Technological Metamodernism: A four-week course with Stephen Reid and special guests

Join Stephen Reid and special guests Hanzi Freinacht (Emil Ejner Friis), Ellie Hain, Alexander Beiner, Michael Garfield & Rufus Pollock for a four-week deep dive into Technological Metamodernism.

The emerging philosophy of metamodernism offers crucial tools for grappling with technology's transformative impacts on self, culture and society. It charts a path beyond the polarized debate between techno-utopian accelerationism (the belief that rapid technological progress will solve all our problems) and despairing pessimism (the belief that our technological trajectory is fundamentally destructive and irredeemable).

Through provocation and dialogue, this course invites you to adopt a metamodern mindset - embracing both/and thinking, an awareness of allergies and a focus on reconstruction - as we explore tech's leading edges. How might metamodernism inform the development of AI, DAOs and transhumanism? Can it help us to bridge tech with the realms of nature, art and spirituality? What new and ancient narratives and mythologies might we call on to cultivate a metamodern relationship to technology and its role in our individual and collective evolution?

Led by experienced educator and technologist Stephen Reid, this course offers a unique opportunity to take a philosophical deep dive into the heart of our technological age. No previous knowledge of metamodernism is required.

Course outline

Sessions will take place 4pm–6pm UK time (BST/GMT)/5pm–7pm Europe time (CEST/CET) on four consecutive Tuesdays via Zoom:

• Tuesday 17th September 2024
• Tuesday 24th September 2024
• Tuesday 1st October 2024
• Tuesday 8th October 2024

The first hour will be a presentation of the key themes of the week, with the second hour reserved for conversation with a guest expert and Q&A. Sessions will be recorded and shared (so you can catch up if you're late/miss one).

Week 1: Introduction (Tuesday 17th September 2024)

• Current mainstream discourse around technology: e/acc, doomers and technofeudalism
• What is technology? Exploring definitions and the history of technology
• What is metamodernism? Origins and key ideas
• Technological metamodernism, and metamodern technology: Why the tech and metamodern communities need each other

Week 2: Metamodern Takes on Technology (Tuesday 24th September 2024)

• Vitalik Buterin's d/acc
• Daniel Schmachtenberger's Axiological Design and Third Attractor frameworks
• Hanzi Freinacht's views on technology, and other explicitly metamodern takes

Week 3: Technological Metamodernism, Myth and Magic (Tuesday 1st October 2024)

• Ritual and initiation in tech: From ancient traditions to modern rites of passage
• Hyperstition and the role of imagination in shaping our relationship with technology
• Technology through the lens of myth and magic: the work of Josh Schrei
• Sophie Strand's Flowering Wand: Reconceiving technological archetypes

Week 4: Metamodern Tech Futures (Tuesday 8th October 2024)

• Solarpunk, lunarpunk and the role of art, design and speculative fiction
• Metamodern DAOs, metamodern AI
• Reality Switch Technologies: DMT, lucid dreaming and the jhanas
• Governance, ethics and wise innovation
• Building the metamodern tech community

Course leader: Stephen Reid

Stephen Reid is a transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator and Dharma student who has trained in the fields of AI/ML, complexity science, physics, transformative coaching and insight meditation. Current projects include hosting immersive residencies as a co-founder of Futurecraft, consulting for top organisations on AI projects, and leading the development of the Dandelion platform for regenerative events and co-created gatherings as part of not-for-profit worker co-op Symbiota.

Previously, he founded The Psychedelic Society, taught the Introduction to AI, Introduction to web3, How to DAO, Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance, The Promise of Decentralisation & Life as Practice courses, and served as the youngest ever board member of Greenpeace UK. Stephen has an MPhys in Physics from the University of Oxford, where he specialised in quantum field theory, an MRes in Complexity Science from the University of Bristol, and a Professional Certificate in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from UC Berkeley. He lives with his partner Laura in Stockholm, Sweden.

Special guests

Hanzi Freinacht (Emil Ejner Friis)

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’, ’12 Commandments’, and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.

As a writer, Hanzi combines in-depth knowledge of several sciences and disciplines and offers maps of our time and the human condition with his characteristically accessible, poetic and humorous writing style – challenging the reader’s perspective of herself and the world.

Hanzi Freinacht epitomizes much of the metamodern philosophy and can be considered a personification of this strand of thought. He has produced a wide array of original, relevant and useful ideas for people in all walks of life. These ideas help you gain an upper hand in the new political, economic and cultural landscape of digital, postindustrial society.

Ellie Hain

Ellie Hain is an artist, strategist and researcher working on a vision of the future centered on meaning and a (re)newed conception of ‘the sacred’. Her work bridges technology and spirituality, theory and feeling, transcendence and imminence.

She co-founded the Meaning Alignment Institute, an AI research lab working to create new technologies and institutions aligned with meaning. Previously, she researched theories of societal evolution, and played with internet memes as cultural vehicles. In her free time, she enjoys intense electronic music, Mediterranean sun, and exploring the mysteries of consciousness.

Alexander Beiner

Alexander Beiner is an author, journalist and facilitator focused on bringing new ways of seeing and being from the margins of culture into the mainstream. He does this through writing, and by creating transformative experiences that invite us to find ways to evolve and thrive in the chaotic times we live in. He is the author of The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world and writes a popular Substack, The Bigger Picture.

Alexandar is also an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest-running conference on psychedelic medicine and culture. He was one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, a popular alternative media platform that ran from 2017-2022 and explored the cutting-edge of systems change and cultural sensemaking.

Michael Garfield

Paleontologist-Futurist Michael Garfield is devoted to helping navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and helping cultivate the curiosity and play we'll need to thrive in it. As host and producer of both Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast, Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers — a practice that feeds his synthetic and transdisciplinary "mind-jazz" performances in the form of essay, music, and fine art. Refusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice, speaking and performing everywhere from Moogfest to Burning Man, SXSW to Boom Festival, Long Now's Ignite Talks to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur, activist and author as well as a long-term zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He wants his child (and all children) to live in a world of love, abundance and wisdom.

He has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives (and some unsuccessful ones) including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datopian. His 2018 book Open Revolution is about making a radically freer and fairer information age and has been translated into multiple languages. His next book “Wiser Societies” is about the cultural dark matter that enables societies be wiser (and weller). Previously he has been the Mead Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge as well as a Shuttleworth and Ashoka Fellow. A recognized global expert on the information society, he has worked with G7 governments, IGOs like the UN, Fortune 500 companies as well as many civil society organizations. He holds a PhD in Economics and a double first in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.