I'm going to be talking about how we can imagine ourselves differently. How can we imagine our date with a potentially ruinous destiny? More importantly, how is this destiny being culturally produced? Behind me are playing visuals by a group known as Orphan Drift. It's called a wilderness of elsewheres. Orphans cut off from our past, drifting through a technological proteome, through an electrosphere, towards the bewildering array of elsewheres or possible futures.
What is culture? Culture is a set of beliefs or practices about the world. It's a set of myth systems that have very real consequences in the world. Our cultural journey began 3 million years ago when we picked up the first stone tool and has been accelerating ever since. In the last 100 years, the human impact on the planet has multiplied by a factor of 40. This impact driven by the myth that nature is a boundless stockpile of resources that are endlessly available. We are technologically obsessed. promises not only greater access to the bounties of nature, but it also promises to release us from the rhythms of nature. We live today in a mechanosphere, an electrosphere of gadgets
and devices. We are swimming through a technological proteome or embryonic fluid into a possibly a possibly disastrous future. The mechanosphere consists of urban super sprawls. It consists of parking lots. It consists of gizmos and gadgets, satellite arrays, and of course an information superhighway through which pulse fictions and speculations about who and what we are. One way of thinking about this is the term hyperstition, Hyper, accelerated, and superstition are myth systems. We now live in an accelerated period of technological evolution. Hyperstition is a science fiction of self-fulfilling prophecies.
It is a Chinese puzzle box that opens to reveal numerous sorcerous cultural and technological interventions in the world. There are four elements of hyperstition. The first element is that it is an element of effective culture that makes itself real. The stock market is a good example of this. Through this market course, speculations and hype cycles that have very real consequences in the physical world. Since 1968, the digital industry has been driven by a prophecy, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Gordon E. Moore in 1968 formulated a prediction that every two years the processing capacity of integrated circuits will double.
This became a buzzword in the semiconductor industry. Companies that failed to keep up with Moore's law fell behind their competitors, and thus we entered an exponential growth curve. The digital industry itself prone to more hyperstitians. During the 1980s cyberspace, a word from science fiction, became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. Programmers worked to make it real. In 1994, the internet came online, social networks have followed, and these accelerate our fictions about ourselves at further and faster rates. We now have our very own planetary information space, an electrosphere conjured into being by hypersensitial forces.
The second element of hyperstition is that it is a fictional quality, functional as a time-traveling device. The future is imagined for us by the media industry. Movies like the Terminator series, Matrix, The Road, Twelve Monkeys, the futures that they call conjure into being are so plausible precisely because they seem so very real to us. The third element of hyperstition is that it is a coincidence intensifier. Our accelerated cultural fictions are bringing about a future at a very rapid rate. Capitalism is an example of this. It is a zone of intensity, a positive feedback cycle that generates further and faster technological
change and continuously amplifies the scope of that change. When urban centers were made possible, massive urban centers, by new technologies, these urban centers themselves became petri dishes for high-prestitutions or accelerated cultural fictions. The stress and disorientation that we feel as a result of constant social, economic, and environmental change brings about a sensation of future shock. We are in a continuous cycle of change, and continuous change means continuous distraction. Technolepsy is a state of mind that describes the state. It's a semi-autistic state, a mild epileptic seizure, a cold and bleak fascination with the power of technology.
We are immersed in an ecstasy of communication. Can we shift this ecstasy of communication to a higher ground? The last instance of hyperstition is that hyperstition represents a call to the old ones. Our vision machines, our computing devices, our electron microscopes have revealed to us the hidden dimensions of nature. We imagine aliens on the other side of the historical divide that we are about to cross. The polytendrilled and attrachophonic entities which beckon to us from the other side of technology's dark mirror. The old ones are the forces of nature, mutability and change, which humans have always innately
realized but greatly feared are there. Science has revealed to us these old ones once more. Today we know that extinction events have been the major shapers of biological life over the last 600 million years. Cosmic forces, geological forces and other forces have caused these extinction events. These are the old ones. 440 million years ago, a supernova explosion or a gamma ray burst was the result of 80% or the cause of 80% of the species then living, going extinct. 250 million years ago, almost 90% of species went extinct as a result of punctuated equilibrium brought about by an asteroid impact. 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck the planet, ending the age of dinosaurs and causing
the age of mammals. Humans have themselves become these mythic forces. Our time is a mythic time. We are theorized and fabricated amalgamations of nature and culture. We are biology morphed by technology. And we ourselves have become old ones. We ourselves have become an extinction event. We now live in the Anthropocene, the age of man, when human activity is impacting the biosphere, the lithosphere, and the atmosphere of our planet. we ourselves may not survive our date with a potentially ruinous destiny. One old one that has come most clearly into focus as a result of science is our 3.5 billion year old mother, Gaia,
a superorganism that has been around for billions of years, an old one of note. She is herself a cyborg, an amalgamation of geochemical and biological processes, And this cyborg has become the launching pad for a new race of cyborgs. When an asteroid struck 65 million years ago, dinosaurs survived by sprouting feathers, growing wings, and taking to the skies. To survive our mythic union with our old ones, with ourselves, we will need to shed our cultural baggage. We will need new stories to guide us into the future. We will need to undergo an evolutionary metamorphosis.
We need desperately to shift our ecstasy of communication to a higher ground, to transform our pycnoleptic technological distraction and find a new way of imagining ourselves. Millions of young people are already doing this, surrendering themselves to the future through the pounding repetitive rhythm signatures, the alien frequencies of technologically produced music. This cyborg union presents the formation of new sonic fictions that are already celebrating the end of Babylon. But we also need to take a leaf from the ultimate Algon, from Gaia. Gaia has survived numerous extinction events by forging networks of symbiosis,
of alliances and partnerships that span the kingdoms of nature, we will have to find new ways of symbioting with our machines and with nature. We will need new stories to guide us into the future. Thank you. Thank you. you