Life Finds A Way • Hyperstition • Freak Flag Mailbox • Psychedelic Book Club • Post-Covid Festivals • Art & Science • The Future Is Disgusting

"We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is...joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes."

– Joseph Campbell

Consummations and conversations: I've been very busy lately in the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server but have nonetheless brought these works — some very long in the incubator — to completion. The relief is real, the resolution deep! Here are my latest psychoactive brain treats to augment your navigation of the weirdness that is 2021:

NEW MUSIC 65 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Listen at Soundcloud • Purchase at Bandcamp • Save to your Spotify collection

"Life Finds A Way" (and the one-minute instrumental coda "Hyperstition") have been in the works since my dorm room days in 2002 — so not exactly the Cretaceous, but might as well be.

This latest addition to my ongoing album-in-progress The Age of Reunion (which you can scope out and pre-order here) brings acoustic guitar, synthesizer, Chapman Stick, organ, electronic drums, and four-part vocal harmonies together into something appropriately bombastic, groovy, operatic, and apocalyptic to serve as the vehicle for proggy epic pop adventures into the pre-and-post-historic.

Here are a few different ways to engage.  Get out your headphones and hold onto your butts:

🦖 Soundcloud (for time-stamped commenting) 🦖

🦖Bandcamp (for lossless audio downloads) 🦖

🦖 Spotify (for saving to playlists) 🦖

Patreon supporters get some sweet exegesis with an extra half-hour of my Ian Malcolm-esque ranting on the inspiration behind this song: technological evolution, complex systems, accidental magic, reality ruptures, and the end of the world. If you're "like me...a digger," then dig into all that here:

UPCOMING BOOK CLUB CALLS

Speaking of awesome science fiction and general weirdness, we're discussing two amazing books in the Future Fossils Book Club this summer.  I hope you can join us!

I PROMISED YOU I WOULDN'T STOP PAINTING

And now that I have a place I can customize however I like (the pressure!), I started small by upcycling our trashy old mailbox into something that screams "weirdos live here."  Next up: my closet doors...

NEW FUTURE FOSSILS EPISODES

Lastly, while I'm not toiling away at my admittedly-excellent (4.8 stars on 147 Apple Podcast reviews) day job show, Complexity Podcast, I've been knocking out some wonderful conversations and solo casts for Future Fossils. And here they are:

I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic integration, and the future of festival economics…

Watch Here

On 23 May 2021 as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds: 

Michaela Emch is a communication and marketing specialist, translator, cultural mediator, biomimicry practitioner, safari guide, keen naturalist and biology enthusiast. Andréa Naccache is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral student in philosophy of law at the University of São Paulo, with an MBA in finance. Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who makes installations, drawings, and performances. Timothy Clancy work ranges from sophisticated simulations of violence & instability to systems thinking for business.

We discussed the relationship between the arts and sciences, conflicts of interest between systems and individual people, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

The first in a new biweekly, patrons-only sidestream for author-read essays, commentary on current events, mailbag replies, and experimental format episodes. First up is a reading of and commentary on my Part Six of my book-forever-in-progress, How To Live in The Future: "The Future Is Disgusting."

Here's a teaser:

The future that I want, the only future I believe worth living in, is full of love — and love is all about relaxing boundaries. Erupting into our Italian gardens, smashing manicured taxonomies, and popping our extropian illusions of a better life beyond constraints, love is the greatest trickster that reveals distinctions in imagined unity and unifies apparent opposites, to hell with definitions; it is time for you to learn.

And that ensures the future will be positively gross, because as every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

Someday all you hate will lose its charge within a greater truth — which, in a way, is even worse than knowing it will just persist. No: it becomes a part of you, and therefore worthy of your love; you learn to dig the things you feared; your brain adapts to shifting norms; we really are remarkable in our plasticity, and you’ll regard you-reading-now as hopelessly naïve, and small, and understandable, for all your ignorances are enshrined and glow within as relics of the origin of that more terrible and beautiful, awake and all-embracing thing you are.

MISCELLANY

Available NFTs at Rarible

Available NFTs at Foundation

My ever-deepening feed of wondrous musical discoveries

Breathing Deep & Seeking Peace: A Cornucopia of New Art, Writing, Videos, & Conversations to Help You Get Through It

Here's a quick overview of what I'm sharing in this update so you can zero in on what sounds most interesting to you without getting cross-eyed trying to scan it all:

• I wrote a psychoactive new essay and talked about it with an Oxford philosopher on his podcast.

• I'm now printing custom facemasks with my paintings on them so you can be safe in style.

• I just collaborated with a Swiss data artist, new music for his AI-generated experimental video.

• I talked about cognitive biases and disinformation on my friend's Top 10 science podcast.

• I flung open the archives to share a long talk, a short philosophy riff, and an epic guitar improvisation from my 2017 Australia tour — as well as an intense panel discussion I was on with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, and a handful of other legends back in 2016.

• I'm hosting a sci-fi book club for Octavia Butler's amazing Lilith's Brood and hope you'll join!

Stay safe and sane out there, my friends.

Love,

Michael

• New Art & Swag

End of the World Party! My presciently-titled Tyrannosaurus painting from Sonic Bloom Festival 2016 (along with three other fan-favorite paintings, below) is now available in face mask form AND eco-friendly giclee canvas prints. 

Grab yours today at iflmasks.com/michaelgarfield (masks) or michaelgarfieldart.com (canvas and cardstock prints).

• New Videos

Evading Confinement was a very fun collaboration with data artist Kirell Benzi. He made a one-minute experimental video with deep-learning AI networks and asked me to compose a musical accompaniment. Since the cyberguitar work I’ve been up to for the last 10 years is an explicit effort to render the shifting landscapes of closed-eye hallucinations in sound, it was like he had just re-visualized the music I was already making. Be sure to watch it in 4K!

The Fish & The Clam: Two Evolutionary Strategies is a short rant about two strategies for navigating the turbulence of our accelerating age, recorded while on tour in Byron Bay, Australia three years ago by Uplift.TV:

Pavonis is a 20-minute clip from one of my favorite live cyberguitar performances of all time. It is a deep dive into epic neo-minimalist psy-ambient terrain, ideal for anything involving incense or art:

Boom Toolkit for Covid-19 #5: Spiritual Perspectives is part of an ongoing series of featurettes produced by Portugal's amazing Boom Festival. Some of my set from 2016 made it into their latest video, with insights from shamanic ceremonial leader Satya and yoga teacher Filipa Veiga:

• New Writing

We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks by Realizing We Are Networks is my latest essay, on the shift required for navigating our weird times. Here's an excerpt:

All of us grew up in a world too vast for anyone to understand. No single person comprehends a smartphone, or the economic networks in which it precipitated. Our necessary adaptations to the baffling complexity of postmodernity include a subtler and more nuanced grasp of context. It’s what Gestalt psychologists call "figure-ground reversal," where you realize that the object you’re examining emerges only at the intersection of more objects, a moiré of ever-shifting, mutually-defining processes.

In common parlance, people talk about this in folk psychological terms like, “You are the combination of the five people you talk to most frequently.” If all of those five people share the same beliefs, it probably won’t matter in a crisis like the one we’re in if they’re all prestigious public intellectuals or they’re all plumbers.

Read the whole thing at my blog on Medium.

• New Podcast Episodes

The Atlas Model ...in which Chris Kutarna, Scott Jones, and I discuss the above essay. Probably one of the best conversations I've had about complex systems, scaling laws, networks, and how it relates to our current mess of inter-related crises. Insights therein on fighting the pandemic, radical police reform, and new modes of fractal governance. (Chris is a fellow at Oxford and co-authored the amazing book The Age of Discovery. Very cool guy, honored to be in the mix with him.)

Here We Are is Shane Mauss' TOP 10 IN THE WORLD (!) science podcast. I just appeared on it for the third time to talk about cognitive biases, social decision-making, fake news memetics, and what that all means for science communication during #COVID19 (e.g., my job at the Santa Fe Institute).

Future Fossils Podcast Ep. 145 is a recording of my talk from Earth Frequency Festival 2017, about a revised narrative of prehistory from which we can grow new myths better suited for our times. We take a tour through mass extinctions, the evolution of plant-pollinator symbiosis, my critiques of transhumanism and SpaceX, and how fish and clams represent complementary strategies for dealing with turbulent environments...

Future Fossils Podcast Ep. 146 is a recording of the panel I once sat on with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Allan Badiner, Gay Dillingham, and Valerie Plame Wilson in a geodesic dome in Santa Fe — a rather intense discussion at the intersection of psychedelic medicines, nuclear disarmament, and ecological conservation generously released from the archives of Synergetic Press...

• Coming Soon to the Future Fossils Book Club



We're about to reboot the Future Fossils Book Club! Next up is Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler. We'll discuss it in three parts since it is actually a trilogy. To whet your appetite, here's a cool essay on some of the themes explored by this very timely series.

The scheduling poll and book club video calls, as well as access to recordings of those calls, are available for Patreon supporters only. I'm sure most people here can afford the lowest tier, but if you truly can't and want to be a part of these discussions, just email me about it.