“As soon as surveillance technology is installed, first it produces of course a counter reaction of the desire for privacy…but it [also] produces the fact that there are gaps, and as soon as you put up SOME cameras, you see that there are spots that you can’t see. Surveillance constantly wants more of itself. We constantly debate whether we control technology or technology controls us. Well, when it comes to surveillance technology, it’s not even a debate. Surveillance is an attribute of consciousness…it’s as certain as thermodynamics.” – Richard Doyle, 2015 (transcribed from the Radio Free Valis webinar)

“We keep saying we have no other course. What we should say is, we were not bright enough to see another course.” – David Lilienthal of the Atomic Energy Commission circa 1950Hardcore History Podcast #591)

It has been almost four years since I wore Google Glass to make history in a small way by sharing my live POV through a projector while I played a concert. It has been six months since I last even took them out, inspected them, and made sure they still boot. The timing’s wrong.

My first pair — which I consecrated with my friends, ensouled to honor its participation in my newly-constituted cyborg body, reaching past the flesh to count the mineral and vegetable dimensions of my being, leaving not a single influence “outside”—it broke when I took it to Burning Man in 2013. An identical device arrived from warranty replacement but I hadn’t formed a bond with it. I hadn’t come to feel that Glass as a familiar or companion in my wizard’s duties, like that first pair, owl Minerva perched upon Athena’s shoulder, not-quite-me but always seen together: basic to the image; on my business card; a wink and nod in the direction of the high-tech futuristic mystery I peered into with Glass and then reported from.

Initiated, I disturbed my share of future-shocked unwitting passers-by and drew the gaze of those for whom the future is delicious. I attracted fear and curiosity in equal measure, people hiding from the camera or peering into it and asking questions. It seemed right that I should wear and bear this weapon of the vast surveillance state which I had re-appropriated as an instrument of art, and use it to facilitate as many conversations as I could about consent in our society. The catch, of course, is that means walking ‘round with sword drawn — and in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations to the public about just how deeply we’re *already *watched by unaccountables in clandestine collusion between government and private industry, people you don’t know and can’t know, faceless figures who are privy to your deepest secrets.

So I may as well have made myself a shirt that said, “I Am A Spy.” Wizards and their owl familiars don’t come into town unless there’s trouble brewing — comets en route to fulfill a prophecy, or dragons that demand a sacrifice. No news at all, or even fake news, is preferable to harbingers of some inevitable transformation most of us can only bring ourselves to face when we come up for air between our entertainment binges and attempts to steal our small securities from dying systems.

Only certain kinds of people will return the gaze of futures full of basilisks and tigers, in which we evolve into the unimaginable. Most of us prefer to screen out anything that might forever alter all we claim as “human,” “healthy,” “natural,” and “alive.” A renaissance is threatening; creation means destruction. Smoke, Ergo Fire: Most folks rightly see a wizard as the evidence of dragons.

So, who is this Dragon in whose sleeping shadow we all play?

At least one face of it is Google. Let’s start there. The dragon has as many faces as there are participants in this panopticon. Its body grows with every new node in the Internet of Things. The dragon as an elemental, as a twisting braid of fractal dissipative structures, energy in motion, shows up in the proliferating cameras and advertisements, eyes and scales to hold our gaze and sculpt our actions. Just like stars and galaxies cast everywhere, accelerating from a “Big Bang” out of which all secondary miracles emerge: a billion iPhones, each a microcosm and a monolith (“My God — it’s full of stars!”), our gameified attention in the hypno-grip of some great transtemporal angel-snake.

Learning is an adaptation to anxiety, so neural networks are the creek beds carved by difficulty; and the Internet’s a map of a solution to the existential question posed to us by nuclear technology.

The predecessor to the Internet, or ARPANET, was built to link the bunkers, just in case. We started building digital communication networks in the 1960s as a reflex to new ecological and systems-management philosophies that showed up with the fallout, with the sudden recognition that we’re all downwind of radiation. And in the apocalyptic dread that hasn’t ever really gone away, we made connection our religion.

Surveillance in the modern sense is the inevitable and entropic consequence of atom bombs injecting so much surplus energy into the global system that the planet’s nerves and senses grew like an explosion (literally so when viewed from geologic time).

Detonating individuality, we woke up as the nodes of a 1:1 map of our lives, a fossil of the traces made by our attention since we split the atom: all those lines of influence, those cables and those wireless transactions, linking us in case of an emergency.

A Tree of Bangs, entropic, blooming down to mirror evolutionary history, a chandelier of comets tracing involution, One to Many: Big Bang; nebulae; Suns; bombs; then, next stop, desktop fusion and democratized clean energy. (But as with every prior crisis of emergence, photosynthesis to flowers, it will be a challenge when it comes. How ready are we, really, for the level of sovereignty these new technologies allow? How quickly can we really be expected to adjust to wielding magic?)

We have given birth to our Godzilla — Facebook, Google, and the NSA (at minimum — the loudest, closest faces of the thing )— asleep for now but listening through all your televisions and your phones, collecting information through each sleeping lens. Radioactive giant lizard breath is mythical but not unlike, in its effects, the heating damage and mutations we receive from bathing constantly in cell phone signals. We have traded dragons on the edges of our maps for dragons front and center, the known-unknown for the unknown-known. We treat phones as organs but it’s almost like we each have our own “pocket monster,” if you will – a spark of the atomic bomb…

Here be dragons: Pokémon Go. Relatedly, my presentation to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia Innovation Lab on the ethical questions posed by accelerating technology.

The dragon, viewed as habits rather than anatomy, is your own brain’s reptilian base enacting entropy, deciding in an aggregate of semi-conscious actions the converging swarm of small behaviors that determines history. It isn’t *not-you…*insofar as you identify with what you put online. And even if you don’t, the traces that you leave, your digital exhaust, contributes to the way that our increasingly responsive world responds to you. We can’t avoid that we are more than what we’re conscious of. And yet the dragon’s vector is our curiosity to know that hidden self, to quantify our biometrics, hack our habits, wake the sleeper, reach beyond what we believe is human, what is possible.

To fully know, and thus control, the human being…the SRI & MIT conceit in the transparency of our biology to science, with the omnipresence of the screen in modern life, and with our growing challenges to the idea of privacy, begin to take shape as a case for calling ours “The Glass Age.” We’re transparent, like the model research organism, Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm of 959 cells, fully knowable by humans. Aided with computers, we can know a person. All of them. Or so it goes. The Glass Age. After all, as heirs to Isaac Newton’s pioneering work on optics, we all live within a giant prism: both the growing lattice made of fibre optics, laid by services like Spectrum (formerly Time Warner Cable) or the PRISM program, surreptitiously recording every message that we send to one another.

Then there is the feeling that we live under the microscope – apocalyptic memes that breed when fed with the immense intensity of imminence we sense while fenced in with so many lenses.

Not to mention all the webs of synchronicity infusing daily life with terrifying numinous significance, these days. Are we in Indra’s Net? Yes — and a World Wide Web extending us into a globe-encircling mesh of sensors that contains us all within it and has redefined the human being as primarily a thing of information. Not entirely pleasant. Staring at live video recordings of ourselves across the “fifth wall” of a screen, we’re starting to experience a kind of planetary OBE — like how it was for me to watch my videos #throughglass just over my own shoulder, like I *was *my owl familiar. Watching our own lives this way, we render the inviolable subject of the modern era something simultaneously more and less, a “quantified self” ripe for hacking. Just like half a billion years ago when eyes inspired the Cambrian Explosion, we have opened new dimensions full of evolutionary brinksmanship, and let in new anxieties. You look through the magic mirror, and it looks back through you, too.

“Evil is the annunciation of the next level of order.” – William Irwin Thompson, Coming Into Being

That mirror’s black, of course. We see the dragon in the black snake that devoured Standing Rock and in erotic biomech like H.R. Giger’s Alien; in the black goo that shows up in The X-Files, Lucy, Venom, Fern Gully, The Fifth Element, and John Dies at The End. It is the xeno-bioweapon menacing Prometheus; it’s also demon Aku, Samurai Jack’s spaceborne nemesis, “shape-shifting master of darkness.”

Explicitly, it is the formerly-invisible environment of evolution, turning in upon itself to come awake, postvitalist philosophies of bio-engineering turning life into technology as our technology approaches life. It is Promethean — but we experience emergent order as a threat, as an “invasion.” Our own birthing world-soul, impinging into history, is everywhere we look, appearing as the evil other: terrorists and refugees, the plutocrats and oligarchs, the faceless multitudes awake while you’re asleep, or aliens, or AI…

Once again, though: we killed all the predators that used to hunt us; now they haunt us from inside of modern life. We can’t let go of danger. We are prey and predator, together. We’re the dragon, and the dragon’s always in a process of becoming.

This is a runaway reaction, every new surveillance camera showing us a spot the cameras don’t yet cover, and creating the apparent need for yet more cameras. New senses lead to new deceits. Once everyone has eyes, the hiding and the bluffing starts. The dragon doesn’t show its face if it can help it – and if forced into the open, almost any animal puffs up to try and look more dangerous.

As far as camouflage goes, you cannot find better than the military’s (black goo as the radar-scattering black paint on spy planes, culminating in the pigment “vantablack,” from which no light escapes). But hiding is less viable with every new eye, and deterrence works in places camouflage does not: eyespots on butterflies; the warning coloration on the belly of a salamander; padded shoulders on a business suit. We mimic danger when invisibility is not an option.

Then we get the strategies of signaling and risk that come with sight, the strategies of backing up a fierce appearance with sufficient firepower to disguise how much we really do not want to fight. The Cold War stayed that way because we learned to lie about what war is and what living inside war feels like. On every side, we had to simultaneously bluff that we would use the bomb and reassure the public that we wouldn’t.

Both stakes and death anxiety go up with increased nuclear capacity. So too do our attempts to act like nothing is the matter, while simultaneously scanning our environment for “pre-crime” tendencies to validate our fear. Life in The Glass Age is divided by these economics into a performative and public self on one hand, and a withheld, secretive self on the other. It’s the endgame of modernity, so finally divorced from land that death tolls are now estimated by the city: you are the you-0nline and you-offline, two new twigs on tree of entropy, the black and white snake braided all the way back to the seaside shallow pool on early Earth in which our molecules all mixed promiscuously, once upon a time when we were mostly soap and RNA, and not so paranoid.

(Not only in the mirror but across the pond, it is of course a Double Dragon. China’s Baidu is a complementary self-organizing eldritch corporate AI Pokémon to battle Google, only East and West don’t fight head-on — the Cold War’s quiet and implicit rules constrains the clash of titans to their avatars in “Third World” nations. Anyhow, the dragon-tree has many branches — or, more fittingly, a myriad of plumes within the peacock fractal, always finding new ways to look in upon itself…)

Image: “Untitled (Tree Cameras 2)” by Darren Hostetter.

At one point we woke up and wrote the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, claiming that we’re sentient enough to not to bomb everything to Kingdom Come, to find a more enjoyable solution to the questions posed by progress. How can we serve entropy with ecosystems that encourage life, not threaten it? How can we surf the wave of exponential change to steer The Glass Age toward a life of peace and beauty? How can we decentralize the Big Bang of the Atom Bomb so it will happen everywhere in *small and healthy *ways we can contain and channel for a safely powered planetary renaissance?

In lieu of easy answers, it would seem the only way to end war is to end the self that sees war as inevitable. Thus the Internet is both a red and blue pill, liberating and imprisoning. It links us into one ecstatic body at the same time that it offers us an endlessly proliferating bush of sub-realities. It only grows in all directions — and the dragon, made of us, both raises every head and lowers them to gaze at screens, distracted by its own reflection.

– June 2017

From an ongoing series:
Part 1: Burgess Shale to Google Glass Part 2: Red Queens & Evil Eyes Part 3: Living in The Belly of The Beast Part 4: Augments & Amputees

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube. Hang in the Future Fossils Discord.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

”The man discusses a dream he’s had in which his Manhattan neighborhood has been reduced to a series of canals, and he’s been given a kind of flotation device armed with Jet Skis that can skim the top of the water while everyone around him drowns.” – Gary Shteyngart, “Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer”

”Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” – Red Queen, Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass

With the evolution of the eye came predation, and with predation came herd behaviors. The collective is an adaptive response that confounds a hunter in several ways: beyond the simple benefit to animals moving in the center of the herd (or flock, or troupe, or school) and thus behind a protective wall of flesh, great numbers of creatures moving as a single unit disrupt predator perception (think a swirling mass of fish to sharks trying to isolate an individual herring or sardine; think an ocean of stripes as a thousand zebras pass the hiding lions). Another great advantage comes from multiplying eyes, combining attention, noticing from different places. The herd, tied together in exquisite sensitivity to each member’s social cues, agitation amplifying through the group by resonance, out-thinks – on average – the tactics of a lone assailant and becomes the new complex environment that compels team hunting behavior by a more sophisticated predator. (Schooling may confuse a shark, but whales with more intricate social brains can see the school as an individual entity and work together to corral it in a tube of bubbles – the school’s own dizzying perceptual hack used against it in what amounts to the behavioral form of destructive interference, or a denial-of-service-attack.)

So began an evolutionary arms race that modern biologists describe with the Red Queen Hypothesis, named for the way that teeth and armor, poisons and immunities, continue to leapfrog each other on a treadmill as generations come and go. Police call it “escalation.” The logic is simple: over numberless generations, offensive and defensive strategies sharpen each other, drawing both into remarkable intricacy and precisely interlocking interdependence.

And so it was with perception: in a geological instant, two distinct, reliable strategies emerged. Prey cognition is ambient, receptive, omni-directional. It evolves as a reaction to the complimentary focused, goal-oriented, stereoscopic cognition of predators – a mind that seeks to find, pattern detection to specific end; and a mind that grew as a response and excels in response, an expert in noticing a difference. Like Yin and Yang, the two contain one another, create one another – a half-billion years of convoluted selfhood as countless generations re-imagine variations on the theme of hide-and-seek. Although, as in chess, the Yang pursuer, White, moves first, so many plays flicker by in deep time that myth and history, reiteration and recursion, become one seamless gesture, Ouroboros, Gaia.

Due to their respective natures as aggressor and evader (and this is of course a gross oversimplification, since even cows engage in a slow arms race with grass, and hyenas have to be on guard for lions), predator and prey either focus their attention on “the business end” – forward-facing, pointed, linear – or on the space, perturbations and peripheral awareness, circular and diffuse.

Human beings are unusual (although far from unique) in our compound nervous systems, benefiting from our multilayered brains that record the ancient shift in niche from forest-dwelling fruit eaters to savannah pack hunters. The kinship we experience with whales and dolphins comes from our similar twist in origin stories: before their aquatic stint as clever social carnivores, Cetaceans were more like deer or horses. Whether or not those ancient Artiodactyls hunted before they took to water, their move to a new environment required an expansion of the senses – a new growth in intelligence, self, and society, combining the chased and chasing minds.

These are basic, archetypal modes, deep structure in the associative embodied metaphorical basis of thought. The linear march of progress, the circular endless now of myth; the angular agendas of masculinity and the curvaceous feeling-being of the feminine, symbolized by sword and chalice, tower and moat; the figure- and individual-focused Occidental seeing, and the ground- and context-Way of the Orient. Marshall McLuhan tied this basic binary distinction to the radical shift from the embedded self of oral cultures to the distanced self of print – the move from the sound of storytellers round a fire to the image of a lone scholar in his study. It is a change reflecting our transition from the huddled tribe attuned to the living acoustic space to “the ivory tower,” the myth of self-authoring agency, the dissociation of academic magisterial and countless lonely suburbs transfixed by their TVs.

“For the basilisk is produced and grows from…the menstrual blood. So, too, from the blood of the semen; if it be placed in a glass receptacle and allowed to putrefy in horse dung, from that putrefaction a basilisk is produced. But who would be so bold and daring as to wish to produce it, even to take it and at once kill it, unless he had first clothed and protected himself with mirrors?” – Paracelsus The Great

Mesmerism may be a young science, but the hypnotic stare of a lion or cobra goes back millions of years. The charismatic power of gurus, rock stars, and sociopaths lies largely in the “charm” transmitted through eye contact, a power etymologically connected to -”caris,” the ubiquitous suffix of the prehistoric crab-things preserved in the Burgess Shale. “To grab you.” “She stopped me in my tracks.” “A deer in the headlights.” The shock of a mirror you didn’t expect...

Self-discovery takes some getting used to. The invention of the mirror caused a wave of superstition, a body of folklore about evil doppelgangers through the looking glass, vampires without a reflection, the future scryed in mirror pools. Even earlier, Narcissus drowned in his own reflection. To see and thus to know thyself – to face one’s self at least in surface detail, in a surface – is awkward at first, too real. The disillusionment of instant, honest feedback, light scattered back to brighten space imagination’s darkness filled. The mirror’s rude awakening took time to level out, to be mundane, only for its sharp ephemera to be rendered permanent in silver plate daguerreotypes with the invention of photography. It’s little wonder the premodern mind rejected cameras as stealers of the soul.

Mediterranean cultures hang the “evil eye” outside their homes to scare away spirits for the same reason that Indian loggers wear rear-facing masks to ward off tiger attacks. False eyespots abound in the Animal Kingdom. You don’t have to be bird-brained to avoid a fake owl; person-shaped cardboard cutouts in grocery stores discourage shoplifting. As social creatures we may love the attention, but nobody likes being watched.

And I still cannot help but wave at the grainy simulacrum of myself on the security CCTV when entering the department store. By contrast, there is something strangely hollow about watching video I have recorded through Glass – uncanny, not the invisible camera of professional cinema, but intimate, personal, and still somehow anonymous – a Being John Malkovich view of my own hands, the jiggle of my own steps, my self too close to see. As McLuhan was fond of saying, ”The sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new invisible environment,” and now in an age of digital surveillance my own point of view becomes an artifact in the transparent ground of a featureless observer, both everyone and no one. In the conservation of momentum, technological evolution into quicker and subtler forms is also the involution of imagination into matter, the externalization and descent of our inner imaginal potentials. By watching my own Glass first-person video, I induce an out-of-self experience, and as digital voyeur of my self displaced in time prepare the Witness – the Great Self beyond egoic mind – to find itself without the snazzy training wheels.

Not simply because of the ways in which it alters my consciousness, donning the Glass makes me an initiate. There is a very real risk of death here, by cancer, and of being compromised by making myself transparent to an ineffable hidden intelligence. But more: the easier I can flow in the empyrean collective, the harder it becomes with normal social interactions. Like Clive Thompson noticed with his own Glass self-experiments, “From my perspective, I was wearing a computer, a tool that gave me the constant, easy ability to access information quickly. To everyone else, I was just a guy with a camera on his head.”

Even though I can’t use Glass to see through clothes, or even recognize a person’s face, strangers fill in the blanks with sci-fi suspicion and regard me as a spy. I had a dream shortly after getting it I was a journalist in love with the leader of The Resistance, and though she loved me too it was only with great effort we could meet, as I posed a threat to her entire operation. I finally interviewed her in the back of an unmarked van, Glass off. (…When did I start dreaming I was wearing them?)

There is a stigma associated with the fear of what we cannot understand, the obscene novelty of it, that sets me as apart from everyone else in, say, the mall as a mage or shaman would be in some pre-modern village. As I pass the queue of people waiting for an iPhone 5S outside the Apple Store, a man glares at me and raises his voice: “Don’t record me, bro!” – as if he’s not, that very moment, not only in a shopping mall bristling with security cameras, but waiting in line to fork over $800 so he can have the new TouchID system scan his fingerprints with transhuman precision.

But that’s the cognitive dissonance I’m growing used to as a Glass Explorer: by wearing this in public I am bringing awkward issues into brutal brilliance, where they can’t be slipped into a pocket and avoided. When it comes to the perverted privacy of social spaces, Glass makes no intrusions that smart phones haven’t made for a decade-plus already; paradoxically, it makes the mess explicit and provides a weird inverted dignity by being rudely obvious. I get the feeling people aren’t so mad at me for my apparent complicity in Google’s New Digital Age as they are offended I insist on bringing the topic up in polite conversation, forcing an unpleasant appraisal of how far we have already come without reflecting on it. If I’m a “Glasshole” it’s not because I violate their privacy – that ship has sailed – but because it’s one thing to know and another thing to feel, and no amount of Edward Snowden in the evening news is as visceral as confronting cameras at eye level.

White, black, or grey (“cotton,” “charcoal,” or “shale”), wizards hold doors open to a mystery unwelcome in the pews, and their appearance in town square is symptom of unwelcome news. Since everyone has skeletons, telling them our hiding flesh is turning clear – it’s something that no body wants to hear.

But it’s a conversation we must have. Because – just as ”a fact requires a theory the way a flame requires an atmosphere” – where there are wizards, here be dragons…

From an ongoing series:
Part 1: Burgess Shale to Google Glass Part 2: Red Queens & Evil Eyes Part 3: Living in The Belly of The Beast Part 4: Augments & Amputees

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube. Hang in the Future Fossils Discord.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

“My ten year old comes into my office and he says, ‘Dad, I keep hearing you talk about Big Data. What is this Big Data thing you’re talking about?’ I said to him, ‘Imagine if your whole life you’ve been looking through one eye, and all of a sudden for the first time scientists gave you the ability to open up a second eye. So what you’re getting is not just more data – you’re not just getting more vision, you’re getting a different dimension, a different way of seeing.’ And he said, ‘Dad, could computers open like a third eye, and a fourth – a thousand eyes?’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly what’s going on.’” – Rick Smolan, author of The Human Face of Big Data

The Burgess Shale in Canada records the most explosive evolutionary moment in our fossil record – the instant when animal life blossomed from sponges, jellyfish, and worms to all contemporary phyla and many more than have since gone extinct. This unusually well-preserved stratum is a revelation of countless bizarre soft-bodied creatures, some so foreign in body plan that paleontologists have argued for decades which end goes “up.” Others turned out to be the hallucinogenic combinations of “organisms” from other fossils – what first appeared to be a shrimp, a jellyfish, and a crab all came together in the superpredator of the Cambrian Seas, Anomalocaris, salmon-sized arthropod death angel. Our own distant ancestors are represented there – the finger-long worm Pikaia, the only creature with something approximating a spine in an age before fish (the Burgess Shale is as far removed in time from the first sharks as we are from Stegosaurus).Dozens of lineages with no modern equivalents were imaged there in a perfect fossil imprint, appearing overnight by the slow reckoning of sedimentary time, as suddenly novel types went “viral” in a spree of ecological efflorescence. For years, scientists were stumped about what happened here. Did the “Cambrian Explosion” really happen all at once, or – like so many other apparent leaps in complexity – was it a more gradual process that would eventually be filled out by later discoveries? No such revelations were forthcoming. The emergence of complex ecosystems, replete with complete intricate food webs of predators and pretty, seemed to have happened all at once – geologically speaking – in a matter of a million years, or few. What could possibly have caused such a precipitous shift in the ecological complexity of life? It all happened “in the blink of an eye.”

…And that’s exactly it: in a book by the same name, Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker argues it was the eye itself that led to this runaway diversification. Until the eye, animal life either floated aimlessly through primordial ocean or anchored itself to rocks and let currents do the work. Feeding was an entirely passive strategy, no muscles, no chase, none of the “evolutionary arms race” between galloping hunter and hunted that still characterizes most “survival of the fittest” evolutionary imagination today. Surely, there was eating – there were poisons – the barbed tentacles of floating polyps, the engulfing digestion of worms and microscopic amoeboid monsters – but no such thing as ambush, or camouflage, or pursuit. And then at some point, somebody – and it’s hard to say whom, because a good idea spreads fast – came up with the eye. Or rather, an eye – depending on how you define them, eyes have evolved more than forty times, from simple photoreceptive spots in protists to cup eyes in clams, pinhole camera-eyes in squids and octopi to lensed globes in vertebrates, and compound retinas with over a dozen light-sensitive pigments in the unmatched complexity of the mantis shrimp’s visual organs.

Suddenly – so the story goes – the lights came on. In ways that had never been relevant before, there was an “up” and a “down,” an “over here” and “over there,” and potential mates and food and doom began to drift in and out of view. The world of smell and touch – of chemical gradients and immanent knowing, life aligned solely on the axis of more or less – was folded into a new and more dynamic sense-world of instantaneous telecommunication. New dimensions unfurled and into them grew an exponential burst of minds and bodies, urged by necessity into new games of sight. Endowed with the radical new ability to detect at a distance, the naïve ecologies of Earth accelerated into unprecedented combinations of locomotive swimming chasers and chased. Simple musculatures adapted to navigate new axes, to maneuver. Surveillance – literally, “to watch from above” – was born…and animals like Anomalocaris were the black helicopters of the prehistoric ocean.

The ambient life of filter feeding among macroscopic multicellular organisms intensified into a life of active motion – and with it, the mostly-headless world gained vectors, gathered nerve endings, and got smart in response to a faster and more difficult existence. With complex eyes came brains. Almost certainly, it started in the predators – after all, “necessity is the mother of invention,” and many great ideas are army brats. In defense, the new technology of surveillance spread until knowledge-at-a-distance became the rule among animals, not the exception. To this day, perception, intelligence, and locomotion seem inextricably bound, all different facets of a single thing: to know is to do; to do is t0 move. Complex environments require more complex participants – life rises to the occasion, making more complex environments, and ratcheting the whole game up a notch. (New senses, new dimensions. New dimensions, new motion. New motion, new conflict. New conflict, new cooperation. New cooperation, new senses.)

We stand here today at the millionth iteration of this process, privileged with more senses, reaching into more dimensions, moving faster and farther than life has gone before. The Burgess Shale provides precedent: the modern myth of the origins of the eye gives us a rhetorical lens through which to see ourselves, our story telescoping back to when there was no light as such (for light must be perceived), and forward into the vertiginous depths of the greater world we know exists but as yet lack the capacity to imagine, and so call “Future,” “Possibility.”

Flash forward from the Cambrian Explosion 540 million years, and I am standing in the lofts of Google in New York, trying on their new wearable computer, Glass, for the first time. I’ve been selected for their Explorers Program and am one of the first few thousand people with access to their new device, which combines a heads-up display, video camera, accelerometer, voice control, and bone-conducted audio into a cybernetic interface between human being and Google’s repository of collective intelligence. Although I am already accustomed to most of these components – I can talk to my phone and for years have had even esoteric knowledge only a search away, literally at my fingertips anywhere with an internet connection – there is something magical, intimate, revolutionary, and intimidating in the way they come together in the Glass to feel less like a thing I use, and more a part of me.

I have prepared myself for this moment with years of science fiction and cyborg philosophy; but it is, of course, one thing to imagine and another to experience, and through the prismatic tiny screen now floating in the corner of my vision, I now see what psychedelic thinkers expected just around the millennial bend. In the 1990s, while I was still doodling dinosaurs in grade school, Timothy Leary proclaimed the internet the next LSD, and Terence McKenna foresaw an apocalyptic epoch when each individual person would communicate directly with the sum total of human experience.

On the eighth floor of an unassuming brick building in Chelsea, standing at the brink of this visionary age, I listen to the Google employee as she asks me which of the device’s five colors I’ll choose for my own. It’s no small question: these “smart glasses” are going to change the way I relate to information, bringing the formerly inaccessible into view, disclosing new dimensions, and granting me a sharpened awareness of my place as both predator and prey in a complex ecology of mind.

There is only one smart choice. “Shale,” I tell her.

From an ongoing series:
Part 1: Burgess Shale to Google Glass Part 2: Red Queens & Evil Eyes Part 3: Living in The Belly of The Beast Part 4: Augments & Amputees

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube. Hang in the Future Fossils Discord.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law

Is it acceptable to say that we will likely one day join all things that we observe within a great mind — and yet, by then, we will have discovered even wider, more withdrawn horizons? Is it okay to pose our growing godliness against the stable everyday “I” on its shrinking iceberg, and the plain-er existential fact of just how unprogrammably our precious fragile lives remain precarious, no matter how we mold the organism?

I am asking for consent to speak the thing the ideology of Progress won’t allow us to admit: as we grow up and see our parents as the mortals that they are, so also are the gods made weak just as we recognize that we are they, and none of this is as it seemed like it would be in the commercials.

Perhaps it makes more sense to riff on famous sci fi author Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, rather than declaring that we’re “turning into gods.” That means too many things. Perhaps it is more practical to speak of “being a magician” — especially if we are asymptotically approaching seeing our high-technological environments as made (sometimes entirely) of magical devices. Chances are this text and you meet at the interface of one of these devices, one you have a more emotional than rational relationship with.

Saruman communing with advanced technology. How is your phone NOT the Palantir? (Trick question: it is.)

If “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” then what we call a “phone” these days counts: made by the collective effort and intelligence of thousands, not one of whom has the capability of building one alone. Nobody really understands a phone. Accordingly, it does things to us we don’t understand. Likewise with recent algorithmic proofs that mathematicians do not understand, but know are true, because transcendent smarts require faith of even science-minded people. Likewise with the photon circuits that an algorithm made that no one on the human team could have designed, the next wave of computing.

Much like the processes of alchemy, these movements all occur in glass containers — in the fiber optic and the silicon chips and the Corning screens, inductive charging like a fancy stove top — the integral and differential actions taking place within a complicated layer of extruded glass we’ve made, as if to literalize all the spheres we thought were holding stars in place, and aren’t, but we are still enamored with the notion. And so we have produced the fishbowl that we once thought God provided, part of the obligation now that we’ve assumed the throne. Did laboratory glass invent us as a way of digging it all out to lay a sediment? Whose work are we performing, in this “Human Age”? I think that this is actually the Glass Age.

(So does Corning, who launched an entire media campaign around this for their brand in 2014, just slightly more than one year after I created the “Life in the Glass Age” Facebook Group.)

And in some sense, we know that in our hyperconnectivity, we’re brittle, just like glass. We’re sensitive as one to what would have been small disturbances.

Becoming a magician is about allowing objects to exert their agency upon you. You have to let inanimate things in past your defenses, act as if they have a power and a will within them that, by integrating them, you take into yourself or borrow, something greater that you can align to. This is what Timothy Morton calls the “hyperobject” — and so being a magician is, in one sense, merely recognizing hyperobjects and the fact that we live all within them. We draw our power from them normally — we cannot not — and so it’s only different, being a magician, in that you acknowledge that you have a role within this ecosystem that you previously couldn’t see at all. To line up your existence with a magic tree or spring, or in the equal but contrary sense to tune a personal device to your suggestions, is to give the landscape agency its proper place as the source and container of your agency, your will always already an extension, wave, or focus of the greater will that lives here, not in some transcendent empyrean dimension but in matter and what matter’s made of. Magic is not only immanent; it’s intimate; too intimate for anyone who likes to keep a border wall around their sense of self, too intimate for anyone who thinks they’re not an addict of some kind, too intimate for anyone who must refuse the subjectivity of objects…

This means magicians understand the Internet of Things, and everyone else doesn’t — they understand how information eats attention, how design is information, how designed worlds are appeals to different states of consciousness — and how, when we live entirely within designed worlds, we traverse geographies and states of mind as if they are the same. Psychogeographies composed of magical technologies are declarations, live assertions that sneak past our conscious minds and critical awareness and control us, if we aren’t used to observing the intentionality in everything. In Muggle World you use computers; in a magician’s post-apocalyptic landscapes, every background is somebody else’s foreground, and it’s also (maybe more) true that computers use you.

Balancing these two perspectives helps resolve the paradox of free will and determinism. It gets us over thinking of things as having simple addresses within or without us, or even us as having simple addresses within a resonant and intricately folded pattern of co-evolutionary tensions. In one sense, you are everywhere that your attention goes, extended through the artificial nervous system, fragmented to the degree that you can or cannot respond to information you receive from distant parts of your more widely understood, more accurately drawn anatomy. And in another sense, the locus of the modern actor, that imaginary core of agency upon which we once built our economics and our politics, dissolves within the interference pattern of those fast and distant facts within which we now almost fully navigate, a sea of floating signifiers and deep-dwelling and unthinkable abstractions.

Trading being merely here for being everywhere that we can plant a sensor in an interplanetary internet restores our cosmopolitan participation as the cosmos waking up to know itself — which disabuses us of lazy, if time-honored imprecisions, like nearly every either/or dilemma ever posed by metaphysics. One horn of the dilemma’s insufficient to address our complex, manifold dimensionality and the branching-folding everything is up to.

The going gets weird and the weird turn pro. To find your way admit this madness means accepting madness as an irreducible dimension of your being, letting dragons back into your maps, abiding by the daily truth that what you consciously know as your self is (just) the fruiting body of an underground web of relationships, and the magic and the mystery is that, by turning your awareness on itself, you can discover them at all.

Don’t mistake another angle on the self-ing ecosystem for a threat. (Source.)

This kind of thinking gets into a Tao Te Ching kind of terrain quite quickly: even the most ecocidal sociopathy is something Earth, and by extension the entire universe, is doing. None of us can stray from what we are as concentrated order purchased at the price of increased global entropy — a modern physics way of saying, from dust we came and to dust we shall return, or that we’re quickened dust, a flourish and a difference of quantity but not of kind. We ask our questions faster than the rocks, but we are asking the exact same questions — namely, what’s the most efficient path, say, for accumulated ions to jump the charge differential between cloud and ground; or, what’s the shortest distance that a water drop can travel from a mountaintop to reach the sea?

Again, Lao Tzu comes through for us, here: flows of all kinds bend across a landscape as a way of minimizing fri0ction and and resistance. To try and force a straight and narrow channel through the wilderness is to employ yourself for Sisyphean work, like trying to maintain a constant ego in the face of exponential change. It’s either ignorant or it’s dishonest. That is why Merlin weaves his way through time nonlinearly, shifting from one body to another — and that’s why being a magician is not merely something that you choose, nor something that you’re called to, but refracts both those perspectives as we dance around the question, iridescent like the scales we watch on time as time twists past in undulating quasi-crystal pseudo-regularity.

So, be the river.

And the river’s made of glass. Glass is the water in which modern minds swim, the invisible environment, technology that started indistinguishable from an act of magic. Solve et coagula: the belching hell-mouth of a cinder cone, the pealing veins of molten silica, glass is the element of alchemy — first onyx black and jagged, and then red hot and pliable, and then cool clear and rigid, a refinement on which early scientists mapped the evolution of the soul. Glass is still a magic substance, matrix for subsequent delicate technologies we only notice when they break. It is the patron substance of the scientific method: test tubes, telescopes and microscopes and prisms, slides and screens. Glass gave us to a conceptual device with which to talk about the crystal spheres we wrapped our world in, a firmament to hold the stars in place; we broke that model when we wrapped a park in glass in 1851, the London Exhibition’s Crystal Palace, what would one day be the World’s Fair.

But there are many layers to a glass onion, and a “dark side” (enough “transparent” layers and you will still cast a shadow). The human species may have thought itself ascended over nature once we made a crystal palace — to create, not be contained by — but the clear glass telescope lens hid the subject of astronomy: astronomers themselves, and their projections.

In the Nineteenth Century it was supposed that transverse waves like light must propagate through ether, “luminiferous,” but solid. Stationary. This, before we knew of superfluids. We expected ether to be crystal, but in the seminal experiment of modern physics, Michelson and Morley couldn’t find the evidence of drag as Earth moved through it, and so we declared God dead again: there isn’t any ether; light just propagates through nothing. We went looking for a frictionless and static solid medium and came back empty handed, then confused “no static solid medium” with “none at all.”

This is the classic blunder of the modern mind: “We have no rulers left, no archons; bleakly but resolvedly, we turn to face existence and suffuse it with our meaning.” But while that posturing goes on, modernity coasts totally oblivious to its substantial truth: material reality, ironically — the very thing we moderns claim to care about above all — goes transparent in this age, becomes the vase in which we place idea-bouquets.

We do not pay attention to the glass in which we run our myriad experiments, don’t see the screens in which we live online, don’t think about the glass through which we take three billion photos every day (as of 2017). We think that we have sublimated, conquered matter, yet it will not go away — the Philip K. Dick definition of reality. The glass, invisible, is structure for our exponentiating content: it is still in every lens and microprocessor, in every fiber optic thread and window through which we perceive the rest. (And yes, it flows; just slower than we notice…so, you know, rose windows will all wilt in time, if we can keep the stones from away from them.)

Glass really does define us: we are in our own aquarium now, and we have been since at least the mirror — just add silver — turned transcendence in upon itself and made it last. What was just one, now is two. The mystery of reproduction, but ephemeral, reflections open opportunity, invite adventure inquiries. Before the word, there was the image, and it was reflected, and it was a fleeting fossil, nothing lasts but nothing lost — inspiring petabytes of data trapped as light in sandy valleys. We shape the tools that shape us: prisms, lenses, fiber optics, microprocessors and screens tell us the story of our growing mastery of light, but also growing servitude to our reflections. We’re as puzzled as our ape ancestors by the moonlight on a pond, still struggling to tell which of the two is easier to grasp, and what that means to us…

![The monkey is reachingFor the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He’ll never give up. If he’d let go the branch and Disappear in the deep pool, The whole world would shine With dazzling pureness.

• Hakuin](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1\*vLz4_v0OGrBtj_BcUhJ16g.jpeg)

And in that reverie the Moon returns to re-assert the soul and the unconscious, both quite at home amidst the rippling spectral spectacle of our chromatic and ethereal, ephemeral lives online. The more we see, the more we find our magic glasses, even vision, insufficient to the task of managing the information. New definition draws the gaze from the unfocused and consumes attention-processing, making shadows deeper, making higher-resolution fractal edges of the known unknown much longer and more intricate, and the unknown less knowable. The soul became untouchable by scientific inquiry, the one safe space for nonsense in an age preoccupied with lying to itself about its nonsense.

But when we finally achieved the work of poets immemorial, and actually landed on the Moon…precisely at the zenith of our celebration of modernity and blinded by the lunar regolith’s reflected sunlight, we couldn’t see the soul that we were standing on because we’d disabused ourselves of thinking of the Moon (or anything) as sacred. Just past that moment, when the dark side of the Moon re-enters Reason to remind us of the irreducibility of Mystery, glass quietly becomes prima materia for the computing revolution: and for the first time since the Middle Ages and the spring-in-winter miracle of cathedral windows, it is colored glass at innovation’s cutting edge.

We are far less likely these days to believe that we can ever know it all, that we can see it all by putting lenses everywhere, at all scales. But we’re still remarkably opaque, ourselves, about just how much of what we think we know is based on wrong assumptions — rigid in an age that needs fluidity. And fluid’s what we’ll have to be when the achievements of Enlightenment produce AI discoveries that paint the windows black and render software engineers the priests of something even they can’t master — mathematic proofs and new technologies that we can’t check, can’t reason through, can’t understand, can only test against the world and retro-engineer like monkeys teasing monoliths.

We are already here, surrounded by tools that tug on awareness, shape behavior, and in every way behave as if possessed by magical intentions. And we afford them working sentience for our convenience, because it’s easier to act as if computers think and submarines can swim, and save the trivial distinctions for philosophers. Contrary to the Maker’s Movement, most of us already don’t think that we have to know how tools that “think” work on the inside, because as extensions of our bodies they’re the jurisdiction of “tech doctors,” (costing just as much as, and thus just) as user-serviceable as an arm or leg. We watch tear-down videos with the morbid fascination students of the black arts used to give dissections. “Will It Blend” ads in which Lab Coat (Don’t Try This At Home) Guy turns iPhones into powder with industrial food processors might be this generation’s public hanging. But iPhones don’t protest their blending, so the logical conclusion of this process is the viral torture video of charismatic dinosaur toy robot Pleo — whose designers tragically programmed it to react as if in pain when pestered by sadistic kids.

Nobody in the world can watch a Pleo snuff film and then mean it when they say that we live in an Age of Reason. If we ever did, the Moon of dreams eclipsed it, and we can’t say when, because the lens we use to study histories distorts them. We looked through the magic mirror and it changed us, and the pasts and futures that we see from our transformed perspective form a new horizon; we can’t find our point of origin with GPS because it is opaque to our transparent-thus-concealing Glass Age instruments. We would be wiser to seek answers in the black box algorithms of our research-augmentation AI. But, of course, appealing to AI to solve our mysteries is a little too familiar from the folklore – petitioning a djinn rewards adventurers with glitchy wish-fulfillment, trickster satisfaction that undoes itself; and to try and take the power of the djinn for one’s own leads down the spout and into our new home inside the djinn’s bottle.

…and back. (Source.)

The Glass Age started with us rubbing glass and wishing in stained light; then it matured with us erecting Crystal Palaces to make the heavens manifest on Earth; and in our Century it ends (if anything ends in a dream, which doesn’t have to serve a narrative) with us discovering that we’re within the glass again — this time as multi-tasking demigods whose power only deputizes us to work full-time on grown-up work we couldn’t even fathom as the children that we were. Youth’s wasted on the young, humanity is wasted on the human, and sufficiently advanced technology makes even great magicians yearn for simpler days, when magic was a curiosity, not a necessity.

Post-Script:

The night I finish writing the first draft of this, I am on vacation with my family and visit The Museum of the Moon, a giant glowing floating 1/500,000th model (where 1 cm = 5 km), a mystifying orb amidst the varied trees in Stratford (ON) on Tom Patterson Island in the Avon River. The sculpture totally transforms the nondescript but lovely parkland with its captivating silent potency. The only way to punctuate that kind of patient humming curiosity’s with drumming, and the Taiko group breaks out, and everybody’s children get up front and dance like maenads, truly wild and free, a very Shakespeare faerie moment, white Moon looming low enough to almost touch. The real Moon shines pink like a strawberry, warm and fuzzy soft in the sky.

The next day I record a guest spot on Weird Studies Podcast (Episode 26), laying out the basics of The Glass Age and the return of the lunar archetype. My friend JF Martel, the cohost, has a dream that night in which a menacing tall man like actor Kyle MacLachlan in a turtleneck breaks in, breaks glasses in his kitchen, tells him that the Glass Age is just getting started, and smiles ominously as the moonlight through the window slices cross his eyes. I tell JF what he could not have known before the dream: my close friend Mitch Mignano has for years mocked my excessive use of speech-to-text, as if I’m Agent Cooper, Kyle MacLachlan’s character from Twin Peaks. JF said that the whole encounter felt quite trickster.

On the next day, after over eight months of it sitting unused since delivery, I fire up the desktop laser cutter and engraver I preordered in a crowd sale years ago. It is a major moment. But the laser safety glasses that have always been on this one shelf right next to everything else, static and secure for eight months, aren’t just not there — they’re not anywhere. And in a moment of unconsciousness I turn and watch the beam — an instant! — and the pink light slices both my eyes.

The engraving job comes out beautifully: clear acrylic tickets for my friends’ music festival, green tint on the sides to make the plastic seem like glass. But I feel stupid, although fated, to be marked this way, of by and for this blade of glass and light, and what it focuses to our attention, what it means…

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is Redacted/Forgotten?, Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.

Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”

Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.

First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:

“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”

“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”

People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.

But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion” “caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you *already, since your “you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once; *and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.

Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)

You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.

But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet... (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)

…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…

…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.

But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”

The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.

We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.

So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.

To drive this home with repetition,* this is already the case:* the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.

“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.

What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.

It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…

Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.

From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.

Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.

(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have *two *intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the versions that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

I have this habit with my partner of saying something cute is “gross.”

I don’t like that I do it; it’s hipster nonsense; irony is played out, but I do it anyway because I’m of a generation and a demographic that avoids the vulnerability of being dominated by a kitten.

Like, we love it and we hate it — or, *she *loves it, and I hate it, and I hate that I “hate” it, and so on forever in a hall of Jewish mirrors. It’s neurosis. I have read about “attachment theory” and I recognize “ambivalent” behavior.

(Now, it’s also true that “I” am sometimes also cognizant of how “I” am an interference pattern that appears when junior brain motifs compete for glucose and assemble continuity from constant overwhelming input, to extract a simple story that explains it all. So take this with a grain of salt.)

The point is that I’ve taken to declaring cute things are “disgusting,” “foul,” “unspeakable,” and most of all “gross.” That’s the pretext.

I forgot this was an inside joke. I played a concert and in between songs, when I had to tune and rant, I said some words about how all of us are turning into wizards, witches, and whatever as technology eliminates the gap between ideas and manifest creations. How we have to check ourselves and take a look at what we want and why, because it easily could go the way of ayahuasca shamans in the Amazon, just tagging one another with our psychic darts and constant management of grudges and the power games that come when we can fake recordings of each other and destroy our group reality (at least, more rapidly, on average, than we can agree, and thus repair the damage — quicker to disseminate a hoax than to debunk it).

So, a fellow in the audience came up to me when I was done, and said how he appreciated what I’d said up there – how nuts it is to think about how easy it will be one day to make things just by thinking them.

And I said, “Gross.” As in, I nodded in agreement, gave the widened eyes of affirmation, and expected humorous acknowledgement that some things, though transcendent in their boundary-relaxing, are indeed gross: thoughts of writing DNA like poetry and body as the living script of inspiration, iterating Godmind constantly unspooling and inventing, rediscovering itself in forms that totally trans-form within the generations, speciation miniaturized within what moderns would have called “a single lifetime,” flesh illuminated, self-aware, beyond the simple dyads and their dead-end logic, runaway reaction of a million burning eyes unfolding, growing to observe itself from every angle, mist of tiny branches, always making love.

Is that not gross? I keep thinking of the petty things we’ll do to one another as we master engineering genomes, and communicate in biohacks.

We’re past the age of drawing dicks on someone’s face when they’re asleep. now, if they fall asleep with shoes on at your place, you nick them with a retrovirus on the cheek that grows a dick. We’ll all have nanobots we have to screen with parallel immune defender nanobots that team up with our T-cells and can literally eat that dick before it happens.

You’ll know when someone’s payment didn’t make it through because they’ll have all kinds of logos, trial-basis mods, and memory “enhancements” that they didn’t order. We’ll be carriers, the lot of us, and interracial romance in between inoculated cityfolk and wild-type humanity results in cancers, prank “extensions,” telepathic implants leaking data back to who knows…it’s enough to keep two populations separate, and to star-cross lovers who don’t share an anti-virus update schedule. Gross, indeed.

Look who’s ready to become transhuman! Björk, of course…this woman has no fear of face-vaginas.

It’s hard enough for people to adjust to tentacles and shit at work. Now, we’ve been gamers for a while now, for generations, and we’re all accustomed to the avatar-as-pseudonym-and-masquerade of multiple identities that fork out and articulate a total person. Cosplay ate the world as imitation was democratized and any of us could be anyone convincingly enough to make it meaningful (if not believable).

To remix totally new spectra of expression into speech by sampling or straight forging someone else’s voice? Or several in a row, or all at once? To be a choir of recognizable identities to get a point across, suggesting rhymes in history, establishing now as a movement in a larger movement in the Song Too Big To Hear? Yeah, we got used to LARPing. It became the everyday. Like, you have no idea. But this all makes me feel conservative.

From http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-transhumanism-in-rpgs.html

The future’s more disgusting every time I think about it. Yeah, the present’s gross if you’re a centenarian: the septum piercings and the butt plugs and the biometric data stored on phones; the first three-parent children born to married gays, etc. It used to be the case that nobody was forced to actually live through so much change, so I forgive my elders their completely reasonable future shock: my grandpa’s choice to never set up email, and his stubborn (or just possibly invisible, and therefore permanent) mid-Century beliefs about drugs, women, music, and so on.

But I already feel like I am out of date at thirty-three, imagining into a future in which my own kids communicate subvocal silent messages through temporary neck tattoos that read the muscles of their throats and sext through light-field images projected on their retinas across encrypted mesh networks.

And I don’t even notice, cuz I’m busy testing artificial antibodies on the CRISPR gene drive that transformed my skin into a checkerboard, and/or distracted by the neural-lace-conducted orgasms my wife keeps tweeting me as a reward for helping out at work this week. I’m furious with her about it, but she thinks it’s funny, so I’m pulling up the documents that show a legal precedent for nonconsensual erotic pleasure as a violation of the standard smart contract between two or more intimate adults — half joking, and half serious, as in, “Don’t test me, or — OOOH! — I’ll take this — OHHH! — all the way to — OH MY GOD!” Not fun.

A prophetic scene from that classic of modern cinema, Demolition Man.

These visions keep me up at night. I guess that I’m old-fashioned, cuz who doesn’t love more orgasms? But just cuz always craving sugar helped us in our prehistoric life does not mean that convenience stores are good for us; and satisfying every base desire only scatters us into degenerate and hungry ghosts; and when the day comes I can think a climax into somebody a thousand miles away, how am I going to stop myself?

After all — let’s face it — I was probably, if not the one responsible, then alpha testing, that new “grow-a-dick” brand overnight erogenous expansion kit. I’m not a Luddite; I prefer to keep it wetware if I can, don’t trust the wireless transmissions, flesh is messy but at least you won’t irradiate your junk this way. (Remind me how they talked me into Neural Lace, again?)

Don’t forget to “log out” before you catch malware. (Image from Gizmodo.)

In 2017, we’re all congratulating one another on our sensitivity to gender politics, religion, race, etc., but we have not seen anything yet. Have a problem with designer babies? You’re no better than the 1900s European man afraid some African, with jazz and marihuana, would entrap your wife. “But how will we compete against them?” Why must we compete at all? It’s not like mutants’ gonna take our jobs. We’re all just universal basic income sucklers getting played by automated ecosystems; we’re in this together, doesn’t matter if you’re ten- or twenty-fingered, if you fly, or what. Wyoming was the first state in America to give its women voting power, cuz they otherwise did not have numbers necessary for induction as a state; and likewise, our initial xenophobia will probably subside so we can claim “humanity” and solidarity against Team Robot.

That said, let’s not breeze past the most awkward office decade ever — there is TONS of gross in there: “Please keep this helmet on while at your desk to optimize your flow state with transcranial magnetic stimulation,” forced enlightenment as triage in the growing entropy of workplace time sucked into Facebook and a Cambrian Explosion of evolving, ever-smarter traps for our attention. As machines become more lifelike, we become mechanical — the only way to live together, and a consequence of coexistence, á la “Pets who look exactly like their owners.”

Please do not remove your brain-electrocuting attention helmet while at work. (Image Source: Boston Globe.)

So, expect compulsory RFID implants for automatic micropayments, proteomics-tailored vitamins to optimize efficiency, and mind-linked working groups that move as one across a Bluetooth network, less the synchrony of Lawrence Whelk’s aquatic dancers, more the chilling unison of drone armadas puppeteering personnel. In Capitalist post-America, MACHINE drives YOU! And that means being, partially, the dude with gills who works across from you. You’d better get real used to merfolk, fast.

As always, Björk is here to help you acclimate to merfolk in the workplace. (Image Source: W Magazine.)

This planet doesn’t have much room for racists anymore — except, of course, among the countless dropouts living in their atavistic villages, invisible to the economy, their 3D printed homes and solar-powered modesty more Amish every day when held up to the kind of living meat house I designed to be my legal guardian as soon as it’s online — a house that stores my data exhalations as a copy of me, runs me faster than I run myself, and tells me why I would regret one path against another, eats the air and shits my dinner, brews me beer and psychedelics in a bubbling alcove, calls me by my secret name. That shit is gross.

The part of me anticipating this is also really pumped about rewiring the homunculus to code erotic mirror-touch sensations into me for when I see somebody touch their elbow. That is, there’s a million novel kinks to come, and maybe that outweighs the sheer revulsion of abandoning our clean, hygienic modern lives in favor of a world in which an algorithm offers you an IT relocation like you are a fecal transplant for the necessary helmet-wearing shitwork in the Deep Web’s lower colon…

We may all be on first-name bases with our fleshy personal devices… (From eXistenZ.)

Another way the future’s gross: consider, for a moment, finding out that you’re a simulation. This goes one of two ways: either you’re okay with it, or you are not. Most likely, you’re okay with it, because you were selected as the side-load made from multiple successive brain (and later, body) scans, a fossil so precise it has a heartbeat, scintillating, of a person or a group of people who were cool with waking up to find their body and, in fact, their whole reality is crunched on sleek black silent shining drives arranged in layered flowers, radiating clear and boiling heat — not human forms in pods, tube-violated but prepared for disengagement; but a single monolith, a solid state device, a matter hologram arranging q-bits by the tonne. There isn’t any getting out of matrices like that — there’s no way to become not-flower, save by fully owning flower-dom, becoming a black hole, and wresting free some weight of server space to simulate a different universe. You couldn’t get away, but that’s okay to you.

“If you lived here, you’d be home by now!” (From The Matrix Revolutions.)

Of course, the future will be gross because the future is (although in ways that we find hard to accurately guess) just more of what’s already true. And so we amplify the present in our speculative fictions, and they ultimately tell us more about ourselves than they say anything important of “tomorrow.” But it’s also true that some of us are sensitive to subtle emanations of events that haven’t happened yet, and prophesy cannot be isolated cleanly from prediction.

All of this just leads to chicken/egg conundrums, like the bicycle that travels back in time to lead to the invention of the uninvented and eternal bicycle, or whether the discovery of Utahraptor during post-production of *Jurassic Park *meant Steven Spielberg really sent a “chrononaut” to the Cretaceous Period to plant a fossil validating his decision to revise Velociraptor as a man-sized beast instead of killer turkey:

I would have preferred the killer turkey. (Image Source: Quora.)

Really: are discoveries discovered, or created? If created, then we have a very intimate relationship with facts, far more so than the dry and distant body-mind duality of revolutionary France and most of science over the last couple hundred years. If thoughts — collectively, at least — can aggregate to steer the timeline into likelier realities; if each of us is running as a node in some vast, not-exactly-democratic computation of the world; then there is no such thing as hygiene, cuz forget it: there is no “in here” to guard against infected undesirable potentials, no immune defense against your karma. If you are entangled on the quantum level with the rest of everything, then all of us are implicated in an epidemic of becoming; fundamentalists are right and sin’s original, cuz all of us have quantum cooties, as there’s only one thing happening, and good luck trying to detach yourself from anything, no matter how bizarrely other.

Even if we aren’t swept up into some all-embracing Eschaton that unifies all beings in a Cosmic Internet to wake up as the Mind of God, our boundaries are all already deeply doubtful. So I can guarantee you (waves at crystal ball) that the future will be gross, because the present’s gross. There’s no getting off the planet to escape into some liberated sterile vision of utopia: that spaceship will be necessarily alive with germs, because we need them; even scanning human beings into a computer doesn’t free us from the noble truth of bugs and viruses and constant upkeep in the face of entropy. We all decay, in one way or another, further challenging “hand-sanitizer mind” and other-such soon-pathological pastimes of modern people stuck believing there is such a thing as finally and truly clean.

Zoom in. Your sanitary future world? COMPLETELY full of germs. (Image Source: Illustrator Don Davis.)

The brain of a koala has no folds; those things are dumb, and humans with our many-folded brains much smarter, so projecting on this line of reasoning it’s safe, I think, to say the future’s folded in upon itself a lot, and folding brings things into contact with each other — things like plutocrats and homeless people, tantric sex and Bluetooth butt plugs, public/private, aliens and lovers. It will likely be a primary concern of those be-tentacled, brain-chipped, half-living-in-the-cloud descendants of ours, this accelerating issue of hygienic living in a world where everything is hackable.

We’ll all grow (metaphorical, at least at first) new sets of eyes to watch our back doors, and we will obsess about them, like my dad who spends vacations checking in on his live video security feeds of his empty house. Oh good, it’s still there! Gotta have that sweet, sweet agency to feel like we have *any say at all *about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. No, we’re all one thing that suffers from an auto-immune problem, God allergic to itself, a dog that snarls at its own leg, a parasite excited to set up inside its own intestines.

You had best believe the future isn’t getting any cleaner; it might seem that way in certain places, though as we devise new strategies for sorting matter, like A/C and home air purifiers that just outboard entropy. All fingers plugging leaks.

It’s going to be a long day at the failing dam of entropy…

The future that I want, the only future I believe worth living in, is full of love — and love is all about relaxing boundaries. Erupting into our Italian gardens, smashing manicured taxonomies, and popping our extropian illusions of a better life beyond constraints, love is the greatest trickster that reveals distinctions in imagined unity and unifies apparent opposites, to hell with definitions; it is time for you to learn.

And that ensures the future will be positively gross, because as every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

Someday all you hate will lose its charge within a greater truth — which, in a way, is even worse than knowing it will just persist. No: it becomes a part of you, and therefore worthy of your love; you learn to dig the things you feared; your brain adapts to shifting norms; we really are remarkable in our plasticity, and you’ll regard you-reading-now as hopelessly naïve, and small, and understandable, for all your ignorances are enshrined and glow within as relics of the origin of that more terrible and beautiful, awake and all-embracing thing you are.

A timeline long enough might bring us all together, cop and criminal, to fold within as saints within cupolas of the all-cathedral we become — but that’s precisely Borg enough to gross most living humans out completely. And they aren’t wrong — Lucifer is all about that unity, erotic transformation, liberation from the prison of the body and biography, all-wanting, all-consuming. Asking for this cosmic love to manifest in time requires sacrificing everything dear.

What happens when you try to reconcile the human and divine. (Myth Source. Image Source.)

But wait. Back up. Because it all sounds overwhelming, but in practice these invasions, miracles, transgressions come to culture as seduction, as convenience, as entertainment. All of this is motivated by a pure-enough desire: the urge to merge; the drive for intimacy; longing; romance. Fiber optic cables stretch across the ocean floor like reaching tentacles, desiring a connection. Satellites spray into orbit just like coral launching sperm beneath the Full Moon, all of Earth a reef in Sagan’s “Cosmic Ocean.” Every new-model phone is faster, higher-bandwidth, because language doesn’t cut it; we would like to really “Reach Out And Touch Someone.”

The beginnings of a legit secular cosmogeny, c/o Gen X snark. (Image Source: Duke University.)

The only way that’s going to happen is by actually happening, a congress of anatomy and not just copied/integrated data sets. We will not trade the flesh for the empyrean completely, cuz the flesh is higher resolution. Matter matters. It’s agape: yearning to embrace it all. It’s tantric, stretching until map and territory overlap completely, sync, and disappear into each other, the mysterious terrain of our entirely embodied consciousness transcendent nonetheless. It Just Makes Sense!

To know, to be, to love the world entirely — that core eroticism’s fundamental to all entities that reproduce with sex. Delicious otherness? The Best! So why would we not try to take this to its logical conclusion and tilt history towards being everyone in bed? Both lovers knowing both sides of the mess.

The tools that let us feel (key word, exciting epicurean desire, restoring sensuous delight to the position of prime motivator for the evolutionary process, every mating act an act of agency, experienced) — those tools will charge with magical significance to the extent they let us out of our own self-constructed selves, the envelope or Hell or temple of our isolation, and connect. This really all boils down to that same need to share — a sunset or a peach, a great idea, a bed — and phones just do not do this (well enough) yet.

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

“The future is here already; it’s just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson

Long before the first amphibian crawled out to lay our modern mythological foundation, our ancestor – some lobe-finned fish – had stubby little feet it used to cling to rocks in shallow water. The good idea of what we now call “hands” lay there unnoticed, latent, till the moment that the pool dried up and (we are told) fate benefited fish with feet, fish that could waddle back into their brackish lakes (which as a site for Epic Moments in Life History are far more likely than the sea, since estuaries offer such a trove of coves as evolutionary testbeds). All the pieces were already there, just waiting for sufficiently large waves to roll up and away, remixing them.

A prehistoric remix. “Tiktaalik roseae” by John Conway. (More on Tiktaalik here.)

The hand is thus an “exaptation”(noun) – which is to say, it is the anatomical (/behavioral) result of “exaptation” (verb), which is when evolution redeploys a trait for uses other than those it originally served.Because it only acts on what’s available, it follows: functions follow form (until we act on form intentionally – more on that in a moment).

This concept, “exaptation” (both the process and its products), yields a major revelation: that mutations do not have a single source, or meaning. All mutations find their use in their repurposing. Life’s major transformations, all the punctuation marks of evolutionary history, take place when innovations migrate from one continent, or category, to another. The “irreducible complexity” of living systems, even simple cells, is not the evidence of an intelligent designer; features of immense complexity, like eyes, can be an aggregate of simpler traits that happened for their own distinct and prior reasons.

Emergent complexity from exapted parts. The keychain’s “fossil” won’t suggest the coin’s past life as currency. (Via.)

Those “reasons” are themselves complex, webbed, myriad, unfathomable, irreducible. The pigments in your retinas did not exist at first to help you form an image; there are other reasons – such as UV shield, or metabolic aid, or camouflage – that life produced the range of colors we observe (and many that we don’t) in other lineages. In vertebrates, at least, some speculate selection favored photopigments, and the neural wiring needed to perceive their colors, as flicker minimizers before anybody figured out that they were good for parsing spectra. (Not to mention, color vision atrophied and then rebooted, and how did we rediscover colors we had lost?)

Samely, wings did not suddenly appear on birds as flesh and bone from nothing, but suggest a kind of synergistic merger, of their elongated scales “for” showing off and elongated arms “for” grabbing bugs and climbing trees. (But those utilities were *improvised *before they were repeated, and then improvised again in every dino-bird that rediscovered – for example – feathers gather the attention of the other sex.)

Again, and earlier: the dazzlingly intricate machinery of nucleated cells and all their busy organelles emerged from tightly interwoven ecosystems of *relationships *between much simpler micro-organisms that combined like Voltron to dissolve their paradox of conflict and acquire new faculties, a new identity appearing at the interference pattern in between their smaller needs and capabilities.

Basically, this is how evolution works.

In every case, selection acts on what’s already there.

(And often more than once. It is the case that good ideas occur in many places simultaneously — just like evolutionary theory did, to the surprise of both the men who independently discovered it, the unsung visionary Alfred Russel Wallace and co-author Charles Darwin. It seems increasingly believable that birds evolved flight several times, and living species represent the one surviving line; it seems more more probable with every publication on the origins of life that it could have emerged on early Earth, been wiped out, then emerged again; and even if it spoils our myth, it’s true that many diferent types of fish “attempted” life on land at once, about 400 million years ago when “fish with feet” was “bleeding edge.” It’s like the rude awakening of learning that the next-school-over’s kids all look and dress exactly like your friends and that you’re automatically fulfilling some invisible self-organizing social molecule. As Parahamsa Yogananda said, “Environment is stronger than will.” Convergent evolution is the natural outcome of the same ingredients at work within the same environments and forces. We are chemistry, however noble.)

Three vertebrates answer the question of aquatic living. For fins, “Just add water.”Art by Victor Leshyk.

Most scientists today would differentiate an exaptation from a *normal *adaptation, like the latter’s a direct “response” to the environment, the former the “co-opting” of a trait originally shaped to suit some other situation. This was how Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba originally meant it. This is silliness. Of course the origins of traits won’t necessarily be obvious in those traits’ later functions. But for evolutionary theory to stay true to its own axioms, then none of it’s anticipated, none of it is purposeful, and none of it (until we started screwing with the process) was a conscious and intentional adjustment of an organism to its changing set of circumstances. Everything just happens. Fitness is determined once a thing exists. No evolution by informed consent. The possibilities of novel traits can’t be predicted, only excavated piecemeal once they’re in the world, interacting. Every interaction changes the environment, so every trait exists before, and makes, the world in which its fitness must be tested. Every trait co-opts the pieces of the prior plays and finds new use for them in an environment it cannot help but alter. There is no original or final function; every adaptation is an exaptation. (Daniel Dennett said this first.)

That means that we will not find Eden in the past or future. By scattering our psychomorphic bias of “Intelligent Design” into the vastly more believable (because empirically supported) Wood Wide Web and Gaian atmospheric regulation, we bestow decentralized “designoid” agency to Earth itself, admitting that it’s smart enough to improvise, if not to plan ahead. (As such, no body planned the head, which we can call, poetically, an afterthought.) Our era is in part defined by this expanding of the definition of “intelligence,” projecting the Anthropocene back into a new past in which life is always acting on itself, there was never “nature” as a thing apart from “culture,” and the notion of a “virgin forest” is ridiculous. If we learn to see the planet in this way, we lose our dream of privilege and come awake to just how smart and busy everything already is.

Left: The World Wide Web. Right: The “Wood Wide Web.” (From my presentation, “Tech Ethics as Psychedelic Parenting.”)

Being the most intentional participants in evolution doesn’t mean that we’re the smartest, and it certainly does not set us apart from other life. Language as a means of horizontal information transfer isn’t even new; it reinvents the promiscuity of genes among bacteria, exchange of modular identity among the simplest and least-constrained varieties of life. By keeping DNA within the nucleus, our complex cells lost most of their ability to benefit from “prehistoric p2p” like this. So sex evolved. We had to find a way to shake it up.

Which brings us back to exaptation: it’s the law, because recombination is the way to maximize your options in the great entropic game called “making use of all available resources.” Life’s modus operandi might be summarized as: “Fill All Niches.” This invites a strategy – call it a meta-adaptation – favoring what Stanford’s d.school guru David Kelley calls “fail fast.” Try everything as fast as possible. Try sex instead of cloning your genetics endlessly and waiting on the right mutation. Then try language so you can communicate a new experience before your listener has had that same experience. (It’s easier than coming up with and remembering new words for every damn new thing, as Martin Nowak pointed out in his work on the origins of syntax.) “Try Exaptation!” to profoundly multiply the possibilities of creature-multiplied-by-landscape, every combination one of countless parallel solutions to the question of survival.

You might even say that evolution only *is *because the universe would “like” to find a way to dissipate itself as inefficiently as possible.

And so it is that exaptation’s everywhere we look. Offering their masters up for remixing, producers let new life into their music, leaving many “offspring” (mixes) more than used to be the case for songs with only one definitive recording. And the catchier the tune, the more alluring it will be to pollinators, gathering attention, leaving strains of melody in memory that then go on to fertilize the ears of someone else.

On how flowers and pollinators collaborated to create what we know as “beauty.” (Watch more of my videos on YouTube..)

Ideas, like flowers, we did not invent; we just discovered and remixed them. Almost every major scientific revolution seems to come from someone outside the domain of their discovery’s accepted expertise, a person whose beginner’s eyes can see new meanings in the data. “When all you have’s a hammer, everything’s a nail”…until, you learn to see the hammer as an open-ended thing-becoming-process, a protuberance of the original, expanding, and ongoing gesture of the cosmos. Then it is an instrument of Art, an invitation into sacred Mystery, and more.

The deepest advertisement ever? (Via.)

The lesson here is in approaching puzzles with the fullest understanding of our resources. It’s equally as true in human innovation as it is in the diffuse cognition of the planet: start with what you have. Start from “facts at hand” – beginning with the hand that you employ right now, to grip that stable and familiar idea, “the hand”…perhaps it can be used to get around on new terrain?

Every future’s laying all about in parts, apparent only to perceptive pattern-recognizers who can hack the game to generate new plays .The reason Thomas Edison was not the first, but number 23, to file a patent for the light bulb, is because the world was “ready for it.” He just made it market ready. The Fourier Transform was not conceived at first to help with switching data packets, any more than phones were made for hitching rides and storing payment information…but everything will find new life in new surroundings, as convergent forces pull the opportunity and need into alignment.

Every move we make, then, we’re remixed. By standing on the shoulders of our ancestors (or, literally, mountains of their fossils), we reach new fruit on higher branches of the Tree of Knowledge. But the higher that we stand upon this mound of bones, the more that we consume and learn, the more we notice usefulness in everything around us. Some define intelligence as raw resourcefulness; if play is deep enough, we never settle on our definitions, and intelligence explodes as all the cosmos saturates with Purpose.

So break out of the way you think about your tools, or even what you qualify as “tools.”

Everything’s technology; Everything can be remixed; Nothing new exists except new combinations; And among the precious few things we can say with certainty is this: The future is exapted.

All of it lives already in some latent form. If, as the Chinese say, our duty is to “let a hundred flowers bloom,” then all 100 of them are now folded in their buds awaiting that white ray of inspiration to invite them open.

Take a look around you. Take a look within you. (Who looks?) Everything you notice is an instrument for forces you can’t comprehend, achieving something that will be opaque to you forever…but perhaps your inquiry will coax one petal from its grip. If you approach your life with ample curiosity and don’t believe the word “just” (as in “only”) when it rises in you, you will find a hidden life and purpose — sometimes many — in the boring and forgotten things.

Take every work of art and turn it upside down. Play every instrument the wrong way. Lovemaking — like its maker, evolution — thrives on inefficiency and bad ideas. Make love to life by wondering if maybe you already have the tools you need to venture to that far horizon.

The only poverty we have, collectively, is of imagination. Develop yours and watch the world transform.

Pre/Post Script:

“Every creative act includes a moment of decision, a deliberate projection of function and meaning onto the artist’s environment. When I pick up my guitar and play, I’m agreeing that this is an instrument, that this is a guitar, that I play the guitar, and that I play the guitar in some specific way. That this is what it’s ‘for.’ But there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to express itself through the functional relationship between a human being and a guitar…it is restorative and inspiring to know that we are capable of exapting our world to the meaning and purpose we see for it now.” – Michael Garfield, “Exaptation of the Guitar” (2008)

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

One more thing that we can say for sure about the future: it is both true and false. My senior year of college, in an animal communication seminar that nudged out foreign language training — casting once again my sights too far, perhaps, and missing trees for forests — I learned that lies will never go away entirely, as they’re an “evolutionarily stable strategy” (or ESS). An ESS, to get game theoretical about it, is a viable approach to play the game of living long enough to reproduce, in given systems, such that new mutations can’t disrupt the balance or invalidate the strategy. It is the stable basin of attraction round which all contingency unfurls and whirls, like stable ratios of predators to prey depending on metabolism, or the shape of wings evolved to suit specific flying gaits. The parts may change; the pattern stays the same (with variations).

The classic situation is the endless “hawks and doves” dispute, in which opposing tendencies toward war and peace reach equilibrium in fluid fractions. There will always be some balance, in which bellicose and peaceful personalities exist in right proportion as the aspects of a meta-peace — dynamic, turbulent, disrupted, yes, but meta-stable. Peace within which war exists in perfect portion. Alive and held in tension, like a runner’s leg. The muscles don’t accomplish anything if they don’t pull in opposite directions.

The ESS is why we’ll never be completely rid of cults, for minds and cultures also follow evolutionary patterns, and a cult is often quite a fine idea when faced with the realities of mystery and power. (We forget that. We don’t intervene in cultish thoughts when we’re in the bubble of the cult itself, or notice how they’re just a reflex action of the brain while being human. Hopefully at least a few of “us,” whatever that means, do this on the regular in distant futures, catching fictions in the making, turning intellect upon itself to weave a platform for the spirit of the age to anchor even deeper and the World Soul to recognize itself in many bodies…)

The ESS is why we’ll never be completely rid of lies. The lie is so sustainable because it’s so ephemeral. It is so easy, cheap, and quick to lie, on average, it cannot not be. A truth implies a lie. Communication’s based entirely upon the pretense, the agreement, of our signs, and thus upon the risk of our deceit. We trust that words communicate the truth more often than they don’t, because they do; and if we notice signs transforming in their meaning, then we all adapt. So nothing can remain a lie forever; misinforming signals ultimately bend to irony, as villagers begin to notice that when boys cry “WOLF!” it doesn’t mean that there’s a wolf. Lies die or they evolve to serve the signal they were made to thwart; but lying is forever, since communication makes a trust surplus that life can’t possibly resist exploiting.

An ESS exists in an ecology, not in a vacuum, and members of a population (e.g., the hawks and doves above) assume opposing stable strategies that complement each other, but tend to make both sides seem crazy to each other. The liars and the cheats think straights are fools for buying it, and those of us excluded from the play of falsehood by our oath to truth all seem to loathe or envy criminals for not abiding by the social contract. But actually, the contract is with physics, as it happens that the ESS for maximizing entropy in dissipative structures, like the USA, is more of everything, including both sincere attempts at intimacy and disinformation of the kind that all of us now take for granted.

Lying will persist as long as there are lines to cross, as long as there are others to communicate with. So you cannot really say and mean that lies are fully false; for each of them contains the truth, reflects it, and says yet more about the hidden mind that models and presents such falsehoods. (You can, but then you would be lying to your self, aware of it, and holding both perspectives from opposing banks across an oxbow of your fractal subjectivity, and only ritually “siding” with one view to immanentize and involve and push-against, cuz God gets bored, so what?)

Our trans-ironic (or is it merely post-ironic?) present is the greatest indicator that the future will be true and false: when jet fuel will not melt steel beams, but did; and when rebooting Cosmos means rewriting scientific history; and when our daily life’s a perfect sphere of equal and opposing experts telling us that cell phone radiation does and doesn’t give us cancer, fracking does and doesn’t lead to earthquakes, that we have and haven’t met ET…then everyday existence is a chance to watch the paradigm shifts in real-time, as our competing explanations for the most complete but parsimonious description of experience appear both outwardly, as scientists and priests, and inwardly, as myths and theories. Incumbents versus young bucks, precious selves and hallowed old traditions versus the implausible, impractical, or even imperceptible…just don’t believe what all you think. (Or do; because although the virtuality of private intuitions versus common objects of consensus shows a gradient of being, curving from what “isn’t” to what “could be” to what “is,” consensus could itself be just hallucination, and you have to be okay with that. It’s all a little dreamy, really.)

As we become transparent to the information processing from which our selves and stances grow like automatic daisies in the field, the simple and traditional “true/false” no longer cuts it. At this depth we can’t even say for sure what “it” is that needs cutting, so we waste less time on clashing certainties against the shore of other truths (truths just as vulnerable to essential doubt), and get on with the business of a practical, provisional, and hypothetical relationship to Being.

As every question answered generates more questions, and the shores of the unknown climb up an asymptote approaching infinite unknowability, our most authentic scientists and priests will drop the pretense and embrace their former foes as fellow seekers. We’ll get more comfortable with the dynamism, turbulence, and transformation of a digital society (dispersed in cloud computing, wireless networks, peer-to-peer instruction, horizontal gene transfer, the blockchain, and our always-split attention) as it melts whatever solid ideologies we stand upon, until we’re back to swimming in a fluid network — fish again, or maybe playful squid with flashing colors, ready for the Mystery to take us all to school.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then…I contain multitudes.” – Walt Whitman

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

“Sexual selection would appear to be a search engine for [compression algorithms] in the implicate order, an ecstatic browsing for patterns that will increase the capacity of any system to produce ever greater amounts of entropy.” – Richard Doyle

If you plan to live in the future, you have failed already: one of its defining traits is that it’s unpredictable. We don’t need a technological event horizon for this to be true (but they are actually quite frequent). The real Singularity that Church of Kurzweil devotees displace into the fruiting moment of today’s still-juvenile Ecology of Stuff — that sharp discontinuity between what is and what can’t be imagined, lives right now and always now, and we’re inside it. It’s the canopy of stars we pierce when we embody old alchemical engravings, poking our explorers’ heads out through the sky-as-limit-of-the-known. It is the Bardo of Tibetan mysticism, that chaotic space between our incarnations in which everything occurs at once — and every moment is the Bardo, since our lives are tunnels made of gates, and every day’s a new year. Every moment’s an inflection point between the end and the beginning of innumerable stories flowing in all possible directions. (If you don’t agree, just sit and listen long enough, and evidence will come.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Day That Changes Everything is that we’re swimming in it all the time. If some Omega Point in hyperspace, the Eschaton that waits for us at history’s end, draws all mundane phenomena into its all-embracing unity, we’re implicated in that vast conspiracy already. We can celebrate. But particles apparently pop in and out of being all the time, each moment a Creation. All of it occurs at once, a party more than a parade. So point me to “the” Singularity, again?

That said, the future seems to have a character that holds up to the deconstruction of our histories: it’s more of everything. Defining time as the apparent movement of relationships between entangled objects — space as measure of entanglement — “time’s arrow” points to greater entropy, an isotropic, isomorphic cosmos in which every game’s been played and all can come to rest at last. But en route to that final moment, entropy-as-evolution seeks the best-fit path to oceanic stillness, and contrives the paradox of order-as-a-means-to-emptiness: the metabolic flurry of our intricate ecologies, no niche unoccupied, the fractal map of river deltas fitting neatly over our phylogenies and food webs. Winding tributaries and the “tangled bank” of Darwin’s evolutionary wilderness take shape as the inevitable system-seeking-rest, its filaments forever reaching from the trauma of explosive origins to grasp at peace in full and evenly distributed disorder.

Every action has its equal, opposite reaction, though. The liberating “march of progress,” Eros constantly transcending limitation by devising and inhabiting more brilliant and adaptable new bodies, is actually the very definition of conservative: the conservation of momentum, energy, and information as the cosmos rearranges its components to achieve a quicker peace by “stepping on the gas” and dissipating everything more rapidly. The answer to the ever-loving question of how order comes from chaos is that order is just *more efficient chaos — *an accomplice, not an adversary. Every tidied desk results in larger landfills; every landfill is a mine awaiting artificially intelligent trash harvesters; the ecosystem that matures to weave together DNA and carbon nanotubule microprocessors in an Anthropocene beyond the over-simple categories “man” and “nature” is itself one giant dissipative structure, functioning as an excretive organ of the Sun as it assists in the accelerated burnoff of the Big Bang.

So: two things collide to make a third. The third thing causes a more intricate relationship between the now-three things that make a fourth. Each novel species founds new niches that are filled as soon as luck mutates a nearby organism up the slope of fitness to become a key to fit the lock. The whole thing drives itself, the ever-deepening complexity of Gaia just a crystal growing in solution, ratcheting on up the double helix, just the natural consequence of radiating heat.

(Intelligence is implicated in this: more complex environments create the need for teams of “individuals” to form and endosymbiotically enfold their members into larger creatures — smarter creatures that have more sophisticated needs and new dependencies — and these conditions favor more diverse and intricate societies, which count toward the increasing intricacy of the whole ecology, which favors teamwork as a strategy, and on we go until the Internet appears to link each nucleus of nation-state and corporation into one great planetwide amoeba, and beyond, our pseudopods already reaching into extraplanetary space…)

And so it is that evolution tilts the narrative toward more of everything. We didn’t leave bacteria behind when we got into bigger, and then bigger, huddles and grew tissues, organs, spines, societies; we made a hundred billion previously undreamed jobs for germs to do. It was (and is, in that eternal and apocalyptic light infusing all of time) a transmutation of the flesh: the simple taken up into the great complexity of something both ineffable and vast, and unimaginably generous. No evolutionary layer left behind, each one the platform for and beneficiary of the next. And when we fuse with our machines completely, we will not render humankind extinct; but will explode in our diversity to offer every variation possible upon the theme of “human,” most of which do not exist today.

The permeable membrane of the atmosphere, so wider than the borders of our nations, just as they were wider than the walls of cities, means a bigger social body, made of far more kinds of people, than were necessary to sustain the spirit of a fatherland or motherland. When cities came they made us all a little dumber, as they made us smarter — specialists in pottery or farming or religion lose a little bit of each as far as knowledge was, before, connected through and through to everything, and pottery was farming and religion, all of it one motion, not the purview of an educated expert. (Presumably, and likewise, DNA was once more flexible than it is now, more potent but less realized, far less speciose.) Now, we have so many kinds of jobs, they do not all have names, so myriad are human economic functions; and when our society has stabilized to know itself at global levels as a day-to-day sensation of each local human life, our tasks will be so fluid, numerous, and partial that we will have moved beyond the modern experts in both hyper-specialization and increased awareness of how miniscule our knowledge is to that of the entire Commons. Each of us will be so much more, such empowered emanations of the Biosphere, and so much less, tiny in the corner of our wide experience, compared to egocentric ancestors with relatively static “jobs” and personal identities. Eventually we will take new bodies with each thought, the epistemic line erased between the-generation-as-experiment by blind selection forces and the-metamorphic-flesh-as-proposition by machinery of spirit, assuming selves to take on certain tasks. The arrow is toward more life, more apparent choice, more radiant and dangerous diversity — all hung together, maddest-ever symphony, admired all at once.

This order, which we organize and make explicit, the “invisible environment” of the cosmos’s distributed intelligence as manifested in the Biosphere’s webwork of thoughts-as-species, is already “out there” waiting to be recognized and drawn down from the heavens (metaphorically). That is one way the Singularity is here already — it hasn’t gathered, coalesced, and focused into history yet, but all of it already lies in wait, the Eschaton at history’s end impressing every moment with its tugging yearning, showing itself to us in and as a universe compelled to speak.

And it can be no other way. The game was rigged “from the beginning,” which here means the origin beyond the Alpha and Omega, not “t = 0” but the architecture of the vacuum, in which past and future happen simultaneously, and the end and the beginning codetermine which of all nows swaddles us between. We are a path drawn from all possibilities, the likeliest of pasts and futures shaking hands to meet as now, and that’s why we get so confused about causality — because we haven’t caught our talk of time up to the networked and nonlinear epistemology of ecological, electric modern thinking.

That’s the essence of “time’s arrow” — echoing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the narrative that our spacetime-projecting minds derive from pure unboxed experience in light of our best scientific work, the best-fit story to survive in this World-Wide-Webbed age is this: time moves from Singularity to “Intertwingularity,” and all the while The Great Perfection is and isn’t waiting round the bend for us.

The evolution of self-organizing parts to weave together an Omega Point that wakes up to itself at every level is the equal, opposite momentum to the involution of the already-and-always order ever seeking novel ways to manifest in form, not just potential. Nothing new exists, except new ways of saying it — the future is a dream we apprehend as best our tiny mammal bodies can, the poetry precipitating out of Holographic All to shape and wag our tongues and typing fingers. And as we approach the Eschaton to recognize it as the Self we’ve been this whole time, categories like “new” and “familiar” explode beneath the weight of our original experience, the only thing that ever was, as it unweaves and weaves us and our grand predictions.

So, in short: in some sense it is hard to be completely wrong about the future, if you say, “This thing will be remembered and repeated in some way.” A universe in which all possibilities occur is more entropic, thus more likely. And that makes the only certain thing that we can say about the future, that it is. (And also isn’t.)

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.

What we call “the future” isn’t something out there to be held. It’s an idea that varies drastically between us, and between each one of us one moment to the next. A better way of thinking of the future than as though it’s some approaching comet is to think of it as our horizon to the “West” of now, a moving point of reference that everyone sees differently, depending on where we are standing. Consequently, most of what we call “the future” tells us more about where we are now than where we’re headed. Things are never all that clear from far away, and there’s no guarantee we’re moving toward that point and not some other.

So when the futurists, the real ones, speak of “futures,” what they mean is that there are a myriad of points along that far horizon, and that it makes better sense to talk about the future as a spectrum of potentials than as if it were the preordained and manifested destiny the corporations and the prophets want us to believe.

I have this thing about imagining the landscape of experience in geographic metaphor (example: I just caught myself describing the lump sum of everything we know in life as “landscape”). Our human memories grew out of neural networks that help orient an animal to landmarks (ironically, originally “watermarks,” as this was going down in ancient oceans) — so it’s no surprise that math explores the n-dimensional, or that most human cultures think of “future” as a thing in front and “past” as something back behind us. We don’t visualize time the way we visualize space, unless you’re with me in the radical perspective that time and space are somewhat meaninglessly differentiated, time is space and space is time, and calendars are close-to-accurate reflections of the way time spreads invisibly across the warp and woof of hyperspace.

(I recently discovered that I’m one of 1-in-50 people that has “time-space synesthesia” and reflexively, habitually sees the year in some consistent pattern in my mind’s eye. I am always standing on a giant ring, December/January at the 12 o’clock divide, July and August there at 6 o’clock, and as I write this now I’m moving counterclockwise through the year somewhere around 1:30, since it’s 17 November. This 3D projection doesn’t handle multiverses, parallel dimensions, linear progression, any of that — it’s an idiosyncratic system, opposite of how I learned to read a clock, but totally persistent. This is how I store my recollections: looking up or down the ring, the annum, not exactly a mnemonic “memory palace” but nonetheless a spatial system for organizing and referencing experience. I was not at all surprised to learn the hippocampus grew from some fish proto-GPS.)

When I attempt to visualize “the future” as I learned to think of it in childhood, I see the image of a silvery, metallic, shifting sphere — presumably, the boundary of some 4D portal casting shadows into the mere three dimensions that my pitiable primate eyes can see. Whether this is my enculturated mind presenting something physics experts tell me is the probable appearance of a window into other times; or whether it’s a genuine prophetic third-eye vision of the portal through which we can gaze at all of our innumerable futures; or it’s allegory and the image represents the Noöspheric nanotech that wraps our planet in a skin of thinking mercury; or I am actually observing my own body from the point of view of someone living in the future, someone who has cybernetic eyes and sees the spherical magnetic field projected by my heart, I do not know. Perhaps it’s all of these.

Perhaps that is the point: that our above/below and inner/outer dyads do not serve us in “the future” and the meaning of this image is that time tends toward holistic, holographic, fractal, and recursive incarnations. That the evolutionary arc defined by entropy assembling organisms as a means for moving energy effectively through space results in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” indeed, but that it is already so, the One Thing That We All Already Are just organizing its internal organs to present an ever-clearer and more luminous arrangement on one side, and that’s why New Jerusalem appears in revelations of the “end of time” and our Big Bang mythology so closely imitates the scene of Hell. That all of this is happening at once (that’s what the current state of science seems to tell us, anyhow) and all the psychonautic maps of glass chrysanthemums and god’s-eyes, portals and glass onions, are the intuitions of this universal truth: that we are wound up hyperspherically, precipitating in a giant goldfish bowl with all the other stars and interstellar dust, which we observe as if it were a string of pearls, one moment to the next, but really it’s the whole damn thing at once, a party more precisely than a great parade.

This is why I think that “future equals East, past equals West” when I imagine time along the spinning axis of a shape I only dimly grasp, which simultaneously is the world outside and also me, my eyes the fire projecting shadows of imagination on the cave walls of my unborn and undying consciousness.

“The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun…” – William Blake

From How To Live in The Future, an ongoing series. Read Part 1: The Future Is A Place, Part 2: The Future Is More Of Everything, Part 3: The Future Is Both True & False, Part 4: The Future Is Exapted/Remixed, Part 5: The Future Is \Redacted\ Part 6: The Future Is Disgusting, Part 7: The Future Acts Like You, Part 8: The Future Is Indistinguishable From Magic

Michael Garfield is a paleontologist-futurist exploring the intersections of complex systems science, weird philosophy, deep history, and creative meta-disciplinarity. He hosts Future Fossils Podcast and the Santa Fe Institute’s Complexity Podcast when he’s not writing, making art and music, and helping raise two kids.

Follow him on Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, and YouTube.

Become a Patreon supporter for the Future Fossils book club, dozens of exclusive podcast episodes, new art and music, and the sheer joy of it.