This week we continue the ecstatically futural mind-jazz duet with cyborg performance artist and body-machine interface master hacker Onyx Ashanti, exploring the frontiers of new meta-languages emerging at the intersection of the born and manufactured, and creative possibilities thereof. 

Onyx Online:

http://onyx-ashanti.com

http://youtube.com/onyxashanti

http://twitter.com/onyxashanti

Anyone who enjoys this episode will also like these essays from my upcoming book:

“The Future is More of Everything”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-2-the-future-is-entropic-2faa4aa6f433

“The Future Is Disgusting”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-future-is-disgusting-911379af30fe

“Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence”

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/being-every-drone-the-future-of-xr-robotic-telepresence-19f12889da78

In this episode, we discuss:

Fractal Sonocybernetics & The Future of Language

The neurological and experiential differences between speaking and singing, between continuous movement and discontinuous speech.

“The English alphabet is created of embedded Fibonacci relationships…there are five vowels; all five of those vowels are odd numbers…between A and E is three letters; between E and I is three letters; between I and O is five; O and U is five; and between U and the end of the alphabet, wrapping around to the A, is five letters…two 3s and three 5s is also one of these relationships. There are twenty-one consonants in the alphabet, and twenty-one is one of these Fibonacci values.”

Book: Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle

Reaching beyond language to communicate the ineffable psychedelic experience…only to create new (insufficient) languages.

Violent counter-reactions to the sudden is-ness of black swan events (like the election of Barack Obama OR Donald Trump).

“Those of us that get it and CAN talk about it, it is necessary for us to talk about it. But then to reinforce what we’re talking about with action.”

The moral imperative of people with a vision to communicate it. The ethical necessity of artists to create and share.

Music as an irreplaceable core module of an n-plus-one-dimensional future language.

“We’re like some kind of ant, or bee, and our honey is technology.”

With respect to the Singularity: The end of the world? The end of WHAT world? WHAT DOES “END” EVEN MEAN?

What happens to identity politics in an age of exponential change and its metamorphosis of “baseline” human identity into something plural, mutable, and ineffably always-evolving?

“We have to burst out of identity politics in a way such that it is BORING, that it is MUNDANE, that our perception of identity politics is that it is no longer [the house-sized thing that I am within], it is [identity politics, this thing I am holding in my hand and I can examine like I would examine a grapefruit].”

“One’s reality is limited by their ability to comprehend complexity.”

If we act from the understanding that our brains are harmonically organized, our thoughts and actions can begin to take on that harmonic organization…

Gamma brainwaves as the lubricating medium of harmonically coherent brain activity, just as blockchain-enabled microtransactions enables a fluid economy and liquid democracy in the global brain…

How to become resilient in a networked society by using failure to inform the design of new evolutionary systems.

“Bitcoin…it’s unstoppable. Right now. And when it IS stoppable, we will have a new version that is vastly less stoppable than this one. And then it will get attacked mercilessly…and then maybe someone brings the quantum chain down. And then we create something we can’t even imagine at this point…”

“I feel that Bit Torrent begat Bitcoin.”

“The interesting thing with the Bitcoin community is that we’re all working for a company that…there’s nobody working for that company!”

Is crypto the cathedral of planetary culture we’ve been waiting for?

Onyx waxes rhapsodic about the blockchain.

Open-source space program.

Book: Project Hieroglyph (containing Cory Doctorow’s short story, “The Man Who Sold The Moon”)

Onyx uses Sun Ra and the afro-futurist mythology that he created repeatedly to make a point about legendary creative badassery.

“You have to share it in such a way that each person feels that they are absorbing it. And want to. ‘How can I get involved?’”

Pay No Attention to The Realm of Loud Dumb Shit

What a bad example of a good future cyberpunk is… (Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner, etc.)

Story/Film: Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson

Imagining a Crypto Pride Parade with everyone wearing reflective Face ID spoofing masks

What it takes to turn a work of art into a movement: resonance.

“If you [lawmakers and IP holding companies] can’t stop a five megabyte file [mp3s], good luck stopping crypto.”

And more for those with time to listen!

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