Fun listening. Some pretty wild stuff in the mix there. I do agree that we can and should utilize humor and the power of the fantastic (think fiction, and simplified versions of our ideas for the masses, and perhaps even Tolkeinesque or Olympian myth, among other things) to advance the cause of disempowering the money-creators. However, there are dangers there: 1) actually starting to believe in the myths we made up, however poetic and beautiful they might be; and/or 2) attracting so many followers (who really do literally believe in the magic/simplified stories and understand little else) that they take over our (presently beautifully scientific and factual) movement and make it into one more emotion-laden, irrational religion; and/or 3) becoming yet another cynical cult, in which the leaders know the myths aren't true, but vend them with fake sincerity to millions of followers. In all of these scenarios, the core of what we want and need could be lost.
[New Podcast] Ideas From the Edge: High Strangeness, Memetics, & the Open Source Insurgency w/ Jack Heart
https://fountain.fm/episode/Yq7TAbg6t2BLvdCqGLyM
https://hivemindvc.substack.com/p/high-strangeness-gnosticism-memetics
This was a fun one! In most recent episodes, I’ve had conversations with builders from the Nostr/Bitcoin community about other rabbit holes they’re interested in. In today’s episode, I sat down with Jack Heart, a longtime blogger and veteran of high strangeness and esoteric rabbit holes galore.
Although we focus primarily on themes from Jack’s blog and recent book, we do spend some time discussing the principles of Nostr and how they align with Jack’s view of building an open source insurgency. I’m hoping to do more conversations with thinkers like Jack from communities philosophically adjacent to Nostr.
You can learn more about Jack’s work on his blog, Tekgnostics, and in his new book, Brave Noo World: A Guerrilla Ethnography of High Strangeness.
Here are some of the other topics we cover:
- High strangeness and the acceleration of technology, society, and novelty
- Tekgnostics - a balance of artifact and epiphany
- J. Allen Hynek - coined the term high strangeness
- The origin of "Foo Fighters" - UFOs
- Cosmic triggers - the atomic bomb - UFO craze after the war - term - UFO coined after lights over Mt. Ranier
- 2012 as omega point for Terence McKenna and the Mayans
- High strangeness going mainstream as dominant paradigm: politicians calling each other weird
- Synchronicity as meaningful coincidence
- Vernor Vinge’s singularity and the end of the human era
- Humor as the highest and most human form of intelligence and the great weapon against bureaucracy
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere as the omega point of human thought and the next layer of biosphere
- Humans will ultimately be all right because of our creativity
- Humans are tool and model builders
- Early internet was the first model of the hivemind
- Nostr and gnostic — a happy synchronicity ;)
- Digital evolution and DNA
- Philip K Dick’s view of DNA as a binary system of memory coils which gnosis allows us to read
- The workaround - humans’ core ability to adapt to whatever circumstances
- Jung and the ability to catch ideas from the noosphere
- The Buddha is in the Park
- Discordianism: seriousness vs humor - don’t take the world too seriously
- Humor is the highest form of intelligence; perhaps AI will struggle to mimic or understand humor
- “When I dress like a clown, the cops won’t hit me”
- The clown and jester archetype; the fool and the trickster (Prometheus , Krishna?)
- Meme magic and memetics as mind virus
- Memes are a big reason Trump won in 2016 (Pepe the frog)
- The open source / decentralized insurgency
- The ebb and flow of everything
- Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, chakras, and the 8 brain model of psychology
- Crowdfunding a billboard for Brazil all over nostr
- Nostr as the open source / decentralized insurgency against bureaucracy
- PKD and blows against the empire
- Bureaucracy lacks a sense of humor
- Gnosticism as the mystic arm of Christianity
- The great Yin/Yang, masculine/feminine, binary dichotomy of the universe
- Why something instead of nothing (manifest vs. unmanifest)?
- The mythology of Ancient Civilizations - civilizations rise and fall all the time
- Creating substrates for data redundancy and preventing human amnesia (Nostr/Project Alexandria)
Discussion
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