Mind Meld 115 | Your Thoughts are the Hieroglyphs of Tomorrow with Michael Garfield and Andrew J. O’Keefe

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Multidisciplinary future-dipped creators Michael Garfield and Andrew J. O’Keefe return to the show to chat about why the future is disgusting, why tomorrow will be beyond imagination and oodles more!

Michael Garfield is an artist, writer and host of the Future Fossils podcast.

Andrew J. O’Keefe is a futurist, writer, archivist and media ninja.

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Our vision of the future is hobbled by the fact that we view it through the lens of the present, this is a problem.  It’s a problem because we cannot access tomorrow’s perspective, language or understanding today.  It’s why when we look back at nearly every interpretation of the future it’s not quite right. Some profits made eerily spot on calls about elements of the future, sure, (your Orwells your Huxleys your Philip K. Dicks etcetera) but no one got it on the head.

Let’s call it– Right now is the future. It’s the the time everyone prognosticated about, nearly 2020. Despite that, we’re not out there colonizing space, the hover boards we have are bullshit, we’re not balling like George Jetson in flying cars or floating houses. Wisecracking Robot house maids aren’t picking up our rubbish or whipping up delectable cruelty-free feasts for us. In fact all of the above sound fittingly cartoonish.

So as fruitless as it would be decode modern English with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, it’d be equally preposterous for us to foretell the lingua franca of the future. We simply cannot scry the circumstances or tomorrow.

Here’s something we can do, though. We can cozy up to our immortal hopes, fears, desires, anxieties and needs. The sort that propel us forward and influence us on a daily basis. We can realize that all along we have been and will continue to scratch and soothe those existential itches at any cost. It is those very rashes of the human condition that all technology and innovation are born from.

Musings and mentions in this mind meld 

• The Future is Disgusting

• John Perry Barlow – A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

• Yuval Noah Harari and his book Sapiens 

• Robert Anton Wilson, maybe logic, reality tunnels and more

• Bruce Damer genesis/probability engine (check out our mind melds with Bruce for more)

• Existenz

• Inception

• Westworld

• Nagel, What Is It Like To Be a Bat?

• Quantum Thief

• Hyper Reality

• Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent

• Crossing the Event Horizon

• How the brain adapts in VR

• Will we outgrow the body and change it like an outfit in the future?

• Will the AR and VR space leak into reality sooner than we think like smartphones?

• How art outpaces technology and inspires technology

• Will we be able to “fork” our personas a shadow fork

• Trying to feed LSD to AI?

  Patron only extra:

• Why intelligence is highly folded and dense

• Visual telepathy

• Is destroying the earth ok as long as we eventually hit harmonious utopia?