Michael Garfield

This is not even Peak 2026

An open invite to anyone keen on "rewilding the future" — my good friends at Weirdosphere.org have granted permission to open the first lecture from my upcoming course, How To Live In The Future, to the public! RSVP here to join us on Tuesday night (5 pm PDT):
https://lu.ma/d28z1rlf

An Intro to "How To Live In The Future" with Michael Garfield @ Weirdosphere · Zoom · Luma Thanks to the generosity of the my admins at Weirdosphere.org, we're making the first talk from my five-week course, "How To Live In The Future: Views from the…

Aishwarya Khanduja on Living Inquiry & Fostering Imagination (Humans On The Loop Ep. 13) Show notes & transcript at: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-13Support Humans On The Loop: https://every.org/humansontheloop

I just read Micro while laid out with a fever. The timing was perfect for meditating on the horrors of the very small...nothing like having one’s body hijacked by invisible replicators to prime you for thinking about how to human-scale mesocosm depends entirely on forces both bigger and smaller than we are evolutionarily prepared to observe or address.

It's a book that says the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud. But maybe it's an artifact of scaling...

🕷️ Terror & Wonder Above & Below: Michael Crichton & Richard Preston's Micro A book that says the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud. But maybe it's an artifact of scaling...

🧬🕰️⚗️ 228 - William Sarill on Intuition in Science & The Physics of Philip K. Dick

This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its paradoxical profundities. He can also boast personal friendships with two of the greatest (and somewhat diametrically opposed) science fiction authors ever: Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov.

In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD’s legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It’s time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…

✨ Mentions

Philip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton

My own edit of the wonderful conversation I just had with Tim Adalin of Voicecraft is now up on YT and elsewhere! Superbly thoughtful (if you can't tell from the cover image of us both thinking entirely too hard). Lots of good stuff in here about how ideas flow in large and small populations, how to foster innovation responsibly, how to make sure your organization doesn't just exist in order to exist...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3dPt6sL_aM

If you work in AI you can do MUCH better to inspire people to get on their boards than "Ride the wave or get wiped out" ...amygdala hijacks like this take the discussion in the diametrically opposite direction, away from curiosity and play and learning and into fear and competitive thinking, which feeds into the LMs and gives us precisely the results you don't want.

Talk about our unprecedented opportunity for discovery and empowerment. Talk about the need to recruit everyone into training the next regulatory layer for positive-sum biospheric stewardship. Talk about how this makes it easier to find work you love and doing it well with people you get along with in service of something that really matters to you.

I have zero reason to trust someone who tells me "This is how it is and if you disagree you're doomed" and every reason to stop and listen to someone who tells me "I chose to devote myself to this because I believe in a story of a more beautiful world and here's the story and you can help us write it".

🧵 Yesterday NPR Planet Money asked why 2024 saw such a precipitous collapse in music festivals around the world. They draw a line to post-COVID social awkwardness, to a decline in Dionysian themes in younger lifestyles, in the prominence of streaming, in the consolidation of ticketing platforms...

I worked in festivals for over a decade and saw this coming even before the pandemic. It was as obvious as an upcoming break in a dance beat. Last January, frustrated with the growing homogenization of lineups (autocorrelation is a well-studied sign of impending collapse) I wrote a piece on how the coming collapse of the festival could be linked to The Age of Big Budget Franchises in Hollywood, the dominance of incremental innovation and prestige maintenance in scientific research, the decline of IRL scenes and subcultures, dropping fertility rates and homeownership in the Modern West, and the definition of the global village by winner-takes-all games that suck the life out of various commons.

What I'm saying is, none of this should come as a surprise, nor is it unique to entertainment (although to see the festival as a liminal space for the exploration of identity and the formation of new tastes and relationships evaporate into cutthroat market consolidation dynamics as it becomes overexposed to profit-seeking plays is especially tragic).

More in the comments:

Helping people dream better lives upstream from all other value. As Terence McKenna and Bucky Fuller both observed, the only real poverty we suffer (speaking about humans as a collective, not individuals) is a poverty of the imagination..which is why art and philosophy are both prerequisite to market activity and regulation and also, tragically challenging to fund. We can't formalize the measures for something before we know how to think about it.

This is why I've decided to take (at least) a year helping nurture discourse about agency in the age of automation and why we use technology (including language and money) in the first place.

⚠️ To put this in more grounded language:

I would say 90% of the conversations I've had this year have been about How technical details of accomplishing some task get more attention than they deserve, and understanding the underlying motivation gets far less than it should.

Another way of putting this, which is why I quit my job at an AI startup to focus on culture building and metacognitive advisory work is that no one is having any trouble funding new technologies but relatively few people are paying any attention to or spending any money on WHY we are using any given technology in the first place.

This puts your and your organization in an immensely vulnerable position and makes you easy. prey for exploitative consulting, coaching, and product sales strategies. If I have one piece of unsolicited advice I feel can yield the most value to nearly everyone who might read this, it would be that people can't tell you what you want if you truly understand why you want what you want.

This has enormous downstream repercussions, because in the 21st Century an industry that can convince people everyone needs what they're selling is leaving its imprint on the fossil record. You may not actually need it, but they're going to convince you you do, and if you multiply that by a billion people then all of us were just complicit due to our intellectual laziness and emotional unawareness in the destruction of entire ecosystems and cultures.

Know who you are, know what you really need, know where your desires come from, and you are going to be the most content and powerful person in the room.

Or you can let "Silicon Valley reinvent the bus again" and spend all your time worrying about how to use tools you don't actually need to use.

Your call.

⚛️ Here are the six dimensions I'm exploring with Humans On The Loop:

🤝 Informed Consent

How can we make “the right” decisions when perfect knowledge is impossible? Are there even such things as “right” decisions, or must we accept that every choice we make is provisional and subject to revision? How can we afford the cost of never settling our minds amidst an ever-changing world? How can we ensure that “more power” means — perhaps counterintuitively — “less violence”?

🕹️ Addiction/Gaming

It’s easier to do things when they’re fun…but it’s also easier to get people to do what you want when you hijack their reward systems. Convenience is the first addiction that lies upstream of every other, and making life convenient is the lazy person’s metaphysics of technology. Rivers run downhill but people stand upright; how can we resist the siren song of entropy and organize our lives to make good use of natural flows while not allowing ourselves to become their slaves?

👁️ Accountability & Oversight

Who watches the watchmen? John Perry Barlow used to say he didn’t mind transparency as long as it went both ways. Each of us is biased so if we are to wield power fairly we need checks and balances: states, markets, and civil societies (within which academia should belong) evolved to make up for each other’s deficits. But economies of scale have hollowed out the practices of human culture and replaced them with transactions calculated by opaque, unauditable forces. If you have superpowers, who do you ask to keep you honest?

🏛️ Multiscale Cognition/Regulation

You make choices based on “the adjacent possible”, the options co-determined by both bottom-up and top-down influences in a complex weave of interactions that extends into the subatomic and the cosmic. Regulation isn’t just the work of states and markets but entire ecosystems and communities and your own nervous system and the germs inside your guts. Technology enhances agency in some ways by providing leverage, but also limits agency in others by creating new complexity and unpredictable behavior. How can we govern better knowing that each choice emerges from and helps constrain a landscape of unthinkable complexity?

🪄 “Spellcasting”

Magic is code poetry and code is magickal working. In the words of John Lilly, language allows “metaprogramming the human biocomputer” — and of course this way of speaking brings some worlds into being and forecloses others. As natural language and brain-machine interfaces become default, what we say and even what we think will shape our built environments….the gap between what we imagine and our physical reality is shrinking. As “software eats the world” and (more broadly speaking) biology becomes the domain of culture, virtual environments spill out into shared spaces and it’s up to us to reimagine initiation for an age of cyborg wizards.

🤰🏼 Technology &/As Parenting

Inventors cannot predetermine how a billion users will eventually find new functions for their big ideas. Parents do not get to tell their children who to be. And when you mix both types of unpredictable creations? Time to focus more on nurture and continual revision/steering than on some insane myth of impeccable foresight or perfect parenting. Every new invention is a giant, uncontrolled experiment. If “it takes a village”, how can we solicit everyone’s participation in the work of raising the next generation well? Who’s accountable, and how can we reward caregiving better?

This series is not just the recording of a journey of discovery but an open source protocol for your own inquiries and how to make them legible to others.

If you've made it this far and see the value of this work, spread the word and say hello.