Weirding the Digital: An Invocation with Douglas Rushkoff

00:57:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9WPp-g0LBs

Resumo

TLDRThe speech explores the evolution of internet culture and critiques the present technologically-driven society that prioritizes profit over authentic human connections. The speaker reflects on how the original, weird, and creative spirit of the internet has been co-opted by corporate interests, leading to a culture of conformity and surveillance. Emphasizing a return to locality, compassion, and community engagement, they call for reclaiming the weird, which they define as authentic and creative human experiences. The importance of psychedelics, social movements, and alternative interactions is highlighted as paths to revitalize and reconnect with this weirdness.

Conclusões

  • 🌍 Embrace the weird for authentic human experiences.
  • 💔 Current digital culture promotes conformity over individuality.
  • 🤖 AI can limit creativity by enforcing statistical norms.
  • 💡 Return to local community engagement and compassion.
  • 🎉 Early internet was about sharing and novelty, not profit.
  • 🪄 Psychedelics can enhance human connections and creativity.
  • 🌱 Strive for organic growth in relationships and ideas.
  • 🔥 Reject the alienation caused by corporate tech culture.
  • 🤝 Connectedness is key to counteracting social divide.
  • 📈 Reimagine tech as a means for enhancing life, not controlling it.

Linha do tempo

  • 00:00:00 - 00:05:00

    The speaker discusses the strange current state of society and expresses a desire to reclaim the weirdness that initially characterized South by Southwest, encouraging attendees to take back reality for humans and all living beings.

  • 00:05:00 - 00:10:00

    The importance of viewing computing and the internet as tools for weirdness and human creativity is highlighted, reminiscing about the early days when these technologies were largely uncommercialized and driven by personal expression and communal interaction.

  • 00:10:00 - 00:15:00

    The speaker critiques how the internet shifted from a place for weird and creative people to a corporate-driven environment aimed at profit maximization, leading to a loss of novelty and the amplification of existing societal structures.

  • 00:15:00 - 00:20:00

    They describe the evolution of the digital world and how it transformed from a space for creativity to one of surveillance and control, reflecting on the negative impacts this has created in modern society.

  • 00:20:00 - 00:25:00

    The notion of 'sticky websites' and metrics like 'eyeball hours' exemplifies how the internet has increasingly focused on the measurable engagement of users rather than their creative expression and innovation.

  • 00:25:00 - 00:30:00

    Society has created a digital 'Skinner box' that conditions behavior, leading to a bad trip for many as the original spirit of exploration and creativity was replaced by utilitarian forms of control and predictability.

  • 00:30:00 - 00:35:00

    The speaker notes that the incremental shift to an oppressive form of digital culture can be countered by embracing our human connections and the weirdness that arises from authentic interactions.

  • 00:35:00 - 00:40:00

    They advocate for a renewal of the focus on mutual support, cooperative behavior, and a return to the values that foster genuine human connections in the face of adversity.

  • 00:40:00 - 00:45:00

    The address moves towards accepting the present conditions of society as an apocalyptic reality, urging for a pivot from despair to developing compassionate cooperation and celebrating shared humanity.

  • 00:45:00 - 00:57:00

    Concrete examples of embracing weirdness and community are provided, contrasting the motivations for building relationships through sharing instead of consumption, and identifying pockets of 'weird' that create meaningful engagement.

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Vídeo de perguntas e respostas

  • What is the main message of the speech?

    The main message is about reclaiming human connections and creativity against corporate tech culture.

  • What does 'weird' refer to in the context of this speech?

    'Weird' refers to authentic human experiences and the embrace of individuality.

  • How does the speaker view the current state of technology?

    The speaker criticizes current technology for promoting conformity and reducing human individuality.

  • What does the speaker propose as a solution?

    The speaker advocates for community engagement, compassion, and a focus on local interactions.

  • What does the speaker think about the future of the internet?

    The speaker envisions a return to local, intimate connections rather than global, impersonal tech cultures.

  • How does psychedelics fit into the speaker's vision?

    Psychedelics are seen as tools for enhancing human connections and opening up new possibilities.

  • What historical events does the speaker reference?

    The speaker references early internet culture, the evolution of Silicon Valley, and social movements like Occupy Wall Street.

  • What is the significance of Austin in the speech?

    Austin is portrayed as a hub for creativity, where weirdness and genuine human expression can thrive.

  • How does the speaker view capitalism?

    The speaker critiques capitalism for enforcing conformity and suggests it hinders authentic human experiences.

  • What are the implications of AI according to the speaker?

    AI is viewed as a means to promote conformity and reduce individual creative expression.

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Rolagem automática:
  • 00:00:03
    >> Hey.
  • 00:00:06
    Thank you.
  • 00:00:07
    Thanks for being here.
  • 00:00:09
    Um, so this is going to be different because
  • 00:00:13
    things are strange.
  • 00:00:14
    Now, I don't know if you've noticed.
  • 00:00:17
    I mean, really strange on so many levels, right?
  • 00:00:21
    I mean, there's the regular strange.
  • 00:00:24
    Musk is in the white House.
  • 00:00:26
    AI is leading society.
  • 00:00:29
    Effective altruism seems to be a lead philosophy of our time.
  • 00:00:35
    And when we ask who's responsible for that,
  • 00:00:40
    I think the only answer we can come up with is us.
  • 00:00:46
    We are.
  • 00:00:47
    And by we, I mean, let's say most specifically
  • 00:00:50
    South by Southwest.
  • 00:00:53
    So today, I'm hoping is our opportunity to pivot for us.
  • 00:01:01
    And by us I mean the weird people to take back South by
  • 00:01:05
    Southwest, take back the net and take back reality on behalf
  • 00:01:11
    of humans and all living things.
  • 00:01:15
    And we're going to do that right here, right now.
  • 00:01:19
    If if you remember, I mean, I was here in the very early
  • 00:01:26
    South by Southwest era.
  • 00:01:30
    Austin was weird.
  • 00:01:34
    And that's why this conference existed.
  • 00:01:39
    It was South by Southwest was the weird alternative to
  • 00:01:46
    going to the Moscone Center in San Francisco and seeing
  • 00:01:51
    some Silicon Valley corporate world bullshit thing.
  • 00:01:55
    We came all the way out here as if we were going to Burning Man.
  • 00:02:00
    Right.
  • 00:02:01
    To say, what is this interactive thing?
  • 00:02:04
    Actually about.
  • 00:02:05
    Right.
  • 00:02:06
    What what do the psychedelic people want out of the internet?
  • 00:02:11
    I mean, and we came to Austin because Austin was the home
  • 00:02:16
    of words that some of you will be too young to know.
  • 00:02:20
    It was the home of Fringeware of Rose x video of Rick Linkletter,
  • 00:02:26
    of Mike Judge, of Alex Jones.
  • 00:02:31
    Right.
  • 00:02:31
    And you think about that for a minute.
  • 00:02:34
    Alex Jones, in that sense, was one of us.
  • 00:02:39
    He actually I mean, he was before this great divide
  • 00:02:42
    happened, it was another person leveraging the weird ass energy
  • 00:02:49
    of this place to trip out.
  • 00:02:52
    Yeah, he was having a bad trip, but it was still a trip, right?
  • 00:02:57
    that it was.
  • 00:03:00
    Austin was a place that that nurtured pockets of weird.
  • 00:03:08
    It was pockets of weird.
  • 00:03:10
    And many of us who were turned on to computers in the late 80s
  • 00:03:15
    and early 90s, we understood computing and digital as a as
  • 00:03:23
    a tool for promoting the weird, for for engaging in the weird.
  • 00:03:30
    Because if you remember the first time you went
  • 00:03:34
    online or the first time you went on a computer,
  • 00:03:37
    it was like being stoned.
  • 00:03:40
    It was like tripping.
  • 00:03:43
    It made the world weird because we were doing things
  • 00:03:49
    in simulation, right?
  • 00:03:51
    I write on a typewriter, take the typewriter, put it in
  • 00:03:55
    the computer as a simulation.
  • 00:03:57
    I am typing now, right?
  • 00:04:02
    I'm meta aware I'm.
  • 00:04:04
    I have a layer of weird, right?
  • 00:04:08
    I was with Timothy Leary the first time he went online
  • 00:04:12
    and he said not online.
  • 00:04:14
    Online.
  • 00:04:14
    First time he went on a mosaic web browser and he said, oh
  • 00:04:19
    my God, Doug, this is more powerful than acid, right?
  • 00:04:23
    More powerful because you don't have to take
  • 00:04:24
    a pill to get it right.
  • 00:04:28
    That's how profound the experience was.
  • 00:04:31
    It made things weird.
  • 00:04:33
    It denaturalized power is another way to say it.
  • 00:04:36
    It it opened up the the the notion that we are living
  • 00:04:42
    in a read write universe rather than a read only universe.
  • 00:04:46
    Once you can program anything, you look at the world and say,
  • 00:04:51
    what else can I program?
  • 00:04:54
    And you realize that everything is programmed.
  • 00:04:57
    These are all social constructions.
  • 00:04:59
    They everything becomes weird, right?
  • 00:05:03
    If you're stoned and you take out a dollar bill, you look at
  • 00:05:07
    the dollar bill the way you did when you were five years old.
  • 00:05:10
    What is this piece of paper?
  • 00:05:12
    Why does this piece of paper have value to those people?
  • 00:05:15
    And this piece of paper doesn't?
  • 00:05:17
    Why am I not allowed to make my own piece of
  • 00:05:19
    paper to be worth $1?
  • 00:05:21
    What is this thing?
  • 00:05:24
    It's it's that strangeness, right?
  • 00:05:26
    And computing and digital, especially when we came here to
  • 00:05:32
    celebrate it, it was about human beings collectively opening
  • 00:05:39
    up their imaginations to make different things possible.
  • 00:05:43
    Right?
  • 00:05:43
    It was about increasing or enhancing the human
  • 00:05:47
    possibilities.
  • 00:05:49
    And it was so sexy.
  • 00:05:52
    It was so weird.
  • 00:05:53
    There was no money in it.
  • 00:05:54
    Those of us who got involved in this, if you remember back in
  • 00:05:57
    the day, if you got involved in computing, your parents were
  • 00:06:00
    worried about you, right?
  • 00:06:03
    It meant, oh, Johnny's going to go play fantasy role playing
  • 00:06:06
    games for a career, right?
  • 00:06:08
    It was like you had decided to do Dungeons and Dragons
  • 00:06:10
    because no one was being paid for this shit, right?
  • 00:06:13
    It was kids getting paid at best in pizza to make
  • 00:06:16
    shareware, you know, shareware software in the in the garage.
  • 00:06:22
    You know, they were penniless.
  • 00:06:24
    It was kind of part of the, the slacker mentality,
  • 00:06:27
    like some slackers would go, like, read Camus or
  • 00:06:31
    something and sit in a cafe.
  • 00:06:33
    These slackers would learn programming and make stuff
  • 00:06:36
    that allowed other people to communicate.
  • 00:06:38
    It was a weird thing.
  • 00:06:40
    It was so it was so unprofitable that if you
  • 00:06:44
    remember, in the early the late Arpanet, early internet days,
  • 00:06:47
    AT&T was offered the internet for like a buck 89, and they
  • 00:06:52
    turned it down.
  • 00:06:53
    They didn't want it because this is just people being
  • 00:06:57
    weird together.
  • 00:06:58
    Right.
  • 00:06:59
    But then we went from weird to wired.
  • 00:07:04
    You know, I remember, and wired magazine came around and it was
  • 00:07:07
    like November 1993, and they reframed the internet as a money
  • 00:07:13
    making opportunity, as it was kind of a, you know, investment
  • 00:07:17
    and dayglo somehow come together as this wired culture.
  • 00:07:23
    The wired did to the internet kind of what Pepsi did to
  • 00:07:26
    the hippie movement.
  • 00:07:27
    Right?
  • 00:07:27
    I want to teach the world to sing, but, uh, it was co-opted.
  • 00:07:31
    Right.
  • 00:07:32
    And this, this renaissance that we were experiencing became
  • 00:07:36
    it became contextualized as a revolution, particularly
  • 00:07:39
    a revolution in business.
  • 00:07:41
    And the reason they contextualized it as
  • 00:07:44
    a revolution is because it was not a revolution they were
  • 00:07:47
    after, but a reactionary force.
  • 00:07:51
    Right.
  • 00:07:51
    When you see a book like Kevin Kelly's book in the 90s, it
  • 00:07:55
    was called Ten Rules for the New Economy, ten rules for
  • 00:07:59
    the New Economy.
  • 00:07:59
    Were not ten rules for the new economy.
  • 00:08:01
    It was ten rules to keep the economy being
  • 00:08:04
    the old economy.
  • 00:08:06
    Right.
  • 00:08:06
    When Nicholas Negroponte starts talking about, oh,
  • 00:08:09
    the difference here, we're talking about atoms and bits
  • 00:08:11
    and what, you know, it's an atom or a bit.
  • 00:08:13
    It was trying to turn bits into the rules of atoms, where bits
  • 00:08:18
    don't have the rules of atoms.
  • 00:08:19
    Bits are fucking bits.
  • 00:08:23
    They're different.
  • 00:08:24
    But no, once they were like, oh, don't worry,
  • 00:08:26
    these bits are like atoms.
  • 00:08:28
    And this is like that.
  • 00:08:29
    That's just ten rules.
  • 00:08:30
    You can we can still just boost the Nasdaq stock
  • 00:08:33
    exchange with this stuff.
  • 00:08:35
    It's not about kids, hippie kids with pizza
  • 00:08:37
    and neckbeards having fun.
  • 00:08:39
    It's about business and amplification.
  • 00:08:41
    That's when we got the long boom.
  • 00:08:43
    Wired magazine said thanks to the internet,
  • 00:08:46
    the global economy will grow exponentially, uninterrupted
  • 00:08:51
    Interrupted forever.
  • 00:08:52
    And this was believed right on up to Alan Greenspan, who was
  • 00:08:56
    the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time.
  • 00:08:58
    He said, yes, I think we are in a new paradigm, right?
  • 00:09:02
    A new paradigm to finally realize the Ayn Rand
  • 00:09:05
    vision of an infinite, an infinite economy.
  • 00:09:09
    But what happens once people are investing money in this thing?
  • 00:09:14
    Once people have bets on the net on digital culture,
  • 00:09:17
    they no longer want the infinite possibility of
  • 00:09:20
    novelty and weird.
  • 00:09:21
    That's not what you bet on when you place a bet.
  • 00:09:23
    What do you want?
  • 00:09:24
    A higher probability of your bet coming true?
  • 00:09:28
    That's what it's about increasing the probability
  • 00:09:31
    of your profit.
  • 00:09:33
    So instead of giving weird people tools to create novelty
  • 00:09:37
    and new possibilities, we use tools on people to increase
  • 00:09:41
    the probability of their behavior.
  • 00:09:44
    Right.
  • 00:09:45
    And we built this, this digital Skinner box around people in
  • 00:09:50
    order to not just experiment on them, but in order to guarantee
  • 00:09:54
    certain kinds of outcomes.
  • 00:09:58
    Right?
  • 00:09:58
    We invented what?
  • 00:09:59
    Sticky websites.
  • 00:10:01
    Remember sticky websites and the the metric we used for
  • 00:10:04
    the success of a sticky website?
  • 00:10:06
    It was called eyeball hours.
  • 00:10:09
    Isn't that a weird metric?
  • 00:10:10
    Eyeball hours.
  • 00:10:11
    That was a big one at the time.
  • 00:10:12
    Your website had to have high eyeball hours.
  • 00:10:15
    That meant the number of hours that somebody's eyeballs were
  • 00:10:18
    stuck on your website.
  • 00:10:23
    So if you think about Timothy Leary saying that this stuff
  • 00:10:26
    is as powerful as acid, what's the one thing that
  • 00:10:28
    he said that you needed to do to maintain the integrity
  • 00:10:32
    and balance of your acid trip?
  • 00:10:34
    You need to look at the set and setting of the trip.
  • 00:10:38
    So we started this trip in Austin with a set and setting
  • 00:10:42
    of weird humans collectively creating new possibilities.
  • 00:10:49
    and we reformed or revised that set and setting to using
  • 00:10:52
    technology on people in order to ensure specific outcomes.
  • 00:10:56
    Right.
  • 00:10:56
    We ended up with a set and setting of
  • 00:10:58
    surveillance and control.
  • 00:11:00
    So we've been living on a psychedelic substrate for 40
  • 00:11:03
    years with a set and setting of surveillance and control.
  • 00:11:07
    And no wonder we are having a bad trip.
  • 00:11:13
    What I realized only recently, after banging my head against
  • 00:11:19
    the wall for 20 years, going, My God, they took acid!
  • 00:11:23
    A lot of these guys even go to Burning Man and they take acid.
  • 00:11:25
    They came to Austin, they played with the same net
  • 00:11:30
    I did, but look what they did.
  • 00:11:32
    The thing that we didn't realize about LSD, about Austin, about
  • 00:11:37
    South-by and about digital, is that these are nonspecific
  • 00:11:41
    amplifiers, right?
  • 00:11:44
    What that means is if you take a tech bro and give
  • 00:11:46
    them acid, you get a tech bro on acid, right?
  • 00:11:50
    It's going to amplify whatever you put in, right?
  • 00:11:53
    So they threw in money and Nasdaq stock
  • 00:11:56
    exchange and profit.
  • 00:11:57
    We were just happy for anyone to even care about
  • 00:11:59
    what we were doing.
  • 00:12:00
    Well, come on, it's all fine.
  • 00:12:01
    We thought that they would start tripping with us
  • 00:12:04
    once they were in, but no.
  • 00:12:10
    So instead, South by Southwest grew into an industry, right?
  • 00:12:17
    And instead of South by Southwest being about
  • 00:12:20
    the weird, it went from kind of the weird to weird washing.
  • 00:12:26
    And you come here.
  • 00:12:27
    Oh, yeah.
  • 00:12:27
    You got that patina of Austin.
  • 00:12:29
    And then it went from it.
  • 00:12:30
    It reversed entirely from weird washing to
  • 00:12:34
    conferring legitimacy.
  • 00:12:38
    Oh, well, we did our thing at South By.
  • 00:12:40
    Oh, well, then you must be investable, right?
  • 00:12:43
    It used to be you did your thing at South By.
  • 00:12:44
    It's like.
  • 00:12:44
    Why?
  • 00:12:46
    If you did it now, it confers legitimacy on the opposite of
  • 00:12:51
    what this thing even was, right?
  • 00:12:55
    Austin has become the epicenter of exponential
  • 00:12:59
    growth back in the day.
  • 00:13:01
    Dell was the only company here, and it wasn't.
  • 00:13:03
    Even Dell was like in round Rock or somewhere, right?
  • 00:13:05
    It wasn't even really here.
  • 00:13:06
    And what was Dell?
  • 00:13:07
    Dell was a couple of airplane hangars filled with customer
  • 00:13:10
    service reps teaching people what how to order a computer.
  • 00:13:14
    Right.
  • 00:13:15
    And now what?
  • 00:13:16
    Tesla comes along with an abortion ban, right.
  • 00:13:18
    Like the same week.
  • 00:13:20
    Right.
  • 00:13:21
    Mark Zuckerberg, he announces that he's moving his
  • 00:13:24
    moderation team to Austin.
  • 00:13:28
    Right.
  • 00:13:28
    And he's he's he's that's like saying we're going
  • 00:13:33
    to move our feminism division to Afghanistan.
  • 00:13:38
    Right.
  • 00:13:39
    It's not a matter of moving the team.
  • 00:13:41
    Do you like that one?
  • 00:13:42
    Yeah.
  • 00:13:42
    It's not it's not a matter even of moving the team.
  • 00:13:46
    It's the idea that announcing you're moving the team is
  • 00:13:49
    a signifier, right?
  • 00:13:51
    Could you imagine that?
  • 00:13:52
    So moving something to Austin has become
  • 00:13:54
    a signifier for becoming part of the reactionary,
  • 00:13:58
    anti weird emphasis of the exponential growth net.
  • 00:14:04
    Right that you're going to become part of of of
  • 00:14:06
    Joe Rogan machismo.
  • 00:14:09
    And there's nothing wrong with a little homoerotic tension.
  • 00:14:12
    I mean, God bless these guys.
  • 00:14:14
    It's all good right?
  • 00:14:15
    We have to help them get comfortable with it.
  • 00:14:17
    Right.
  • 00:14:20
    But remember.
  • 00:14:20
    Right.
  • 00:14:21
    Austin is a nonspecific amplifier, right?
  • 00:14:23
    It is.
  • 00:14:24
    It is it maybe because of the the indigenous people
  • 00:14:28
    that I didn't, you know, do a land acknowledgment
  • 00:14:30
    for before I got up here.
  • 00:14:32
    But it is a, a an always charged geographical signal that will
  • 00:14:40
    magnify whatever we want.
  • 00:14:43
    Right.
  • 00:14:43
    The same as technology, the same as South by Southwest,
  • 00:14:48
    the same as psychedelics.
  • 00:14:50
    Right?
  • 00:14:50
    And I think Hugh Hugh Forrest, who kind of
  • 00:14:53
    runs this, he gets that.
  • 00:14:54
    That's part of why they do like let's do a psychedelics
  • 00:14:57
    track, let's do a climate track, because they get maybe if we put
  • 00:15:01
    these things in the mix, they'll amplify in a in a positive way.
  • 00:15:05
    But what I want to do is, is, is launch the,
  • 00:15:11
    the rewording of the digital as the next iteration of
  • 00:15:17
    the net while we still can.
  • 00:15:19
    And I want to initiate that right here, right now as
  • 00:15:22
    a public pivot from the probable back to the possible right from
  • 00:15:29
    the utilitarian exploitation of humans to the, the,
  • 00:15:33
    the amplification of the the sacred expression and connection
  • 00:15:38
    between people.
  • 00:15:40
    And I think that goes back to using the digital as
  • 00:15:45
    a model of mycelial networks, rather than a model of global
  • 00:15:50
    business networks.
  • 00:15:53
    Sorry, Stuart, you got that wrong.
  • 00:15:56
    Um.
  • 00:15:59
    Because what we're doing now is using technology
  • 00:16:04
    to autotune human beings.
  • 00:16:07
    You know, and that's the part that feels so awful and scary
  • 00:16:11
    to so much of us, right?
  • 00:16:13
    It's if you're on Facebook, you understand the way
  • 00:16:17
    social media works.
  • 00:16:18
    They use your past to figure out what statistical bucket
  • 00:16:21
    to put you in, and then put things in your newsfeed that
  • 00:16:25
    get you to behave truer to your statistical model.
  • 00:16:29
    Right?
  • 00:16:29
    So they can increase the probability, if they knew
  • 00:16:32
    with 80% accuracy that you were going to go on a diet next
  • 00:16:35
    month, they want to edge that up to 85% or 90% accuracy.
  • 00:16:39
    They want to take the 20% of people who are going to do
  • 00:16:42
    a novel, take a novel, action, take something out of away from
  • 00:16:47
    their statistical accuracy.
  • 00:16:48
    They want to shave that group down.
  • 00:16:51
    They want to reduce the weird, reduce the the people who are
  • 00:16:55
    not behaving according to the the statistical models.
  • 00:16:59
    And this auto tuning, it became a, a cultural,
  • 00:17:06
    uh, a cultural value.
  • 00:17:09
    You know, we auto tune our music, we auto tune
  • 00:17:12
    our human singers.
  • 00:17:14
    And I get it for Ariana.
  • 00:17:15
    You want her on the perfect note, right?
  • 00:17:18
    For the most commercial are right right there.
  • 00:17:22
    It's a perfect a flat.
  • 00:17:23
    You were off.
  • 00:17:24
    But we are going to tune it up there right.
  • 00:17:27
    And that's fine.
  • 00:17:27
    Wicked go for it.
  • 00:17:29
    But James Brown right.
  • 00:17:31
    If you take his reaching up for the note and auto tune that
  • 00:17:34
    you're slicing the soul off of the music, right in the culture
  • 00:17:41
    of probability in the digital culture of quantized music that
  • 00:17:48
    reaching up for the note.
  • 00:17:50
    That's the noise, and the note is the signal.
  • 00:17:53
    And what I believe, what Austin believed, what South-by
  • 00:17:58
    believed was no, the note is the repeatable thing.
  • 00:18:03
    It's the reaching up for the note that is the signal.
  • 00:18:05
    That is the weird.
  • 00:18:06
    That's the human interpretation.
  • 00:18:08
    That's the liminal place.
  • 00:18:10
    That's where James Brown speaks to us, even from the grave.
  • 00:18:16
    You know, the the.
  • 00:18:23
    There's a utilitarian function we can serve for
  • 00:18:26
    one another, like being the doctor that figures out
  • 00:18:29
    what medicine you need.
  • 00:18:31
    But then there's a doula function that we humans provide
  • 00:18:35
    for each other that the I that that that no Answer works.
  • 00:18:41
    There is no prescription for what is it to sit with another
  • 00:18:45
    person and co metabolize what they are going through, right.
  • 00:18:50
    That's the stuff that we're leaving behind when we buy
  • 00:18:54
    into the new utilitarian understanding of technology.
  • 00:19:01
    There was a throw in a joke here.
  • 00:19:04
    There was a founder of one of the social media apps who I met
  • 00:19:10
    at one of Tim O'Reilly's camps.
  • 00:19:13
    He used to do those boot camps.
  • 00:19:15
    Friends of O'Reilly.
  • 00:19:16
    And I met this guy, and he was concerned for me because
  • 00:19:20
    he had seen this is back when I was on medium years ago.
  • 00:19:22
    He'd seen these pieces.
  • 00:19:23
    I was writing about AI and he said, well, Doug, you know, I'm
  • 00:19:26
    a little concerned for you.
  • 00:19:27
    You're writing all these negative things about AI.
  • 00:19:29
    Aren't you worried about what's going to happen
  • 00:19:32
    when AI is in charge?
  • 00:19:35
    That they're going to see what I wrote and take it out on me?
  • 00:19:38
    And I said, no, I really hadn't thought of that.
  • 00:19:40
    And he goes, well, I've made sure to, you know, to
  • 00:19:43
    pull anything about I out of anything I write before
  • 00:19:46
    I put it up on the net.
  • 00:19:48
    And I said, well, if the A's are going to be so smart, aren't
  • 00:19:51
    they going to be able to infer from the selective redaction of
  • 00:19:55
    AI content from your material, would you believe?
  • 00:19:58
    And he.
  • 00:19:58
    >> Was like, oh fuck.
  • 00:19:59
    Right.
  • 00:20:01
    But the reason he was saying, oh fuck is because what he was
  • 00:20:05
    concerned about was that I was going to do to him what he was
  • 00:20:10
    doing to all of us, right.
  • 00:20:13
    That's what they're building.
  • 00:20:16
    That's what they're building.
  • 00:20:17
    Right.
  • 00:20:18
    And the more that we allow our technologies to autotune
  • 00:20:23
    us, and I would argue AI does that too, because everything
  • 00:20:27
    AI gives you is the most probable response, the most
  • 00:20:31
    probable next sentence.
  • 00:20:33
    What happens is I will revert our civilization
  • 00:20:38
    to the mean, right?
  • 00:20:40
    Just as it reverts every screenplay you try to write
  • 00:20:43
    to that, to the mean, right?
  • 00:20:45
    It reduces it to the perfect Avengers script, to the mean.
  • 00:20:48
    It's doing that to our society as we bring it into more
  • 00:20:52
    and more of our activities as we incorporate its values.
  • 00:20:57
    And when you look at what's happening, what I don't look
  • 00:21:03
    at what's happening right now as so strange feudalism,
  • 00:21:07
    if that's what we're going into, techno feudalism or
  • 00:21:10
    authoritarianism, that's the mean look at the history
  • 00:21:14
    of Western civilization.
  • 00:21:15
    Very little of it was spent in sort of euro zone
  • 00:21:18
    democracy, global values.
  • 00:21:21
    The majority was Genghis Khan and Caligula
  • 00:21:25
    and Alexander the Great.
  • 00:21:26
    That's how people lived.
  • 00:21:28
    And there were smart people living then, too.
  • 00:21:30
    All that cool philosophy and all that shit that we
  • 00:21:32
    read that was all written under oppressive, dictatorial
  • 00:21:36
    regimes That's the mean, you know, at best the this storm
  • 00:21:45
    cloud that we feel we're living under in America today.
  • 00:21:48
    Most of the world has been living under that kind of storm
  • 00:21:51
    cloud for most of the time.
  • 00:21:54
    Even most of the time we were happy.
  • 00:21:56
    And most of the time that storm cloud that these other people
  • 00:21:59
    were experiencing was because of the way in which we were
  • 00:22:02
    maintaining our happiness here.
  • 00:22:04
    Right.
  • 00:22:04
    So this is basic karma.
  • 00:22:10
    Right.
  • 00:22:10
    But this is also the way that technology promotes the average.
  • 00:22:17
    This is what happens when we allow technology to promote
  • 00:22:20
    the mean rather than the weird.
  • 00:22:23
    So how can tech instead promote novelty, which is
  • 00:22:29
    what I'm after most simply, it's by making things weird.
  • 00:22:39
    So the weird can make things.
  • 00:22:44
    That's really the whole thing I want to say.
  • 00:22:47
    You make things weird so that we weird can remake things.
  • 00:22:56
    You reveal that this is a read write universe so that we can
  • 00:23:03
    start writing it again.
  • 00:23:06
    It's that simple.
  • 00:23:07
    Once you alienate yourself from the supposedly given
  • 00:23:12
    circumstances.
  • 00:23:14
    You can see that it's fungible, it's changeable, and only
  • 00:23:20
    people who are willing to feel and get weird are capable of
  • 00:23:25
    doing that right.
  • 00:23:26
    To go fuzzy enough to go, this is not a dollar, right?
  • 00:23:30
    I am not a number.
  • 00:23:31
    This is not my wife.
  • 00:23:32
    This is not my beautiful car.
  • 00:23:34
    Right?
  • 00:23:34
    It's that moment of weird what David Lynch was begging us to
  • 00:23:38
    do in every fucking movie.
  • 00:23:39
    Right.
  • 00:23:39
    We didn't understand it.
  • 00:23:40
    No, you're not supposed to.
  • 00:23:42
    Why is this guy sweeping the floor for ten minutes?
  • 00:23:46
    Just watch until it looks weird.
  • 00:23:51
    And once it looks weird, then the weird meaning?
  • 00:23:55
    Us, the weird people can make the things again, right?
  • 00:24:00
    The original net was like Austin.
  • 00:24:03
    It was pockets of weird.
  • 00:24:04
    Think about Usenet.
  • 00:24:06
    What was the joy of the Army again?
  • 00:24:08
    I'm sorry if you're not old enough to remember, but I'll
  • 00:24:10
    tell you, there were there were these there was this on
  • 00:24:13
    the old text only internet.
  • 00:24:16
    The way you found a conversation that you wanted
  • 00:24:19
    to participate in was by going to this place called
  • 00:24:21
    Usenet, which had thousands of different conversations like
  • 00:24:24
    alt anime, mysticism, erotica, you know, it's like, oh, those
  • 00:24:29
    are my people, right?
  • 00:24:30
    And you go into a conversation, you find
  • 00:24:32
    a pocket of weird in order to engage with others, right?
  • 00:24:37
    What is internet culture today?
  • 00:24:39
    It's influencer culture.
  • 00:24:41
    Internet culture today means talking to everybody at the same
  • 00:24:45
    time all at once, right?
  • 00:24:49
    It's the opposite, right?
  • 00:24:51
    It's always has to be bigger.
  • 00:24:53
    How do I get more fans?
  • 00:24:54
    More this, more that.
  • 00:24:55
    So you have to average down whatever you're doing, you
  • 00:24:58
    know, to some equivalent of tits and ass and whatever your
  • 00:25:01
    field is so that you can reach the most people right now, this
  • 00:25:07
    is a design problem of the world in which we live, right?
  • 00:25:10
    The economic model that we're using depends on
  • 00:25:13
    exponential growth.
  • 00:25:15
    Right.
  • 00:25:15
    And that's nothing to do with economics.
  • 00:25:17
    That's to do with a 13th century economic operating system that
  • 00:25:20
    was developed by kings who didn't want you to have any
  • 00:25:23
    ways of creating value, except borrowing money from a central
  • 00:25:26
    treasury and returning it at interest because you had to
  • 00:25:28
    return the money at interest.
  • 00:25:30
    Today, GDP has to grow for us to feel okay about
  • 00:25:33
    ourselves has nothing to do with reality, right?
  • 00:25:36
    Nothing in nature grows exponentially
  • 00:25:38
    forever except cancer.
  • 00:25:40
    And it kills its host, right?
  • 00:25:43
    That's not nature.
  • 00:25:45
    So what does that mean?
  • 00:25:46
    It means money is weird.
  • 00:25:48
    Money is weird.
  • 00:25:49
    Money is weird, right?
  • 00:25:50
    So once money is weird.
  • 00:25:52
    So now the weird can make money, right?
  • 00:25:54
    What kind of money do we want?
  • 00:25:57
    Right?
  • 00:25:58
    And because of this wrong set and setting.
  • 00:26:01
    This set and setting of surveillance, control, paranoia
  • 00:26:04
    and and power, the people who are most invested are having
  • 00:26:10
    the worst trip, right?
  • 00:26:12
    This is why in the last book, this is why the tech
  • 00:26:15
    billionaires I spoke to are building fire moats
  • 00:26:17
    around their houses.
  • 00:26:19
    That's not a good trip.
  • 00:26:21
    That's a bad trip.
  • 00:26:22
    That's like the kids who burn worms, right?
  • 00:26:25
    That's.
  • 00:26:26
    They're not.
  • 00:26:26
    It's like fun for them.
  • 00:26:27
    But it's not good that it's fun, right?
  • 00:26:30
    Billionaires, moats and Mars.
  • 00:26:32
    I mean, honestly, where do you want to spend the apocalypse?
  • 00:26:36
    You know, I want to spend the apocalypse
  • 00:26:38
    in my lover's arms.
  • 00:26:39
    Thank you very much.
  • 00:26:41
    You know, the real weird.
  • 00:26:45
    And this is the thing that's so hard for them.
  • 00:26:47
    It's so hard for the.
  • 00:26:48
    The people who put the nouns on, the things who have
  • 00:26:51
    a metric for everything.
  • 00:26:52
    The real weird is going on between us.
  • 00:26:56
    That's where the weird happens.
  • 00:26:58
    It's interstitial.
  • 00:27:01
    Right?
  • 00:27:01
    It's it's liminal.
  • 00:27:03
    It's it's non-digital.
  • 00:27:05
    It's non-metric.
  • 00:27:07
    And it's so hard to you can't pin it down.
  • 00:27:11
    You can't put a number, you can't quantize it.
  • 00:27:13
    So is it even real, right.
  • 00:27:17
    To someone who thinks the digital is real?
  • 00:27:20
    The interstitial is noise, right?
  • 00:27:24
    The interstitial is the James Brown between the notes.
  • 00:27:27
    It's not.
  • 00:27:27
    It's nothing.
  • 00:27:28
    Right?
  • 00:27:29
    To the person who lives on the ticks of the clock.
  • 00:27:31
    They forget about the duration between the ticks when life
  • 00:27:34
    actually happens.
  • 00:27:36
    But that's that's where we are.
  • 00:27:39
    That's where we're living.
  • 00:27:41
    I mean, for me, when I realized that was real, it was weird.
  • 00:27:44
    I was, um, in a hospital as the relative who happened
  • 00:27:49
    to have to be there with this older woman while she
  • 00:27:53
    was dying, and I wasn't even a close relative.
  • 00:27:56
    And at the moment, I was kind of like, uh, I don't
  • 00:28:00
    know, I felt, why the fuck is am I the one who's here?
  • 00:28:03
    You know, and this was the moment when the machine
  • 00:28:06
    started, you know, it was like, oh, fuck, she's
  • 00:28:09
    going, this is it.
  • 00:28:10
    It's happening.
  • 00:28:10
    And I'm the one in the room with her.
  • 00:28:13
    And I was kind of freaking out a little bit, but feeling very
  • 00:28:17
    kind of put upon and, and like, this awful obligation to be
  • 00:28:21
    with this person when this.
  • 00:28:22
    And, uh, and something compelled me to hold her hand just to hold
  • 00:28:28
    her hand because she was out of it on the morphine and all.
  • 00:28:30
    It held her hand.
  • 00:28:31
    And I'm not tripping.
  • 00:28:35
    It's as real as I'm standing here, I promise.
  • 00:28:40
    She knew I was there.
  • 00:28:41
    I knew she was she, I could I was up there inside her.
  • 00:28:46
    I could feel her soul and I could.
  • 00:28:49
    I could feel myself helping her metabolize the moment
  • 00:28:55
    that she left her body.
  • 00:28:58
    You know, I don't know if she went anywhere else or
  • 00:29:00
    anything, but I know I was there and I could feel her
  • 00:29:05
    organism, her consciousness, her soul, whatever it is,
  • 00:29:09
    using my nervous system and my whatever it is that's there to.
  • 00:29:16
    And I understood, I don't know, I understood that the,
  • 00:29:25
    the and I feel like I'm saying this to a world that's dying,
  • 00:29:30
    and I'm sorry for that, but that palliative care is enough.
  • 00:29:38
    It's not always about curing.
  • 00:29:41
    It's not always about solving the problem.
  • 00:29:43
    Sometimes it really is.
  • 00:29:45
    Or at least it's also about being genuinely present
  • 00:29:50
    with and for each other.
  • 00:29:54
    It really is.
  • 00:29:55
    Right.
  • 00:29:56
    So conditions on the ground right now, if we want to
  • 00:29:58
    play Marxist or realist, we are going down.
  • 00:30:02
    Right.
  • 00:30:02
    Conditions where this is fucked, right?
  • 00:30:05
    If you look at it any way, this is it.
  • 00:30:08
    We are in it.
  • 00:30:08
    We are over the event horizon, right over the lip.
  • 00:30:11
    This is who.
  • 00:30:14
    Right.
  • 00:30:14
    So just as going down.
  • 00:30:18
    Just a couple of options, right?
  • 00:30:20
    One is palliative care.
  • 00:30:22
    Be there for each other.
  • 00:30:23
    With each other.
  • 00:30:24
    Love each other.
  • 00:30:24
    Use it.
  • 00:30:25
    Embrace the apocalypse.
  • 00:30:27
    You know, I was thinking to write a book embracing,
  • 00:30:30
    Embracing the Apocalypse how to Enjoy the end of
  • 00:30:32
    the world and maybe save it in the process.
  • 00:30:37
    Right.
  • 00:30:37
    Because if we were actually there for each other, if we
  • 00:30:40
    were actually there for each other, then all the shit
  • 00:30:42
    that we're doing to each other starts diminishing.
  • 00:30:46
    The other possibility is to flip the script.
  • 00:30:49
    Right.
  • 00:30:50
    No one knows what the fuck is really going on here.
  • 00:30:53
    We didn't know about the gut biome till a decade ago, right?
  • 00:30:57
    And there's more of a gut biome than there is of us.
  • 00:30:59
    We might just be carriers of gut biomes.
  • 00:31:02
    You know, who we fall in love with is my gut biome.
  • 00:31:05
    My gut biome.
  • 00:31:07
    Wanting some of those bacteria to mix with
  • 00:31:08
    and its culture, right?
  • 00:31:11
    We might be the passive passive players here.
  • 00:31:14
    Nobody knows.
  • 00:31:15
    Right?
  • 00:31:15
    Trees.
  • 00:31:16
    I was taught that trees are shading each
  • 00:31:18
    other in the forest.
  • 00:31:19
    Remember, the big tree gets the light and the little
  • 00:31:21
    tree withers.
  • 00:31:22
    And we know now that's not science.
  • 00:31:23
    It turns out it's the opposite.
  • 00:31:24
    The big tree is taking the sunlight and putting
  • 00:31:26
    it through its roots, through a mycelial network
  • 00:31:28
    to the little tree.
  • 00:31:29
    So the little tree gets nutrients, the big tree
  • 00:31:31
    loses its leaves and the in the winter, and then the little
  • 00:31:34
    tree, the evergreens, sends nutrients back to the big tree.
  • 00:31:37
    They are cooperating.
  • 00:31:38
    They're collaborating.
  • 00:31:39
    We don't know what's going on here.
  • 00:31:41
    Right.
  • 00:31:42
    Even, you know, you talk to Rupert Sheldrake, who's
  • 00:31:46
    the only Ted talk I know that was actually censored because
  • 00:31:49
    he said that the rules, the laws of physics might
  • 00:31:52
    themselves be evolving.
  • 00:31:54
    The laws of physics themselves might be changing over time.
  • 00:31:57
    And what would that mean?
  • 00:31:58
    Right.
  • 00:31:59
    That was too.
  • 00:32:00
    It's too radical for a Ted talk.
  • 00:32:02
    Geez.
  • 00:32:06
    Right.
  • 00:32:06
    Or magic, right?
  • 00:32:08
    I've become a believer in magic because you know what's
  • 00:32:12
    the main sign of magic?
  • 00:32:13
    Robert Anton Wilson and all he wrote about was weird
  • 00:32:16
    synchronicities and weird shit starts happening.
  • 00:32:18
    We're all experiencing that every everything gotten weird.
  • 00:32:22
    Not just number 23, but they think about someone and they're
  • 00:32:25
    there and this and that.
  • 00:32:26
    It's all weird, it's all synchronicity, it's all strange,
  • 00:32:29
    and it's all happening as if to show us there's other shit going
  • 00:32:33
    on here that you can leverage.
  • 00:32:35
    Have faith in that.
  • 00:32:37
    Weird.
  • 00:32:38
    Because in the weird is the power, right?
  • 00:32:41
    Civilization is built, for the most part, to do
  • 00:32:45
    the opposite of what?
  • 00:32:45
    Civilization, really.
  • 00:32:47
    I mean, if you want to.
  • 00:32:48
    I mean, this isn't.
  • 00:32:49
    I'm not an anthropologist.
  • 00:32:50
    What?
  • 00:32:50
    Civilization?
  • 00:32:51
    Really?
  • 00:32:51
    It's old monkeys creating rules so that new monkeys
  • 00:32:55
    don't kill them until the new monkeys finally are
  • 00:33:00
    old enough to figure it out.
  • 00:33:01
    But then they're the old monkeys.
  • 00:33:05
    Right?
  • 00:33:07
    Tech bros are like the old monkeys, right?
  • 00:33:10
    They're preserving the established order.
  • 00:33:15
    Talk to the most billionaire tech bro you can find.
  • 00:33:18
    They're more than happy to disrupt a vertical.
  • 00:33:21
    I'm going to disrupt hotels.
  • 00:33:24
    I'm going to disrupt books, I'm going to disrupt automobiles.
  • 00:33:28
    But no one's willing to disrupt the underlying foundations of
  • 00:33:32
    whatever this is extractive colonial capitalism, right?
  • 00:33:39
    And because they can't believe it or not, these
  • 00:33:42
    rich guys feel powerless.
  • 00:33:46
    They feel more powerless than anybody in this room.
  • 00:33:49
    This is why with all that money, all that success,
  • 00:33:52
    the best they can think to do is to build a fortress in Maui
  • 00:33:56
    to protect themselves from us.
  • 00:34:00
    Right?
  • 00:34:00
    Then to figure out how to make a world that wouldn't require
  • 00:34:04
    a fortress to be protected in.
  • 00:34:07
    Right.
  • 00:34:08
    They feel powerless.
  • 00:34:08
    The best they can do is predict the future and protect
  • 00:34:12
    themselves from it, rather than create the future in real time.
  • 00:34:16
    The way any alchemist, any magician, any spiritual person,
  • 00:34:19
    any programmer worth their salt would know how to do.
  • 00:34:25
    I think we should claim it.
  • 00:34:27
    We are magicians.
  • 00:34:29
    We can change the future.
  • 00:34:32
    And magic is a spectrum.
  • 00:34:33
    Believe as much as you want.
  • 00:34:35
    At the very least, we can use language to disable
  • 00:34:40
    the mind virus of capitalism that counts as magic, right?
  • 00:34:45
    Using your words to create a spell that changes
  • 00:34:49
    the way they think.
  • 00:34:50
    You know, it's good old fashioned NLP.
  • 00:34:52
    L Ron Hubbard style linguistic magic, right?
  • 00:34:57
    We can write new programs that change the landscape, whether
  • 00:35:02
    they're computer programs, economic programs, social
  • 00:35:04
    programs, or we can cast spells that change physics, that change
  • 00:35:13
    the very physics of the world.
  • 00:35:15
    That's what we're starting to see.
  • 00:35:16
    Look at things like Retrocausality.
  • 00:35:18
    If you want to see some weird ass challenges to
  • 00:35:21
    physics, There's there's stuff that we can do.
  • 00:35:27
    I think we need to accept as weird people that consciousness
  • 00:35:32
    precedes matter, that that these dudes are wrong.
  • 00:35:35
    Consciousness awareness is not an emergent phenomenon
  • 00:35:40
    of matter groping towards complexity, right?
  • 00:35:44
    But matter is something that consciousness uses to play.
  • 00:35:51
    And by changing the story.
  • 00:35:52
    How ever it is that you're going to change the story,
  • 00:35:55
    whether it's changing the story around capitalism, changing
  • 00:35:57
    the social programs, changing our understanding of the physics
  • 00:36:00
    of our reality, changing the story may prove more
  • 00:36:05
    important than any invention that comes out of the lab, you
  • 00:36:11
    know, for carbon capture.
  • 00:36:13
    Changing the story changes the way everybody does
  • 00:36:17
    what they do, you know?
  • 00:36:18
    And that's where our Austin ness, This r s w ness is it
  • 00:36:25
    needs to be summoned again.
  • 00:36:27
    You know, what is the story of this place, of this conference?
  • 00:36:32
    And who gets to tell it right?
  • 00:36:34
    What is the set and setting here?
  • 00:36:39
    I think that the the increasing complexity and novelty of this
  • 00:36:45
    moment has maxed out our ability to understand things rationally.
  • 00:36:51
    You know, we we keep trying to treat what's happening
  • 00:36:55
    as if it is complicated, but it is not complicated.
  • 00:36:59
    It is complex, right?
  • 00:37:02
    We think that there's enough we can put enough gates, enough
  • 00:37:05
    traffic lights in the system to contend with the traffic,
  • 00:37:09
    rather than trusting people to use a traffic circle.
  • 00:37:13
    Right.
  • 00:37:13
    1 or 2 rules and you're going to be a complex.
  • 00:37:15
    It's going to work out.
  • 00:37:16
    You got this?
  • 00:37:19
    No, but more gates.
  • 00:37:20
    More gates we're going to get.
  • 00:37:22
    It's sort of like the, the, the Jews before Jesus.
  • 00:37:24
    We're going to keep adding to the Talmud, keep adding
  • 00:37:29
    another law, an ever more granular law around this.
  • 00:37:32
    You know, if your cow tramples on the other person's sheep,
  • 00:37:35
    then that person's response.
  • 00:37:36
    But what if you had a fence?
  • 00:37:38
    Yeah, but what if the fence was faulty?
  • 00:37:39
    But who built the fence?
  • 00:37:41
    And they're adding?
  • 00:37:42
    And Jesus was like, oh my God, can't you just love each other?
  • 00:37:44
    You know?
  • 00:37:47
    I mean, I get it.
  • 00:37:48
    It was it was sweet, right?
  • 00:37:51
    The best the best technology for coping with systems
  • 00:37:55
    change on this order is not programs or even AI.
  • 00:38:00
    But again this is a pivot moment.
  • 00:38:03
    I'm doing it in public.
  • 00:38:04
    Here I am.
  • 00:38:04
    It's not programs or AI, but psychedelics, spirituality,
  • 00:38:10
    sex, magic, sex magic, ecstatic dance, intuition.
  • 00:38:17
    Pattern recognition.
  • 00:38:19
    Ignition resonance.
  • 00:38:21
    The domains of the weird, right?
  • 00:38:25
    This this this moment, you know, is, is hopefully collapses our
  • 00:38:34
    faith in not just fascism, authoritarianism, but the whole
  • 00:38:42
    World War Two kind of world order, which was kind of
  • 00:38:47
    camouflaged colonialism.
  • 00:38:50
    Sorry.
  • 00:38:51
    You know, we tried, you know, going to have the world Bank
  • 00:38:54
    and the IMF and all these things, and they're going to
  • 00:38:57
    help develop these places all around the world.
  • 00:38:59
    You know, what development really meant
  • 00:39:01
    was open your markets to us so we can develop you.
  • 00:39:04
    Right.
  • 00:39:04
    Open your markets to our big agro corporations that take
  • 00:39:07
    your land from you and make it less sustainable.
  • 00:39:12
    And now you're going to have to export, borrow money from us.
  • 00:39:15
    Haiti.
  • 00:39:15
    It's all good, you know.
  • 00:39:18
    and then your dictator takes it and leaves, and we're still
  • 00:39:20
    going to make you pay for it.
  • 00:39:21
    I mean, Haiti and Dominican Republic are on the same island.
  • 00:39:25
    They're on the same island.
  • 00:39:26
    The Dominican Republic, they're living like this.
  • 00:39:28
    Haiti.
  • 00:39:28
    They're living like that.
  • 00:39:29
    Why?
  • 00:39:29
    Social construction?
  • 00:39:30
    Right.
  • 00:39:30
    Debt from our our great world Bank that we won't forgive.
  • 00:39:36
    Right.
  • 00:39:37
    It's it's that realization.
  • 00:39:39
    It's funny.
  • 00:39:40
    It's disappointed and disillusioned.
  • 00:39:42
    And we we engaged that sentiment with Occupy Wall
  • 00:39:49
    Street, which you can look at as a failure because it
  • 00:39:52
    didn't accomplish the thing.
  • 00:39:54
    But that's the whole point.
  • 00:39:56
    It was an occupation.
  • 00:39:59
    Occupy Occupy Wall Street was meant to model a new
  • 00:40:03
    normative state in some ways.
  • 00:40:05
    Occupy was closer to Burning Man than it was
  • 00:40:08
    to a 1960s revolution.
  • 00:40:10
    It was what is can we model a way of being, a way of of
  • 00:40:16
    forging consensus, a way of talking with each other,
  • 00:40:18
    a way of doing politics.
  • 00:40:20
    Right.
  • 00:40:21
    So that's the real learning.
  • 00:40:22
    The real learning is can we occupy a new normative state?
  • 00:40:27
    Right.
  • 00:40:28
    And for me, and that doesn't have to be for everyone.
  • 00:40:31
    Go do your activism.
  • 00:40:32
    Do your thing.
  • 00:40:33
    March.
  • 00:40:33
    I'll come.
  • 00:40:34
    When Naomi Klein says to do something, I'll go do it right.
  • 00:40:36
    It's fine.
  • 00:40:37
    But for me, it means shifting from being an agent
  • 00:40:41
    of change is the way I saw myself an activist agent of
  • 00:40:44
    change to an agent of care.
  • 00:40:48
    And that does mean, in some sense, embracing
  • 00:40:51
    the possibility of apocalypse, even if that's happening.
  • 00:40:56
    Right?
  • 00:40:57
    If it's happening, what do we do?
  • 00:40:58
    If this is really apocalypse?
  • 00:41:00
    You do social care, you do mutual aid.
  • 00:41:02
    You start borrowing and sharing things with your neighbors.
  • 00:41:06
    I used to do this talk called borrow a Drill, where I went
  • 00:41:08
    through the whole, you know, what's the difference if you
  • 00:41:11
    need a drill, what happens if you go to Home Depot and get
  • 00:41:15
    a minimum viable product drill to make your hole.
  • 00:41:17
    Who's being sent into a cave to get the cobalt?
  • 00:41:19
    You know, where does it go when you're done with it?
  • 00:41:21
    Because you're going to use it once.
  • 00:41:22
    Stick it in the garage and never use it again.
  • 00:41:24
    Then you try it again and it doesn't recharge
  • 00:41:25
    and you throw it out.
  • 00:41:26
    You know what's the cost of that versus the cost or
  • 00:41:30
    the price of going to your neighbor's house and saying,
  • 00:41:32
    Bob, can I borrow your drill?
  • 00:41:35
    Right.
  • 00:41:36
    Then Bob may become your friend.
  • 00:41:37
    Bob may ask you, oh, can we, you know, do you have
  • 00:41:40
    a barbecue the next week?
  • 00:41:42
    And like, Bob smells the meat cooking and he's
  • 00:41:43
    like, I lent Doug his drill.
  • 00:41:46
    Why didn't he invite me to his barbecue?
  • 00:41:47
    So you invite him over, and then the other neighbors
  • 00:41:49
    are like, why is he having Bob over to his house?
  • 00:41:50
    Then you got to invite them before long.
  • 00:41:52
    You're having all these people over at your
  • 00:41:53
    house, at your barbecue, and that's the bad thing.
  • 00:41:57
    But that's the thing we're trying to avoid, right?
  • 00:42:01
    But yeah, social care, mutual aid, borrowing
  • 00:42:04
    things, ceremony circles.
  • 00:42:06
    Love.
  • 00:42:07
    Right.
  • 00:42:08
    It's okay.
  • 00:42:09
    Even if the world is ending.
  • 00:42:11
    Is it okay to have fun?
  • 00:42:18
    And what happens if you do, right?
  • 00:42:20
    What happens if you do?
  • 00:42:22
    And then I start realizing the real the the challenge,
  • 00:42:27
    the reason, the deeper reason, I think why people
  • 00:42:29
    are afraid to have that fun.
  • 00:42:30
    That connection is because I think we all know when
  • 00:42:34
    you actually connect with another person, even just
  • 00:42:36
    playing cards, helping an old lady out of a vestibule with
  • 00:42:39
    her dog and her walker or whatever, there's a moment,
  • 00:42:43
    I think, where we touch this, um, this thing I started
  • 00:42:48
    calling the Ocean of Tears.
  • 00:42:51
    I feel like there's under everything we do, under every
  • 00:42:56
    even minute interaction.
  • 00:42:59
    There's an awareness that we're living on this ocean of tears,
  • 00:43:05
    of trauma, of sadness, of what has happened over the last
  • 00:43:09
    couple of thousand years, of the the people we've killed
  • 00:43:12
    and enslaved and and the trauma each of us have had trying to
  • 00:43:16
    grow up in this society.
  • 00:43:18
    You know, each moment.
  • 00:43:20
    And I think we're so afraid to touch that
  • 00:43:23
    ocean of tears because we think it's just infinite
  • 00:43:25
    crying when it's actually the waters of compassion.
  • 00:43:29
    It's the ultimate interstitial connective reality in which
  • 00:43:33
    we're living, and we're so afraid to touch that, that
  • 00:43:36
    we construct everything to avoid it.
  • 00:43:40
    Right?
  • 00:43:41
    The internet, when it first started, for those
  • 00:43:43
    of us who were raised on TV, it seemed like it was
  • 00:43:46
    going to be an access point to each other again.
  • 00:43:48
    Right?
  • 00:43:49
    I'd just been programmed by Gilligan's Island for
  • 00:43:51
    my whole life, and now I'm going to get to talk
  • 00:43:53
    through the tube to someone else and make that contact.
  • 00:43:56
    And there was that moment of, ah, that weird Austin
  • 00:44:00
    psychedelic, huh?
  • 00:44:02
    And that's the thing that was so scary.
  • 00:44:05
    That's the thing that we had to build more capitalism on top.
  • 00:44:08
    >> Oh, no.
  • 00:44:09
    Musket.
  • 00:44:10
    Let's musket down.
  • 00:44:11
    Right.
  • 00:44:13
    >> Let's let's not let's not feel that.
  • 00:44:16
    But this is what a a loving network counterculture is
  • 00:44:21
    about, right?
  • 00:44:23
    It's it's novelty inspired.
  • 00:44:26
    The weird.
  • 00:44:27
    Ultimately, the weird is a form of compassion.
  • 00:44:33
    And what keeps us from the weird are the figures on the screen.
  • 00:44:38
    And I get it.
  • 00:44:39
    These figures are real.
  • 00:44:40
    They're on CNN, so they must be.
  • 00:44:42
    They're real.
  • 00:44:42
    Right?
  • 00:44:43
    There's Trump, there's there's Musk, there's climate change.
  • 00:44:48
    There's these things.
  • 00:44:50
    And if you watch Mad Hours, they're up there.
  • 00:44:53
    They're these figures.
  • 00:44:54
    But these figures I feel like, yes, they're real
  • 00:44:58
    and we should fight.
  • 00:44:58
    And but they're also distractions from
  • 00:45:02
    the conditions on the ground.
  • 00:45:04
    They're distractions from the real ocean of tears
  • 00:45:07
    where we actually live.
  • 00:45:08
    It's just like unicorn businesses to
  • 00:45:11
    people at South by.
  • 00:45:12
    Those are figures right?
  • 00:45:16
    Instead of the ground of weird you know.
  • 00:45:19
    To which we came to play.
  • 00:45:21
    Right.
  • 00:45:21
    We had the figures at the Moscone Center in
  • 00:45:24
    San Francisco.
  • 00:45:25
    We came to Austin to get back to the ground and play.
  • 00:45:29
    Right.
  • 00:45:30
    There is a concrescence of novelty.
  • 00:45:34
    What Terence McKenna wrote about what happened in 2012.
  • 00:45:37
    It's happening.
  • 00:45:38
    This is it.
  • 00:45:39
    This is it.
  • 00:45:40
    The synchronicities, the novelty.
  • 00:45:42
    We all know it.
  • 00:45:42
    We can feel it.
  • 00:45:43
    There's the wobble, right?
  • 00:45:45
    The wobble of the system.
  • 00:45:47
    You can feel it.
  • 00:45:49
    And the other side.
  • 00:45:51
    The so-called other side if you want.
  • 00:45:52
    And if you're a red person, that's fine.
  • 00:45:54
    Whatever.
  • 00:45:54
    You know, the other side is feeling the same thing.
  • 00:45:58
    They're experiencing the same horror show that we are.
  • 00:46:02
    They're just experiencing it from a different perspective,
  • 00:46:05
    the same horror.
  • 00:46:08
    So what's the weirdest thing we can do, I think, is to
  • 00:46:13
    reach across to our red state, blue state, brothers
  • 00:46:17
    and sisters, and realize they are not the enemy, right?
  • 00:46:22
    It is the enemy.
  • 00:46:24
    It's this machine doing it to us.
  • 00:46:28
    And a measure of its success is how far it can alienate us from
  • 00:46:33
    other living human beings.
  • 00:46:36
    I mean, that's why in the end, it's so good that
  • 00:46:39
    we're here in Austin.
  • 00:46:40
    Because Austin is the crossroads of the two
  • 00:46:44
    weirds, right, of the Rogan weird and the psychedelic
  • 00:46:48
    weird of the of the the both weirds are here so we can
  • 00:46:54
    lean into our compassion.
  • 00:46:56
    We can lean into our love, our sex, our intimacy, our
  • 00:47:01
    smells and our sounds.
  • 00:47:03
    I mean, this was a music festival, remember?
  • 00:47:06
    This was a music festival.
  • 00:47:09
    They had a little interactive thing came on
  • 00:47:11
    top to play with it, right?
  • 00:47:16
    I believe we can reject the alienation on our
  • 00:47:20
    screens and retrieve the ground of connection
  • 00:47:24
    here in the real world.
  • 00:47:27
    Okay.
  • 00:47:27
    Thanks a lot.
  • 00:47:31
    Yeah.
  • 00:47:39
    Thanks.
  • 00:47:40
    There's some.
  • 00:47:42
    We got 12 minutes.
  • 00:47:44
    We got some questions on the thing.
  • 00:47:46
    You can do the thing.
  • 00:47:48
    Join via the Sky go app by clicking engage
  • 00:47:53
    on the event page.
  • 00:47:56
    I didn't make that up.
  • 00:47:58
    Um.
  • 00:47:59
    Oh, and I'm going to do a signing of some kind
  • 00:48:02
    in the bookstore area on the third floor.
  • 00:48:04
    Right when this is over, I'm going to run down there.
  • 00:48:06
    So if you want to talk after, come there.
  • 00:48:08
    Okay, let me see.
  • 00:48:10
    Um.
  • 00:48:13
    Wizards need to be united.
  • 00:48:15
    I think so we can keep being wizards.
  • 00:48:18
    Being in a lonely weird might be part of the problem.
  • 00:48:22
    Oh, I would say there are no lonely wizards.
  • 00:48:25
    There are no lonely wizards?
  • 00:48:26
    No.
  • 00:48:27
    I mean, you can network wizards in an anarcho syndicalist
  • 00:48:30
    fashion, I suppose, but resist the temptation to grow your
  • 00:48:35
    weird, right?
  • 00:48:37
    Growth.
  • 00:48:37
    Growth is fine.
  • 00:48:38
    Let things grow.
  • 00:48:39
    Remember they used to say organic growth.
  • 00:48:42
    Organic growth.
  • 00:48:43
    Right?
  • 00:48:43
    Organic growth is fine.
  • 00:48:45
    And let it grow as big as it needs to to be.
  • 00:48:47
    It's weird, but it's fine if Joe's weird is in
  • 00:48:52
    the next town and your weird is in this town, you don't
  • 00:48:54
    need to connect the weirdos.
  • 00:48:57
    You know, there will always be.
  • 00:48:58
    There's there's going to be interfaces in.
  • 00:49:00
    Fine.
  • 00:49:00
    But I wouldn't worry.
  • 00:49:01
    I wouldn't worry about that.
  • 00:49:02
    If you're weird alone, then yeah.
  • 00:49:04
    Find another.
  • 00:49:05
    You know, that's on the back of Team Human.
  • 00:49:06
    That's my main thing.
  • 00:49:07
    Find the others.
  • 00:49:08
    Right.
  • 00:49:09
    Find the others first.
  • 00:49:10
    Find the other weird people in your pocket of weird.
  • 00:49:12
    But then find the other others.
  • 00:49:14
    Find the ones who are not.
  • 00:49:16
    That my.
  • 00:49:16
    For me, it would be like the the red state people.
  • 00:49:19
    The people who are listening to Alex Jones.
  • 00:49:20
    Alex Jones today I listened to him 20 years ago.
  • 00:49:22
    It was kind of weird stuff.
  • 00:49:24
    Um, but now, you know, engage, engage with them.
  • 00:49:29
    What are some examples of digital spaces or
  • 00:49:31
    movements today that embody the spirit of weirding
  • 00:49:33
    the digital successfully?
  • 00:49:35
    This room.
  • 00:49:37
    Right.
  • 00:49:38
    We're the start.
  • 00:49:39
    This is the only one I know.
  • 00:49:41
    Um, I was on a discord a couple of years ago, and there were
  • 00:49:44
    some weird people.
  • 00:49:45
    It's usually, um, the people who are willing to create tide
  • 00:49:50
    pools have more success at, uh, germinating weird than people
  • 00:49:58
    who are using the the rivers.
  • 00:50:00
    Right.
  • 00:50:01
    So an infinite river, like an X Twitter or even
  • 00:50:05
    a blue sky or something.
  • 00:50:06
    It's really hard to create those little pockets.
  • 00:50:09
    It's not about creating exclusivity, but stillness.
  • 00:50:12
    Think about the tide pool, where all that weird shit grows
  • 00:50:15
    versus when the water keeps coming and washing it away.
  • 00:50:17
    You don't want the infinite ocean on everything.
  • 00:50:20
    So I'm I'm seeing them all over the place.
  • 00:50:23
    Podcasting space has gotten really interesting for that.
  • 00:50:26
    It kind of replaced the blog or the web page as as a place.
  • 00:50:31
    And it's it's the beauty of it is it goes from top to bottom.
  • 00:50:34
    There are, you know, like movie star, you know, super
  • 00:50:39
    famous people with podcasts and there's kids with
  • 00:50:42
    podcasts and each size.
  • 00:50:44
    I like that when there's when many different size of things.
  • 00:50:47
    What does the next interactive age look like to
  • 00:50:50
    you, and how do we ensure it doesn't fall into the same
  • 00:50:53
    traps as the previous one?
  • 00:50:56
    Ain't no guarantees.
  • 00:50:59
    Um, the new interactive age looks real to me.
  • 00:51:03
    And this is just to me, right?
  • 00:51:05
    And there's as many visions of it as there are people
  • 00:51:08
    in this room or more.
  • 00:51:09
    Um, for me, it's very physical for me.
  • 00:51:13
    It looks like I just started doing this thing
  • 00:51:15
    called Contact Improv.
  • 00:51:17
    Have you heard of that?
  • 00:51:18
    It's this kind of dance where you're, like, leaning on
  • 00:51:20
    people and touching and stuff.
  • 00:51:21
    Ecstatic dance.
  • 00:51:22
    Mushroom.
  • 00:51:23
    I mean, think about at the beginning, right?
  • 00:51:27
    We did rave.
  • 00:51:28
    We got 5000 people in a field, played 120 beats per minute,
  • 00:51:33
    took ecstasy and danced to electronic music.
  • 00:51:36
    Now we get 15 people lying in a circle, taking mushrooms,
  • 00:51:41
    listening to music for mushrooms on analog synthesizers.
  • 00:51:46
    We've grown up right.
  • 00:51:50
    So.
  • 00:51:50
    And I get it, because at the beginning it was like, let's
  • 00:51:52
    get the whole world tripping.
  • 00:51:54
    We're going to touch the aliens.
  • 00:51:56
    And you know what I mean?
  • 00:51:57
    We're going to bring the the or bring on the eschaton, you
  • 00:52:00
    know, and crack the cosmic egg, you know, and it's like,
  • 00:52:03
    that was sweet.
  • 00:52:04
    Very American, very, you know, it was, but it was
  • 00:52:07
    so universal, right.
  • 00:52:09
    Because we came we come from the enlightenment
  • 00:52:10
    and everything's universal.
  • 00:52:11
    Universal, generic everything.
  • 00:52:14
    But no, it's again, it's it's pockets.
  • 00:52:18
    So I think the next interactive age looks very local.
  • 00:52:21
    You know, it's people being willing.
  • 00:52:22
    I'm going to make a restaurant app for my town
  • 00:52:26
    and it's going to work.
  • 00:52:27
    It's the specificity of, of of local because we live local
  • 00:52:31
    I mean sorry, we are local.
  • 00:52:32
    We're not getting out of body anytime soon, you know,
  • 00:52:36
    and and good luck astral projecting once you're dead.
  • 00:52:39
    You know, I think it's harder.
  • 00:52:41
    It's it's going to be here, you know, on some level
  • 00:52:45
    the next interactive age is going to be I think it is
  • 00:52:47
    going to be real world.
  • 00:52:50
    Originally we built the internet partly so that
  • 00:52:52
    we, the weird, would have a place to go because the real
  • 00:52:55
    world was not friendly to us.
  • 00:52:58
    So we went online and talked to our friends.
  • 00:53:00
    Well, now the banks and the billionaires
  • 00:53:03
    and they all went online.
  • 00:53:04
    And they all believe in that more than they
  • 00:53:06
    believe in the real world.
  • 00:53:07
    Almost like, cut the cord, let them go, and we can
  • 00:53:10
    reclaim reality.
  • 00:53:12
    Right.
  • 00:53:12
    Reclaim the real world.
  • 00:53:14
    The wet, intimate reality that they're so afraid of.
  • 00:53:18
    Right.
  • 00:53:18
    The little Mark Zuckerberg running around in
  • 00:53:20
    the metaverse with nothing from the waist down.
  • 00:53:22
    Right.
  • 00:53:22
    That's that's a good time for them.
  • 00:53:25
    What ideas do you have for the weird genius that created
  • 00:53:30
    the internet to create something new and different?
  • 00:53:33
    Well, the weird genius, the collective weird genius.
  • 00:53:36
    The collective weird genius that created the internet.
  • 00:53:39
    The next idea, I guess, is what I'm saying is
  • 00:53:42
    just follow your heart.
  • 00:53:43
    The next great idea.
  • 00:53:45
    It's compassion.
  • 00:53:45
    Building it all with compassion, building it all
  • 00:53:49
    into relationally, right?
  • 00:53:50
    It's to look more at the network than the nodes,
  • 00:53:54
    more at the interstitial.
  • 00:53:55
    Look at the the interfaces between systems is a really
  • 00:53:59
    interesting place.
  • 00:54:00
    You know, we can kind of do systems theory about this
  • 00:54:02
    and systems theory about that.
  • 00:54:03
    But but what about the gradients between those systems?
  • 00:54:07
    I think that's where things are going to be interesting.
  • 00:54:10
    Is there something in the new generative AI technology
  • 00:54:15
    that excites you, similar to the internet, and how do you
  • 00:54:18
    use it to find create, explore?
  • 00:54:20
    Weird.
  • 00:54:21
    Um, I use it in a bunch of ways.
  • 00:54:24
    Now, for me, the most interesting thing about
  • 00:54:26
    generative AI is to query it with the same thing that you're
  • 00:54:32
    working on, so that you know what's already been done right.
  • 00:54:37
    If you're like, when I used it in my last graphic novel,
  • 00:54:41
    I wrote not to do anything, but I would write a scene
  • 00:54:44
    and then ask it to write the scene that accomplished
  • 00:54:47
    what my scene accomplished.
  • 00:54:48
    And if it wrote the same scene, then I wrote something
  • 00:54:51
    else or stopped for the day.
  • 00:54:53
    Right?
  • 00:54:54
    Because the way you know, when you're writing,
  • 00:54:56
    if you're writing fiction, is way harder than non-fiction,
  • 00:54:58
    at least for me.
  • 00:54:59
    The when you're inspired, you're writing and you're
  • 00:55:02
    pulling out all that new space and you're in novelty zone.
  • 00:55:05
    But then when you get tired, you end up lapsing into some
  • 00:55:10
    version of Walking Dead or Lost in Space or whatever.
  • 00:55:13
    Some trope will come in and take over.
  • 00:55:16
    And that's how you know you're tired and you have
  • 00:55:18
    to stop and go back.
  • 00:55:20
    I is really good for helping you recognize when
  • 00:55:24
    you've troped, right?
  • 00:55:25
    The other thing, I mean, I think it's great to use it
  • 00:55:27
    in in the noncreative, I feel like I is finally realizing
  • 00:55:31
    Al Gore's original internet dream when al Gore was was
  • 00:55:35
    was hawking the internet.
  • 00:55:36
    He said, we already know all the things we need to
  • 00:55:38
    know to solve the problems.
  • 00:55:39
    We just haven't connected it.
  • 00:55:41
    I can connect shit way better than Google can, right?
  • 00:55:45
    And you and the way to do that is to query it the same
  • 00:55:48
    thing like in different sentences ten times.
  • 00:55:51
    And it'll bring it'll bring different stuff to bear.
  • 00:55:53
    It'll bring stuff to bear that you may not have
  • 00:55:56
    expected is is relevant.
  • 00:55:58
    All right.
  • 00:55:58
    Let's just do one more.
  • 00:56:00
    any chance of more comic writing in your future.
  • 00:56:03
    Yes, my very next book is a graphic novel that right
  • 00:56:08
    now is called The Post-humans, and it's about.
  • 00:56:13
    I don't know how to say it yet.
  • 00:56:15
    It's about two things, but mostly it's about
  • 00:56:18
    a future where technology has not gone away.
  • 00:56:24
    But it's technology has gone into remission,
  • 00:56:27
    and the enchanted features of our reality become
  • 00:56:33
    available to us again.
  • 00:56:36
    So watch out for that one.
  • 00:56:37
    All right.
  • 00:56:38
    So I'm going to go 0333.
  • 00:56:40
    That's one of my magic numbers.
  • 00:56:41
    It's the perfect time to stop.
  • 00:56:42
    It's a cult.
  • 00:56:43
    It's good.
  • 00:56:44
    All right.
  • 00:56:45
    Thank you.
  • 00:56:45
    Thank you for being part of this invocation.
  • 00:56:48
    We got this.
Etiquetas
  • Internet Culture
  • Authenticity
  • Psychedelics
  • Community Engagement
  • Capitalism
  • Weirdness
  • Human Connection
  • Technology Critique
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  • Compassion