Tag Archives: tech

Is spiritual tech possible? My conversation with UFO scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka + media analyst and tech critic Doug Rushkoff on AEWCH 204!

23 Nov

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Friends,

As the weird tech world of social media seems to be crumbling around us, and UFOs have made the mainstream news, and all our problems seem both fixable and unfixable by technological solutions… we feel ourselves detaching from the period that lasted roughly the last two decades, as well as its accoutrements and decorations and denials.

So where are we going? I wanted to take a look at some of these changing features, but to look at them with as many  factors in site as possible (at least in an hourlong podcast). 

To that end, I’m so happy to have brought to luminaries together: religion scholar and UFOs-in-culture expert, Diana Walsh Pasulka – author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Technology, Religion –(she was on the show back on AEWCH 144) and Doug Rushkoff – media analyst and tech critic – my friend, host of the Team Human podcast and author of so many books (most recently Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires was last on the show on AEWCH 125.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ?
I haven’t read this book yet, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt – but it’s Doug’s recommendation to. Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World by Ramesh Srinivasan.

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
One of my favorite episodes I’ve done on tech is AEWCH 183 where I talk about esoteric Christianity as a counter to the dangers of technology.

MORE ON DIANA and DOUG
Here’s Diana’s second appearance on Rune Soup. Here she is on a long (almost 3 hours!) podcast that often has… less interesting guests, the Lex Friedman show. And here’s her CV on her university’s site. Doug’s website is here. And be sure to listen to his podcast Team Human (which I’ve been on twice now!)

Until next time friends… uh, keep it real!
CH

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Alienation & Alien Nation. Catholicism and UFO researcher Diana Walsh Pasulka on AEWCH 144!

16 Mar

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker• Anchor

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Diana’s books, and books related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 144 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,

Everyone who listens to this show knows that I’m interested in the intersection of spirituality, politics, and philosophy. Not in some sort of parapolitics or conspiracy way, of course – which I generally find plays out a bit shallow, even when there is truth there – but in the way the aforementioned currents play out in our inner lives, in our spiritual understandings, in our desires and drives, in our ethics and morals and activism.

Of course, this means, more and more, that I find myself contending with technology and the scientistic worldview that accompanies it.

It’s why this episode’s guest – religion and UFO scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka – is a perfect person to talk to on the show. Diana Walsh Pasulka  is the author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture and co-editor (with Simone Natale) of Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural . They’re all amazing books.

At the top of this episode, I also spend a bit of time pulling apart something that comes up, and that’s the topic of AI, and how it relates to political economy and UFOs (phew!).

I’m still reeling from this conversation with Diana. She’s warm and thoughtful, and she’s mediating a lot of the intensities of the world that we need mediated. Ethics, morals, spirituality, science, tech, religion, and more.

I’m so excited to share this conversation with you.

(PS: As a bonus, this is coming out just before St. Patrick’s Day and has some St. Patrick’s lore in it! So it’s a sort of holiday episode!)

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Why do we not believe the things we don’t believe
  • Stopping ourselves from saying “that was weird” and “that was crazy”
  • The language of art as a way of knowing and learning
  • St. Patrick’s revelation
  • Diana’a UFO initiation process and academia as a site of false initiation
  • Academia’s resistance to supernatural and paranormal phenomena
  • Interacting with the dead in study and research
  • What’s the difference between Purgatory and limbo, and where is Purgatory (hint: Ireland)
  • When did physical evidence become a necessary aspect of making spiritual claims?
  • Are we all in Purgatory/limbo in quarantine?
  • My undergrad Geocities site as evidence of me speaking in tongues
  • When Diana’s social media was destroyed by bots
  • The burden and adventure of seeing what you see in the world

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Diana here’s her first and second appearance on Rune Soup. Here she is on a long (almost 3 hours!) podcast that often has… less interesting guests, the Lex Fridman show (I like Lex himself, no comment on him!). Here’s her CV on her university’s site.

• I talked about creating the new symbolic forms and language in the first episode of 2021, AEWCH 136. And here’s my discussion about metamodernism and theosophy with Jason Josephson Storm on AEWCH 141.

• The review of Diana’s book American Cosmic that was…not exactly positive, but still worthwhile in its critiques was from hermeticist Poke Runyon (who also identified the initiation event in Diana’s life).

• The shaman who said “you’ve graduated into a new danger” to me was Malidoma Some.

• I did a whole series on spirituality, politics, and tech – AEWCH 112 with Peter Berbergal an occult technology, AEWCH 113 with Duncan Laurie on the magical tech of radionics, AEWCH 114 on destroying Silicon Valley, and AEWCH 115 with Joanne McNeill on the inner experience of the internet.

• Here’s the trailer for Host, which, though flawed, is a really enjoyable horror film. Watch it on your laptop, for full effect!

• Here’s Somi Arian’s essay/“open letter” to tech about ethics/morals/free will.

• Steiner’s book, Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom, hasn’t been reprinted in the Collected Works series, but you can read it here.

Until next time friends,

CH

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Meeting The Archangel Michael.

29 Sep

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast • Soundcloud
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on/related to this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 126 at bookshop.org.
It will help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,On Michaelmas, the celebration of the Archangel Michael, I wanted to present what I think is the most urgent task of our moment: aligning ourselves with the Archangel Michael.

SHOW NOTES

• “Lily” by Kate Bush evokes the four archangels. And it’s a great song, isn’t it?

• I talked on Rune Soup back in January about 2020 as the most Micahelic year we’ve ever experienced.

• The illustration of the adversarial forces on this episode is detailed at great length on other episodes, especially the most recent episode, AEWCH 125 with Doug Rushkoff. See also AEWCH 114 on how to abolish Silicon Valley with Wendy Liu, AEWCH 115 on the inner experience of the internet with Joanne McNeill, and AEWCH 105, talking apocalypse and AI with Mark O’Connell.

• Peter Roth’s beautiful book, Worlds In The Mirror, is only available through the Camphill Books.

• I wrote about helping stop suicide by the Liffey and sharing the burden of suffering here.

Love to you friends.
CH

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How to be human in an anti-human era. It’s Doug Rushkoff on AEWCH!

22 Sep

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Friends, does this show have value to you?
If so, I ask that you support it on Patreon! The show is funded exclusively by listeners like you, and your contribution is vital and deeply appreciated!
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep?
Go to my booklist for AEWCH 125 on bookshop.org! It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
Fascists, intense weather, immigration panics, global health crises, authoritarian governments, ideological divisions, conspiracies, fake news and fake experts and fake press conferences, the singularities, the doomsdayers, the white power psychopaths.
What do we do?
I draw inspiration from my long time pal and this episode’s guest: media analyst, prolific author and the Team Human podcast host, Doug Rushkoff!
What do we come up with?
Well, that being human is the most radical and subversive strategy in an anti-human era.
And what does it mean to be human? Finding the others, of course. But also seeing the others, and seeing the other in yourself. This might sound like a simple answer, but getting there is complex. Also? It’s exciting and bizarre and intense.
In case you’ve been missing out all this time, Doug is the author of a whole shelf of books; my favorite of which are his latest, Team Human, a manifesto based on his podcast; and Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
Doug is always one (or five) steps ahead of everyone else. I’m so happy to have had this conversation with him, and to share it with you. It’s warm and full of laughter and connection.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • What is the anti-human agenda, and what does it mean to be human?
  • Why Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins are, uh, a problem, and emergence is stupid.
  • “Systems theory is spirituality for misogynists.”
  • Why localism still matters
  • How (and why?) to organize with oppositional people
  • The particular failure of straight people in dealing with coronavirus
  • Drawing on a commonwealth to meet with each other
  • Whether or not conservative conspiracy theorists are Very Online or not
  • Why being bullied helps us in later life
  • How to do judo with QAnon
  • The benefit of becoming an outsider to every group you’re in

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Doug, visit his website; and for a sampling of his podcast and its range, I recommend the episodes with Richard Metzger, James Lovelock, and Astra Taylor. All the intro monologues to Doug’s show are available as medium.com articles, too, which you can find here. Since so many episodes of my show focus on anti-work politics and postwork worlds, you may also enjoy Doug’s 2011 article, “Are Jobs Obsolete?” You can also find (most of!) his books available via the bookshop.org link!

• In some ways, this episode is a follow up to the run I did on the challenges of technology: AEWCH 112 on occult tech with Peter Bebergal, AEWCH 113 on the mysterious magical technology of radionics with Duncan Laurie, AEWCH 114 on how to abolish Silicon Valley with Wendy Liu, and AEWCH 115 on the inner experience of the internet with Joanne McNeill. (And the forerunner – on AEWCH 105, talking apocalypse and AI with Mark O’Connell.)

• Okay, I keep sharing eps of my show in the show notes, but I talk a lot about the idea of creating a heart for the machine being with Scott Elliot Hicks on AEWCH 122.

• Doug gives a soft shout out to EF Schumacher and his “small is beautiful” ideology. I’m on board. Check out the Schumacher Center for New Economics, they do good stuff.

• The Social Dilemma is out. Haven’t seen it, but I guess I will, keeping in mind that they ripped off Doug.

• Doug brings up democracy and it ties into his conversation with Astra Taylor, who writes about politics and philosophy and collaborated with David Graeber.

• I talk about the wage labor relationship and sex work with my friend Dr. Heather Berg in the article “The Problem with Sex Work Is Work“\

• Tony Norman has written a short article on the crossover between Q and antisemitism.

• Here’s the Grant Morrison’s amazing presentation on sigils, magic, and how we’re all time-larvae. (And yeah that’s a picture of him when he was a young lad with a mop of hair.)

• In spite of my joke about Richard Metzger being a liberal, it’s difficult to overstate how influential his work has been on me, as well as attending the Disinformation conference at the Omega Institute in 2005 (NOT 2003, Conner!). Here’s Richard’s blog, Dangerous Minds. And here’s Doug’s talk at the conference (and links to the other talks except Paul Laffoley’s for some reason). And Lynn Margulis becoming my mentor was the other mindblowing event around that time.

• Byron Katie is still very important to me, for her ability to separate thinking from feeling and also her lived experience of the Tao. She’s incredible. Plus, she wears cool lady scarves.

Until next time, be more human than ever,

XO
CH

Leslie Marmon Silko

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Who are we when we use the internet? And who are we becoming? I talk with internet historian Joanne McNeil on AEWCH 115!

30 Jun


Against Everyone With Conner Habib · AEWCH 115: JOANNE MCNEIL or THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF THE INTERNET


LISTEN ABOVE OR ON: iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud 

Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company and making you think or inspiring creativity, please give what you can.
Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 115 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

AEWCH115TitleCardFriends,
In my final episode (at least for now) in my mini-run of episodes on the challenges of tech, I thought I’d turn the lens a bit: What does tech feel like for us? What is the experience of it, particularly using the internet?
To answer this question in a deep and engaging way, I talk with author, cultural critic, and internet historian Joanne McNeil.
Joanne’s book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, is unlike any book on the internet that you’ve ever read. Why? Because it’s not a book of praise or even condemnation of social media founders, or a journey through start-up-dom. Instead, it’s an exploration of what it’s like for us to be on the internet. What were and are the contours of our experiences on Myspace, Hotbot, Friendster, Google, writing and reading blogs, and (ugh) Facebook? What kind of people do we become engaging with these “spaces?” And perhaps most challengingly, what’s good about them?
(NOTE: Joanne and I had some sound challenges in the episode, so you’ll notice a few quality discrepancies, but nothing terrible. Just a heads up that you’ll get the glitches. mid-ep.)

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Respecting the interactions on the internet
  • What the internet has done to memory
  • The way pop culture just before the internet hit got lost
  • The gay history of the internet
  • The shaping of love on the internet
  • What sort of relationships are forming in quarantine conditions?
  • The fulfillment of wandering and lurking on the internet
  • Craigslist’s lost potential
  • The asymmetricality of anonymous users and open users
  • How twitter acts like capitalism
  • The difference between caring about wrongs and being involved in the stories of them online
  • The three times I had twitter pile-ons
  • Why we need to get rid of facebook and not replace it
  • Where to go from here and all this mess

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Joanne, here’s her website, which has tons of links and a great HTML aesthetic. And here’s a great interview with her just after the release of Lurking.

• Have you seen Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero? Also, did you know that there’s a severely distorted sample of a Brainiac song in the AEWCH theme? Well, there you go.

• The Tech Won’t Save Us podcast featuring Joanne is here. And they have a patreon!

• I wrote a bit about my trip to Florida to meet Ron in my essay “Gay For Pay, Part 1”

• Who else remembers the Pet Shop Boys’s 2002 song about falling in love via online text, “Email“?

• Here’s my old essay on hookup apps as pornography, “Facing The Torsos“.

• SESTA/FOSTA was passed years ago now, but I and other workers fought against it. Here’s a review of what it is.

• Yes, I was really into Unwound, and I still like them a lot!

• Yes, I’m changing my twitter in the next few days. We’ll all be okay, promise!

• Melissa Gira Grant comes up a couple of times in the episode, so check out her writing via the twitter link and her website!

• Here’s Run Your Own Social by Darius Kazemi, and here’s Darius’s patreon.
Until next time, friends.
XO
Unwound

 

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Abolish Silicon Valley! On fighting technocracy with Wendy Liu on AEWCH 114.

23 Jun


Against Everyone With Conner Habib · AEWCH 114: WENDY LIU or AGAINST TECHNOCRACY
LISTEN ABOVE OR ON: iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud

Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company and making you think or inspiring creativity, please give what you can.

Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 114 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
AEWCH114TitleCard

Friends,

 

Collectively, the world is waking up to the problems of big tech, and the challenges that lay ahead. But to understand what the problems are, and how to overcome them, we need guides, particularly guides who have been through the anti-life equation of tech themselves and somehow managed to not become deadened by it.

So I knew the best to talk to would be Wendy Liu, Bay Area software engineer and start up founder, and now the author of Abolish Silicon Valley, a practical memoir about awakening within and then challenging tech.

With a book title like that, Wendy’s stance on tech has obviously changed since the start of her career. Her public presence now focuses on revealing turn after turn of unsound ethics, structural inequality, the problems with data gathering, and even darker impulses in tech. To that end, Wendy and I talk about what’s happening now, how theory and activism can help with what’s coming, and lots more. This is a great episode, and I’m so happy to share it with you.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Why tech workers can’t “change things from the inside”
  • How tech used to solve the problems of centralized “analog” forms of power, and what happened
  • The collective discontent with tech
  • The way identity politics issues in tech
  • The evil embedded in tech itself and how to spot it without becoming a luddite
  • Theory language vs coding language and how code completes the inner state for you
  • My goofy undergraduate hot-guys-on-geocities site
  • Why the pandemic regulations aren’t exactly new conditions
  • Repression and oppression as a tactic for tech
  • The pitfalls of tech socialism (and Wendy says, “Conner, don’t worry about that just yet!”)
  • The elimination of emotion
  • How (and how not) to resist the tech monster
  • The neoliberal tech erosion of Ireland

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Wendy, here’s her website. Here’s a great interview with her on the gay Marxist podcast, Twink Revolution.
• Want to learn more about Total Information Awareness? You should.
• Also on the you-should list, check out Doug Rushkoff if you haven’t yet. He’s one of the most brilliant thinkers I know.
• Although I’ve been doing a sort of mini-run of episodes on tech, the first one, really, was AEWCH 105 with apocalypse writer and tech critic Mark O’Connell. If you haven’t yet listen, go for it. And here’s the article on J.G. Ballard that Mark wrote, and which both Wendy and I loved.

OB

• I’ve learned a lot from Owen Barfield (pictured) about language, consciousness, and art.

 

• J.G. Ballard’s Myths Of The Near Future isn’t available, but you can get his collected stories (or selected stories) via this episode’s booklist link.

 

• The economics, political, and cultural sphere stuff, is social threefolding, developed by Rudolf Steiner.

 

• Here’s a little rundown on the death of honeybees from 5G radiation. It’s on a honeybee-centered website, but you can find the data corroborated by other entomologists and tech workers.

 

• Here’s the trailer for Sorry To Bother You.

 

• Learn more about Wilhelm Reich’s occult tech on AEWCH 59 or other forms of occult tech via AEWCH 112 with Peter Berbegal or AEWCH 113 with Duncan Laurie.
Until next time,
X0101010101010 (JK!)
CH
ALE

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Magic technology, technological art, and dials to the spirit world. Duncan Laurie on AEWCH!

17 Jun

AEWCH 113: DUNCAN LAURIE or THE UN-SCIENCE OF RADIONICS

LISTEN ABOVE OR ON: iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud • YouTube

Thank you for your support in this time, friends. This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company in isolation, please give what you can.

Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!

Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 113 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
AEWCH113TitleCard

Friends,
I’m becoming increasingly wary and interested in the deepening commitment to tech in our world, particularly as we go through this global crisis together. I want to push on our capacity to imagine tech in different ways, to create a new relationship to tech in our lives, and to better prepare us for the challenges ahead.

 

So I decided to dig up my 2011 conversation with sculptor and tech-magic practitioner, Duncan Laurie. Duncan is the author of the profound book (seriously, everyone should read it!), The Secret Art: A Brief History of Radionic Technology for the Creative Individual.

R2I first heard of Duncan’s work with radionics via his segment on the late, great Disinformation series. In that clip, he talks plainly about two strange technologies I’d never heard of. First, radionics, which we primarily discuss on this episode. Second, bio-sensor sonic connection to plants and stones.

 

I talk at length about what radionics is at the top of the episode, so I won’t repeat it here, but the intersection of art, magic, science, and philosophy in radionics opens up completely new pathways for us.

 

Like AEWCH 91 with Lynn Margulis and AEWCH 97 Diana Young-Peak, this was part of a podcast project I started and abandoned in the early 2010s. I would love to have Duncan back on the show again now that I actually have a show, especially since he’s done plenty of work since 2011, obviously. But for now, bear with the less-than-ideal audio/discussion style/my younger voice. It’s pretty good, considering!

 

ON THIS EPISODE

  • How Duncan became attuned to the energies of growth and decomposition
  • “The first step where you get beyond the dimension of just materialism and the mechanistic viewpoint of life and suddenly just walk into a world where a different set of parameters is at work.”
  • What happens when we see beyond all materialism, and what radionics’s part is in that
  • How materialism degrades art and how art erodes materialism
  • The disconnect between validating radionics via science versus its use
  • Where Duncan sees using magical technology goes
  • The problem with seeking proof
  • Writer’s block as an analogy for not using magic
  • How desire connects us to art and to healing
  • Taking time out from what is known to look into the unknown

SHOW NOTES

• Duncan created an entire album – Induction Furnace – out of sounds from bio-sensors (the first album of its kind, I believe), and it’s a bizarre and wonderful listen. There are other musical bio-sensor works there, too, including a plant responding via bio-sensor to Bob Dylan’s “Cocaine”. Here’s an (unfortunately low-quality) video of Duncan getting rocks and plants to respond to each other with sound. Here’s a talk from Duncan at the TSAGregg Museum. Also, here’s a picture from his book, which, again, please get and read.

• Here’s a video by two modern radionics practitioners; they break it down in simple terms, although a little materialistically – “systems” “operating” etc. I do like their term for the radionics machine as a “high tech magical wand.”

 

• I wrote an essay about radionics, using them, and also sex (of course) years ago fro Vice.

 

• Here’s an essay on the founder of radionics, Albert Abrams, by one of his students, Eric Perkins.

 

• The author Upton Sinclair was interested in radionics and other weird science, and he wrote about it in his book Mental Radio.

 

• Duncan mentions that he’s a practitioner of Sura Shabd yoga. Here’s a very plain language explanation of it by Master Sirio Ji. The volume is low, so turn it all the way up.

• The United States Psychotronics Association is pretty fascinating, and offers a lot of great new and strange directions.

 

• Duncan mentions the SE-5, a “radionics computer” which you can look into here.

 

• Here’s a link to a rare interview in The Sun with Cleve Backster, who put biosensors on plants. Unfortunately it’s with neo-primitivist transphobe and anti-sex worker activist, Derrick Jensen. But Backster is the focus.

 

Until next time, friends,
CH
O

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Why we need occult technology now. I talk with Peter Bebergal on AEWCH 112.

7 Jun

Against Everyone With Conner Habib · AEWCH 112: PETER BEBERGAL or OCCULT TECHNOLOGY


LISTEN ABOVE OR ON: iTunes • Stitcher • Soundcloud

Thank you for your support in this time, friends.

This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. If the show is keeping you company in isolation, please give what you can. Contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!

Thank you so, so much. Want to buy books mentioned on this ep? Go to my booklist for AEWCH 112 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.
AEWCH112TitleCard

Friends,

As the coming technological innovations face us and threaten us, can we reconsider what technology is, what role it has in our lives, and how we can encounter (as well as build it) spiritually? What is the morality of technology; not just the morality of building new technologies, but the I asked writer and theologian Peter Bebergal to talk about just that.

Peter is the author of the entrancing book, Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural as well as two other books and an upcoming anthology about the inspirations for Dungeons & Dragons. His work always confronts and investigates the connections between the spiritual, the artistic, and the seemingly everyday.

I am experiencing all of these topics with a sense of increasing urgency, so I’m so happy to be able to share this conversation with you.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • That time I saw a skeleton walking down the road
  • Why repeatability in science is dehumanizing and how to liberate ourselves from it
  • Why we need to understand technology as enchanted
  • Mapmaking through the enchanted
  • The uses and problems of seeing information, not individuals, in medicine
  • When (and why) ayahuasca doesn’t work
  • Magic for frivolous uses versus magic that we need
  • How spiritualism dissolved our fear of hell
  • There are no unaltered states of consciousness
  • Why religions are not the same and how art reveals this
  • How to use magic to hack technology
  • The failures of wonder
  • Using technology to mediate the presence of dangerous spirits

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Peter, here’s a great episode of Other Side podcast with him, and here’s a conversation between he and Jeffrey Kripal. And here’s his website, which is outdated, but has links to tons of articles he’s written.

• I talk about some of the issues of morality and technology on AEWCH 105 with Mark O’Connell.

• I do love Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, whether or not it made me want to send Thomas an email and be like, “Just read occult stuff!”

• Want to read up on the Keely machine?

• I have yet to read Umberto Eco’s classic novel, Foucault’s Pendulum. But I’ll get to it soon enough.

• “As long as humans can misuse technology, we will never be slaves to it.” – Erkki Kurenniemi

• Peter talks about Gareth Branwyn, a trailblazer in the maker movement.

MAM• Anyone else remember Mazes & Monsters? I actually never saw the film (with Tom Hanks) but I did read the novel.

• Here’s a summary of the work of philosopher and theologian, Rudolf Otto.

• “One way of torturing the dead, one way of failing to show them love, is to participate in spiritualist seances. For this forces them to manifest in a particular language. The dead person is expected to speak a particular language, for even with table-rapping the signs have to refer to a particular language. What is done to the dead by forcing them to express themselves in a particular language might very well be compared with pinching someone living in the flesh with red-hot tongs. So painful for the dead are spiritualist seances which expect them to express themselves in a particular language. For in their normal life the dead are striving to free themselves from the differentiations between languages.” – Rudolf Steiner

• Here’s Peter’s essay, “To Believe or Not To Believe: That Is Not the Question”.

• A great, easy-to-read explanation of the Galileo stuff I mention is in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield.

• The Cottingley fairies are a lovely and beautiful hoax (although there is a little bit of CFcontention over one of the images, all these years later).

• Here’s Peter channeling Arthur Machen for an interview.

• If you haven’t read James Merrill’s channeled, beautiful book of poetry, The Changing Light At Sandover, you really should.

• My Friend Dahmer is, in my opinion, a far superior graphic novel than film. So get it and read it.

• Here’s “Errormancy” by Kim Cascone.

Thanks friends, I’ll contact you again through your devices soon!
CH

PB

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