I am struck by the concept of cultural anticipations, here mentioned in High Frontiers 4 (1988) by shaman and psychonaut Terrance McKenna, as related by Thomas Rid:
The early internet was evolving fast. Yet McKenna was ahead of his time. To him, a new form of planetary connection was emerging: “Through electronic circuitry and the building of a global information system, we are essentially exteriorizing our nervous system, so that it is becoming a patina or skin around the planet,” he told High Frontiers. “And phenomena like group drug-taking and rock-and-roll concerts and this sort of thing,” he said, “these are simply cultural anticipations of this coming age of electronic-pooling-of-identity.”
Cultural anticipations! The existence of which implies the following algorithm for divining the future:
Look for new behaviours.
View those behaviours not as a phenomena in their own right, but as symptoms resultant of something else underlying and not yet in the present – either a psychological reaction against, or a pre-appropriation coping strategy toward, or some other kind of response.
Guess at what the impending something underlying is – and in this way, you discover the truth about the future.
What this method proposes is the future already exists, in some sense. Future events and future configurations of society are immanent in the world’s collective unconscious – we can’t name the future, we can’t talk about it, we can barely consciously feel it approaching, but the future is there and as real as the sluggish yet titanically unstoppable currents in the magma layer deep below the Earth’s surface.
Some people are sensitive to cultural tachyons - these particles that travel backwards through time - artists and poets and those with a certain madness - but what I like about this method is that it doesn’t rely on the individual: it’s a method of divination from dowsing the collective unconscious.
Society itself is a vast, gossamer scientific instrument to detect faint ripples from the future.
This is what has previously excited me about GPT-3. As a Large Language Model, GPT-3 was trained on a snapshot of the world’s text made in late 2019. For example, it is knowledgeless re Covid-19.
BUT:
What if there were a new GPT-3 made every 3 months? And then we looked for diffs between the models, plotting them like global weather maps? Would that reveal the telluric currents of the collective psyche? Could we use that to forecast the future?
The possibility of automating the augury algorithm!
Perhaps they are easier to recognise in retrospect.
For example: Stewart Brand’s 1966 campaign Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? (here’s Brand’s personal recollection of the campaign). Or really, the whole drive towards computing machinery and networks to think and act more powerfully and collectively, since the 1950s, and the development of the “global village”…
I read all of these as cultural anticipations of the Anthropocene, the realisation that humanity can and is acting on a planetary scale, for good and ill – but only popularly named in the year 2000, despite the fact that the whole 20th century was this slow lift of history to a rolling boil.
We’ve got the cultural tools and the perspectives we need to deal with today’s challenges (if only we use them). But somehow they were created just in time… in anticipation?
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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I am struck by the concept of cultural anticipations, here mentioned in High Frontiers 4 (1988) by shaman and psychonaut Terrance McKenna, as related by Thomas Rid:
Cultural anticipations! The existence of which implies the following algorithm for divining the future:
What this method proposes is the future already exists, in some sense. Future events and future configurations of society are immanent in the world’s collective unconscious – we can’t name the future, we can’t talk about it, we can barely consciously feel it approaching, but the future is there and as real as the sluggish yet titanically unstoppable currents in the magma layer deep below the Earth’s surface.
Some people are sensitive to cultural tachyons - these particles that travel backwards through time - artists and poets and those with a certain madness - but what I like about this method is that it doesn’t rely on the individual: it’s a method of divination from dowsing the collective unconscious.
Society itself is a vast, gossamer scientific instrument to detect faint ripples from the future.
This is what has previously excited me about GPT-3. As a Large Language Model, GPT-3 was trained on a snapshot of the world’s text made in late 2019. For example, it is knowledgeless re Covid-19.
BUT:
What if there were a new GPT-3 made every 3 months? And then we looked for diffs between the models, plotting them like global weather maps? Would that reveal the telluric currents of the collective psyche? Could we use that to forecast the future?
The possibility of automating the augury algorithm!
Perhaps they are easier to recognise in retrospect.
For example: Stewart Brand’s 1966 campaign (here’s Brand’s personal recollection of the campaign). Or really, the whole drive towards computing machinery and networks to think and act more powerfully and collectively, since the 1950s, and the development of the “global village”…
I read all of these as cultural anticipations of the Anthropocene, the realisation that humanity can and is acting on a planetary scale, for good and ill – but only popularly named in the year 2000, despite the fact that the whole 20th century was this slow lift of history to a rolling boil.
We’ve got the cultural tools and the perspectives we need to deal with today’s challenges (if only we use them). But somehow they were created just in time… in anticipation?