used for one-way one-to-many broadcasting. What made that become the common sense understanding of ‘radio’ as a medium had to do with other decisions that were made socially – people who invested in transmitters and users who bought radios and listened. 

Sterne is inspired in this approach by a scholar named Raymond Williams, who is someone that I am a gigantic fan of as well. Among many, many other things, Williams wrote an early study of television that is exactly contemporary with the Firesign Theatre, which was an incredibly useful coincidence. It even includes a famous description of falling asleep by the TV, just like George Tirebiter!

Both Sterne and Williams are quite critical of Marshall McLuhan, who famously was a ‘determinist’ – his idea was that particular forms of media shape particular kinds of consciousness, whether we know it (or like it) or not, i.e. they unilaterally change what it means to be human. 

But Sterne and Williams both, and Sterne in particular, appreciate the Very Big Questions that McLuhan asked (so do I), and those questions would have inspired the Firesign Theatre as well. 

Whether they read McLuhan carefully or not, he was completely inescapable as a public intellectual in the ’60s and ’70s, and his ideas and mantras – at least in reduced form – were widely known to all. And by the mid-70s, McLuhan apparently knew them! According to Proctor, McLuhan summoned him and Peter Bergman to his chambers at the University of Toronto after they played a show sometime in the 1970s and gave them exploding cigars – and he takes just as much pride in that as he did in Steve Jobs’ admiration of Bozos (and who wouldn’t?).

The way Firesign would depict a broadcast on a car radio, which is a scene in a movie, that is being watched on a television, on the LP album you’re listening to is without doubt a riff on McLuhan’s slogan “the content of a medium is always another medium.” But side one of Waiting for the Electrician ends with 8 million hardbound copies of Naked Lunch being dropped on Nigeria from a B-29 bomber called the Enola McLuhan, and that seems like a devastatingly skeptical critique of McLuhan’s techno-utopian Global Village.

RU: Let’s close out with some politics. Somehow despite being both a New Left Yippie and a Firesign fanatic back in the day I was surprised by their history of, and connection to, political activism and saw them as observers who were laughing  at it all (and there was plenty of absurdity to laugh at). On the other hand, as also covered in your book, they were actually excoriated by some (in the early 1970s) for not being enough down for the revolution. Firstly, I wonder how anybody who wasn’t there during that period could even make sense of any of it.  And then, how does Firesign’s politics, both left and ambiguous, show up in their albums? 

JB: I’m glad that the book rings true to a New Left Yippie who was there. As to your first question: to piece together the context, I had to consult a huge range of sources outside of the albums: histories of the period, of course, but also lots of primary sources like newspapers, the rock press and independent press, fanzines, and plenty of interviews. And I met other people who were working on projects that were adjacent to my project and we shared work as we were writing; my colleague Claudia Verhoeven is writing a cultural history of the Manson murders, and the anthropologist Brian D. Haley just published his fantastic book Hopis and the Counterculture, which has a chapter on Firesign in it. 

The question of the group’s politics – both on the albums and in terms of their internal dynamics – is very complicated. I do think they were skeptical about the Yippies’, “you can’t be a revolutionary without a television set” approach (which was very McLuhanite), because they knew that the powerful people would always want to control the media, too. 

And more broadly, there were four people in the group, and they did not absolutely agree on everything, and things changed among them over time. But it is obviously meaningful that they all came together on KPFK, which then and now is a station on the left-wing Pacifica network, which meant that they both worked and were heard in that context from the very beginning. 

I would also point out that it’s possible to make jokes about things with which you are in sympathy. So one place you can see that is near the end of the first side of How Can You Be in Two Places at Once, which was written and recorded weeks after the 1968 Chicago DNC. Lilly Lamont’s USO-style singalong “We’re Bringing the War Back Home” is a travesty of the SDS slogan “Bring the War Home,” which was coined for the Chicago protests. But that whole album is very obviously, and in so many different ways, opposed to the Vietnam War, so it’s hard to see how the song could be seen to be mocking the antiwar activists – even if there were some revolutionaries who thought they should have been more overtly militant. Firesign’s humor is in general not angry or indignant – as with Dick Gregory or Lenny Bruce – and is more about finding a place to make connections, ask questions, and even express anxiety, as the Creem reviewers all understood. For instance, Dwarf is very much about Kent State, but to get there on the album you have to pass through televangelism.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: In Pat Thomas’s Jerry Rubin biography, he notes a clear timeline in which 1973 was the year when every participant with half a brain knew that the new left counterculture revolution was not going to succeed politically. And it seems like there might be a similar clear distinction between the Firesign albums before and after that year. I perceive a sort of certainty of purpose pre-1973 that turns more drifty in the later albums.

JB: That’s generally true. Peter Bergman once said that they lost their audience after Vietnam and that they began to lose focus as a result. But I see it a little differently. First, it’s just hard to keep a band working together with that intensity that long. The Beatles didn’t break up because the counterculture failed, for instance, though their breakup was probably seen as a sign of it. And on the other hand, Firesign could be seen as mourning the promise of the revolutionary movement as early as Dwarf in 1970. And by the way, I think their last Columbia record, In the Next World You’re On Your Own (1975) is as good as anything they ever did, and is very political.

RU: Ok here’s a tough final one. You write often about Firesign performing in “blackvoice” (or Asian voice etc.) Could Firesign Theatre exist today? Would they have to include all diverse categories of persons in their group and wouldn’t that also be problematic? So what I often ask myself, and now I ask you… does this situation represent a positive evolution or are we losing our ability to process or allow for nuance and context?

JB: A huge and important question, and I think about it often. The spirit of your question, I think, is that these were four educated middle-class white guys who nevertheless wanted to represent all of society, including racism and segregation, which they were opposed to but decided they could never make the primary theme of their work. It’s more complicated than that, and for good reasons their blackvoice would not be viable today, but I think it is generally true.

My short answer is to say yes of course there could be a Firesign Theatre today, but it would have to be different. Here’s a utopian (but also problematic) thought experiment: what about a multiracial group that also included women, and that they all had the liberty to speak both in their own identities and in those of others? That could create a space to really explore the conflicts and contradictions of social life, but also provide a utopian image of how things could be otherwise. 

I actually think that around 1972, Firesign were setting themselves up to experiment, however unconsciously, in that direction as two of their wives (Tiny Ossman and Annalee Austin) were becoming increasingly present on the albums, and in The Martian Space Party performance, and there is at least one photo shoot where they appear to have expanded into a six-member group (albeit still entirely white). 

I was thinking about this fun counterfactual when I was watching Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary a couple of years ago: what if The Beatles had invited Billy Preston and Yoko Ono into the group as full members – going further into Yoko’s avant-gardism and into Billy Preston’s soul and R&B chops, while having Asian, Black, and queer voices in the band? 

The Firesign Theatre identified closely from the very beginning with The Beatles – a band that was bigger than the sum of its parts, but composed of four distinct personalities, all of whom were important and (crucially) who all really loved each other. 

Could there be a comedy group that looked more like Sly and the Family Stone or Prince and the Revolution, but with the democratic give-and-take of the Beatles? I mean, I know that George began to feel constrained, and Ringo wasn’t really a songwriter, etc. But you see my point: yes it would be possible, and it’s something that it is very much worth wanting. I think the real question is whether there would be an audience that would have the attention to listen to that work again and again – I would hope that there is.

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Lee Felsenstein, who Started The Digital Revolution (I’m Exaggerating a Little); Declares the Golden Age of Engineering

Posted on by RU Sirius

Yes, I exaggerate. No one person started the Digital Revolution. But Lee Felsenstein was (and is) a key figure in the evolution of personal computers and social networking. His book Me and My Big Ideas: Counterculture, Social Media and the Future is a cross between a conventional autobiography and a historic discourse about digital culture: where it’s been, where it’s going, and what is to be done.

Felsenstein’s roots are in the Free Speech movement in Berkeley, California, where, among other things, he wrote for the radical left counterculture underground newspapers Berkeley Barb and Berkeley Tribe. As a means of increasing communication and community in Berkeley, in 1973, Felsenstein developed Community Memory, an early social networking system that existed on computers located in public places around the town. He was also one of the main progenitors of the Homebrew Computer Club, which started in Menlo Park California in 1975. 

This is the scene where many important early computer hobbyists met up and started working and playing with, and around, the first reasonably priced microcomputer, the Altair 8800. 

The Homebrew Computer Club might be most famous for being the club wherein Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs showed off their early work on what would become the Apple. Felsenstein was not very impressed, finding developments by other tinkerers more exciting. This is the sort of deep history of the digital revolution you will find in this revealing, personal, technical, and highly entertaining and informative book. I urge you to run out (or log on) and get it immediately.

RU Sirius: Because this interview is being conducted for a webzine that is largely for AI enthusiasts, let’s start with a couple of contemporary queries and then dig into your book.

Is there actually artificial intelligence… with emphasis on the word intelligence? Do you think whatever we’re now calling AI can be wrestled philosophically or tweaked technically into a context in which it could be considered convivial?

Lee Felsenstein: The current state of AI is summed up in my book by the section heading: Artificial Stupidity. It reminds me of David G. from high school, who never thought that he could deduce a correct answer and was notorious for polling others around him for their answers so he could construct an answer that might possibly get a passing grade. That strategy would rate zero on my ‘intelligence’ scale and somewhat higher on my ‘cunning’ scale. 

When I read postings on Facebook that go on and on at great, repetitive length describing something or someone without putting forth a single idea, I realize that I have been tricked into reading an essay generated by AI (usually ChatGPT). I feel slightly taken advantage of when the realization hits me. 

Intelligence – in my view – has a creative component. It makes an unanticipated connection, or tickles the funnybone, or presents a striking juxtaposition that is more than random and vanishing – it has to build upon these types of incidents to let you out on a higher floor than the one on which you entered. 

People are indeed using GPT and other apps to provide editorial criticism for not only programs but for written text. I was advised to run my book manuscript through ChatGPT to give myself input for stylistic editing. I wasn’t having it; I won’t allow an idiot-savant of a machine to lead me by the nose through a task that I should do myself, or should present to other people for discussion.

That being said, there is a universe of tasks that require no intelligence and occupy the lives and attention of multitudes. Theodore Sturgeon’s famous law (“90 percent of everything is crap”) applies to that universe, which accounts for nontrivial percentages of GDP, and which is threatened by the onset of AI. When the mass of people who crank out bullshit to keep their bosses placated are rendered redundant by AI, there had better be tasks ready for them that give their lives a little more meaning and provide a salary. Otherwise we will face a fearsome revolt that will make the MAGA movement look like a tea party (or has that one already been done?)

RU: Towards the end of your book you write about the strategy of appending data to a file as a basic function of computer operating systems, and about programs that are like ‘Papyrus Scrolls’. It made me think of blockchains, which some people think can become – or even already are – a good way to exchange capital. What’s your impression of this trend?

LF: Computers are great at counting beans – always have been – and blockchain just makes this impermeable to legal authority. So what? The black box isn’t going to get arrested – the people outside it who profit from the illegality are. Police work has always concentrated on the people involved – they make stupid mistakes that incriminate themselves, and are prone to greed and thinking they’re smarter than they really are. I don’t want to automate the process by having a wonderful machine crank out well-formatted reports on who violated what law when. Law enforcement requires a certain amount of – guess what – intelligence.

RU: Early in the book you go into your experience as part of the Berkeley-based Free Speech movement. And as a technically oriented person, your way of being helpful is to help with technology, particularly with communications technology. And as someone who was socially awkward, this was also your entry point to becoming part of a community. This leads eventually towards early attempts at computer networking, specifically Community Memory. Using technology to connect to community as a personal strategy and helping to create technology designed to help manifest community for others are deeply linked – in this case, through you. And it’s a pattern that a lot of computer hackers and the like should relate to. So please respond to that observation in general, and also maybe tell us what a contemporary person with some of your attributes and personal peculiarities might learn from this book and from your experience.

LF: What I would want them to learn is that the barriers to creativity and social impact are nowhere as high as they are felt to be. Digital technology (meaning the software) can be fashioned by very small groups and distribution of its use is primarily a social matter – it doesn’t require large amounts of money. It does require the ability to assemble groups of interested people and start them off puttering around to see what can be done and how to intercommunicate among groups.

This is my message: I have to proclaim the Golden Age of Engineering, in which the capital requirements have fallen so low and the body of knowledge has grown so accessible that significant products and projects can be realized by creators and enthusiasts. And as I say – “to change the rules, change the tools”.

Geeks like me have to develop our ability to talk outside of technical boundaries – a very good way to do that is to envision a game whose play can be facilitated by your app, and try to seed the tool/game combination among your contemporaries. 

RU: Thanks for that, but I want to reiterate my observation that you used your skills as a technologist to connect to community in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and then built technology to help others in Berkeley to connect with each other. The book can be seen as a personal and technical exploration of these two dynamics: personal isolation and using tech to generate community connections. I guess what I’m asking is whether this observation resonates with you…. and/or did you learn anything about yourself during the process of crafting this book?

LF: In my first draft, I found myself elaborating on my childhood and what made me who I am, but I tore that up when I realized that was off the point I was trying to make – namely, how I developed the ideas that led me to social media and the personal computer. As I went forward (and my writing process was just what I knew how to do – dump words out on the page and then look at them, the way I had done my journalistic writing on deadline), I began to see a larger outline – one man questing after his holy grail of finding (more accurately making possible through technical development) an accepting, nurturing and supportive community of the sort I had never known in my family or outside. I had experienced a vision of such a possible community in 1965 immediately following the Free Speech Movement’s victory, and that kept me going.

The writing did give me a vantage point over my history, and allowed me to research some points on which I was unclear. I found that there were a few others who were following parallel paths with visions somewhat similar to mine, but I seemed to be the only one who was sufficiently obsessive-compulsive and possessed of high enough skills to stick with it for the long term, and throw off enough artifacts of value to support me in the process.

Thus I came to realize that I was probably the key (I say the ‘go-to’) person in tying together the student radical political culture, the larger Dionysian counterculture, and the personal computer open-source culture. 

When Efrem Lipkin, Ken Colstad, and I sat down to create The Community Memory Project as a legal entity (a 501 (c)(4) nonprofit), I explicitly took on – with their concurrence – the role of public scapegoat for believers in the great man theory of history. 

Later on, Lipkin came to blame me for hogging the glory (Ken died in 1985) and I have never apologized for taking that position, though I tried to apologize to Efrem personally (he did not accept it). (RU Note: As coauthor with Efrem’s life partner Jude Milhon, I was vaguely familiar with these conflicts.) 

I don’t think I have hurt anyone in the process, but in anticipating the fallout to come from the notoriety stirred up by the book, I have to expect a certain amount of “who does he think he is?” resentment as well as possible lionization by some people who see me as a target of parasitism in the hopes of catching some reflected glory. I can only blunder ahead in the face of this, relying on what I have learned through therapy about self-examination and reflection.

In the summer of 1965 I found myself standing in the street in Emeryville as a troop train approached. I was holding a red flag and two cops were watching me from a parked police car. As the train neared I gulped, stepped onto the tracks and made a mess of trying to flag the train down (I knew it had to describe a figure-8 but nonetheless swung it in a circle, which wrapped the flag around the stick), when a miracle happened! Someone who had been hiding a block up the line dashed out with a huge red flag and started flagging the train. The cops roared off in pursuit of him and I was kept out of jail (the train had a supervisor in the cab who instructed the crew to ignore flaggers like me).

Maybe someone will save me from myself in this case, too. Not likely, though – I’ll have to do it myself.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: Getting into the legendary early days of the evolution of the PC, you write about your experience as one of the main people behind the Homebrew Computer Club. And you go to some pains to correct the impression that the club was made up entirely of hippie freaks (Mondo 2000 apologizes…). It was made up a diverse group, many of them fairly straightlaced. Still, you have ‘Counterculture’ in the subtitle of the book. So please reflect on this generally, and also, do you think the counterculture character that was present, if not ubiquitous, during the early days of the PC and digital revolution ultimately impacted on what it became – let’s say in the 1990s when everybody thought of it as sort-of hip – and then today when a lot of people hold more ambiguous views of what they call ‘tech bros’?

LF: I have never felt that I was any kind of hip guy – that reeks of popularity, from which I recoiled as an adolescent. I did encounter, in my discussions with the Homebrew Computer Club participants, a general consensus that what we were about would be subversive to the general order of society (the most stultifying and immobilizing aspects of the order, that is). 

They wouldn’t discuss it much, but I recognized the thread from science-fiction that better worlds are possible through technology, especially when the technology is wielded by groups – sort of the syndicalist world view. Our after-meeting gatherings at The Oasis (burgers and steam beer) were closest to this vision, and we all loved them. Is this countercultural? Certainly they were counter-authoritarian!

RU: Nonetheless, ‘counterculture’ is in the book subtitle. Is that just to connect to a prospective readership? It’s amazing that the word still has resonance.

LF: No – counterculture is where my motivation came from – I saw people at the point of liberation, being creative – taking risks they had never anticipated, defying their conditioning. I’m not laying cunning marketing plans by making it prominent – I have no idea what it means to the current generation (though I do mean it to be incongruous to my generation, and maybe Gen Z).

RU: Speaking of counterculture, there’s a small segment in the book about how Theodore Roszak (who coined the term back in 1968 or 1969) had a very dismissive take on your work, but you don’t dwell on it. Would you care to say a bit about it here?

LF: In a few episodes I show that not fitting into the general consensus worldview has provided protection for me and my ideas. County prosecutors ignored me in favor of more political targets, no private or governmental Lucifer showed up to co-opt me and my work, IBM did not bring down their assumed hammer when the Homebrewers started to show them up.

Security through obscurity has apparently worked for me, and Roszak’s critique I find gratifying, as I discovered that he had come around to my outlook in his later coda. I did have the opportunity to confront him (and Jerry Mander) on a panel at a Computers, Privacy, and Freedom conference in the 1990s, and welcomed them from the floor as fellow members of priesthoods, noting Roszak’s “zany” comment. I got no response.

Mander, of course, was known for this blatantly-titled book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which I had read. I don’t plan to be quite so blatant during my fifteen minutes of fame, but it’s always an option (until time’s up).

RU: I’ve said “Don’t-be-evil doesn’t scale.” Is there an inevitable contradiction between the idealism of wanting people to have access to data and the possibility of connecting to community, and the reality that things get shitty when they get big… or is it just capitalism? And can localism work on a mass distributed scale?

LF: I’d like to clean up the language here a bit – the issue is not ‘access to data’ (note that the Latin meaning of “data” is “that which is given”) but rather ‘access to each other through data’. The concept that ‘data’ exists in a big pile somewhere and we have to scrabble to ‘get access’ to it is a capitalist mind-game. Back in 1993 there were two schools of thought about the Internet: “We own the content so we’re in charge” (asserted by the movie studios and content owners), and “It’s pipes with meters, stupid”, asserted by the geek crowd. I was invited to participate “as a shit disturber” in Jeff Sonnenfeld’s annual forum of media C-suite suits, where I tried to tell them that people can and will create their own content. This prompted blank stares and no questions, but I did get asked back.

I have hopes for punk sensibility to be able to bring some (dare I say) rationality to the questions of “what is to be done and how?” A community that sees itself as already separate from the capitalist scene, who would never tolerate the archetypal ‘tech bro’ arrogance – that’s who I see as carrying forward the growth of the systems we need to return to the commons and the kind of neo-village society: that is, I believe, the goal of many people. Big is shitty when it’s centralized and run by money – it’s benign when it’s a headcount but those heads see it as “a large number of small”.

RU: I want to worry this point. You write “the issue isn’t data but rather access to each other through data.” One of the greatest concerns now is people accessing each other through false data, a situation that is endangering lives during weather disasters and empowering a presidential candidate with extremely dangerous ideas and impulses. And even more interestingly, people who form alliances and communities around bad information experience a lot of the rewards that anyone would feel from having allies and friends. So how do you think we untangle this problem or conundrum?

LF: My solution is to populate the system with people who perform a reference function: you can ask them for suggestions about where to look for info and for their judgment about it. They would be well positioned to recognize patterns and to develop blacklists and graylists of users who source fake or deceptive data.

People performing this function were suggested in a 1971 paper by Chris Beatty, titled The Journal of the Bay Tea Company. He and his group had tried to set up a computer-based classified ad system in Los Angeles and were run out of business by the L.A. Times, making use of legal restrictions that applied to everyone except newspapers (e.g. selling cars without a dealer’s license).

In The Journal of the Bay Tea Company, Beatty suggested ‘gatekeepers’ who provided a kind of human reference function. Efrem Lipkin passed this paper around among Community Memory members when we started, so we were all familiar with it, though I could not locate a copy now if my life depended on it.

I’ve kept the idea alive and will attempt to implement it in Version 4 of Community Memory, whose design I will be resuming right after the book stabilizes. I have added to it the concept of what I originally called ‘The Inspectorate’, which I was informed by Dr. Poerksen in his book Digital Fever was really just journalism!

I’ll have to design these functions into not only the technical operation of the system but also into its economy. Users would be able to subscribe to one or more gatekeeper to gain a certain level of access to ask for their help, and likewise the journalists would need to participate in an economic support stream.

I would in this way try to create a viable small community that lives in and around the technical system, with human feedback paths that would tend to keep it viable and stable. Not a simple task that can be dashed off in an afternoon, but without doing it the system would be doomed.

The embedded human aspects qualify this as a ‘golemic’ system as opposed to a ‘robotic’ system – something that I explored in the 1979 Journal of the West Coast Computer Faire (‘The Golemic Approach’), which postulates ‘golemic’ systems that incorporate humans into their feedback paths as counterposed to ‘robotic’ systems which have no human component in their feedback paths. It’s the reason I named my corporation ‘Golemics, Inc.’ – a reaction to Norbert Wiener’s book God and Golem,
Incorporated.

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Howard Bloom Repeals Entropy In a Sexy Cosmic Way

Posted on by RU Sirius

Howard Bloom Repeals Entropy In a Sexy Cosmic Way

When I was in college studying creative writing, I had a professor who said I was trying to cram the entire zeitgeist into every sentence. Turns out I was thinking small; Howard Bloom tends to bite off the entire history of cosmic evolution in his books. Bloom’s forthcoming book is titled ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong’. The book is a tour-de-force that tracks the continuing audacious spread of life from the Big Bang to this age of wild human created technological change.

Earlier books have included ‘Global Brain: Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century’, and ‘The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History’. Bloom, now 81 years old, has had a long and interesting life that has included everything from doing public relations for innumerable musical acts to suffering from Chronic Fatigue System which left him almost housebound for approximately 15 years. And of course, many controversial and speculative books. 

Bloom, known for provocative texts, hits the reader right up front in this one. He praises the “common sins” of materialism, consumerism, waste and vain display, calling them drivers in evolution that add to the “toolkit of the cosmos.” Some of those are not among my favorite vices, but you shouldn’t let that stop you. This is a fascinating book. It drew my attention away from everything else I thought I wanted to read for many weeks. And I hope you will find this conversation as interesting as I found the book.

The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong comes out January 1st, 2025.  from World Philosophy & Religion Press.

RU Sirius: So since this is mainly an AI oriented website, published by SingularityNet, would you be able to state the premise of your book, and put it in the context of AI, and of any notion of the Singularity you would care to reject or embrace.

Howard Bloom: ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong’ makes mincemeat of two of science’s most cherished laws. And it tells the tale of the cosmos – from the Big Bang to what’s going in your brain as you read this sentence – from a startlingly new point of view.

Take the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that all things are constantly falling apart, that entropy is constantly on the increase, that disorder is always on the rise. The Second Law is wrong.

This cosmos is one where all things are falling together. It is not a cosmos constantly sliding downhill into what Lord Kelvin called heat death. It is a cosmos constantly stepping up an invisible staircase. Yes, stepping up.
 
And the cosmos is using her ability to churn out radical new inventions, whether those inventions are atoms, molecules, suns, moons, or stars, not to mention galaxies. 

She’s constantly using these new creations to reinvent herself.

The greatest reinventors of this cosmos have been life and humans. Life is not a matter of laying down and being consilient (to use E.O. Wilson’s word) with what’s around you. Life is obstreperous. Life is audacious. Life is spunky. Life has moxie. Life takes on challenges. Life surmounts those challenges. And life creates new realities.

Those new realities reinvent the cosmos. They add to the cosmos’ toolkit. And in the 40 years since 1983, when computers became widespread, and since 1993, when the World Wide Web was started, we have invented more new capabilities, new tools for the cosmos, than any other children of the Big Bang have ever produced.

That’s one basic premise of the book. The cosmos is not proceeding on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law that all things fall apart. It’s proceeding on the First Law Of Flamboyance. The law that all things fall together.

Getting down to AI – the last year of the writing process for this book I had something brand new: AI. And that meant that I had the capacity to go deeper in my research than ever before, I always doubt every sentence that I write. I go back and fact-check it at least five times. Which explains why there are approximately 7,000 references in this book.

RU: Yeah. There are a lot.

HB: And it used to take two days to fact check a sentence. Even with the Internet and old-style search engines, it was a grueling process. But now we have Consensus, an AI offering which digs into all the scientific studies that it’s been able to get its hands on. So checking a fact has become a matter of 45 minutes. Now 45 minutes is a lot of time when you’ve got a lot of sentences in your book. But…

RU: Do you worry about errors?

HB: Oh, yeah. I’m worried that my premises could be wrong, the premises of the entire book. I’m worried that each paragraph could be wrong. And in fact, there was a chapter that I was setting out to write and it depended on a single contention. And for almost ten years I dug through a mountain of books and could not find the information to either back it or refute it. Then, helped along by AI, I was able to discover that no, there is no evidence for this contention of mine. None. And I was able to see that in a matter of days, not years.

RU: Would you care to say what that is?

HB: Well, the contention was that the amount of biomass on earth has increased since humans and modern industrial civilization, not decreased. I mean we spend $2.4 trillion a year on the care, feeding, and breeding of plants. It’s called farming.

One of the most important things Consensus helped with was pinning down dates: the date of the first bacteria in the sea, the date of the first bacteria on the land, the date of the first land plants, then the first land animals. Consensus also helped when I was going after the date of the first sex. 

Meanwhile, it turns out that the premise that we have increased the planet’s biomass is not reflected in any research at all. What we have increased is sentience. So I had to switch to give you an idea of how humans have grown this planet. And we have grown this planet. In fact, we have grown the Universe. We have added to the tool kit of this Cosmos. And I had to show you how by telling you the story of the increase of sentience. Sentience is a word that I find awkward to use. But sentience has been around on this planet for approximately 3.9 billion years. ever since the first bacteria. And it has grown exponentially, especially in the last 200,000 years since we became Homo sapiens. And more recently, since the 1990s and the computer revolution. 

But I wasn’t able to pin down my premise about humans increasing the biomass until the last time I went over the book. Then AI suddenly sprang into the picture and made life easier. Google Scholar is very useful, but it’s nothing compared to Consensus.

RU: So now you’re talking about how you used AI, but what about how does AI fit into your view of how life has evolved?

HB: The premise of the book is that life is not what we think it is. It is not in harmonious balance. Telling a deer that the lion tearing her to pieces while she’s still alive is a matter of harmonious balance… the deer would find the argument incomprehensible, for good reasons.
We think of the Cosmos as harmonious balance, we call that an equilibrium. We think that the Cosmos follows the law of entropy, which says basically that all things fall apart. That is not this Cosmos. This Cosmos is one where all things are falling together, where the Cosmos is constantly stepping up an invisible staircase.

It isn’t stepping down that invisible staircase, which entropy would tend to get us to believe. The Cosmos is using her products, whether they are atoms, molecules, suns, moons, and stars, not to mention galaxies. She’s constantly using these new creations to reinvent herself. And the greatest reinventors of this Cosmos have been life and humans. And life is not a matter of laying down and being in concilience, to use E. O. Wilson’s word, with what’s around you. As I said, life is audacious. Life is spunky. Life takes on challenges. Life surmounts challenges. Life creates new realities. Those new realities reinvent the Cosmos. They add to the Cosmos’ toolkit. And in the 20 or 30 years since computers have become widespread and since the invention of the World Wide Web, we have been doing more invention of new capabilities, of new tools for the Cosmos, than anything else the Cosmos has ever produced. That is one of the basic premises of the book.

RU: Right. You call it the First Law of Flamboyance.

HB: Yeah, the First Law of Flamboyance replacing the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

RU: All right, but what happens if we’re uploaded or if we unite with Artificial Intelligence. Does that turn into something else? Will we say we had thermodynamics, then we had Blooms’ First Law Of Flamboyance, now we have Prigogine’s idea that chaos comes back together at a higher level of complexity?

HB: I think Prigogine’s book is nonsense. It’s like walking the mile to the dentist’s office backwards. In other words, he defines everything in terms of entropy. Entropy has been radically disproved by what we know of the evolution of the Universe. And we know quite a bit about the evolution of the Universe now. And at no step does that evolution display the kind of universal entropy or heat death that Lord Kelvin talked about. 

I mean, entropy was an idea of this little group involved in inventing thermodynamics from 1850 to roughly 1875. And they had a brilliant idea – that heat was not caused by a particle called the caloric, which was taken for granted up until then. They were certain that heat instead was the movement of atoms and molecules. And the very idea of atoms and molecules was totally unproven. So they took a big jump and they turned out to be absolutely right about the nature of heat. 

But then they, arrogantly, went about giving two laws of thermodynamics. One was the conservation of matter and energy. And that has held up very well. The other was that entropy is constantly on the increase. And what did they mean by entropy? Well, Lord Kelvin put it perfectly in 1850, when he was still known as William Thomson. He did it in a paper on the dissipation of energy. He talked about the dissipation of energy in a steam engine… the idea that 75 percent of the energy produced by making steam is lost in a steam engine to friction.. And he made a big leap. He said that because of this same sort of dissipation of energy the earth would eventually run down and become uninhabitable by human beings. That’s what Hermann von Helmholtz later called ‘heat death’.

And Rudolf Clausius was a contemporary of Thomson’s. The two of them were batting papers back and forth like ping-pong balls across the distance from Scotland to Prussia. And Rudolf Clausius was the one who came up with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the idea that entropy is constantly on the increase in this universe. Which means the whole universe is falling apart.

So anyway, Consensus made my life fact-checking far, far easier. The change was beyond belief.

So what’s going to happen to AI? The AI panic, I think, is totally unwarranted. Elon Musk believes in it, but Elon Musk has come to believe a lot of crazy things over the last two or three years. And the fact is that everything we’ve ever invented has augmented us. And this panic is like a panic that Plato had.

Plato was panicked because there was a new technology. And kids were jumping into that new technology like crazy. And Plato thought that new technology was going to destroy the Greek mind, to break the ability of the Greeks to think. Why? Because up until then, every school child had been forced to learn by heart, word for word, every sentence of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And that’s what Plato felt made the rigor of the Greek mind, having to go through that process.

RU: McLuhan said that enhancements come with reductions, that the extensions of man come with amputations.

HB: Well, that makes sense, because if you put your entire brain…

RU: We stopped using our legs as much when we got the self-moving ‘automobiles’ and then people got fat.

HB: Well, that’s a good point, but the technology that Plato was panicked by was writing. What Plato didn’t realize is that with writing, instead of knowing two books, you could know a hundred books. You could know far more, and you could write your own thoughts down.

RU: Now I have more than that on my iPad, or on my cell phone.

HB: Things like writing become our augmentors. Things like writing become our enhancers. Things like writing make us more human than we’ve ever been able to be before.

For example, thanks to writing, we now produce 2 million books a year. And thanks to technological tools like oil paints and musical instruments, we’ve produced roughly 15 billion works of art, over 3,000 symphonies, and 80 million songs, Not to mention building 104,000 museums,

Our AI terror is overblown. Imagine a bunch of bacteria being around for approximately 2 billion years. And suddenly they’re hit with these newfangled things called multicellular organisms. They’d think it’s the end of the world for bacteria and for single-cell life. So it’s now a billion years later, and what has happened to bacteria? Well, there are more bacteria. There are ten times as many bacteria living in you as the cells that make up you. 

They’ve found ways to use humans, for example, as their grocery shoppers. A human can’t digest a chocolate éclair. It’s the bacteria in your gut that digests that chocolate éclair. Bacteria can eat it. You can’t.

So the bacteria in your gut motivate you to go down to the local supermarket and buy them chocolate eclairs and bring the éclairs home for them. You’re their transport mechanism. And then you chew on the éclair and pass it down your esophagus to the bacteria in your gut. The bacteria then eat those éclairs and defecate out things like glucose that are food and fuel to you.

So the bacteria have not been eliminated by the existence of multicellular beings like you and me. They have been augmented. They have been given new powers like the power to get down to the grocery store and the power to chew. All these things are immense new abilities for bacteria.

And humans will co-evolve with AI. There’s no reason at all that AI should want to get rid of us – except for the AI that we’re building for war. That can turn on us. We have to be very careful about the commands we build into our killer robots, the ones operated autonomously by their own internal AI.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: I’m still wondering about this: if and when we unite with AI, will we have already gone past what you call the First Law Of Flamboyance and gone into something we can’t even begin to comprehend.

HB: We are going into something we can’t even begin to comprehend. The future is always so mind-boggling that it’s ridiculous. Or at least it’s been that way for the last 224 years since 1800. Since 1800 major technological changes have been hitting us every 15 years, And now it’s down to every five years. Possibly every year… when Apple and Google announce their new products, and when companies like Open AI come into existence. So the future is unimaginable to you and me. Nobody imagined what the future be in 1993 when Tim Berners-Lee inspired the idea of the worldwide web.

RU: I would say that lots of people were predicting things that might emerge from the internet in 1995. It was a heyday of futurism. What most people see now is that it’s more dystopian than a lot of people predicted in 1995. People are getting ripped off. We’ve had economic crashes in which the banks got bailed out while lots of other people lost their life savings. Ad infinitum.

HB: That may be true. But there’s an unbelievably empowering positive side. Today the web is rich in things that allow you and me to talk to each other face-to-face. While my laptop is sitting on my knees, on my thighs in my lap. And yet I’ve got you here. Back in 2011 or 2012, the Internet was already so far along that I was able to put together a Skype meeting between Buzz Aldrin and the 11th President of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who was the most respected politician in South Asia, a superstar in South Asia. And I was able to do that with my laptop on my lap, from here in Park Slope Brooklyn.

RU: Yeah, certainly we have things that would have seemed like a miracle a few decades back to people who weren’t paying attention.

HB: Yup. Let’s go back to the 1990s, when we already had cell phones. They were little bricks we carried around with us everywhere and they were immensely handy. They made possible all kinds of things we’d never been able to do before. Then the smartphone came along in 2007. Things exploded when Steve Jobs decided to make the smartphone available for third-party apps. And we have no idea where it’s gonna go next.

The same thing is true of AI. We’re just at the very beginning, and at the very beginning it’s almost impossible to predict what new things are going to be invented given the powers of AI.

There are apparently already artificial romantic partners, boyfriends and girlfriends, that you can find on AI. That is, the AI will fashion you a girlfriend or boyfriend of your dreams. And you don’t have to worry about dating anymore.

RU: That’s kind of sad. I mean, for people who don’t have a choice because of some condition it’s a plus. But people in good health, I think, should find human partners at least as their main relationship.

HB: I agree. And AI romantic partners could seriously shrink the population of the humans on earth.

RU: This is a theme of your book. The whole idea that we’re in a sexual cosmos that you connected with flamboyance as part of the ability to attract sexual partners in order to – you don’t use the term ‘reproduce’ – you say we’ve been creating originals not reproductions. Please say a little about that.

HB: Every new baby produced by sex is a product of gene-shuffling. It’s the product of gene splicing so complex that it’s hard for even the most intelligent among us to keep it straight. Sex is not about making carbon copies of yourself: it is not about ‘reproducing’. It’s about making something new. It’s about making one-of-a-kinds. Oddballs. New probes of the cosmos into possibility space. The way dinosaurs produced oddballs with feathers. And the way those oddballs eventually took to the skies. The way those oddballs actually made it through the meteor smash that wiped out their dinosaur cousins 65 million years ago. There are now twice as many species of these sky-soaring oddballs as there are of us nice, conservative, land-walking mammals. That dinosaur weirdness, that flying, is a product of gene-shuffling. It’s a product of sex. And the oddballs I’m talking about – the loony dinosaurs who flew – are called birds.

RU: We have the ability to create digital others, and we’re moving into a lot of post-gender ideations. We are moving into a culture where people get pretty pissed off if you tell them that one of the things you’re supposed to be doing is creating other human beings. It’s a whole different culture. How do you think about all that in terms of your theories of sexual attraction and the laws of flamboyance?

HB: It’s another one of those rebellions against nature that nature seems to love. Another movement of oddballs. In ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos’ I tell you stories that explain a simple, underlying rule of nature: nature loves those who oppose her most. The current obsession with gender fluidity is one more way of turning ourselves into something the cosmos favors, probes of possibility space. Probes into the unknown. Novelty makers. Boundary breakers.

Way back around 1976, I was flown down to Houston and named the Ambassador of Texas Culture to the World by the mayor of Houston. That same month I was named by Ray Caviano, one of the founding fathers of disco, a spokesman for the gay community. That gay community was using disco to build its pride. It was using disco to come out of the closet. So I was named a spokesman for Texas and for the gay community even though I’m neither Texan nor gay.

I learned something very interesting about the gay culture once I immersed myself in it. Gay culture takes flamboyance to the nth degree. Why? Because they don’t have to spend their disposable income on children. They can spend their disposable income on anything they want. And the result is a flamboyant creativity. So when HIV came around, and it was killing gay men ferociously, and the gay community needed help, people like Cher threw herself into this because gay designers had made her costumes, and her costumes had made her career. Bette Midler felt the same way: that the gay community helped make her who she was. When she first played the gay bath-houses of Manhattan in the early 1970s, the gay community adopted her. And they energized her. So we may not recognize the value of the gay community to the culture as a whole, but it’s made an enormous contribution.

RU: In other words, in terms of your analysis of flamboyance adding to sex which in turn adds to life, then gay people distribute some flamboyance to people with more normative sexual desires and that adds to the reproductive.

HB: A brilliant summation. When people break new boundaries it adds to the whole tool-case of the cosmos. Talk about breaking the boundaries of the possible, I mean, I ended up working with Michael Jackson, an amazing boundary breaker. On the surface, Michael and I simply did not belong together. And yet we did.

Look, I’m a science nerd. I’ve been in science since I was ten. I started at ten in microbiology and theoretical physics. I co-designed a computer that won some science-fair awards when I was 12, and was schlepped off to a meeting with the head of the graduate physics department at the University of Buffalo. We discussed the hottest new debate in science: the steady-state theory of the universe versus the Big Bang theory of the universe. So you may wonder how I came to work with people like ZZ Top and with the disco scene in New York City. Not to mention with Michael Jackson.

Well, at the age of 12, I became fascinated with this word from the black community, ‘soul’, and its clue to a higher level of experience. Soul was a peephole to an ecstatic experience where you are utterly taken over by something that’s bigger than you. Where something else dances you for a while. And that experience became important to my science.

I graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from NYU. I graduated with fellowships from four grad schools in clinical psychology so I could study physiological psychology – what’s now called neuroscience. But then I realized something. If I go off to grad school, somebody’s going to stand over my head and train me. He’s going to train me to do experiments that follow up on his big idea or the big idea that he follows. If I go to grad school, it’s going to be like Auschwitz for the mind.

I mean, I’m going to spend the rest of my life giving paper and pencil tests to 20 college students in exchange for a psychology credit. And will I ever see kids having the kind of ecstatic experiences that I’ve been seeking, the ones that are captured by the word ‘soul’? Not on your life. Never. I will be totally isolated from the phenomena that interest me most.

So I co-founded a commercial art studio. And I did because it would be a periscope position into popular culture. And eventually I founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, ACDC, Aerosmith, Kiss, Queen, Billy Joel, Bill Idol, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and David Byrne. And how many scientists have had this sort of privilege, the privilege of creating an attention storm? None. Not a single scientist I’ve ever heard of.

Alexander von Humboldt did astonishing things. He mounted the most publicized scientific expedition that anybody has ever seen. And he spent five years walking six thousand miles in South America cataloging so many new species that 300 species are named after him. And doing it so famously that 4,000 city streets, town names, rivers, and geological locations all over the world are named after him. And he influenced a much younger man through his journals. He published seven journals. And inspired by them, that younger man went off on another scientific expedition, another voyage of discovery. His name was Charles Darwin and his expedition was the Voyage of the Beagle. And it led to his concept of evolution.

But von Humboldt was not Darwin’s only influence. Darwin denied that his grandfather had influenced him. But that grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had laid out of the history of the universe on an evolutionary timeline. And that provided a boost to the thinking of Charles.

My scientific expedition was different. I did not go to South America. That scientific expedition had been done. My scientific expedition was into the realm of the ecstatic experience, into the realm of popular culture. And all of my books are a product of that side trip, that 20-year scientific expedition into the forces of history. Looking for the forms that mass emotion takes. Looking for mass hurricanes of passion.

RU: I guess that work relates clearly to the questions of flamboyance because you entered a flamboyant culture. Some people in that music culture contrast ‘soul’ with flamboyance. They would say that the more rootsy sort of musician who does not do glam is expressing soul.

These things are dividable into subcategories. For example, within flamboyance itself you have the tacky flamboyance of Donald Trump, right? He made Trump Towers. There you have an ostentatious display. You use the term ‘vain display’ in your book as something important to the evolution of the entire cosmos

HB: Yes, yes.

RU: Okay, in Trump you have, in some ways, the ultimate vain display. You can contrast that with maybe someone like Mick Jagger, whose display is fun or like Salvador Dalí, who makes it funny and playful. Whereas with Trump there’s a kind of rot at the center of it.

HB: Because there’s no moral compass. That’s a problem. Almost all of us come equipped at birth with a moral compass. Donald Trump did not. And that sickens everything he does.

RU: Let’s look at the values you say drive the evolution of the cosmos: materialism, consumerism, waste, and vain display. I’m pretty happy with the vain display. I can sort of embrace waste because my room’s a mess. Now materialism, consumerism… for me, it was always a bit of a cliché when people would say, “Oh, you’re a new left hippie, therefore you’re not materialistic.” That’s a simplistic misunderstanding of what I was trying to do. I was never opposed to material, per se. But then again, I mean, materialism, consumerism… it got me to thinking about how boring it is to be at a really bourgeois party where everybody’s talking about their houses and their yachts and their cars and how their kids are going to the best schools. It’s a really banal thing. I mean, material wealth, business itself, I think, is pretty dull, and the people who are engaged in it are pretty prosaic.

HB: I found business exciting. First of all, I co-founded Cloud Studio, my art studio, which I had no credentials for. And the artists I was working with were exciting. That’s one of the reasons I got into it.

RU: Yeah, it worked for you. But your inventors and discoverers are more interesting than the financiers.

HB: I stayed away from the financiers. But I was going to visit art directors. You would think that would be boring, visiting art directors at the major advertising agencies and at the major magazines and book publishers. It wasn’t boring at all. Each one of them was a human being and every human being is a new experience.

RU: That’s your experience and it’s within the arts. But on the other hand, the web, the internet was a really free place where you could move across everything and dig into everything. And now there’s nothing but turnstiles, and roadblocks… firewalls.. and all of it is because people want to…

HB: People want to monetize it so they can pay their staff. Makes a lot of sense.

RU: You ask most people what they think of the internet today and they’ll tell you it’s pretty bad. It’s what Cory Doctorow calls ‘enshittification’. It’s really warped the entire experience so it can actually be unpleasant.

HB: But look at the Internet’s positives. Especially now that we have the first primitive AIs. Every Wednesday night, I go on 545 radio stations for three-and-a-half to four minutes doing a news commentary. And my host, George Noory, throws me my topic anywhere from 1 o’clock in the afternoon to 9:30 at night. Then, in three hours, I have to become one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. And then write my script. How can I pull this off? I mean, it’s true that I was doing this before there was an internet. But I was forced to rely on just a few magazines and The New York Times News of the Week in Review. Now, with the internet and search engines, I can consult over a hundred publications from all over the world. In just two hours.

RU: Maybe you’re using an AI thing because the basic Google search now is not good. It’s become cluttered. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t see someone saying that Google search is useless.

HB: Well, my research on a Wednesday night used to take me four to five hours. My research on the show I did three days ago, took me less than two hours. That’s a huge difference.

RU: Sure.

HB: That’s massive because I can ask AI the question I’m trying to pursue instead of trying to come up with search terms.

RU: Yeah. AI has definitely made a change… that’s a good change for that purpose.

HB: The one problem is that I need to check everything that AI tells me because AI comes up with serious hallucinations.

I don’t know if it still does this, but six or seven months ago, when I was using AI, I asked who first came up with the term ‘assortative mating’. And it gave me what sounded like a highly credible source from 1903, complete with the name of the author, the title of the article, the name of the publication, and the date of publication. It was a perfectly well-formed piece of information. But when I went to check it, I couldn’t find the name of the author anywhere. He may not have existed. When I searched for the title of the article, there was no such article. The AI made it up, but it did a brilliantly convincing job. I don’t know if they’ve solved that problem.

RU: There’s still hallucinating going on, I believe, although that’s a very strange thing to attribute to something. Because hallucinating is an experience. So, we’ve embedded into that language this idea that whoever is saying that the AI is hallucinating thinks that the AI is having an experience.

HB: that’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought of that. Still, this tool is proving to be very helpful even in its infancy, in its crawling years.

RU: So maybe it’ll write your next book for you. Maybe you could just say “what would be the next book Howard Bloom would write?” And it’ll be so advanced it’ll just do the whole thing.

HB: I know what the next book is. It’s going to be a real challenge. This book is the ‘Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong’. The next book is ‘The Grand Unified Theory Of Everything In The Universe Including Sex, Violence, And The Human Soul’.

RU: It sounds like an extension of what you’ve been doing

HB: It’s the attempt to pull together all the threads of the previous eight books.

RU: You don’t go for small slivers of content.

HB: You might as well be outrageous. You know what T. S. Eliot said in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’? Its essential message is… If you have something heroic to do, do it now. Start today. Do not wait. Or you will start putting it off and putting it off until one day you wake up and realize you no longer have the life energy: the life force to do it. And you will live the rest of your life in regret.

RU: One of your themes is that nature demands competition. Maybe that’s something we want to evolve past, that competition that causes damage, that causes hurt…

HB: Well, we have to get past war. War is outrageous.

Look at what’s happening in the Sudan, something like twenty million lives are at stake. The number of actual deaths so far is over 300,000. And it’s a racist war. It’s a war of the Arab north on the Black population of Sudan’s south.

RU: Isn’t that more motivated by material? By resources?

HB: It’s motivated by the drive for power…

RU: Did you ever read “What Does WoMan Want” by Timothy Leary?

HB: No. What does it say?

RU: At the end of the book, he starts referring to the drugs that he was interested in, which would have been the psychedelics, but also stimulants like cocaine, as ‘brain reward’ drugs. He proposes that this chemical culture could be a new way of satisfying the reward circuits in our brain that are now satisfied by power…. Let’s talk about religion though – that is something you go into quite a bit in the book.

HB: Well, every religion says, in essence, once our group rules, once our religion is in charge, we will have peace. This is the battle between group identities among humans.

RU: Monotheism… they’re all murderous… it goes back to Jehovah. He kills everybody for not honoring him properly or whatever.

HB: Right. And God laid out a commandment to kill all of the Canaanites. And that’s genocidal.

RU: In some ways, neoliberalism has the same idea: if everybody was under capitalist democracy, then the entire world would be at peace.

HB: Good point, very good point. The battle between group identities for alpha position in the dominance hierarchy is eternal. We have to figure out how to turn it toward peace.

RU: You’re very focused on the idea that everything continually grows. Life is basically equivalent to growth in your vision. But growth can be cancerous as well.

HB: In the Bloomian grand scheme of things, “Every good thing in excess is a poison.”

RU: There’s a kind of predestinarianism in your vision.

HB: Yes. It’s called teleology. There is a sense that there is an invisible staircase and the Cosmos has been climbing up that invisible staircase ever since the first instant of the Big Bang.

RU: Should we make decisions based on this? We do make choices.

HB: Well, we should take this into account. Ultimately, the most important thing we have is our moral compass. That is the most important thing. And if you have this information, you realize that Nature’s call is not to freeze everything the way it was in 1650, before the Industrial Revolution. The most important call of Nature is to add to Nature’s powers… to add to the powers of the Universe.

Yes, take care of existing things. Always care about ecosystems and species diversity. But don’t stop the evolution of novelty. Don’t stop the evolution of totally unexpected things. Because that is what the Cosmos calls for. The Cosmos has been stepping up this invisible staircase for 13.7 billion years now. It isn’t going to stop because we want to stop it at one point, like 1650, before the industrial revolution.

Nature is restless. Nature is constantly looking for the next opportunity in possibility-space. It may be a mistake to be as concerned about invasive species as we are. In evolution, Nature has always used invasive species to open up new opportunities. To try new things.

You know, Charles Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands and he took notes especially on the Galapagos Islands’ finches. And ever since then, the Galapagos Islands has been regarded as a paradise of Nature. But that paradise is what it is because of invasive species. The Galapagos iguanas came from South America and were invasive species 10.5 million years ago. And the finches came 2.3 million years ago. They, too, were an invasive species. And those iguanas and finches are now the species that we think have always been there. They are now the species we think of as natural. So do we really have the right to stop invasive species? Well, if there are species that we love that are about to be destroyed, yeah, we have that right.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: We have a capacity for making decisions despite whatever predestination might be in play. And humans are going to try to create novelty. Do you feel like it requires an argument that you need to present for this to continue? You talk about — or to — environmentalists at various points in the book. Do you feel there are forces that want to stop us from creating novelty?

HB: Yes. So I’m saying there are two systems that are trying to stop things dead in their tracks. One is the Islamic system. And the other is extreme environmentalism. And the extreme environmentalists are a subculture that has been with us since the 1960s. That subculture has managed to gain control over our schools. And it’s taken over a good many of our scientific institutions. And extreme environmentalism is anti-technology and anti-modernity. Some of its adherents believe that technology should be stopped dead in its tracks.

RU: That’s a big generalization. There are plenty of environmentalists who are not anti-technology, not anti-novelty.

HB: Well, I applaud the ones who are not but I’m disturbed by the ones who are.

RU: Right. And you seem to feel they have a lot of power?

HB: They have a lot of power. There’s no question about it. They’re not overt about their anti-technological approach. They’re covert about it. They’re sneaky.

The mind of a culture is determined by the competition between its subcultures. And each subculture has a different premise, a different hypothesis about what the world is.

And in the battle between subcultures for control of the group mind, the environmentalists have done astonishing things. I mean, Earth Day was in 1970. And within five years of Earth Day, when I walked past the local grammar school, I saw all of these ecology posters that kids had drawn in the windows. And then you got the IPCC: the committee that meets to figure out how close the temperature and CO₂ levels are to producing a catastrophe.

And at the core of the group, I believe, are people who are anti-technology. Folks like this say that space is a waste, it’s simply a joyride for the super-rich. They say that we should take the money we spend on space and use it to solve problems on Earth. We should use it to feed and clothe the starving. And that looks at first to be a generous and humane view. But it’s not. These people are crazy.

RU: That’s about class not environmentalism

HB: Well, how so?

RU: It’s not obvious? They’re indulging because they have billions of dollars. There are a few billionaires that control over 50% of the wealth while other people live limited and sometimes wretched lives.

I was just watching a piece about kids in the U.S. that rely on school lunches because they’re hungry. A great percentage of our young population go hungry and they rely on their school lunches. And they’re not all free. Some get it free, but if their parents earn a few dollars above a certain amount, then the parents have to pay a fairly decent amount of money. And if the parents miss their payments, they harass the children at some U.S. schools.

HB: That’s monstrous.

RU: There’s all kinds of examples, all kinds of class issues. And in terms of the environment, if you live in certain neighborhoods, you end up with asthma. It affects your ability to breathe. That’s pretty real. That’s a real day-to-day situation. And climate change, throughout most of your book, is a big abstraction. Earth’s climate has been changing radically over and over since it first formed and I guess the cosmos had crazy shifts before earth. But in this local pinpoint of space and time, it’s a danger, particularly to people who are living in places that are vulnerable to being wiped out.

HB: But Ken, let’s go back to opening new frontiers like space for a minute. Every time we’ve opened a new frontier, we’ve elevated the living standards of the poor. I mean the beggar who mooches for change at my local supermarket has a bicycle and a cell phone. Do you know how much one of the richest tech lovers of the 1800s would have been willing to pay for a cellphone and a bicycle? That rich tech lover was Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. He was at the height of the British class system, yet he died at the age of 42 of a stomach ailment. But when one of my homeless friends, Derek, who used to beg in front of the local supermarket came down with a stomach problem, he cycled five blocks to the local hospital, checked himself into the emergency room, and was given an antibiotic. Prince Albert died at 42. My friend Derek, the beggar, lived to 78. That’s how opening new frontiers lifts even the poorest among us.

Then there’s climate. The Case of the Sexual Cosmos advocates climate stabilization technologies. That is, we do need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, to the best of our ability. And we need to switch over from fossil fuels. China still heavily relies on coal for God’s sake. So does India. We need to get out of the coal era entirely. We need to get out of the gasoline era as rapidly as possible.

RU: They’ve been saying that for a long time.

HB: Yeah, so I agree with the environmentalists about all of that.

RU: Keith Henson has been talking about bringing solar energy from space for years.

HB: The guy who started space solar power was Isaac Asimov in 1941. Keith is a member of a group that I run: the Big Bang Tango Media Lab every Sunday night. So I see Keith every Sunday. And I see him again nearly every Monday night in the Space Development Steering Committee, another group that I run. So yes, we have these debates.

RU: Henson also wants to build a space elevator.

HB: I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, but what do I know about the future? The most important thing is that this book supports climate stabilization technologies and offers a climate stabilization technology that can bring us to net zero, that can achieve the goals of the Green New Deal. And that technology is solar power harvested in space, as you just said, solar power transmitted to earth using the kind of harmless microwaves that our cell phones use. And that’s an almost infinite source of power, a huge huge source of power without any greenhouse gas emissions at all.

RU: Yeah, but how do you get it? How do you get any of that to happen?

HB: I’ve been working on it.

RU: When Jerry Brown was campaigning for president in 1976, he talked about getting solar energy from space at some university…

HB: Really!?

RU: Yeah and he was basically laughed out of the electoral process. That was part of the Governor Moonbeam image. Although he kept after the idea for several years beyond that.

HB: That’s amazing…. And disturbing. But, as I said, I’ve been working on space solar power. So I put together a meeting on Skype between Buzz Aldrin and the 11th President of India. Buzz had introduced me to the engineer who designed the Lunar Lander, because that engineer, Hugh Davis, was totally gung-ho into space solar power. And Dr. Kalam, the Indian 11th President, was also head over heels into space solar power. And I learned later that an email that I sent Dr. Kalam was what turned him on to space solar power. Then he became a collaborator of mine for the next four years.

So I’ve tried many things with space solar power. I don’t feel I’ve really gotten anywhere. But hopefully a few people will read this book and see how space solar power solves the problem of net zero. But ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos’ says that this is just one climate stabilization technology. We have to develop as many other climate stabilization technologies as possible because beyond the climate crisis of the moment looms the next Ice Age, or the next real global warming.

In the past, nature warmed this planet so much that there were tropical dinosaurs living at the South Pole and the North Pole 155 million years ago. Tropical dinosaurs: that’s global warming big time. And that’s not caused by tailpipes and smokestacks. That’s not caused by human kind. That’s nature.

RU: You also show how Nature has coughed up, so to speak, climate stabilization technology, or techniques of its own during these episodes.

HB: Carbon dioxide is a climate stabilization technology invented by Nature. Because it’s carbon dioxide that keeps this planet warm enough for life. So monkeying with the carbon dioxide level is a dangerous business; it could bring about the kind of global warming that raises the sea level 70 feet and wipes out all of our coastal cities, including Park Slope Brooklyn, where I’m sitting. Brooklyn is surrounded on three sides by water.

So yes, ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos’ tries to tell you there are bigger things to watch out for. Watch out for man-made global warming, but realize that Mother Nature is not nice. Mother Nature is bizarrely, wackily creative and driven by novelty-lust. A lust to create impossible new things.

And sex, as ‘The Case of the Sexual Cosmos’ tries to show, is the most impossible thing this Cosmos has ever contrived. It goes against Pierre Louis de Maupertuis’ Law Of Least Effort, and shows that Nature is willing to use amounts of effort that are utterly unimaginable to achieve unimaginable goals.

RU: We are doing this interview for Ben Goertzel’s Mindplex supported by SingularityNET. So let’s return to the theme of AI.

HB: Say hi to Ben for me. AI is one of the most wonderful things to come along in my life. It expands what I can do as a human being. And I see the way that it could expand what I do – and what I am – far, far more in the next – who know? – two years? Five years? We’ll see, but changes tend to come every six months in AI.

The idea of the Singularity is, I believe, off base. Humankind has gone through an almost infinite number of singularities up until now. We have this very stable sense of human nature when we read Plato or St. Augustine. It’s as if they’re our contemporaries. They’re people just like us. No, they were not people just like us. They didn’t have laptops. They didn’t have smartphones. They didn’t have cars and planes. They were radically different from us.

We’ve been through so many singularities since their day that it’s ridiculous. But Ray Kurzweil’s idea is that there is one singularity, and once we get to the other side of it, we will be dramatically changed, changed in ways that we can’t recognize. No. I don’t believe that. These singularities are incremental. We don’t even notice them. And yet we have been through them in your lifetime and mine.

RU: I feel that a billion and more people getting online has been a social singularity and that people can’t really locate themselves and figure out what the boundaries are anymore just on the basis of that.

HB: Well, something new is congealing. I came up with this field I call Omnology, a scientific field for the promiscuously curious, for people who want to be in many disciplines, not just one, and who want to get rigorous about them.

One woman in the Howard Bloom Institute pointed out to me a few days ago that all kids these days are omnologists because they all carry smartphones and may bounce through seven topics in an hour. And it’s true. You can soar on your smartphone through so many different disciplines that it defies belief.

So yes, people are undergoing a singularity at this very moment, and they’ve been undergoing singularities of this sort ever since 1800 when steam engines were first mass-produced.

Since 3.2 million years ago when we crafted the first stone tool, we’ve been changing the nature of what it means to be human. And every time we change the nature of what it means to be human, we add new tools to the tool kit of the Cosmos itself.

RU: I like that perspective. Let’s close it off there.

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Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity: A Conversation with David Jay Brown about his book

Posted on by RU Sirius

It used to be a bit of a secret in tech circles. But given the recent rise in the social and even political acceptance of psychedelic drug and plant use in the USA and elsewhere, now it can be told. Psychedelics and extreme technological change go together like peanut butter and jelly.

This new book of interviews by David Jay Brown casts a wide net. It chases after what the various interview subjects think about the Singularity, but beyond that, as Brown says in my conversation with him, he asks them about, “Simulation Theory… DMT entities… psychedelics and ecological awareness, God, and death.”

A diverse cast of characters are on the receiving end of Brown’s inquiries, and almost every one of them remarks that Brown really asks the big questions. My personal favorite interviewees include the great trippy graphic novelist/comic book writer and bon vivant Grant Morrison, the writer Erik Davis whose recent book High Weirdness looks at far out psychedelic, sci-fi, techno-visions of the 1970s through the lens of the works of Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna, and the almost indescribable Bruce Damer who seems to be engaged in projects related to almost everything –including space science, virtual reality and the origin of life, just to name a few. Damer also curates the DigiBarn in Santa Cruz, which holds libraries and archives of Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. These are among the many wildly brilliant interview subjects.

I met David Jay Brown in the mid-1980s, back when I was publishing High Frontiers, a predecessor to Mondo 2000 (as Mindplex is its descendent). Since then I’ve been consistently impressed by his output as a writer and interviewer. He has written for Scientific American, Wired and other periodicals. Books include ‘Mavericks of the Mind’, ‘Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse’, ‘The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality’ and ‘Women of Visionary Art’.

RU Sirius: What made you decide to combine the themes of psychedelics and the Singularity, and how did you choose the people you would interview?

David Jay Brown: I think the rise in Artificial Intelligence and the psychedelic renaissance are two of the most important forces driving the future evolution of consciousness right now, and that they dovetail in a way that mutually compliments one another. Psychedelics have inspired the development of computer technology and software development from the beginning, and the ecological awareness, personal boundary dissolution, creativity, and spiritual elevation that psychedelics often bring provide an essential balance to the foundational development of AI, its integration into the world, and may assist in reducing the possible dangers that it could bring. 

As with all my interview collections, the people that I chose to interview are simply the people whose work are inspiring me, whose books I’ve been reading, and I let it organically grow as I proceed with the project. 

Another major theme in the book is about exploring the extended state DMT research and the possibility of non-human entity contact, which I think will also be major factor influencing the future evolution of consciousness, and a number of the people in the collection – such as Andrew Gallimore, David Luke, and Carl Hayden Smith – were chosen for the role that they’re playing in this research and exploration. In addition to contemplating the symbiotic relationship between AI and psychedelics, I see both as catalysts for expanding human potential and pushing the boundaries of what it means to be conscious in the 21st century. AI has the potential to radically transform our cognitive processes, but it needs the human element – the kind of insight that psychedelics offer – to help guide its ethical development and avoid purely mechanistic outcomes. By engaging with these two powerful forces, we’re not only enhancing our technological abilities but also deepening our relationship with the natural world, the cosmos, and the unknown realms of consciousness. 

The interviewees were chosen not just for their expertise, but also because they represent a wide spectrum of perspectives – scientific, philosophical, spiritual – on these issues. They are the thought leaders pushing the envelope in their respective fields, and I wanted their diverse voices to reflect the complexity of the Singularity and the transformative role that psychedelics may play in shaping it.

RU: There’s not a lot of Kurzweilian hard-science singularitarianism in the book. How would you respond to that? It’s a very expansive view of the theme (which I like). What versions of singularities do you find most compelling?

DJB: I was corresponding with Ben Goertzel, and he was supposed to be in the collection, but he got too busy as my deadline was approaching and so, unfortunately, he didn’t make it into this book. I interviewed Ray Kurzweil for two of my previous collections, and corresponded with him as I was doing this book as well, but exploring the notion of the Singularity was really only one of the themes in the book, and the title was chosen by my publisher after the book was completed. The notion of the technological Singularity, that Kurzweil and others have popularized, as a reference to the future time when digital electronic minds become more intelligent than all human minds combined – which is a poetic application of the term borrowed from astrophysics, describing the point where the known laws of physics break down, like the center of a Black Hole or whatever state of the universe existed before the Big Bang, and future predictions can’t be made – was a good question to stimulate the imagination of my interviewees.

Other questions that were explored for the same reason had to do with Simulation Theory, the possible reality of the DMT entities, the relationship between psychedelics and ecological awareness, thoughts on the concept of God, and what happens to consciousness after death.

The notion of the Singularity is similar to Terence McKenna’s idea of an attractor or transcendental object at the end of time where novelty becomes infinite, and Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the Omega Point, the final evolutionary point of unification between God and humanity. It’s a great concept to stimulate our thinking about what could be, during a future time where reality blurs with the imagination. The Singularity, as Kurzweil and others have framed it, often focuses on technological advancements leading to a superintelligence that reshapes our reality, but my approach intentionally opens the door to more speculative, expansive interpretations of this transformative moment. I find versions of the Singularity compelling when they incorporate a sense of mystery, where not just technology but consciousness itself becomes the focal point of evolution. This includes models like McKenna’s timewave theory, where consciousness reaches a crescendo, or de Chardin’s Omega Point, suggesting an inevitable spiritual awakening or divine integration. In these frameworks, the Singularity isn’t just a technological event – it’s a spiritual and philosophical one, where the boundaries between human, machine, and the universe dissolve. The potential for contact with non-human intelligences, whether through DMT or other means, might also play a role in how we conceptualize future consciousness expansion. For me, the most compelling version of the Singularity is one that embraces not only the scientific possibilities but also the profound unknowns of existence.

RU: You wrote “the kind of insight that psychedelics offer – to help guide its ethical development and avoid purely mechanistic outcomes.” I myself have a line in my memoir that psychedelics may be necessary to lubricate an otherwise brittle and mechanistic tech future. But a lot of the high end techies that are into psychedelics like Musk or Thiel seem to develop superman or supremacist ideas and attitudes. When I interviewed Martin Lee about ‘Acid Dreams’ for High Frontiers back in 1987 he said psychedelics can be “exaggerants” that bring out whatever potential is inside a person in an outsized fashion. What do you think about the lessons learned about the unreliability of psychedelic use in turning out enlightened or compassionate humans?

DJB: Yes, “exaggerants” is a good term, and I understand your concern. As Stan Grof points out, psychedelics are non-specific brain amplifiers, and they don’t inherently bring out the positive attributes of people. They amplify what’s already there. I recall hearing stories about Pentagon officials doing acid and dreaming up new mass-killing technologies, and we all know what happened with Charles Manson and his followers. There are many people with sociopathic personalities in positions of great power, and according to Tim Ferriss all of the billionaires that he knows, without exception, are using psychedelics. 

But sociopaths only make up 1 to 4 percent of the population. More than 96 percent of human beings, I think, have good intentions, and this gives me great hope as psychedelics awaken the masses. I think that as critical thresholds of positive psychedelic awareness are reached, this will drive compassionate action, ecological awareness, and enlightened conscious evolution. Also, people are complex, and often it’s not black and white as to what’s dark and what’s light, especially as consequences unfold in often unexpected and surprising ways, and I do trust that a higher intelligence inherent in the natural world is helping to guide us in ways that may not be obvious to our rational minds. While psychedelics can certainly amplify darker tendencies in some individuals, particularly those in positions of power or with pre-existing sociopathic traits, I believe the broader cultural awakening that psychedelics foster will lean toward a more compassionate and interconnected world. The key lies in set and setting, as well as in education and integration practices. With responsible use and proper guidance, psychedelics have the potential to help individuals confront their shadows, fostering deep healing and growth. But you’re right – it’s unreliable to assume that psychedelics alone will result in enlightened or compassionate humans.

Transformation requires intention, community support, and ethical frameworks to truly guide individuals toward positive change. In this way, psychedelics are tools, not cures – they provide the potential for insight, but the outcome depends on how that insight is applied.

RU: I loved McKenna and his vision. Back in the High Frontiers days in the mid-1980s, he told us that the interior of the human was going to be externalized, and what we imagine will simply come to be and this was years before everyone was talking about VR. Still, Timewave Zero predicted a massive transformation culminating in December of 2012. Believers will say that the transformation happened under the surface and it’s just not visible, which is what all religionists and cultists say when a prophecy fails. But the Black Mirror reality of today is not something Terence would like. (Terence himself didn’t take the predictions as seriously as others who adapted it) 

So the question here is whether you think faith can be excessive and – just as the hyper-rationalists could use some influence from the visionary or spiritual – a lot of psychedelicists could use a dose of rationality.

DJB: I certainly agree that balancing faith and rationality is a good idea, and that too much of either can be excessive. I always viewed Terence as more of a storyteller and a poet than a scientist, and as much as I think many of insights are quite compelling, I take much of what he said with a grain of salt, and you’re right, I don’t think that Terence even took his own predictions that seriously. He actually changed the date for the end of his novelty-accelerating Timewave model a number of times, and December 21st of 2012 was chosen to align with the end of the Mayan calendar, so I see the endpoint that he predicted as more of poetic interpretation of where human evolution is headed – that seems to resonate with what Kurzweil describes as the Singularity, what de Chardin means by the Omega Point, and what Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson mean by the actualization of the 8th brain circuit, which also seem more poetic than scientific. 

As for the idea that we are living in ‘Black Mirror’ reality today, I think that this perspective is open to interpretation. Most certainly the dark aspects of the world have been amplified. Those in power have sought greater and greater methods of controlling the human herd, and they now have access to technologies that can seemingly enslave much of humanity. But this tension between enslavement and liberation isn’t really new, it’s just been greatly amplified. We live in a dualistic universe, and I think that there will always be a Yin-Yang balance of dark and light forces. It seems that our species is wobbling on the edge of either planetary suicide or divinity status, and this growing tension has continued to escalate and intensify. But I think it has always seemed this way. In Tim Rayborn’s book ‘A History of the End of the World’, he makes it clear that this inclination toward apocalyptic thinking has been present throughout human history, as has the notion that humanity is on the verge of a Golden Age of Enlightenment. Are we headed toward an environmental apocalypse and global mass extinction, or will our wayward species overcome the immense challenges that currently face us, and become all-powerful and immortal superhuman masters of space and time? These teetering polarized possibilities have now become so extreme that it seems like our species is facing an evolve-or-die intelligence test, but I suspect that it has always seemed this way and will always seem this way in our dualistic universe. I know that many people think that the world has gotten too dark to be optimistic, however, I suggest that we consider that two things may have influenced this perspective regarding optimism and excitement about future possibilities: the acceleration and intensification of both positive and negative forces, as I’ve described, as well as the aging process. Young people seem more optimistic than the older generations. I don’t think the world has just gotten worse; I think it’s gotten both better and worse at the same time, and the aging process tends to decrease neophilia and increase neophobia. This happens in all animal species and humans are no exception. I see all the dystopian possibilities that everyone else my age sees – the division in our country, the climate crisis, the rise of racism, the threat of nuclear war, etc. – but I also see enormous positive potential as well – the psychedelic revolution raising ecological awareness, AI evolution promising advances in medicine and virtually every field of human endeavor, incredible scientific advances, astonishing new technologies, and young people seeing through the corruption in our two-party political system. I suspect that this Yin-Yang nature of world will continue to accelerate and intensify, but that utopia or dystopia will never fully arrive. It will always be some weird mix of the two, with infinite evidence to suggest that either light or dark perspectives will prevail. 

I also think that part of the appeal of Terence’s ideas, and the broader psychedelic movement, is the invitation to engage with uncertainty and paradox. The poetic, visionary nature of his predictions encouraged people to look beyond rigid frameworks of understanding, allowing them to imagine and co-create potential futures. But as with all visionary insights, it’s essential to temper them with discernment. Faith can become excessive when it blinds us to reality, just as rationality can become constricting when it limits our capacity for awe and wonder. Psychedelicists, like everyone else, benefit from balancing intuition with logic, especially as the stakes grow higher. In today’s world, where technologies like AI and VR blur the line between imagination and reality, it’s more important than ever to remain grounded while exploring new possibilities. As the collective tension increases, so too does the responsibility on each of us to use our tools – whether technological or visionary – wisely. 

In a sense, our challenge is to prevent the ‘Black Mirror’ reality from consuming us, while still allowing space for the unprecedented opportunities of this evolutionary moment. After all, if we can harmonize the rational and the visionary, perhaps we can transcend the dualistic cycles of history and consciously shape a more balanced, compassionate future.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: Why DMT? In other words, of all the psychedelics, and there are many of these chemical and plant wonders, what is it about DMT that fascinates us in this accelerating time? What are your thoughts?

DJB: There are several reasons why DMT is special and unique in the world of psychedelics, as well as profoundly relevant to our accelerating time of information overload. Let me first provide a little background on DMT. DMT is endogenous to the human body, it’s found in all mammalian species, and throughout the plant world. It’s ubiquitous throughout nature, and no biochemist can tell you what function it serves in any of these places. It seems to be both a neurotransmitter and a hormone in the human body, but no one really has a clue as to why it’s there. It’s a very simple molecule, derived from the essential amino acid tryptophan, and its place in the natural world is a profound mystery. 

In studies with rodents, we know that DMT levels escalate in their brains after cardiac arrest, which lends credence to the popular idea that it mediates the near-death experience in human beings. When ingested in sufficient quantities, DMT experiences generally become an order of magnitude more intense than that of any of the other psychedelics, and it quite literally transports one to another world, which is commonly referred to as “hyperspace” by the psychonauts who have traveled there. One becomes completely immersed in a multi-dimensional reality that completely replaces our three-dimensional world, and it is often reported as seeming “more real than real”. It doesn’t appear to be a hallucination; it seems completely real and one remains fully lucid during the experience. And most profoundly, this new world appears to be populated by hyper-intelligent, non-human entities that seem to take great interest in communicating with us in various ways.

Surprisingly, there is an incredible amount of similarity among the reports from psychonauts as to what these beings look like and how they act towards us. This phenomenon provides the basis for my latest book, ‘The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities’, which is an attempt to create a taxonomy of these beings, and was just published by Inner Traditions. 

In the book I describe 25 of the commonly encountered DMT entities – such as gray aliens, jesters, reptilians, octopoid beings, and “the self-transforming machine elves,” that McKenna famously refers to – and Sara Phinn Huntley, Alex Grey, Luke Brown, Harry Pack, and other brilliant artists illustrate them. 

This phenomenon is being taken seriously by a number of prestigious scientists – such as Rick Strassman, Andrew Gallimore, and David Luke – who have organized studies at Imperial College in London and elsewhere to put people into extended-state DMT sessions. This is being done with the intention of sending DMT voyagers into longer periods where they can access hyperspace and communicate with these strange entities, to see if there truly is an objective reality to them, and what can be learned from them. In my book ‘Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity’, I interview Gallimore and Luke at length about this phenomenon, as well as Carl Hayden Smith, who is one of the brave subjects in the Imperial College extended-state DMT studies that are currently underway. I think this is some of the most exciting scientific research in human history, as we appear to be building technologies that allow us to consistently and reliably communicate with more advanced species – like the contact with alien beings that has been long-anticipated in our science fiction stories – and this is eerily resonant with the recently leaked Pentagon footage of UAPs, and the reports of secret government programs that some military insiders claim exist with the goal of reverse-engineering the technology of crashed alien vehicles.

But what I’m describing is largely from a Western perspective, as many indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin, who have been using a DMT-based jungle brew known as ayahuasca since prehistory, have long reported contact with powerful spirits and advanced beings during their shamanic journeys. To them, this isn’t news at all, but we’re discovering this at a new technological level, which may provide a more sophisticated medium for communication with these advanced beings. Remember, it was McKenna who first began popularizing DMT back in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was basically an obscure drug at the time. We were just talking about how McKenna predicted that novelty would accelerate with his Timewave model as we evolved – well, he accurately predicted the explosion of interest in DMT that resonates with the explosion of information and novelty that we are presently experiencing. 

Another aspect that makes DMT so compelling is its potential to challenge our understanding of reality itself. The fact that so many people report similar experiences, with recurring motifs and entities, raises the question of whether DMT provides access to a shared, objective dimension that exists independently of our usual perception. This idea blurs the line between the subjective and the objective, and it forces us to reconsider the nature of consciousness. Is DMT merely unlocking hidden aspects of our minds, or is it truly opening a doorway to other worlds? These are questions that challenge the core of our scientific and philosophical paradigms. Additionally, in the context of our rapidly accelerating technological world, where we are exploring artificial intelligence and virtual realities, the DMT experience stands out as a reminder that there may be even more advanced, mysterious layers to existence than we can currently fathom. It’s as if DMT serves as a bridge between the ancient wisdom of indigenous practices and the cutting-edge frontiers of modern science.

RU: Is there anything you would like to tell the Mindplex readers about what they might learn or gain in perspective from reading this book?

DJB: We’re currently facing a unique juncture in our evolutionary journey, where the human adventure can branch into a multitude of new directions. It’s an extraordinary time that’s filled with great peril and much promise. Never before in human history have so many human minds been interconnected at the speed of light, thanks to the Internet and other evolving electronic communication technologies. All of human knowledge is now available to everyone nearly instantly, and our collective intelligence has been elevated substantially – yet our collective stupidity paradoxically threatens our very existence. I suspect that this ability and interconnection is greatly amplifying human potential and this gives me enormous hope, but there is also much at stake and we could be on the verge of our own extinction. 

In my book I bring together the perspectives and ideas from some of the most brilliant minds and far-sighted visionaries on the planet to help us navigate through these difficult times and offer out-of-the-box solutions to some of our most pressing problems. These genius luminaries not only offer hope for our wayward world, but also an excitement about the future that rekindles the optimistic enthusiasm that many of us had back in the 1990s, when ‘Mondo 2000’ magazine saw its heyday, and the future seemed bright and filled with great promise – when the internet, transhumanism, virtual reality, brain technologies, and psychedelics were viewed as fantastic agents of liberation, mind expansion, and evolutionary catalysts, instead of as dark tools of oppression, consumerism, slavery, and control. 

By reading ‘Psychedelics and the Coming Singularity’, I hope that people will gain not only a deeper understanding of these transformative forces but also a renewed sense of agency and responsibility. The world may feel chaotic and uncertain, but within this turbulence lies the potential for radical positive change. Through the wisdom and insights of the great thinkers featured in this book, I believe readers will come to see that we are not passive participants in this unfolding story. Rather, we have the power to consciously shape the future and co-create a reality that aligns with our highest aspirations.

Ultimately, this book invites readers to embrace both the mysteries and challenges of this pivotal moment, and to step boldly into the unknown with curiosity, courage, and a sense of hope for what’s to come.

Let us know your thoughts! Sign up for a Mindplex account now, join our Telegram, or follow us on Twitter. 

TESCREALism.  Has The Silicon Valley Ruling Class Gone To Crazy Town? Émile Torres in conversation with R.U. Sirius

Posted on by RU Sirius

TESCREALism
T=Transhumanism
E= Extropianism
S= Singularitarianism
C = Cosmism
R = Rationalism
EA = Effective Altruism
L = Longtermism

Émile Torres, a philosopher and historian who has focused recently on existential threats, developed what they refer to as a ‘bundle’ (we might call it a memeplex) that claims to link the above series of -isms into a sort-of singular force that has been embraced by many of the super-wealthy and influential in the tech world. It is the influence of these tropes on the super-rich and influential that, in Torres’ view, makes them very dangerous.

In an article for Truthdig, Torres writes, “At the heart of TESCREALism is a ‘techno-utopian’ vision of the future. It anticipates a time when advanced technologies enable humanity to accomplish things like: producing radical abundance, reengineering ourselves, becoming immortal, colonizing the universe and creating a sprawling ‘post-human’ civilization among the stars full of trillions and trillions of people. The most straightforward way to realize this utopia is by building superintelligent AGI.”  

In the same piece, Torres gets into the wilder projections that I suspect even many techno-enthusiastic transhumanism-oriented Mindplex readers would find fantastic (rooted in brilliant minds  taking their fantasies for reality),  Torres theorem leans heavily on Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom’s views, writing that he “argues that if there’s a mere 1% chance of 10^52 digital lifetimes existing in the future, then ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.’ In other words, if you mitigate existential risk by this minuscule amount, then you’ve done the moral equivalent of saving billions and billions of existing human lives.” 

As he explained in his conversation with Douglas Rushkoff, Torres identifies TESCREALism as a philosophical ‘bundle’ that, in a sense, trivializes the lives and sufferings of currently existing humans by finding a greater importance in the possibly trillions of posthumans that could exist in physical and/or virtual space in the future — ‘people’ having experiences that can be valued beyond our imagining. Some of those quoted tend to use statistics to value experience, which is about as alienated from experience as you can get.

I can assume you all know about transhumanism and the singularity. If you’re here, you probably know about Ben Goertzel’s project to build AGI. But are most of you familiar with the eccentricities and extremities that have attached themselves to Rationalism (as defined by LessWrong), Effective Altruism and Longtermism?

In the interview below, I mainly ask Torres to thrash out how real all this is. Do a lot of people buy into the whole philosophical bundle? My own attitude, even as a longtime associate of transhumanism, has always been kind of “are you for real?” when it comes to people taking their shit too seriously, particularly when they’ve deluded themselves into thinking they’re rational. 

In a follow up poll, I will ask Mindplex readers and veterans of the transhumanist culture to weigh in on the TESCREAL bundle. 

RU Sirius:  In your book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation, you went from writing about existential threats as a historical phenomenon to various transhumanist tropes. As I was reading it, it was like suddenly we had gone from science and geology into science fiction. Then I was wondering if there was science fiction in older times. (I suppose there was the Bible and other myths.) How did you get into this? 

Émile Torres:   Back in the mid-2000s, I encountered transhumanism for the first time. And I was initially really critical of it. The second paper I ever published was a critique of transhumanism. But  then, certain considerations led me to believe that transhumanism is a defensible position, and I became a sort of transhumanist.

And one of the main considerations was that the development of these technologies is inevitable. So if you’re going to be against transhumanism, then maybe you need to be against the development of certain person-engineering technologies. But since they’re inevitable, there’s no point in opposing it just to hold back the tide. So the best thing to do is to join the transhumanists and do what you can to ensure that that project is realized in the most optimal way.

The notion of existential risk was tightly bound up with transhumanism from the start: existential risk was initially defined as ‘anything that might prevent us from creating a posthuman civilization’.

RUS:  I’m sure there must have been mention of existential risk before that in various intellectual circles… like related to nuclear war and so forth?

ÉT:  There was definitely talk of extinction and global catastrophe. But what’s new about this idea of existential risk — right there in the definition — is the idea of desirable future development. 

There were people, particularly in the second half of the 20th century, arguing that one reason human extinction would be bad is that it would foreclose the realization of all future progress, future happiness, and so on. But that lost-potential argument was never formalized. The focus was really on going extinct. Everybody on earth is going to die. You and me are going to die. Our families will die. That was the foreground. Lost potential was not prominent. 

The notion of existential risk, I think, flipped that around and foregrounded the lost potential: the argument became that the worst aspect of human extinction is the lost potential. It’s not the 8 billion people who are going to die. That’s very bad, but the badness of all the lost potential is orders of magnitude larger.

RUS:  I may be a bit out of touch with the transhumanist culture… to me this is a bizarre iteration of transhumanism. It’s not something I bumped into much when I was interacting with that world in 2007-2010 as editor of h+ magazine. At that time, you’d mostly hear about life extension and other enhancements. Or immortality, if you wanted to get really far out. The notion of uploaded mind children was around, but as something very speculative. But the idea of sacrificing just about everybody to imaginary future people as you’ve discussed in your writings about TESCREAL did not seem to be much in circulation back then.

ÉT: That sounds right to me. I think this notion of potential is really central to longtermism. The initial definition comes from 2002, with Bostrom discussing the  transition dynamics from our human to a posthuman civilization, foregrounding the potential of becoming posthuman. This was also bound up with this notion that the creation of posthumanity isn’t just valuable because it’s a good way for cosmic history to unfold. But also, you and I might benefit, right?

So why is creating a posthuman civilization important (according to Bostrom and people like him)? Well, because if it happens within my lifetime, maybe I get to live forever. Or even if it happens within maybe a thousand years, I still get to live forever because I’ll sign up with ALCOR and get resurrected. So I really see this moment where there is a  sort of the pivot towards thinking about the far future. I think initially, for the transhumanists, it was bound up with their own fate as individuals. 

RUS: I was thinking that maybe – for example – Eliezer Yudkowsky is being selfless when he talks about risking nuclear war and sacrificing most life on the planet to make sure AI doesn’t happen before he thinks we’re ready. Because it seems to me he could have at least a 50:50 chance of being a victim of the nuclear war that he is willing to risk to prevent the development of AI too soon. So I’m thinking he’s being selfless but he loves the idea of the blissful future humans so much that he’s willing to sacrifice himself.

ÉT: My understanding of the history is that it was really in the 2000s that people in this community became increasingly aware of just how huge the future could be. With that awareness came a corresponding shift in the moral emphasis.

Yudkowsy wants to live forever. On Lex Fridman’s podcast, he said that he grew up believing that he would live forever. And so part of the trauma for him, as he mentioned on that podcast, is being in this situation where AGI is so close, and he’s having to face his own mortality, maybe for the first time. It seems like his thinking exemplifies this pivot throughout the 2000s.

RU: To me it sounds like it’s all fantasy. Some of this stuff that you’ve mentioned being part of this bundle – like the theoretical trillions of people, including digital people, having quantifiably great experience — it sounds like dormroom stoned nerd brainstorms that just never ended. They keep elaborating from the original premise, getting more and more isolated from real-world experiences turn by turn. Ideas used to mature – now they just seem to get crankier. I can’t prove it, but it could be the result of the attention economy. To misquote Neils Bohr, “Your idea is crazy but it’s not crazy enough to get a following on social media.”

ÉT: With respect to the attention economy, my sense is that longtermists recognize that this vision of the future is kind of nuts. I mean, some of them have used the term ‘crazy town’. Consequently, I think they do their best to avoid mentioning what their actual goals are publicly. Crazy ideas do grab the public’s attention, but in this case, I think they feel that some of these ideas are not good PR. 

What About Useful AI?

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RUS: Regarding your assertion that AI activity can only be explained by this ideological configuration. I don’t know whether you’re talking about practical AI for, say, tracking and responding to weather conditions, developing vaccines and other responses to pandemics, developing medicines, etc. Or if you’re referring only to AI that is performing what we consider intellectual or creative things.

ÉT: I don’t think AI in general is motivated by this ideology. The race to AGI is. And I think there are two factors. One that’s obvious is the profit motive. Microsoft and Google expect to make billions of dollars off of these large language models. But I think the other crucial component of  the explanatory picture is TESCREALism. 

It’s like… why did DeepMind form in the first place? Why did Demis Hassabis – who was at a lot of these transhumanist conferences – found it? And Shane Legg, who received $100,000 from the Canadian Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence after completing his PhD thesis, and gave talks at the Singularity Summit conferences.

RUS: If I went to all the boardrooms in Silicon Valley and talked to the owners and the programmers, do you think most of them would embrace this entire TESCREAL idea? My guess is they would tend to be transhumanists, and quite a few might be singularitarians, but they are probably not into the ‘trillions of future people’ aspect of that project. I mean, how ubiquitous are these ideas really?

ÉT: In terms of the ubiquity of TESCREAL beliefs, I think you’re right. A lot of them wouldn’t even use the word transhumanism. You could ask, “Would you support re-engineering the human organism?” Or ask, “Are you funding projects to try to re-engineer the human organism so we can merge AI into our brains?” I think a lot of them would say yes. And they’d be for aspects of the longtermist worldview like the imperative to colonize space and plunder the cosmos. My strong suspicion is that’s the water that these people swim in.

An article I want to write would be about the different terms and ideas that various authors use to describe the culture of Silicon Valley – using different terms, but ultimately describing the same phenomenon. So what I mean by TESCREALism is the same thing that far-right guy Richard Hanania calls the “tech right.”

There was a Huffington Post article about how he holds white supremacist views. And he said, “I hate the word TESCREALism.” So he called it the ‘tech right’. Douglas Rushkoff calls this ‘the mindset’ – he says it is everywhere in Silicon Valley among tech billionaires and so on; in talking to them about their views, he found that they all thought: “the future is digital. We’re going to upload our minds. We’re going to spread throughout space” and so on. What Rushkoff means by ‘the mindset’ is basically what I mean by TESCREALism. Would these people who embody ‘the mindset’ say, “yeah, I’m a longtermist, and I believe that the most morally important thing to do is to conquer space and create all these digital people in the future?” I don’t know. But their worldview looks a lot like longtermism.

RUS:  Do you think a lack of concern for currently living people is a sort of political manifestation of the longtermist view is driving some of the people of  Silicon Valley towards right-wing extremism?

ÉT: I think that’s largely correct. I think some people, like Wil Macaskill, [a figure in ‘effective altruism’] really accept this very abstract philosophical position that what matters is that there are huge numbers of people in the future. And a lot of tech billionaires see this vision as bound up with their fate as individuals. So the thinking is like… “I want to build a bunker to survive the apocalypse so I can get to space, have my mind digitized” and so on. And that definitely can lead to this disregard for most human beings. A wild example of this is the news that broke that Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother and somebody else at FTX had discussed the possibility of buying the island nation of Nauru explicitly so that members of the ‘effective altruism’ movement could survive an apocalyptic event that  kills up to – as they wrote in the document – 99.9% of human beings.

The Singularity is Probably Not Near

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RUS: Ben Goertzel said that I should ask you if you think the Singularity will happen. And if it will happen, will it happen in 2035 or 2050?

ÉT: I guess it depends on what one means by the Singularity. There’s the intelligence explosion interpretation… there’s the Kurzweilian idea that just has to do with the rate of change.

RUS: I think of the Singularity as the point where the AIs get smarter than us, and beyond that, you can’t predict anything. You can’t predict who we’ll be, or if we’ll be around, or what the world will be like. The science fiction writer Vernor Vinge was the first person to suggest that idea of a Singularity. We would make intelligences that would become as incomprehensible to us as we are to worms.

ÉT: I’m sympathetic with that view of the Singularity. There’s just not much we can say beyond it. I’m very skeptical of the intelligence explosion idea. And the rate of change idea from Kurzweil seems to be in direct and significant tension with the fact that a climate catastrophe is almost inevitable unless there’s some new technology that, at scale, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

RUS: Kurzweil shows that the inclining line of human technological development survived two World Wars (actually world wars boosted technology development) and Mao and Pol Pot and all kinds of terrible events.

ÉT: I think climate change is different than that.

RUS: Yeah, I think so too.

ÉT: We’re talking about global civilization. Is it gonna survive? I don’t know. I mean, there are legit climatologists out there who don’t think it will unless there’s immediate action to avert catastrophic climate change.

I remember arguing, many years ago, with colleagues in the existential risk field, where I was claiming that climate change is a much bigger deal than they were suspecting. They thought: “We’ll invent AGI. And once we have AGI, it’ll…”

RUS: It’ll figure out what to do, yeah.

ÉT: Figure out what to do. But how are we gonna create AGI in a world that’s just crumbling and falling apart? How are we gonna host conferences on AI when the weather is so hostile that you can’t get there?

RUS: I guess the question becomes how radical the intervention of weather catastrophes is in the immediate future. People are thinking they might be able to accomplish AGI in the next 10-20 years or so. And we’re already dealing with all kinds of crappy weather and deaths and destruction. But to the visible eye, western civilization seems to roll on. People get in their cars and go to the store. Food is still being distributed.

So we do seem to be carrying on, and maybe we will do that for 10 or 20 years. If the people making the AGI and related robotics and so forth are able to manage to get to the lab and do their work, get in their cars and get enough food etc., then maybe they can  accomplish what they hope to. I guess that’s the idea.

ÉT: It’s just not my area of expertise. But my sense is that, in terms of the LLMs that we have, there’s no obvious path from those systems like ChatGPT to genuine AGI or superintelligence.

RUS: A lot of people are saying that ChatGPT and the like are not much to brag about. Michio Kaku, who generally tends to be a hyper-optimistic tech promoter, called it a glorified tape recorder.

ÉT: I think it was Gary Marcus who was laughing about the rise and fall in prestige, if you will, of ChatGPT. It became a joke line during a Republican debate.

RUS: It happens so fast these days.

ÉT: Yeah. So I don’t think that Singularity is going to happen, probably. And I would put money on it not happening soon, not happening in 2045 like Kurzweil predicts. 

What About the Humane Transhumanists, Singularitarians and AI Enthusiasts?

RUS: Let me ask you about the varying ideologies and ideals within transhumanism and its spin-offs. You’ve mentioned Ben Goertzel — the captain of the ship here at Mindplex — in various places as having a central role in the ‘bundle’ because of his longtime pursuit of AGI. And I know Ben to be a humanist, and more or less a liberal or even better. I know he doesn’t want to exploit or enslave or kill off the current people on earth but wants to try to lift everybody. So I know from experience that there’s a  lot of philosophical variation within transhumanism. 

I can remember when they asked me to create the magazine for humanity+, I had my own assumptions based on earlier experiences with the Extropians. So I confessed to these guys at a meeting, I said,  “I’ve got to tell you right up front that I’m not a libertarian. I’m a leftist with a libertarian streak.”  And one of the guys said “Yeah me too.” And the other guy said “I’m not even sure about the libertarian streak.” 

Generally, around that time – around 2007 – I learned that a lot of the people engaged with that official transhumanist organization thought of themselves as liberals, sort of conventional mainstream liberals. And there’s a lot of variation within that world.  

ÉT: I recognize and affirm that. The notion of TESCREALism is supposed to capture the techno-utopian vision that came out of some of these movements, and to gesture at the worst aspects of that. I think they’re the ones that have become most influential now. So, like the democratic socialist James Hughes — he was somewhat influential. But, compared to someone like Bostrom, his influence is minor. And I absolutely recognize that there are transhumanists who like anti-libertarian. Some of them are Mormons.

RUS: Yeah… the Mormon transhumanists! They’re adorable. I think when you had people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk attaching themselves to these ideas, they probably became the main attractors to transhumanism or the ideas of human enhancement associated with it. More people who would be attracted to their ideologies have been  pulled in, particularly in the Silicon Valley culture. These ruling class scary monsters and super creeps became sort of the main widely-available public voice for those kinds of views. Then you had the neoreactionary movement and the dark enlightenment. Most of the people talking about those tended to embrace transhumanist tropes. That became the alt-right; it fed into the spread of right wing extremism.

You can see how the idea of the glorious future – stand up straight and tall and shoot yourself up into the glorious future – could attract a certain type of fascist sensibility.

ÉT: That’s my impression also. Obviously there’s a fascinating history involving futurism and fascism. Maybe it does tend to attract a certain type of person or lends itself to being interpreted or exploited by fascists. TESCREALism captures that aspect.

Is Less Wrong A Cult?

RUS: I remember being at a Singularity Conference and being approached by someone involved in Less Wrong. And it felt something like being approached by a cult. I wonder if you run into any actual cult-like behavior in your studies, like people gathering in communities and getting guns to defend themselves, or worship the leader and that sort of thing.

ÉT: There’s definitely that charismatic leader aspect to rationalism. There are these Less Wrong posts that are just lavishing praise on Yudkowsky. I remember seeing a list of one or two sentence statements about Yudkowsky. One of them was something about how “inside Eliezer Yudkowsky’s pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.” “In the history of Western thinkers, there was Plato, Immanuel Kant, Eliezer Yudkowsky.”
(Laughter)
Someone who I won’t name told me that the Bay Area rational scene is a full-grown apocalypse cult. 

I think EA (Effective Altruism) is sort of a cult. There was an article published by Carla Cremer recently. She talked about a secret competitive ranking system in which participants get points subtracted if they have IQs of less than 120.

RUS: Oh! I was thinking I might ask people engaged in transhumanism if they even believe in IQ as a legitimate measurement of intelligence. 

ÉT: I’d be really curious to know. Because I do think that IQ realism is pretty widespread within this community. Bostrom has written that IQ is good but imperfect. So they sort of lean towards IQ realism.

Does Anyone Call Themselves a TESCREAList?

RU: You noted that Marc Andreessen has identified himself with this bundle that you co-created. Have others directly embraced the term as a positive identity that you’re aware of?

ÉT: No, not really. Hanania acknowledges it in arguing that the ‘tech right’ is
a better term. He said we were basically right about what the streams are, what the bundle is, but ‘tech right’ is a better term. I’m not surprised that there aren’t more people coming out and saying they identify as TESCREAL.

RUS: Maybe after this runs on Mindplex there’ll be a bunch of people deciding that is who they are. Oh dear. Whatever have we wrought?

Eugenics

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RUS: Let me try a thorny issue: eugenics. What about intervening at the germline to prevent horrific diseases and stuff like that? Do you think there can be a legitimate use for that sort of thing?

ÉT: Yes. I do think that could be permissible under certain circumstances. I mean, I have worries about the limits of what that technology will be used for. Will it be used just for what we would intuitively call therapeutic purposes? My main concern is that it could easily open the door to an ‘enhancement’ approach. As soon as you’re talking about enhancements, there are questions like, “What criteria are you using to judge whether some modification is better?” That’s where you get into the issue of ‘super-classes’ which Bostrom has written about. 

A lot of that is probably ableist. What ‘enhancing’ means for somebody like Bostrom might be completely different than what I might mean. Right?

RUS:  I must confess I had a knee-jerk reaction the first time I heard the term ableism. People should be able. Generally, we should be in favor of abilities and not get into a place where people are worshiping their broken parts, so to speak. At the same time, people should have the right to choose how they want to be. But I’m uncomfortable with the idea that people would want to maintain what most people would consider a kind of brokenness. And I wonder: where’s the line for that?

ÉT: My sense is that words like ‘broken’ are normative terms. I think disability rights activists or disability scholars have a point when they say, “there’s an infinite number of things that I can’t do.” I can’t fly. The notion of disability, some would argue, is just a social construct. We live in a society that is unaccommodating for somebody who can’t do something that a statistical majority of other people can do. That’s what a ‘disability’ is. So maybe, you fix society, the disability goes away even if the inability remains.

RUS: How would you think about physical problems that make life more difficult for an individual, or for the people around them? 

ÉT: There are two aspects to that. One is the inability and the other is the society one lives in. So you can fix or eliminate disability by improving society. And then there’s a good argument that a lot of the inabilities that we classify as disabilities would not be seen as bad. It’s just different. There are people of different heights. There are people who can’t walk. I find my heart is filled with a lot of empathy for the disability scholars — some of whom are disabled themselves — arguing that they wouldn’t want to change. And their view that we shouldn’t aim for a world in which people like them no longer exist.

Techno Gloom

RUS: Do we need to worry about extreme forms of tech negativism? For example, the person who can’t walk on their own will rely on good technology to get around
and probably hope for even better technology. And there’s a real move towards extreme tech negativism now, clearly provoked partly by the sort of TESCREAList people that you’re bringing to the surface. I wonder if you’re a little worried that there might be an overreaction, a tech reactionary kind of move that is actually harmful?

ÉT: Not so much because I haven’t seen a lot of evidence, at least like my social media feed.

RUS: You don’t live near San Francisco…

ÉT: To put it simplistically, a lot of the people in my circle are for good technology,  not bad technology. Maybe small-scale technologies, which doesn’t mean low-tech. So you can have advanced technologies that would enable somebody to get around who can’t walk. But without the megacorps, and all the control  and all the risk that comes with that.

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The Singularity Obsessed AI Hacker in Antero Alli’s Last Film Blue Fire is Only The Beginning

Posted on by RU Sirius

I suppose the way to get Mindplexians interested in Antero Alli – author, theater producer, experiential workshop leader and film director – is through his ties to Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson starting back in the 1980s, where that pair were advocating transhumanist slogans like Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.

But the reality is that Alli has carved his own path as a writer, a thinker and director. And as he slowly exits corporeality, it’s his film oeuvre that most fascinates me.  

I recently spent a day watching several of his films and it struck me that I was looking at part of  an entire body of work that has been largely neglected by those writing about and advocating for indie films. Alli’s films may be about to be discovered. They certainly deserve substantial notice. There are hours of enjoyment and intrigue awaiting viewers.

And while enough of his films enclose neo-tech tropes like VR and AI to cause one or two commentators to toss out the buzzword “cyberpunk,” these are all ultimately human stories leaning on depth psychology, Jungian symbolism, dreams and real experience.

In the preview for his latest film (and most likely his last) ‘Blue Fire’, Alli highlights the Singularity.

The central protagonist is an underground singularity-obsessed AI hacker. Scenes show male computer-freak social awkwardness, unrequited male obsession with a woman and a bad Salvia Divinorum trip (been there). Ultimately ‘Blue Fire’ is not a film about AI or the personalities of underground hacker archetypes. It’s a film about human connections — connections made but mostly connections missed.

I interviewed Antero Alli by email.

R.U. Sirius: Since Mindplex readers probably aren’t familiar with your work, what would you say is the theme or project or search that runs through all of your work that includes books, theater, experiential workshops and film, including the most recent one we’re discussing today?

Antero Alli: The silver thread running through most everything I’ve put out to the public since 1975 – my books, films, theatre works, Paratheatrical experiments – reflects my ongoing fascination with how our diurnal earth-based realities are impacted in meaningful ways by our nocturnal dreams and related astral or out-of-body events. I have felt compelled to share these visions through the Art of words, images, and human relations. All this obsession started back in 1975 when I endured a spontaneous out-of-body experience at the age of 23. I say endured since the experience itself was traumatic and a massive shock to my concept of identity. I was no longer able, in all honesty, to identify as a physical body after being shown more truth when seeing and knowing myself as a light body, an electric body, cased within the physical body. No drugs were involved. The only condition I can relate it to was exhaustion from an intense theatre rehearsal that evening. All my films are oneiric docufictions, where real life experiences are camouflaged and spun by my feral poetic imagination.

Credit: Antero Alli

RUS: We met when we were both working and playing with the ideas of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. To the extent that their ideas are likely of interest to the mostly technophile readers of Mindplex, they would be attracted to the technotopian ideas they advocated like SMI²LE and evolutionary brain circuits as opened by drugs and technology, and then Leary’s later advocacy of cyberpunk and the digital revolution. How do you see your own work in relationship to these tropes?

AA: My contribution to the legacies of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson is demonstrated through my thirty-year era of working with The Eight-Circuit Brain model. This started in 1985 with the publication of my first 8-circuit book, ‘Angel Tech’, updated and expanded in 2009 with ‘The Eight Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body’. (Both books are still in print at The Original Falcon Press.) My approach is somatic and experience-oriented, rather than theoretical or philosophical. I relate the eight-circuit model as a diagnostic tool to track and identify multiple states of consciousness and eight functions of intelligence that can be accessed as direct experience through ritual, meditation, and trigger tasks. This embodiment bias sets my circuit work apart from Leary’s more theoretical approach and Wilson’s use of multiple systems theory to expand the eight-circuit playing field. Between the three of us, I think we cover the bases pretty well.

RUS: The dramatic persona in Blue Fire is an underground AI hacker… seemingly a singularitarian. How did you conceive of this character? Was he based on someone or a composite or a pure imagining?

AA: The AI-coder Sam, played by Bryan Smith, was inspired in part by the actor — a singular personality with a dynamic physical sensibility and this very pure kind of cerebral charisma, a complexity that I felt could brilliantly serve the film. I was also intrigued and inspired by the subculture of coders that I discovered talking with a few of my friends, AI freaks and serious hackers, who shall remain anonymous.

RUS: Without giving up too much of the plot, the other protagonists are a relatively normal nice seemingly-liberal couple. The dynamic between could be read as a contrast between neurotypicals and neuro-atypicals, In this case the atypical doesn’t do very well but is perhaps a catalyst for putting the typicals through some changes. Would you read it that way?

AA: The so-called typical couple are not lovers or married or in any kind of romantic involvement; nowhere in their dialogue mentions or indicates that. What is clear is that she is a student in the college-level Psychology 101 that he teaches. They form a bond over their shared interest in dreams, a bond that deepens into a troubling mentorship. All three characters act as catalysts for each other in different ways. Much of this starts in their nocturnal dreams and how their daily discourse is impacted by these dreams. This daytime-dreamtime continuum continues as a thread throughout most of my films.

RUS: Again, not giving up too much, the hacker dude smokes some salvia divinorum… and based on my own experiences, you got that right in the sense that it’s often an uncomfortable high. I’ve referred to it as “naggy”. People who want to be happy about being in disembodied cyberspace should probably make ketamine their drug of choice (I’m just chattering here but welcome you chattering back) or even LSD rather than a plant. McKenna used to believe that with plant psychedelics there’s someone or something in there… kind of another mind with something to impart to the imbiber. Any thoughts on this or thoughts on minds other than our own here on earth and what they can teach us?

AA: I knew Sam, the A.I. coder, had a drug habit, but didn’t know at first what drug would be the most indicative of this native state in mind. What drug would he gravitate towards? What drug amplifies his compartmentalizing, highly abstract, and dissociative mindset? After smoking salvia several times, it seemed like a good fit (not for me but for Sam). By the way, I don’t make my films to school the audience or teach them anything. It would be a mistake to also view any of the characters in my films as role models, unless your Ego Ideal includes flaws, shortcomings, and repressed Shadow material. Though ‘Blue Fire’ revolves around Sam’s AI coding, this is also not a story about AI but how AI acts on Sam’s psyche. Like my other films, I explore human stories planted in extreme circumstances or situations where people face and react to realities beyond their control or comprehension.


RUS: Aside from AI, virtual reality pops up in some of your work, and the language of hacking occurs here and there. But I don’t think your work would be categorized as cyberpunk or even sci-fi. What role would you say fringe tech and science play in your films?

AA: The fringes of tech and science play a role in those films – their presence amplifies the human story or shows the viewer a new context or way of seeing how the characters interact with tech and science. This keeps me and my films honest, as I’m no techie or science nerd. My deep background in theatre and ritual (Paratheatre) has slam-dunked me into the deeper subtext of human relations and how this interacts with the transpersonal realms of archetypes and dreams.

RUS: I’m feeling a little claustrophobic making what I suspect might be your last or one of your last interviews just about Blue Fire as directed at the Mindplex audience. If you’re up to it, why don’t you hit the world with your parting shot, so to speak. A coda? A blast of wisdom? A great fuck-all? A kiss goodbye? Whatever you feel. And thanks for being you.

AA: I’m feeling a bit claustrophobic about answering your question. I get that others sometimes think of me as this fount of wisdom – which humors me to no end. I suppose whatever ‘wisdom’ has been born in me, it’s come from making many mistakes and errors of judgment that I have felt compelled to correct as soon as possible, if only because I hate the dumbdown feeling of making the same mistake more than once. This self-correction process vanquished any existing fear of making mistakes, in lieu of an excitement for making new mistakes – defining my creative approach to most everything I do as experimental. Everything starts out as an experiment to test the validity of whatever idea, plan, or theory I start with. Sometimes I’m the boss and sometimes the situation is the boss.

No fuck alls, no kisses goodbye, no regrets. I remain eternally grateful to have lived an uncommonly fulfilling life by following and realizing my dreams. At 70, this has proven a great payoff during my personal end times (I was diagnosed with a terminal disease and don’t know my departure date).

BLUE FIRE Official site

https://www.verticalpool.com/bluefire.html

Antero Alli Films online

https://www.verticalpool.com/dvd.html

9/21 Portland premiere

Purchase Advance Tickets

Sept. 22 – YouTube Premiere

Sept. 26 – New York Premiere

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Steal This Singularity Part 2: The More Things Change, The More You’ll Need To Save

Posted on by RU Sirius

Steal This Singularity Annotated #2

Four score or make that four columns ago, I presented Part 1 of Steal This Singularity Annotated, promising: “Every fourth one of these Mindplex articles will be an annotated and edited excerpt from my multipart piece titled Steal This Singularity, originally written some time in 2008. This will continue until I get to the end of the piece or the Singularity comes. Annotation is in gray italics.”

As it turns out, this second presentation will just about cover it. I’m so happy with how I critiqued (made fun of?) my transhumanist and singularitarian friends that I may not need to do a lot of annotating.

Part Three: The More Things Change, The More You’ll Need To Save

It was 2008 — maybe a week or two into my first experience working with ‘official’ transhumanism (as if) as editor of h+ magazine. I was being driven down from Marin County to San Jose to listen to a talk by a scientist long associated with various transhumanoid obsessions, among them nanotechnology, encryption and cryonics. As we made the two-hour trip, the conversation drifted to notions of an evolved humanity, a different sort of species — maybe corporeal, maybe disembodied, but decidedly post-Darwinian, and in control of its instincts. I suggested that a gloomy aspect of these projections was that sex would likely disappear, since those desires and pleasures arose from more primitive aspects of the human psyche. My driver told me that he didn’t like sex because it was a distraction, a waste of brain power… not to mention sloppy. As a boomer who was obsessed with sex most of my life, as I’ve hit my seventies, I’ve had the peculiar experience of completely forgetting about sex for days at a time. Nonetheless, as a matter of principle, I still believe that repressed sexual energy is a giant badness. It’s essential to my distaste for right-wing fundamentalist Christians, the Taliban and the like.

Putting aside my personal experience, which has caused me to view my earlier life’s priorities with a certain note of bewilderment, I must confess to a curiosity regarding the reports that young people today are far less interested in sex. Is it a loss of male testosterone so much worried about by right-wing talking heads? Is it an evolutionary mutation? Was the driver I thought I was making fun of in the above comments on to something? Is the oncoming climate apocalypse perhaps rearranging some instincts? (Can I suggest that instincts exist? And do I dare to eat a peach? And can I find a classy way to exit this subject?)

I arrived at a Pizza Hut in an obscure part of San Jose. This gathering of about 15–20 transhumanoids would take place over cheap pizza in the back room that was reserved for the event. There was even a projector and a screen.The speaker — a pear shaped fellow clad in dress pants held up by a belt pulled up above his stomach — started his rap. I have a funny memory of a couple of MONDO 2000 staffers going to an extropian gathering at the end of the ‘80s. Jas Morgan and Morgan Russell (both of whom had a certain dandyish élan) and were accustomed to the classy party extravagances dished up by Queen Mu at the MONDO house, complete with her homemade desserts returned with noses upturned. The party was in a dicey little under-decorated house in one of the Bay Area’s strip mall suburbs with chips and dip and Coca-Cola. It was noted that the attendees looked like they didn’t pay much attention to their misshapen bodies nor did they seem to have any sort of fundamental aesthetic for making life extraordinary. They wondered at the Extropians’ desire for more of that life – and suggested that maybe quality rather than quantity should be considered.  Now, I’m not sure how I should think about this. I’ve been thinking hard about why people outside urban areas were attracted to Donald Trump. I think it’s partly because they could sense and identify with his resentment of the culture-makers of New York City. He wanted to fit in but they considered him tacky and lacking class. Yes, class. Do liberals and even many leftists have class? And what does that say?

Somehow related, there’s this funny and interesting piece by Sam Kriss, in which he textually executes all hipsters before obsoleting nerd culture. Let me say this right out loud: MONDO 2000/1990s cyberculture was hipster-nerd back when hipster wasn’t yet a swear word. Now we’re just washed up on the shoreline of cultural desolation with few identity life rafts to relate to, and mere survival rearing its jeering head. We’ll see fire and we’ll see rain.

As I recall, he predicted major nanotechnology breakthroughs (real nanotechnology i.e. molecular machines capable of making copies of themselves and making just about anything that nature allows extremely cheaply) within our extended lifetimes, allowing us, among other things, to stay healthy indefinitely and finally migrate into space.

I recall him presenting a scenario in which all of us — or many of us — could own some pretty prime real estate; that is, chunks of this galaxy, at the very least that we could populate with our very own advanced progeny (mind children, perhaps.) I’m a bit sketchy on the details from so long ago, but it was a very far out vision of us united with advanced intelligences many times greater than our own either never dying or arising from the frozen dead and, yes, each one getting this gigantic chunk of space real estate to populate. (That these unlivable areas can be made livable either by changing it or ourselves or both with technology is the assumption here.)

Once the speaker had laid out the amazing future as scientifically plausible, he confessed that he was mainly there to make a pitch. Alcor — the cryonics company that he was involved in — needed more customers. As he delineated how inexpensively one could buy an insurance policy to be frozen for an eventual return performance, he began to emphasize the importance of a person in cryonics not being considered legally dead… because that person could then build interest on a savings account or otherwise have his or her value increase in a stock market that was — by all nanocalculations — destined to explode into unthinkable numbers (a bigger boom).

For the bulk of his talk, the speaker dwelt on the importance of returning decades or maybe even a century or so hence to a handsome bank account. It was one of those “I can’t emphasize this enough” sort of talks that parents used to give to their 20-something kids about 401ks. 

As the floor opened up to audience participation, the questions continued to dwell primarily upon the financial aspects of suspension and its aftermath. Insurance. Savings. Investments. Finally, a woman raised her hand and asked something along the lines of… “In light of all the stuff you’re predicting, will US currency still be meaningful in that future?”

An audible groan went up from a portion of the gathering, implying, “fuckin’ stupid hippie asking that ridiculous question again.”

So there they were accepting…

•  Raising people from the dead

•  Becoming more or less immortal

•  Making intelligences many times more powerful and capable than our own

•  Individual earth humans privately owning big chunks of the galaxy

…but they could not imagine that the local (local in time, perhaps, more that space) currency and the nuances of its valuation and growth would be irrelevant in that envisioned world. Given that transhumanists are among those pushing forward cryptocurrencies, I find it curious that our speaker didn’t consider the likelihood of some extreme discontinuity in currency, rendering those savings and investments meaningless. Transhumanist culture – before and after the 2008 financial collapse – has a trust in finance management to glue obsoleting accounts to futuristic ones. Late-stage capitalism isn’t late-stage at all. Its coming death has been greatly exaggerated. It’s unbreakable: the capital you possess now will somehow transfer seamlessly into whatever system is collaboratively summoned by or with our smart machines. 

This, it seemed to me, represented a stunning and peculiar kind of stasis sitting at the heart of radical technological change or the imaginings of same, a clinging to the most trivial and boring sort of continuity by the very sort of people predicting extreme “disruption” and radical discontinuity. The Singularity then, if any, would present before us as an unthinkably complex quantum accountant, as — figuratively speaking — a godlike 1950s bespectacled nebbish, a bean counter (literalized already by the fashion for “quantified life.”)

Part 4: The Worm Earns (Or It Can Fuck Off and Die)

Cut to a Singularity Summit that same year, also down in the sainted city of San Jose. During one of the talks, the speaker, Marshall Brain, at that time the host of the TV Show Factory Floor and author of Robotic Nation spoke about the exponential acceleration of robot technology that the conference was, in its essence, about. He noted that the degree of automation that was soon to arrive would lead to such a loss of jobs that it would be necessary to start providing people with a guaranteed income.

This time, it wasn’t a slight groan that arose from the gathered transhumanoids. There was actual hissing from a substantial segment of the audience. It was the first and only time I ever heard this kind of response at one of these gatherings.

(Transhumanoids tend to pride themselves on a Spock-like calm logic. They are not rowdy sorts.) Guaranteed income has gained popularity since. Possibly the situation is reaching the point where you either have to kill the poor or hand out some free tickets; or Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign charmed the pants off of a few hardline libertarians or perhaps, upon noting a rise in working class union militancy, some anarcho-capitalists are thinking they’d better throw the dog a bone.

Again, allow me to contextualize. Here we were at a conference about the Technological Singularity — the time upcoming soon, according to most singularitarians, when we would design intelligences that — in the words of original singularitarian Vernor Vinge — would be to our intelligence as we are to the worms. Nonbiological life would be more competent than us in every way imaginable. And, in fact, even stopping short of the singularity, we were hearing from a whole bunch of speakers about the rise of machines doing more with less better than us in nearly every field of endeavor. And yet, here again, the Infallible Papacy of Contemporary Currency raised its head, angrily this time — with the emotional/ideological undertow undoubtedly ranging from the Randian/libertarian virtues of being financially “self-made” combined with the immorality of assisting anyone not so self-made as one’s self…. to the Calvinist idea of the ennobling nature of work.

That the very same people that can applaud building intelligences that make them about as interesting and useful as a worm can get their knickers into a twist over the idea of humans not having to “earn” tickets to live is indicative of a Calvinist/Randian determination to punish “slackers” even in the face of an endlessly self-replicating, robot-delivered “free lunch.”

Incidentally, during a lunch break following Brain’s talk, I was explaining to a friend why the audience had hissed at Brain when a large, heavy-set man standing behind me on line turned beet red and started shouting at me about how many people were killed by the Chinese communists and how capitalism had defeated communism because planned economies don’t work. I didn’t engage with him, but I would now point out that the nation states and their economies that outlasted Marx-Leninism were the United States, which had a New Deal mid-20th Century, and the European “welfare states” that this beet red fellow no doubt refers to as “socialistic.” A lot of Republican-influenced persons have been convinced in recent years (by people who know better) that centrist Democrats like President Biden are communists. The term is bandied about virtually without context by politicians that are also appealing to these same people with populist anti-corporate and, in some sense, anticapitalist rhetoric. I suppose this goes back to Mussolini. Nothing new here.

Indeed, what Brain was suggesting was not collective farms, totalistic planned economies and the eventual end of all private property, but merely a logical extension of the “welfare state” in response to the conditions predicted (and already starting to occur) by technophile futurists.

Or maybe not even that. During the ’70s, many libertarians, even Ayn Rand quasi-acolyte Milton Freidman, suggested less bureaucratic paths to guaranteed income, once workers were replaced by machines. So, in concrete terms, the barbarism that doesn’t want to resolve superfluous labor and other forms of exclusion from the economy may be more a function of the psychological acceptance of post-Reagan/Thatcher conditions than it is of Randian ideology. (People younger than myself have grown up stepping over the homeless on their way to whatever for their entire lives. The scale of homelessness that continues to exist is a post-Reagan phenomenon).

Part 5: There’ll Be Pie in the Sky When You Don’t Die

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

The conservative or apolitical transhumanist/singularitarian argument against the Steal This Singularity approach is, fundamentally, that it’s unnecessary. The tech will produce democratized abundance and liberties beyond our wildest imaginings and all we need to do is hang on tight and support science and technology and, generally, not stir too much shit up. I call this the “there’ll be pie in the sky when you don’t die” argument, which is a play off of a Woody Guthrie satire, which is, in turn, about 40 times more obscure to young 21st Century Americans than even an Abbie Hoffman reference. A lot has changed since I wrote this in 2008. Not only are a lot of younger people fairly radicalized leftists, a pretty strong sense of history is emerging among some (fostering bizarre reactions in the wilds of Florida and elsewhere). Also, within this milieu, tech negativity has gone a bit too wild. (I must follow up on this theme soon.) GenXers and older millennials really just want to go back in time to before the internet existed.

Basically, the narrative goes that we’re going from home/desktop media, which gave all of us the equivalent of a printing press and broadcast studio from which to have a voice in the world to 3D home printing i.e. manufacturing. If we get molecular technology and tie that in with 3D manufacturing, every man and woman can make what they need from very little in their homes. Of course, that assumes homes, but that’s one brief example of a path to democratized abundance that seemingly doesn’t require any political activism.

Of course, the past and the present are prologue, even in consideration of technologies as disruptive as those being promoted and predicted by transhumanoids and singularitarians. Such was my point in Part Three of this mess about folks clinging to today’s currency as a life raft while sailing about the entire galaxy visiting other property owners. We have both the willingness and the talent to snatch scarcity out of the jaws of abundance and oppression out of the jaws of liberation. We do it today when we impose austerity based on the abstraction of global debt and when we let the US-based National Security Industrial Complex build one-way transparency by using the same now-completed Virtual Panopticon to shield itself from investigation while having full access to everybody else’s data.

Since the dawn of the digital culture, there has been a tug of war between the notion of

•  Free — stuff that can be easily copied and shared should be shared, because otherwise you create scarcity in the face of nearly limitless (virtual) wealth

•  Business — the systemic legacy of selling intellectual and creative stuff, starting companies that lock replicable bits behind turnstiles and make a business of it. Bill Gates took the side against free and did very well by it.

As much protested by the likes of Jaron Lanier, creative artists and writers are now stuck in the middle of this inconclusive dialectic.

During the early 1990s, digital countercultural idealists trumpeted the idea of free. There was a broad feeling amongst those of us at play in the fields of the arising tech revolution that if the anarchic shockwaves of shifting social relations brought about by — among other things — the digitization of cultural stuff and the resultant ease with which that stuff could be copied unto infinity and accessed from anywhere hit us, then we would happily surf those crazy waves of change.

The other part of that deal, as many of us perceived it, was that everything else had to change too. We knew that the end of scarcity in the digital realm would be “heightening the contradictions” (as they say) in the industrial capitalist model. We assumed that either capitalism would rise to the challenge by finding ways to support those disintermediated or displaced by technical change — or it would be forcibly altered or dissipated in the forward rush of boundary defying technologies.

Rather, we’ve been subjected to that same stasis — stuck in these same primitive currency valuations and their correspondent debts — and we stand today as perfect examples of what could not only continue but expand under the regimen of home manufacturing — that is, the utter disintermediation and abandonment of formerly wage earning (and eventually, business-making) people for the crime of not being able to come up with a sublime enough hustle in the midst of satiated needs to get some other human being to pass those currency tickets that legitimize his or her existence to hir.

We shall see. As a famous poet once said (I’m paraphrasing): First they disintermediated the livelihood of the musicians, and I did not speak out for I wasn’t a musician. Then they disintermediated the livelihood of the writers, and I did nothing for I wasn’t a writer. Then they automated the programmers, and suddenly a whole lot of libertarians decided that guaranteed income was a thing. Not bad guesses for 2008.

Part 6: White Babbits  (2008)

Yes I did top the whole thing off with some song  lyrics. They are now a song and a video.

One pill makes you smarter
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Ritalin or adderall
And your phallus
Needs Viagra after all

And if you go fleecing Babbitts
‘Cause the banks are gonna fall
Tell ’em the hookah smoking anarchist
Has got you by the balls
Call alice — she’s totally appalled

White men on the radio
Get off on telling you who to hate
And your friend has joined the teabags
And you spend your weekends straight
And your phallushas a Cialis date

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the fat cats are aging backwards
While your friends are filled with dread
Remember what the lab rat said
Freeze your head!
Freeze your head !

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Risk and Precarity Part 3: Possible Solutions. In Conversation with Vinay Gupta

Posted on by RU Sirius

I first learned about Vinay Gupta just about a year ago when Bruce Sterling told me he was in a discussion with a guy who was declaiming about how important MONDO 2000 was and how much he was influenced by it. I looked him up and learned that he had been involved in the launch of Ethereum, and since then has created something else called Mattereum. I was just starting to launching an NFT project called ‘I’m Against NFTs’. I started the work with former MONDO 2000 participants on the project at a time of gold fever for visual and audio NFTs. So I called upon Vinay, among others, to guide me through the fog around bringing NFTs to market.  

As things evolved, the project became a song and an immersive environment with PlayLa.bZ and associates that was presented at MOZFest. The NFT fever abated, and the “I’m Against NFTs” offering was shelved. But I’d grown to treasure my connection to Vinay and to admire his philosophic depth and sharp intelligence regarding blockchain politics and the state of the world in general.

As I was completing my second column here on the topic of Risk and Precarity in Web3, I realized that I had to lean on Vinay’s wit and wisdom for “Risk and Precarity Part 3: Possible Solutions.”  Here I present our conversation about the issues raised by my earlier columns.

Vinay Gupta helped to coordinate the release of the blockchain platform Ethereum, and is the founder and current CEO of Mattereum, which offers legal protections for physical assets sold on the blockchain. He’s clearly had a full life and has done a lot of other amazing stuff, some of which comes up during this conversation.

RU:  I’ve been writing about tech culture’s romance with risk and adventure, and the scams we find in blockchain activities today. When you were helping to start Ethereum, was risk — personal, for other individuals, for the wider economy and culture — part of your calculation?

VG: Firstly, I want to say a huge thank you for your work on MONDO 2000. I was a Scottish teenager living in the crappiest part of a crappy town, before the age of the internet, and one day I was in a board game shop and I saw this glossy, colourful magazine. Picked it up, browsed through the contents, bought one, then another and it literally set the direction of my whole life! I knew I had to get out of Scotland and get to America where it was all happening. I arrived in 1995 and I was not disappointed.

I don’t know that I would have ever made that journey without you. MONDO 2000 was a beacon, a homing signal for me and I am sure many others. Well done. I think you’ve had more impact than you could ever know. Anyway, back to the question of risk.

Before I joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2014, I had spent about ten years as a worst case scenario disaster guy working for government and academia, including stints for a variety of military think-tanks at quite a high level in both America and the UK.

The terrain I worked in was unholy. “I don’t get out of bed for less than 1% mortality” was one of my sayings. In fact 1% mortality wasn’t a thing I ever really paid attention to. My work really kicked in at 10%, 20%, 30% mortality. Genocides, smallpox or worse pandemics including bird flu, nuclear terrorism – that sort of thing. 

We got very, very lucky with Covid. It could easily have been ten times that bad. If it was bird flu it could have been fifty times that bad. I’m not kidding, these are the numbers.

To stay sane during that period I referred to my work as ‘apocalypse mitigation’ because my territory was after prevention has failed, now what? My business cards were designed to set the tone, and were legendary.

Of course climate change was high up my list because a wracking wave of global droughts and famines will also unleash resource wars and accelerate a global cycle of decline. This is why it’s so important we get into geoengineering early.

But nobody wanted to pay for the truth about risk. Discovering the truth about things like inadequate government preparedness for pandemics wasn’t paying the bills. Nobody in government was willing to do the work to fix the problem. As we have seen with Covid.

Eventually I just ran out of money. So I largely focused around my own survival and got a job in tech, with the Ethereum Foundation. Most of my civilian friendly work around the open source hexayurt refugee shelter system is linked from myhopeforthe.world which gives a summary of the approach. I’ll get back to it if I ever succeed in becoming independently wealthy.

So I would say I was one of the most risk-aware people in the world when I joined the Ethereum Foundation in 2014.

A hexayurt quaddome at Burning Man (Credit: R.U. Sirius)

RU: What do you make of the emphasis on anonymity as a protection for individuals as it was emphasized by early crypto money people like David Chaum, the cypherpunks etc.?

VG: David Chaum and the cypherpunks are right. Modern crypto is mostly wrong. I say ‘mostly’ because crypto is littered with fully anonymous actors jealously guarding their True Names. Unfortunately a lot of those anonymous individuals are among the worst scammers in crypto.

But the rest of crypto went down the path of using centralized exchanges. KYC AML CFT PEP SOF* checks and all the rest. [KYC = Know Your Customer; AML = Anti Money Laundering; CFT = Combating Financing of Terrorism; PEP – Politically Exposed Person, SOF = Source of Funds] The problem is that these exchanges have a foot in both worlds: they’re cypherpunk on the side where they’re getting tokens from the raw chaos of the blockchains. They’re TradFi (traditional finance) where they are taking copies of passports and verifying home addresses. As a result, all the legal liability piles up in the exchanges and they also have huge opportunities for operating their own scams: see FTX.

The SEC case against Coinbase is likely to be where a lot of this mess gets sorted out but I am not liking Coinbase’s chances.

RU: So the crypto that you like — the anonymous crypto, uncompromised by TradFi… is it for the masses or is it an elite thing, at least at first? Does it translate into a meaningful means of exchange with which to get, say, food, clothes and housing, and is it a longer wait to get there than TradFi?

VG: Crypto gives the same kind of privacy that everybody had when they made payments before the invention of credit cards: cash. It’s not some magical new thing, it’s just using cryptography to enable computers to maintain our human and civil rights in the face of a changing technological environment.

Cory Doctorow seems to have a serious dislike of anonymous electronic cash, and I don’t understand why. It’s a defense of human rights, nothing more and nothing less.

My guess is that CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) will wind up wrapped in anonymizing layers to protect civil liberties in most jurisdictions: only the most repressive of regimes would force their populations to have all their transactions recorded on a central government ledger! That’s probably how cryptocurrency makes its way into the mainstream economy. That’s how people pay their rent, buy clothing and food, and everything else. CBDCs with privacy layers provided by third parties using cryptography to make private transactions with central bank digital cash.

In this scenario what becomes of Bitcoin? I think the answer is that Bitcoin doesn’t change much. Maybe they migrate to entirely green energy (please!) but other than that I think the honey badger don’t care.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: With Ethereum and then with Mattereum, you’re working within the current reality of crypto largely connected to TradFi. What are some of the strategies for making the terrain as secure as possible for the average person looking to improve their lot via crypto?

VG: There are a lot of ways to earn money with crypto. Many of them are what I would term ‘zero sum games’ – every dollar gained by one person was lost by somebody else. It’s often like a lottery. There are two major non-zero sum ways to make money with crypto –

The first is people printing their own money rather than having nation states do it for them. Any good anarchist should support this and the libertarians of course do too. If that ‘People’s coin’ turns out to be widely adopted and more people want to trade goods and services for it then its purchasing power increases. Bitcoiners believe in this model above all others.

The second is a little more complex: if it costs 1.4% to pay with VISA, and 0.4% to pay using Polygon, then 1% of the value of the transaction is there to be split between the buyer and the seller. If there are goods on sale and it’s $100 with VISA or $99 with crypto you are going to pay with crypto every single time.

For retail transactions, that’s a relatively small effect. Right now the hidden costs of payment processing are mostly silently borne by the merchants. But there are similar margins being claimed by third parties all the way through the financial system. They implement patterns of trade unchanged since the Age of Sail. Digitizing these archaic trade systems properly – it has to be done right – is going to put a couple of percent on global GDP through sheer efficiency. That’s only the first step, mind you.

RU: How does your more idealistic notion of a circular economy intersect with crypto? And since this is a site for those enthusiastic or curious about AI, how do you see current AI (if we can call it that) being a part of any potential transition?

VG: The second step of trade digitization is AI-based trade optimisation. Right now the world is massively damaged. Waste starves many people of resources: we grow roughly twice the amount of food required to feed the entire world and waste enough to feed billions. That’s just one example: usable electronics rotting in drawers and camping gear that hasn’t been used in years. Cars people no longer drive but cannot be bothered to sell. All of it.

So once trade is mostly-digital and mostly-sensible, then we can start optimizing. Well-documented machine readable descriptions of what things are so that they can be found, valued, bought, sold, recalled and regulated effortlessly – then we can start to restructure the fundamental patterns of trade in a way which is compatible with the survival of the poor and nature itself.

This might sound pretty abstract, but here’s what we’re building at Mattereum. Every significant object in your life – Gore-Tex jacket, camera, laptop, e-bike, couch, airfryer – will have a unique ID either in its electronics or on a tag. There is a blockchain record of those objects – a Wikipedia for items – where every single object has its own page. All the data on that page is machine-readable and legally warrantied. If any of the information is inaccurate, you can make a claim for damages.

The first object to be tagged this way is my camera. It’s not science fiction!

In our model of the future, when you sell an object to somebody else, usually an independent third party will take a look and verify the item’s condition before it is sold. That might be done by a bike shop or a camera shop or it could be a next-door neighbour. It could also be a fine art authenticator working for a Lloyd’s syndicate. It just depends. So goods can be bought and sold many times because you can always check what you are buying online and get reliable trustworthy data and cheap transactions: a global decentralized eBay which acts as a clearinghouse for all the stuff we’re done with and finds a good home for it.

What could that save on our environmental footprint? Probably 20% of all consumer goods manufacturing. It could easily be 50% once society has had a chance to adapt. Note that quality of life goes up: buy what you need, sell it again for almost exactly what you paid for it. Less waste, more of what you want when you want it. It’s like streaming music but for physical things. Not a sharing economy or a renting economy but a hyper-liquid second-hand economy.

AI can help in two different ways. The first is automated identification and condition reporting for physical items. Hold the toy in front of a camera and get an Asset Passport pre-populated with information about that toy line. It makes the whole scheme dramatically less labor-intensive.

The second way is optimizing what people have. Show the AI what you have and it can suggest things that you don’t use and should sell and also figure out things which you might like but do not currently have: a liquidity assistant helping to keep the markets moving. This sounds abstract, but one of our partner companies NeoSwap is using AI to build optimised barter networks so people can swap what they have for what they want even if there are dozens of people who all have to coordinate to make that exchange possible. It’s like magic.

RU: What I see with crypto is that average people see that wealthy people’s money makes money – and they want to do the same. They’re entering Casino Capitalism with high hopes and little data. Are you sympathetic to those who enter this arena purely to get some quick bucks?

VG: Bluntly, if US financial regulators had provided regulatory clarity about tokens ten years ago then we would be in an entirely different universe. Reg CF, Reg D and Reg A all provide regulated frameworks suitable for crowdfunding and other community-based fundraising. The legitimate projects raising funds could adhere to manageable SEC requirements to put their token projects on a secure legal basis, and the Ponzi schemes would have been unable to enter the market and compete against the legitimate projects. But without that regulatory clarity, the innovators were forced into legal gray areas, and it’s been a disaster. We needed more regulation early, not less. All kinds of seedy characters flooded into that gap and it really has been a betrayal of everything that I had hoped to achieve with my work in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Mattereum sat on its hands through not one but two bull markets in crypto and did not issue a token because the legal and regulatory structures were not mature enough to support a token issue on terms that we liked. This year we intend to issue a token on a fully regulated exchange in the European Union, playing by the rules. It should have been like that for everybody.

We’ve just announced a partnership with the Swarm Markets exchange to do things like splitting ownership of real estate into tokens – so you start with something like an industrial building and break the ownership up into thousands of tokens which are bought and sold on a regulated exchange by real estate industry professionals. It can be done for high-value cultural assets like fine art too, Mattereum has been working towards doing this for things like Stradivarius violins as part of a more general conservation strategy for fine instruments. We think the ability to transfer the ownership of heritage assets to tens of thousands of people is a good way of securing their long term future, as long as you can also get the governance right. A 300-year-old violin cannot be handled like an office block!

A lot of people in the blockchain industry have been chasing this vision for years. I would argue in fact that it is the original Ethereum vision from 2014 and 2015 which did not see the blockchain as existing outside of ‘the system’ in some kind of crypto utopia, but foresaw Ethereum as a mainstream part of everyday life particularly in business and commerce. That was always my vision for the future of Ethereum too.

Ethereum: The World Computer

RU: This sounds very TradFi. What about preserving what’s good about the cypherpunk intentions?

VG:  The ultra transparent nature of the blockchain is a great fit for business, but it does not serve the cypherpunk vision of a crypto-anonymous society particularly well at all. In the UK there is intense support for this vision of the blockchain from our judges and legal think tanks, and we feel that is 100% the right way forwards.

The Law Commission in the UK is laying out an agenda for legislation which stands up digital assets not just as a class of regulated financial assets, but as a new class of property: digital stuff you can own rather than just ‘a financial instrument on a new technology platform’. I feel like in time this new legal approach might sort out a lot of the horrible problems we have handling the internet in law: copyright, software licensing, control of personal data like images or click trails, all that might be covered by the same class of legal abstractions. 

But I 100% believe that cypherpunk pirate finance still needs to exist as a hedge against tyranny. That does not mean it has to be the dominant mode of finance using crypto technology. Rather, there should be a diverse environment with self-issued anarchist and libertarian tokens at one end, through to safe-as-houses blue chip regulated bond offerings from major financial institutions and even governments. We can’t afford to throw away either end of the market: everybody needs better transactional technology.

But this ponziconomy stuff is just a disaster. I really wish the whole token boom had happened inside of an equity crowdfunding framework under things like Reg D offerings rather than the mess we have now. And that’s the capability that this new EU-based partnership gives us.

Of course it did not have to be this way. The crypto industry could have established a credit rating agency, some kind of independent project review board, checks-and-balances to protect token buyers from unaudited smart contracts, rug pulls and unstable token designs. But that’s not what happened – a market failure to be studied by economists for the ages – and when you get a market failure that large, of course government steps in.

Credit: Tesfu Assefa

RU: Your ideas for saving the world sound pretty good. Of course, what actually occurs is likely to be messier even with the best intentions and the smartest actors.

But putting that aside, do you see anything in this bag of tricks for the precariat today in terms of immediate (in years not decades) relief? A lot of people feel stretched thin. They’re increasingly hostile to tech solutions, and they’re ready for populist revolutions… which tend to be quite authoritarian — either at inception or eventually.

I don’t even mean the wretched of the earth. Just the ordinary folks, say, in the US or Great Britain.

VG: Well, let’s talk about the wretched of the earth for a second first, then we can get on to the former middle classes. The rhetoric is that things are getting better for them. However as with unemployment statistics and inflation numbers the books are cooked. How do we define poverty? Is it really $1.90 a day? Is it $7.40 a day? It depends who you ask.

These folks are by-and-large seeing a ton of improvement in their lives: access to clean enough water, fertilizer to improve crop yields, gadgets like LED lights which displace kerosene, phones, the internet, all of that is helping. We’re climbing the stairs incrementally.

However at the end of that staircase there’s no landing: there’s a 40-meter drop into the abyss called climate change. Climate change brings drought or flooding, and that brings famine.

A reasonably stable one-acre farmer growing most of their family’s own food can expect slow, incremental quality of life improvements on the current trajectory. Most people agree on this. But then climate change comes and the land becomes unfarmable with crops dying unpredictably in the heat or the drought and suddenly those farms are completely wiped out, just like the dust bowl experience of America in the 1930s.

The poor farmers are the ones that climate change is most likely to kill in enormous numbers. They weigh on my mind constantly.

What can be done for the poor? Prevent climate change!

Now let’s turn our attention to the working class and middle class.

First up, working class and middle class are now the same class. What made the middle class the middle class is that their work could not be done by machines. Now that we have AI here and more AI coming over the horizon, everybody with a job is working class. It’ll take a generation or so for that shift to be felt fully but it is going to change everything. The middle class will rapidly find themselves even more disempowered and disenfranchised. The working class will have a “this is what we were telling you about” attitude to their new brethren. I don’t know what happens to the precariat and the gig workers, but I fear it comes down to: “Are you cheaper than a robot or not?” which is no way for a human to live. But it has been the experience of the industrial workers for centuries, and our lack of sympathy for their plight should be ringing in our ears now.

My writing has improved since I started feeding my copy through an AI system and asking it to edit. Shorter sentences, less commas. I’ve got maybe a million words of my own writing out there for a training data set: how long before the AI trained on my work is a replacement for me in many situations?

I view that as legacy, a way of scaling myself. But it’s also creating my own competitor. How weird does this get in ten years?

As for what is to be done, as the Irish say when asked for directions, “If I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

RU: Is there anything in all this that can be acted on now with rapid effect?

VG: Socialism as implemented in poorer societies has a bad habit of turning into genocide. I hate this but it is true. Socialism in affluent societies seems to work pretty well. The Scandinavian model is quite excellent. It secures human decency and avoids the extremely high personal and systemic financial costs of things like homelessness, delayed cancer treatment, untreated mental illness and similar problems which can be very inexpensive to prevent but hugely expensive in their later stages. The American system lets people crash through all the cheap-and-easy-fix stages of problems and right into the life destroying and budget wrecking late stages. This is unacceptable.

And I think that this is actually the way forward for us. There are a lot of questions about “what is the State?” How you answer that question shapes how you imagine the State helping people. I’m quite fond of “a prince is but a stationary bandit” as a general model, but social services are real, and the State does a lot more than steal. It also serves.

RU: OK so do you have a favorite model for what the state should be?

Mariana Mazzucato thinks of the State as being a kind of super-VC making 60-year bets on billion-dollar megaprojects and then reaping the rewards through tax revenue. In particular she points at Silicon Valley as a product of decades of defense spending on semiconductors and other primary technologies, on top of all the WW2-era codebreaking research on computation. Another common model is the idea that the State is there to maintain the rules of the game and ensure fair competition: a model rooted in concepts like antitrust legislation and consumer protection. A third model is that the State is kind of like a superparent. Germans used to call Chancellor Angela Merkel the Bundesmutter (Federal Mother).

I’d like to focus more on the idea of the State as an ‘insurer of last resort’. It has played that function in a truly spectacular way in the financial markets: the 2008 bailout damn near bankrupted entire countries and cost trillions of dollars. It’s probably the root cause of the inflation we are seeing now. “If we’re bailing out corporations, why not people?” runs a common logic. But it’s not the right logic: the bailouts arrive when the situation is at its most expensive to fix. Waiting for people to become homeless before getting them mental health treatment is the worst possible way to do things. We take that approach for everything: medicine by the emergency room, civil order by the gun, and ultimately peace only after war. If the State steps in to make sure that there’s enough money in the system to treat problems at the point where they are cheapest to treat, overall economic efficiency goes way, way up. Get the tooth filled, not crowned. Get the tooth crowned, not pulled. Get the tooth pulled when it’s rotten, not when it’s causing systemic infection. It’s not rocket science.

Same for homelessness and mental health treatment. I really am talking about insurance here, not a generic welfare mandate. I believe it’s so much cheaper to insure risks like major medical risks than to try to pile up enough money to pay: $50,000 for lifetime medical insurance, versus $2 million for a worst-case scenario expensive, rare, treatable illness.

And these systems don’t just operate at the national level. Friendly societies, ROSCAs, and many other structures exist to let people insure-and-invest together. The basic recipe is always the same: everybody pays money into a common pot, and if somebody has a major problem money can be taken back out again to help them. Exactly what the rules are varies, but it’s a kind of mini-institution which creates social solidarity where none previously existed. I’ve read estimates that as many as 40% of American men were members of such structures in the 19th century.

So that’s my suggestion. People who are scrambling for survival should look at the models from the old days, models that worked when life was hard, and update them for modern norms and problems. Pooling regular payments into shared pools which are carefully controlled and audited – or maybe theft-proofed using technology – has enormous creative power. My cryptographer friend Ian Grigg turned me on to the concept of the chama, which is like the bottom-up economic building block of Kenya. I look at that and think there’s basically no place in America which couldn’t use and adopt this model.

We have to rebuild bottom-up social power and I think it is a good idea to start there.

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