đťđśđ 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet
1h 35m
·
FUTURE FOSSILS
·
If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more â or at least mash âsubscribeâ on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!
Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.
Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.
It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage weâre doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal â and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And itâs well past time for us to move beyond a ânature good, tech badâ or âtech good, nature badâ duality â both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.
Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!
⨠Mentioned & Related Links:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owockiâs Green Pill PodcastMG on âvalue creationâ as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of âRealityâ by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow
â¨Support The Show:
â˘Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodesâ˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPalâ˘Buy the music (intro/outro: âOlympus Monsâ & âSonnet Aâ; episode codas âTransparentâ & âSignalâ) on Bandcampâ˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellersâ˘Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
â¨Related FF Episodes:
213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean EsbjĂśrn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
The episode đťđśđ 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet from the podcast FUTURE FOSSILS has a duration of
1:35:39. It was first published
More episodes from FUTURE FOSSILS
đđ˝âŠđ¤ 219 - Joshua Schrei on Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I.
This week marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I., a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast. This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called âSo You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powersâ â exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiatic mystery schools in order to provide us with the requisite self-mastery to wield tools like generative language models. Iâm honored to be part of the all-star crew lined up to co-facilitate this course and as part of our pre-game sync and prep, I met with Josh to talk about the forces weâve unleashed and how to live responsibly in a world where tech is, in Arthur C. Clarkeâs words, now undoubtedly âindistinguishable from magic.â We explore the need to pace ourselves and anchor novelty production in ecologies of accountability; what it means to raise kids well amidst the A.I. revolution; and why humans cannot seem to stop invoking power and powers greater than our understanding.
If you enjoy this conversation, join us âand several dozen other awesome people â from 4/18-5/16 to learn and grow together and answer the call to better ourselves in service of this great historical unfolding!
(Big big thanks to former Center for Humane Technology Innovation Lead Andrew Dunn, founder of The School of Wise Innovation, for everything youâve done to help inspire and organize all of thisâŚ)
Right after this course I will be in Denver for the 2024 ICON Future Human Conference and would love to see you there! Use my link to grab yourself a conference pass and spend 5/16-5/19 with me and folks like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Marianne Williamson, Ken Wilber, Jeremy Johnson, Layman Pascal, and many moreâŚ
â¨Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:
â˘Subscribe onSubstackorPatreonfor COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodesâ˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPalâ˘Buy the music onBandcamp. This episode features:
TĂĽlmodighed (from Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016)Gamma Pavonis (from Pavo: Music For Mystery)The Cartographers (from Get Used To Being Everything)â˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org pageand I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellersâ˘Browse and buyoriginal paintings and printsor email me to commission new work
â¨Mentioned & Related Links:
âModern culture is âahead of the one.â Modern culture is rushing to get somewhere.â
* Josh Schrei on Howl In The Wilderness Podcast Episode 120
Sam Arbesmanâs Cabinet of Wonders
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
Rick Rubin and Dan Carlin discuss magic
Michael Garfield w/ host Kiki Sanford on This Week In Science Episode 965
âInformation overload is a personal and societal dangerâ by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr
Future Fossils 172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity
Center for Humane Technology
The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
âScan Loversâ from How to Live in The Future by Michael Garfield at Boom Festival 2016
Wisdom 2.0 Summit
âThe Techno-Optimist Manifestoâ by Marc Andreessen
Iron John by Robert Bly
âThe Model Isnât The Territory, Eitherâ by Douglas Rushkoff
Darwinâs Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard Doyle
âChief Philosophy Officerâ by Peter Limberg
âThe Next Tech Backlash Will Be About Hygieneâ by Jonnie Penn at TIME Magazine
Douglas Rushkoff at Betaworks in 2023: âI Will Not Be Automatedâ
Zohar Atkins (Website, Twitter)
My comments on âHallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelsâ by Xu, et al.
âFor The Intuitivesâ (Part 1, Part 2) on The Emerald Podcast
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribeđđŹđ¸ď¸ 218 - Neil Theise on Complexity & Nonduality
Iâm honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity.
⨠Mentioned & Related Links:
Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwinâs Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)âThe King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scaleâ by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical PlatonismâMultiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Nowâ by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
â¨Support The Show:
â˘Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodesâ˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPalâ˘Buy the music on Bandcampâ˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellersâ˘Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
â¨Related FF Episodes:
14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribeđťđśđ 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet
If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more â or at least mash âsubscribeâ on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!
Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.
Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.
It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage weâre doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal â and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And itâs well past time for us to move beyond a ânature good, tech badâ or âtech good, nature badâ duality â both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.
Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!
⨠Mentioned & Related Links:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owockiâs Green Pill PodcastMG on âvalue creationâ as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of âRealityâ by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow
â¨Support The Show:
â˘Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodesâ˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPalâ˘Buy the music (intro/outro: âOlympus Monsâ & âSonnet Aâ; episode codas âTransparentâ & âSignalâ) on Bandcampâ˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellersâ˘Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
â¨Related FF Episodes:
213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean EsbjĂśrn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribeđŚââŹđŚđľđźââď¸ 216 - Jingmai O'Connor on Dead Birds & Living Paleontologists
This week I speak with Jingmai OâConnor (Staff Page | Instagram), Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles (a.k.a. Priestess of Dead Dino-Birds) at The Field Museum in Chicago, about the magnificent strangeness of Mesozoic flying reptiles, the perverse anthropology of paleontologists, and much else. Contrary to expectations for a show with âfossilsâ in its title, I donât ordinarily interview people who actually dig up prehistoric creatures, but as I make perhaps too obvious in this enthusiastic get-to-know-each-other session, I still care deeply for the treasured mysteries that lie in store beneath our feet and love the people who devote their lives to studying the ancient biosphere âeven if the systemâs crooked and we fight about as much as dinosaurs themselves.
Hereâs to Jingmai and her singular life and mind! Do yourself a favor and acquire her book When Dinosaurs Conquered The Skies, truly a treat for all ages, and then if you want to leap like Microraptor into the thicket of her publications you can scope her work on Google Scholar. (And shout out to her friends Rextooth, who do in fact make awesome dino comics.)
â¨Support The Show:
â˘Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!â˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.â˘Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: âOlympus Monsâ & âSonnet Aâ) on Bandcamp.â˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and Iâll get a cut.â˘Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!
â¨PLUS! New Single & Music Video âIndecisionâ from The Age of Reunion
Listen on Bandcamp/Spotify or Watch on YouTube/Instagram.
This one's a Jon-Brion-inspired riff on the phenomenology of near-death experiences and the neurophysiology of 5MEO-DMT, a quick trip up above the plane of normal waking life to see the panoply of possibility exfoliating from the Godhead in each moment. How do you choose your next life? (Trick question.)
Join my small but gorgeous mob by preordering the entire album at Bandcamp (or subscribe on Substack/Patreon to have it all at once right now), and then go talk to integrate your experience with Daniel Shankin.
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribeđŤđŠđźâđťđ 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs
This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence â new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges. And the time for this work is definitely NOW. As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet. This is the century âand the decadeâ in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another. And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism. In the 1940s, the message was âLoose lips sink ships.â Perhaps the message for the 2020s is âCognitive biases spread mind viruses.â
If youâve followed me for a while, youâve likely read my 2017 science fiction short story âAn Oral History of The End of âRealityââ, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together. We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt â to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale â and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard. 2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense: fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality. Iâd be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology: a sane and healthy global brain.
Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. Iâll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.
⨠Mostly-Complete List of Citations:
Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)
â¨Support My Work:
â˘Subscribe onSubstack orPatreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!â˘Make one-off donations at@futurefossils on Venmo,$manfredmacx on CashApp, or@michaelgarfield on PayPal.â˘Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: âOlympus Monsâ & âSonnet Aâ) on Bandcamp.â˘Buy the books we discuss atthe Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and Iâll get a cut.â˘Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!
This is a public episode. If youâd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe