“Let go or be dragged.”
— Zen Proverb
Hello, friends and friendly strangers. Life has been very full...it's been a while, but I hope you agree this is a substantial and nutritious mind-meal for you to connect to the sublime and wonderful amidst the hardship and confusion of our blip in history. May it enrich you! Write back any time...
First off, I got a new gig (on top of my job at the Santa Fe Institute) working as Community Manager for The Long Now Foundation, an organization devoted to the cultivation of deep time thinking. Long Now was one of the main inspirations for Future Fossils Podcast. I'm so excited that they have decided to take some of my short writing from their members-only Facebook group and use it to help revive their blog! It's one of the oldest on the Web and features copious contributions from heavyweights like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Brian Eno, so I'm once again a hummingbird flitting amidst majestic goliaths.
Here are the first few links I've curated and framed for their readership, and for you:
Speaking of time and movement, next week I'll release my first EP of avant-fingerstyle guitar—a journey through 17 years of intermittent composition and my deep practice with what Philip Toshio Sudo called, in one of the most influential books I've ever read, Zen Guitar.
Mudras is twelve minutes long but unfathomably deep. In it the fans of Michael Hedges, Kaki King, Tim Reynolds, and the Candyrat Records school will find familiar purchase—and everybody else will find surprise and novelty and feeling and precise dynamic passage.
Right now it's up on Patreon. Pre-save it to your Spotify collection and be notified when it's available for listening. Next week it will be up on Bandcamp and everywhere else you'd go to stream such things.
That awesome cover photo is from Kathryn Cooper, who's amazing, and whom you should follow.
In the same spirit but at far greater length and with far greater intimacy, I just drafted the fourth (and final?) installment in my essay series on The Evolution of Surveillance, tracing sensory and cognitive arms races back half a billion years and forward into our very weird future.
"The Evolution of Surveillance, Part Four: Augments & Amputees" is about how I started thinking about deep time in the first place, how my time as a Google Glass Explorer came to an end, what it was like to detox from a dinosaur-hunting augmented reality game, and why we have to be careful about letting corporations control our prosthetic extensions. It's a Patreon exclusive, for now.
Meanwhile at SFI, I occasionally get to have some fun with making "whiteboard" style animations for new science publications (like this one on the math of parking or this one on animal communication and information theory).
The latest was an animated rap by visionary architect Ann Pendleton-Jullian on the layers of complex networks that make up a city, all of which we'll have to consider when we start making permanent habitats on other worlds. This was a totally delightful project. Watch it here:
And for anyone who missed my latest (and hugely ambitious, if brief) public essay, here is "We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks by Realizing We Are Networks," republished at Liminal News.
Lastly, we just had two wonderful discussions in the Future Fossils Book Club on the Lilith's Brood trilogy by Octavia E. Butler — conversations that could not be more timeless, and more timely. I hope that you will join us for more deep and meaningful discourse like these two calls:
Listen here.
Listen here.
“Our lives are an opening into a transpersonal opportunity.”
– Terence McKenna
