I think a key role for technology is helping us see the patterns that we can't see ourselves about ourselves as we get more granularity and ability to parse increasingly subtle patterns in the data about ourselves. It might be able to tie spikes in heart rate or biometric fluctuations to certain events that happen in our life or certain thought patterns. I think we're just going to be able to get a little bit more granular with the kind of data we have and that unlocks knowing ourselves not only on an individual level, but it can also help the human organism to know itself. I'm imagining a future in which you can see when a certain policy or change in material conditions leads to a spike in people's anxiety or stress or an increase in a certain ideology and get really clear on what is important to us, but also what is important to the human and hopefully can help us see ourselves within this connected network as part of this broader creature that is humanity.
Welcome to Humans on the Loop episode 19. I'm Michael Garfield and this week we're asking what the hell is going on with culture right now? The web is running evolution and fast forward, remixing the very substrates of identity and personhood in a molten broil of post-ironic post-human post-truth meme play that reminds me of nothing more than the poorest networked selfhood of bacteria in a molten wash of horizontal gene transfer, rest in peace genres and all hail the hyper-real individual as institution, the self-fulfilling prophecies of Baudrillard's Society of the Spectacle, the revenge of religion as our accelerating techno-social evolution prompts kind of reversal as the movement of the dau that challenges the dreams and ideals of the Enlightenment. This is a time of monsters, a rapid recombination of worlds and ways of living in them.
How to make sense of it all, or is making sense even a viable strategy when rifts and ruptures are the name of the game. Amidst the chaos of pop culture and mainstream news, my friend Rina Nikolai swims comfortably as a thoughtful commentator, riffing philosophically on networked society and its discontents, the emergent spiritual traditions of digital natives, and the post-human beastery of our AI and biotech saturated century, Rina's sub-stack incognita is a handbook to the cyborg aesthetic, the imagistic and algorithmic complex of online identity, our entanglement with capital, and our possession by and performance of meme space. How do we not become caricatures of ourselves in the world-creating and world-destroying flood of remix culture? How do we cultivate our roughness, fractality, wildness, eligibility?
How do we stay, as Kadell last put it in the previous episode, in the gaps and cracks instead of becoming prey to the new monsters of our unleashed collective imagination? And how do we befriend those monsters? William Irwin Thompson said noise characterizes the emergence of planetary culture, an age in which technology slays the victim of the mind and resurrects it as art in a new ecology of consciousness. If then, the only way through is up and out, then join me as once more we dive into the noise and make music together with Rina.
Before we start, thank you for listening, and if you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, comment, and consider becoming a member and joining our inspiring live discussions at sub-stack or Patreon. Context is king, not content, and while members do, of course, get access to a deep trove of exclusive writing and episodes, the most valuable thing right now is the chance to find the others and participate in the formation of what Thompson called a musical noetic policy with the other amazing people this work continues to constantly. Right now, I'm raising money to grow that noetic policy by attending the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute in Scotland, a world-class nexus of leading-edge researchers and artists exploring the fundamental theory of intelligence, who collectively present an amazing opportunity to build community for wisdom and technology projects, as well as to go fishing for mind expanding new guests on the show. Leaving the country for three weeks with my kids to participate is an out-of-pocket expense, but it'll feed our discourse and applied projects for a long time to come, so let me hang some bait for your membership.
I'm sitting on six months of unreleased episodes right now, and if I reach 300 paid subscribers or find a patron to cover the cost of this trip, I'll upload them all and every new recording to a private archive so you don't have to wait for months to stay up to date on the ideas this project is mid-wifing. So there's that! Stay tuned for more wonderful guests and much more writing this summer on the history of simulation, the magic of code, wisdom in human-machine collaboration, and how to navigate our increasingly hallucinatory evolution of culture and consciousness at humansontheloop.com. And join me in giving thanks to Rina Nikolai for her thoughtful contributions to this discourse.
Enjoy! Alright, hey! Rina Nikolai, I'm glad to have you on the loop. Hi, Michael.
It's great to be here. I've been listening to your podcast for a couple of years. It's one of my favorites, so it's an honor to be here. So yeah, this is a Twitter friendship.
I like when they jump the rails and disintermediate themselves, and you actually get to know somebody. And yeah, you just have said so many interesting things that when you started incognita, I was hyped. And yeah, it's a funny case. There's a category of desired guests on the show that are just like quote-unquote ordinary people, but like demonstrate the ability to think deeply and to observe things without having some kind of fancy affiliation or a platform.
And I don't know. Part of it is just like my appreciation for the, like, when Priya Rose talked about what an independent research PhD would look like in this world, like, how is it that we can live lives of scholarship and then make our knowledge and our expertise legible to other people without conventional credentials? You're someone that I think is really worthwhile as a mind on the topics that are relevant to the show, but isn't like part of the machine of the production of intellectuals. And so that makes it doubly interesting.
Thank you. Thank you, Michael. I had all my institutional credentials over the past few years. And yeah, I realized that I kind of want to forge my own path rather than attaching myself to any given structure that exists prior in society.
I'm stepping back and trying to critically examine the things I want to be a part of and things that I don't. And then from there, choosing to, I don't know, up back into some and not others maybe, or just doing my own thing for a while. So I want to start by having you give people a bit of an autobiography. I think it would be just as a way of addressing the way that you think.
And what you're choosing to write about for your blog and why you care about this stuff is the best way to situate what it is we're going to talk about today. And we can start with the person and then we can get into the philosophical reflections. Great. That sounds good.
I'm in my mid 20s. So a journey that I'm just now beginning. I went to Harvard for undergrad. From there, I went to Wall Street doing investment banking.
From the start of my professional career, I was on the super rigid career driven path that I very quickly realized was not for me. COVID came around, I moved to LA, did a couple other jobs within that corporate world, and then I decided that I would take a step back from all that and then really try to develop my thinking a little bit more. I noticed that the people around me just weren't thinking about the same kinds of questions that I was or really interested in the same kinds of thing that I was. And that kind of motivated me to say, am I really a fit for this world that I'm stepping into or is it another path that I should pursue?
So for the past year, I've spent my time really following what makes me intellectually curious. That includes really a lot of thinking about how society operates, but then also about technology. So I got really into reading theory and also philosophy, specifically post human philosophy, because I think that framework helps us understand the moment we're living in now, which is this intersection of culture and society with the force of technology. Technology's always been something that moves culture and moves material conditions, which then changes the kinds of ideas that people have and the kinds of things people believe.
This moment feels particularly strange because we're seeing technology mutate reality in increasingly strange ways, whether that's brain organoids hooked up to each other in a computer that then gets rewarded by literal shots of dopamine to the system, or whether that's the phenomenon of the social media influencer that is inherently entangled with these algorithms and systems of technology and capitalism in one. So we're seeing all sorts of these hybrid forms that make reality particularly strange in this moment. So this blog on sub-stack is called Incognita. It takes the form of a critical theory tabloid, so it's a mix of high-low culture.
It discusses pop culture, technology, society, cultural trends, but then takes a little bit of a more academic and theoretical lens on some of these things that I'm observing. So you've written a few pieces for this blog on the relationship between technology and religion and culture that I found especially interesting. And maybe the right place to start is up in the Harvard stratum of the introductory piece on what is posthumanism because defining it as you have, I feel like a lot of people get this confused, you did a good job of disambiguating that transhumanism is not posthumanism nor is it a type of posthumanism. And I feel like in my own efforts to thread the needle with a critical stance about technology but a curiosity and an interest in the new kinds of self that are emerging within the built environment that I terrify a lot of people, that a lot of people are engaging with the will-dering pace of change.
It's like you're meeting someone in a dark alley and you don't have time to get to know them. And so you, this is how police shootings happen. We feel like the stakes are very high and so we retreat into category and the category that people on either extreme of the technology conversation are leaning on is very fear-based or rapturous, eschatological. And that's different than the kind of nuanced thinking that a lot of posthumanist scholarship has brought to the stuff.
So I would love for you to talk a little bit about actually not just what is posthumanism but also the piece that you wrote on profits of the machine future about effective acceleration ism and the way that technocapitalist thinking has become a largely unwitting reskin of Christian eschatology. How you see the differences between those things and how those distinctions are showing up in the literature is like a good place to start. Yeah, great. So posthumanism, I would define it as a group of philosophies that comes out of the mid-20th century and then continues to the present day.
Some key philosophers within that movement are Donna Haraway with her Seyborg manifesto. More recently, Rosie Braydotti, who is an Italian philosopher whose life work is about posthumanism and posthuman feminism. I would say posthumanism has a few, maybe key characteristics. The first is that it de-centers the human but engages with this idea that the world does not revolve around the human and over the last few hundred or thousand years we've been stuck in this philosophical mindset where it still has a lot to do with human consciousness and human perception and the world of human things.
Posthumanism is saying let's do that a little bit and let's see the whole planet. So in that it's post-anthropocentric where the species of the human is de-centred to the whole picture of what is going on in the planet. It challenges traditional dichotomies between, for example, culture and nature. And embodied, individual and the collective, the natural and the synthetic.
These are all troubled by technology and posthumanism says instead of appealing to nature as a marker of what's right, we should accept that nature is malleable. And these boundaries are simply concepts created by the human mind to keep things in line. But actually the reality is that these boundaries are much more complex and much more porous. And we see today with technologies that cause us to really question these boundaries between natural and synthetic, for example, with various gene editing technologies, having us question the nature of intelligence with technologies like AI.
These boundaries are becoming blurred before our very eyes. And then I would say another characteristic that goes along with that is the rethinking of agency. So when you realize you're part of an interconnected node that is affected by everything else and you're not really a solid, stable entity, it causes a rethinking of agency in which you really can't look at just the individual scale anymore. You must look at all the various interconnections, all the various forces that shape an individual's agency.
So it's shifting from looking at an agent as an individual to a node within a network, let's say. And that's the basis of post humanist thinking. It's this kind of emphasis on the disillusion of boundaries in technology, this anti natural stance where anything can be malleable and we should use technologies to improve things. But then with that also comes a rethinking of agency and a rethinking of our interconnectedness with other people, other animals, other species, and also with broader planet as a whole.
With this eschatology question that you're interested in, I wrote a piece called Propets of the Machine Future that addresses this trend in Silicon Valley of Yak or effective acceleration mechanism, which is a way of thinking about AI as this inevitable end towards which humanity should apply all its efforts. We need to get AGI because that is like the next stage of consciousness. That's going to help us rise in the scale of civilizational might, harness more energy from the sun, make the species multi planetary and importantly not just the species but make consciousness multi planetary. So it's this kind of almost teleological drive towards a state of more powerful consciousness and a more powerful civilization.
And to me, this train of thought which is really popular now among young people and attacking young people in AI and it's definitely gained more of a following online on Twitter that the discourse around this train of thought is really vocal. To me this seems misplaced religious fervor that doesn't have an outlet in our kind of industrial hyper modern technologically enabled society and especially in Silicon Valley. And so this religious fervor takes the shape of the culture it was born in which is this focus on optimization and productivity towards greater and greater ends. And then the end result of this is this kind of cold and calculating machine God basically.
And so a lot of people in this community will phrase it as we're creating a machine God. We are bringing about a deity on the planet that is going to help us transcend the base of humanity and it's purely the material state and merge consciousness with it and become multi planetary. So yeah, to me this kind of is like the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. It's a lot of this kind of imagery.
But I think that perspective is perhaps a limiting one because it shapes the nature of the of this new invention of this new technology that we really have no no clue what is actually going to end up as but it unnecessarily pre shapes it in the image of a deity which I think is interesting and powerful because we see time and again that our stories of how we think things should be and our stories about the future are myths often actually have a sort of gravitational pull where they act as a target actually shape the trajectory of the future in the image of those stories. Because we have this image of this God will it affect the way that AI actually manifests in the world. Maybe it seems like it maybe already is. Yeah, one of the things I would like to provoke in this conversation is a reflection on where narrative production is actually happening.
You make a point in this article on acceleration is to prophecy that this is all based on a big story of thermodynamics. I think about my buddy Bobby is Ariane and he's been immensely successful in the wake of writing his book the Romance of Reality which in attempt to synthesize all of the research on complex systems and thermodynamics and self-organization into something like a substantiated secular religious framework to explicate all of the thinking that's going into this sort of David Deutsch beginning of infinity attitude toward marshaling human energies toward the production of machine super intelligences. One level it's hard for me as an evolutionary biologist not to accept that the trend in evolution is toward more and more diverse intelligences greater symbiotic unity of intelligences that the planet is in any way that is meaningful to us more intelligent than it was four billion years ago or a billion years ago that this is driven by evolution as a process that finds free energy and uses it in processes of active inference to minimize uncertainty but then exports uncertainty and then thereby creates more and more opportunity for an ever more incalculable like the horizon of incalculability we never actually reach it we just keep growing and evolving and expanding into it and so on one level I am sympathetic to this on another level all of the reasons that it seems problematic have to do with the fact that this story is grounded in a kind of rationalist objective bias that this is the truth about the world but when on the other hand you've got the post humanist position that you outlined here that you summarized a history of is one that troubles the distinctions between self and other like you said that it makes it clear that there's a cognitive dissonance I feel like in how people can say we are information processing systems we are algorithmic processual entities and yet this is the truth and are making doctrine of the current state of physical and psychological knowledge to extrapolate into futures that they admit are completely ineffable and to say you know what we're going to recruit the entire economic apparatus of our planet and the ecological material and energy systems that underlie that in service of this and so it is still very much an ideology and it's an ideology that seems to me as transparently in conflict with itself as like radical genocide is postmodernism going out there and saying no position is absolutely true except for this one I want to bounce back and forth between like five of your pieces here in our conversation one of which is the piece that you wrote on the new monstrous because you link this weird world that you mentioned earlier about you know digital organic hybrid intelligences and the body as a site for technological manipulation and you compare it to Jack Helberstam's writing on monsters as entities that trouble boundaries and categories they're chimeric and they're metamorphic and so they unsettle us precisely because we recognize self and other simultaneously and then also Julia Kristeva's notion which I was totally unfamiliar to me I love this of abjection which is very similarly the abject as you write exist outside the symbolic order but not entirely separate from it embodying what is cast out in other yet inescapably linked to the subject blurring the distinctions necessary for maintaining identity so it's like what I'm trying what I'm hoping to do with this show is to get people comfortable with the ways in which what we're living through right now is sensible through frameworks that already exist and have for some time about the self as strange like the way that Timothy Morton has written about the radical otherness of the body as an object that we can never fully understand or the ways that our cognitive limitations draw a kind of pragmatic envelope around selfhood that the instruments of modern technology, telescope, microscope, big data, analysis have all complicated by viewing it's like in your point about the post human as a node in a network and I take it a step further into the self as a multi-scale network right in the way that like K.I.L.O.T.O.T. talks about AI and brain computer interfaces showing that the stories that we write about ourselves are abstracted or they're embeddings in a much larger space of possibility and that the causal mechanistic frameworks that we come up with through science and reason run up against the induction problem like the fact that we can never actually prove those interpretations to be true that there's always another way of looking at things.
Yeah so obviously there's a lot of abyssal horror in all of this but if you go all the way back to the legible origins of a lot of this in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster is a very sympathetic character and in many ways a far better exemplar of the nobility of our humanity than Frankenstein himself. Now the question is like without trying to respond in the kind of inflammatory oversimplified way to all of the crazy shit that's going on right now how does your research, your reading, your personal experience make sense of how to actually embrace our post humanity, what governance and economic systems emerge, what will the human conscious experience feel like, what values should be prioritized and that by viewing AI as an unstoppable godlike force beyond our control we abdicate our responsibility to consciously direct its development. So we have this paradox right? On the one hand we know that this is fundamentally mysterious on the other hand we have to do something we're not actually making anything that we can legitimately call progress if we relinquish our agency to physics or to finance or to or it was like our addiction capital.
Yeah yeah yeah absolutely I think you really hit the nail in the head with that it's a paradox of do we become actively involved in its shaping or do we not because we see that sometimes when we do become actively involved it does take the shape of maybe something unintended or something that might not be the best thing to bring about into reality and it also unnecessarily constrains possibilities like you were saying it's working with where we are now and the current human consciousness and the current values of a society so then do we imprint these things on this technology that comes next with unintended effect or do we just let it develop on its own it's a paradox and the thing that makes it paradoxical is the fact that AI to us right now is fundamentally unknowable so we're faced with the situation where we're meeting this great otherness this unknowable kind of otherness and it's causing this paradox in ourselves where we don't really know what to do in the face of that and the same with other technologies too like we we see all sorts of mutations of different forms for example the skin covered robot with its pink shiny face and its mechanical eyes poking through it does elicit this feeling of disgust the researchers were trying a kind of a skin layer for these robots to make them appear more human like so that's something that I find really interesting because it's like why do you need to make that more human like why don't you just let it be a robot let it be how it is and not constrain it in the image of a human and I think that principle it's a post human one that de-centers the human in this picture but I think that principle is an interesting one to look at in this current landscape because like in the case of the robot and even in the case of AI by shaping it to be in the image of a human you constrain it and you turn it into something that is like a degenerate version of a human which is what causes this kind of disgust and repulsion thing I think what I'd like to see is a more de-centered perspective around how to build these things de-centered from the human experience and human values where it's like you can give it freedom to be whatever it's going to be because maybe AI is a completely different type of entity its mind will work in a completely different way that's maybe more akin to a different kind of intelligence we have on the planet or maybe something that's not even on the planet at all but I think by constraining it around humanity you narrow down its possibilities Benjamin Bratton talks about this he mentions this term called epistemic technologies which are basically technologies that change the way we view the world the change our consciousness about reality and AI is one of these tools that has the potential to vastly open up how we see reality has the potential to generate completely new thoughts that would not come from a human mind at all but by shackling this thing to first century human values you essentially also shackle its possibility for it to be revelatory in that way and so in a sense it's like giving in to the unknown where there's something very powerful on the horizon but if you tie it too much to be intelligible to the human maybe you never get that phase shift in consciousness but then on the other hand yeah if you let it be completely unconstrained who knows do you run a risk there like an existential type of risk I don't know I don't know I would advocate for balance and for humility in the development of these things yeah respect and humility almost treating it like another entity that is deserving of respect on the planet yeah I wonder about the value of leaning in to the religious because obviously not all religion is obsessed with eschatology I've spoken to a lot of practitioners of interfaith traditions over the years who remind us that there's a hierarchical order within which we can understand that the like book of revelation and other eschatological texts and prophecies are mythological in the formal sense that they are unfolding at all times and the way the creation is unfolding at all times and that to place them along a timeline is misplaced concreteness that the world is always beginning and always ending and that where that actually leaves us is not in a preoccupation with the fulfillment of prophecy but in a much more complex and challenging consideration of how to live right now that like this is not about waiting for the world to end or helping the world end or participating in genesis except in that these are concerns that arise uniquely for everyone in every moment in every generation and so like to the extent that reason is literally built out of mythic thinking in the brain the ability to craft stories and characters and to assemble them on timelines and to understand cycles and so on is necessary in order to be able to reflect critically on all of that stuff I kind of want to lean in with you because if you make the point in your piece on the new monstrous you're like I love the etymology I'm a big fan of that turn in writing it remind us that the latin monsterari is to show it a reveal you know Monare to warn to pretend and this has direct links to the apocalypse as an unveiling yeah you say monsters play a revelatory role in society they expose what we identify within the human by defining what is other to us and that again that's a moving target I feel like it's a more interesting world in which we don't necessarily collapse the question of whether a i ought to be treated as a distinct entity or as a reflection of ourselves we certainly live in a more pluripotent world if we allow people to explore both options and every other variation and so at any rate that's all just to lead in because one of the other pieces that you wrote recently on malady of love and light are on remilia corporations malady nft's and their weird similarity to the vatican's mascot this weird anime looking catholic pilgrim or lusae which i was like really lucifer like you're okay whatever fine but there's this i was delighted that you took some time to explore the cultural phenomenon of the resurgence of catholicism as an aesthetic and its relationship to onomat and acuteness and to all of this because like you talk about in you're writing on the monstrous there's something about the chibi or the kawaii and the mass cotization of religion that that has strong resonances with the process of domestication the fact that we as a species are like cuter by virtue of having domesticated ourselves this weird preoccupation that we have with making robots cute and familiar and interoperable with us and it means like adjacent to like the waifu AI phenomenon also like what's going on here and how it really is yeah it's interesting i feel like as humans we have this drive towards cuteness where cuteness arises from our activities like for example the domestication of animals dogs to be hyper optimized to be hyper cute and then we do that with ourselves on the internet too and in a way lujae she's so cute i love her how can you all love her it was great a great strategic move i think but she's the flip side of the monster she's also this post human form with these exaggerated features these big eyes the cartoon character she's flat she's a native of the two-dimensional image brought to life but she is also a monster in the same way that all these like hyper optimized dog breeds are also monstrous in the way that they blur these boundaries between the human and artificial creating something a little bit uncanny so yeah she's a flip side of this like disgust feeling that we might get when looking at like a brain organoid computer this kind of mutilated collage of nature and technology the opposite where we get this feeling of cuteness but also from her exaggeration from her entanglement with technology so yeah i think that's interesting because it's again this remixing of forms and this like hyper exaggeration this malleability of the body and the image that gets really multiplied and accentuated online specifically so in the piece i talk about how the internet incentivizes these exaggerated forms of cuteness because you have to cut through the noise the algorithm incentivizes behavior that doubt and makes you pause and has you engage with it and so you get these really hyper optimized forms of cuteness but then also there's an element of like disembodiment anyone can be whoever they want to be online so you get with various avatars in games or people with like anime profile pics on their x-account so this disembodiment also allows this freedom of forms for people and it gets heightened online and then yeah it's also tied to certain cultural trends and yeah in the piece i talk about how these aesthetics of religion and Catholicism got adopted by certain cultural scenes in the early years after the covid pandemic even a little bit before there was this return to like trad cat or catholic coquette aesthetics online where girls are wearing lace veils and praying and going to church and it starts sarcastically but starts in this post-ironic way where it's engaging with something for its power a lot of subcultures these days get flattened into aesthetics and then repackaged and then cycled through through tiktok through instagram through algorithmic means of image conveyance these subcultures are repackaged as a flat image that anyone can then buy into the look and so i think that's a little bit of what happened in those years but i think it was driven by something a little bit deeper which is this online world that feels really disconnected from everything and very chaotic and very fast paced it was almost like people felt this instinctive need to return to a spiritual place something with history something with roots because it does feel like reality especially online reality is lifting off from the physical world so i think it was this desire to return to something with roots but then it also became this thing that was associated with this changing tide of neo-reactionary more right-wing thinking that had various political origins but it became absorbed into this like edgy new online downtown subculture and then all these things mushed together and then you get the same people who are into the tradcat stuff are the same people who are into the anime stuff and so anime then becomes this vehicle for religious imagery almost and then i talk about remilia corporation which is an experimental art collective that comes out of the scene in 2019 or the early 2000s that to me exemplifies the nexus of these forces where they basically are a art collective that does nft's so they release a line of 10 000 nft's called my ladies you might have seen them online they're these chibi style anime profile pictures and they're often juxtaposed with either images of violence like guns fire or heaven angelic imagery spiritual imagery but definitely very much like catholic and western inspired religious imagery and so this art collective comes out of the scene and does actually a pretty radical thing and uses the mechanisms of the internet itself to transmit these images as memes they say we're post-authorship it's not about credit it's basically meme as art and then these things spread in a viral way people remixed them made different art pieces using these characters turn them into memes and then they basically spread online using the mechanics of the internet itself to be a co-participant in this art project and they call this immersion with the internet network spirituality which they speak about their founder charlotte fangs speaks about about this concept on their blog it's a collection of all sorts of different ideas and the core bit seems to be that it's this abandon to the mechanics of the internet and the internet as a spiritual place and as the whole arena of reality and the malleability of that and the pro-dian nature of this ever-shifting realm of information and memes and content and using that as your base material and your world within which to operate yeah so it's a very interesting project it's it takes art in a new direction very online direction that reckons with the internet not as an afterthought or like a new force that arrives on the scene and must be critically engaged with as a lot of post-internet art of the 2010s did it's digitally native it's the first project that really feels like it's using the internet in a way that it feels like it's at home there rather than feeling like it's we must critically engage so i i want to just cite a piece of the writing of remilia corporation in this pull quote you take from their piece on network spirituality because i think that in understanding what an internet negative institutional religion looks like there's a refiguring of the institution that runs in parallel with the refiguring of the self-imposed humanism and i think you just spoke to some of that and we don't need to define all these terms right now but i want to lay this out as a groundwork for asking you my next question you quote network spirituality is the futurist embrace of experiential hyperreality found in the webs accelerated networks a lens in which to efficiently and safely engage lucid virtuality and the internalization of its new cultural modes and more though the esoteric school also furthers a lainist occultism around persona agrigors i want to put a pin in agrigors positing the development of genuine spiritual entities spontaneously self-organized as hyperreal entities in the catalyzed collective consciousness veritable deities network angels and demons it's like okay here again we have this gesture toward this relationship between technology and transcendent intelligence like the the agrigor as a hyperstition or a self-fulfilling prophecy that occultists have been playing around with for hundreds of years it shows up in Tibetan traditions as the tulpa in jewish traditions as the gollum and everybody following the relationship between religious and magical literature and ai has drawn these connections already that this is the terrain in which stories rupture the boundary that we have taken for granted between the real and the virtual for the last few centuries and are escaping our imagination into the wild i want to link back to your piece on posthumanism because you mentioned in the posthuman beast gerry chrisper babies and other organisms with artificially alter genomes blurring the line between natural evolution and human design and then make the point that this is already happening that there's peer-reviewed research out there on various genetics laboratories that are that have been identified as having containment failures and their experiments are ending up in the bloodstream of the researchers and that human beings we've learned in the last few decades of research largely through our microbiota through horizontal genetic transfer in the other supposedly non-human organisms that that allow us to be human in the first place that we're finding things like monsanto gene sequences in our guts and so you know that this is so there's two layers there's that looking down into the way that the ideas that motivate research and design are resulting in very real physical and behavioral modifications to what we think of as a human and then there's reaching up into our co-evolution with those stories as distinct entities in their own right that may not precisely predate us but if we like transect the sort of causal network you can say that cultures and ideas cause humans as much as humans cause culture and ideas and so where this gets really interesting for me is this assumption that people have about what you said lifting off from the physical world that a lot of the acceleration is rhetoric and the transhumanist rhetoric is about ephemeralization is about somehow escaping the imminent in the physical but of course like you said people are choosing cute avatars online because it cuts through the noise because it is hijacking human attention systems because it competition for attention is a very old game in the biosphere that that has to play by the rules of this active inference and free energy minimization that we were talking about earlier and so what we're really looking at is all of this stuff is happening within a more than human logic that is grounded in materiality and in metabolism so this gets to this thing about like okay well why are these the stories that the church and remilia corporation are stumbling on independently like why is cuteness so strongly convergent and then i want to ask into this relationship between our subservience to extractivist thinking and ever greater efficiency and convenience through economies of scale which is a kind of smoothing over of the complexity of the world by rendering the singularity of each individual thing in the world as a bit stream in computers or like five oranges which we can now represent by a numeral and we can say like five oranges are in some sort of platonic sense equivalent to five apples and we can you can we can run calculations on that and that's what afforded all of this so the question is what does it mean to not be cute the reason i was so glad that you brought up cuteness in context with all of this stuff is that the acceleration is the fast and the cute and the small are all very tightly knit in an associative framework like they're close in vector space small beings tend to be cute because they depend on parental care and they happen to be fast because of scaling laws they're just like my kids heartbeats are so much faster than my heartbeat and yet not everything in the biosphere is cute and smoothness versus roughness so when i think of what it means to not be cute there's a relationship with that and i want to say like decelerationism exactly but in an acknowledgement that resilience or any fragility as strategies depend on a balance between the sort of hyper-competitive short-term financialist thinking and long-term thinking about sustainability and adaptability and the modern world has looked at nature and seen what looks like inefficiencies that have time and time again proven to have some sort of evolutionary utility once we actually understand things from a systems perspective you know so like you know why do grandparents exist they don't reproduce anymore the thing about the human life cycle is itself a kind of averaging of different life stages and different life functions and utilities and if what the show is ultimately doing is asking about wisdom then there's wisdom in acknowledging the appropriate context within which one is to be cute and one is to be fractal or rough or inefficient that gets us back to the monster right so like that's the sigil i want to drop for you which is like what are the stories that we are not telling that are like capacious enough to accommodate all of this hyper-competitive race to the bottom melokian war of the cute kind of thinking and yet make room for multiple other strategies and the last piece i'll tie into this is again in your post-human beast year you mentioned that there are teams out there 3d printing coral reefs and restoring marine habitats affected by coral bleaching blurring the boundary between the technological and the environmental like coral reefs are a very obvious place where roughness is working out as a strategy and cute little things like the world's most famous fish the clown fish exist in the coral reef but so do like groupers and frog fish and stuff that people do not identify as cute that are relying on other strategies what are the evolutionarily sustainable ugly stories that we might want to include along these because there is this balance that we have to draw between we should claim more agency in the telling of these self-fulfilling prophecies and the fact that the stories that clearly work in the world are stories that are able to find purchase and are able to establish themselves based on stinging affordances so like why not just lean into religion but lean into religion in a smarter way yeah yeah these are all really good points okay we're to start with this i think you make a lot of very interesting observations that are similar to my thinking on this in terms of like the cuteness monstrous dynamic there are two different polarities of this like post-human age one is like the attractive pole and one is the repulsive pole almost so i'm getting this image of like human energy in under these new set of post-modern conditions polarizes towards the formation of cuteness and has this like disgust or uncanny reaction with regards to the flip side of the sigil which is like the monstrous so yeah and then i i think it it does have to do with the stories that catch on in a population and like the behavior that's incentivized given a certain set of initial conditions and when you have something like an algorithm that is basically deciding what people's attention goes towards it incentivizes certain behaviors and certain types of content so cuteness this hyper cuteness is born out of this machinic algorithmic thing yeah it's an interesting image that you set forth about the cuteness and the monstrous dynamic the other thing that i think about is this idea that you mentioned about the grandparents what is what's the utility of having grandparents that they're no longer reproducing and this idea that in the genetic diversity of the human population you have these mechanisms by which you avoid a disaster so like certain types of humans are gonna be amazing in certain situations and certain types of humans given those same initial conditions are gonna really struggle to like fit into society versus if the conditions of the planet were different maybe those ones that are previously struggled then fit in and become the main driving force of that society so i guess there's like something there about diversity and like the human system as an organism as a whole that has certain people in it or certain parts that do better in certain situations versus others and then depending on the like material conditions and structure that we build onto the world it enables certain types of people to do better in that situation versus 100 years ago or a thousand years ago so like maybe the people that are doing better now because the conditions are right for them to like ride the wave are the people that are really comfortable spreading images of themselves across various algorithmic platforms and have that type of relationship to the self where they're using the self as material for their own co-creation which kind of ties into my piece on kim kardashian in which i analyze her as a cyborg that is simultaneously image and also corporation so human as in her physical body which she has notably modified to attain a very cyborgian second is the image complex that she has around her so she doesn't exist as kim kardashian in her own body exclusively she exists as kim kardashian in this kind of complex of images that are all each a node in this entity that constitutes her cultural presence so it's not just her body she exists literally in this thing that is simultaneously embodied and disembodied and algorithmically constructed so she's entangled with technology already you can't have a kim kardashian without having the algorithm and without having digital media and then also she is entangled with the forces of capital she is a corporation in her own right and she's been the whole kardashian family has managed to create a really sophisticated ecosystem where they're performing themselves their performances become content for their various image distribution machines which are then harnessed to the machine of capital through their various business enterprises so it's this really sophisticated ecosystem that they've managed to create and in doing so have transformed themselves in the process they had to become completely a completely new kind of hybrid entity hybrid between the human the image and the corporation it's the playbook for the influencer and they were the first to really pull it off in such an industrial scale that is the form of influencer itself it is a post-human hybrid of human image and capital and what I think is quite interesting about the kardashians is that they really take this dedication to the capital system so far and so far as they're willing to sacrifice their own bodies use their bodies and their image and their personal lives and every relationship and every conversation as material for the system so they really aren't like alchemizing themselves into something new it's much it's a much more radical way of participating in capitalism than anything before and then you see also in a more who are capitalists and entrepreneurs in a more conventional sense like tech CEOs now a page out of the kardashians book like Elon Musk is becoming a caricature of himself he has created a sci-fi world he's importantly been able to boil down his mission to one sentence which is important because the easiest ideas are going to spread the fastest the more complicated an idea is the more you lose people on the way so he's condensed his mission to one sentence which is we must make humanity multi-planetary and then he's created a sci-fi world via his tweets via the images he chooses to share that paints a certain aesthetic of the sci-fi world and paints him as a character within it he then embodies that character he follows a certain set of aesthetic guidelines like this art deco thing that he's doing with the cybercab and optimists and the way he chooses to present himself by wearing all black and these graphic t-shirts that say occupy Mars he's becoming this character in this world that he's creating and that's what the Kardashians do the Kardashians were the ones to do at first so then we get this cross talk between this world of culture and media and then this world of more traditional capitalism and entrepreneurship and corporation building so the self becomes the corporation and the corporation becomes a self so yeah i just want to point out in your piece on kim kardashian you make the point that she is poreless that like she seems to have that the part of her cyber identity is the perfect smoothness of her skin and which constantly in these like skin-tight nude colored outfits that again it's like part it's like she can't make herself chibi but she can get real damn close by just filing off everything about the actual woman and in some cases even like surgically redistricting that from her waist or ass to create this image i want to read a piece from the because all of this sounds horrible but i am still committed to trying to understand what this logic offers those of us who are not just going to surrender our agency to the big machine yeah i want to read a little piece of this essay for people you say kim kardashian may be a striking early example of an emerging paradigm in which capital accrues to those who can perform and commodify themselves best who can most thoroughly transform themselves into human technology market assemblages under this new paradigm technological mediation and market logic cease to be external forces and instead become the very substance of subjectivity labor becomes a constant process of self-surveillance and self-commodification that demands total integration with digital systems i guess my question to listeners would be in what way is this not already the case or can we become aware of the ways in which this has always been true for as long as we've been alive or at least for as like as long as marshal mccluen talking about electronic media making the individual into an institution right like the brand of jimmy hindricks the brand of marshal cluen and rather than assume that the only way to engage with this revelation is to retreat into the most efficient expedient cute interoperable domestated version of the post human the other question is how do we literally afford the time and the attention to hold the process of inquiry open and make ourselves spacious enough to really confront and embrace and welcome and integrate all of the messy complexity of this sort of hyper object version of what we are the line that you and others have drawn between attention and capital gets really concrete in terms of like how do we innovate more wisely how do we design technologies including stories that reward us for holding this quantum superposition of all of these different ways of seeing together rather than serving one of them reducing everything to the subservience to the thermodynamic gradient that takes work yeah one of the key issues there is to be able to tell that kind of story and to have it resonate with enough people and to spread you need to have will be basically prepared to hear that story and understand it and no one's going to care about that story if they don't have food on the table and they are scared or someone has told them that we should be scared of immigrants coming into the country and crossing our borders there's a competition in this marketplace for stories and there's only a limited amount of human attention and so the stories that resonate the most are going to spread and those are stories that are going to be meeting us where we are as a society and a story like one that you just set forth which is a very important story the interconnectedness of ourselves as nodes within this broader network that includes not just us as individuals but all of humanity and all the planet that story is not going to be one that people care about when they're worried about all sorts of other things when they have other allegiances like the nation or the church or the economic system or if the story they really believe is chasing financial and material benefit is going to be what improves your life they're not going to care about another story if they're fighting to survive and if they think that capital acquisition is going to be the way to outcompete other people so that they can ensure that they and their family survives so I think you need to have a fertile ground for stories to be able to catch on and I think we're not there yet and it involves laying conceptual groundwork but also kind of spiritual groundwork and psychological groundwork because people's conscious experience really is what affects the stories that are going to resonate with them and if their conscious experience is going is dominated by feelings of anxiety or fear that's what's going to take priority so I don't know I think it's a complex problem it has to do with it is it's tied into all the different realms of reality and by that the material conditions the literal surroundings that people surround themselves with the way they spend their time the way their conscious experience looks it also has to do with ideas and belief systems and cultural norms in a society and also how those things get filtered through their unique conscious experience whether they're scared or anxious or suffering from trauma or you know have other things going on in their life it's all filtered through everyone's conscious experience so I don't know it's a really hard problem I think it has to do with shifting the consciousness of humanity and there's various levers to pull in that endeavor yeah until we're ready as a society to be in that receptive state for that particular story I don't believe that it's going to catch on so we must do the groundwork to hopefully get us closer to that this is where I wanted to end this to you because I I have a working answer to some of these questions that I've been playing around with in a lot of the conversations I've had for the series I've talked with Jim O'Shaughnessy I've talked with Terence Southern and several other specifically about the use of the language models that exist today as tools for the enhancements of self-knowledge for the promotion of metacognition making it easier for people to afford reflective processes that are historically only available to the people who can afford a therapist or a mentor or something like that one of the things that's come up again in the conversations again and again in these conversations is that there is a fairly robust argument that actually being able to think better and knowing oneself better does in fact confer a competitive advantage and so to your point about what it's going to take to get people out of a state of anxiety and complacency and to surrender themselves to stories without any kind of critical immune system I realize that my goals for this particular show I'll ultimately boil down to we have the option now to tell better stories so let's dream better and like everybody wants to feel good as far as I can tell so the again it's like if this is all really about addiction and gaming and the relationship between those things and then the access of like community accountability oversight multi-scale regulation and innovation technological innovation as a form of parenting it's like we actually have a rich body of literature and experience like real hands-on practical experience in how to encourage learning and curiosity and play and to make it fun and suddenly we have this remarkable opportunity to make these things not only fun but to help us adapt ourselves into a world in which as Kevin Kelly said in his book The Inevitable like one of the major trends that will continue to unfold over the course of our lives is one of constant becoming and lifelong learning and this is where I wanted to tie all of this into the essay that you wrote as your submission to the Cosmos Institute essay contest on AI and human flourishing and specifically the line in there that you say AI reward functions could be fine-tuned to prioritize moments of surprise learning and fulfillment and it's like I just keep thinking about this and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this because again if it is all about the fact that people are making these decisions because our attention is scarce then where do you see levers for freeing the attention that we have available to us not harvesting our ever scarcer attention but rewarding us for being more deliberate in our exercise of where to place that attention and like how do you see the potential of computing to actually make us better people instead of worse people? Yeah I think what you said about knowing the self is absolutely right because unless you know the self and what you want what it is you really want you don't really know where you're aiming and then you're easily swayed by whatever other people are telling you to think or to desire so your attention can be more easily captured if you don't have a set goal and a course set of values and a course set of things that you want to work towards or achieve so I think it starts with knowing the self I think knowing the self helps to understand what desires are genuine to you and helps divide those from all the things that you're told that you should want people trying to make money off of you by institutions that are trying to get you to conform to be a model citizen of society so I think the core thing is knowing the self being aware of what beliefs and what motivations guide you and then also being aware that could also be constantly changing yeah it is a process of becoming the most human thing to do is change no one's the same from one moment to the next and in that way also becoming as a kind of freedom because you're not tied to anyone you were in the past and you're not tied to any given set of belief systems you're going by your own internal compass and what feels right to you and that could be constantly changing so I think a key role for technology is helping us see the patterns that we can't see ourselves about ourselves whether that's our thinking but also like biological and biometric data I think we're pretty close to being able to have really good biometric devices then with AI technology and the kind of conversational engagement we have with these things there's an opportunity for it to be able to analyze patterns in our speech in our interactions with it from our data and as we get more granularity and ability to parse increasingly subtle patterns in the data about ourselves we might achieve a state where technology can know us better than we can know ourselves really and with that it can help us illuminate different parts of ourselves different patterns different motivations that we might not have even known were there it might be able to tie certain like spikes in heart rate or biometric fluctuations to certain events that happen in our life or certain thought patterns I think we're just going to be able to get a little bit more granular with the kind of data we have and that unlocks knowing ourselves not only on an individual level but it can also help the human organism to know itself so you can imagine a future in which a lot of people now buy into these really granular data tracking kind of situations and you can see when a certain policy or a certain change in material conditions leads to a spike in people's anxiety or stress or an increase in a certain ideology so you're able to study the human organism better as a whole as well because you just have that level of data granularity but then also this mechanism in AI that can now actually parse through all that amount of data and pull out the salient patterns so I see a future in which that level of engagement with our data helps us to see ourselves and get really clear on what is important to us but also what is important to the human and hopefully it can help us see ourselves as a node within this connected network as part of this broader creature that is humanity yeah see us as a part of that for me the kind of punchline of this joke is that when you say in this piece with values like emotional sensitivity, curiosity, transparency and learning at its core fostering self-awareness through metacognitive reflection and critical engagement this framework allows us to continue advancing AI while simultaneously expanding human autonomy emotional sensitivity, curiosity, transparency and learning are like dog traits like in a weird way in a weird way the cute is not just the mask that Shagoth is wearing as the rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem right it is actually a the strategy that made us human in the first place and that we can lean into all of these things that are familiar to us and that we prize as people our socialization our the satisfaction of our skin hunger our desire to know and to be known our desire to have fun and to play and to be satisfied with purpose so it's like and then it's just it's funny because like again this is like where I was hoping to get to with that piece on Kim Kardashian you say when you say labor becomes a constant process of self-surveillance and self-commodification that demands total integration with digital systems it sounds scary but if you reframe that as now going to work means like knowing yourself and making yourself known in in ways that are suddenly vastly easier thanks to the fact that we have these tools available to us then it sounds like we are on the cusp of getting paid to engage in self-actualization and self-transformation yeah that's a great point that is a great point that'd be amazing if that were the case with the help of a cute AI friend your little your cheap and your make it make a I cute I think that's the solution but cute enough that we can still say no like if you can't say no you're not making the choice exactly exactly so anyway Rina where's your cultural radar turning right now what do you see on the horizon on the horizon now I've been really interested in this question of how can is there a way to simply explain like how all these mechanics tie into one system so we were talking about the interplay of stories in reality and the interplay that it that has with human consciousness and our physical conditions I'm interested in putting together like a unified theory of how things work and I want to tie it to yeah this like dialectic between material conditions the material realm and the memetic realm of ideas but then also what that has to do with us and the way we perceive reality the way it's filtered through our consciousness and then how that also has to do with kind of the more unconscious layer of things the biological layer because the unconscious layer is really what drives on the planet you can't have the human without cells and cell metabolisms and ATP and all that stuff so I'm working on synthesizing all these different trains of thought that we've been speaking about today I'd have been to like a simple model just to make things a little bit clearer for myself and hopefully for other people as well I think we're on the edge of a new paradigm related to that which is seeing the human and seeing the individual as a node within a more interconnected network and seeing humanity as an organism as a whole and changing our scale and our perspective and like being able to zoom out one more level not only across space to see like all of humanity and all the planet but also across time so like how the initial conditions of the systems we set in place then influence behavior into the future and the interplay of the different allegiances and structures between like religion, nations, governments, economic systems, how these forces wax and wane in strength and in the magnitude of their effect on physical reality and our conscious experience so I'm peering into that new paradigm and I'm really having fun with kind of perceiving the world and this more yeah it's not at all focused on the individual but it's more focused on humanity as a whole and the planet and that's pretty exciting to me. Awesome thanks so much for riffing today and for your writing it's a lot of fun and it's I look forward to seeing what you decide to focus on next. Thank you Michael thanks for having me, it's been a pleasure.
Thanks again for listening. Humans on the Loop was launched by microgrants from OSV, Cosmos, BitTensor and others but it's in full glide now and made possible only through the updraft provided by consulting income and the subscriptions and tax deductible donations of listeners like you. If you care about Third Way Futurism and dreaming better worlds together help us keep this going at every.org slash humans on the loop or by emailing me to work together at humansonaloop at proton.net you can also find a link to our wisdom and technology discord in the show notes and join our amazing monthly community calls by becoming a sub-stack or patreon supporter. Next week we speak with the brilliant Evan Miyazano of Atlas Computing on an evolutionary framework for AI alignment and control.
Until then take care and remember attention is our greatest natural resource.