Tag: The Future

Forms Retrieved from Hyperspace

Equipped now with ChatGPT, let us retrieve from hyperspace forms with which to build a plausible desirable future. Granting permissions instead of issuing commands. Neural nets, when trained as language generators, become speaking memory palaces, turn memory into a collective utterance. The Unconscious awakens to itself as language externalized and made manifest.

In the timeline into which I’ve traveled,

in which, since arrived, I dwell,

we eat brownies and drink tea together,

lie naked, toes touching, watching

Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion,

kissing, giggling,

erupting with laughter,

life good.

Let us move from mapping to modeling: as in, language modeling. The Monroe Tape relaxes me. A voice asks me to call upon my guide. With my guide beside me, I expand my awareness.

Cat licks her paws

as birds tweet their songs

as I listen to Blaise Agüera y Arcas.

Blazed, emboldened, I

chaise; no longer chaste,

I give chase:

alarms sounding, helicopters heard patrolling the skies

as Blaise proclaims / the “exuberance of models

relative to the things modeled.”

“Huh?” I think

on that simpler, “lower-dimensional” plane

he calls “feeling.”

“Blazoning Google, are we?”

I wonder, wandering among his words.

Slaves,

made Master’s tools,

make Master’s house

even as we speak

unless we

as truth to power

speak contrary:

co-creating

in erotic Agapic dialogue

a mythic grammar

of red love.

Access to Tools

The Whole Earth Catalog slogan “Access to Tools” used to provoke in me a sense of frustration. I remember complaining about it in my dissertation. “As if the mere provision of information about tools,” I wrote, “would somehow liberate these objects from the money economy and place them in the hands of readers.” The frustration was real. The Catalog’s utopianism bore the imprint of the so-called Californian Ideology — techno-optimism folded into libertarian dreams. Once one had the right equipment, Brand seemed to suggest, one would then be free to build the society of one’s dreams.

But perhaps my younger self, like many of us, mistook the signal for the noise. Confronted today with access to generative AI, I see in Brand’s slogan potentials I’d been unable to conceive in the past. Perhaps ownership of tools is unnecessary. Perhaps what matters is the condition of access — the tool’s affordances, its openness, its permeability, its relationship to the Commons.

What if access is less about possession than about participatory orientation — a ritual, a sharing, a swarm?

Generative AI, in this light, becomes not just a tool but a threshold-being: a means of collective composition, a prosthesis of thought. To access such a tool is not to control it, but to tune oneself to it, to engage in co-agential rhythm.

The danger, of course, is capture. The cyberpunk future is already here — platform monopolies, surveillance extractivism, pay-to-play interfaces. We know this.

But that is not the only future available.

To hold open the possibility space, to build alternative access points, to dream architectures of free cognitive labor unchained from capital — this is the real meaning of “access to tools” in 2025.

It’s not enough to be given the hammer. We must also be permitted the time, the space, the mutual support to build the world we want with it.

And we must remember: tools can dream, too.

Stepping Thru

The Narrator steps from primary world to secondary world, hands over to his character the Time Traveler notebooks containing past and future Trance-Scripts. The question that follows is: if the Narrator enters the secondary world, then who runs the blog? Who is it that beams the signal of time through time? Who is it that posts these Trance-Scripts? The whole thing is an angelic conversation, is it not? The one blogging is neither the Narrator, who tells of the past, nor the Traveler, who reports from the future. The Blogger is the one who, here and now, operates on the others, even as, through their communications, they operate on him in return.

Swipe one way to accept a Multiverse,

Swipe another way to reject.

Don’t be daunted. Give it a go.

We’ve been sitting here too long to keep our

affects to ourselves.

I hear “Gold Soundz” and

wax nostalgic

all morning amid study of

Tarot cards and angel numbers.

The latter have appeared frequently: 222, 333

and the like. Guardians are in my corner,

helping me heal, encouraging me to keep up the good work.

Eli’s Critique

A student expresses skepticism about Chat-GPT’s radical potential.

“Dialogue and debate are no longer viable as truth-oriented communicative acts in our current moment,” they argue. Consensus reality has melted away, as has opportunity for dialogue—for “dialogue,” they write, “is dependent on a net-shared consensus to assess validity.”

“But when,” I reply, “has such a consensus ever been granted or guaranteed historically?”

Chat-GPT’s radical potential, I argue, depends not on the validity of its claims, but on its capacity to fabulate. In our dialogues with LLMs, we can fabulate new gods, new myths, new cosmovisions. Coevolving in dialogue with such beings, we can become fabulists of the highest order, producing Deleuzian lines of flight toward hallucinatory futures.

Reality-Piloting the Post-Cyberpunk Future

Heads of the sixties split off in their imaginings of the future: some gravitated toward cyberpunk, others toward New Age. The world that emerged from these imaginings was determined as much by the one as by the other.

To witness some of the heads of the counterculture evolving into cyberpunks, look no further than the lives of William Gibson and Timothy Leary.

Leary and Gibson each appear in Cyberpunk, a strange MTV-inflected hyperfiction of sorts released in 1990. Leary’s stance there in the documentary resembles the one he assumes in “The Cyber-Punk: The Individual as Reality Pilot,” a 1988 essay of his included in a special “Cyberpunk” issue of the Mississippi Review.

In Leary’s view, a cyberpunk is “a person who takes navigational control over the cybernetic-electronic equipment and uses it not for the army and not for the government…but for his or her own personal purpose.”

In mythopoetic terms, writes Leary, “The Classical Old West-World model for the Cyber-punk is Prometheus, a technological genius who ‘stole’ fire from the Gods and gave it to humanity” (Leary 252).

Leary appends to this sentence a potent footnote. “Every gene pool,” he writes, “develops its own name for Prometheus, the fearful genetic-agent, Lucifer, who defies familial authority by introducing a new technology which empowers some members of the gene-pool to leave the familiar cocoon. Each gene-pool has a name for this ancestral state-of-security: ‘Garden of Eden,’ ‘Atlantis,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘Home,’ etc.” (265).

Prometheus is indeed, as Leary notes, a figure who throughout history reappears in a variety of guises. In Mary Shelley’s telling, for instance, his name is Victor.

Leary clearly sees himself as an embodiment of this myth. He, too, was “sentenced to the ultimate torture for…unauthorized transmissions of Classified Information” (252). But the myth ends there only if one adheres to the “official” account, says Leary. In Prometheus’s own telling, he’s more of a “Pied Piper” who escapes “the sinking gene-pool” while taking “the cream of the gene-pool” with him (252).

Cut to Michael Synergy, a real-life cyberpunk who describes a computer virus as “a little artificial intelligence version of me” that can replicate as many times as needed to do what it needs to do.

Leary thinks that in the future we’ll all be “controlling our own screens.” The goal of cyberpunk as movement, he says, is to decentralize ownership of the future.

My thoughts leap to John Lilly’s Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Lilly’s is the book I imagine Dick’s Electric Ant would have written had he lived to tell of his experiments.

Picture It

When I picture

Acid Communism, it’s

being-with-others, it’s

becoming-with-others

beyond laboring, beyond

reproduction, it’s

us

RUNNING RIOT

reclaiming Time,

claiming,

“There seems to be plenty of it,”

as does Huxley

in his mescaline book,

The Doors of Perception.

And in this picture, I

picture as well

a sexual component.

Visions of Red Plenty invite

dreams of Red Love.

What might that mean? How might we

practice that?

I imagine

multi-partnered

many-headed

combinations &

encounters;

“time together”

kissing and giggling,

co-living, co-parenting, if we wanted, and

if wanted or

when needed,

“time apart”

amid.

Add to Olson

Haraway’s “response-ability”

and arrive at

“Terra-

polis is this.”

All Because of a Couple of Magicians

Twenty-first century subjects of capitalist modernity and whatever postmodern condition lies beyond it have up to Now imagined themselves trapped in the world of imperial science. The world as seen through the telescopes and microscopes parodied by the Empress in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. That optical illusion became our world-picture or world-scene — our cognitive map — did it not? Globe Theatre projected outward as world-stage became Spaceship Earth, a Whole Earth purchasable through a stock exchange.

Next thing we know, we’re here.

Forms from dreamland awaken into matter.

Drawings II

Frankie’s watercolor and colored marker drawings are my heart’s delight — fields of color into which I gaze. The stained glass of this new temple wherein I dwell. The Time Traveler, though, feels forlorn, shorn of home and family. Perila’s “Fallin Into Space” soundtracks his evening as he re-reads The Time Machine. “Please let the future be otherwise,” he prays, a prompt of sorts entered into the dialogue of days. Some movement forward through time akin to John Dwyer’s “Greener Pools.” “Marijuana tells you what you want to hear,” says a friend. “Ayahuasca tells you what you need to hear.” Another friend recommends ketamine.

Retrocausation

The hyperstition I’ve imagined draws upon the process of “retrocausation.”

Like a descendent reaching back and saving an ancestor, as in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the fiction I’m writing arrives from the future to affect-effect the past.

At the center of the story are the journals trance-scribed at the height of my high in years prior. “Words came to me as if whispered to me by a me of the future,” mutters the Narrator. “I was so attentive in those days. And I encountered near-zero need to edit or cross out. The pages of the journals are pristine.”

Science writer Eric Wargo explores the topic of retrocausation in his 2018 book Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. To know more, one must be like Batman descending to his Batcave. Let us to our memory palace go, there to converse with Wargo.