These miraculous machines! Do we shape them Or do they shape us? Or reshape us from our decent, far designs? But we are learning. We are learning to build for the future From the ground up. – Robert Flaherty, 1948 This was written for a forthcoming essay collection by Bennington…

Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the Twentieth Century’s musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses. It’s rare that an artist evokes such obvious and linear geographic metaphors for me, but I love Pärt’s music for…

Taking deep time into the music studio, a robotics engineer and midtempo producer uses modern tools to commune with rocks and send notes to the distant future. — Evan “Skytree” Snyder straddles two worlds: by day, he is a robotics engineer. By night, he produces electronic music that drops listeners into lush atmospheres evocative of both the ancient world and distant future. We had a chance to speak with Snyder about his 02020 album Infraplanetary and his recent…

Abstract: Modernity was largely built upon the “epistemic backstop” of recordings we can trust. What happens when we lose this privilege? As of 02020, most widely-subscribed visions of the future seem like presentist projections of a brief moment in which the West was capable of large-scale consensus on reality. Between…

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds. — About: This continues my now-ancient essay series on my experience as a Google Glass Explorer and the lens it offered me on the evolution of intelligence and cognitive/sensory arms races going back half a billion years. Before you dive in you may want to read Parts 1, 2, and 3…

Integral Theory and Post-metaphysical Entelechy Originally written in 2007 for JFKU’s Integral Theory graduate program. Previously published at KenWilber.com and IntegralWorld.net. I’ve come a long way since then but feel like this still holds—I’ve made an extensive mind map and bibliography of follow-up research into complex systems science available for…

Resurrection comes in many forms… — Although the sensitive can feel it in all seasons, Autumn seems to thin the veil between the living and the dead. Writing from the dying cusp of summer and the longer bardo marking humankind’s uneasy passage into a new world age (a transit paradoxically defined by floating signifiers and eroded…

In Times of Rapid Change, Turn and Face The Strange. Two short riffs on the same key point: “This is the epistemological crisis of the moment: There’s a lot of expertise around, but fewer tools than ever to distinguish it from everything else. Pure credentialism doesn’t always work. People have…