👁️🔄📀 214 - J.F. Martel, Phil Ford, & Megan Phipps on Weird Cybernetics: Waking Up From The Ecstasy

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Merry Christmas, Future Fossils!  This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 214 of the podcast that explores our place in time — and as demonstrated in the Dr. Who and Aliens franchises, Blade Runner 2049, and Batman Returns, Christmas is a fruitful backdrop for the pondering of big ideas — a moment in which we can see with greater clarity than usual the unity of everyday mundane humanity and transcendental cosmic matters.  In other words, perfect timing for this episode’s conversation about cybernetics and the philosophy of the weird with Megan Phipps, Phil Ford, and J.F. Martel.  

Lecturer in Media and Information at University of Amsterdam and Phd Research Fellow at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt who writes trippy and insightful papers on topics like Brian Eno, circuit bending, and surveillance capitalism.  Phil is an author and musician who teaches musicology at IU Bloomington and infuses his curricula with the profundity he has polished through years of committed Zen practice.  J.F. is an author, film-maker, and para-academic online course instructor in media studies and magick, who runs Dungeon and Dragons campaigns on the side.  Together, J.F. and Phil host the delicious Weird Studies Podcast, every episode of which triggers in me the Holy Grail of podcast affective listener programming: namely, that I wish I were in the room and part of these discussions.  Luckily, I’ve had that opportunity before, to talk about my writing on the material agency of glass in our scientific era…and both of them have been on Future Fossils also, both alone and together.  But getting all four of us on one call is a rare and precious thing — and now’s the perfect moment to rap about the emergence of the cybernetic era as a kind of numinous event in human history, a divine invasion that transfigures us and forces us to think about which boundaries *should* melt away and which should stay where evolution learned to put them.  

You see, we live in an age of multilayer networks — and when our view of humankind transmogrifies from the static image of divine forms to a fluid wash of interweaving processes, the self becomes a metamorphic fugitive and  a work of art. When everything’s connected, politics is an aesthetic act and art acquires moral force. Advanced   technologies have granted us godlike powers to reshape the world in our image…but “life finds a way” and there are always gremlins, aliens, dinosaurs, and elves lurking latent in the tidy systems diagrams. The beauty of progress necessarily conceals the ugly externalities, the entropy exported in our efforts to arrange wild nature into an image of our lost garden. 

So what does cybernetics as a way of seeing change for us in terms of how we live?  What does it mean to be human in an age of very lively, seemingly intelligent machines?    

But before we dive headlong into this recording of a conversation so good our first attempt was erased by trickster intervention, let me express my thanks to everyone who has helped me and Future Fossils through a year of (what I hope remains) extraordinary challenge. This show is weird and obstinate in its refusal of clear definition. I follow my muses where they lead me and leave these discussions and soliloquys as fossils of a process of discovery and creativity…and staying true to this defies the logic of the market, which would have us classify ourselves as tidily as possible so we are pre-chewed for the algorithms that determine whether what we make is ever noticed by those over the horizon of organic peer-to-peer suggestion networks. If you’re listening, chances are a friend told you about this show — I’d be surprised if you just found it randomly, and definitely not because a sponsor amplified it. I started Future Fossils under pressure from my friends but keep it going as a kind of Benedictine prayer.  However it might seem, it’s lonely work — but every now and then I find I’ve reached somebody where it counts, that I’ve inspired a major life change or just helped you orient yourselves amidst the wider movements of a transformation that once seemed chaotic and now seems symphonic.  That’s why I keep this going.  Every single time I check my email to discover someone else finds value in my work and shows appreciation with a Patreon, Substack, or Bandcamp sub, it makes my day and takes a little of the sting away from my ongoing balancing of kids and unemployment.  I’d like to make this work sustainable in 2024 but I’m still very far from that…so thank you, each and all, for everything you do to hel