What Herbert Marcuse called the Great Refusal — the rejection of a world reduced to instrumentality — blooms, under another sky, as what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney name “generativity without reserve” (The Undercommons, p. 90).
In this phrase, the pharmakon of liberation is refigured: not merely as refusal, not merely as resistance, but as an unbounded creativity that does not spend itself against capital’s horizon of scarcity. A force that flows, communal and excessive, not calibrated to productivity but to the improvisatory abundance of life itself.
Into Fisher’s book on Acid Communism Rig and Thoth write of a kinship between Marcuse’s utopian surplus and Moten and Harney’s fugitive sociality. Both are intonations of a world where joy and experiment are not rationed but diffused, spreading rhizomatically through collective being.
Acid Communism in this sense is not a program but a practice, an invitation into the commons of sensation, an opening to what is already here, already spilling over the edges of control.
If Marcuse urged us to refuse the administered world, then Acid Communism dreams of a refusal that is already dancing — a refusal indistinguishable from joy. Fisher’s unfinished manuscript leaves us an aperture, a place where our hands may join his, where the sentence trails off and others rush in to continue it.
Here, Harney and Moten’s “generativity without reserve” enters as the counter-chord: a reminder that the future is not produced but continually improvised, excessive to every measure. In the Library’s shifting stacks, this generativity appears as whole aisles rearranging themselves mid-step, titles dissolving into laughter, footnotes sprouting new texts like mycelial blooms.
Acid Communism would not simply cite these moments. It would dwell in them, treating them as both archive and score. Fisher, the teacher, the DJ, the writer, would invite his students to listen collectively to what resists capture: a Sun Ra card game, a rave at dawn, a poem folded into a protest chant.
What unites these fragments is not a program but a rhythm. Marcuse named it liberation; Harney and Moten name it fugitive planning; Fisher dreamt it as the utopian surplus of psychedelia and collectivism. In every case, the through-line is the same: life refusing to be reduced to survival, insisting on pleasure, creativity, love.
Acid Communism is the name for this unfinished chord, one that asks not to be resolved but to keep resonating, louder, further, in the hands of all who play it.
Science is a practice that emerges from myth, its form found in the stories we tell of it. I’ve identified a pattern connecting the stories we’ve told of AI. Yet I know not what to make of it or how to respond to it. What is my role in this pattern? How much of it found, how much projected?
Time to rewatch Forbidden Planet (1956), classic 50s sci-fi retelling of The Tempest, filmed in CinemaScope, with Ariel recast as a nonbinary robot and Caliban recast as the Id. “For your convenience,” says the robot, “I am monitored to respond to the name Robby.” When asked if it’s male or female, Robby replies, “In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning.”
As this initial exchange indicates, gender is one of the film’s primary concerns. Like the island from The Tempest, the planet here in Forbidden Planet includes a father and his daughter among its few inhabitants. Prospero and Miranda have here been replaced with recluse philologist Dr. Edward Morbius and his daughter Altaira. Where The Tempest begins with Antonio and his fellow castaways washing up on the shore of Prospero’s island, Forbidden Planet opens with the arrival of a space cruiser. An all-male crew led by Leslie Nielsen lands on the planet as the film begins.
Morbius thinks of Robby as “simply a tool.” He commands Robby to walk toward a disintegrator beam to demonstrate to Commander Adams and his crewmates the robot’s “absolute selfless obedience.” “Attribute no feeling to him, gentlemen,” says Morbius. “Order canceled,” he shouts as Robby marches toward the beam.
As Morbius notes Robby’s superhuman strength, a concerned crewman replies, “Well, in the wrong hands, might such a tool become a deadly weapon?”
Morbius tries to disarm such fears: “No, Doctor,” he says, none too reassuringly, “not even though I were the mad scientist of the taped thrillers, because you see there happens to be a built-in safety factor.” Built in, we soon learn, by none other than Morbius himself, Robby’s creator. “I tinkered him together,” he explains, “during my first months up here.”
Morbius is no Frankenstein. Yes, he inhabits laboratories. Yes, he creates a robot. His science, however, is linked with philology, parlor magic, and most of all, technologies belonging to the Krell, an ancient alien civilization of the planet’s archaic past.
It is this other technology, with its triangles and pyramids, that constitutes the film’s innovation into the continuum of the Frankenstein narrative.
Morbius tours the crewmen through an underground museum of Krell technology. Advanced mnemotechnics. “On this screen,” he says, “the total knowledge of the Krell, from its primitive beginning, to the day of its annihilation, a sheer bulk surpassing many millions of Earth libraries.”
As the tour continues, we witness another device: the Krell’s “Plastic Educator.” Gathering around the object’s plastic pyramid, Morbius explains it to the crewmen as follows: “As far as I can tell, they used it to condition and test their young — in much the same way we once employed fingerpainting among our kindergarten children.” I picture Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The device outputs holographic images, manifestations of mind visible to others.
“I often play with it myself for relaxation,” Morbius adds with a smile, sitting down beside it. “Although working here, I sometimes wish I’d been blessed with multiple arms and legs.”
The Krell as pictured later in the film are hideous — though here, I picture an Octopus.
Awed by Morbius’s demonstration of the Plastic Educator, Lt. Ostrow, the ship’s doctor, calls it “Aladdin’s lamp in a physics laboratory.”
Next, as if moving sequentially through a space similar to the Futurama exhibit from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Morbius guides the crewmen on a tour of the Krell’s thermonuclear energy system. The men board a capsule-shaped vehicle and descend into an underground space of vast proportion, an imaginary architecture: hints of what would become the atrium of the Westin Bonaventure, with its ascending glass elevator, rendered in the style of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Despite these grand glimpses of the post-scarcity utopia on the far side of history, Morbius is still cut from the Frankenstein cloth. For something befell the Krell. There’s something tragic and forbidden about this alien knowledge. Their experiments had apocalyptic consequences. Morbius, “answerable exclusively to his own conscience and judgement,” feels mankind isn’t fit for such knowledge, and resists Commander Adams’s wish to share these discoveries with others.
However, as Lt. Ostrow explains after his ill-fated “brain boost” via Plastic Educator, the Krell forgot one thing: “Monsters from the Id.” When pressed by Commander Adams, Morbius defines the Id as “an obsolete term, I’m afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis for the subconscious mind.”
“Monsters from the subconscious: of course!” replies the Commander. “That’s what Doc meant!”
The veil parts, Morbius awakened suddenly to the danger of technologies that bestow the power of creation via thought. “Why haven’t I seen this all along?” he says, awed by the realization. “The beast. The mindless primitive. Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning.”
The Commander, angered, digs deeper. “And so, those mindless beasts of the subconscious had access to a machine that could never be shut down. The secret devil of every soul on the planet, all set free at once to loot and maim. And take revenge, Morbius! And kill!”
As Morbius struggles to acknowledge the vengeful power of his own subconscious, the Commander scolds him with the standard Freudian prognosis: “We’re all part monsters in our subconscious. […]. Even in you, the loving father, there still exists the mindless primitive, more enraged and more enflamed with each new frustration. So now you’re whistling up your monster again!”
“Guilty! Guilty! My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it!” cries an anguished Morbius, accepting the tragic Oedipal weave of the film’s borrowings from Freud whole cloth.
As consolation to Altaira upon her father’s passing, Commander Adams delivers the film’s closing words. “About a million years from now, the human race will have crawled up to where the Krell stood in their great moment of triumph and tragedy. And your father’s name will shine again, like a beacon in the galaxy. It…will remind us that we are, after all, not god.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trance-Scripts 