Success for me from anything that I do is that people come away with more questions and answers. I don't go in and say I'm an expert. I'm somebody that asks a lot of questions. And if you can't away again, I just don't understand any of that.
I need to look it up. That's great, because that means something's stuck. So I choose to say that I'm an artist amongst many labels and choose to explore and take a big complex idea and work out how I can turn that into something that people feel before they make a judgement about the verbal language or the language that's used is powerful and a responsibility as well. Welcome to the ninth episode of Humans on the Loop.
I'm Michael Garfield, and together we're deconstructing and reconstructing what it means to be human, the nature of agency, and the ingredients and practices of wisdom in an age of automation and magical technologies. Last year, I stumbled upon the work of strategic futurist and pattern navigator, Adder Paris, a London-based wizard and weirdo with whom I immediately hit it off and knew I had to have her on the show. Some of our immediate resonance came from a shared interest in cyborg shamanism and an emphasis on being good ancestors, which some of you may remember was the motto of a future fossils podcast, Forbes Brazil called Adder one of the most important futurists in the world. And it's hard for me to measure the impact that she's had on business leaders, tech startups, marketing and communications firms, art schools, and the lives of many other colleagues, clients and friends who unanimously report her as a singular, inspiring, energizing, tenacious, supportive and resourceful person.
But we're not here to talk numbers or accolades today. Or rather, we are here to talk about the relationship between numbers, language, and the boundarylessness and inevitability of the ever-shifting human spirit. Despite the sense of unprecedented change that dominates discussion in this decade, some things are ever green, like the tension between individuals and institutions. The vital importance of interpersonal connection and the courage and soulfulness that persist through and even flourish in times of fear and oppression.
Adder's work points past knowledge and history into the elemental nature of both human and machine, past our differences, into the deep similarities that we share with celebrating, and the mystery that we inhabit and embody. Plus, she's just damn fun. I invite you to join us for a yarn that is both silly and profound, present and far-reaching, bold and grounded, and get to know a fine example of the kind of person I believe can help us reckon with the wicked problems that we face. But first, I'd like to thank everyone helping me build this trove of wisdom and to synthesize ancient and emerging technologies.
Bodhi Gegoforth and Nathan Alharis are the latest of hundreds of people who contribute every month to help me focus on a life of purpose and the production of public goods. Being human is a multi-dimensional affair, and humans on the loop is an ongoing experiment in how to reconcile the finite game of career and family life with the play of creation and discovery at a moment brimming with transcendent possibility. It is to borrow from Paul Millard my pathless path, and I feel blessed to have so much freedom to help foster key investigations at this threshold between worlds. For those of you who are new here, this podcast is just a tiny piece of it.
I'm writing as much as I can, producing new ballads and anthems and pieces of meditative music, making art, training a language model, and doing whatever else I can to help others navigate the weirdness. I've got a book finally coming out this spring and an online course and our nourishing monthly community calls and upcoming member discussions on two delicious books, Vesper Flights by Helen McDonald and Prophetic Culture by Federico Compaña. So if you have the means to give, please visit humansontheloop.com for info on how to become a sub-stack supporter or to make tax-deductible contributions. I also take every form of cryptocurrency and would love to loop in some volunteers so drop me a line at humansontheloop at proton.me if you're inspired and want to get involved.
More announcements soon, thanks for listening, liking, subscribing, etc. and enjoy this warm and wonderful conversation with the one and only, Adder Paris. Thank you. Adder Paris, you are on the loop.
Hey, time I go ahead. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. I figured I would dress up for you today and we're in the shirt I got married in.
Oh, wow. I feel honored. Yeah. I've dressed up in leopard print and magenta because that's what was needed today.
I see. Leopard print is a primary color. It is in the sense that it existed before anyone thought of it, right? Yeah, it's nature, right?
Dappled light probably existed before the visible spectrum. Oh, wow. If we're thinking of Big Bang cosmology. Yeah.
Anyway, well, Shucks, this is great. We've had a number of amazing conversations already. I love our rapport. I have implicit faith in our ability to just take this somewhere fun.
But I do want to start with a little structure. Okay. The little structure is how do you tell your back story, specifically the back story of how you became interested in the stuff that you write about and that you speak about and the work that you're doing, why it matters to you, you know, like I put it in different ways before, like what was the catalyzing trauma? Although it's not always trauma.
I need to lie on my couch. I mean, it's all about. Tell us the slice through latent space that organizes you as a person. Oh, interesting.
What just brought to my head? I'm going to say it. And I don't know where it's going, but what popped into my head is a fear of rejection. Then we see if I can follow that thread.
So there's something about wanting to be seen and heard and knowing that I'm enough. I believe that everything has a voice. It's maybe that we just don't always speak the same language or we don't give ourselves pause to listen to understand. And it's really interesting where this is going in my head because suddenly there's this, I'm thinking about what we're doing.
This current biodiversity crisis, not just the climate crisis, is about the way that we are rejecting nature, rejecting the very fundamental elements of life. And our ego is making us overpower them and be over that. And interestingly, the way that you ask me that question, that's what came to mind. I've never thought of it that way because a lot of the work I've done before, especially with humans has been around lots of identity.
But this actually goes deeper. It's so most likely the choice to reject the choice around gas lighting around rejection. And I'm like, so people say, I'm for the planet, I'm vegan, and then still doing lots of other stuff that is really damaging as well. I think that when you said the word trauma, that's the bit that came up because it was this.
Actually, that's what's happening. I think that I don't think I know. And every part of my body and my being is remembering that even when I draw breath, I'm a part of nature, but not even one because I draw breath on a part of nature. So what I'm doing, what many are doing is rejecting ourselves by rejecting nature, by not recognizing its voice, not recognizing that we're part of this interconnected system.
I think that is what that's how I've ended up here. I think it's been different journeys of exploration through the different industries and sectors. And I know that I've always seen life as a series of experiments. And I feel like I finally get it, not finally, because it's almost up, but I'm getting to the place where I'm able to viscerally, somatically in my body know what's right because I feel my connection with nature.
So I see a beautiful tree and I start crying and I see rolling hills and mountains and I see the pattern connecting that with the human form. And so everything about me now is about that. And I don't know any other way to be. And I don't even know if I answered your question, but it's what came up.
That's a deliciously deep place to start. I want to come back to that. But I also, I want to offer the opportunity to tell the more mundane version of that story. Like I live in London and this is how I started my career.
I think that'll give us two layers of context to work with. Yeah. So the mundane version is that I born in London, Southeast London to a Nigerian Evo father and a guy and his mother. Interesting.
They both came to this country when they were 19. My dad came and went to college and went to Ford Motorcars. My mom came and she was 19 and went up to Glasgow and was one of the first black nurses at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And they met in London at parties and they loved dancing.
And so my life started with movement and rhythm and flavors and smells and my name ada. So all the reason I said my father's Evo is because all the first born Evo daughters are ada. And I'm the eldest of three. Grew up, went to conference school and all of that brings and studied physics, chemistry, maths.
I think I love recognition and there's so many things jumping around in my head because my favorite toys are the child were a record player, a microscope and a jury maker. And that says a lot about who I am. I would take stones and spin them in this thing that made me the hell of a noise and then I would make people a jury and have a record player and a microscope cycle take samples of things. And I think that's how I've always been this trying to understand what's underneath and not taking somebody else's word for gospel.
It was always and why and why. And so through school and through university, I studied physics, chemistry and maths at one point, I wanted to be a primary school teacher. And I changed in my second year of university because I just didn't like the course. I didn't like the fact that we weren't really learning to me at the time.
We weren't learning about how people think. We were learning to contain. I went, no, that's not why I wanted to be a part of. I don't want to keep doing that.
So changing the educational studies and maths. And then I had various jobs where mechanical copyright, work, long business school for six years, secretary, right through, really got into marketing communications, did my marketing qualification, went into advertising, but the business side ended up running lots of committees being this person in the middle who sat and understood all these different connections and started to connect dots and people and ideas and saying, well, this one's talking about this and it's the same thing. So you should come together and recognize the value of being a conduit and somebody who can speak those languages to bring those different people and things and ideas together. And then from there, went into more education learning design.
So at school of communication arts, went to telephonica, helped to design and build their first technology accelerator in the country. So Wira designed that, built that, ran that. And then the next, you know, I've suddenly had the, well, I had the rum pulled from under me is what happened. And suddenly found myself out within two weeks for various reasons.
And it was a huge lesson humility in forward planning in go and oh my god, I got a thing on my feet. And the thing that I never thought was a thing was just how I showed up in the world. Suddenly I was being asked to give talks about personal brand identity. I'm like, I have no idea what that is.
I'm just, you know, I'm just being me, but I had to put some structure around it. And that was the first time I started to recognize that the lessons I had seen in the inside, seen in different spaces, I was just naturally applying them to me because to me, the same thing doesn't mean it's a business model. It's a model and that model you can probably find out model in nature. To me, they've always been the same thing is just we put these boundaries around things and this language and then somebody can charge whatever they want for it.
So I've always been that, oh, well, that makes sense to me. So that's why I should adopt, right? And if I see it happening in nature, I see it happening in this place. It's like it doesn't matter that it's a business thing.
So got into this personal brand identity before suddenly it was structured and everybody was doing it. And then for a long time, other people saw opportunities and invited me in. So my career path was very, so the outside world had hasn't actually what I was doing was taking the lessons from the previous one. It's like a waterfall, taking the lessons and the insights and the frameworks and the understanding from the previous one and then applying it to the new one.
And so going from there, and then I ended up in a world of tech. And I think that's where this kind of journey really started. Where I am now because I have been going to events in forests with beautiful communities. And I had understanding of my own ancestry and really connected with nature.
And that was always a part of me. And yeah, I found myself in this digital technical startup world where everybody's talking about runways and scaling and unicorns and all this stuff. But where's the human? I don't understand.
If you're talking about, look, I remember people talking about blockchain. Anyway, as if it was something new and I said, yeah, but I can see that in many places. It's not Starbucks, Starfish, Restart, the way that many global South Indigenous peoples and communities name their children in Mexican civilizations. I remember a friend showing me that example.
And suddenly I'm going, so I started asking these questions about, well, what about this? Why is it that somebody in Silicon Valley has thought that they have been the person to create this? Well, actually, it's been inspired and probably because many people were going off and doing shamanic tourism and, you know, drinking, Iowa, and what have you and being enlightened and seeing different ways and not recognizing that those things are turning on the tap. That's not the medicine that people, well, for me, that's not just the medicine that people get, saying I'm drinking a medicine.
There are things that we have and doing life that can help turn on the tap that give us different perspectives that get us to see in different ways. And if we are still enough and patient enough and humble enough, then we can recognize that those things are, we didn't create them. We're recognizing them or remembering them. And so the work I do now, even with tribal shamanists and elemental peers, I talk, I say, I speak about it that I remember or I've given a new language to it, but I didn't create it.
Okay, all right, I just drew a whole mind map here, listening to you talk. I don't think I'm going to get through all of this in one swing, but let's give it a shot. All right, let's see. Let's see.
Well, this will be like two or three rounds here, but interesting points of connection. You said your father worked for Ford. My stepfather worked for Ford. I learned to play guitar because of that.
And I have some kind of adjacency to what it means to associate the father figure in one's life with their enmeshment in or service to the big industrial assembly line machinery and the ways that empowers and also dehumanizes. I think it's interesting. Your mother is a nurse. Your father worked it for it because that's like the classic left and right hemisphere.
Like the Cartesian animals don't have souls like the Viva section by way of seeing the use of number and of measure as the thing that grants operational leverage over the living world. But then in order to get that, everything becomes decontextualized. It's like everything loses its uniqueness because it just becomes numbers. Like the digitization of the human being or of the rainforest or any other living thing makes it fungible.
And so we lose context and we lose touch and relationality, ironically, in our effort to quote unquote reach out and touch someone like AT&T, the telecommunications network that in some sense, like you were saying, made these life ways visible to the modern West. Also weirded them to a perspective that had lost its sense of place in the cosmos. Okay, so there's that piece of it. There's the assembly line and the nurse piece.
There is this relationship to what you were saying earlier about rejection and acceptance and being heard and the way that being rendered a number like members of my father's family that did not make it over to the states ended up some of them with barcodes on their arms. There's a cut that happens in like the transition from analog to digital and that cut keeps playing itself out that trauma, which if I'm going to get Old Testament about it, like the mosaic covenant there that yokes people to a transcendent principle is also that which separates them from a sense of like situatedness or like the animal nature in some sense. Okay, so that's piece of it. Another piece of it is I did not know this thing about the tradition in your father's line to name the firstborn daughter, Adder, but my firstborn daughter is Ada and I named her Ada because of the patron saint or matron saint, whatever the mother of all codes.
The daughter of lord Byron, whose mother said your father is a scoundrel and a dog and you're not going to learn to be a poet. I'm going to teach you math instead, which is funny because at the time it was a men's tradition, it was a men's world, but you know what? I want you working in numbers because poetry, feeling her mother was enacting a sort of patriarchal impulse to be like, no, we're not touching that. It's not being else to solve the feeling things because it's going to make you a bad person.
And then she ends up being the one that wrote the first computer program and wrote that letter to Charles Babbage about how if computers can perform calculations, then one day they will write music and they will make art because music and art are quote unquote just number their operations of geometric and numerical relationships. And so in a way, it's funny because I was at the time working at the Santa Fe Institute where I see them or science generally, not so much as originating an idea, but stepping an idea down from the intuitive and conceptual and into the formal quantitative framework. So it's like they're not really interested unless we can talk about it in the language of math. And so I thought like I'm a poet working among mathematicians and I'm kind of a scoundrel.
I'm going to give my daughter this immensely respectable and inspiring and influential firstborn female aspirational title. And then when she was just a baby, one of our friends gave us this book, Ada Twist, Scientist. Somebody friends daughter bought it for me. Oh my god, it's great.
I think she was about five or six and she knew my name was Ada and she saw the book and she went with we have to buy that for Ada. So I've got the book from this girl who found it and went this is for Ada because she's also does science. Right. So like the beautiful thing about that is very much in the spirit of us naming Ada that all of those things, the record player, the microscope, the rock tumbler jewelry maker thing show up as getter at us in the immensely creative household of this little girl who is learning to inquire, learning to ask why in the world.
There's something about all of those things that I see all of them as different objects that offer an object lesson in this kind of relationship, the relationship of investigation and discovery that we're talking about here, the record player being an analog thing, but being something that's involved in the act of creating recordings and album memories and is like rotational and the lens inside the microscope is you rotate it to bring it into focus and jewelry maker. There's something about the rotation of ideas as a way of observing them from a different perspective or the rock tumbler captures through it, you file off. It's like physicists talk about first, we must assume a spherical cow that we have to get rid of all the roughness and factality and the non-computable complexity of life in order to behold this perfect shiny stone. It's that fungibility again.
The call in diamond. Yeah, and then the last thing I'll say about it for now, because that's plenty to jump on, is that when you were talking about boundaries being arbitrary and we draw boundaries around something, again, we draw a boundary around something knowing in some sense that it's arbitrary in order to operate on it, in order to make it legible to capitalism, in order to claim it as our intellectual property or whatever. And that's associated with the kind of forgetting that I brought up a moment ago about what happens to the living world when we treat everything as capital or as the mathematics that makes it so that we can say that something going on in the brain is the same as something going on in communication networks or in the spread of disease or in that mathematician offers deep understanding and insight, but in generalizing things, we also run the risk of losing the specificity just finished writing this essay on autonomy because this show is partially funded by a grant from the Cosmos Institute, which is running the new human AI lab at Oxford. And they prompt was about how to develop and govern AI for human autonomy, meaning in their definition, freedom of thought and freedom of action.
And I was like, well, that's kind of a strange way to put things given that we live in an era of networked media that make it obvious that the bound that we place around itself is sort of emergent from or created by these interactions and that we're not living in the world of being alone on a farm all day, communicating through letters or like you know, like just like slow communication of the age of print or like the way that Marshall McLuhan talked about, you consume print alone and at arm's length rather than an oral tradition or like the kind of operatic media that we have now where you are immersed in it and the self is like overwhelmed by these flows of information. So like this question about the autonomous is really strange. And I think that speaks to the kind of cognitive dissonance that you seem like you had after the traumatic rug poll in your career talking about personal brand, because it's like, well, wait a minute, what am I even in the way, right? What self?
Because to define your story through parents that met dancing gets back to Timothy Morton's emphasis on fumos and rhythm as the actual sacred of biology that what we're talking about is a sense of being involved in oscillatory and pulsating and relational stuff. And so it's like a wave particle thing. It's like, how do you actually talk about an autonomous self upon which one can commercialize the institution of a personal brand when you're not operating under the assumption of a spherical cow, you're confronting the actual roughness and texture and mystery. And that's a ton of stuff.
We're doing your so happy. Thank you. Because now I had post it notes in front of me as some of the things that you said when you started mirroring back some of the things I'd said and talking through your mind map what came to my mind is when you were talking about the assembly line in the nurse and my mom and dad what came to mind in nature capital. And when this is why I don't like, I can't stand the idea of nature capital because it's trying to put structure around something that shouldn't be that there's this assumption that we control them.
The two words came up, wandering or by doing that we lose our sense of wandering or and I feel that those two words define my whole life. I've allowed myself to wonder and that means the question and to think and I you can tell when I'm excited by something because I start talking really fast and I hand start moving in and then suddenly it's like oh my and I do it. I stopped trying to hide it now when I'm in meetings so I was on the meeting of the day and suddenly I was just like oh my god that's amazing I just threw my hands up in the air. And when by creating these boundaries and these tight constructs around things we end up in this very well instantly I'm going to in my head I'm saying who do I mean by we?
Many have ended up in this very linear iterative approach to everything including designing computers so that's binary systems and what have you and I feel that many of our computer systems and digital technologies are now finally beginning to replicate nature in the holistic approach. So A the lovelace great computing wonderful amazing and it was still ones and zeros it was still very linear in comparison to for example my encounter which is holistic and alive and multi-dimensional and how many different things and so even the book that I'm writing at the moment is about the fact that both are valid we need both and the idea that it's only going to be from the place of ones and zeros that the answers are going to come and the god complex of many in those ones and zeros world is because there's this almost is white knuckle holding on going weird I'll be the ones to do it and whereas my whole life in the earlier part of my life is kind of fluctuating between the two oh I need to do this I need to be structured I need to have this thing but actually this is also me and so there's this what's usual language one of the quotes you said at the end there's a rhythm and movement in everything that I am and everything that I do there is a fluidity and a recognition and increasingly a recognition of the non-binary non-linear approached everything and so I am intentional in being very aware of when I even go down the down the path of speaking in binaries because I think the answer is always my friend wonderful Dr Kate Stone and I were having a conversation about AI and we both ended up at this place with it well the answer is always yes and no and so many people have conversations to prove that they're right rather than actually well we can both be right we'll both have we could both have very different ideas and very different starting points and that doesn't mean that we can't work together to redefine the problem from both of our perspectives because otherwise what we where many end up is that we have some people who have had a very particular lived experience very particular type of education very particular type of privilege in the world and what have you trying to define problems for everybody else and trying to design technologies to address those problems when they're only talking about those problems from their perspectives and so the thing that keeps me going the thing that keeps me motivated is that well not the thing one of many things is that there's not one future there's many potential futures so increasingly when people ask you to talk about what's the future of this and what depends who's perspective you're talking about so I think those are some of the things that came up with you're speaking so there's this idea that we do that boxing off that kind of containing everything and that's partly why postmodernist world has ended up in this place of it's all about climate change and money and GDP and all those things and the other side of that is that my lived experience my work my ideas come from recognizing the wonder and awe of rhythm and movement and flow and all those things and it just a quote popped into my head I come in I think I was just into podcasts or something and I just heard this quote and I went that's it because a flood is just water reclaiming its path once I recognize that I went well that changes everything how I approach the world right I didn't expect it to go here but this conversation we're recording within days of all of my friends in Asheville surviving Hurricane Helene and like that whole city basically being destroyed yeah and I remember like being in Asheville and this is just the canary in the coal mine as it were you know we're starting to see the effects of making these settlements right down by the water right like at water line and how that assumes a kind of stability or there's a rigidity and abrittleness and I'm saying this fully in on the sorrow that this community and other communities that are being flooded are experiencing and will continue to experience but then I think about the still towns in Cambodia where there's a seasonal lake yeah and they sort of they build all of their homes there's an awareness of the rhythmic nature of the water that we build into the systems or like the way that the Japanese use bamboo because they know they're gonna have an earthquake where like meanwhile San Francisco is just like ah stealing glass we're fine and that is part of the elemental approach that I spoke about my last the latest helix door the water bit is so the elements ether airfiles earth and they are I recognize them in many many indigenous communities have these different things that ether is the ethical pause the slowing down but just because we can doesn't it doesn't mean we should probably not sometimes I watch up in Hyman when oh that's an example of that so there's vision quest there's walk about there's those moments of going in and really connecting with ourselves and finding answers in the stillness and the discomfort is creating spaces for the flow of diverse ideas because then you can really try and define the problem when you have different lived experiences different perspectives all sitting around together as equals not as anthropological research subject fire is energy transformation is fire stick farming and when people think of fire they think destruction but Aboriginal fire stick farming is regeneration of the land is control burns water what is self-reflection adaptation the backe people who live in the forest and they move and they might great based on the flickers and the natural rhythm of the forest and an earth is turning that into I used to say real world but what I mean is offline impact because as much as people are designing for the metaverse and all these things we're still physical beings there is still a physicality about us and who we are in the world that we exist in and if people aren't mindful and take those pores and all of those different things and we're going to end up just stuck inside the headset just living a life and externally your body is deteriorating and only designing for that space is creating the bigger divide okay so I want to talk with you about cyborg shamanism specifically like you've to the extent that this is like a post-ironic conversation here you've developed a personal brand around this and that was one of the places where you and I connected because there was like okay there is this recognition I like the way you put it online offline not IRL this is real too it's real in a different way it's real in the way that like you were just saying you can get lost in thought and then get punched in the mouth that doesn't mean that thoughts aren't real thoughts are very real they take calories you think really hard and you get hungry really I do and yeah the five element framework and cyborg shamanism I want to connect again to your life story in the another thing that you and I have in common is working in communications and there being something initiatic about that about being in between a network theory language the betweenness and trolley of being the one that everyone is talking to and so therefore you become diaphanists or something you're more porous you're more networked and that puts you in a kind of mediating position in the way that you mentioned being a seer I think there is this relationship like a hermetic mercurial kind of relationship between being someone who works in communication professionally and being like the delphic oracle or the hut at the edge of the village that communicates with spirits on the behalf of people in a healing crisis and I just wanted to say of that that the elephant in the room here if it's not obvious everyone already is the other thing that seems figured in this pattern we connected on is this idea of quote unquote ADHD and I just wanted to reference this particular paper that I really think about a lot it was in the proceedings of biological sciences attention deficits linked with proclivity to explore while foraging by erock at all in which they do a computer game in which they have people identifying patterns and they find the people that were diagnosed with ADHD turned out to be better at finding virtual berries in a virtual forest and the hypothesis that they offer at the end of this paper is that ADHD is only contextually a disorder but that it's actually a neurotype that may once have been at a much more common neurotype among foraging nomadic people who were whether you think of it as having to do with the body kicking in a kind of explore mode due to nutrient deficiencies or whether it has to do with having to pay close attention to the patterns of migration of animals that you're following through a landscape or whatever and I look around and like most of the people that I hang out with now are either officially or self diagnosed as somewhere along an ADHD continuum and that's strange like that's everybody that's like 80 percent of the people I talk to on Facebook and all of them are extremely online and there is this thing about being extremely online that is in many ways not just this like or culturally retrieves something again of that pre-print pre-modern living in the jungle mind of moving through these really dense environments where there are agencies or entities out there that you become more again like right-brain peripheral that the quote unquote paranoia of life online seems to be about assigning agency the proliferation of conspiracy theories again also related to pattern identification and being like oh what was that Russell in the woods right but it's not all bad it's like it's been characterized as a dysfunction but there's this proposition that the mode of attention of assigning a kind of animism assigning agency to your computer being like this is machine intelligence right that so much of the history of technology in the last century like you were saying is on record about people having these experiences with psychedelic plant medicines or fungi and there and then I'm going to be talking to Henrik Alata McDowell who'd founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google and wrote the first book, Pharmaco AI, that was co-authored with GPT-3 and that book is just rich with conversation on animal vegetable machine intelligences in these ensembles of co-creation that's just all compost for you to rip-line cyborg shamanism as it relates to these other kind of more mundane aspects of life online and like the way that our attention has been demonstrably flowing through this conversation if we were to model it with a topic model in AI we'd be like oh we can tell from orbit that these two people are diagnosable as like extremely online forager type minds. With the neurodivergent spicy nest when I was having a conversation I was actually into the end of the day and they were talking about the fact that they were dyslexic in the way they described it and the things that they went through. I just had this moment and it happened again when you were speaking of it.
You couldn't dyslexia also be seen as being able to see things multi-dimensionally because the things are moving off the page so it doesn't mean that you because you can't fit into this pre-determined hierarchy of seeing things very flat and reading on the page because that's what we're told that's how it's supposed to be and then you see in a very different way and are able to see all these different things that the language and the letters and everything is in that form of animism but for us people language is animistic and what many have done is tried to define and say no you're understanding of that word is wrong because somebody has told you us and put it in a book that this is what it means and it's written down on paper somewhere in the British library or something and that's what we're told that's what it is so any other description any other way of pronouncing it is wrong so if you don't pronounce it the right way that we have told you that it has to be pronounced or you don't spend it the way you don't see it or define it the way you're wrong. I'm like why who told you that? Who was the person who was this was what I used to be like at school as a child? Well who was the first person to say that and how did they come up with that?
They must have been really good at discarding and arguing to get everybody else after that to then agree that's what it is. That's the measure of success that's how languages that's how money is that's how I did the one conference and learn how to create cryptocurrency and suddenly when I was trying to create it definitely not my thing but create this thing. I was like well this is just somebody who's deciding it's this I'm really good at debating and I'm going to tell everybody else that this is what it's worth and the rest of you're just gonna follow like sheet and that's it. And I think that's where I'm bringing this back to the side book shamanism that's how I recognize the patterns it was recognizing that over here people are talking about well it's starting from realizing or feeling like people were looking for a new religion they're looking for something external to themselves to negate responsibility to give structure and there's both religion that does many wonderful things for many people.
I was brought up Catholic I don't consider myself Catholic now but I recognize that there is power in faith and I'm not going to negate anybody else's choices about their belief systems and at the same time some will use it as a way of negated responsibility and having a structure and what have you and it's back to time it was cyborgs and well let me start by saying my definition of technology first because that's what I like to say is my definition of technology is that it's a form of relational ecology so take it back to untackled it's about creating relationships and the three relationships I kind of look at and we're self with other and with our environment and that includes nature so that's where my definition of technology starts from and so you can have digital technology and you can have faith as a form of technology you can have plant medicine spirituality even the friends who are quantum physicists about what I'm talking about as emergence so I had all of these things and so that's technology part of that for the minute and at the same time I was seen Silicon Valley going to Peru to go and do I have to come back in light and to create these new technologies and these new things and this is the way forward and we're all going to be down this path and what have you but we're all trying to do the same thing build nurture relationships and whether you use a digital technology or a hardware the world of the cyborgs so cyborg to me is using a form of digital technology to augment the biological so whether it's the cyborgs or the shaman and that world in it at first I saw is linear so the shamanic world is using plant medicine or sound or what have you to augment the biological to understand relationship with self-othermizing environment and the same thing it's just somebody who's decided that this is worth more than this and so initially it started off as it's either or and then the more I started to explore it and maybe me suddenly ended up with this going down this spiral of oh well it's like down toes infernos of heaven and hell there's this people are suddenly going well this is more important I've been to this world and this is the most important one and now I've went to this one and this is more so you ended up in this hierarchy of going well the digital world is more important and better than anything else and that's what cyborg's shamanism started and then I spoke to people from different fields world and said look this is the path 90 and do you see it in your world and a friend who's a quantum physicist said yeah that's emergence and different spiritual people and leader said yeah it's a very similar thing so a friend challenged me and said look why don't you try a creative exercise and see if you can create an alphabet and so you start with a and what's the a word that appears in all of those places that you've seen this same pattern and don't progress to be until you have found the a word as I just took my time and I just I didn't seriously try to think about it with the word with the merge what I have you know so it was anthropomorphism balanced curiosity diversity experimentation flow and then you get genealogy human interreception liminal metaphysical narrative and I'm probably missing some but systemic organic playful J J just a position yeah and it was a very interesting exercise because sometimes I'll be asleep in the world and pop up and I did just think myself awake and I don't even know what that means let me look it up before I fall asleep and I'm looking up and up okay this word fits beautifully and I'd used to be doing a lot of thinking a lot of sorting through things in my sleep so when we talk about the ADHD brain in the daytime it's like this and nighttime is when things can sort themselves and it's a little calmer and a little slower so cyborg shamanism the patterns much of that comes in my sleep the other morning I work up at four o'clock and something oh my god I know what I need to do with this framework and I created a whole business plan for a potential tool I just want to leave it I just needed to get it out and I'm going to put that down and leave it and it may be tomorrow maybe next week it may be five ten years time I will come back to it when the time is right cyborg shamanism is the result of recognizing that what we are trying to do is nurture relationships create relationships and understand the relationship between ourselves others and our environment I didn't create that but looking back Ernst Hackle father ecology who talked about it relationships and he talked about creating relationships in the real and the imagines and he could have been talking about AI and he could have been talking about virtual reality so these patterns are there and they repeat and they show up in very different ways and that's the bit that I do is I recognize it and am able to get oh well give it a language of the time or as a translator be able to help other people see it I want you to see it's very difficult to unsee it so okay you said something really key I'm gonna go in all of that about dyslexia I was having a conversation with a member of my family this summer who had recently found some measure of relief in finally receiving a diagnosis that they were on the autism spectrum and we were talking about neuro diversity and they reminded me that my stepfather who worked in the Ford plant for all those decades the reason that he found himself arguably in this sort of blue collar assembly job was that he had trouble in school because he was dyslexic and they were like but the thing about that is that like you were saying like dyslexia is also correlated with a different kind of spatial awareness and having the superpower where you can like visualize an engine in your head in three dimensions and like pull it apart and put it back together in your head yeah it's weird that like you were saying someone has decided that X is worth more than Y that what in certain contexts would be a superpower of spatial cognition is precisely the thing that makes someone incompatible with the sort of Lewis Mumford John Taylor Gatto educational environment as the whole house the indoctrination of ironically assembly line factory workers right it's that even that is like ill fit to task if what it really works in that kind of environment is somebody that can like think a machine apart and back together I wanted to bring that up in relationship to this other thing about structure you're talking about religion and structure and I think about the market as one of the secular religions and how when we talk about like paltillic talking about religion in terms of ultimate concern that people outboard personal accountability highlight on one of the main themes of this series this issue of accountability in the way it's held by quote-unquote individuals and quote-unquote collectives that a lot of the people that are serving the sort of backstory creation of the AI deity are doing so in the language of this story of emergent self-assembly they're using the language of thermodynamics and order out of chaos and the claim that higher levels of intelligence are coming out of quote-unquote lower levels and yet it's all saying let the invisible hand of the market make my decisions and so yeah even as that market goes through different phases of deciding for us other institutions as well decide for us what is and is not valuable it may be that in another 50 years dyslexics and ADHD and autistic people are actually like in the majority and have some sort of economic advantage over I don't know but like the point is this thing about just how when I think about you know my systematically oppressed lost a workers comp workplace injury lawsuit with Ford and has spent most of the time that I've known him the decades that I've known him in horrible pain for having his foot crushed by a machine that he's like a white guy but that's not the point right the point is the way that we are diminished by systems where the people that have power are claiming that they don't they're claiming that they're just serving the system that is why I think that to many people are understanding what politics is wrong because politics isn't the people in the houses of parliament or the senate or whatever politics is also recognizing that if you choose one brand of water over another that's a political choice and that we have choice and it's this ability to have choice that I think is the thing that much of the structure that is put around things is about removing that sense of choice that understanding of choice and that ability to be free because even I really don't when you say it all the route of chaos what's wrong with just having chaos this planet was born out of chaos but no we have to have all the route of chaos but then is it chaos it becomes something else and there is something about just even the language of be comfortable being uncomfortable but I'm not comfortable anymore because you've turned into something else and I think recognizing that discomfort is necessary chaos is necessary stillness is necessary slowness is vital all of these things are a part of everything we are and everything that we're doing and will be for as long as we if we don't destroy ourselves in the process and I think it just remembers that I was being interviewed for another podcast a while ago and at the end it was asking me what's the one piece of advice that you give I was like or the thought I would probably just to say that you're enough to recognize that we are enough we don't have to fight for all of these other things and this North Star that somebody else has told us that is what we're all supposed to work towards and that we have to say on the hamster wheel and the treadmill and all of these things and be all over social media getting likes and all of these things that for many of us and I'm treating myself in that because far from perfect and still trying to figure it out and make it up as I go along sometimes that it's okay to just stop it's okay to go you know what no I don't want to do that I don't want to play that game anymore and I'm afraid of heights right yeah terrible and I was once in dandies and had this opportunity to go parapetting off the andes and was like yeah you know what I'm here yeah I'm never gonna be here again I might as well do it and on the way up in the back of this band it's going oh my god I know it okay rationalize work through it what is it that's happening and I realize I'm not afraid of falling I'm afraid of hitting the ground you know what I'm probably gonna hit the ground so far so I won't even notice I might as well enjoy the freefall and that just changed everything you could hear my laugh my cackle at the bottom of the mountain and I was there with my camera wrapped around my hand because I was afraid but I just went you know what if I focus on the fear I'm not gonna enjoy this and then why am I putting myself through the situation when I have a choice about how I show up and so I will show it up for myself again well if I hit the ground what's gonna happen I may hit so fast I don't realize it I may break a leg I'll deal with that when I get down there but for now I've made the choice of getting this back and I've made the choice to go up this mountain and so I might as well just make sure I have a bloody great time because I'm not sure I would do it again but I'm here now and I think that my approach to my work and I think that's also why I'm finding it more difficult about using social media and doing certain things is because when I start to recognize what it actually takes to stop sometimes or to step off okay so now if I'm asking other people to do it how am I going to do it myself what am I going to do what do I need to change in order to change the things I'm asking other people to change and so what my work has become what my life has become is recognized it can be small nudges it can be small things I don't have to give up eating me or the whole thing not completely but I can be more mindful about the choices that I make about where I buy it you talked about being prolific on social media I've slowed down a lot to the point I almost stopped other than the fact that look I'm human and I got new puppy and I was like oh my god I'm going to see this everybody needs to see but recognizing that I had this question in my head can I be a client activist and new social media what after reading reports about the exponential increase in our demands for electricity in the need for data storage facilities in the impact the algorithmic searches have in on the planet in the impact that this is having on our transfer from fossil fuels to alternative sources and I'm like well social media is here it's not going anywhere so what can I do to be more conscious about how I use social media because if I'm a client activist I'm posting a game yes like my thing am I really undoing all the things I'm saying I'm working towards so what I've done recently is I've just started to pull together a social media strategy for myself that means that I am trying to consciously think about every post that I use and the intentionality and the message and lookal to action so there are things that we can do that is in this breaking out of this structure of the way that things are done and creating new ways for ourselves that are small incremental changes that do eventually make a difference you brought me to exactly where I want to tie a grand bow around all of this with you like the last tesseract or whatever it is that I want to assemble with you gets back to the same thing that you said earlier about watching Oppenheimer and being like wow that's a situation where the urgency of the existential threat of war we chased a terrible situation into a terrible situation right and yet living here in Santa Fe I'm like downhill from Los Alamos I think about this stuff all every day you know walking out of that theater was like oh my god I live in the blast radius of this history we all do but it's like right there and so I keep thinking about the relationship between trauma and learning and I want to connect that to this question that you asked about how do I stop how do I slow how do I take the ethical pause this podcast would not exist if not for the fact that I saw the next generation of computing coming okay in my job and I said the only way that we're going to be able to integrate this in a responsible way and actually get people to take personal accountability for its direction and participate in it the collective parenting of this particular future rather than seeing it as inevitable like seeing it as probable and then being like okay how do we catch this well like how do we do this thing that it required me quitting my job because it was the only way that I could take the time to actually work on building out the network of trust relationships between people and help people see what I have seen and what these people are working on and actually encourage the village into which this thing is going to be born one way or another whether it succeeds or fails is less the question of like I like the way that Dikai just wrote that book that's coming out next year raising AI I met Dikai finally this last weekend in New York and I was like yeah we got to have you on this we've been talking about this thing raising the machines right and again K. Aladdin McDowell is also very much on that tip of like we must teach the machines to love how are we going to do that if we're not how do we embody the things that we are trying to impress and amplify our technologies so within that I want to offer a motif to kick back here which is the relationship between war and commerce and innovation and again like we were talking about earlier discovering these things happens in the course of that when we when you and I first spoke I mentioned that when I saw cyborg shamanism on your website it was highlighted because I had given that talk at Moogfest on techno shamanism in 2016 and that talk had been about the documentary of the life of ern's heckle proteas is the name of the film it's free on youtube it's amazing that the story that they told was all about how heckles ideas of ecology and of living form as ideas in the mind of god came out of his engagement with the specimens collected by the HMS challenger mission and that that trans-oceanic biological expedition was a result of the trans-Atlantic stock prices telegraph cable that they were trying to lay from London New York breaking a couple times and then they pulled it up and it was encrusted with all these things and they realized that the deep sea was not lifeless but actually full of life and that was part of that way in which the modernist enterprise of trying to conquer the world or trying to control and understand everything seems to invariably at its extremes it humbles us if you realize that the void is actually full of life in mind like that there's this thing a one more piece I want to put on this is that when you talked about having the rug pulled out from you under your career and how it made you think on your feet I too have learned that there's something about trauma and displacement like my buddy Tada Hazumi and I years ago in Future Fossils talked about the cultural somatics of trauma and how you look at jazz and funk music as coming out of slavery right that were like the way that there are post-war art forms that in America for sure and in the world in general come out of a weirding due to the sense-making crisis that the war created and if you look at actually in the war effort that there's something about the urgency of that situation that modern digital computing owes a lot to Alan Turing who like as soon as things cool down they're like okay we need to chemically castrate you because you're criminally gay but during the war everyone was willing to turn a blind eye and that gets back to that thing about the relationship between trying to fit everything into a model trying to optimize trying to answer that urgency and then the slacker the tolerance or the appreciation for diversity which includes an appreciation for the arts in some kind of paradoxical way and like cultural creation as necessary in the process of making sense of the traumatic condition that we've created in the network digital era and so the very last piece on this is I want to cite another paper in biology letters the Royal Society sonic restoration acoustic stimulation enhances plant growth promoting fungi activity by Robinson et al which I only found this morning and the takeaway from this paper was that they found that white noise like that of radio static high-frequency monotone crackles actually encourage the growth of certain strains of mycorrhizal fungi and that it's not that they're listening with their ears but that the vibrations of white noise are inducing growth in these networks of fungi and so it seems like again there's something very deep and universal that it's an abstraction but we can say this thing about how it is that we can make the decision to pause or like how it is that we can accommodate creativity in an intensely competitive market or how it is that we can make time for ourselves to be more complete human beings in spite of or perhaps even because of the fear and the anxiety maybe we can cinch it down to this question of how can you tell a story about finding that space in your life where you can think better or you can be more deliberate about allocating your attention or you can make room for yourself to be a more complete person and express yourself in creativity or how can you be a hyper learning hot mess and also still like useful but being useful isn't the end all be all how do you reconcile the intrinsic and the instrumental and we've said this whole thing about being like the sort of goal of this relationship is jazz right how can we lean into as you put it thinking on your feet possibly as a moment in a story that does involve the kind of traumatic dislocation and kind of a softer way is about like using noise to encourage growth in a system that betters the relationships that fosters healthy relationships in the whole system the way that noise fosters the growth of trico derma harzi onum i trust you to just take us home the way that i'm doing that is i'm leaning into making art i'm finding another outlet through creating art in various different mediums and one of the things i realized in creating art and i don't always know what it's going to be but sometimes it's been sound and sometimes it's painting and then mixed media or immersive experiences and one of the things i realized when i especially in the experiential is that as an artist what i do is i create moments of pause moments of presence because people will start and look and even if they don't like what they see it's it's a vote in emotion and so i feel like i'm metamorphizing into something into a different way of it's showing up and telling stories and all those things and there's definitely a role for the artists and the creatives and i think that we all have that in ourselves and recognizing that i never used to call myself an artist because i thought i haven't had something in a gallery i haven't had an exhibition but it's my ability to tell stories in many different forms and understand and recognize the nuances of language and experience is itself a form of art and showing up in different spaces of the form of art so that is a way that i am moving forward and i feel that as our modes of storytelling are expansive and changing and going back to the new right diversion dyslexic piece about the multi-sensory multi-dimensional is that artists and the stories that storytellers and the green things who have been the first to be able to understand that and create inner spaces and it in many ways cause our digital technology is moving into this more multi-dimensional space i feel that to help other people to be present to be able to ask themselves questions success for me from anything that i do is that people come away with more questions and answers i don't go in and say my next but i'm somebody that asks a lot of questions and if you come away going i just don't understand any of that i need to look it up that's great because that means something's stuck so i choose and to say that i'm an artist amongst many labels and choose and to explore and take a big complex idea and work out how i can turn that into something that people feel before they make a judgement about the language that the verbal language or the written language that's used is powerful and a responsibility as well but i think that is where i think i will eat a lot of the stuff i've shared is that we need to make space for art we need to recognize it as valuable it's not just that airy fairy soft skills thing out there it's vital to everything that we are when we do life is art right look at the leaf nudibranch the leaf re-nudibranch beautiful photos emphasis amazing and it's beautiful it's artistic just so that we bring this totally full circle and land it in your starting place do you feel like this issue of rejection and seeking acceptance needing to be heard like obviously it's very explicit in the way that you draw the focus of the tech world to the dignity and salience of the global south quote unquote or of indigenous voices do you feel that you have healed this for yourself right like oh well the way that i try to address it is to recognize when my ego gets in the way because that fear rejection is that i have created and maintained certain narratives about value and worth and hierarchy and all of these things and at the end of the day we're all just cells and all those things and everything else are various constructs so i'm still working through all of that then do you ever get to the point where you say oh no i've achieved that now i'm enlightened i've enlightened i don't have any problems we're human and it's okay to recognize that those humans were beautiful and complex and we're messy and vulnerable in all of those things and instead of well self-reflection is important taking responsibility for how we show up is important taking responsibility for the decision that we make even if it's with information that we chose to believe was true at the time but actually on hindsight you realize it was different best my journey continues because i'm in a constant battle with ego and that's not about the narcissism thing it's that oh my god i can't walk into that space because everyone's gonna be looking at me nobody cares but in my head it's like oh my god i can't oh no i can't say that because they're not gonna think i'm stupid no i've now created a narrative in my head about what i think other people think they don't care so i'm learning and i'm with great support i am working through those very human very vulnerable very fragile things i get i'm thinking about it more than anybody else has given me any kind of notice about any of it and those moments where my mama's is more the moments now those times when i'm not even thinking about any of that stuff the ability to connect with others is just beautiful because you're not looking at the differences and comparing the differences you're recognizing the similarities and going we share so many more things and we think are different and let's just celebrate and have fun and dance and all those things and move the language that we've used earlier rhythm and motion and chaos and it's probably why i can't dance in formation because i'm all over the place i've tried i've tried i will stand on listen pretty style great i will dance myself into a child anything that's formation that's that i am standing on people's toes i am falling over i lose rhythm i'm not one of those people that's supposed to be in those boxes and i think going back to your original thing that's how i've always been try and put me in a box and take away my choices and i will come out fighting and spray me like ah okay but somebody is calling you can hear him right yeah yeah you can argue the minute a box for the last hour and a half well i've been in him trees but the treats have run out so he's like no i want food fair well that's our cue and it's been an awesome time i think we would have maybe had more fun dancing we're gonna be dancing together and it will be unstructured and arms and legs and the same way i love the same way i dance i throw my head back in my whole body just completely dances that whole movement medicine is the only way i know how to dance well those of you listening i hope that she has infected you that's been great thanks so much thank you thanks again for listening if you enjoyed this conversation please tell a friend humans on the loop it's made possible thanks to gifts from cosmos institute japanese ventures imaginal seeds bit tensor and listeners like you subscribe at humans on the loop.com to stay in the current of this evolving work and stay tuned for the next episode in which we will explore the mysterious dimensions of technology and the new religions of ai with my friend the excellent jf martell filmmaker author and reclaiming art in the age of artifice as well as the co-host of a love its sister podcast weird studies until then take care and remember attention is 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