Using AI for Countercultural Art and Global Transformation with Steve Fly

Steve Fly is a countercultural musician, writer, and gadfly who is incorporating AI into his creative process. He mentioned taking some inspiration from our publisher Ben Goertzel and his ‘Hyperseed-1’ theories so I decided to interview him about how he thinks about it and what he’s doing.

Steve James Pratt, aka Fly Agaric 23, aka Steve Fly has worked and lived as a DJ/turntablist, drummer and poet. He has worked with Indian composer Surinder Sandhu, jam band supergroup Garaj Mahal, and The Gregory James Band (as turntablist). He toured England, the Netherlands, and Germany as a drummer and all-round helper to John Sinclair (RIP), the legendary poet and co-creator of the revolutionary early punk/metal band The MC5. You can find Steve’s full musical biography here. Steve was an associate producer of the 2003 film Maybe Logic, and musical director for the Cosmic Trigger play (2014), performed live at the 26th Annual James Joyce Symposium in Antwerp (2017). He recently performed at the Brainwash Philosophy Conference in Amsterdam (2024). He also makes weird sounds with his mouth. For some background and context, see my (badly) transcribed-by-ear interview with Saul Paul Sirag about some physics principles and structural foundations behind RAW’s Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy.

RU Sirius: How do you view your creative project (in the broadest lifelong sense) as a process that benefits from integrating current AI systems?

Steve Fly: The latest iteration of my quarter-century (and counting) of research into Robert Anton Wilson’s Tale of the Tribe is a collaboration using some AI tools. Tale of The Tribe is a mountain range whose size and scope requires training to traverse, hill-climbing toward coherence. So far I’ve produced over 65 stanzas with corresponding audio. The first iteration is structured on 60 stanzas to represent the 60 vertices of the Buckminsterfullerene. This is prompted from a line in Ezra Pound’s Cantos “buckie has gone in for structure.” The structure of the poem/album is a tribute to Buckminster Fuller, whom RAW admired and studied with, and it snugly sits as one of the 13 primary inspirations in the way RAW conceived/perceived the universe.

These first 60 stanzas are a proof of concept, to be built on in the next iteration. The goal is for each stanza to also function as a concept for a new core ontology, the totality of the 60 stanzas. As Ben put it: “an overlapping yet somewhat diverse set of perspectives on the core ontological concept”.

RU: Tell Mindplexers a little bit about this Tale of the Tribe. How does your interest in our man Ben’s Hyperseed-1 intersect with your project?

SF: As I understand it, ‘the tale of the tribe’ was originally a phrase to describe a modern epic in verse, a poem including history. The late Robert Anton Wilson (secret hero of these musings) outlined his interpretation of the tale of the tribe as a lineage of thinkers, or innovators of one kind or another, who RAW felt helped to describe his way of perceiving/conceiving world. Sadly RAW died before completing the book project, leaving a riddle to ponder: what do Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, Nietzsche, Ernesto Fenollosa, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Alfred Korzybski, Bucky Fuller, Claude Shannon/Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, Orson Welles and INTERNET all have in common? You’ll find out!

Jumping forward a quarter-century—after pondering this question and tackling some of the coursework, and now lit up by Hyperseed-1—I revisited the tale of the tribe with new tools and perspectives.

My study into RAW’s tale of the tribe (a new global epic poem including history for all humanity, the planet and sentient beings), is adjacent to emerging outlines for core ontology knowledge bases beneficial to all humanity.

RU: You’ve done some work with the counterculture hero John Sinclair (RIP). What would you say are the current and future countercultural potentialities of AI to become a tool of liberation and anti-authoritarianism?

SF: My suspicions concern the benchmarks set by human countercultural ‘goodies,’ such as Leary, Wilson, Sinclair, Burroughs, Ken Kesey, and our beloved musical warriors like Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and hundreds more.

For AI, or AGI (or better yet BGI (Beneficial General Intelligence) to become a tool for liberation and anti-authoritarianism, the training sets and models must better reflect the alternative underground methods and practices that, for me, primarily utilize and innovate art and crafts, driven not by greed or super-ego, not for obscene profit but against the odds and by the will to communicate, share and express openly. Innovation. Outsmart ’em.

Sinclair, for example, took a vow of poverty, as did Allen Ginsberg, in sync with the Buddhist-Taoist conception but inspired by the American beats, not directly by ancient mystics. The practical—or impractical—results of such a bold decision are tenfold: dependence on occasional stipends, gifts, good friends, and community to help support such an unfashionable mantra as, “I don’t give a fuck about the money, just get on with the work, give me challenges”. Perhaps some of those challenges are AI potentialities?

I sense an adjacency with the tendency of decentralized, rotational and open source systems to prove efficient, less impactful on the environment and less damaging to human psyche and society. This is my hunch. AGI to ASI (Artificial Super-Intelligence) looks impossible without BGI (Beneficial General Intelligence). And to understand the benefits, in the human universe, look to our fabulous innovators, scientists, artists and thinkers who demonstrably and most obviously worked for good – for the betterment of all around the world humanity – with incredible feats of bravery and brilliance and discipline and daring without violence. Livingry not killingry.

This latest wave of so-called ‘dark gothic accelerationist MAGA’ shows little alignment with the vision of BGI, clearly and explicitly defined by SingularityNET and Mindplex, standing as an alternative to Big Tech and killingry, an open invitation to benefit all. Maybe the smartest and least violent strategy concerns superabundance. Sufficient food, clothing, shelter and leisure time so everybody gets along without squabbling. Throw in some universal basic income – why not? If the resources of planet earth were fairly and equally distributed, we would all be millionaires. The (six) philosophical commitments/hypotheses underlying Hyperseed-1 in Ben’s post are to my mind correlated with RAW’s general philosophical outlook, and so to The Tale of the Tribe, in some sense.

RU: Tell us again what you’re doing, and how are you going to help enact the idealistic version of AI, ASI, BGI and all of it? And feel free to give us a SingularityNET pitch for support.

SF: It’s Alchemai 60/60 – Sixty Visions of Beneficial General Intelligence is a multimedia project, a contemporary ‘tale of the tribe’, a poetically-charged core ontology for the age of BGI. Pairing 60 original stanzas with 60 musical pieces, co-created using a range of LLMs and generative audio tools. Alchemai includes comparative analysis of the AI tools, evaluating their potential to efficiently communicate solutions for the social and ecological poly-crisis, guided by SingularityNET’s definition of Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI). The final work will be presented as a website and album. Tanmoy is my proof-of-concept.

I’m also fortunate to guest on Rotifer, the new album by Garaj Mahal, a band who (much like Joyce, and RAW) help to raise the bar of what art and human intelligence can accomplish. Let the fingers do the talking. Garaj Mahal are worthy of consideration by Mindplex and SingularityNET as leading-edge musicians unifying a wide array of traditions into their unique virtuoso performance by example.

From my limited analysis of the state of the world right now, SingularityNET are at the vanguard of technology and scientific innovation, bringing some heart to the emergent BGI and ASI games. They have a road map, and human ingenuity to give any of the Big Tech bros a run for their money, or a triple-jump for their tokens. Efficiency, alignment, timing, integrity and synchronicity are paramount.

As a part of the rag-tag nomadic tribe of independent artists and thinkers who have spent decades immersed in the open community of bands, festivals, and happenings, I heed the call.

I’d ultimately like to see SingularityNET infused with more analogue arts: live music, new poetry challenges and multimedia happenings, locally, all across the planet – humans exhibiting what AI can’t, setting new benchmarks for creativity and ingenuity. These real-life events can be rapid prototyping sessions, gathering virtuoso artists to celebrate human beings and beingness, while sending a five-finger nose-wave to those conglomerates incapable of pulling off such organic gathering of self-organizing individuals. Get your dream team fit, it’s showtime.

Furthermore, the kind of ‘mutualist syndicalist’ flavour of the RAW community, composed of such wide-ranging and generally good-hearted characters, can also be defined as a gathering of self-owning ones, a temporary affinity group, for the most part, currently concerned with propiracy or Operation Mindfix. Entities gathering together to cause benefit to others, the planet, all life on earth. You know who you are. Imagine what we are capable of if we can synchronize our efforts, temporarily on occasion, to really go for it and bring about the RAW enlightenment (for want of a better term, but, it has light in it which is what we need right now). Count me in. Let’s fix and build and benefit. And to those who may have fallen for the greed and the ogre, and who secretly admire our man and have taken what he taught and weaponized it for obscene profits and general enslavement, the hidden light will be revealed. Let’s do justice to Synergetics.

As my collaborative AI research project Tanmoy demonstrates, there are tantalizing avenues for research at the intersection of geometry (Buckminster Fuller’s geometry in particular) and crystallography, origami and tactile physical modelling (hyperbolic crochet), hologrammic prose, music, and the ideogrammic method.

The goal of this research is meeting the challenge posed by RAW: ‘What do they all have in common with the internet?’, plus the parameters and requirements laid out by Ben in Introducing Hyperseed-1: A Fairly Minimal “Core Ontology” in particular the six aspects listed under ‘Philosophical Perspective Underlying Hyperseed-1’.

As Ben humbly points out, these are experimental concepts, a “semi-formal” or “initial abstract knowledge and perspective guide”. I must try to echo this sentiment when contemplating such heady projects as AGI, BGI, ASI. I personally find Ben’s communication style similar to RAWs in its operationalist language and cautionary approach to oversimplified conclusions, as all good scientists exhibit. Sadly this all too often gets overtaken by the unnecessary hype, marketing, sensationalism and absolutism.