Scouts of the Noosphere is a weekly show where Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox explore strange forms from the depths of the internet. This episode is about egregores and memetic superorganisms. Support Technosocial https://www.patreon.com/technosocial Also on https://anchor.fm/technosocial Music by Salvatore Schiano http://www.salvatoreschiano.com/...
Chris Gabriel is the visionary behind MemeAnalysis, a YouTube channel producing in depth analysis of popular internet memes, trends, and philosophies. In this conversation we explore: meme magic and symbols; digital culture, schizophrenia, and how the internet brings out the bizarre from the collective unconscious; archaic archetypes in contemporary memes; memetic lineages; Dionysian and Apollonian drives; Hassan-i-Sabbah and the idea that everything is permitted; the personal development scene;...
Rachel Haywire is a Cultural Futurist who recently founded Elixir Salon. She is the author of The New Art Right, and an entrepreneur with a love for VR and transgressive art. She posts frequently to her Substack, where she now holds her own private events. We discuss: Elixir Salons, Rachel's digital art parties, and her history of throwing events; subcultural creativity; embracing chaos while avoiding nihilism; the idea of transcending the center; aristocratic values and gravitas in artists; exo...
Moritz Bierling is an independent researcher, writer, programmer, and open source operative. In this conversation we discuss: communities and practices for developing virtue and non-exploitative relationships with self and world; faith and choice; Peter Thiel's idea of Zero to One; becoming a Zero to One person; capitalism and alienation; operative frameworks for engineering and interfacing with reality; currencies as the grammars of cultural exchange; designing new currencies to enable new soci...
Dan Faggella is Founder and Head of Research at Emerj and advises the UN, Interpol and global enterprises on Artificial Intelligence. He is also a former MMA coach and fighter. In this conversation we discuss: AI, social media and filter bubble creation; monopolies and power concentration in Big Tech; weaponisation of social media and AI, and the difficulties in defining what can be classed as weaponisation; whether digital media culture is fragmenting nations; autocults; blind spots in public u...
David Burke is a writer and critic. In this conversation, we explore: heavy metal as a critical response to late capitalism and industrial society; the idea of the original metalheads as dark hippies, and what metalheads have evolved into; shamanism, esotericism and occultism; lyrical explorations of death, mortality and hedonism; black metal, terrorism, fascism and the aesthetics of death and occult iconography that often inform these movements; whether metal has a coherent political or theoret...
Justin Murphy is a political scientist and online intellectual and entrepreneur. In this conversation we explore: Balancing compassion and analytical coldness, and how an excessive focus on compassion hinders the contemporary radical left; how "woke capital" manipulates this aversion to analytical coldness; accelerationism and how the global market order functions as an AI; the impossibility of computing the end goals of this "AI", and how it maps onto the religious notion of God; the Christian ...
Gregg Henriques is a clinical psychologist and professor at The University of Madison, Virginia. This is part 2 of a 2 part discussion, in which we explore: the notion that we are living through a liminal crisis and existential responses to them - depression, anxiety, following cult leaders, and transcendent pathways; the fragmentation and polarisation of American society; the value and limits of scientific thinking; regulating sex and conflict; Gregg's CALM MO approach to psychological mindfuln...
Gregg Henriques is a clinical psychologist and professor at The University of Madison, Virginia. This is part 1 of a 2 part discussion, in which we explore: Gregg's idea of justification systems theory and the formation of culture; the development of the human abilities to ask "why?", to share and conceal our inner states and motivations, and to explain our position in the universe; the four emergence points of Gregg's theory, matter, life, mind and culture; the origin of religion and temple bui...
Alexander Bard is a philosopher and former pop star and music producer. Patrick Ryan is an AI warfare specialist. In this conversation, we explore: a diagnosis of the state and near future of technosociety, talking about AIs, pathos and the rise of a new elite; the faulty logic of the brain/body split and the idea of uploading consciousness to machines; digital religion and religion-as-technology; mimesis and crazy wisdom; the end of the human race; tribes and the shamanic caste; the infantiliza...
Carl H Smith is a Cyberdelics Researcher, Director of the Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC) and Principal Research Fellow at Ravensbourne University. In this conversation we explore: Technologies for achieving altered states; Carl’s work on cyberdelics, using technology to design and access these states; the overlap of Carl’s work on context engineering and Daniel’s on ontological design; the loss of common ground in informational society, and the dangers of ontological design technolog...
Benjamin Teitelbaum is an ethnographer of contemporary radical nationalism in Europe, a performer of Scandinavian folk music, and Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and International Affairs at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In this conversation we discuss: the philosophy of traditionalism underpinning the contemporary far-right and its leading figures, from Julius Evola and Rene Guenon to Alexandr Dugin and Steve Bannon; the key principles of this philosophy: a view of cyclical time; ...
Gregg Henriques, professor of psychology at University of Madison, Virginia. We discussed: the flaws with the discipline of psychology and lack of consensus on what it is that it studies; Gregg's unified theory, which attempts to pull together the disparate strands of the discipline; the four points of emergent complexity - matter, life, mind and culture - and how each corresponds to a new means of information processing; how artificial intelligence and network technology bring us close to a fif...
Owen and Daniel begin playing a glass bead game. The glass bead game is a psychotechnology designed to explore a specified topic in a way that creates space for profound insight. We play on the topic of debt, which then leads into a discussion of: debt, sacred and material; sacrifice and what it enables; the tensions of interplaying potentiality and actuality that characterise life; mythic interpretations of the coronavirus - the plague gods, the lord of the flies, the existential turning-inward...
David Lion is founder of Evolving Men and an embodiment and relationship coach. In this episode, David and I discuss: our experiences running men's circles; the new culture of masculinity and men's work; the idea of masculinity, what it means and whether it is an idea worth clinging to; common issues that men suffer from in the current world, like shame, loneliness, lack of purpose; embodiment and being present with uncomfortable feelings; leadership; and thoughts on coronavirus and surviving in...
In this conversation Daniel and Owen discuss the theory and practice of Ontological Design, exploring: what Ontological Design means and why it is relevant as an discipline in the informational age; the noomachia, 4th generational warfare, the battle of ideas and informational fluxes; the transformations in subjectivity brought about by digital network technology; the death of Man and posthumanism; magic, machinic phylums and technological lineages; and the insight that we create technologies an...
Daniel Thorson is a resident at the Monastic Academy and host of the Emerge podcast. We explore: the end of liberal humanism as a political and personal philosophy; confronting pain and escaping entrapment in one’s feelings; how times of collapse open a space for new leaders to step forwards; the spiritual class structure (for instance, an elite with money, education, time and exposure to top teachers and traditions, a middle class practicing yoga and reading Eckhart Tolle and other spiritual be...
Daniel Thorson is a resident at the Monastic Academy and host of the excellent Emerge podcast. In this, part one of our conversation, we discuss: the interconnectedness of systems change and personal growth, and how the minds we use to solve today’s problems are products of systems that are destroying themselves; the work of the Monastic Academy in creating awakened leaders; the importance of being able to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives within one’s worldview; Slavoj Zizek’s...
Our guest this time is Paulita Pappel, a Berlin based porn performer and producer and cofounder of Lustery.com, a website where couples upload their homemade sextapes. In this conversation we think about the absense of serious conversations around...
Jorge Arturo Zubieta Calvert and Sylvie Rockel are food activists. In this, part 1 of our conversation, we talk about the absurdities of our current food systems, touching on wastage, unnecessary shipping, sterilising seeds and more. We dig into what it...
Andrew Sweeny is a blogger, musician and independent thinker. In part 2 of their conversation Owen and Andrew Sweeny continue their discussion of Joker, exploring the importance of storytelling in culture, the idea of fatherhood, the crisis in modern...
In this episode Andrew Sweeny and Owen dissect Joker, relating it to themes increasingly being discussed in the alternative media. We note how Joker represents the "death of the superhero movie", existing at the fringe of the comic book universe in a...
Our conversation with philosopher, futurist and author Zak Stein
Our conversation with journalist, author and film director Sebastian Junger
Part 2 of our conversation with philosopher and futurist Alexander Bard
Part 1 of our conversation with philosopher and futurist Alexander Bard
The first half of our conversation with John Vervaeke, professor of cognitive science and psychology at the university of Toronto and creator of the popular you tube series 'awakening from the meaning crisis.' In this portion we discuss what the meaning...
Our latest conversation was with a guest who chose to remain anonymous. He recently left a teaching post at a higher education institution in Ireland after being charged with misconduct for taking work outside of the institution and for being critical...
This is the second part of our conversation with Iain McGilchrist. In this episode we continue our conversation about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, focusing on antidotes to the dominance of the left hemisphere.
This is the first part of our conversation with Iain McGilchrist. In this episode we talk about the stifling of political and academic discourse, the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and Iain's theory that the left hemisphere has come to dominate in our times.
