Michael Garfield

🔥🦀🖥️🔥 My absurdly ambitious debut feature at @aeonmag is up — enjoy! This long read on human-technology co-evolution detours through sci-fi history, memeology, military history, etymology, thermodynamics, scaling laws, and more. It is one of the few pieces this year they've opened for comments so have at it: https://aeon.co/essays/are-humans-destined-to-evolve-into-crabs

🎶✨👁️ The Big Machine: A New Anthem for "The Attention Economy" My new single is out today! Please enjoy and share it far and wide. Extensive liner notes essay and bibliography in my bio. Lyrics: How long can you go without looking at your phone? How long does it take before your concentration breaks? How sure can you be that your mind is really free? How much would you stake that your "reality"'s not fake? Where do your desires arise in fields of wireless privatized And pirated attention? In enclosed incomprehension? How much is your agency and how much is the will of other Entities entirely? Or is that even how to see this sea? Doom scrolling (Like/subscribe) You're trolling (Find your tribe) Everybody wants to be seen by the Big Machine Fan polling (Leave reviews) Rage swollen (Count your views) Everyone's volition is squeezed by the Big Machine Everybody wants to be pleased by the Big Machine How much would you spend to stay in touch with your own friends? How relieved are you the algorithm offers the convenience Of staying in a bubble of your spoon-fed preferences? How much of your self is really what your heart intends? And where do you define the line you draw between your mind And the global operations of unconscious just-in-time Logistics, markets, states, and great unfolding fated intertwined Machinic processes; you're hospiced in a matrix planet wide. Doom scrolling (Like/subscribe) You're trolling (Find your tribe) Everybody wants to be seen by the Big Machine Fan polling (Leave reviews) Rage swollen (Count your views) Everyone's volition is squeezed by the Big Machine Everybody wants to be pleased by the Big Machine Everybody's choices are screened by the Big Machine Ask yourself just who you are feeding When you play to the Big Machine Now if you aspire to be free from the Big Machine Just how long can you go without looking at your phone?

✨ SOLD! ✨Tag a friend who loves #dinosaurs - it's my newest #painting! 🦖 "Our Lady of the Late #Cretaceous" 🦖 24"x36" - #acrylic @liquitex_worldwide #paintpens on 2" gallery-wrapped #canvas; 🦖 Started in Austin, Texas but completed primarily in Santa Fe at @meow__wolf , my first finished work as a New Mexican #painter; 🦖 Made in honor of my childhood role model and mentor, #paleontologist #RobertBakker, the only person with enough foresight and nerve to draw #raptors with feathers back in the 1980s, before we had concrete evidence (and author of the AMAZING #dinosaur novel, #RaptorRed - find it and read it!); 🦖 #featuredart on the @jurassicworldalive social feed; 🦖 Dedicated to my partner and new mom @nicoletaylor.strings ; 🦖 Available to collectors (please DM if you have a serious inquiry) 🦖 #SantaFe #santafeart #santafeartist #SantaFeNM #prehistoric #artcollector #artgallery #artcollection #artbuyer #dinoart #paleoart #paleoartist #paleontology (and #ufos, because come on)

Tech ethics is cooked. It's time to compost the Leviathan. This week on Humans On The Loop I decant a conversation with the brilliant Mathew Mytka — a moral imagineer, social entrepreneur, UX designer, educator, artist, and public policy advocate. Mat has over twenty years’ of product, project, and program management experience, designing and running real-world relational experiments everywhere from startups to federal government initiatives, Fortune 500 tech companies, and grassroots communities. In short, he’s precisely the kind of incompressible generalist I look to as a model for how to live wisely in our age of accelerating weirdness. Dig in wherever you go for podcasts! Chapters 00:00 Intro 06:02 Starting Over With Play 08:05 Mat’s Origin Story 13:56 Online Performance and Anxiety 18:24 How Tethix Began 40:07 Teaching The State about The Duty of Care 46:26 Collective #Futurecrafting from Circles to Bioregions 47:05 Start With What Exists 48:34 Pivot Beyond #TechEthics 50:08 Weird Gardens for Online Community 57:42 Composting The Leviathan 01:01:48 #Trauma, Empathy, Care 01:13:11 Agency Rituals and Closing #PhilosophyPodcasts #Metacrisis

Just dropped another 4,700 words on becoming planetary if you’re in the market for a totally unhinged romp through evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cultural evolution, media theory, nondual mysticism, and “some secret sixth thing." Some excerpts: We can’t participate in what we can’t perceive. Today we have personalized “for you” news feeds, but no say in the news feed ranking algorithm itself. The feeds themselves are linear, squeezing high-dimensional and richly structured information spaces through a straw and leaving us with none of the depth perception or original range of movement we had in the physical environments to which our brains adapted over the course of more than half a billion years. Demographics are useful fictions when they help us to identify shared stake, but they have become the tools by which our predatory egregores divide and conquer. Surveillance capitalism can only optimize per-person extracted value to the extent we are legible to these systems, and our own drive to be legible to ourselves and one another—to fit in—makes us easy prey for systems that know us better than we know ourselves. In planetary culture, the representation of a fixed identity—and the attempted actualization of its values—becomes the latest version of the kill traps into which Paleolithic people drove herds of bison. Various thinkers, including Alan Kay, Danny Hillis, Douglas Adams, and Kevin Kelly, have articulated variants on “You only notice technology when it breaks down.” Kelly in particular qualifies technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet”—but the assumption that this “yet” one day arrives as a fixed achievement becomes obviously wrong in an age of cascading supply chain failures. When we can not assume and ignore the bedrock of representational democracy, journalism, accreditation, and even public utilities, we end up in the paradox of being both the child who suddenly has to grow up and the adult who can only respond to crisis by becoming more childlike. #writersoninstagram #planetaryculture #collapse #regeneration #nonduality

And here it is! My long-awaited conversation for #HumansOnTheLoop with @alieninsect about why why can't dismiss the bewildering, dense, #hyperdimensional #DMT “realm” and its apparent inhabitants as mere dreams or hallucinations—nor can we take their presentation at face value and assume we know what an “alien” is. Especially considering how, in his latest book, he shares numerous accounts of psychonauts being told precisely by these “others” that their perceived form was not their actual form, and that the way they appear to us has more to do with the limits of the human brain-mind as an “interface” between astonished human subject and a suddenly undeniable, transcategorical Reality we usually sip through a straw. I'm intensely fascinated by the question of how we can take Aldous Huxley up on his injunction—to “send the natural historians to this new continent”—and what might have to change for science to function as it crosses the topological transition between waking-state and DMT #consciousness and back. Because if everything we're doing here—the quest we're on as a species—is based on our prehistoric adaptation to a low-dimensional projection of What Is Really Going On, then the real trick might be changing the shadows it casts by rotating the thing itself. Or maybe that's just a trans-me thing. We definitely didn't discuss that. And I'm pretty sure whatever DMT entities are, they aren't going to let us break the universe. But we did ask some pretty hefty questions, and caught a nice fresh slice of beach right next to Cosmic Mystery and Wonder. (cc our pals at @Noonautics , whom we adulate in this episode!) #Psychedelics #PsychedelicScience

New episode of Humans On The Loop! Today's conversation is with AI ethicist and organizational trust expert Nathan Kinch of Trustworthy By Design, asking questions like: How do institutions made of decent, well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory “living labs” for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together? If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas — and who isn’t? — this will speak to you, and I’m excited to share it. Dig in wherever you go for podcasts. More primer: Nate is amazing. An AI Ethicist for Services Australia, he’s worked with major organizations including Microsoft, Autodesk, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, Telus, Open Banking, and the Autralian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. He is the Philosopher in Residence at CoLabs Australia, a Guest Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, led Ethics in Action at The RSA, works as a Reviewer for IEEE’s Transactions on Technology and Society, and co-owns the artist collective Nightfall Worldwide. The “intent-to-action” gap in corporate ethics and the “paperclip machine” problem in our built wilderness of black box super-machines are structurally identical. And if we can “tame” the secular gods of the modern industrial era , our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing. #AIEthics #Trust #PhilosophyPodcast #Podcasts #TechEthics

Sitting on a small grip of available original works, from "squeeze into your last remaining wall space" to "centerpiece of your main living area" size, and all up for the taking! As always, I'm very flexible with agreements—just want to see these find a good home and add some color and wonder to your life. Also open to requests! My inbox is open. 🌈🎨🫟✨🌊 #ColorfulColorado #VisionaryArt #ArtCollector #ArtForSale #OriginalArt

MMM BAMBOO 🎍🐼 I did another thing — original already en route to a dear old homie, but I'm always down to do more! (It's how I stay sane when I'm not bingeing on intelligence research for work.) What other creatures do you think deserve a jazzy paint pen glow-up? Possibly biomech/cyberpunk, possibly Art Nouveau...spin the wheel. #panda #pandabear #pandalovers #pandapower

Just spoke with the brilliant C. Thi Nguyen (our third!) for #HumansOnTheLoop about his @penguinpress book The Score — this is the most accessible and enjoyable read I've ever found on the #philosophy of games, how the metrics we use to coordinate at scale also wash out vital context and variety, and how to stay human in a mechanical age. Easily one of the deepest and most important conversations I've had in over 360 #podcasts. This book needs to be on your shelf! Our episode will be out in a few weeks, so play the game and "smash that button" wherever you go to listen so you'll be ready — this work will help you learn to see the hidden ways that systems define your values, and the hope to be found in #GameDesign for futures where cultures foster agency and identity as art forms. Seriously, look at all those tabs! This book is amazing, easy to read, and will change you. And our conversation used it as a launchpad for a huge and awe-inspiring inquiry into our relationship with technology, language, and how we might reconcile what matters to each of us personally with what matters to our institutions...I'm especially eager to share this with all of my friends working on the Decentralized Web and CivTech, but equally with all of my goofy gamer buddies. It's that big.

Excited to share this dialogue on a promising alternative vision for AI—easily one of the most urgent and insightful episodes to date. The version of AI most of us have come to accept or reject looks like corporate-owned super-assistants with all your data. Instead, we could have a decentralized ecosystem where software self-assembles around you—private, personal, and prosocial. @komorama speaks on this possible world with authority: he spent 13 years at Google as PM Director on Chrome’s web platform, Search, and AR, and later led corporate strategy at Stripe before co-founding Common Tools with Bernhard Seefeld. Some of the topics we discuss: • confidential compute, • emergent ontologies, • where we want friction, • the tyranny of the marginal users, • the rise of the generalist, • the importance of context ownership, • software ephemerality, • and how to rethink the technical basis of data itself so machines don't prey on us, but help us truly become the people we want to be... Full episode and *extensive* show notes here: /p/h-31 ...or anywhere you go for podcasts! #AI #PhilosophyPodcast #PhilosophyOfTechnology #DecentralizedAI #Decentralized

So very excited to finally share this long overdue dialogue with the delightful and insightful @laymanpascal ! If you know, you know. If you don't: Layman is one of the wisest and warmest people I've ever met and has extremely developed (meta)perspectives on the wicked problems we face, the mutations of consciousness we are living through in the Digital Age, and how to embrace and navigate it all with humor, grace, and compassion. Every single conversation I have with him is podcast-worthy. Here is one of them. Enjoy anywhere you go for vicarious excellent conversation... #humansontheloop #integralphilosophy #metamodernism #futurist #philosophypodcast