This week someone described me as a file that had been closed, annotated, and archived. In this (relatively) short video I compare the cybernetic circle with the dynamic spiral. Promises of stability and homeostasis are set against uncertainty with possibility. It draws upon themes I raised today in my discussions with Jason and Leo on […]

I’ve been working for the past month or so to wrap my head around bio-geochemistry, radio-ecology, and complexity theory. During that time a collaboration I’d had with Raul Diego at Silicon Icarus transitioned, which I am chalking up to a cyclical communication failure, which unfortunately is not uncommon in these challenging digital waters. That situation […]

Part One: Scientific Management, Robo-Bees, and Digital Babies Part Two: Apocalypse, Mind Files, and Interplanetary Promises Part Three: The “Magic” of Radio-Eugenics and Holographic Twins Part Four: Ritual Gaming and Berggruen’s Transformation of Humanity Part Five: Elite Views on Automated Law and Vending Machine Democracy Part Six: Reject Scientific Management, Celebrate “Weeds” Part Seven: Computation Life and […]

This is the fourteenth installment in the Synthetic Pretenders series examining the proposed CaliforniaTrust Framework within the context of synthetic biology, eugenics, and the Spanish mission system.  Part One: Scientific Management, Robo-Bees, and Digital Babies Part Two: Apocalypse, Mind Files, and Interplanetary Promises Part Three: The “Magic” of Radio-Eugenics and Holographic Twins Part Four: Ritual […]

Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the […]

For years I’d hoped someone with an artistic inclination would come along to translate themes of cybernetic control, empire, and global finance into a format that was more accessible to the general public than my long-form essays and presentations. Yesterday that dream came true. I met Eve at an info-picket outside the Philadelphia School District […]

I became somewhat of a hermit over the winter. Once it got cold in late December our Subaru intermittently wouldn’t start. It took several visits for Raphael, our mechanic, to find the loose grounding wire, and by then I had made it a habit of spending my days making maps and planning presentations at my […]

I’ve been meaning to share this jewel of insight from my friend Cliff for a month, but I needed to get past the summer doldrums and re-engage with my blog. I’m taking a week off to refresh my thinking in the Shenandoah, but when I get back I’ll be ready to jump back into Berggruen […]

This presentation is a follow up to the one Jason, Lynn, and I did deconstructing the Joe Rogan / Marc Andreessen interview last month. You can watch that here. Laura Arrillaga, Marc’s wife, established policy infrastructure around data-driven philanthropy and social innovation in the Bay Area starting in the late 1990s through her ties to […]