The Technosocial Institute

Brendan Graham Dempsey joins us to talk about the explosive creative relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, and debate the approaches to art and mythology that appear in metamodern and dark renaissance thought.   Brendan can be found here 

Daniel Garner, one half of O.G. Rose, joins us to talk about ethics, Dostoevsky, walking a path between extremes, and much more besides.   

Cadell Last and Owen Cox are launching a new project in January in collaboration with Maniphesto, called The Art of Being a Man.   

Alexa Vartman is a tantra teacher and the founder of The New Tantra.   We discuss all things tantra, androgyny, orgasms, dangers on the spiritual path, and criticisms of The New Tantra.  

John Robb is an author, military analyst, entrepreneur, and writes the monthly Global Guerilla report.   In this conversation we discuss new networks of power, conflict and warfare in the information age, the emergence of the tech elite, citizens' data rights, the concept of The Long Night, blockchain and networked consensus building.   

Edwin Bywater is an engineer and author. In this conversation, we explore ideas from Edwin's book, different types of ecological consciousness, planetary desire, capitalism and attentionalism, critiques of the environmentalist movement and global power dynamics and networks.

The Alexandrian Trinity join us for an epic enquiry into metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and more.   Alexander Ebert is an American singer-songwriter, composer and philosopher. Alexander Elung is a storyteller and philosopher. Alexander Bard is a music producer, TV star and philosopher.   In this conversation we touch on emergence vectortTheory, transcendental emergentism, theories of the prima materia of the universe - spacetime, space, hypertime, compression, implicate and explicate orders, habits of nature vs. laws of nature, determinism and transdeterminism, Roger Penrose's physics, ontological design, ethics, the barred absolute, and aesthetics. 

Jean-Philippe Marceau is an editor of the Symbolic World blog and a YouTuber. His work explores symbolism and uniting religious ideas with scientific thinking.   In this conversation, we debate and discuss ways of approaching truth and universality, Christian metaphysics and Hegelian dialectics, freedom and necessity, Christ's resurrection, and religion as pragmatic instrument.   

Ole Bjerg is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Economics at Copenhagen Business School and the author of The Meaning of Being A Man.   In this conversation we discuss Heidegger and the existential task of becoming a man, "Das Mann" and the new movement of gender moralism, entering into relationship with nature as it expresses in subjectivity, cryptocurrencies and paradigms of money, Being and technology, fatherhood and abortion.   

Peter Limberg is the founder and steward of The Stoa. Peter is a friend and an earnest, balanced sensemaker in today's chaotic cultural world.    As steward of the Stoa, Peter is a respected cultural commentator, having had conversations with a vast and diverse range of powerful and insightful thinkers. He also coined the term "memetic tribes" in his celebrated medium article "Memetic Tribes and Culture War 2.0", and is a practicioner of stoicism.    In this free-flowing conversation Limberg tells us about his perspective on the culture wars, on politics, creativity, the internal daemon whose advice he follows, the relationship between parental issues and political inclinations, and the concept of virtue.  

Thomas Hamelryck is a Lecturer and Researcher at the Bioinformatics Centre at the University of Copenhagen Biocenter. His academic research interests revolve around  Machine learning, Bayesian statistics, Protein Structure Prediction, Probabilistic Programming, Deep Learning.   In this conversation, we discuss the topics of Mimetic Desire and René Girard, Nietzche, Religion and mass culture, the Internet, the spiritual practices of Tantra, Sutra, and Tribal Dynamics in the Internet age.   

Paris Cecilia Jayer and Timo Jansen are teachers and practitioners of tantra.   

In this conversation we discuss The New Tantra and their workshops, anal and vaginal de-armouring, crossdressing, practicing sex without orgasms, polyamory and jealousy, physical techniques for working with sex, sex education, NoFap, sexual shame, porn and internet culture, playing with masculine and feminine polarities and having confidence when flirting.  

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Dylan Walker is the original co-founder of Technosocial. He spent 9 months living in the Canadian wilderness during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.   We discuss Dylan's 9 months in the wilderness, technology, agriculture, ideology and civilisation, universal basic income and the Silicon Valley elite, immortality and end of history thinking, history as contraction and expansion, all-encompassing institutions like modern medicine and education, modernity's allergy to suffering, and returning death to consciousness.  

Raven Connolly is a thinker and facilitator on the Stoa. Cadell Last is a philosopher and YouTuber.  

In this episode we explore: hyperstition; the notion of "Late Capitalism", and whether it is still meaningful to speak of capitalist societal structure; the new problems of desire created by sharing economies; using reason to work through the paradoxes of bodies, and reason's limits; what reproduces itself in a post-capitalist culture; dying a good death; defeat and the present historical moment; ego, immortality and original perception; Cadell's notion of the invisible handjob of history; commodity fetishism; creative tension between objects; the impotence of human bodies; love stories and romance, and how they might look in the 21st century; new forms of storytelling; and bringing digital subcultures into the Real.   

Brent Cooper is a Political Sociologist, behind the The Abs-Tract Organization (TATO), a Metamodern Think Tank producing political theory and critique.     In this podcast we explore critiques of both Ontological Design, as explored in Technosocial by ourselves, as well as of some of the broader ideas around Metamodernism.   We speak of critique, of progressivism and about activism - through political action as well as design interventions.   Correction: The Centre Pompidou in Paris is not a train station but an arts centre (I swear I didn't mean it on purpose). Additionally, the Dutch artist and architect behind “New Babylon” is Constant Nieuwenhuys.   

Cadell Last is a philosopher and YouTuber.   In this conversation we explore: why Cadell wrote a book on sex, masculinity and God; the paradox between evolutionary theory and religious civilisation; capitalism, the collapse of religion and the explosion of sexuality; the political struggle for liberty and sex; sex as a battleground; the interplay between identity and the real of the sex drive; noopolitics and competing meme complexes; how identity constellates around memes, and how these memes are disrupted; how racial and gender struggles have replaced national and religious struggle; bringing language and knowledge to sexuality; Hegel, death and disappointment; relationships between masters and students; the Big Other and lack; Heidegger, Einstein, Being and Time; Islam, Communism and other competing universalities; the production of self creating, purely technological life; biological, cultural and technological reproduction; the prospect of a new, noological species; collapsing temporality; dialectics, division, and the trap of perfect images.  

Jasun Horsley is an author of a number of books on Hollywood and secret societies, and host of The Liminalist podcast.   

In this conversation we discuss dissociation and movies; trauma and the nervous system; parenthood and behavioral imprinting; disassociation and fostering a docile population; child sacrifice and paedophilia and its ubiquity in society; secret societies; uninstalling social programming; memes, people, groups and superorganisms; our inheritance of the technology of drama, and its (often unappreciated) power; archetypal possession; psychological operations; embracing uncertainty with regard to conspiracy; knowledge that cannot be integrated; practices for embodiment, and their commodification.  

Miguel A. Fernandez is the author of the Operative Traditions book series and an industrial engineer.   In this conversation we explore: how tools and creative disciplines shape human beings; how literacy has replaced the intelligence of other senses; the way a craftsman's nervous system fuses with his tools; Eastern traditions, why Westerners seek them, and how they have been coopted by capitalism; how ancient cosmologies cannot easily be applied in cybernetic or industrial cultures; the heroic path; knights templars and freemasons and their legacy in crafts; technique and technology; the constraint of bourgeois values; art as more than entertainment; approaching the internet as a raw material; using paradigms as materials; belonging to something greater than oneself; wholeness as the maximum expression of what is possible in the moment - as opposed to perfection; suffering, guilt and the myth of paradise; approaching power structures themselves as raw materials that can be learned from.  

Carl Hayden Smith is Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University London. His research interests include Embodied Cognition, Spatial Literacy, Perceptual Technology and Hyperhumanism. His other projects involve Context Engineering, Umwelt Hacking, Natural Media, Sensory Augmentation, Memory Palaces, Artificial Senses and Body Hacking.  In this conversation we discuss context engineering, ontological design, the brave new world of immersive and embodied technologies, our own perception of time and how psychedelics play into this.   

In this episode, we interview Professor Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, Russian political analyst and strategist, often called the most dangerous philosopher in the world.   Duginism's influence on contemporary Russian thought, geopolitics and contemporary political discourse is widely recognized. Dugin is a traditionalist, a critic of liberalism and of modernity, and a proponent of Eurasianism. He is also a prominent student of Heidegger, of the Kaballah and a Platonist; and in this interview we explore how his metaphysics fit into in the Internet age.  We also ask him about the role of creativity in geopolitics, on his relationship with Chaos Magic and  about Political Angeleology - and how different Logoi and angelic entities are engaged in a war of mind, or Noomahia, as per his own work.   We also asked him about his views on Ontological Design, and ended up exploring how modernity is actually an ancient phenomena, manifest in the Logos of Cybele and the cult of matter.   

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Raven Connolly is a thinker and facilitator on the Stoa.   In this conversation we discuss: sexual reproduction and game theory; the Egg as a philosophical concept; technology and nature; pathos, creativity and the distinction between the complex and complicated; anarchs; design; contemporary ideology and purging the "impurities" of the past; androgyny, phallus and virtual phallus; female sexuality and pathos; Onlyfans and porn; motherhood and infanticide; the collapse of civilizations; how modern women repress and detach from their fertility; pregnancy and childbirth as female initiation ritual; adolescent development, aggression and self sabotage; modern education systems and ostracism; commodification and how it produces a risk-averse populace; social and sexual conflict and the internet; the digital avatar as a new subject position; entering a creative and exploratory state.  

Scouts of the Noosphere is a weekly show where Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox explore strange forms from the depths of the internet. This episode is about Glastonbury, Hippies, magic, super/hyper-stition, and reality bubbles.   

Dan Faggella is Founder and Head of Research at Emerj and advises the UN, Interpol and global enterprises on Artificial Intelligence. He is also a former MMA coach and fighter.   

In this conversation we discuss: Lotus eaters and world eaters; digital dominance and tools for today's Napoleons; advertising and future online business models; virtual reality and novel experience; political struggle in digital space and the battle for the computational substrate; the permeability of the Western online ecosystem compared with China's; how physical power interacts with digital power; noomachia, Russia and disinformation; industry and solidarity as foundations for political and economic prowess; Vladislav Surkov's short story "without sky"; societal values and survival.   

Scouts of the Noosphere is a weekly show where Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox explore strange forms from the depths of the internet. This episode is about the recent history and future of human productive organisation.  

Meta-Nomad is the host of Hermitix podcast and a writer.  In this episode we discuss: trends that the mainstream academy follows - and that it ignores; the popularity of Marxist materialism and the obscurity of mysticism and occultism; subjective and objective ways of knowing; precognitive dreams; technocapitalism as an intelligence; collapse theory and accelerationism; genius and how ideas have people; opening self to the outside; how fantasies are immanentized as fictions, which then inspire reality; how democracy shortens human time horizons, and the implications for civilisation; virtue signalling; tokenism in contemporary culture; Junger's idea of the anarch; how capitalism recuperates attempts to change it because it thrives off unfulfilled desires; accepting defeat; nonlinear time and eschatology; purpose and meaning; avoiding hypocrisy by staring the monstrosity of humanity in the face.  

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Scouts of the Noosphere is a weekly show where Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox explore strange forms from the depths of the internet. This episode is about egregores and memetic superorganisms.   

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Chris Gabriel is the visionary behind MemeAnalysis, a YouTube channel  producing in depth analysis of popular internet memes, trends, and philosophies.   

In this conversation we explore: meme magic and symbols; digital culture, schizophrenia, and how the internet brings out the bizarre from the collective unconscious; archaic archetypes in contemporary memes; memetic lineages; Dionysian and Apollonian drives; Hassan-i-Sabbah and the idea that everything is permitted; the personal development scene; tantra and crazy wisdom; old and new gods; the Donald; sex, masculinity and society; music subculture; the castration of art in current society; will, egoists and egotists; digital sexuality; and how apps are altering the perception of young people.

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Rachel Haywire is a Cultural Futurist who recently founded Elixir Salon. She is the author of The New Art Right, and an entrepreneur with a love for VR and transgressive art. She posts frequently to her Substack, where she now holds her own private events. 

We discuss: Elixir Salons, Rachel's digital art parties, and her history of throwing events; subcultural creativity; embracing chaos while avoiding nihilism; the idea of transcending the center; aristocratic values and gravitas in artists; exodus and outsideness; rhizomes; how the supposedly decentralised internet has centralised around Twitter, Joe Rogan and other core nodes; our projects as responses to this centralisation; attention whoring and the cult of instagram influencers; philosopher queens; the cultural fetish for liberty; embodying new artistic directions.

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Moritz Bierling is an independent researcher, writer, programmer, and open source operative. In this conversation we discuss: communities and practices for developing virtue and non-exploitative relationships with self and world; faith and choice;  Peter Thiel's idea of Zero to One; becoming a Zero to One person; capitalism and alienation; operative frameworks for engineering and interfacing with reality; currencies as the grammars of cultural exchange; designing new currencies to enable new social formations; the priestly function and the barred absolute; digital monasteries as the next power concentrations in society; the prospect of AIs ruling societies, and how to adapt; the commodification of mind by technocapital; new technical interfaces for human activity; using operative frameworks to capture and optimize energy efficiency in life; genius, and the dangers of overidentifying with it; animism; oral and written communication, and the codification of language and power.

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Dan Faggella is Founder and Head of Research at Emerj and advises the UN, Interpol and global enterprises on Artificial Intelligence. He is also a former MMA coach and fighter. 

In this conversation we discuss: AI, social media and filter bubble creation; monopolies and power concentration in Big Tech; weaponisation of social media and AI, and the difficulties in defining what can be classed as weaponisation; whether digital media culture is fragmenting nations; autocults; blind spots in public understanding of AI; the rapid increase in capability of AI image manipulation, and the end of the correspondence between images and reality; the pace at which different sectors will be affected by AI; user experience and interface design; the difference between customer facing and backend AI applications, and the amount of error they can tolerate; the prospects of friendship, lovers, teachers and other social relationships being replaced by virtual versions; Dan's concepts of Lotus Eaters and World Eaters - the former numbing themselves and escaping with tech, the latter radically extending their capabilities with it.

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David Burke is a writer and critic.

In this conversation, we explore:  heavy metal as a critical response to late capitalism and industrial society; the idea of the original metalheads as dark hippies, and what metalheads have evolved into; shamanism, esotericism and occultism; lyrical explorations of death, mortality and hedonism; black metal, terrorism, fascism and the aesthetics of death and occult iconography that often inform these movements; whether metal has a coherent political or theoretical project within it; heavy metal fashion and its roots in 60s, working class and gay culture; the self-mythologisation of metal as a  reaction to postmodernity and the loss of cultural meaning; the sacred and the profane; a comparison between heavy metal and hip hop and their connections to class; the fluidity of performers and audiences within underground genres; metal concerts as postmodern shamanic circles; the Deleuzian notion of intensity as difference, and how this is reflected in metal; how heavy metal as an aesthetic of late industrialism and machinery is transposed into digital and the internet age; and how "heaviness" has become culturally canonized, and overflows into other genres and objects. 

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Justin Murphy is a political scientist and online intellectual and entrepreneur. 

In this conversation we explore: Balancing compassion and analytical coldness, and how an excessive focus on compassion hinders the contemporary radical left; how "woke capital" manipulates this aversion to analytical coldness; accelerationism and how the global market order functions as an AI; the impossibility of computing the end goals of this "AI", and how it maps onto the religious notion of God; the Christian eschatology, and the overlap between capitalism, instrumental rationality and the antichrist; alternatives to instrumental rationality (using rationality to optimise certain outcomes; efficiency); Justin's Christian faith, and the Christian focus on the truth as the fundamental ethical imperative; eschatology and the Kierkegardian "leap of faith"; the notion that modernity and exponential economic growth may have come as a result of a Faustian pact with the devil; US geopolitical hegemony and US-China relations; political responses to the coronavirus pandemic, and how the US federal government's failings might actually motivate citizens to become more creative and self reliant; social cohesion and building small, technologically sophisticated communities; reengineering humanity to adapt to digital, and the  inequalities that will open between those who experiment and adapt and those who cling to a "normal" that has disappeared.

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Gregg Henriques is a clinical psychologist and professor at The University of Madison, Virginia. This is part 2 of a 2 part discussion, in which we explore: the notion that we are living through a liminal crisis and existential responses to them - depression, anxiety, following cult leaders, and transcendent pathways; the fragmentation and polarisation of American society; the value and limits of scientific thinking; regulating sex and conflict; Gregg's CALM MO approach to psychological mindfulness, an internalised "wise elder"; Jordan Peterson, male pathos, and creating interpersonal spaces to explore and regulate it; curating a healthy, positively aligned superego; creative, pathic ways to communicate; the danger of the present moment, and the possibilities opened by digital; power games, the distinction between growth hierarchies and dominator hierarchies; ethics and pluralism; and creating teams and processes for designing new social organisations and technologies.

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Gregg Henriques is a clinical psychologist and professor at The University of Madison, Virginia. This is part 1 of a 2 part discussion, in which we explore: Gregg's idea of justification systems theory and the formation of culture; the development of the human abilities to ask "why?", to share and conceal our inner states and motivations, and to explain our position in the universe; the four emergence points of Gregg's theory, matter, life, mind and culture; the origin of religion and temple building; technologies and how they inspire the theological ideas of an age; the history of premodern, modern and postmodern justification systems; the failings of modernist humanism; Bard and Soderqvist's Syntheism, and the orientation towards digital as the new face of God.

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Alexander Bard is a philosopher and former pop star and music producer. Patrick Ryan is an AI warfare specialist. In this conversation, we explore: a diagnosis of the state and near future of technosociety, talking about AIs, pathos and the rise of a new elite; the faulty logic of the brain/body split and the idea of uploading consciousness to machines; digital religion and religion-as-technology; mimesis and crazy wisdom; the end of the human race; tribes and the shamanic caste; the infantilization of post-1945 society; the flaws with current "revolutionary" political movements and Black Lives Matter; alchemy and its value as psychohistory; the emergence of a non-cognitive ecosystem and the breakdown of the scientific method; the replacement of democracy with sensocracy; creating shamanic communities; global conflict and factions; the battle with big tech and politics for free and open algorithms; Butterfly War as a means to disrupt and destroy identity. 

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Carl H Smith is a Cyberdelics Researcher, Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University.  In this conversation we explore:

Technologies for achieving altered states; Carl’s work on cyberdelics, using technology to design and access these states; the overlap of Carl’s work on context engineering and Daniel’s on ontological design; the loss of common ground in informational society, and the dangers of ontological design technology; distinctions between posthumanism and transhumanism; the concepts of tulpas and egregores as units of thought exchange and exploration; stories of Carl’s exploration into his consciousness; perspectives of reality and mind that transcend the subject object divide; shamanic experiences of becoming other objects; the democratization of transformational experiences; practices for grounding, and the place of magic, rituals, communities and structure within consciousness exploration. 

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Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnographer of contemporary radical nationalism in Europe, a performer of Scandinavian folk music, and Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In this conversation we discuss: the philosophy of traditionalism underpinning the contemporary far-right and its leading figures, from Julius Evola and Rene Guenon to Alexandr Dugin and Steve Bannon; the key principles of this philosophy: a view of cyclical time; a belief in a hierarchical caste society; an opposition to progress and mass society; the belief that we are at a time of disintegration at the end of a cycle; the disagreement between Bannon and Dugin on the USA; how Bannon and Dugin see AI; the ethics of studying the far right; the intersection of traditionalism and accelerationism; the place of Trump in history; the traditionalist vision, or lack of vision, of what the supposedly coming Golden Age will look like; the political and sociological implications of digital; Dugin's view of the new political subject (against the "individual" of modernity); and Bannon's view that Dugin is the key to turning Russia back towards the USA and away from China.

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Gregg Henriques, professor of psychology at University of Madison, Virginia. We discussed: the flaws with the discipline of psychology and lack of consensus on what it is that it studies; Gregg's unified theory, which attempts to pull together the disparate strands of the discipline; the four points of emergent complexity - matter, life, mind and culture - and how each corresponds to a new means of information processing; how artificial intelligence and network technology bring us close to a fifth emergence point; the fragmenting effects that the digital landscape has on society and psyche, and the prospect of a 21st century digital religion to address these effects.

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Owen and Daniel begin playing a glass bead game. The glass bead game is a psychotechnology designed to explore a specified topic in a way that creates space for profound insight. We play on the topic of debt, which then leads into a discussion of: debt, sacred and material; sacrifice and what it enables; the tensions of interplaying potentiality and actuality that characterise life; mythic interpretations of the coronavirus - the plague gods, the lord of the flies, the existential turning-inwards as expansionary modernity is challenged; the sense that in 2020, shit is getting real; critiques of metamodernism and the Game B subculture; and religion and technoshamanism. 

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David Lion is founder of Evolving Men and an embodiment and relationship coach. In this episode, David and I discuss: our experiences running men's circles; the new culture of masculinity and men's work; the idea of masculinity, what it means and whether it is an idea worth clinging to; common issues that men suffer from in the current world, like shame, loneliness, lack of purpose; embodiment and being present with uncomfortable feelings; leadership; and thoughts on coronavirus and surviving in uncertain times.

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In this conversation Daniel and Owen discuss the theory and practice of Ontological Design, exploring: what Ontological Design means and why it is relevant as an discipline in the informational age; the noomachia, 4th generational warfare, the battle of ideas and informational fluxes; the transformations in subjectivity brought about by digital network technology; the death of Man and posthumanism; magic, machinic phylums and technological lineages; and the insight that we create technologies and then they create us, underlining the importance of becoming skillful artists and designers of our media and technological environments. 

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Daniel Thorson is a resident at the Monastic Academy and host of the Emerge podcast.

We explore: the end of liberal humanism as a political and personal philosophy; confronting pain and escaping entrapment in one’s feelings; how times of collapse open a space for new leaders to step forwards; the spiritual class structure (for instance, an elite with money, education, time and exposure to top teachers and traditions, a middle class practicing yoga and reading Eckhart Tolle and other spiritual bestsellers, and a lower class dabbling in astrology and crystals); how cultural decentralization and the ability to access information online creates the illusion that we can learn everything online, preventing access to (and even awareness of) wisdom that can only be imparted via human transmission; how contemporary culture conditions us to advertise our superiority, in the form of CVs, qualifications etc.; and the value of being in service to something higher than yourself.

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Daniel Thorson is a resident at the Monastic Academy and host of the excellent Emerge podcast. In this, part one of our conversation, we discuss: the interconnectedness of systems change and personal growth, and how the minds we use to solve today’s problems are products of systems that are destroying themselves; the work of the Monastic Academy in creating awakened leaders; the importance of being able to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives within one’s worldview; Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Western Buddhism as the hegemonic ideology of late capitalism; how the pathologies of Western Buddhism show up in the contemporary spiritual scene; and heroism and the process of being in service to a grand narrative of how to improve the world.

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