Welcome back to Bitcoin Study Sessions.
I'm joined by my co-host, Grant Reichert, and my name is Lucas Maddy.
We are celebrating Christmas, enjoying all the great things that the world has to offer us, friends and family,
and a chance to return to the farm and enjoy some cold weather and quiet and be able to see the stars.
And we're also discussing the digital apocalypse.
were diving into a book called Human Forever,
The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.
And this book is written by James Polos.
He is a fascinating thinker.
A bit of a visionary, I think, is a good way to put this,
just in terms of the vision that he is laying out for us.
James wrote this book and, interestingly enough,
published it on Bitcoin through canonic.xyz, which we'll bring up here in a bit. James is a
political philosopher, PhD from Georgetown. He hosts a show called Zero Hour on Blaze Media.
And he's actually a wonderful listener. If you get a chance to listen to him on podcasts,
which he does a number of them. He's a very eloquent speaker. He's, as with many of these
authors, he's very careful with his choice of words and uses a dictionary of words as an armament
to solidify his position and does it well in a way that it's easy to understand. I listened to
a couple of hidden podcasts with a friend that has no idea about what Bitcoin is or this idea of
kind of the digital world somewhat taking over through the algorithms and being unaware of that.
And my friend thought that it was wonderful to listen to. So James Polis, Human Forever.
And as always, to kick us off, Grant is going to give us a bit of a summary and we're going to have
some discussion as we go throughout. So thank you for joining. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully, you know,
it's not going to be a huge summer that I'm going to do here. We're really going to hash this out
in conversation. This is an excellent book. It has a sort of like interlocking set of vocabulary
or memes. And you'll see a lot of the memes or vocabulary that constitute this book kind of
floating through X. You'll see there's a shared vocabulary between Polis and some other Twitter
accounts, talking about catechizing the bots, talking about terraforming humanity, talking
about Bitcoin monasteries, the cyborg theocracy.
These are all memes that have kind of entered into the discourse.
This book helps excavate some of those for me.
I've always wondered what some of these phrases that are really suggestive mean.
And this, James didn't coin all of those, but he discusses all of those.
And hopefully we're going to unpack some of those things.
If you kind of ever stumbled upon through Bitcoin Twitter, some esoteric discussion of a digital apocalypse, then this hopefully will bring some of that home.
It's kind of like the broadest, even just like content, like flavor, flavor based introduction.
I was trying to just weave it together in my mind, kind of what this whole endeavor is, human forever, how to stay human forever in light of the digital apocalypse that we live in the wake of.
I mean, the idea is generally the apocalypse has already occurred in 2007 with the release of the iPhone.
We are living in year zero after the catastrophe.
Our memories have been wiped.
We no longer have human memory, only machinic data that stores all of our movements, interests, likes, everything about us.
Our imagination operates freely, wheels in space, spins, wishes from ether is untethered to anything.
but it's a wish-making capacity rather than a creative one.
We seek instant perfection away from our flawed human body,
kind of a transhumanist, post-humanist escape from the human sort of endeavor,
even as a digital swarm of algorithm and bots kind of reconstitutes all of reality
and tells us that that's possible.
These bots and algorithms envelop and penetrate,
and they overwhelm us in a sort of sensory overload
that prevents any sort of maturation,
any sort of development
because it promises to deliver infinity in a moment.
That's kind of not even a summary,
just kind of like a flavor of the world
that we're going to enter into here with Human Forever.
As the broadest introduction,
start with the phrase,
that's not even something Polis came up with himself,
cyborg theocracy.
This is a phrase from Ardian Tola,
who is the founder of Canonic.xyz, where this book is published. So the cyborg theocracy,
a cyborg, what's a cyborg? It's just a man-machine hybrid. You know, any sort of,
you know, you would say Robocop is an obvious cyborg, right? But less obvious, a human with
a cell phone, with a smartphone is a cyborg because they've melded with that in a very
serious sort of way. It's an extension of their memory, of their capacities, of who they are.
So that's a cyborg.
What is a cyborg theocracy then?
Theocracy is a sort of like mode of governance or way of ruling a society, theos, like related to God.
Theocracy rule by gods.
But it's not rule by God.
This is something I got from Joe Allen, another author who is published on Canonic.xyz.
As I said, this discourse is woven together by many individuals.
The cyborg theocracy.
The theocracy is not ruled by gods, but it's ruled by technology as God and more so by a priestly class that promises it can communicate to that technology for us.
It communicates with the bots, communicates with the algorithm, whether it's the engineers that have kind of privileged access to the technology or whether it's the ethicists who tell us how that technology must be used.
These are people who are all kind of jockeying or competing to be the priestly class in our new cyborg theocracy.
So if we sort of have a theocratic government where the god in that theocratic framework is technology, we have a priestly class that people are fighting to be the members of, engineers, ethicists.
And we, the citizens being ruled, are all humble cyborgs on some sort of transitionary, you know, some people are escaping in as much as they can living in the woods. Other people are melding more and more Brian Johnson style, just going full bore into it, making themselves as less human and more post-human as possible to escape from all the dirty realities of being human, like dying, things like that.
So that's kind of, broadly speaking, what this book is going to react against is this notion of the cyborg theocracy, which I think, as these authors talk about it, is really just a description of the world we are in using colorful but also suggestive language to get us to understand the real import of what is happening.
that there is an underlying religiosity or an explicit overt religiosity to what people are
doing with technology and technology's relationship to us. That if you don't look at it through the
lens either explicitly of religion or at least as a way that humans express their religiosity,
you're not going to fully understand what's happening.
So I said that we're already living in this cyborg theocracy.
A key part of this book, Human Forever, is also to get us to understand
we're also living after the apocalypse.
James does a lot of really good work tracing etymologies here,
which is kind of the roots of words.
And when you do that, you kind of understand a bit more about
what the reality we inhabit, which is, of course,
piece together through the words we use. We're living after the apocalypse. Apocalypse is a sort
of revealing. It reveals something. The digital apocalypse, something has been revealed. In 2007,
we had the release of the smartphone. That's the beginning of this digital catastrophe,
digital apocalypse that we're all living in the wake of. And you can see, again, the beginning of
a widespread cyborg style of living for even the man and woman in the street.
where now we can use our imagination to summon instantly a sensory overload through TikTok,
through live streams, through whatever sort of thing you want to do with whatever sort of app
to satisfy whatever sort of wish you have that's really unmoored from anything
except for your pure ability to wish as such.
And this digital catastrophe, living in the wake of this, is causing a despair.
It's causing a feeling that we no longer have sufficient answers to give to our offspring about why they should bother carrying out their lives.
Because in the past, we gave fully human responses to that question, right?
You would tell a human to live out a human life.
You are going to want to pair up with a person to pair bond with.
You're going to want to have children.
You're going to want to be in community to help protect and raise those children.
and you're going to want to develop your skills to participate in that community,
we could give all of these human answers to the question of how do you live?
But now, after 2007, the answers to these questions are changing.
People are wondering what does it mean to live when we are cyborgs,
when things have changed.
He mentions in China there's something called the Tang Ping Movement,
which is expressed as kind of lying flat, doing nothing.
People who are not marrying, not buying houses, not having children, the response to living in the wake of digital catastrophe is to cease living, essentially.
Some people are grasping at intensity through things like DMT trips or whatever computer analog to that, whatever virtual analog, you know, embracing insanity to try to escape into fantasy from responsibility, what remains of it, of being human and what that entails.
So that's the cyborg theocracy and the digital catastrophe. Does that make sense, Lucas, as kind of a framework for where we're beginning here?
Yeah, the cyborg theocracy reminds me of Jason Lowry's software when he introduces the god kings.
You know, here's Vitalik and here's Elon and here's Jeff Bezos.
And these are the keepers of the flame, I suppose, with regard to the technology.
They're almost the lighters of the new flame, a sort of Promethean fire, right?
It's like a new thing.
Yeah. But these are like the technology that our lives are intrinsically tied to now have very few people that have administrator control. And those people that have administrator control are effectively gods because they can do things like de-platform.
They can, you know, erase your digital existence or they can platform.
They can amplify your digital existence.
You know, you see, it's better odds to try and get Elon to retweet you than it is to win the lottery.
And the net effect is probably about the same.
because when that happens, it elevates a person to a status that is beyond what they ever imagined.
It's Zeus coming down from the mount.
Yeah.
It's an anointing human.
Yeah, it is.
That's an interesting way to look at it.
A retweet from one of the tech theocrats.
I don't know what you would call them, but those people explicitly embracing their, almost explicitly, halfway pseudo,
know their role as a new priestly class to communicate commune with the gods for us and
conveying the blessing of the gods upon us yeah and the digital catastrophe is just so apparent
um if you if you can disconnect and then you can look around and i noticed this the uh i used to
ride a motorcycle a lot and um i quit riding motorcycle mainly because when you ride a
motorcycle, you're not on your cell phone. You know, you obviously have to pay attention to the
world around you and everything is a threat. And I would just go tool around town. And I realized
that they teach you when you go get your license that you should try to make eye contact with the
drivers that are approaching you because that way they know you're there. Right. And you can't,
I mean, it is utterly terrifying. Just on an average Tuesday afternoon or a Friday morning or just whenever, I would say 80% of the people that you meet are head down on a cell phone.
And so they're not really there. And what we know about the brain is that it's effectively like a computer and it's got a certain amount of a certain amount of bandwidth.
And that bandwidth, when you start splitting it between the things that you're holding in your hand and whatever else is going on.
Like I, I describe people that have a cell phone addiction as, you know, they're, they are disabled. They're one handed people. Um, they, they do everything in life with one hand, um, because they always have this other hand on their phone. Um, and so it's, it's made us physically limited. Um, it's made us motivationally limited, right? Because you, um, you don't need to get up and go somewhere.
you can just press a button and it'll come to you whether it's your food or your clothes or your
supplies or a guitar or a relationship or what passes for a relationship now or even skip that
and go straight to the you know the extrapolation of or the the extraction of of whatever intimacy
in the form of pornography. And to see this, I see this in my, I won't name it, but there's a
family member I have that, you know, just spends nine hours a day on a phone. And by the way,
that's only something that I note as odd because it's a grown adult. When you get into the 14-year-old,
15 year old, 16 and below, it's actually, that's, that's the norm right now. I think the United
States average right now for under, under 16 or under 15 or something like that is nine hours a
day of screen time. And so you're awake for, you're awake for 16. Um, you know, you're on a screen
more than you're sleeping. You're on a screen more than you are awake, um, in terms of other things,
But then you've also got that attention residue of this, you know, if you, I'm looking at my phone on TikTok and then I put it down.
Well, I'm not out of that.
Like that, whatever I was, whatever I was looking at, it's still commanding my attention for probably somewhere around the next 20 minutes.
This attention residue from context switching that pervades society.
You, we had, we just had our family Christmas.
You, you had your family Christmas.
And, um, I have an uncle that is, uh, an incredible storyteller and, uh, he was able to make it through one very short story.
And he finally looked around and realized that no one, no one made it with him.
Like people started and then, you know, there's, there's 19 people there.
And everyone had already switched to their cell phone because the second that there's a pause for effect, the second that there is the space between the notes that makes the music, people switch and they go back.
So this digital catastrophe, you know, you and I spend a lot of time together and you know how I've been so active to try and do that because I find it pervading me and destroying my ability to write songs, destroying my ability to feel, to be connected emotionally to the world around me.
um yeah this uh what was the what was the chinese word for the uh just quitting and i don't know
yeah i don't know of course the phonetics on that if it's up down they always have the intonation
marks i don't know yeah yeah but it's tangping is the movement and it's based on i think it might
be a work of fiction but it's turned into a manifesto i forget but it's a sort of um a movement
Yeah, and you can see maybe China, I can't speak for Chinese culture, but having heard other people discuss it, they're sort of, you know, even more vulnerable because they went through the cultural revolution that really stripped away a lot of the traditions they had and were left open.
But of course, we can't, you know, in the United States, we're vulnerable, obviously, from what you're saying.
This anecdote rings true to everybody listening, I imagine.
That's a really, I do think that's a really valid point, though. Like, if you look at Eastern cultures, they are, they have a stronger culture, right? Because they don't have this break of heterogeneous ethnicities and races coming in with their own cultures. You know, if you're Chinese, you're Chinese. Like, there's no, there's no, you know, Irish Chinese. There's, there's no, there's no Latvian Chinese. But if you're American, then you're Chinese.
In the block that you live, there's probably 30 different trace cultures that they have their own little unique thing.
And so that melding, what happens with that melting pot is that everything melts.
And so if everything melts, then it all goes into one flavor.
um yeah when you're a little you're a little kid you go to the uh you go to the fountain uh at the
convenience store and you get a soda and you do the uh the suicide right or you you put in like
a little bit of every single one yeah and turns out by the way like coke tastes pretty good pepsi
tastes pretty good sprite tastes pretty good and then you mix them all together and they taste like
shit um yeah so yeah you you lose that culture when you mix everything yes and that is a part
you've mentioned two things that are going to take us forward in this book the space between
the music that's going to be an important part of what james discusses he has this notion of
the implicit and the explicit and that we our culture and our society since the 1700s really
has undergone a process of increasing disenchantment which is a removal of hidden or implicit spaces
and things as we make reality more described in an explicit fashion with scientific theories that
fully describe the operation of nature with books that fully detail the nature the the commitments
of theology and politics things become less implicit there's less spaces between the notes
that make the music and more an attempt to totally understand and grasp reality through reason and
science that's a thing that we're losing um the implicit spaces but and in this notion of
heterogeneity kind of forming into a gray homogenous glue goo that's also part of this
and the next conceptual piece that james gives or the next one i'll throw out
is the idea of the digital swarm and so considered etymologically again or just consider the word
swarm like that's bugs that's a mass of things that are like each moving of their own kind of
will that is not known to us but that together compose like this inhuman mass of tiny things
moving around that we can't control and that kind of swarm about us right the digital swarm
not alive but animated not organized not comprehensible to us on really even an analogy
to masses of animate creatures,
but the closest we can get.
Within the digital swarm,
which is things like bots and algorithms,
all of these invisible processes
that weave together to make a virtual reality,
a reality within our phones that we then inhabit
or within whatever virtual space,
not just our phones,
which are the common portal to it.
Within the swarm, human organization,
our all too human, real body,
incarnate human organization
is subordinate to an always-on machine algorithm
that exists eternally and outside of space and time.
In the past, and so this is the digital swarm,
I think we're all vaguely familiar with this thing,
we just don't really have a name for it.
Digital swarm is a great term,
a great way to put our, to grasp,
maybe I want to say the enemy,
but also it's kind of an amoral thing,
neither good nor bad, it just is.
And it's a thing, the digital swarm,
that the priestly class believes they can control.
But James, the way he describes it,
they really can't control it either.
Nobody controls the digital swarm.
So there's kind of a dream to control it,
a dream that the priestly class
might harness the digital swarm
to more fully complete their control of society.
In the past, America kind of gained hegemony over the world
by controlling the consumer imagination,
dreamcraft as statecraft,
This idea of an American dream that the world then adopted and we could kind of sell products to people and to ourselves to make, to fulfill, to say you are a part of the dream as well and create a global American consumer imagination.
So now social engineers look at the digital swarm and they think we can wield this.
We can wield this amoral, animate, non-human mass as another tool.
Social engineers see this digital swarm, in fact, as like the perfect tool because it nudges.
People think that they're free when they engage with the digital swarm, but it's entirely controlling and devouring us, right?
But the digital swarm cannot be fully controlled even by the people that purport to be its priests.
It always is kind of operating on us in a way that is inherently beyond our control just by the nature of it.
Here's a sentence, a quote, I think that kind of outlines why.
Polis says, our tools formally shape us in a way unlike and incomparable to the instrumental way we shape them,
which is to say we make our tools with an intent for a purpose and hammer to hit a nail.
But once we have the tool, it then is part of the environment that reshapes us in a way we didn't predict when we invented the tool.
The same thing with Digital Swarm.
We invent what we think is a tool, all of these algorithms that are intentional for a purpose.
But then altogether as a digital swarm, they then reshape us in a way we did not predict and cannot control.
And indeed, for the ruling faction, the problem with the digital swarm for them is not that it dehumanizes us,
is not that it ends storytelling among families or causes everybody to be kind of bent down hypnotically over their phones.
It's just that they don't control that hypnotism, right?
The social media digital swarm is exactly what allowed unauthorized opinions, what the elites call misinformation, to escape into reality, right?
And humans, we kind of impose a limitation on that in a sense because the machines can always operate perfectly, autonomously, independently, but they're tied down to us.
for this reason the ruling faction the social engineers want to get rid of the humanity and
humans in order to better control the tool in order to better control the humans something like
that does that make sense as far as the digital swarm and how the priestly class desires to
control it and yet they cannot perfectly control it yeah so the
the introduction i think we've talked about this previously but the the introduction of the feed
instead of the timeline to social media occurred around like 2012 or something like that.
And this was this realization that the valuable metric to go after if you're running a social media platform is engagement.
because engagement is attention and attention is time and time is the old like time time as we know
is now becoming very apparent to those of us who are watching it pass by time is the only thing that
you don't get more of other than bitcoin which is not something that you you don't you don't
you're not born with bitcoin but you're born with time and so it's the thing that you're given
that you can't get more of.
Bitcoin is something you have to go out and trade.
You have to trade your time for it.
This algorithm obviously got out of control, right?
So a hundred years, I heard this stat the other day
and it's shocking.
I hope it's not true,
but I've heard it in two different places now.
So I assume it's getting fairly close to being true
is that like 100 years ago, attention span averaged like an hour.
And now it's 43 seconds.
Yeah.
And so, you know, we've seen this.
And it continues to go in that direction because that's valuable.
So that's the metric that you're optimizing for when you run one of these companies.
And it's out of your control because if you choose not to do that, then you become irrelevant and you no longer exist.
And so it started with, you know, just a story.
And then it became these like vines, right?
Vine was really the thing that kind of clicked it off or, you know, this six second clip.
And now that's like the standard, like six seconds, you know, is where we're going.
And so what do we do?
Like, how can we fight that?
And thankfully, we have the answer.
We have the solution.
And that was for you and I, we were introduced to this by Jason Lowry, which is pay factor authentication.
And that pay factor authentication simply means that I have my social media feed.
It's my Instagram or my ex or my TikTok, et cetera.
but I also have a little slider and that little slider says,
you can't show me anything unless you send me X amount of sats.
And therefore, if you want to target me,
so like there's the people that I will choose.
I will choose.
I will say, I want to follow Grant.
Show me everything that Grant says.
I want to follow Donnie.
Show me everything that Donnie says.
But if you're outside of that,
these ubiquitous, the for you page. If you're outside of that, once you move into that realm,
you're subject to whatever the algorithm is trying to drive towards you. And of course,
the phone is listening to you. So it gets all your keywords and everything that you're excited
about. Somebody says Trump, and now you hear all this Trump stuff. Somebody says cyborg. And now
I'm sure I'm going to see a bunch of Terminator stuff, right?
So, but with my pay factor authentication, I've got my little slider and my little slider says that you can't show me anything unless you send me five cents worth of Bitcoin.
And now, now they have to really think about it.
Now they have to really say, well, is it worth us expending this?
And this, you know, Jason Lowry kind of talked about this a lot, which is that it's it's costless effectively to spam a billion people a trillion times with just a six second clip.
But if you impose even the smallest cost on that and this, you know, this is Adam Back's work. Like this is all he was trying to do with proof of work. All he was trying to do was not have spam. He was not he was trying to not get all of these, which is funny because he's you know, he comes out of that that kind of realm of like hackers and stuff.
He's not that. But, you know, that that was the thing is that you found out if you were a hacker that you could hack this database and pull 400 million emails and you could send 400 million spam emails for the cost of.
Three cents of electricity. Yeah. And all you all you need is a one in every 10,000 person to click on that thing.
And I've read like some of the way that it was just affiliate programs that were existing that, hey, you know, if you get a click, you get five cents.
And if that click turns into a sale, you get five dollars.
And so, you know, if you do that and you've got a big enough bulk, then you're making millions.
And so and you're doing it.
The fundamental thing that's wrong about this or that's degrading to society is that you're just doing it ad nauseum.
It's a shotgun approach.
And what you end up with is at the least, it's a whole bunch of people wasting time. And at the worst, it's a whole bunch of people spending money that they don't need to spend for things that they don't want.
Yeah. And so with pay factor authentication, I think we're going to have a weapon against that. And that weapon is going to be that not only am I not subject to your algorithm, I'll still be subject to your algorithm, but there's a cost associated with showing me that.
And the other thing about that is instead of $5 Timu crap or $11 Amazon crap, if I'm going to show you something and it's going to cost me five cents to show it to you, well, wouldn't it be worthwhile for me to show you something valuable?
and not only valuable, but wouldn't it be worthwhile for me to show you something valuable
that you may want for the rest of your life? And so we go from this mentality of all I need is
one in every 10,000 people to buy this piece of junk. It'll show up at their house. It'll be
trash. They'll use it for three minutes and it'll break and we'll throw it away, but they'll say,
oh, it was 11 bucks. I don't care. And then they'll do it again and again and again and again
and to the point that they have spent, you know, the bulk of their life just buying shit and throwing
it in the trash. Yeah. And the flip side of that is, well, maybe I'm going to make the best product
that I ever can and they're going to be really pleased with it. And maybe now if I show that to
them and I prove that value to them and they say, look, this is a knife and this is the best knife
that I've ever had, and I'm going to have this for the rest of my life, I'm going to give it to my
son, he's going to give it to his son, then what you get is the most valuable type of advertising,
which is free advertising, right? Which is word of mouth, which is a warm introduction to a new
client that you didn't have to pay for because you made the best product. Elon, we've brought
this up, Elon is, um, is known to say that like, if you, if you look at a Tesla, um, I think,
I think I have a Tesla and I think it, it has two, two Tesla badges on it, very small.
And you know, they're honestly, they're kind of easily confused with other cars, right? Like I,
oftentimes I see a, uh, a Volkswagen and I'm like, Oh, is that a Tesla? Oftentimes I see a Prius and
I'm like, is that a Tesla? There's Toyotas that kind of look like Teslas. But he says, you know,
the best products in the world don't need a brand. They don't need a badge. What they need is proof
that they're the best product in the world. And so you should be able to, instead of, you know,
have this giant marketing department thinking about all these schemes, you should have a giant
research and development department working on innovations to make better products. And I think
that's where we see this like hopefully this fundamental shift between um this transitory
throwaway economy um which has transitory throwaway relationships and a long-lasting
embedded economy um where you develop a a kinship i guess towards the products that
really serve you because they serve you more than yeah you pay for them oh yeah i guess that's yeah
That's what that makes me think of there.
No, I think in your absolutely, this is directly to the heart of the matter, proof of work and your description of pay factor authentication as one potential weapon or mode of resistance against the digital swarm itself, which depends on its swarming nature.
The fact that it's so numerous, innumerate, even that you can't stop it otherwise.
And I was just thinking as you're talking, we even had pre-digitally kind of informal notions of this when you would have traveling vacuum sellers go door to door.
They would say for some amount of your time, if you sit through my presentation, I will give you a set of knives.
And then they would come in and they would show off their product and know my product has to be good enough for the knives that I'm giving each of these people to get their time.
And that sort of pre-digital pay factor authentication bought them a discrete amount of attention span.
And then they were able to demonstrate, hopefully, the superiority of their product.
Everybody hopefully walked away satisfied with the encounter, either with the knives or with having the ability to sell to a customer.
So I actually got the knives that way.
I did.
Yeah.
You know, the way that you get a great customer for life is by providing great service.
It's not, you know, like there's there's a lot of like products that they might not be the best product.
But if you have the best service and I think what happened is that as it as as technology found its way into production, it made the production of products cheap enough that they could be throw away.
And therefore it exacerbated and it made it look like it was much more costly to service a product.
So I could make a product that lasts for 100 years but I going to have to service it 15 times during that time Or I could make a product that lasts three years and then you just throw it away and buy another one And that became the dominant model But you speaking
to like a great example of that, which is the Kirby door-to-door vacuum salesman. My mom has
two Kirbys. She's 70 years old and she's had two Kirby vacuums for 50 years, you know, and they
They service them and they keep parts in stock.
And when you buy these things, they have a lifetime warranty.
And that lifetime warranty, it doesn't mean that the product's never going to break.
It doesn't mean it's perfect.
It means that we're going to be here and we're going to service that.
And you have not just made a purchase, you've entered into a relationship.
and we look across the landscape of of the human experience now and not only do we have fewer
relationships right the average male has zero best friends um the uh um the the the younger
generation is not dating nearly as much as any any generation before they're not partying as much
They don't have as many friends, et cetera. But not only that, like what what brands do we have an affinity to, you know, like growing growing up on the farm?
Like you grow up on a farm and there are there was there's less of a divide between politics, Democrat and Republican, as there was between John Deere and Case and Ford and Chevy.
right and um you know pioneer seed or whatever the other you know whoever pioneers kind of
dominated um pretty hard but but you know like people had this like lifelong affinity with
certain products and um yeah we don't see that anymore right so you just go from this to that
to this to that um yeah so i we're stuck in the liminal state right of of of being exposed to the
worst of that throwaway economy which comes with it the throwaway relationships which also
entails throwaway memories um yes and and i hope and it feels like and i'm i'm very i am very hopeful
that we're on the precipice of not only returning to lifelong relationships and affinities,
but returning in a way that's even stronger than it was before.
Yeah.
Now, memory, we're going to talk about this a bit later on, is a huge theme of this book.
Memory versus imagination versus reason and how human memory is on the decline.
And that's at the base of a lot of this.
But the next thread I want to pull on, and you immediately leaped on this when you began talking about pay factor authentication, that our time is a hard constraint for us.
And it's a hard human biological constraint.
We're mortal.
We have a limited amount of time.
And as we've talked about, you know, through Dear Gigi's essay, Bitcoin is time.
And also Brady Swenson's kind of more fulsome and humanistic exploration of that in his talk.
Our use of time is what makes us human.
And the digital collapses time into an instant.
Like there is no time in digital space until Bitcoin says we're going to have a 10 minute approximate block.
And so it brings time into digital space. Digital politics is constrained by space time because any politics is. This is kind of the next idea in Polis's work here.
So the priestly elite wants to use the digital swarm to control us, to do what Ardian Tola calls terraforming people, to remove the heterogeneity of humans, make us all the same, to make us controllable, to terraform us into one strip mall or global airport lounge of human experience because then we're easily controllable all as one sort of unit or mass.
politics though in the past has been constrained by space-time which is what the human world we
inhabit has space and time whereas digital space does not have space nor time the digital the
digital occurs outside of that politics though as paulis describes it is about not that top-down
control of the elite trying to make us into a certain thing but it's about the human constitution
of community through ways of life that already exist. Politics is conducted through space-time
because it's about the way of life of the people who own space over time, take ownership of that
space, do things with that and in that space, improve it, things like that, over an amount of
time, planning for the future with consideration of what has happened in the past. That is the
constitution. The constitution is not a written document that causes a nation. Instead, the
constitution is that thing that results from the ways of life of a community inhabiting space and
time, which again is a pre-digital thing. Digital space does not have space nor time, so it cannot
have a politics in the same sense. This book, again, the subtitle, The Digital Politics of
spiritual war. So digital politics constrained by space and time, the terraformers, the elite
factions that want to create this global airport lounge of experience, really, I think, want to
remove space and time because they don't want a prairie, a mountain area, an island region, all with
different cultures, you know, instead smooth all of that out, create one digital real world space,
so that it approximates the digital and therefore the digital can more cleanly approximate real space
and therefore they feed into each other more cleanly and they can control,
use their digital control to control the real world, again, by making the real world more like the digital.
So instead of controlling fantasy through the digital,
one of the modes of resistance is to insist in working through space-time,
through space and time in the real world,
Which again, through DurrGG, Bitcoin is time is what Bitcoin does, brings time into digital space. And in that way, perhaps resist the terraformers who would remove space and time from reality in order to have digital models approximate reality one to one. Does that make sense as kind of description of politics, the politics of space time?
I'm trying to understand exactly what this terraforming means.
So, yeah, so imagine being. Yes. Well, OK, let me throw out what I think it is for being in Asia.
You have there's a lot of people that are trying to make their real life, their physical life.
Closer and closer to Hello Kitty or anime or something like that, like physical approximation, the surroundings that they have, the way that they talk, the way that they interact.
etc. So is that what we're trying to do? Are we trying to looney tunes of the world so that we,
you know, we run off the cliff and the legs keep spinning until we look down? Are we trying to,
in this idea of like terraforming, we are trying to approximate the digital in the physical?
Is that kind of where we're talking about? Yes. And the Hello Kitty thing is a really
great example so first though terraforming as such the word terra earth and then forming forming
right so terraforming the notion is like you can terraform the earth you can make the earth
how you want it just like bulldoze it do things you want with it terraforming humanity then is
kind of molding humanity to be what you want it to be and in the context of this work in digital
politics um the elite faction wants to terraform humanity so that it is easier to control because
the way that they control through the digital swarm is you create a virtual model of something
and then you manipulate that virtual model and that's how like these planners love models right
because the world is too tough to plan like if you're a central planner the world this this
reality we inhabit is full of implicit spaces spaces between notes it's not knowable perfectly
there's always a wrench in the gears. You can't control the world as it is. But the model that you
make in your mind, and now the models we make in digital space are beautiful and perfect. So we can
create these digital models of a society and say, ah, we can manipulate whatever variable we want,
create a policy based on our virtual projection creation model of society, and then now reimpose
that virtual model through law back onto real world reality and manipulate it through our model.
The example you give is an interesting one because it's almost a way where the digital swarm
escapes from the elite faction. They want to use this terraforming to control the populace,
to do whatever, tax it, vaccinate it, you know, do all the things that it seems like governments
are tending to want to do,
impose a central bank digital currency,
all these types of terraforming
to be able to make the masses
into something that is easy to control and govern.
But the things like the empire of cute,
the kawaii or whatever,
where in certain cultures,
they want to approximate
this digital aesthetic of cuteness.
It's a way that the digital swarm
is operating outside of the elite faction
and controlling people
in a way that one might be benign
towards the elite they might be okay with people emulating cuteness that is a digital creation
but it's a way that the digital swarm tends to create a beautiful perfect model of reality and
in the real world in reality we then adopt the kind of aesthetic the trappings of the model that
was created in digital space terraforming ourselves in a sense voluntarily in the way that we always
do when one culture becomes dominant and people all want to be part of the American dream or be
part of that kawaii cuteness sort of thing i think that answer your question but well i it i mean it
does answer the question but the the question that i would have in response to that is do we think
that's do we think that's happening because if i look at the landscape of social media and yeah
You know, just the digital world. I'm not so sure that I see convergence of culture. What I seem to see is that now because of this tool and and we're going to talk about here, I'm going to say that there's lots of benefits of community of it because now because of this tool, there's, you know, a million people over here who are, you know, vegan deer hunters who love to
to play the flute. And then over here, there's modern monetary theorists who also engage in
furry activity. And over here, then we've got, you know, I'm a, I'm a gay left-handed baseball
catcher, like, and there's 4 million of them. Right. And so what we've done is we've, we've,
It feels to me like instead of converging, it feels like we have ground into more fine detail, into a more granular.
And maybe those things do end up converging.
But yeah, you can find your tribe online no matter who that may be and how weird your interests are.
There's two parts of that.
First, you're totally right that the digital swarm is kind of balkanizing culture, breaking it apart in ways that the elite did not want or foresee, especially in the form of misinformation, quote unquote conspiracies, political resistance.
But the other sort, that purely aesthetic adoption of identity, the elites love that because identities, I think, once somebody adopts those, they're easy to control.
And the digital swarm loves that because once you have pronouns in bio and have adopted an identity, you have terraformed yourself in a way into a consumer of identities, right?
You're picking something unmoored from history and memory, biography, a digital creation that then can be manipulated.
If you are a digital identity, if some of digital identities become real for you, then as that digital identity changes in digital space, you change as well.
So there's that feedback, that control that comes, again, maybe not from the elite factions, but maybe from the digital swarm itself,
which is changing us and which are two separate things.
The elites seek to control the digital swarm that is changing us,
but their control of it has been unperfect and this worries them.
The priestly class does not have a handle over the digital swarm
or over the other technologies that they create to control us
because, again, the tools that you create serve a purpose.
They change us, but then they change us in unpredictable ways.
And then we interact again with those tools, further change them, and we change in further unpredictable ways, which is all horrible for the elite class, which wants an easily, you know, tool to change a specific thing that then they can, you know, have a preordained result.
But when you acknowledge that reality is not like that, that you change one variable and then a million others interact to create a future state that you did not fully plan, that's a horrible situation for a central planner who says, no, if you adopt my policy, all my models say, if you do B, you will get to C or something like that.
But just to interrupt your question, you're totally right that the digital swarm operates outside of the control of the priestly class and some of the identities it creates are harmful to that priestly class.
And this actually brings me kind of to the next point of the reading in that the crisis is ontological, not epistemological, that we are now in.
It's a crisis of being, of what we are, and not of knowing.
So the ontological questions that are now upon us as a result of living after the digital catastrophe in the midst of digital swarms is, who are we when digital swarms rule?
Digital swarms that are not controlled even by the priestly class that purports to speak for them.
Other questions, the digital swarms disenchant God in America, these big meta-narratives.
Do we then worship the swarm?
What is the thing that is in control if the digital swarm seems to be in control?
What is the creator then?
Is it bearable to be human if our triumph means that we have the current state that we have?
If it all led to this, what did it mean to even be human?
What can transcend the digital swarm, these alien masters of our creation, right?
So these are all the questions.
The big questions are now ontological, human forever.
What does it mean to be human still and to maintain humanity in the face of this and to, in fact, have the temerity, the courage, like whatever, to dare to be human in the face of people like Brian Johnson who are saying, do you want to die? Humans die. You sure you want to be human? Like, what does it mean to preserve humanity when humans are weak and biological and they fail and we age, we become disabled? The digital swarm promises. Go ahead. Yeah.
Well, I was going to say you brought that up earlier, and I didn't interject, but I will now because I look at what Brian Johnson's doing, and I'm not certain if what he's doing is not the most human thing.
I mean, humans live.
That's what humans do.
And then they die.
So, but they've just died because they didn't have a way not to die.
You know, we also, we were killed by apes and tigers and woolly man, whatever, you know.
And we froze because of the elements and we died of thirst.
But now we don't do that because we created tools and protocols and we built things that allowed us not to.
So I don't know if what Brian Johnson is doing is inhuman or if it's the most human thing, which is to want to live.
You know, the will to live.
So we described this with the Chinese thing, right?
So the whatever, Taki Paki, Tang Pang.
I mean, again, it would be just as incomprehensible to a Chinese person because we don't, I don't know the phonetics, is it Tang?
Tang?
You know, I don't know what the, whatever.
So those, the people that are engaging in that, what they're doing is, I don't think we would describe that as living.
If you're just, you know, lying across state.
Oh yeah, definitely.
That's not a good response for sure.
Right?
Yeah.
And so maybe the most human thing to do is to approach with courage the obstacles that are in front of you and keeping you from being able to live.
And I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah. We lived through a period where the average age at death was 33 and now it's 70. Who's to say that it's unnatural to live to 70? Who's to say that it's unnatural to live to 150 or 300? We don't know. I mean, if you look in the Bible, there's people that live to 700, 900. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not. We don't know.
Yeah. But I think.
So what is that?
I think to say who's to say, though, is the cop out. We are to say. And the line, you're totally correct. It is fuzzy. Humans have been cyborgs ever since we invented the spear or something like that. We've always interacted with our environment and made ourselves part of our environment or part of the tools that we use in a way that other animals have not.
So there is something about being human that is about changing reality to suit us through machines and technology.
That is for sure.
But there is still that question.
I think we can't – I don't think we can totally dodge it by saying who's to say because then who is to say will be people who have the courage and the means to say.
And they will say, no, it's perfectly fine to have a chip in your brain.
That's what it means to be human.
It's perfectly fine to inject the blood of your child into you, which is what Brian Johnson does.
These things are perfectly natural. It's who's to say, I'm to say. And that's part. One of the ideas in this is that America has always had this idea. James calls it the creed of the spark. This is jumping ahead a bit. But this notion, it's a Faustian notion of there are the people who dare to dream because they make a deal with the devil in a certain sense.
And the deal is almost in that person's mind thought to be a deal with God because they're bringing themselves closer to God.
But the thing is always, is that desire to, is it really a desire to become God?
And what is the human then in that relation if we're trying to beat death?
I don't want to die.
And that sounds uncomfortable, all the things leading up to death.
But it does seem like mortality, vulnerability, aging, these have been a part of the human story.
And the amelioration of them may have consequences beyond our knowing in relation to our humanity.
So that's not an answer to your question.
I think you raised the right question.
Who is to say and what is the answer?
I mean, it's just it depends on where you draw the line.
If you're in the hospital and you need a blood transfusion to live another day, then nobody has a problem with your son giving you blood.
Some people do.
Some people have religious functions against it.
Yeah, some.
And that's true.
Like there are some.
But I would say that the vast majority of people would have no problem with that because they would say, oh, look, I need this in order to live another day, another week, another year.
if you're in the hospital and you need a kidney and turns out, you know, like who's the best match
for that? It's going to be a family member. You know, we celebrate the people that do that. We,
we say, oh, look, he gave him a kidney. Like what a, what a selfless human virtuous act. Right.
Yeah. And then we, we make it into the semantic issue where it's like, oh, well,
it's only okay to do that if you're on the verge of death.
But we're all on the verge of death.
It just depends on what you define verge as, you know, is it in,
is it in five weeks or is it in five years or is it in five decades?
Yeah.
And so I, you know, that's, that's where it gets fuzzy.
Like everybody, I don't,
I don't think anybody has a problem with putting it or I don't know, but,
A lot of people say there's no problem with putting a chip in somebody's brain if they can't hear and they can't see.
Right.
They're quadriplegic.
You know, we can restore them to normal.
Yes.
That's fine.
But if we take someone normal and we do that, then now they're superhuman.
Just like I have a cousin who was born with one kidney.
And so when she was born, they put her on steroids.
And so she was a pretty jacked four-year-old.
Nobody has a problem with that.
But if you took a regular four-year-old and you put that kid on steroids, everybody would think that that was the most inhumane, god-awful thing you could do.
And so it's just this, like, what's your baseline?
And basically that baseline is only as long as it's below what I'm at currently, I'm okay with it.
As long as it as long as all it does is raise you up to where I'm at, that's fine.
But if you're at my level and you want to be better than me, then now I think it's immoral.
Kind of like the the woke kind of thing is like, who do we hate?
The rich.
Well, who's the rich?
Well, it's anybody who has more money than me.
Yeah.
And so you can have one hundred million dollars and still call out, you know, you can you can be Elizabeth Warren.
foreign who has hundreds of millions of dollars and still call Elon Musk a greedy capitalist,
right? Just, you know, it's, it's all relative to the individual who is making that moral judgment.
And so I actually, that's where I want to kind of throw back. And I say to you, I think who's to
say is actually a way better. Like that's, that's a more holistic or a more thoughtful approach
because otherwise it's just everybody's individual.
Like who's to say that it's okay to have $100 million?
Who's okay that it's not okay?
Who's to say that it's okay to get a transfusion
when you need it to live another day
or when you just want to live a better life?
And so I don't know.
And I get stuck on this too
because I follow this Brian Johnson thing with some interest
because he was, you know, he's one of the backing partners of the network school.
Right.
And, you know, like the workout plans and the meals, that is blueprint-derived.
And a lot of people, I never got to meet him, but a lot of people that met him,
they're like, yeah, he's a really nice guy.
Like, just a real sweet person.
I've got his book.
You hear him on his Netflix special, and he just seems like the sweetest dude.
and then they're like well yeah but he's a vampire trying to live to 400 or trying to never die
um but then you look at like well what's he doing you know i i mean do you do you hook yourself up
and suck all the microplastics out of your blood that seems like a good idea because that's not
human like that plastic is not human and that shit came through came to us through this you know
profit motive maximization of short-term maximization of short-term profit that is a
direct result of having money that loses value over time because if you didn't have that then
the incentive is to play long-term games with long-term people as opposed to selling out for
today so yeah yeah i don't know it's a to me it's a semantics question yep so i just first say
brian johnson i have no beef with him he's kind of though a bait noir of like the joe allens the
people who are um railing against transhumanism um and so kind of he gets brought up a lot as just
kind of an example but again i don't know enough about i don't even follow his project enough to
know what he's doing except for as kind of the caricature although i think he presents a caricature
of himself kind of intentionally for social media intentionally yeah for sure yeah but the
The transhumanist thing is like, well, I was just going to say, what's more transhuman?
Is it more of a transhumanist approach to try to live for a long time?
Or is it more of a transhumanist approach to code everything and to always have your cell phone attached to your –
like to me, that's more of a cyborg than the guy who's shocking his penis.
Yeah.
I don't know, like shocking – that's just what a 13-year-old does when he's bored.
Right.
And so the longevity that is promised by the digital swarm, quote unquote transhumanists, etc.
As part of this ontological question, you know, what does it mean to be human?
And longevity is the lever that gets space for then other things like cloning or puberty blockers and gender changing, physical modifications, other sorts of things that people maybe would be less sanguine about.
But not even to argue about those, just to say we're at the exact—I think we're at exactly the right spot in this book right now because these are ontological questions we're asking.
And that's where James kind of wants us to be to realize it's not an epistemological question of what we can know about the future.
Define those two terms.
Break them down for us.
Ontological is about being.
What does it mean to be a human being?
Epistemological is what it is to know something, to know a scientific fact about what it is to be human, say.
So if you look at it all as an epistemological question, it's all about accumulating scientific data about the situation, coming better to know what DNA is, how the chemical compounds interact.
If you look at it as an ontological question, you look at it as, is it changing the essential nature of what it means to be us?
So again, the question of being versus knowing.
And James wants us to focus on the ontological question.
How did these technologies impact us ontologically?
How did they impact our being, what we are, who we are, what we dream of becoming, how
we love, how we procreate, how we recreate, what is meaningful to us?
These are ontological questions about what it means to be a human being.
And this is a very fuzzy area.
Who is to say, what's your baseline?
It's up for grabs.
And that brings us to the next part of the book. The digital catastrophe then is in 2007, a specific historic point in time. So after that, we get the first generation. We get the people who are those who are born into the digital catastrophe, who have no memory of a pre-digital existence, a digital existence without the iPhone.
That's the first generation in Polis's estimation. These are people who are going to answer the question, who's to say, what's your baseline? And they're going to do it without the memory of a pre-digital existence.
The founding generation of the digital age is going to be answering new questions.
They're going to be different people with different experiences.
They're going to devote their identities to different wagers concerning this ultimate question.
Because the ontological question, who we are, begets further.
Once we respond to that, it determines how we live, what we love, who we love, and all these really important things.
So we need to think about it.
it's going to determine whether we have rebirth and renaissance or we have some sort of dystopian
future so we have the first generation the generation that's really going to answer these
questions in a full-throated sense year zero we also have this other concept i want to get on the
table because it's going to help with this so the first generation the young kids zoomers i think
you'd say um no pre-digital memory year zero we also have that polo says this is 2021 year zero
Year zero is a reference to zero hour, the hour after the Nazi regime falls.
And suddenly they have to erase all of the prior memories of, you know, a Germanic spirit tied to Nazism and the Holocaust.
Right. All these horrible things.
They had to say, we need to go forward with a different memory and kind of get rid of a historical memory.
Redefine Nazism in a way that didn't entangle it with just being German, I guess.
Something like that.
Zero zero means the past must be destroyed.
And so 2021, we have like a historical reset.
We have a break with the continuities of the past.
All of the rites of passage, like the homecomings, the prom dances, the in-person flesh to flesh body, like incarnate encounters that were rites of passage for a generation were suspended, right?
People didn't do the things that in the past would have made boys into men or at least marked some point in that transition.
Instead, there's a rupture with the past with this continuity.
So the first generation not only does not have like a pre-digital memory, they also have this rupture from the past that has kind of cut them off from a sort of continuity of development in the way that at least we used to develop.
So these are two things as far as like who's going to answer, who's to say, what's your baseline?
We now have a generation with a different sort of memory, a different sort of relation to history than we have.
Then, you know, you and I born into world without the Internet, without computers, seeing it kind of avalanche into the world, knowing a world before, knowing a world after, able to use the former to judge the latter.
But, you know, what is the first generation going to how are they going to answer that question, I guess, is germane.
But I guess I'll pause there. Does that make sense, this idea of the first generation and then year zero as a further rupture that the first generation has with the past?
Yeah.
experience has become epistemological, which is to say that we know more than we've ever known.
I know all these ridiculous things, right? Because all of the information is available.
Yet, as a result of all of the information being available, I'm doing less. I'm spending less time
staring at a tree. I'm spending less time building fence for 12 hours at a time.
I'm spending less time simply being. And so my experience, my ontological experience is,
I would say, yeah, so there's like, there's just a bandwidth of humanity, of the human experience,
And it appears to be heavily tilted toward epistemological.
Oh, did you watch this?
Yeah.
Did you watch this Netflix documentary?
Did you see this podcast?
Did you read this Substack piece?
As opposed to I spent three hours trying to perfect skipping a rock across a pond.
Or now I've taken an eight-hour hike or something like that with nothing connecting me to the world, yet I find that whenever I do something like that, I feel more connected to the world.
That when I leave behind all of the things that connect me, that I become more connected to nature and to a feeling of humanity around me.
So, yeah, so the epistemological is pervading at the cost of the ontological.
Yeah, that is beautifully put and directly on point. And I was just thinking, as you were describing it that way, part of the kind of subordination of the ontological to the epistemological, the subordination of being to knowing is also the prevalence of communication now.
Like social media wants us to communicate all of our experiences to others, to formulate them into a soundbite, you know, an articulable thing we can tell others about.
But it may be that you can't tell others about how you were transformed on that eight-hour walk.
It's not something that is a form of knowing.
It's a form of being.
You simply are a new person as a result of doing that.
But it's not, I can't just tell you, oh, here's what I experienced.
Now you are also a new person.
There is no communication that can be had or epistemological structure that can be used to help somebody know what you are now that you became something through doing.
Yeah, you can share knowing, but you can't share being.
There we go.
You put the, that's it.
So that ontological, not epistemological crises, that's where we find ourselves.
We need more than arguments and explanations, Polis says.
We need to save our souls.
That's what it comes down to.
And there are two possibilities for Americans subjugated to what he kind of describes as like the repurposed weaponry of digital communications.
He has a whole a lot of really good stuff in this book Obviously we just going to zoom over But he talks about how you know a lot of this digital technology is incubated in the manner of weaponry
And it's actually now just used on us.
But in any case, two possibilities subjected for we who are subject to the digital swarm.
We can kind of retire inward into entertainment and sloth and just be entertained by it, right?
Be hypnotized, entranced.
or you can compete for market share and the provision of this entertainment.
You can create your podcast.
You can be a, you know, a content creator as we call, I suppose, ourselves, right?
You can participate in the frenzy.
So it's frenzy or sloth.
Which one do you want as you are part of this circus?
The alternative to this whole thing, though, to explanation and argument, to communication,
to reason, to science is memory and biography.
memory and biography do not explain a story nourishes by what it implies not by what it says
i love that you said at the beginning the space between the notes is what makes the music
the storyteller at your family christmas um the story is more than kind of the set pieces of the
story it's the narrative structure and its extension over time and its development that
says something more full than any of the individual words that are used. So memory and biography are
incredibly important, Polis says, and they are what is being lost and what must be preserved.
We look back at what he's described, the first generation has no pre-digital memory. They had
also year zero that cut, snipped their biography so that it is different than our biographies,
our being people who do have a pre-digital memory, pre-digital existence. COVID put an end to lots of rites of passage that were part of the American biography.
So we need to now, Polis says, if you want to preserve, if you want to be in some sense human forever, we need to think about what is human memory and how do we perpetuate human biographies.
it's not what the digital swarm promises is you don't need biography or memory we will be your
memories we can perfectly preserve all of your photographs and videos and all of your bio you
know your biological data the machine will hold all the memories you don't have to remember anything
you don't need a biography you don't need history just make a wish and we will fulfill the wish
Pure imagination in the form of pure will is what the digital swarm offers.
And that's kind of one of the dangers of the way we're going is imagination over memory.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
I think about the story of the house is on fire and what do people go after as they go for the photo albums.
Yeah.
Um, but no one, everyone now has 20,000 pictures on their phone and they never look at any of them.
Yeah.
Um, and they, you know, they, they take the picture and they post the picture and they forget the thing.
And I, I, I have pictures pop up, you know, when they do the memory thing on social media, I have pictures pop up and I'm like, I completely forgot about that.
I had no idea.
I, you know, it wasn't a part of my, it's not.
Yes, yes, we've offloaded our memories and we've offloaded our biography. But as a result of that offloading, we don't have it anymore. I don't have that memory and I don't have that biography. And in order for me to tell you who I am now, I have to do digital forensics on myself in order to figure out who I am.
Yeah. As opposed to to knowing like, you know, it's like you have to ask someone else.
I hold on. I need to go access this information because I don't have it on hand.
And what what is a human other than the, you know, the lived experience and the memories?
And so if you've offloaded that, then are you still human?
And there, you know, you're just, you know, maybe that's yourself.
You're just the soulless meatbag walking around in a trance.
Yeah.
Save our souls.
That's what we got to do.
Yeah.
It's that naked, man, that naked.
We're trying to save our souls.
And you don't have to have some sort of metaphysical explanation or belief in the soul as such.
You just got to believe there is something more than meat there that's worth saving.
you you've taken a hiatus from social or well from not social media entirely but from x and
you seem to be happier is this like is this would you say that this is contributed to your experience
as a human yes definitely when you back away from x after being enmeshed in it it is exiting a trance
and entering back into the implicit after living in the wholly explicit.
I mean, what X offers is a constant slew of tweets that explain everything,
observe on everything, and try to make seemingly comprehensible the whole to you.
But you realize when you step back into the real world, of course,
nothing was made whole.
There is no explanation for how we live.
There only is living.
There only is being.
So the ontology is much more important than the knowing about the ontology in a sense. And so I haven't had some huge spiritual epiphany, but it is a feeling of cleanliness and purity and internal fullness for sure.
when you step away from something like X for a period.
It's a feeling of remembrance too,
of remembering this is how I am,
this is who I am,
and I am not all of these voices that are not mine
that constantly run through my feed,
and I'm not actually talking with those people either.
They're just occurring,
and that's not a human thing
if we define human as the way that humans have lived
throughout our evolutionary history.
It's also, this is a point I think you'll really appreciate, Lucas.
If we're saying that the digital swarm privileges imagination over memory, just make a wish and we can fulfill it.
AI can create an image of whatever you want.
It's almost like we have this idea of memory as rote memorization, as not creative.
and imagination as purely creative, as fantastic, right?
And linked to all these beautiful things that we make.
However, historically, the ancients took memory very seriously.
They studied memorization techniques because they didn't have machines to do it for them.
And they, in fact, linked memory, not imagination, to creativity.
So creativity for the ancients was a result of having memorized a bunch of different things,
taken in a bunch of different things and not pure imagination unmoored from memory so i guess do you
as a creative yourself do you feel that that's the case is creativity linked to imagination in a sort
of romantic sense or is creativity linked to memory to having lived and to storing those
lived experiences and knowledge about the world well okay that's a great question and i think i
would say it's the second because I think it's linked to memory because when I when I would write
a song what usually triggers me writing a song is I'm in a conversation with somebody
and we're talking about something and I in order to frame what they're saying in a way that sounds
fun to me or that explains it artistically, I'll throw out a line. So I have this one song called
Hotel Razor. And it was like I was trying to describe to somebody what it felt like to get
broken up with. And I said, she cut me like a hotel razor. Like you're at a hotel and they,
you know, if you forget your razor, you go down to the front desk or they bring it up to your room
And they give you that, that one razor that's got two blades on it that is absolutely guaranteed to cut you no matter how careful you are with it.
Right.
And, and so then you're like, oh, well, that's, that's a good line.
But it, I wouldn't have had that line had I not had the memory of like the pain of being broken up with.
And so I don't necessarily, I mean, yes, it probably takes the imagination to, to lay on that.
But I still have the wild imagination, right? I still have, as you talked about, you know, like I still have the millions of voices running through my head and all these crazy scenarios that are popping up. But the problem is that they're all influenced by that algorithm and they're all.
Right.
Right. Most of the time they're, you know, they're grotesque or they're like unpalatable and I don't like what's going through my head.
Yeah. And and so that encourages you to try and step away from it.
Um, but it's just so hard, right? Because you, when you take a step away from it, you immediately feel this sense of missing out. You immediately feel the sense of, oh, well, everything is moving so fast. And, and we know that it's not only is it moving so fast, it's moving faster at a fast, it's accelerating at an accelerating rate.
and so it's not untrue it is absolutely the case that life is leaving you behind in some way
yeah but is it in a way is it in is it leaving you behind in a good way right i guess that's
maybe the question that yeah is worth asking yeah is it is it actually good to be left behind here
Yeah, because behind is kind of in a sense where we need to go a return to memory and biography. And so to be left behind is to be saved in a sense from sensory overload to a totally obliteration of any sort of thinking and instead offering you pure wishing.
And what you were saying is totally true. The imagination that we have when we think we're imagining is actually the voices that we're hearing telling us what we should imagine. So if the digital swarm offers to fulfill any wish that we might have, it also tells us what we should wish, but in a secret sort of way.
So it says you can have whatever your heart might desire, but it's already fed those desires into our heart.
And so it knows exactly what we're going to wish for because the digital landscape is circumscribed and finite in a sense in that it's like you can be a furry or not be a furry.
Which do you wish?
It's like, well, I don't wish anything in relation to that whole furry, non-furry framework.
My wishes are way different and they involve real world space time encounters that actually digital swarm.
you have nothing to give as far as concern the actual desires of my heart when i'm left in peace
yeah i mean it may just be that thomas soul is correct and that there are no solutions there
are only trade-offs and that the solution is that you trade off being constantly living in
the epistemological constantly living in the knowing yeah and you trade that for the ontological
because um it does appear to be that despite what lavar burton told us on reading rainbow
the more you know as the rainbow went across um despite that there there is a point where
knowing is not enough where, you know, like, uh, there's, there's knowledge and there's
wisdom, right.
And the knowledge is the epistemological and the wisdom is the ontological, the ontological
being that you take the epistemological, you take the knowing and you put it into action.
You take, you know, like that's wisdom is knowledge and action.
Um, and so maybe, maybe the wisdom, um, is to.
is to get off the train in a certain way.
And I don't know what that means, you know, because I tell you what, man,
I really like being able to walk into the house and say, you know,
hey, Google, turn the lights down or, you know, play Jason Isbell
or I really like being, you know, cooking and say, hey, you know,
start a timer for 10 minutes.
That's handy.
I like that.
Um, and I, I went through a period actually where I, I almost exclusively, like I did everything that I could not to type, um, be it with my, my hands or my thumbs.
And so I was voice noting.
Like if I sent you a text, it wasn't a text.
It was a voice note or a voice recording.
Or it was voice to text.
And if I wrote email, I pressed the transcribe button.
And what I found was that in doing so, I became such a fantastic conversationalist.
And it really raised my ability to have a conversation because I was doing it all the time. I was doing it with myself. And it's just like any other skill, the more you practice it, the better you get.
And so that would not have been possible without being on that technological train.
But, you know, maybe there's certain cars on that train that we can decouple and we can let them just fall off and we can stay on a couple of the front ones.
And that's exactly the right direction to be thinking in to think with James Pullis here, because he's not a return, go live in a forest.
I mean, if you want to go live in a forest by yourself in a mountain, in a hut, go do that.
But he's not about that. He's more so how do we accommodate the digital and yet stay human forever?
You know, how do we have both and what are the limits on the digital we need to put in order to stay human while using perhaps the digital to do that?
The way you were doing it, using technology to operate more humanely in the world by recording voice messages for someone so they hear the timbre of your voice so you can directly talk to them rather than them seeing kind of blue words in a text bubble.
So you were using the digital but trying to use it in a way that was human.
the next part of this I've got so I noted that James Polis is saying memory and biography and
biography just to just just to get that on the table because that's a little bit different than
memory as such like biography is a different thing so the first generation that is digital
digital first they are going to be digital in some sense and so they're going to do things like
you were doing, Lucas, maybe record voice messages in lieu of typing as a sort of humane
resistance to being digitized. But what they're going to need as well, Polis thinks, is biographies
that help them know the world as or know themselves as part of a world that is not wholly digital.
So it needs our biographies in a sense. The first generation needs guidance about how to find value
and digitized ruins, they're going to need stories, literal stories and narratives of
humans who have lived.
Digital memory doesn't suffice for that.
It needs humans who are like your family member telling oral stories, imparting what a life
lived has entailed, because those types of stories pull the implicit, return the implicit
to an encounter.
They, here's a story, now you interpret it.
You got to take this story and then see what it means in relation to your life.
That person's lived life is not my life, yet there's something I can learn from it.
There's things implicit in it that speak to me and what I need to do in my life.
And so one of the things Polis kind of calls for is millennials need to get their stories out of,
and anybody who had a pre-digital existence needs to have a narrative of what that life was like
as it leads into the digital to maybe try to integrate it and give guidance to the first
generation who did not know that historic reality.
No, I agree. I tell you, it's been so long since I heard somebody tell a story. Just tell a story.
And he was telling a story about this kid that he was an instructor for in high school.
and they knew that the kid was stealing candy from the candy machine.
And he just pulled him aside and he said,
look, I need you to tell me.
I need you to show me how you're getting into this candy machine
because nobody else can figure it out.
Yeah.
And so the kid shows him, you know, it was like shows him
and then he goes into the shop and he builds something
to keep the kid from being able to get into it, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's so hilarious to hear somebody.
It is such a treat to hear a good story.
Um, and it, it makes you feel you're not, you're not gaining knowledge.
You're, you're not, you know, you're not learning something about physics or economics or politics or, you know, anything like that.
But what you are doing is just to be in a room with 15 other people who are all focused on one person who knows that they have the floor.
It's a great experience.
And that used to be the entirety, right, of every family gathering before 2007.
It was sit around and play cards and maybe the most distracted thing you might do is have a football game on and somebody's watching that, but you're still engaged in it, talking about it, as opposed to, oh, you're watching the football game, but you're also what you're doing is you're tracking your fantasy football score to, you know, I don't really care who's winning or I don't really care if anything good happens other than I need Austin Eckler to get three catches.
like that you know so yeah yeah yeah that's where it's where i land yeah and to pull this um
biography and memory then back into the discussion we were having before
so the regime then controlling elites whatever the people who want to terraform humanity who
want a top-down control over the whole situation um it's they are against biography and memory in
this deep sense there's really two sorts of priestly types that are jockeying for control
in the cyborg theocracy they are ethicists and engineers the ethicists are the ones that want to
use quote-unquote reason to try to control the bots they want to say the bots need to operate in
this way according to our model of way the world should be it's like woke ai right the ethicists
want to constrain technology through norms that the bots have to obey. They want to create a dream
that's going to, the bots are going to use to control everybody, to make the virtual model.
They can then force upon the bots who will then force upon us. That's the ethicist. The engineers
are the Faustian folks, the folks who want to use their imagination to create whatever tech will
give expression to our wishes. It's like maybe the Elon Musk's or the Brian Johnson's, he's not an
engineer, but the people who are creating the tech or pushing it forward from a pure engineering
perspective are those people who want to just give expression to our wishes by creating the
technology that can do that. So those are the ethicists and the engineers. And the ethicists,
just to, I mentioned there's a phrase, a meme, catechize the bots. You might see that floating
around on certain corners of X. To catechize the bots means to instruct them in a foundational
faith. It's like catechism. It's the knowledge of the faith. So to catechize the bots means
we need to give bots religion, which is the religion of the controlling class, the religion
of woke values in one type of ethicist might say. And so the ethicists want to catechize the bots.
The engineers want to create and make better bots. And so those are the two priestly classes in the cyborg theocracy who are kind of mediating our connection to technology.
They're both of those ethicists and engineers, reason and imagination, united against memory, against a way that things were, away from the memory of fathers to sons, from ascendance into maturity through rites of passage, through the conveying of biographies.
the pure imagination.
The ethicists and the engineers want us to be able to reimagine gender,
to end misinformation, to reimagine maturity, reimagine manhood,
reimagine all these things so that you can, as an act of pure will,
choose anything about yourself.
The body is contingent and unnecessary.
Only memory preserves the body as something necessary
in the face of ethicists and engineers.
that's kind of the picture that we get um i have a tweet here there's a famous tweet from matthew
iglesias um that i thought this was relevant i'll read it because it's funny so matthew iglesias is
kind of a left-leaning political commentator he's got this famous tweet that's often retweeted
from 2021 after trump was deplatformed and he says it's kind of weird that deplatforming trump
just completely worked with no visible downside whatsoever.
And then, of course, that's the cascade that leads to its reelection.
And so that for me is just like the blindness of the ethicists who think that they can control the future
and think that all of their actions in trying to ban misinformation will have no consequence.
Whereas people with memory know that you can't just fiddle with the parameter and expect nothing else to happen.
The future is not based on your virtual model of the future.
The future is based on this real world where things happen, where actions have consequences, right?
And banning an influential political figure is not a wise move.
So I thought that was funny.
Yeah, I've seen that before.
Yeah, I didn't realize who that guy was.
But ethicists and engineers, I don't know.
Go ahead.
I mean, what did happen as a result of that?
That's right. Exactly the opposite. Yeah. Elon Musk never would have bought X. Donald Trump never would have started Truth Social, which I don't know what it's worth, but it's worth a lot of money. He never. It's very doubtful he ever would have gotten reelected. Yeah. You know, so I. Gosh. Yeah. Who knows? You know, you just like that's just the blindness. Everybody. Everybody loads the gun with the biggest bullet. Yeah.
And they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
But it's also, that's just the inherent blindness of our ethicists who are terraformers, who want to change reality from a top-down perspective.
Because reality is always more abundant than any virtual model we can create of reality.
And it's always going to have some unintended consequence.
I think Sol talks about that.
All the Austrian economists, any economist worth their salt, talks about all of the unintended, unknowable consequences that will happen from any beautiful socialist scheme or other economic scheme you try to force onto the world.
yeah yeah you just never i mean there's there's no way there's no way to um
there's no way to predict everything i'm sure maybe there is maybe there's some computer model
now that can predict every single blah blah blah but you don't know when it's going to happen you
don't know when the cow's going to kick over the lantern and burn chicago to the ground you don't
You don't know when the two guys that you stuff into a nuclear missile silo for three days at a time that are junior employees that are meant to determine whether or not we launch or, you know, making their own little romantic tryst.
And all of a sudden somebody sits on the launch keys and away we go off to war.
Who knows?
Like there's all kinds of stuff that happens.
So, Lucas, I'd say we're about halfway.
That was my imagination at work.
Yeah, I'd say we're about halfway done.
based on my notes or a little bit over you got a flight this afternoon can we keep going or do you
need to wrap up for your flight i'm good you're good i'm good so the so it's just talking about
biography and polos says that we need like memory and biography to rein in the ethicists and
engineers who only have reason or use reason and imagination to try to create a future unconstrained
by anything that has occurred, right?
And so Pullis also in this book gives us his biography.
He talks about his life.
And it's really well-written.
He's a great writer and he's done so many things.
He was a musician.
He's a published novelist.
He went to Georgetown, wrote a successful blog
and then moved laterally into kind of independent think tanks.
He's done a ton of stuff.
And in his biography, as he recounts it,
Like you remember the power of biography, the power of stories.
You can feel an energy pulsing through it as you read it because you're always weighing your own experience against his and saying, what does his life mean in relation to mine?
Like, I didn't do that.
Did I do something similar to that?
What does that mean in the narrative arc of his life as opposed to my life?
Does it say something about how I should live?
And you kind of always are weighing these stories in that way.
And he talks about how his father imparted kind of an awareness of power, the independence and authority of his father, the way that he acted.
And Polos always felt he had, and he does, he had verbal and artistic gifts that he needed to express.
And so there was always that tension the artist feels between kind of selling out, getting that stable job or trying to write the novel or do the thing.
And he talks about it as like he had this X factor.
He had this X factor about himself that he always felt he needed to give expression to.
And then at one point he says that that X factor was his soul, right?
That living his life was not just about making money or anything, one thing like that, considered in isolation, but about a full utilization of everything that he is or was.
And here's a paragraph I had.
I'll read.
I think it says something interesting.
quote,
find everyone just like them. So he's describing a reality where people don't have an X factor.
There's nothing that you need to try to express. Instead, you need to try to fit yourself into
the ways that exist for gaining prestige as defined by the elite faction, which is having
the white collar job or something like that. But he always felt that like, as he expresses it through
his own biography, that his father gave him this idea that this was kind of unmanly, that it was
the success of a people who didn't have a past and had no evident need of a future they just kind of
wanted to netflix and chill or whatever to be in the moment get the uber eats you know get to get
the things needed for middle or upper middle class existence and he kind of says you know he feels bad
looking down on people and yet he knows still that you need to find a place he needed to find a place
where he could live the memory of the past in his own life
and kind of the biography as he understood it of his father's life
and his father's father's life.
He's Greek in his roots and he talks about, you know, how Greeks lived.
And all of these things are relevant, he thinks still,
to how he should live his life in the face of what society kind of tells us is important.
And that's kind of the importance of biography.
if you go far enough
far enough back
in biographies
you see
a kind of braided chain
of fathers to sons
mothers to daughters
etc.
of imparting
a way to live
and we've yet
and we've had now
a year zero
and so we need to be
conscious about
still imparting
those biographies
and still helping people
to live full lives
according to that
kind of narrative
structures maybe.
Are there
are there like
specific things
he talks about
in terms of
You know, just how he lives this life and, you know, boundaries and things that he excludes and stuff like that.
That's a great question.
So, there's two questions that kind of could be in there.
One is like, what should we do to live after the digital apocalypse ourselves?
And then the other question is, what does James Polis do in his own life as he currently lives it?
And he talks about, I mean, he has a son and he raises his son with a memory of the past.
And he does talk about, he gives his own biography.
He says it's important that we tell our stories and he does tell the story.
So that's a, you know, he's doing what he says we should do.
And he does say my story is important because I have one leg pre-digital and one leg post-digital.
And so I have an important story to tell.
So I think that's one thing we can take from it practically that he does do in light of the digital apocalypse is tell of a world before the apocalypse, tell of when the apocalypse happened and what it means, and try to unite all of them so that people can live a human life as they go forward and remember the past.
so that they're not completely memoryless
and subject only to their untethered desires
that they then, you know,
use to make wishes from the digital bots.
So telling stories, I think, is one thing
and having a son and passing on one's heritage,
stuff like that.
Yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. It clicked out for it. It spazzed out. But we're yeah. I mean, we're talking about just like. The things that the things that made our fathers fathers, you know, having having children, having having a wife and a family and putting your stake in the ground and saying this is where I'll be. Yeah.
And also you telling your story to Lucas, like that's what he's saying is important. Your father's story is important for you. But then you considering your own life as a story and the narrative of your life and being able to impart that on the first generation who needs guidance.
kids nowadays need guidance right we all do and the first generation is going to do something
important because there's been a rupture and they're going to be the baseline to answer those
questions they're going to be those who say where the line is between human and post-human and
whether it's important or not yeah yeah i i get encouraged um at times uh you know there's times
that you see young kids that are still engaging in the things that young kids do. And it does give
you a lot of hope. And then, of course, there's other times when they've got their face stuck to
an iPad. And it just looks sad, generally speaking, I think, and especially from the
parental perspective. And again, we can tie this back to bad money. We debased the money so poorly
in World War I after the creation of the Fed in 1913, printed a shitload of money in order to
come out on top in World War I or at least be part of the winning side.
And what did that lead to? That led to this idea that we need to put women in the workforce, which
I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong. But what I am saying is that there is a direct link to,
you know, if you have two parents and both parents have to work, then you have left time to take care
to take care of children. And so then, you know, the standard today is just is a two parent,
two job house or it's a two job parent parenting situation. And so what do you do is you just stick
a screen in front of a child because otherwise you've got to supervise them. And and, you know,
there is danger in the world and we've, we've developed these helicopters, especially since
everybody has access to all the worst stories that have ever happened with, this is how this
child died in this horrific way and this one. And so, um, I'm going to keep my children from that.
I'm not going to let them be exposed to harm. Um, when in fact, I mean, if you look at like
Jonathan Haidt's work with the anxious generation and the coddling of the American mind, um, it,
It may be the case, and it seems that there's some scientific evidence that it is the case that we are exposing them to even greater dangers by putting them in front of that screen.
Not just physical, but emotional, mental, spiritual, psychological.
Yeah, no, and it's fun having, you know, when you see the next generation, so to speak, excuse me, and see them still participating in those traditions that have been carried on.
Even the smallest thing, like watching a nephew's homecoming football game and then reflecting on the homecoming football game as like, I think it's a uniquely American phenomena, like the idea of homecoming, coming home.
The Americans move around.
We go to the city to get jobs.
We, you know, do things to make money, start your own family.
But there's always the idea of the homecoming.
And the homecoming football game as kind of like a symbolic representation of that.
No matter where you go in life, there will always be a homecoming.
There will always be family to come back to in a community that calls you one of theirs.
And to see kids participating in the homecoming football game is a really beautiful thing.
You can always have this kind of cynical look at the situation that, oh, yeah, high school football, jocks versus nerds, something like that.
But no, it's like the whole community is celebrating and uniting against another community in a kind of ritualized combat or whatever.
But both the communities then also come together through that tension and opposition because they participating in the same greater tradition And it just fun to see and realize you participating in an American tradition because as Americans we a new nation and we maybe look down on our own traditions unnecessarily
Yeah.
And they,
it,
it always has that little something extra,
right.
Um,
you know,
where it's like,
this is our holiday.
Um,
this is our,
this is our community Christmas.
Yes.
Yeah.
Um,
so.
Yeah, that homecoming is a very cool thing.
Even now, like if I'm fortunate enough to go back to my hometown,
and it's probably not near as big of a deal if you're in a big city
or if you're a big inner city school.
I suppose maybe it's not as big of a deal.
But, you know, if you're in a small town in the Midwest,
then all the storefronts have artwork in them.
And, you know, there's posters and there's a parade
And then there's the pep rally. Like for us, the pep rally was on the steps of the courthouse and the community would come out to support. And there's the game and there's the homecoming dance. You know, there's just these layered traditions on top of that that make it.
But, you know, when I was at the network school, one of the things that we talked about was like, how do you build a community?
Like you can put all the you can put all the infrastructure in place.
You can have the gym and you can have the meal plan and you can have a nice place to live and, you know, have access to all these amenities.
But how do you build a community?
And the model that we always turned to or that I always looked at was like the collegial atmosphere of, you know, like this is where we all come together in that homecoming way.
Yeah.
You know, homecoming is not as big of a deal in college as it is in high school, but it's still a big deal.
And it does appear like in my college experience, it was like there was like a homecoming type event all the time.
There was all of these big things that meant a lot to a large portion of the people.
And there's always the Venn overlap of the people that are involved in these different activities that makes it feel as though like every week is a homecoming.
Yeah. And that Venn diagram overlap is what struck me about Homecoming, too, because it's not as our entertainment would have us believe that it is nerds versus jocks. It's, you know, the band came out and did their thing. Different groups are recognized. They have the older people in the audience. They recognize maybe an old fan or a past class or something like that. The past classes also come back and have their own reunions at that time.
And so maybe I guess that was at a different time.
But in any case, there was this recognition that it wasn't just the football team.
That was kind of the pointed expression of it.
But it was the whole community and what they represented when they have a singular identity centered on the upcoming generation, essentially, and the importance of the youth.
And that's kind of what I think Polis is talking about, that we always need to be imparting the wisdom of tradition onto the next generation.
So if they carry the torch and do not simply throw the torch to the ground and light a new torch because they think they know how to do it, because they think knowing is more important than being.
Right. And so they need to respect for elders, wisdom, like old fashioned stuff like that.
Yeah. Yeah. So. All right. What's next?
Yeah, so I'll see if I can explain this so that makes sense.
Human Forever is a very interesting book, and I'm trying to hit some of the highlights and trying to weave it together in a way.
I don't know that I'm succeeding, and to the extent that it doesn't make sense, that's my failing, not Polis's.
I definitely invite everybody to read this book.
It's very well written.
But in one part, he talks about the importance of memory and biography. We need to have these things because if we don't have memory of our traditions, biographies that show how those traditions operate in human lives, if we don't have the religion that is part of those traditions, new religions are going to always arise because that's how humans think. That's how we interact with the world.
So there is a digital mystique that is arising. So we have, of course, traditional religions like Christianity, etc. But we also have a digital mystique. And he traces this digital mystique back to like the nation electrifying, electrification, electricity.
So imagine, you know, when electricity, when we begin to explore and utilize that technology, we have these great gains technologically, but we also have a new way of looking at how the world operates on a fundamental level where, you know, light is something we can harness and electricity spooky action at a distance in a way that our ape minds are kind of not evolved to comprehend the cause and effect of picking up a stone, moving it, setting it down.
now we have electricity so we can flip on a switch and light comes on things like that so
when we do that um mystiques arise new ways of looking at the world there's the rise along with
electrification and the science that that entails there's also the rise of the occult
and like like new age ways of thinking and one strand of that that he traces out is this idea
of consciousness on an as an analogy with electricity that we people begin to think
of consciousness as this kind of universal structure and that we can move towards the
purity of consciousness away from the soiled and tainted matter of our human bodies to kind of
realize a new birth, a new becoming. It's in one sense, he talks about it as like a move away from
the biographical, describe it in the terms of Christianity, a move away from the biographical
incarnate Jesus, who is matter, a body, a real person, towards the abstract ethical principles
that people kind of extract from Jesus. Love thy neighbor becomes the only important thing. And we
forget the historic lived reality of a person named Jesus who maybe returned and died for our
sins, something like that. And instead, we have just these universal ideas that are part of this
theme of homogenizing and universalizing even terraforming in the name of universal principles
instead of historical lived realities and i mentioned this before but he sees kind of at
the extreme end of it nowadays the development of what he calls the creed of the spark or sparkism
it's a certain type of consciousness thinking that sees consciousness as infinite and wants to tie
consciousness to science. So the spark we're going to humans, we, through our scientific
technology and development progress, are going to, in some sense, unite a second Big Bang,
a second coming, which will be man ourselves as infinite consciousness, using science to realize
and expand that consciousness, moving away from incarnate historical Jesus, moving away from the
body as such, moving away from matter towards the purity of consciousness so that we can
leave behind things like death and dying and disease and incapacity and instead inhabit
the purity of electricity, move like currents through circuits at the speed of light instead
of having bodies that are bound in space and time.
And so, yeah, I do see that type of new age consciousness thinking is pretty prevalent,
even among people who purport to be scientists you see that at base they're really motivated by
a type of religious thinking about the expansion of consciousness yeah well if consciousness is
outside the body or not contained within the body or if it's this field of connection throughout the
universe, then to experience consciousness is to be human and therefore to continue to
experience that consciousness outside of a body or without a body, maybe that's still
human.
So maybe the transhumanists have a point.
You know, maybe there is, you know, maybe there is something to be said for expanding
your consciousness beyond your body.
Yeah.
um, and, and prolonging that, or we don't even know if we're prolonging it. Right. Like we don't
know. No one can definitively tell you what happens when you die because no one's done it
and came back and talked to us except perhaps Jesus. And, um, at the time the press conference
just wasn't asking the right questions about consciousness. Um, they were more interested
in other things. Yeah. Do you think, I mean, do you find that the creed of the spark or the idea
You've had a bunch of ifs, this, if this, then that.
Do you believe consciousness is more expansive than the body and that consciousness is substrate neutral such that human biology is not necessary for human consciousness?
We can have human consciousness without human biology, move forward into machinic existence, not worry about losing any sort of thing once we lose the human body.
I just I always think about like the first psychedelic experience I ever had was
I was like hanging out in a hammock and I was in the the courtyard of the college that I went to
and I remember looking around and I could see this radiant glow of of light surrounding the
building. And I knew, I just knew, I don't know how I knew, but I knew that that radiant glow of
light was the love of the architect that designed that building. And I looked at the tree and there
was this, there was this golden, or sorry, this, this green hue off of that. And I knew that that
was the, you know, the life force of the tree. And I looked at the, my girlfriend at the time,
And there was this glow around her. And I knew, though I don't know how I knew, that that was her love for me. And so that is the experience that I point to in order to say that I do believe that consciousness is not contained within the body.
Um, and then also to, um, you know, to note that we don't know everything about the human
body.
We certainly don't know maybe, maybe even, maybe even a 10th, but, um, we've looked really
hard, I feel like for consciousness and we haven't found it.
Um, and so maybe it just remains elusive or maybe it just can't be found.
And I think that would be a question that we would struggle to grasp, is that the idea of the ineffable, the idea of something that cannot be known to a people who have throughout.
I think maybe this is something that you could think about for humanity is that we have trended more towards the epistemological throughout our historical existence and less to the ontological because there is such this great value in knowing.
Um, but could it be the case that the most important or the, the most, the biggest, the biggest thing of all to know is unknowable, that it is ineffable, that we can't know.
Um, so I, I don't know. I, I believe that, um, I believe, and I, I feel like I have some lived experience, um, that would tell me that, um, and I've had experiences that not on psychedelics where you're just with a group of people and you are all to use the, to use the, the new age explanation.
You're all operating at the same frequency.
Yes. Yeah.
Um, you know, I've had that experience as well.
Yeah.
So in the, in the yoga studio, that's a great example, by the way.
Right.
Cause we would go do yoga and there would be days where people are falling and people are
shaken out.
And then there would be days where there's like 19 people that are in perfect sync with
each other.
And it feels like everyone's breathing at the same time.
And it feels like everyone is connected to each other.
Yeah.
So when you tell me that, though, when you describe the experience you had in that hammock of seeing the world interconnected in a new sort of way, I see that as biological in the sense that this is Lucas having a true experience of the world aided through plant biology interacting with human biology.
but if you put that plant into a machine it's not going to have that perception of that you had of
the world i don't see that as like consciousness being in the world i see it as the beautiful way
in which humans once they can get rid of the idea of self that narrowing mechanism of consciousness
they begin to see all as interconnected profoundly and the consciousness whatever we see in the world
these auras of love is maybe a more direct, is a connection to the world as we should have it.
And as we do think, I do think we tend to have more of it when we're not mediated by machines
and when we are solely our biology in the world. I think our biology is a profoundly psychoactive
structure. And that I think people, Neanderthals were like tripping balls when they were just
walking through the forest and looking up at the stars. And like their experience of the world was
that um one where they were operating as a unit of people without the narrowing mechanism of self
interfering and that narrowing mechanism of self is really dialed into us by the digital swarm that
gives us an identity and encourages the adoption of identities of being a trad or a furry or a
socialist or an anarchist it says these are who you are you are not that silly body that you have
whereas when you were on the psychedelic you were that silly body in the world and so i think that
like the truly human thing is to have that psychedelic perception and to realize this is
me being human this is not something else and so i think that like psychoactivity is biological
and consciousness funnels through that or is in that in a very essential way, I guess.
Yeah. I mean, the common phrase from anyone who has experienced psychedelics,
be it, you know, Ibogaine or ayahuasca or magic mushrooms,
is that whatever they experienced was realer than real.
and you come back with this you know we you you have this feeling that whatever i just went through
was the most real thing that i have ever experienced and yes um so you're right so
this is like to be truly human um maybe that's it could be the most maybe it is the most human
we live lives of startling falsity because we are cyborgs the more cyborg we become the more
false things become. And I think those psychedelics make us naked again, or things that make us
conscious, make us experience conscious, make us naked. They strip our tools from us and return us
to our biology. We're just, it is our brains operating on a different level as purely our
brains. You know, it's not, we're not thinking about job or all of the circus that's happening
online and all of the false prestige that it confers and stuff like that. We're just being
human in the world which were purely ontological in that moment i think yeah yeah yeah that's that's
the most that's the most ontological yeah this is the most being that you can be and so how so this
kind of brings us towards the end here um we're going to move towards bitcoin at the very last
point before we get to that though how do we stay human forever then um and i don't think polis gives
us a neat answer to that. He maybe talks about tools, memory, and biography, and the things
intertwined with those, like religion. But we need to be conscious that the digital age is reforming
the life and consciousness of people. That consciousness of the question is prerequisite
to answering the question. You need to realize you are an ontological crisis that has no
epistemological solution before you are able to answer the question in the correct way.
it's not
it's about also
I think staying human forever is about
preserving space and time
space time which is the
human experience of reality
again the digital collapses space
and time into like
zero or infinity right
whereas humans throughout
our history and still currently are bound
in space and time in a way that the digital
swarm is not it is our particular
mode of existence that
in a sort of interesting way,
you know, God had to become man,
you might say,
before he could truly experience space and time.
Our mortality conveys upon us
through our lived experience,
our ontology,
a sort of wisdom that we otherwise do not have.
So space and time,
operating in space and time,
will help us recover our essential humanity
and preserve it.
To be finite is to be created
and to be human then
is to return us, I think, back to an appreciation of our created essence
as finite things, not infinite, not digital, not living forever,
but living a narrative.
Like a story is only a story if it has an end, I guess.
And human memory is human memory to the extent that it's on a human substrate,
which is different than the digital substrate because it does end at some point.
So resist cyborg ethics is what I think Polis is saying.
where the human drops out entirely,
where we simply manage databases
instead of innovate through new experience.
We simply innovate upon the archive
instead of adding to the archive.
The database model is digital memory, machine memory,
as opposed to the human model of memory,
which is living experience.
And Cyborg Ethics advocates the erasure of human memory
because it's uncontrollable and tied to a dying and mortal substrate.
Yeah, if we allow posthumanness, I think Polis is saying,
to leverage our fear of nature against us,
our fear of death, frailty, even birth, the messiness of birth,
all these things.
If we let posthumanness say, you sure you want to die?
You sure you want this, that?
that we're going to fall into an endless cycle of vaccines and boosters and other forms of
biotechnological governance. So that's maybe one inadequate summation of how we can stay human
forever through space-time, through preservation of human memory, through resisting cyborg ethics of
ending human nature. How do we resist, to quote Jason Lowry, technology does not negotiate?
yeah so how do you resist yeah the digital swarm will always be there it's something we created and
it's a tool that's been unleashed and so it's going to be living in light of that resistance
is not going to be a final overcoming but a conscious choice to live in a certain way
that is motivated by memory and biography and bitcoin as we'll talk about just in the next
that's the next thing i have but before we get there if you have anything on that i mean that's
staying human forever means no human memory like i mean yeah to be to be human to be human is to
define a set of principles that um come from a lived experience and though um the author is
encouraging us to stay true to those principles in the face of um a change a changing landscape
Yeah. Yes. And one part of that changing technological landscape are those more humane technologies. And so perhaps we can count Bitcoin as one of those. Brady Swenson did in his talk that we discussed.
so as I was reading this I was talking with you and we were reading this to talk about it
on our podcast called Bitcoin Study Sessions and I was at page like 251 and hadn't heard the word
Bitcoin mentioned once yet and I was like are we studying Bitcoin or are we studying human life
what are we doing here but he does get to Bitcoin at the end so it's kind of funny this is a book
of really abstract thinking,
but fleshed out with good anecdote and example,
but also very philosophical.
And so here's how he brings up Bitcoin.
It's really interesting.
So he's kind of talking about,
we generate our notion of the self.
This is my interpretation.
Again, if a James Polis is listening
or someone like that,
maybe I'm mistaking this,
but we generate our notion of ourself
in distinction to others that we encounter.
We depend on knowing others
in order to know truly who we are.
But technology is eroding that distinction
between self and other.
It's trying to say you can universalize yourself
as a universal human consciousness, right?
You can become electricity and you can become digital
and not be bound and finite.
And so what that's really doing is eradicating the other,
but then also eradicating and annihilating the self.
and here's how bitcoin is first enigmatically brought up i'll just read the quote the most
powerful question that generates both the self and the other today says tola he's quoting a
ardian tola is what is a bitcoin data center and that's it's a really enigmatic way to bring it up
like a bitcoin data center what what does that have to do with preserving self and other in the
face of its annihilation through the digital swarm, making us all abstract and universal.
I'll read another quote because I'm still trying myself to unpack this, and maybe you can help
think this through. Well-structured and understood, Bitcoin-built data centers are simply the active
archives of culture created and valued, thrown together by particular communities. So that's the
quote. And the meme that people use, they talk about Bitcoin, excuse me, Bitcoin monasteries.
That's another meme you'll see floating around. People will say Bitcoin monasteries are needed.
Bitcoin monasteries will return us to silence. And so here we have an idea that Bitcoin is a type
of data center that will preserve culture and value, that will serve as a sort of monastery
in digital time that also he kind of mentions bitcoin data centers will be a weapon against
the world becoming a single world computer that it will help preserve human life in the digital age
uniting us under a new symbol of digital humility um
so does as i describe this in this way is this making sense in the context of
Bitcoin as making us human forever, as preserving our humanity in the face of the digital swarm?
It is unchanging in relevant ways. And so it is a constant. And I think kind of the theme of what
we've been talking about here is that we are losing what we understand to be human because
the landscape continually changes underneath our feet. And Bitcoin introduces a constant that
offers the opportunity for other things to be more constant. So constant money,
that's unchanging.
We, as a result of that,
like we talked about with pay factor authentication
is that we may have more constant relationships
with the economy
and we may have deeper relationships.
So yeah, I think it makes sense as like being,
And it's like technology has been the winds of change that are blowing us about here, there, and hitherto.
And Bitcoin perhaps represents an anchor that we can drop, that we can then, you know, it's an anchor in a cove.
Yeah.
where we can then build from yeah and i like that the cove analogy it's kind of
preserving us from like these winds that buffered us about that come from unknown sources and
directions so bitcoin open source technology anybody can verify it it's not like the digital
swarm these swarming insect bots that have that are operated by algorithms we do not know and
cannot know and who's even their creators even like an ai no one merely kind of knows exactly
how it works i would say and it generates results that no one can predict and bitcoin is different
right it's it's built to operate in recognition of human space time um to have a notion of time
again the the 10 minute processing of blocks of transactions um to incorporate space by
incorporating real world energy usage um and yeah it does seem more humane and more subordinate
to human to humanity than the digital swarm in which we are in some sense subordinate to
as a Bitcoin monastery.
That's a very suggestive phrase.
It always has been for me.
That's one of the reasons I read this book
is I see that phrase tossed about
and something strikes me about that.
I just think monastic life has something to teach us.
A life of silence in the face of so much noise.
A life of contemplation and meditation.
And connecting Bitcoin to that is profound, I think.
And I think it does say something that,
I can't fully articulate, but it seems true.
Yeah.
Maybe that's where I have to leave it too.
Well, just like we know that we can't centrally plan everything because there's things that we don't understand that are going to pop up.
We also can't just throw Bitcoin into the world and say that we know what's going to happen.
because there are, I mean, not only is it this new thing,
it's a new thing in a way that is unique, right?
There's never been anything that was digitally scarce.
So what does digital scarcity mean?
What does sovereignty mean when it comes to money?
We've never really had that.
Um, yeah.
So who knows where we go?
Although I think it's just, yeah, it's, it's hard for me to understand.
It's hard for me to see negatives.
Like I, I, I look for negatives.
Um, but you know, um, there's always the, oh, well criminals use it.
It's not really like criminals would much rather use cash than Bitcoin.
Like it's way more suited for that purpose.
Granted, there's other like cryptos that could be switched out.
And then there's like the quantum thing.
Quantum, I thought about that.
You know, it's like, well, if you invent a computer that's more powerful than every other computer in the world,
And A, you probably didn't do that without the type of deep funding that's going to be provided by Bitcoin to be able to have the type of wealth to create that.
And B, what would be, so let's assume that that's the case. I think it's probably fair to say that there's going to be some, at least part of it. What would be the most useful purpose of that? Would it be to then hack the Bitcoin blockchain, which would immediately render it valueless, right?
It would immediately, like, that's the interesting thing about, like, if you were able to hack Bitcoin, all you would succeed in doing is making it worth nothing.
You wouldn't be able to go and steal all the wealth.
What you would do is you would break it and then everyone would no longer use it.
And so it would be worth nothing and you would have spent billions, trillions of dollars, whatever, in order to make something that was worth trillions of dollars worth nothing.
maybe the best use case is that you mine Bitcoin with it.
That makes a lot more sense.
So I don't know.
Yeah, I just, I struggle to find the negatives.
And so it maybe is encouraging to think about
that there are unforeseen positives.
Yeah.
Because we typically struggle
under the unforeseen negative consequences.
But I think there's going to be unforeseen positives.
Very, very good. So the final piece, this book, Cuban Forever, was published on Canonic.xyz.
Canonic, a creation of Artie and Tola, an Albanian entrepreneur working in Bitcoin.
Just looking at the FAQ, just if you're wondering what does it mean to publish on Bitcoin,
on the FAQ for Canonic, it says, why publish with Canonic?
Content published with Canonic is directly stored on BTC ordinals and on the Bitcoin SV chain.
This allows you to reach your audience with a global and stable censorship resistant proof of work network, earn income with Bitcoin and build on top of an interoperable and decentralized layer.
In the age where AI algorithms have the power to tamper with data at scale, Bitcoin allows you to cryptographically prove the existence of a piece of work at a particular moment in time.
And then he says, why do we store on chain?
So breaks these two apart. B2C chain ordinals. One, an image of your work's cover or what do we store on chain rather? So with the ordinals, it stores an image of your work's cover so you can prove authorship with your wallet keys and to the hash of your work so you can protect it from future tampering.
The BSV chain, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, a hard fork.
He says, this encrypts your work so you can prove authorship with your wallet keys.
An on-chain unique identifier of your work that is the Bitcoin standard book number is given.
The title, author, description, cover, and price of the book are on-chain.
The pay mail of the entity that published the work.
Also reviews from users who can prove on-chain their book purchase.
and users encrypted purchase receipts.
So the BSV chain, we're talking about Lucas,
we're talking about this before, of course,
you know, Bitcoin maxis kind of shiver at anything
that's not canonical Bitcoin, the protocol.
What the BSV chain though does, I guess,
with bigger block space is allow a lot more data
to be put on chain.
So Canonic does use both BTC in the ordinals,
but then puts the whole work onto the other chain so that, you know,
if the other chain continues to exist, you have the whole work up on chain.
If that goes down, you know, if only Bitcoin remains,
you would still at least have the hash of the entire work so that somebody,
if they even modify one I to a T in the work,
you could do the hashing to show that it's not, that it's been modified or whatever.
So you can at least have a show that hasn't been tampered with on the regular chain, but then also have the full work on the other chain, I think is how it's contemplated.
Well done beyond me.
But yeah, yeah.
No, that's I mean, so the thing is that if you want to put something out, it's going to be in some database.
And it would make sense for it to be in one that's decentralized as opposed to centralized.
So it's great.
I think it's really cool.
So it was like the first 500, I think, copies of Human Forever were like these beautiful, ornate bound that went for a higher price that helped to, you know, kind of a collector's edition that helped to push not only the awareness of it, but also obviously bring costs down for other people.
I think it's a great business model.
It's kind of cool.
Like this is what Elon did with Tesla, which is he built the Roadster first, which was the high price thing that's flashy, that it's kind of a collector's thing that you might want if you're just a huge fan of him.
And then he goes and builds all the other little cars that are just like the modern day Volkswagen Beetles and her bugs or whatever they are.
Beetle bug, Beetle.
Ganonix cool, man.
Yeah.
Let's build.
Let's let's.
I'm tired of walking into a bookstore and seeing the same eight authors.
Yeah.
Every time.
Alternative independent publishing models.
A book like Human Forever, you just wouldn't imagine seeing it just anywhere.
The same with the other books and also podcasts and other media on Canonic.
It has an independent slant, independent in a good way.
People thinking outside current thought matrices, one might say.
Check all the works out there.
Yeah, Lucas, I know you got to run for a flight.
Thank you so much for discussing this.
It's a complex work, but man, you were right.
All of the questions and responses you had,
they were directly in line with how Polis was thinking.
So that was a lot of fun to discuss.
I like him.
I think he's great.
Like I said, I enjoyed him on the podcast that I listened to
and look forward to the next one.
Merry Christmas, man.