Shifting people's thinking is one thing, but then also the actual conditions in which we live in are systemically much more of a factor, I think, in those sort of things. So we can talk all day to each other about the problem without really getting at how we can change an entire society from the ground up. That's not usually how this happens, how it works. History rolls forward.
One thing is built on top of another as a reaction to that thing before. We're talking about 30, 40, 50 years where it's the complete right turn. How does that happen? And I don't have an answer to that, but that's a question I'm asking.
You're one of the questions I'm asking. And if I was going to criticize the thing I'm doing with the Casket, the one problem I do have is that although I don't want to end things with the sort of traditional, and here's why it's actually okay part of the documentary or the essay. I recognize these problems, but I'm not working towards the like, and here's how we fix it, because I don't have that. I like to have that.
I don't. Greetings Future Fossils. I'm your host, Michael Garfield, welcoming you to episode 230. The podcast explores our place in time this week.
I'm welcoming Jamie Curcio back under the show who appeared for the first time in episode 195 on AI Art. This is our first one-on-one for the show in which we're discussing his fallen cycle podcast and a tales from when I had a face. Jamie is just a remarkably prolific, interesting, strange, esoteric thinker with whom I identify very deeply. And I'm delighted to pull this one out of the editing queue to share with you now in a week where it feels like a deep, loamy, profound, numinous, challenging time for a lot of people.
But it's a good time to look at philosophy and art, I think. This week on the show we ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power? Where does that power come from?
To whom do we sell our stories? And again, I can't think of a more appropriate time to ask these questions than in the wake of United States presidential election where I keep hoping every four years that people will realize this time finally a country of over 300 million people cannot possibly continue to invest our future, to invest our stories in the outcomes of these spectacles. But maybe this time we realize that we do feed powerful beings in realms beyond our control with this displacement of our own narrative agency. And so yeah, it's a great conversation on the world behind the world.
Lincoln, Jamie's writing, and his game world building in the domain he calls mythpunk with the equally eldritch, complex systems of wicked problems of climate action he explores in his nonfiction essays. Studying that link, we can trace the outlines of the emerging 21st century religions, the reinterpretation of axial traditions suited to the digital era, the metamodern revival of land-based animistic traditions, and even weirder novel forms that arise at the end of one world and the efflore essence of so many others. We link between Dionysus and Jesus, we talk about the festival as a pocket lips, of course the bright side of dark ages. It's a good one, I'm glad to share it with you.
And to announce that this is the third episode before future fossils rebrance as humans on the loop at the beginning of December. I have 22 episodes in the can for that one. I am excited to share with you. You can get a teaser for some of those themes in this conversation.
Thinking about prompting AI as casting spells and the roles of parenting and of accountability in community, storytelling and decision-making in a collective sense and the way that we reconstitute ourselves in an age of opaque and magical technologies. So a very cool project. At which point I will continue to record future fossils episodes for periodic release on the substack and Patreon members-only feeds and I'll start hosting Patreon Live Community Falls starting in December as well. If you want or were in a minute engagement with me and the other awesome people in this community, now's a great time to sign up at microgarfield.substack.com or patreon.com slash microgarfield and thanks to everyone who has been helping pay for groceries and electricity for the last several years and helping me keep this show going.
As a listener supported program, stubbornly resistant to ad revenue. So with that, everybody, thanks and enjoy this conversation with the weird, the wonderful Jamie Curcio. Jamie, welcome on board. Thanks for being so super extremely patient with me as we have rescheduled this approximately 500 times.
Yeah, I'm happy we're able to finally connect to the same place as well at the time. Yeah. So for folks who don't have the inside track on this, you appeared in one of the most personally referenced episodes of this show ever of 195, which was our sort of fellowship of the Ring conversation two or two and a half years ago about artists using generative AI and where we sat on some of the moral complexities surrounding that. And I'm not going to belabor that point in our conversation today because we're in a different world.
But I do want to sink some hooks into that conversation at different points in talking about the projects that you've got at the top of your multivalent life feed right now. But first, introduce yourself to people because really we only did that in passing, unless I had you on the show. Sure. Yeah.
My name is Jamie Cercio. My book is called James Cercio, which is another story, but as indicated, I've got a kind of jack-of-all-trapes thing going on, which turns out to have been at least partially undiagnosed in nerd divergence. But there is a through line through most of my work, which is that I could tell this story five different ways and it would be true, but framed a little differently. And so that connection really in all my work is it's all founded in narrative and storytelling, but the way that narrative and storytelling actually affect the world that we live in.
So when I was in high school, I started playing role-playing games. And that was actually one of the way that started making friends really. I was kind of a little child and kind of a loner when I was young and then became much more social through telling stories with people about make-believe characters that we were playing. And then, I guess, a couple years later, someone my mom knew gave her a huge collection of those of Campbell lecture videos, BHS, and I watched through all of them.
And there's certainly some room for criticism in terms of the approach of the monomyth, but in terms of introducing kids to all the stuff that's out there, I definitely felt a debt of gratitude from that because it got me into Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Buddhism and Taoism and Westernist heresism and all sort of things, which many of which I've already started to get into, but I think he helped get me on that track. And then college, I started a psych major and then I was asked by the head of the department to become a philosophy major because I was engaging in so many debates with the professors about the role of culture and systems and the construction of mental health, diagnostics and that sort of thing, which was always, yes, that's true, but let's get back to the DSNR where they're- We have a place for people like you. Exactly, for the philosophy department, go there and talk to them around your round table or whatever. And by the time I graduated, I co-founded a kind of art collective media production company with a bunch of people I knew from college at Bard called the Volvog Media Network and the plan there was a due work for corporations by day, pharma companies and stuff like that.
And then here's the money we made from that to fund the work that was actually more interesting or more useful, but for whatever reason that stuff seems to be the stuff that makes money and wastes very much of it. And that kind of held for 20 years in a way, like I've been involved in a ton of different startups of various kinds and less sort of media, well trans media, our journalism sort of space, unfortunately, a lot of those, especially ones from like the 2000s and even some of the 2010s are just gone now because the internet supposedly, everything happens there for forever, but in practice it's gone so fast. Maybe on a hard drive somewhere, but so yeah, it's been the basic trajectory, but of course in there, play music, I write books, I go from comics and so it seems like it's all over the place, but it all does loop back to that point about narrative. There is an overlap also, which we might get to a little bit about.
Well, there's an inflection point for me. It happened to really come to point because I picked up a book on Friends' bookshelf, D'Wanda's Thousand Years in Non-Minute History. I don't know if you've heard of it or not. I haven't read it.
It's a good book, but it just, it completely flipped the script on me because up to that point I was very immersed in monastic idealism, point of view, like everything crease back to thought in the mind and concepts and it shifted to framing things in terms of non-reductives, largely non-linear systems-based perspective, but materialism, but not the reductive materialism. You cut up the world into these little atoms. It's the opposite version of materialism. It's a system that's complexity, sort of basis materialism, but in that book, in and of itself, what made it wasn't the only thing, but it was definitely turning points for me.
And so that's become the non-non-fiction part of my work. It's been, I have really influenced by that. So I guess now I'm a quote-unquote materialist. But not in the way that a lot of people seem to think that means.
Yeah, so just to establish where I see us, you and I have had now years of moral support or solidarity, just for folks that are only listening to this, you have a tattoo of the intero bang on your arm. And also, those faded, you can see the tree of life on their tooth and arm. Yeah, so I don't know if I ever told you this, but when I was in college, my buddies said that if I were a punctuation mark, I would be an exclamation point. I said, but I feel like a question mark.
And at the round the time that I was studying integral philosophy and starting to think in a meta-perspective frame. So that's actually how I discovered that the intero bang even existed. Because I was like, what is that thing? That if you turn it one way, it looks like a question.
If you turn it another way, it looks like an answer. And there's something about that. I see, riddle through your work. I just want to read real quickly a couple of brief excerpts from a piece that you have pinned to the top of your medium account.
You have this piece that's the end note from your book tales from when I had a face called Investing in the Unknown. People who listen to the show a lot know that I am deeply preoccupied with this issue of legibility, which I guess links into your point about being interested in systems and the language of system science, system thinking and how the vantage lines that converge on the horizon where I think you and I both meet intellectually is in the fact that horizon is something we can never reach and that the models that we use, the economic frameworks that we use are always missing something. And so you say it really elegantly here. The occult science and art arose from the same spring, not uncertainty but uncertainty.
Each begins with retaining space for the unknown. And then later, you say there is no solid ground under our feet and it is our beliefs that often obscure how precarious our vantage point is and what a drop there is beyond it, even as they lead us right to the edge. I've heard you on and will link to your conversation with the host of weird studies, J.M. Phil.
Yeah, the work that you were doing then. And there is this piece of reclaiming art in the Age of Artifice, the book where you're talking about symbols and how the symbol is that kind of mask for a Jeff loves Gillis de Lewis and this notion of the rhizome and how everything is connected to everything else behind. But that we can never really tease out all of the subterranean rhizomal relationships. And so when you say investing in the unknown, it's funny because it has that quality that like my buddy Tom Morgan who came on the show for 221 used to write for sapient capital about how the real high yield investments are in places that other people aren't investing because they think it's crazy.
So yeah, the yarn ball here has to do with the way that I appreciate how you use myth, not as artifice that functions as a vehicle for propaganda or moralizing, but as a way to draw our attention to the sort of transcendental mystery within which the systems of knowledge that we weave together are basically just a raft upon this oceanic mindfuck that I feel is captured so well in the punctuation mark you have tattooed on your arm. So yeah, it's an element of Buddhism in that too, the whole the raft gets you from one side to the other. I hate to mention him, but it's funny when you mentioned the terror bang, the first in the Kingdom Mind was Alistair Curly's essay, The Soldier in the Hunchback, which I haven't read in years, but I remember one of the central premise of it was that is that an immediate kind of back and forth between the like this assertion and then the question and the assertion and the question and it gets stuck on one because it is like the becoming thing, you can always deepen that and find other complexities to tight other things. So when you stop, it's not the thing stopping, it's use of pink.
It's always more working behind it. The whole mask all the way down idea. As I was being named, I was on JF on the bridge studies, maybe a little bit rhetorical in a way. I wasn't caught that though, or saying that everything is artificial and that it's all masked all the way down.
But I was trying to make this point that when you think you found the final thing, that's the best sign that you haven't in a way. So I sort that while at the same time, like it's I'm not saying like we should try to be artificial, it's the opposite in a way. It's you trying to find the deeper mask, but also recognizing the sort of, I don't want to say futility because the point isn't to find the end and that's the shift that has to happen ultimately as it comes to the process. So yeah, it's funny because after staying up listening to your new podcast until four in the morning last night, we're recording this kind of hot on the heels of the theatrical release of Alien Romulus.
And so I was like binging on YouTube all the fan videos about all of the recent Alien films. And so I'm going to apologize in advance for making this connection because it's oh my God, he's talking about this again. But one of the things that I really appreciated about the film Prometheus that so many people panned it for being obscenely over explanatory, like even Eric Wargo says like they took this amazing mystery of this fossilized spaceship Alien Pilot and then they gave it this sort of pornographic, well, this is what's going on kind of account to which is one of the things that I love whenever I can disagree with Eric because it's rare to find someone about with which I agree so much. But I actually think that there's that scene in the film where they finally find the engineer of the species that ostensibly created humankind through biotechnology and they go to ask it there Peter Wayland goes to ask the question.
And originally in the script, there was a whole conversation that happened there where great answers are revealed and they cut it all out and the encounter that they have with their God or their creator being is of querying a silence. The behavior of this thing then responds instead with shocking and inexplicable violence. And so love that because contrary to the way people typically interpret this film, I think though it seems as though it explains some things that people enjoyed being left unknown that Wargo's problem with this is John Keats's problem with Newton, the unwieving the rainbow with the science of optics and that not that I always side with Richard Dawkins, but I appreciate Dawkins's point in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that actually answering these questions only draws us further into an even deeper mystery and that Prometheus was a film made by a director in the last act of his career and was like stubbornly refusing to give people what they wanted out of a prequel. It was like, no, I'm just going to throw all this weird random crap at you and you're just going to have to deal with this explosive expansion to the lore and the speculation and anyway, bringing it back to your work.
There's this tension between your non-fictional writing and I want to get into the three part essay that you wrote on the cascade and climate change, even though it's a total bummer. And how you hold that tension with the kind of stuff that you're doing with the fall and cycle mythos fiction podcast. And it strikes me as a really important kind of diastole and systole in sense making this mystery. I hope to just give you a chance to riff on that before we actually address the specific work objects.
Or you want to talk about it? Yeah. It's something I noticed only in the last five or six years, but there's been a pattern for quite a long time where I will work on one non-fiction project and then fiction project and back and forth. And they tend to mirror each other in some ways.
And it wasn't intentional for at least for a while until I realized a lot of things I was working on in essays that became narrative machines were also at the roots of party at the world's end and with tales it was masked. So I have been in dialogue with myself with that and I have those tensions in myself. I don't have tensions quite the right word, but it is a dialectic, right? Whenever I go too far into non-fiction I tend to feel like I'm reducing things and trying to define them and saying that and give being led astray by that and then fiction opens up in a way and that's something I appreciate about it.
But then it can also start to feel navel-gazy when I feel spent too much time just working in the fiction space, which may be as well I've come full circle and way back to role playing games as a way to interact with people and engage with people with these things and try to bring some of the kind of quote unquote deeper level stuff into a game or what we call a game and also have that level of surprise and engagement with other people. It felt for me the earth. It's funny actually I agree with you about the way it raises more questions than answers and really whenever it answers something it tends to be in a way that just raises more questions. If I have a criticism of it's much more of the characters their motivations don't make a whole lot of sense to me in some places but a different criticism.
Yeah, actually just in passing and just to like button that thing up before we move on when Evan Snyder and I talked about the Ridley Scott prequels back in 2017, the sympathetic interpretation I'm willing to give them is that these are people that live so deep inside of an advanced technological infrastructure inside of an opaque, machinic hyper-capitalistic, hyper-modernistic domain that you would frankly expect them to be idiots. There is a sense in which the more we become embedded in and dependent on the hyper-object of a technium or whatever the less capable we seem to be at fending for ourselves. And so it made sense in a way to plunk that kind of classic horror trope of people just making extremely stupid decisions in this because that's where we are and that's actually something that you talk about in your non-fictional writing about climate change and how hard it is for us to make the behavioral changes that we need to make. And then also it speaks to this thing about agency and what agency really means like accountability is relative to our ability to account, right?
And when we're dealing with forces that are beyond our understanding the question of responsibility or our self-determination becomes really weird and tangled. And so this is where I would love to draw into the orbit of the podcast. I'll start by just letting you set the scene for however much you feel like you want to lay out in front of this very trippy story, which for the record, again, whether you're talking about climate change or you're talking about tree spirits and I love the term like myth-punk world building. There's a disclaimer in your show that I really appreciate which is that it may lead to psychosis.
It's right there. I felt myself teetering last night at 3 a.m. listening to this stuff. And I think that's actually like the labels on the can and that's a feature.
It's not a bug. Right. Yeah. It's a joke, but also not.
Yeah. So basically what I'm doing is creating audio editions of the stories I've written so far for the fallen cycle. And then my hope is that by the time we get to the end of the party at the world's end, there'd be enough of an interest legitimized continuing to do the many more stories we've been developing. I like use role-playing games more as a springboard.
It's not like I'm interested in being like exactly what happened in the session, trying to transcribe it. That's not interesting to me. I'm sure it's not interesting to the average listener, but in terms of developing characters and arcs and so on, it's a great way to spitball. It's like having a writer's room with rules of the sort.
So that's my hope with it ultimately. But yeah, right now the story that we're dealing with this tale from when I had a face, we've taken on the entirely mad plan of having it all set to original or semi-original soundtrack, which Dave Bessel's been really helping me out with that. He has a lot of soundtrack work in, but still it's what the tale's been going to have to face this probably going to be, I don't know, seven hours, six hours in total runtime. It's like a lot of music to produce.
So we'll see. We're going to try to keep it up so far. It's been going better than expected with that. But with part of the world's end, music has integrated the story in a way because it's a story about these sort of people who are labeled as terrorists and they started a band basically touring on the road after escaping from that.
And so on and we're kind of hijinksy in a way that then tells us much more somber. So it'll be a change of tone, but I'm not sure yet how we're going to integrate music with that because it might be fun to have a whole kind of band performance of some of the tracks of that like fictional band play, but I'll see. It's pretty high. Cool.
So when we're talking about, again, as you put it, the various sort of domains of human knowledge emerging from this, or whatever, to spring, an unconscious, there is, I don't know how much of this story you want to lay plain for people, but I say this as what I hope is really high praise that Stephen Bachelor in one of his books on Buddhism said that we misuse the term originality that we use it to mean that someone has done something the world has never seen before. Whereas, analogically, it means that through this person's work, we can see into the origin. And I think there are ways that both in the decisions you've made in actually telling the story, like the way that you've chosen tools and the sort of operation of the storytelling, but then also in the symbolism of this work that you are aiming, like we were saying earlier, one through the roots of the world tree and into the black, lo-me mysterious stuff. And so, yeah, however much you feel cool guiding us into that world.
Basically, the format for it is starts out with a grandmother telling a story to her granddaughter of a very fantastical kind of alternate history to what her mother tells origins in her grandmother's story is. And so it becomes this ongoing kind of dichotomy between the story that she's told by society and world around her in when the 2000s, I think, is when that section of the book is set in historically. So, and her grandmother's story, which is like occurs in Alter on the Second World, which is the sort of juncture point between the land of dreams and land of the dead and our world. So the first half of the book is framed around that ongoing shoot, the young girl gets older, her grandmother gets older, her grandmother dies.
And then the story kind of flips, we haven't got there yet, but that's when it becomes more about ICHES story because her grand is passed on. And now she has to rectify these sort of different sort of myths into the world that she's living in and how that goes. And of course, it goes tragically because of the story. So yeah, there are some kind of recognizable figures in this, or motifs, one being the invocation of Lilith, one being the notion of a lot of Yeah, spirits bound into a tree, like Aku, in Samurai Jack, or Hexis in Ferngully, like this kind of ongoing motif.
And then also that there's something about, like, I'm probably not as steeped in mythological literature as you are. So my comparisons might be a bit impoverished, but I was getting strong vibes of Tom Robbins as jitterbug perfume or, you know, American gods in the sense of the way that live in relationship with beings that depend on our service, our attention, our sacrifice. And yeah, I'd like to hear who do you think you are feeding with the work of this storytelling? That's a hard question to answer for me for whatever reason.
I can say that those figures are talking about do they become delineated much more clearly in part in the world den, to a certain extent. And then hopefully in later stories where there are 12 of them, they're called the Fallen, and they are like gods in American gods in some ways, or the manless in Sandman. It was definitely inspiration that it's gone beyond that in some ways. But I started out with the 12 astrological signs in the triple cities of the Zodiac under the feed that, and then looking at the pattern of kind of popular characters, I don't have to listen in front of me, but I made a kind of master list of fictional characters who correspond to each of the archetypes, each of the Fallen.
So then they both, this will become part of it, or is becoming part of the system for their RPGs, they have these sort of archetypes that you can reap in body. And also this idea of the Fallen in particular are basically juncture where spirits in the void in the underworld influence certain people. And then those people gain certain benefits from that influence, but there's also a certain kind of curse to it in a way too, because their own story then becomes entrapped in the underworld and feeds that archetype makes that archetype more powerful, as opposed to their spirit being recapitulated in the cycle, which is a Buddhist, Tibetan sort of thing where normally a human spirit goes into the land of the dead and is heard by one of the spirits called Afean, and they basically eat your story, and they're sustained by it. But then at least according to them, it's a benefit to us as well, because that story would keep us stuck in the land of the dead, but without being burdened by the story, you can return to a new life and be recycled in that way.
So take on reincarnation, but of course it's almost the opposite of reincarnation, or at least I guess you say American or Western version of reincarnation, because there's no you that's being recycled, there's no memories that are being recycled. It's Tibetan, the grasping, three cycles. I want to dip out here, because there's an interesting through line to a point that you make in this three part essay. I remember when you were writing this, and you were posting about the dance you were engaged in with the abyss of taking so much more time to read climate science briefings and research, and this kind of stuff puts you in this position that people like Josh Shri talks about the role of the seer in cultures throughout history and the marginal identity of the people that are willing to peer over the edge.
And there's a point in the first part of Cascade where you say, we don't have leaders, we have vested interests, that is financial ones. In fact, must be considered first and foremost in any discussion of solutions. It must also be assumed that many so-called solutions entailed their own devil's bargain, particularly when it is sold to us by a corporation. And so I know that I think back to the conversation I've had with Chris Ryan in 178, the way that even he in a very mundane secular sense as an anthropologist is looking at human institutions as these Lovecraftian entities in a similar way, the beings to which we are selling our stories to be corporations being their own sort of form of AI.
Before an L11 was a thing. Right. So yeah, this is just an invitation to dig out a little more context on the climate work and how people feel through a kind of theoretical slash emotional resonance. Yeah.
I mean, these two things we've already linked. That's a challenging thing to talk about, but also just emotionally. But it's just I had to talk about it because for so long I've been frustrated by the fact that there are a lot of really great advances that are being made, especially in terms of solar energy and awareness about climate change and that sort of thing. But it's not only that it's not happening fast enough, but it's also that there's sort of disconnect between technological or engineering solutions or looking at it as an engineering problem and then recognizing what we do as a society and the sort of inertia of the systems that we have in place, the simplest version of it being like, you can think what you think about having gasoline running a car and having a car and all that sort of stuff, but you have to get to work and you're going to get your groceries.
And that's what the environment provides for you to work within. And perhaps you as an individual might be able to make certain sacrifices to not do that, but to silently that's not viable, obviously. And so it's like, where does the time you throw out with that sort of problem? Obviously, cars aren't alone, the single kind of silver bullet solution for climate change, but especially in America where the kind of the culture and the technology of the car is so central, like in places where a lot of places that could be better public transit and then there's some restrictions on that are systemic from their ulcer to the fact that culturally people a lot of times will not take a couple of transit, even when it is available.
So shifting people's thinking is one thing, but then also the actual conditions in which we live in are systemically much more of a factor, I think, in those sort of things. So we can talk all day to each other about the problem without really getting at how we can change an entire society from the ground up. That's not usually how this happens, how it works. History rolls forward.
One thing is built on top of another as a reaction to that thing before. We're talking about 30, 40, 50 years where it's the complete right turn. How does that happen? And I don't have an answer to that, but that's the question I'm asking or one of the questions I'm asking.
If I was going to criticize the thing I'm doing with the Casket, the one problem I do have is it, although I don't want to end things with the sort of traditional, and here's why it's actually okay sort of part of the documentary or the essay. I recognize these problems, but I'm not working towards the like, and here's how we fix it, because I don't have that. I'd like to have that, but I don't. Well, I don't know if you heard the conversation I had with Tim Morton on the show recently about their new book, Hell, in search of a Christian ecology, but you cite Tim and you cite this idea of micro objects in this essay.
And as you put it in the third part of this essay, consequently, even when free to act in all the ways we can, our array of choices may present an incredibly restricted and conditioned actual range of motion that you say, we need to recognize that the solution can't simply be additive, despite the fact that it seems common sense that if I change certain behaviors and sort of my friends and neighbors on the line, a sort of top up effect must take hold. There's something going on here. It's like this question of the Tim points to the mythic structure of Christianity and how we can leverage the affordances of the Christian mythos in a postmodern era to reclaim a felt sense of the sacred that overwhelms the incentives and the prioritization of trying to find technological and economic solutions. I see it everywhere in your work that when we're talking about the ritual of lifestyle consumerism, you're operating with a constraint space and as you talk about in this piece, how are things going to change when the change starts to pick up and more and more millions of people are displaced by the zone of uninhabitability moving forward?
Well, it sounds very exodus to me. It sounds very much like what we're really talking about is moving out of a realm of sense and of the solution is thinking that you and Timothy Morton both indict and into something more like the constrained ritualistic behavior that governs the actions of your characters as they traverse these underworld spaces. Yeah, your fictional work. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that observation, but there's a luminosity to the self terminating fulfillment of the modern project here that in this reckoning with the reality that this is not our dominion, that we are ultimately organisms that are serving weird, often terrible things that exist beyond us that out of time in a weird way.
Yeah, we actually are able to reclaim something of the religion that we lost in our effort to transcend all possible barriers and obstacles and constraints. Maybe. Yeah, that's an interesting connection with the fiction work. And I'll say one of the things that we started working on with a previous fiction podcast, The Witch Doctor, that takes place after the fall in the sense of like, after the civilization loses its memory of itself.
Like, there's still maybe some thumb drive you can find somewhere, but what are you going to read it on? And now it's 500 years old. It's broken, right? So all that record of what happened, what came before is gone and you have this resurgence of certain patterns that have happened previously in human history.
But of course, a new version of it. And the question there is, is it just a recapitulation or is it like a new way forward? That of course is beyond the vision of people in the world and society today. What 100 years if things progresses, they are in the real world, I can see that sort of skis am happening.
I'm not saying it will, but it's certainly a possibility. But I find myself very compelled to wonder about that new humanity, if you will, if we can get through this bottleneck. So in a way, it's like the optimistic side of it is almost like through that, that I have a needle. It's through that exit.
This is, yeah, a good way of putting it. Just to really embellish this point, I think it's perfect that folks watching this conversation can see that you've got this. You've made this poster of the Saginick temple, rather than it's a Carl Sagan in this hilarious kind of ironic. It was from an art installation that me and my friend Daniel did for some festivals and stuff like projections and these things.
It was a wacky idea, but one of having a four hour video projection thing that Daniel had put together for it and stuff to make the Church of Carl Sagan. It's there. It's in the, in his writing on the demon haunted world. This thing that we're talking about looks like the evil we're trying to avoid.
But Tim Morgan's point is that having the choice to disobey the commandments, to actually embrace the body and its pleasures is in a deep way to the futurality or the pure contingency that's there in the gospel, like in the promise of Christ for redemption. And in a weird way, I think a lot of my, I am not myself a doomer, but I think it's largely because I think there's this like relationship between the way that like psychoanalysis talks about the death drive and this desire to transcend the limiting framework in which we operate in which we are like, in this case forced to regard ourselves as national citizens or as capitalist consumers or as people with jobs or whatever. And that there's a freedom and a release in returning to something that is a bit more transparently mysterious and untamed. It's funny.
It's been a little while since I've done reading on this, but there are a lot of connections between Dionysus and Jesus. And also the first places where I've seen sort of glimmers of this, although in a kind of, I don't know, dissociated framework where it's hard to imagine it becoming like culturally viable, but it is a festival, it is infinitesimal space where people break these patterns. And but by design, you can't really bring Burning Man home and probably shouldn't. So there is that sort of thing about it, the festival space, even like in a sort of more ritualistic sense, what distinguishes it is specifically being distinct from the everyday space of the place where Kings and subjects are the same level, that sort of thing, right?
So there's something there. And that's part of what led me to keep returning to those sort of festival events. Unfortunately, the pandemic has got a tight button that I got long covered in a wary of crowds, these days, both from that and also just habitually now, more used to the small groups or for solo meditation. This brings me to the sort of last big chunk I wanted to discuss with you.
There's a sort of reciprocity or mutuality between this, don't bring Burning Man home, don't try to infuse your everyday life with the liminal space and its possibility, which again, is like very much the sort of Promethean point that Ridley Scott is making about. Maybe you're not supposed to be trying to use this black goo, which is like metamorphosis incarnate. Maybe the point is not to productize that and turn it into some sort of medical biotechnology, kind of constrain it all in a system. And then this conversation I was just having on Twitter earlier today with someone who was saying, I don't think it's a good idea to monetize your passions.
I've certainly made that mistake. I'm doing it right now with the podcast, right? That's another sort of purgatorial space in which you and I meet. And so holding that, I want to bring it back to this question about method with you and the ways in which you chose to explore and to use generative AI in telling this story, in part because like Josh Shry and Tim Horton and many other people who said, there is a sense in which prompting an opaque language model, trying to get it to work for you as a productivity enhancement instrument is very mythologically linked to signing on the dotted line in blood.
I would say, and there might be some truth to that, but not anymore so than so many of the other ways that we engage with corporations. That's where the split is for me. In terms of how I use it and don't use it, that isn't fully explicative of all the possible uses for it and certainly isn't like how a corporation will use it. Like I look at it differently if a multi-billion dollar corporation uses AI to lay off all their voice actors for instance, whereas I running a small independent project use text to speech because I can't hire voice actors to do the kind of work that I want them to be able to do with it.
I could do it myself with my friends, but it's not going to be way on the level. So I look at that differently, right? I think more people should parse it based on their own use. But still there is true that when you engage with the system, a lot of times the repercussions of that go beyond the context of your use.
I do think that it's important to open that up to all the other ways that we engage with corporations and all the ways that we sublimate our ethical sort of investment in those systems. For instance, because I'm wearing, I haven't followed the providence of them like to how it was so where the fabric came from and so on. But I've done enough research on that sort of thing to find that if you go far enough, quite a lot of times it leads to like child slavery or any number of other horrible things that I think most people would agree are horrible. But yeah, I'm wearing the shirt, right?
So that's something we all have to wrestle with and come up with different answers too. What was behind your decision to use AI for certain parts of this and to use human collaborators for other parts? And then because right now, if you needed seven hours of music, you can go hash that out with Suno or cassette or any of these services, UDO. But then there's this other piece which is like where we started this conversation, there is an element of mystery and uncertainty and surprise in leveraging these tools.
And I'm curious about where you found yourself surprised. Why did you make the decisions you did and what so far have you recognized as the ways in which it turned out that you were employing a far livelier tool that's become more of a collaborator in the process of your storytelling? In some ways, I definitely have discovered that I tend to use them in a very different way from a lot of people seem to. As an example, with an image program like Mid Journey, a lot of people seem to think of it as what's the prompt?
The prompt? What's the prompt to get this result? And it's no. Whenever I get to something I'm using in a comp, it's probably hundreds of iterations.
And that's the interesting point of me for is tweaking something, seeing the results, saying that one is more interesting than that one or closer or perhaps there's something in that I wasn't even thinking of. And let's work on that. Add these words in here, change the waiting on this thing, change the style reference, whatever, and just keep iterating. And the risk for me, if it feels more in the creative sense, seems more like having control Z or having anything that adds to options.
Like it's good to have more options, but it's also bad where it's okay. Now I have a thousand comps, right? And all of them are actually pretty good. Which one's the right one?
That's where it becomes more challenging to me than being stuck on one thing. It's nice being able to not be too precious about anyone resulting to see it as an experiment. I guess that's the other side of it is if you look at it as an oracle, there's no truth of any sort or as a final destination, I think that's where you can get into a lot of problems. Putting the ethical stuff aside, just even creatively, it's basically a pattern recognition machine that basically takes those patterns and then tries to produce more like the parameters that you're giving it.
So don't think about it like I'm talking to a person, certainly. It's funny though. The first thing, this is more chadgy P.T. because from now, actually set your parameters in a funny way.
But the thing that taught me the first way to go about it was actually Star Trek. Like an instructor at TNG and when I go to B and the Holiday I can be like, okay, like that, but change that. Okay, computer actually, this thing. And so it's that sort of back and forth engagement with it.
That sort of seems definitely starting point. You can go a lot deeper than that, but trying to get your results with one step isn't going to cut. Just again, to tie it back into your fiction, the Raven Man is a prominent character here. Yeah, the line here.
Yeah, the conversations that your characters have with this figure traversing a shifting desert landscape where the episode description for this latest episode that you have out, like I'm not privy to the conclusion of the story. But it sounds to me like there's a way in which art is imitating life is imitating art here as they traverse the Sun's scorched wilderness, the whisper of prophecies and the weight of destiny loom large, setting a tone of both anticipation and dread, then the portance that have been spoken of become all too real. It's well, hey, here we are. So yeah, it's not really a question.
It doesn't make me think though that actually that becomes true within the story where the portance becomes true within grand story. Within later in the book, those portance become real in a way where they actually come into the real world to fall in love with someone who nissa recognizes as a character in a grand story. And that's where the rupture starts to open up of like where is the line here? Do you worry all about hyperstition with this stuff?
Because if you take it like masks all the way down, masks all the way up. And if you are playing with metafictional tropes in your work and you're engaged in magical workings and thinking about the influence of myth on the structure of thought and behavior, and you're actually having people play this stuff out in a role-playing game, where do you? It's funny. You mentioned that because we haven't even touched on it.
But it's become less of a kind of key word nowadays, but I was involved in a lot of trans media and alternate reality game projects. I work with Joseph and I worry sometimes people are realizing it too much. I guess just writing on this and I'm totally off the rails into speculative terrain. I've been talking with a lot of people lately about Cindy Kuhn here in New Mexico does threat casting and future casting with a lot of three-letter agencies and brings people together into these perspectively diverse groups to engage in the derivation of speculative affictions about particular scenarios as a way of like harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.
And there's a link there with being the quote unquote dungeon master. I just sort of treat you as a language model. I might prompt how can the kit that you're playing with serve to catalyze social processes that might help answer some of the questions that you're holding about the actual futures that we might be about to live through? Is there a way that we can use role-playing and mythology to traverse the four years in the desert we have ahead of us?
Well, I think it can help us to ask better questions more than find answers, but I think that in terms of the actual help thing in a way, it's like relearning a method of storytelling and sharing stories with people. And one of the things I love about running RPG is implying them, but if my natural role has always been for group team is to like the fact that after we've run the story, after we've gone to its end, we all have these memories and we'll like years later even still have the jokes and the references to all this character. Of course, no one else would know what that reference is. You have that shared language.
So I find value more in developing shared language with people. I'm not maybe there's a way that it could have a larger scale sort of effect, societally, I'm not sure, but definitely within the context of that group that you're playing with, quote unquote, playing, you're developing not only a shared language with them, but also memories and you learn things about each other from the characters that you play, although my favorite groups to play with, most people don't know just do self inserts with their characters. It's not like this character is me, but he's cooler. He's got more cool hair, whatever.
I think we all have had those campaigns. And sometimes it can be fun if it's explicit competency, porn, or whatever it's called, but it's more like you take a part of yourself and exaggerate it to the point where it's not you anymore and change it when you see where that goes and you find things about yourself, but even more so about the people you're playing with. So I find that really both really interesting and potentially valuable. Certainly, yeah, maybe more helping people remember how to dream together rather than yeah.
And I feel like we're talking about AI again, like it's not about wrangling this thing to get it to perform some sort of low noise, perfect execution as it is about the information that you get by seeing engagement. You're prompt in a new way. Yeah. And like exploring that space of possibility.
In the final moments that we have together today, I guess I'll just ask you if in light of all of that, how might you prompt listeners to engage more deeply with the ethos of your work? Obviously, I want them listening and I want them reading stuff, but how might you invite people to enact the world space that you inhabit? I think I've tried to encode that in my work, but so I have put some breadcrumbs out for that. FallEncycled.com obviously is one big entrance point for the one particular fictional universe I've been developing for a long time.
And Modern Mythology.net is the other side of my blog where I've been doing actually Modern Mythology used to be a kind of web magazine before everyone was calling it blogs, right? And it's pretty popular when for a while and then it came to my personal blog after a while. But that's a big question though in terms of how to engage with it that way. I don't know.
I think part of the reason why I created the podcast, why I'm creating is to create sort of an opening entrance point for people because I've had a number of people, even friends who were like, you've produced so much stuff, I don't know where to start or how to enter it. So I'm like, okay, let's make a linear entrance point and trace the story for that way, whereas most of the fall Encycled content is the standalone projects that are on the same world, but they aren't released in like book one, book two, book three, their cycle and you could start with the third book that I wrote. So that's where I would suggest people enter. Although one other thing I'll mention though is we talked about that the tells me when I had a face book was we did a Kickstarter edition that was hardcover and full color and has a hundred illustrations.
That's like a whole, I thought I would have a soundtrack for the audio version, but the book version is also pretty heavily illustrated. So the images are also part of it when you experience it that way. I'm still trying to get a mass market version of it together. It doesn't cost any books.
So we're going to do it black and white. Unfortunately, some of the colors are really nice, but it's definitely the way to do it. If you want to teach it affordable. Yeah, dude, I shouldn't leave this without saying that I am really impressed by your abilities as an illustrator.
And, yeah, that's just a little button on top of this whole conversation. But certainly it's as much the people I choose to work with as my own talent, I guess, we'll say, but I definitely feel, I guess that's why Bowie in some ways is one of my favorite artists in terms of his method of working even more than just the music because it's like his work was heavily influenced by the people he surrounded himself with and Senious, not Genius, right? But maybe we can make a Jamie Curcio chatbot trained on the phone cycle that can become one's Senious. If it gets not suck, if you haven't developed that technology yet, it's so funny with all of them.
So when you're looking for the patterns or to extend something, like here's something, create more like that. It's fairly good at that. But when you try to give it an open space and here's this thing riff on that. It's so quickly to come so painfully generic in a way that's not interesting to me anyways.
So if that line exists now, I don't know if that's a hard limit or not because we thought a lot of things were hard limits for machine intelligence that clearly aren't in the current state. It's like, whenever I feel like you open it up and say, you do your thing, I don't have a thing. I'm just going to spit this out. It just makes me wonder how long could you play a kind of text based RPG with a Jamie Curcio bot before it would just lead you off a cliff.
That'd be pretty quick. Yeah. Speaking of cliffs, thank you. And we've got the talk finally on the show.
Yeah. I look forward to wrapping with you more while I still have the actual human in my Facebook messages interactive RPG. Often. Thanks again for listening.
Hope you enjoyed that conversation. The last two episodes of Future Fossils as we know it coming up are a trial log with Eric Wargo and JF Martell on the non-linearity of time and art and religion and culture and creative process. Fascinating. I am extremely excited to share with you as a capstone to the last eight and a half years of conversation.
Also, I will be sharing my talk from Stephen Reed's course on technological metamodernism as an inquiry into the mythic and magical underpinnings of rational and trans-rational thought in the 21st century. It's a real smooth, clean lead in into humans on the loop. And please subscribe if you haven't already. Follow up with me, michaelgarfield.substack.com, patreon.com.
And have a wonderful Aeon.