As I post this piece, US national debt has passed forty trillion dollars. A stack of pennies worth that much money would be 42 times the distance of the earth to the sun. Even in dollar bills stacked up, it would be high enough for around 6 trips between the earth and the moon. In money, it’s about $119,000 for every person in the United States.

Or think of the scale of America’s annual healthcare costs. It’s a way manageable cognitive load, at just $5.7 trillion annually. By far the most in the world, for not even close to the best care. And, don’t worry, that cost will go up if the administration’s policy doubling the price of generic drugs from overseas goes into effect.

When money is this big, when it is this many times bigger than any transactional reality it was meant to serve, things get weird. I just had a student asking me, confused, about why rising employment figures make the stock market go down. Shouldn’t good employment news be good for business, because people will have more money to spend?

You’d think so! But because money and capital matter so much more than real people, it kind of works the opposite way. The better off people are doing, the worse it is for the “money gods.” When unemployment goes down, it means more people have jobs. If companies are hiring people, it means their payrolls are going up. If they are spending money on employees, then there’s less to be siphoned off as profit for shareholders. Therefore, stock values—or at least stock prices—go down. Lay off a bunch of employees, and the stock market rewards you.

But even more insidiously, and systemically, if people are getting employed, it means that the working classes are starting to do better. They will have more money to spend, and start buying stuff. More demand. This could make prices go up, which in turn makes cash correspondingly less valuable. Get it? If the cost of this ring or a can of kumquats goes up from 5 to 10 bucks, that means each buck is less valuable.

The Federal Reserve hates that. Their primary job is to keep money valuable (and rich people rich). So when employment goes up, they raise interest rates, making money more expensive to borrow from the bank. That fights inflation, but it makes it harder for companies to borrow money to grow their operations. If it’s harder for companies to borrow, they can’t grow as fast, so their stock prices go down.

It’s all so counterintuitive, but that’s only because money and people are actually at odds. They’re from different universes. People are living, metabolizing, impermanent beings. Our health and flourishing is dependent on our ability to transmute and transform. We living beings turn food into waste into fertility. Attraction to love to mourning to rebirth. We are cyclic, ever-changing, temporary.

Money—at least the central currency that was chosen for us to use—is meant to last. It’s like a forever chemical. Once issued, it never goes away. It’s not real, mind you. It’s just a digit. A symbol. But that’s why it never dies. It has no form, nothing to decay, nothing to metabolize, no way to change.

As I’ve discussed before, we live in a pyramidal civilization, optimized for savings and growth. We resist being metabolized by climbing higher up the pyramid. The wealthier we are, the higher we go, the more insulated we are—or at least feel—from the realities of floods and storms and decay and competition.

In that kind of society, we want money to be as permanent as possible. Not like the moneys of the Muslims or those local currencies of Late Middle Ages Europeans who copied them. Those were moneys optimized for transactions between people. Their only purpose was to help promote exchange of goods and services. These moneys would usually expire at the end of the day, like poker chips after a game. Or, if they were based on a commodity like stored grain, they would lose value over time as the grain itself decayed. Money was built to support flow, respiration, exchange. It didn’t get stuck. People didn’t collect it, because it didn’t have any value other than as a temporary placeholder for them to trade.

Money for horizontal societies was more organic, and decayed just like people do. And because people couldn’t store it permanently to rise up above their peers, they didn’t optimize their work for savings and growth. They optimized their lives for leisure and meaning. Get your work done, exchange it for what you need, and then enjoy your life until you need to work again. It was like air you breathe in and breathe out. You don’t hold your breath to get more powerful. You exhale and inhale to become more alive.

Living moneys promoted life. The moneys we use now, starting with central currency? They promote death. Permanence over respiration. Monopolies over exchange. They pool and accumulate by design.

Let me explain really simply how they came to be this way. When kings and other elites saw people using local currencies and living in prosperity, they got really scared. How do you maintain authority over people—how do you hold onto your entitlement, your birthright to control others—if they’re all happy and prosperous? You can’t. So kings made all these local, temporary moneys illegal, and forced people to use central currency, or coin of the realm. This money wasn’t designed to promote exchange so much as to lock in the wealth of those who were already at the top of the pyramid.

People had to borrow money, at interest, simply to transact. No free trading or barter allowed. If you got caught trading with some other form of money, they’d kill you. Yes, Philip the Fair, King of France, sent the Knights Templar in there to kill anyone using any means of exchange other than coin of the realm. And the already-wealthy got even wealthier by maintaining exclusive power to lend money to people who just wanted a way to transact.

Central currency, our money, has always been about preservation of wealth, entrenchment of power, going up the pyramid, and staying there. The more you print, the more debt you have created, and the more power you have over anyone trying to do the real business of life. Instead of a society of exchange, we got a society based on growth. After all, if a king lends out money at interest, more money has to be paid back. Where does that new money come from? Growth.

So everybody out there is not just exchanging goods and services, but trying to earn enough money through their labor that they can pay interest on the money they’re using. This growth mandate supported, actually required, the colonial expansion of the European empires. Everything was denominated in coin of the realm—money that lasted forever, so that those holding it could maintain their wealth.

And like the forever chemicals now polluting our topsoil and oceans and bloodstreams and livers, forever money and its anti-respiratory bias has seeped into everything. It’s like a P-FAS, that chemical developed as a non-stick Teflon coating for pans, but then seeps into the everything else. And like college debt or medical bills, it never goes away. It cannot be metabolized.

Our money is also like Teflon in the way it’s made so nothing sticks to it. It’s not local, not personal. It’s anonymous. Generic. Its users are free of responsibility for the damage they create with it. It just slides off. Investors, shareholders, derivatives holders…increasingly removed from the externalities of their efforts. No residue.

And like PFAS, money is continually re-engineered to improve on itself, turning more matter and energy into itself - converting organic matter into dead symbol systems.

What is crypto, after all, but an excuse to build and run the servers required to store it? It’s a meaningless product that requires Nvidia chips, oil, cobalt and rare earth metals. Crypto is just the front-end on the fossil fuel and chip manufacturing industries. We burn planet to prove our faith in the digital tokens, again transforming matter and energy into tokens. The real living world of time and transformation and metabolism is converted into the dead world of tokens and permanence. Money for its own sake.

Of course a meme-coin of a president like Trump—a reality TV star hiring other reality TV stars into the spectacle of an administration now robbing the wealth of generations to come—of course he’d get into this game. Although he called crypto a “scam” in 2021, he now wants to make the US the crypto capital of the planet. He’s got his own tokens, stable coin, even his own exchange. Countries now bribe him simply by carrying out multi-billion dollar crypto transactions on his platform. But the real robbery here is getting hapless MAGA believers to buy Trump’s coins. Investors have lost 3.81 billion dollars on Trump’s memecoin alone, which lost 98% of its value. If you include Melania’s memecoin, American Bitcoin, and his governance token World Liberty Financial (just listen to these names), the tally of investor losses go up to $7 billion.

That’s over a million people who lost their savings, while Trump accumulated around $3 billion off them, and his family countless more.

Beyond the particular grift, what’s really happening here? Political energy, social dissatisfaction, cult celebrity, are all being converted into token. Real stuff into digital symbols. Movement into stasis. Life into death. All for tokens. Tokens. What colonialists and conquistadors gave to indigenous people for land. To reduce a living earth into static property, and ratchet power irreversibly up the pyramid.

When the crypto grift just gets too obvious, too blatant a rug pull with no practical or essential value, they add another front end—a new interface to hide its valuelessness from us. NFTs did that. We all knew crypto was worthless, and in 2018 the whole crypto market fell into a long winter of disinterest. That meant less mining, less energy expended, and fewer Nvidia chips sold. The ERC-721 protocol for NFTs on Ethereum was standardized that same year, OpenSea was launched, and NFTs became a new “front end” on crypto: a meme, 10,000 variations on a cartoon image, something almost like “art” sitting like a tag on a bunch of tokens, pretending to give them value. And the whole grift gave people the sensation that they were supporting artists, not just investing in another crypto pyramid scheme. The NFT art sales were really just a way to bolster the underlying crypto currencies. And the crypto currencies just an excuse to burn more oil, mine for more rare earth minerals, and produce more data centers and Nvidia chips. The tail wagging the tail wagging dog, Even art became the calling card for forever money and the deadly pyramid in which it accumulates.

And when that whole marketplace got so bloated it crashed, what happened? A new savior came in to justify the metals, the slavery, the energy, and the chips. That’s right: AI. Even without a demonstrated function, AI became the new space race. Its primary purpose was not to enable better thinking, but to keep the Nvidia chips in production, and even bigger processing centers than they needed to mine for bitcoin. AI is just the new face on crypto. Think about it: AI companies measure their quarterly results in what metric? Tokens! That’s what we spend when we use the stuff. We’re transforming our time, thought, electricity, groundwater into what? Tokens!

Yes, they’re tokens of code in the processing blocks of AI computers instead of tokens of coin in the processing blocks of crypto computers, but the metaphor holds. We’re turning more and more of the real living world into dead tokens. More human cognition into AI slop. Forever slop. While rotting our living brains in the process.

In order for AI companies to make money, we turn physical matter, human labor, and cognition itself, into tokens - while robbing the world of resources, people of liberty, and humanity of thought. And given the economic hole we’ve dug, we have to somehow have to create 40 trillion dollars worth of tokens in the process.

That’s going to be hard with China now offering free AI. Alibaba and others are out there, online, for free. Yes, China has put big filters on it to prevent users from learning about Chinese history or treatment of the Uighur people today. But unlike the filters on Grok, it doesn’t spew disinformation. It simply says “I cannot answer that question,” or that the output contains “inappropriate content.”

Anyway, their low cost versions of LLMs shows we’re pinning our economic hopes on a commodity that can be rug-pulled. Tokens. Tokens. Remember “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins? The old lady sitting on the bench, “Feed the birds, Tuppens a bag.” Tuppence. Two pence. Give the old lady two pence, and she’ll convert them back into seed or breadcrumbs or whatever real thing you get in the little bag to feed the birds. That’s the transformation we’re looking for. From token back to stuff. Figure back to ground. Money, back to life. (And Mary Poppins? That’s a movie about a magical goddess—Super Kali—who teaches a banker to make his life about his kids and his suffragette partner instead of about money.)

So what to do? You can’t get rid of money entirely, but you can live by a different metric. Such as: amount time spent with friends, depth of your conversations, number of insights, philosophers understood, music played… This was what we called “slacking” when we got out of college in the 1980s to a world with no jobs. We temped at coffee shops or grocery stores. I tutored SATs, waited tables at weddings, transcribed legal depositions, and played cocktail piano a few hours a week, and optimized for leisure time, conversations, intellectual freedom, and writing for no money. They called us lazy, but we were working—just not for money.

We can do that today. And as we learn to live more for these other metrics, we will be contributing less to the pyramid and instead finding lateral means of support such as offering our couches to people “between homes,” or making meals together. We reduce the need for the forever chemical money balance sheet.

And when we do use money, so be it. But let’s optimize for flow, regeneration, and life. Keep it in ram, not the hard drive. Moving, so it doesn’t leach into our flesh. It can’t be digested, only circulated. So let’s lean into those principles of flows and generosity and see how it comes back. Make money as soft and temporary and valueless as it really is, and maybe something better will come to replace it.

There. I said it.

The only real question is whether we do it individually, or all together at the same time.

There’s a pervasive, ambient terror many of us have been carrying for a while now. Words like “collapse” and “polycrisis” have replaced more actionable entry points to social change, such as “environment” or “peace.” Doom is everywhere. It sometimes feels as if there’s nothing we can do but sit and hold space for what’s about to happen.

And over the past couple of years, I’ve concluded that this form of acceptance may not be failure at all, but our most necessary adaptation to a world in crisis. What if surrender—or even more actively, a full embrace of what is actually happening—constitutes our last best hope for rising to this occasion?

I was scheduled to give a talk in California to a group of activists on the topic of Averting Apocalypse. This was a few years ago—after Trump became president, but before Covid, if you want some sense of where we were on the…trajectory. I was just about to get on the plane when I got the news that an elderly family member was back in the hospital with pneumonia, and not likely to make it out. She had frightfully few loved ones with the means to attend to her, so I canceled my ticket and spent the long drive to the hospital making my apologies to the conference and cashing in a few favors to get a suitable replacement.

The hospital was cold at night. Hours at the bedside turned into days, as she went from talking to moaning to sighing to just lying there. There were just a couple of us so we each took turns sitting with her, in 6-hour shifts. I seemed to be the one there at two or three in the morning, watching her and listening to the beeping machine while ashamedly wondering why am I even here? I’m embarrassed to admit I resented having ended up serving in this way, for a woman who wasn’t even conscious.

Besides, I was saying to myself, there is nothing I could actually do here. The antibiotics hadn’t worked. Bloodwork showed that systems were shutting down. Morphine was maxed. I was sitting here in a cold hospital room, powerless to effect change, when I could be working on solutions with the people who might actually be able to do something about our collective descent into multiple catastrophic crises. Strategic interventions to eradicate microplastics, rising ocean temperature, economic inequality, species extinction, geopolitical conflict, technological disruption, and cascading emergencies.

There was no opportunity for intervention in that hospital room, and it pissed me off. I wanted to be out on the battlefield, not stuck here doing hospice, without WiFi. But as I sat there, hour after hour, alone in a room with this dying body, something changed. I slowly, reluctantly, surrendered to the moment. To not being able to do anything but sit there. And as I did, I began to see more than a comatose patient receiving oxygen from a tube while emitting beeps through electrodes to a monitor. I saw the person who had lived through 80-something years, and who was now both struggling to breathe and struggling to let go. Each exhale followed by a pause, as if her body was deciding whether to make the next gargantuan effort to try again.

I knew she was in a coma and unaware of her surroundings. At least that’s what the hospital people said. But I figured there was some chance she was still in there, somewhere, experiencing her stuckness between life and death. Or not even knowing exactly what was going on around her, where she was, what was happening…

I pulled my chair closer to the bed, and put my hand on hers. Just so that she’d know I was there. Someone was there. And I may have been overtired, but I wasn’t high on anything. I hadn’t tripped in years. I was quite straight and quite rational—yet I swear, I could feel her soul in there, taking account of my presence. It was as if she needed more than her own nervous system to make this transition.

It felt as if she was testing me, probing me, almost asking permission to enter me. Not physically, exactly, but even more intimately. I kind of…gave consent. And it was as if my nervous system became an extension of hers, metabolizing the fear and pain. She just came up and into me. It was not a subtle, metaphorical experience. It wasn’t scary for me, or painful. Not at all. In fact, I was feeling something closer to warmth, to bliss. I could directly, physically feel her coursing through my body, using me as a resource as she made the passage from this place and out of body to whatever is next.

And as that was happening, I realized what a profound gift I was being offered. This was, at least up that moment, the most profound experience I had ever had in my life. The same duty call I was cursing just hours earlier was now the greatest blessing and honor I could have ever been called to.

All of a sudden, I felt I understood the essence of what death doulas do. It’s not just making the dying more comfortable, although that’s certainly a part of it. But on a deeper level, the doula facilitates a more intentional and practiced form of what I had ended up doing almost accidentally. While doctors intervene to prevent a patient’s death, doulas show up to acknowledge and help metabolize it. They offer their sheer presence, as living organisms, to bear witness and exercise compassion in the truest sense of the word.

Only by utterly surrendering to the moment, giving up on the possibility of intervening in any way, was I able to be of service. And in doing so, I felt a profound shift stirring in my approach to my life and work. I was transforming from an agent of change to an agent of care.

I had spent the last few decades of my life as something of an activist. The WTO protests in Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, No Kings…strategizing climate remediation, alternative currencies, political campaigns, teaching social justice, theories of change, congressional hearings. Making a difference.

And at that moment, instead of leveraging all my hard-won research and experience to help young activists strategize how to save the world from its impending metacrises, I was simply sitting there, utilizing no skill, not saving a life or making any measurable contribution other than giving up. And in doing so, I was making the most substantial contribution to another human being I had ever made, in a way that registered for me in an immediate, undeniable way. I am not a woo person—or at least I wasn’t until that night—but this was as real as your own next breath.

It has set me on a different course. I don’t begrudge those who are in the trenches trying to change our political systems, tweak the economy toward justice, or rescue the rainforest from capitalism. Thank goodness for them. But most of us are simply watching the horror show on the TV screen or doomscrolling the metacrisis on our smart phones, occasionally casting a vote or standing up for a cause in a difficult conversation. We watch until the sad truth of inevitable doom makes itself abundantly clear, and then we distract ourselves under the false hope that every civilization thinks it’s the last one, or that some new technology will surely swoop in and rescue us from ourselves. It always does.

What if we took a different approach? Instead of avoiding the prospect of apocalypse, what if we stared right into its gaping maw and accepted what’s happening? How would you behave if you really knew this was it? The patient is dying. Might there be a value in entertaining the possibility, even for just the time it takes to read this piece? I promise, the metacrisis will still be waiting there for you when we’re done.

What if instead of looking for the next clever intervention to save this dying patient, we show some mercy and begin to offer palliative care? What would that look like? What if we began to care for one another as if we really were the last generations to enjoy the Eden into which we’ve been born? Instead of competing over the scarce remains, we give up. We meet our neighbors, take time to reflect, tend to our gardens, love our children, and do whatever we can to soften the impact of the impending collapse. As the Medieval Jewish poem Unetaneh Tokef offers, the outcome may be determined, but we can lessen the severity of the decree. We identify the most vulnerable in our communities; commit to checking up on the elderly after the next extreme weather event; consider what sorts of lives we want to offer children who may not make it to adulthood; choose whether to spend what hours we have left on social media feeds.

As we live and love more, we buy and compete less, reducing our consumption, extraction, and burden on the all-too-brittle corporate and government infrastructure. The abstract universes of finance and capital shrink and lose their power as people slow down and appreciate the places they inhabit and the people in their lives.

Back when my own father was sick with cancer and deciding whether to get hospice care, I remember how the visiting nurse reassured him, “just because you’re accepting hospice doesn’t mean you have to die.” In fact, if a majority of us assumed roles as agents of care, we may not only make the impending catastrophes less painful for many; we may just avoid some of them, or at least create the best conditions for recovery after they occur. It couldn’t hurt.

If there is no guaranteed future to optimize for, then the results of our actions come to matter less than the actions themselves. Revolution is no longer an ends-justifies-the-means battle for liberation, but the liberty and grace to prioritize our comportment in the living moment.

Over the five years since I made this shift, accepted what I believe to be the inevitability of collapse, and embraced real-time care over abstracted strategy, I have come to see our predicament differently. I discovered that what I have been so terrified of losing is not human civilization at all, but a brittle, anti-civilizational illusion with which we have been taught to identify. By letting go of this machine, we stop fighting death and instead rejoin the living world, recognizing that what the technocrats and the most well-meaning activists among us call “the end” may simply be the necessary, regenerative cycle of life.

By embracing apocalypse we are not accelerating an ending at all, but—as the word apocalypse literally describes—uncovering what is real. Yes, things may be ending. But not necessarily everything. The colonial, might-makes-right civilization currently toppling is not a civilization at all. It is the antithesis of a society based on care and mutuality. As archeologists and anthropologists alike understand, human evolution owes itself not to competition but collaboration: food-sharing and group cooperation formed the basis for what it meant to become “civilized” humans. Civilization can best be understood as our capacity to transcend violence and domination as the arbiters of flourishing.

Instead of trying to save this anti-civilization, we can serve as its death doulas, making its collapse as gentle as possible on the living systems it has been exploiting all this time.

We can also serve as birth doulas for the emergence of a more horizontal civilization of mutuality to take its place. This requires discipline, maturity, and—yes—spiritual development. This is not “spiritual bypassing” at all (that accusation of doing spiritual work as a substitute for confronting real world challenges). Rather, when we jump straight into “actionism” or big ego savior missions, we are running away from the terrifying reality of our limitations and our grief over what is already lost. We use “strategy” as a psychological defense mechanism, allowing us to look away from the suffering neighbor in front of us because we are focused on a grand plan to save a million hypothetical people tomorrow. That’s the “activists bypass,” just another version of “effective altruism” if it isn’t checked against in-the-moment comportment and real-time, face-to-face, body-to-body co-metabolism of the moment.

This fixing reflex is simply the old, industrialist mindset with a progressive intent.

The real, human work of accepting our mortality and sitting with grief is not a self-indulgent detour from the political struggle; it is the ultimate guardrail. It is what prevents our necessary rebellions from degenerating into the same ends-justifies-the-means control structures that are destined to annihilate us.

I ended my book about longtermist, transhumanist, tech-solutionist billionaires, Survival of the Richest, with the line “if you’re not doing it in the moment, you’re not doing.” Let me add to that: If you are doing it in the moment, you’ve already won.

It’s a different theory of change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately—this idea that social change doesn’t always need a big plan, top-down leadership, or the mandate to reach “scale.” Sometimes, maybe all the time, the appropriateness of any given action can be sussed out in the moment, negotiated in real time, allowed to emerge from the bottom up or the inside out. It can be intuited rather than rationalized or justified.

I had the opportunity to have these sensibilities tested in a format premised on their very opposite. I was invited to do a debate with William MacAskill, the Oxford philosopher who wrote the book on Effective Altruism. I couldn’t justify the time and travel to do it, but just thinking about it, conditioning myself for such a thing, generated a lot of reflection.

If you’ve skipped this particular discourse, Effective Altruism is a moral philosophy that says we should make decisions based on the rational analysis of their future impact rather than our ethics in the moment or some emotional sensibility. We can’t see, in the moment, how saving one child from an oncoming bus could cause the bus to fly off a cliff; or saving members of one community under quarantine could risk an epidemic escaping to the world. Its proponents argue that major philanthropic and policy decisions should be guided primarily by formal models and long-term forecasts, rather than by intuitive judgment.

The tech-bros who have adopted and distorted EA into their secular religion believe that if you just get the math right, the messy business of live human presence becomes obsolete. They want a moral framework that functions like a software update—something you can code once, throw on a blockchain or embed it in an AI model, and deploy it globally or even cosmically.

The pattern repeats itself across the digital landscape. Effective Altruism is just utilitarianism reinvented by people who have never encountered philosophers like Bernard Williams, who argued that we mustn’t lose touch with “the real concerns that animate our ordinary ethical experience,” that we can’t surrender those real, felt concerns to the arid, ahistorical, second-order debates about ethics in philosophy departments. They don’t know from Derek Parfit, who agonized over the implications of consequential reasoning, and the way it sacrifices personal loyalties and emotional bonds for the cold logic of collectively beneficial outcomes. It’s two centuries of philosophical literature explaining why naive expected-value calculations produce monstrous outcomes when applied without limiting principles. They’re ignoring it all.

The EA movement walked itself straight into the Sam Bankman-Fried catastrophe because it adopted a moral framework without understanding its failure modes. (Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind who became EA’s primary billionaire benefactor, used the movement’s “earn to give” ethos to rationalize a multi-billion-dollar fraud at his FTX exchange. In his hyper-rationalized calculus, treating his customers’ life savings as a casino bankroll was a statistically acceptable risk, because any wealth he generated would fund grand, long-termist projects and geo-engineering to save the species from extinction. The way it worked out, however, the pyramid collapsed and real-world lives were wrecked.) It’s what happens when you drop out of college to do a startup before you’ve taken history, economics, or moral philosophy. The billions that these child-men earn convince them that they know something.

The rationalist community rediscovers Bayesian epistemology (degrees of confidence, like a 20% chance of AI wiping out humanity) and treats it like a revelation, unaware that the philosophy of science has been working through these questions since the 1920s. They treat their blog post manifestos as foundational texts. People who have never read Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend construct epistomologies from first principles, marvel at what they’ve built, and proceed to use them as the intellectual building blocks for decisions that affect billions of people.

They are trapped in the Dunning-Kruger effect—that psychological phenomenon where people with a superficial understanding of a complex field mistake their minuscule experience for total mastery. Because they don’t know enough to realize what they are missing, their confidence is inversely proportional to their depth. Effective altruism is Dunning-Kruger at scale, armed with venture capital, supercomputers, artificial intelligence, total surveillance, mind control technology, and rocket ships. What could go wrong?

This intellectual hubris peaks with Longtermism—the philosophical engine of AI acceleration. MacAskill isn’t nearly as simplistic as his followers, but his thesis has made him the darling of Silicon Valley, who are happy to fund a real professor from Oxford who helps them justify their escape plans.

They use Effective Altruism to support their belief that we must optimize our resource allocation today for the welfare of hypothetical future beings. Present-day costs are acceptable in service of that goal. The welfare of trillions of post-human life forms should take moral precedence over a couple of billion lower humans today.

It is a framework any competent ethicist can dismantle in an afternoon. It has no limiting principle. It cannot distinguish between genuine moral urgency and the self-serving conclusion that whatever the billionaire tech executive was already doing is existentially important. In practice, it is little more than a program for generating justifications for the concentration of power by people who have decided they are the ones best positioned to steward the future of the species. Even if they’re the only surviving representatives.

This desire to outsource life’s ethical challenges into accounting tables isn’t new. Or malevolent. Some of the greatest social crusaders saw math and engineering as ways of transcending our emotional prejudices and misperceptions. Behavioral economics proved we don’t see things as they are, and make bad financial decisions because of our various fears and biases.

Take Karl Marx. He started out like a poet, trying to help people remember and value the social fabric underlying our interactions. Only later on, when he was looking for a way to rescue workers and society from industrial alienation did he get more systematic.

In Capital, he used the example of Robinson Crusoe on his island, keeping charts, ledgers, and timetables of his activities, as a model for how a rational society might distribute its labor. He thought if we just got the structural bookkeeping right, justice would follow. But a ledger is still a mechanical abstraction that treats human energy as an input. It may be mathematically fair, but at what social cost?

It happened in religious history, too. Think of the ancient Jewish tradition’s well-intentioned but ever-more granular system of laws. There’s just too many possible human interactions to write a law for every one. And the more we depend on the labyrinthine network of rules, the more distant we are from the impulse that’s supposedly informing them. We argue our case instead of finding new levels of compassion and cooperation. The law proved incapable of engendering the very thing it was designed to protect.

We keep trying to build mechanical, external means of ensuring justice, and we keep failing because these systems are incapable of engendering genuine human compassion or goodwill. Like a blockchain, they substitute for trust rather than inspiring it. And they invite the machinations of those who want to game the system for their own benefit.

That’s why the rabbi Hillel, and later Jesus, strove to break through the administrative layer—the executable code—to center something different: embodied, real-time, radical love and presence. They realized that adding more lines to the legal code doesn’t get to the core problem. If the heart isn’t attuned in the moment, the rules just become a tool for bureaucracy, manipulation, or evasion. Jesus stepped in and said, if you just feel it in here, the rest will follow.

The law, however well-intentioned, is an abstraction. Cause and effect. If this, then that. Nothing in the moment. Computer code doesn’t have the moment, either. It only has steps. Like they’re not even continuous or part of the same thing. This allows us to surrender anything or anyone on this step, to that next step. Every next moment is like a revolution that leaves the last moment—and any necessary victims—behind. After all, you have to break a few eggs to make a cake. Right? Wrong.

There’s a whole century of philosophy on this. It peaked in 1952 when Albert Camus broke with Jean-Paul Sartre and the French left over the same question I’m asking here: Can the people alive today be treated as acceptable casualties in the pursuit of a better future?

Sartre and the Marxists said yes. History has a direction. The revolution requires sacrifice. Camus said no. Any system of thought that subordinates living people to a hypothetical future has already committed the foundational moral error.

Camus understood the existential dilemma: how we’re temporary flesh beings on a rock hurtling through cold, meaningless space. But he also knew we couldn’t escape this terror by focusing on some theoretical future utopia. You can’t utopia your way out of this.

Marx and Sartre believed the revolution would require violence and sacrifice. Camus despised bloody revolutions as wastes of human life in an ends-justifies-the-means travesty. Instead, he championed what he called “the rebel.” The rebel isn’t a nihilist destroyer or an idealistic mathematician; the rebel is someone who says “no” to oppression in the present because they recognize the inherent dignity in themselves and in the person standing right next to them, right now. Rebellion defends the immediate, messy reality of living people against the abstracted justifications for violence of an inhumane civilization.

Once you accept the logic that future gain justifies present cruelty, there is no limiting principle. Any atrocity becomes permissible. Any amount of present suffering can be rationalized as a necessary input to the glorious, modeled output. A prerequisite for the Messiah. A necessary resource for AGI. Shouldn’t one child be allowed to die of thirst today if the data center using her drinking water could save ten children from thirst tomorrow?

That’s the AI acceleration argument made plain. The technology will eventually benefit or save humanity altogether, so present disruption must be tolerated. Displaced workers, the death of democracy, destruction of the environment, the concentration of power in a handful of private actors who have exempted themselves from the consequences of their own project—it’s all regrettable, but necessary.

Besides, if we don’t do it, someone else will. Sam Altman won deregulation of AI by arguing that China would beat us to the punch and take over the world. A startup called Mechanize, looking to enable “the full automation of the economy,” says it directly: “The only real choice is whether to hasten this technological revolution ourselves, or wait for others to initiate it in our absence.”

If it’s inevitable, I’m not responsible. It’s technological determinism as moral absolution. The future lets me off the hook for the present.

It’s the same argument Marxists made for redistributing peasants’ grain or sending dissidents to the gulag. When Sartre and the French left defended the Soviet labor camps, they used the same sort of determinism. History is like a train heading to communism. It requires coal in the form of human sacrifices. If we try to stop the train, we’re standing in the way of human evolution. Sound familiar? We’re not murderers or apologists so much as the midwives of an inevitable tomorrow.

But Camus staked everything—and lost his existentialist friends—on the claim that the person standing in front of you is not an input to a utility function. Their suffering is not redeemed by a future state of affairs they may never see. Their dignity is not negotiable against projected outcomes.

The person who exists right now—the one who has a job they’re about to lose, a family to support, a community that depends on a local economy—is the unit of account. There is no humanity in the abstract. Team Human is actual humans, not an idea. That’s not what Elon Musk means when he says “I’m on Team Human.” (He’s not even a Patreon subscriber.)

The entire AI acceleration project is premised on abandoning the present. It asks real people to bear costs for future benefits distributed to people or post-people who do not yet exist, administered by a self-appointed class of demigods that has insulated itself from the consequences entirely. Even if they’re here on earth, they’re not living on the same planet.

If we want to resist this top-down engineering, we have to dismantle the very categories that allow it to function. The rationalists rely on lines of demarcation: Now versus Then, Subject versus Object, Us versus Them. They convince us that we can separate the observer from the observed, or that we can sacrifice the present “now” for a superior “later”; an open “if” for an inevitable “then.”

But this is an unnecessary and dangerous distinction. All we actually have is the now. The future is imaginary; the past is memory. Morality does not exist in a future state; it occurs exclusively in the immediate, interstitial space between us.

This is why I’ve been into 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza so much lately. He said that ethics isn’t about following rules or predicting consequences; it’s about increasing our capacity to affect and be affected by others. For Spinoza, we are all expressions of a single, continuous reality. When we engage in interactions that recognize and enhance the vitality of the other, we increase the collective power of the entire system as well the freedom of all its members. That’s the paradox that American libertarians can’t grasp. Once we’re in a true living system together, we each get more independent power, not less. It is a somatic, real-time feedback loop of mutual flourishing.

Martin Buber took this further with the idea of I-Thou relationships. He argued that we spend most of our lives in the I-It mode, treating the world, nature, and other people as objects to be used for our own ends. Like in capitalism, sexual exploitation, Effective Altruism, or AI modeling. The more human path, the sacred human path, is the I-Thou encounter. When we have no agenda, we meet another human being in their total, novel uniqueness. It can only happen between us, in the moment. Unarmored. Face to face.

Emmanuel Levinas anchored his entire philosophy of morality right here, in the epiphany of the human face. Levinas argued that ethics does not begin with an intellectual calculation or a social contract. It begins the moment I look into the face of another human being. The face of the Other carries an absolute, divine demand that says: You shall not abandon me; you shall not destroy me. There’s no subject/object anymore. It is interstitial. I do not master the other person with Jedi mind games; I am held hostage by their immediate humanity. This face-to-face encounter is the true source of morality. It cannot be modeled or generalized.

It’s not about strategy or results so much as comportment.

Whatever we choose to go for may be less important than the way we go for it. The compassion and care with which we regard ourselves and one another matters as much as, maybe more than, the maps we’re using to chart the path. I get it: in a pyramidal society built on KPIs, it’s no wonder those of us trying to make the world a better place look to metrics and outputs. UN Sustainability Goals. But what about those of us trying to forge a horizontal civilization based less on growth than on our capacity for mutualism?

It’s also a failsafe. Let’s play “bad trip” for a second. Even if the macro-structures fail us, even if our political and economic systems degrade to the worst-case scenario that Trump and his regime are working towards, where half of us are in prison camps and the other half are employed as guards—how much could our comportment define our experience? Could we make a heaven of even that world, together, simply by the way we choose to look at each other through the containment fences? Could the basic human refusal to reduce the other to an object or function disrupt the machinery of oppression? This is what Camus meant by “rebel.” Where love and care become the weapons.

This flips the logic of the technocrats and apologist reformers on its head. The utilitarian mind-meld has convinced us that we must tolerate corrupted means—lies, exploitation, centralization of power, environmental destruction—as long as the projected destination is net-positive. But that is a horror story told by people who want to control the future. It’s the same reason authoritarians tell us there is blood in the streets: to justify violence.

If the way we treat each other in the present moment is the true compass of civilization, then the destination is more a map point than a North Star. The path is the place. For the rebel, every interaction becomes a potential act of liberation.

For me, this is no longer some abstract academic exercise. Yeah, I’m a professor of something, but this is how I’m learning to navigate my most sacred encounters with other people. If you see consent as a limiting contract rather than a gateway to the ineffable, you’re missing the point. It’s a safe container to lose one’s boundaries and become part of a living encounter. To trust in the other and oneself as parts of a living dynamic.

We can level that up. I think we all, together, have to learn to trust this moment and the power of our comportment as the source of our collective healing, and our potential for universal justice. Capitalism, and its messianic son AI, is obsessed with results. Humanity is about process. When we prioritize the results of the model over the process of living, we stop engendering a civilization and instead create permission for brutality.

And living a present-based ethics doesn’t mean we are abandoning the future, either. What if (and I’m just “what-iffing” here) what if right action, or proper comportment, in the immediate moment doesn’t just feel better—what if it leads to the most mutually beneficial long-term outcomes?

Industrial Age logic, and ethics, measure inputs and outputs. Resources and yields, as if they were separate things. Sacrifices and triumphs are separated like causes and effects, winners and losers. But what if we are living in something closer to nature? An interdependent, living system that operates like a fractal?

In a fractal system, the geometry of the smallest part mirrors the geometry of the whole. The macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm. If that is true, then it is impossible to arrive at a beautiful, just macro-scale future by using ugly, cruel micro-scale means. What is right, compassionate, and honorable in the immediate moment is right for the entire system.

Stepping into this realization requires a profound leap of faith. And faith is what the long-termists—on both sides of the social justice equation—are lacking. They don’t trust the universe’s emergent architecture. They don’t trust human nature or the natural, self-organizing property of love. Because they are terrified of the inherent uncertainty of life, they try to bypass the present, forcing reality through a computational bottleneck of their own design.

If the universe is a fractal, then our moral education shouldn’t be about learning how to calculate outcomes or optimize spreadsheets. It has to be about learning how to feel, and to sense the others more deeply. To affect and be affected by them. We need to learn how to tolerate more, metabolize more, and engage the world with an open heart.

Becoming “strategic” is a psychological defense mechanism. It is a substitute for developing these deeper, somatic sensibilities, and it prevents us from doing the hard work of presence. Strategy allows us to look away from the suffering child in front of us because we’re focusing on a grand plan to save a million hypothetical children tomorrow.

True moral maturity requires we surrender that narrow self-interest for a boundary-free, open-hearted, limitless understanding of our place in the greater swirl of things.

Pope Leo XIV explained it in his encyclical on AI:

If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.

The technocrats want to optimize away our flaws, our grief, and our vulnerability. They want an algorithmic salvation that eliminates friction. But as the Pope reminds us, our limitations are not bugs to be patched; they are the very soil from which soul grows:

To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well.

Becoming human again starts with the absolute refusal to treat the person in front of you as a casualty for a hypothetical tomorrow.

Once that commitment to the present is abandoned, the door opens to every form of rationalized cruelty that the twentieth century spent a hundred million lives trying to teach us to reject.

Which brings us all the way back to knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking to borrow something. “Bob, can I borrow your drill?” starts the whole process. Your body is local. You want to feel more connected to things? More influential?

Who are the ten closest human bodies to your body when you go to sleep at night? Or twenty? What are their names? How do you get along with them? Comportment, compassion, and empathy don’t have to scale up—just out. Those people are your immediate mission.

The quality of a civilization is measured not by the size of its towers, but by the way people treat one another, and whether they can recognize other people as faces, not functions.

The ability to care for one another is the fundamental dimension of our humanity, learned through lived experience. Reading stories to a child, offering company to an elderly person, or arranging a home so that it is welcoming are the essential gestures of community life. They teach us to value care at a societal level and train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention.

The revolution isn’t something we get to enjoy after the cable news networks declare we’ve won. It’s not something we get to; it’s something we do in the here and now. That’s the rebellion.

If you’re not doing it in the moment, you’re not doing it. And if you are doing it in the moment, you’ve already won.

But no, I’m not talking about that. I mean the New York Knicks winning the NBA finals, after 52 years of heartache. This town went crazy. With everything going on around us—the war, the atrocities, ICE, extreme weather, voter suppression, trillionaires feeding our water to AIs, artificially enforced divisiveness—it felt so good to have something in common. For a whole city to be on the same team.

During the whole run up to the finals, I’d get in conversations with strangers on the street: black white young old rich poor male female and other. We all had permission to talk with each other. The Knicks served as “social currency”—that’s a term I coined in the early 90s, for topics that give us an excuse to interact. It can be some authority or skill you have, like telling jokes or knowing facts, that make you interesting at a party. But it can also just be touch points that allow for social contact.

After one game, I got in a conversation in the street with two twenty-something guys about the magic rituals we’d do to ensure wins. I explained how when things get really dire I switch from TV to radio, and it sometimes makes the difference. Then they call over some other strangers, “This old guy listens to the Knicks on the radio for luck!” “Old guy” notwithstanding, I felt part of my local community in a way I hadn’t experienced in a while, particularly in today’s polarized landscape where people seem afraid to talk at a bar or a barbecue lest they find out their on opposite sides like Hatfields and McCoys.

The night we won the championship, everyone went outside into the streets as if on cue. NYC does carnival. Traffic halted. Everything halted, as everyone celebrated the opportunity to celebrate together. It was madness. It was love.

The very next night, on the south lawn of the White House, a different sort of sporting event took place. The UFC, owned by Trump ally Dana White (and my former literary agency, William Morris Endeavor), and broadcast exclusively by Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Paramount TV—of which Trump is a shareholder, and for which his administration cleared a $111-billion takeover of Warner Brothers along with CNN, just a week or so prior. The fighters, meanwhile, receive their winning bonuses in cryptocurrency issued through Trump family’s World Liberty Financial.

But I’m less interested in the conflict of interests here, than the interest in conflict.

This was a throwback to the gladiatorial contests of Ancient Rome. In case you missed it, a giant arena was erected on the south lawn, dwarfing the White House itself. They called it The Claw, for the giant steel superstructure over it. Neon and lasers, Joe Rogan announcing, Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires attending, fighters fighting ,and the winners running over to President Trump in the first row, bowing to him, and receiving his approval. “Good fight.” Yes, it was his 80th birthday celebration, but this was more like the attention a two-year-old gets at his birthday party. Or, more to the point, a Roman Emperor.

In those times, like in ours, the games were intended as a form of propaganda. They usually held games in times of war, when the public was getting impatient with the slow returns on expensive campaigns. If Anthony was losing battles in Africa, the taxpayers funding it all would still get a reward in the form of a day of matches. The Emperor’s thumbs up or down after a match decided the fate of the vanquished fighter, and reinforced the Emperor’s god-like power over life and death.

They knew what they were doing. We know this because regional leaders were not allowed to hold death matches within a few months of an election (see my 1999 book Coercion for more on that). It gave them too much authority, and too much of an advantage.

But even more than a chance to aggrandize the emperor, beyond satisfying the sadistic, malignant narcissism of an emperor or would-be emperor like Trump, gladiatorial contests are meant to affirm the underlying ethos of an authoritarian society: might makes right. Military force, wealth, or violence dictate the law, overriding abstract morality. The “abstract morality” is all that law, all that trickery devised by intellectuals and Jews to protect immigrants, minorities, and other inferiors. The kinds of ideas now getting officially listed terrorism and leading to long prison sentences.

The fights celebrate a world where the strongest guy, the best fighter, gets the glory, the girls, and the gold. Ideally, the biggest winner at the end of the day, the last man standing, is a Roman or white dude or whoever represents the national bloodline. The original games made this explicit. They’d start with a round of animals against animals, then female slaves against animals, black men against females, and so on, all the way “up” in their schema, to white against white. The games offered an opportunity to see those racial hierarchies play out in their bloody fullness.

Retrieving the spirit of the games, if not the actual death matches, retrieves these same sentiments and ideologies. I watched some of the matches at my friend’s place. He couldn’t get the Paramount channel to stream on his TV even though he’d paid for it, so we watched through one of those pirated sports streaming websites. It ended up even more of an anthropological deep dive, because the website had a chat board attached to it.

And, trigger warning, that board was vile. I’ve been living a pretty insulated life lately, I guess. The most popular word in the chat was the N-word, when it wasn’t words for Jews, gays, or women. Several users kept posting 3D swastikas composed entirely of text characters. But most of the conversation had to do with questions such as whether the Jewish fighter would beat the Black fighter, an argument which hinged on the pros and cons of the various racist tropes associated with each….species of sub-human. As in: can a Jew use this or that of his known qualities against these other attributes that any Black fighter would have — or will he lose because of this quality or that. The loudest voices simply complained about having to watch a match between two inferior races.

That is, until the biggest interracial match of the evening was between ostensibly white (actually half-Mexican) American Josh Hokit and black heavyweight (and Trump favorite) Derrick Lewis. After Hokit won with a TKO, he got interviewed by Joe Rogan in the ring. As if trying to win Trump’s favor, he said “Shout-out to Trump for having the balls to put some s— like this on,” then he thanked his Lord and savior Jesus Christ, and then — as if he hadn’t done quite enough to appeal to the emperor, added the complete non sequitur, “Michelle Obama is a man.” Joe Rogan didn’t break his grin.

The chat stream went wild. One of their own had the guts to say the naughtiest, most racist, sexist, Trumpy thing possible. Hokit later told a podcaster he meant it as a compliment because, well, “She knows how to work hard like a man when the times get tough. You know… the tough keep going.” He said he was also celebrating America’s greatness through a demonstration of freedom of speech.

Beyond the racism and transphobia and circa-2008 Alex Jones conspiracy theory, the statement in the ring was a bizarre, adolescent version of might-makes-right. I won this fight, so I get to say something crazy. Like performing a daring act in front a cult leader in order to prove devotion, Hokit upped the ante on depravity. All to get daddy Trump’s approval by modeling his crude verbal impulsivity. To him, and to this culture, it’s a sign of masculinity.

But it’s also a reflection of the core tenet of this whole approach to life, sex, race, and geopolitics: might makes right. The very opposite of what defined human evolution, and what makes a civilization actually work.

I had been explaining this to my friend with the illegal stream (I talk a lot when the TV is on), and he disagreed. “When you think of it,” he responded “it’s always been might makes right.” And this guy was something of an intellectual. He wrote real books, and he’s smart — even if the covid-era restrictions and Democrat hypocrisy had pushed him over to dark enlightenment thinking. His point was that even when we have apparently cooperative agreements between us or our nations, they’re really just the result of someone having overpowered someone else. It’s always might makes right, same as it ever was.

But in practice, that’s just crazy. Trump clearly believes might makes right. He often acts as if he has unlimited power, or at the very least seeks to behave as if he did. In his vocal ramblings lately, he has asked what would Napoleon do? Or Attila the Hun? After his invasion and kinda-coup in Venezuela, he came to think of himself as invincible. His failure in Iran hasn’t convinced him otherwise. Trump’s strategy of force only succeeded in turning Iran into a dominant regional power with a chokehold on the passage of global oil, while also encouraging Israel into a possibly suicidal overreach.

It turns out, treating the rest of the world as enemies who will submit if we show a willingness to unleash our power does not work.

Neither does social Darwinism, a bastardized misinterpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which holds that everything is in competition with everything else. The fittest individual survives the battle, and is better for it. It doesn’t take cooperation into account at all. The most prevalent feature of the most evolved species, like trees, is that they have learned to facilitate the lives of many others—or even benefit from them. Trees are homes to thousands of other species, from lichen to squirrels, many of whom provide services in return. Trees have had time to learn how to shift from simply protecting themselves from others, to collaborating with them.

Humans are quite new as a species compared with trees, and humans of this civilization even newer than our indigenous elder siblings, which is why we’re just learning how to get along with things. The retreat to might-makes-right, whether supported by Ayn Rand’s science fiction stories or the feeble efforts at machismo cosplayed by Mark Zuckerberg, is a step backwards toward middle school. Michelle Obama is a man.

And the misguided notion that collaboration weakens everyone flies in the face of not just morality but science. When Elon Musk, in his illegally appointed role as commander of DOGE, shut down USAID, he said it “was not just an apple with a few worms inside, it was a festering ball of worms in the shape of an apple.” He claimed it was “a radical-left political psyop.” In other words, it’s not just that USAID was corrupt; it’s that the very mission of sending aid to stop AIDS and Ebola was a corruption of the God-ordained principles of might-makes-right. Sending African children vaccines or, worse, eradicating one of “their” diseases altogether, is cheating. It’s tipping the scales on the might-makes-right competition. It’s disadvantaging those who have already attained their trillion-dollar lead. It’s the kind of charity that Peter Thiel calls Satanism, because it redistributes assets that could be used for an Ubermensch’s ascension to an inferior, sub-human’s unnecessary and redundant survival.

Lancet—the most prestigious medical journal in the world—estimates that defunding USAID will lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. According to Harvard University, the number of deaths caused by the sudden retraction of aid led to 1.6 million by April. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is threatening to sue representative Ro Khanna for quoting these figures on the house floor.

But it’s not just “them” who suffer and die. Them is us. You don’t want them getting ebola, not when 15 million people in the world travel by plane every day. It’s not just their babies who die of AIDS if we don’t send medicine. It’s our scientists who lose the ability to observe its modes of transmission and end the threat to everyone.

Employing might-makes-right against Greenland and Denmark alienates Europe and makes America weaker. Just like using UFC logic to teach kids to be bullies doesn’t make them safer on the playground. Even if it makes one kid—the strongest kid— safer for a moment, he’s now got to watch his back all the time, like a silverback male awaiting the next challenger.

But that’s the whole point under authoritarianism. These violent foreign policies model our interior culture. They create the atmosphere of constant threat that leads people to seek the protection of the authority. That’s what the endless, meaningless wars of Orwell’s 1984 were about. The enemy without is no less important than the enemy within.

To authoritarians, cooperation and collaboration are themselves the enemy. If people aren’t afraid of each other, they won’t revert to this childish playground behavior. We must be kept competing with each other, in constant danger from outsiders, immigrants, different races, or even just those who question all this violence.

At best might makes right is a temporary stage for societies that have gotten imbalanced. But once you win, the first thing you do is put down your weapons and rebuild a cooperative society. Jamie Wheal just wrote a piece about how America was founded on the ideal that as soon as you win the war, you return to your farm. After you’re president, you go back home and live a normal life. That’s what the Enlightenment taught: humans can make the world less cruel, slowly but surely optimizing for everyone’s pursuit of happiness.

I tend to look at it more geographically. The world may be violent so you need a standing army of some kind, but you have that army on the perimeter so that you can enjoy an entirely less might-makes-right reality within. That’s the very definition of civilization. A way to cooperate and collaborate together in big groups instead of fighting over stuff. This means we can spend less of our energy on battles and more on music and love and science and children. That’s what we can teach our kids; not the fiction that “might makes right” is the natural law. Civilization is how people learn to work together for the benefit of all. It’s more advanced than might-makes-right. Not wimpier, not repressive. It’s the indigenous American tribes who let a council of women choose a male chief — always with the power to veto his choices or select a different one if he got out of hand. And if he wouldn’t step down, the people would just leave.

As for our relationships with the rest of the world? If it’s truly barbaric out there, you marshal some resources to defend the perimeter, and seek out other tribes or nations with whom to forge alliances. The more alliances you have, the fewer enemies you need to worry about, and the less relative power they have. That’s what institutions like League of Nations, the World Court, and the United Nations were for. Can they get bureaucratic and boring and even co-opted by big money? Yes. But at least they are principled on something other than the logic of organized crime families.

So you make alliances, cooperatives, and communities within and without. And if they don’t get too mired in capitalism, they end up smarter, living in greater abundance, and with more resources to spend on defense (and more allies to come to your side) if it becomes necessary. Not people to come help you invade someone else, as Trump thinks it works, but people to help defend if someone is trying to invade you.

When we succumb to the prison yard logic of might-makes-right, we enable and empower the sociopath. We don’t have to suffer sociopaths as the richest and most powerful people in our society. That’s more a function of our choices, our values, our refusal to forge solidarity and mutual aid, than it is their intrinsic power as mighty individuals. They are rotten fruit of a might-makes-right non-civilization.

You know how I’ve been saying lately that this civilization is dying and we have to learn to act as doulas for its passing, as well as doulas for the birth of whatever comes next? Well, let me amend that. It’s not civilization that is dying, but this anti-civilizational logic, and the criminal, anti-human enterprises that have grown in its poisoned soil.

Don’t avert your gaze. Look at it. This is not life. Mixed martial artists deserve better than to serve at the feet of an 80-year-old sadistic child, bastardizing aikido and ju-jitsu as evidence of their very opposites. What would Bruce Lee think? Or Mohammed Ali? Men for whom fighting was not a battle of might makes right, but the transformation of violence into spirit.

Past into future.

Boys, into men.

“Them”, into us.

All of our experiences are potential portals to new ways of thinking and feeling. For just one example, I put my hand on a tree the other day. I don’t know why, exactly, but I felt compelled to put my palm on its trunk and leave it there for a bit. And I swear, I could feel the essence, the intelligence of the forest of which it was a part. These kinds of awarenesses, the ones we sometimes get to feel as children before stress and logic and being “right” about things obscures the subtle nature of being from us. As a result, we end up in the flatlands of the probable instead of the infinite swirl of the possible. Disconnected from the vitality of the rest of this organism, and obsessed with how to maintain the boundaries between us and everything else instead of how to make them more porous. We come to think of that solidity and permanence of self-hood as the life we want to extend, when it’s actually the opposite.

Here’s how I learned that.

I got invited to a retreat—just a few days in the country. (Interesting that word, “country.” The countryside really just means “not city.” It’s just the real world. There was nothing to call “country” until we built cities to define it by contrast.) I heard there would be a facilitator offering people a short-acting medicine called Bufo, but I wasn’t planning on making it a part of my retreat. I had just come back from that shamanic experience in Costa Rica, and didn’t want to interrupt all that integration with yet another download.

But when I met the facilitator, I started to feel like I was in the right place at the right time to try something I’d only heard about from Terence McKenna. I’m not getting any younger, and how many opportunities am I going to have? Plus the people who had been invited were really loving and accepting. This was a gathering of hand-selected friends, not a commercial adventure in the woods. It was a safe place — meaning, a safe place to experience challenging things. Everyone knew how to make space, how to engage and not engage with people integrating things, how to co-metabolize and co-regulate. And the facilitator herself? It was like I knew her from a dozen past lives.

I admit, I was scared. Bufo is a form of toad venom that contains a molecule know as 5-MeO DMT—often called the Mount Everest of psychedelics. It lasts about only ten minutes. Instead of a psychedelic trip with hallucinations and insights and what-not, you get total ego death. All subjective experience and self-identity is just stripped away. Time and space vanish. It’s like having a hundred mushroom trips on the head of a pin.

And for a lot of people, it’s challenging. Even psychedelic legend Timothy Leary once told me DMT was too much of a roller coaster for him. Too much ego dissolution, all at once. It is believed that 5-MeO-DMT is a naturally occurring substance in the human body. Something that gets released at the time of death, and responsible for a lot of the “near death” experiences people have of heading toward a white light.

The people and setting were so nice, though, and the facilitator assured me that we all get whatever the “God molecule” determines we need. That was enough for me, so I went into the huge ceremony room with three other people, so we could do it one at a time—and support each other by bearing witness.

Because I was the least experienced (nice for a change) I went first. I read a prayer, or really an extended affirmation, that the facilitator held up for me. It was all about how I already have the thing I’m looking for, how I am already loved, and stuff like that. Then she held out a glass pipe, torched it, and I inhaled. I heard bird sounds (I later found out they were made by the facilitator). It sounded like a flock of birds I could follow through a portal in the sky and then…

I was bathed in white light. Warm. Like the sun, but more. Total love. Total bliss. I realized my even having the presence of mind to think about it meant it was over. I was past the peak. Beautiful.

But all I could think about after that was do I deserve a totally blissful experience like that? I have all sorts of problems to work on, right? So why or how do I get through this without some horror? Why do I get a pass?

I was happy and glowing the rest of the day, but I still had a nagging doubt. Maybe I didn’t do enough? Had I somehow avoided the work? Some sort of spiritual bypass had occurred, maybe? More experienced people told me that most people don’t even remember what happens on DMT. It’s outside time and space, and whatever needed to happen, happened. I’ll find out later, and maybe even remember pieces of it, as it integrates.

But there was an opportunity to do it again the next day, and I chose to go for it. I decided that the medicine simply introduced itself to me on the first day. It knew I was scared, and wanted to show me it was a benevolent molecule—a gentle spirit that meant only the best for me. So I would go back and really surrender this time, to whatever it had to say.

The next morning I met a wonderful young man, who told me he was going to be in my group and that he was so very honored to be there and share this experience with me. I was touched and humbled. A person who knows of me and my work? Such a reward. As if my efforts doing all this stuff, all this Team Human and writing and vulnerability was coming back to me in the form of this person who happened to be in this experience with me. How good to see the face of someone who appreciates me.

We went back into ceremony. I was more scared this time. I was inviting this medicine to do its worst with me. I read the prayer again, inhaled as much of the stuff as I could, followed the bird, and BAM. An even hotter, brighter, totalizing dissolution of everything. Pure love, molecular vibration, resonance, disappearance. Nirvana.

So again, I ask, and right in the moment this time: Really? Do I deserve this? Total bliss?

And the Bufo answered, not in words, but by offering me alternatives. I could enter a state of purging. I felt the potential of spending an hour throwing up, my gut ready to contract, but I passed on that. No need to go there.

Then I touched the ocean of tears. I could cry an infinity of compassion for the suffering. I touched it, tears welling up, but let that go.

I thought of my achievements. Have I done enough? I could worry about what I’ve done, how effective it has been, and re-dedicate to getting more done in this lifetime. Eh.

Or I could worry about my friends, my daughter. Does she have the tools she needs to make it through this world? To meet the challenges of her illness, find a sustainable career? Will she be okay? I could worry endlessly about that…

Or, you can just die. Bufo said that. You can just die.

And that’s the door I picked. Just die. I thought of that young man who spoke to me earlier, the one who was so honored to be there for this. It made me feel like I would not die alone. Married or partnered or not, I had reached people with my work, with this work. They would be there when I needed them.

Just die.

And in accepting that, it was as if I had passed through the Bardos of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and accepted the light, without being tempted by one of the many false promises of completion. There was nothing to do but let go into death.

That’s the moment I opened my eyes and returned to breathing, waking consciousness. I inhaled my first breath like a baby emerging from the womb. This place of breathing. Where existence is an active process. It had been a couple minutes, maybe just seconds, when that timeless eternity had taken place. Accepting death meant coming into this world. This world of impermanence. This world—and I mean this in the most beautiful way—this world of death. This is where we come to die. From the timeless, egoless void of perpetual bliss, to this temporary, fragile, metabolizing existence of inevitable change and eventual disappearance.

That’s what we do here. That’s what makes this place so special. That’s how we know we are alive. Like the frog: everybody, everything croaks.

They were all crying when I returned to the group. I hadn’t said anything but they must have felt it. The universe as a cradle.

Sadly, tragically even, our civilization seems built to deny or resist this essential aspect of this existence. The pyramids of Egypt and capitalism alike were constructed in defiance of the dissolution. This is why we built a world based on accumulation and extraction. Climbing higher and trying to reach into the sky as ourselves, ego intact. Extracting the energy of this place and its creatures and people to somehow accrue enough mass to escape the inevitable. To recreate the ineffable infinity of the place we come from and the place we go to, but right here in the world of respiration, exchange, and metabolism.

This drives the tech bros’ fascination with life extension. Or that guy who injects himself with his son’s blood in the hope of living forever. Or growing clone slaves for replacement parts. As if the purpose of this place was to resist the intimacy of being metabolized. We look at aging itself as disgusting, instead of seeing the true delicate grace of the old woman on the park bench, or the wisdom she can articulate about learning to exhale.

To take one’s mind, one’s personality, exactly as it is, and somehow upload it to a server where the breath has no province, and life is frozen in place, resisting the metabolism and swirl of exchange where true living occurs. “Just die” is the one option they cannot bring themselves to see, much less accept. In an effort to transcend, they reject the bliss of voluntary dissolution, and the passively active state of resonance with every other living entity in this realm. Poor things.

As I see it, the object of the game here, if there is one, is the opposite. It’s what Spinoza, the 17th Century philosopher was getting at. In his masterpiece, Ethics, he argued that the very definition of a person’s power and vitality—their life—was “their capacity to affect and be affected by others.” The capacity to affect and be affected by others. Your ability to be not an isolated object simply maintaining its own coherence, but a dynamic interplay of energies continually interacting with the rest of nature and society. True power comes from ceasing the struggle to freeze time, and instead learning to flow with the universe’s infinite causal chain.

Yeah, Spinoza got ex-communicated from Judaism and his books were banned, but that’s another story. His dangerous belief was that we multiply our collective power to act by developing deep connections with other bodies and minds and learning to harmonize with them. And to do that requires us to accept the fleeting, shifting nature of corporeal existence.

He believed that human suffering arises when our natural will to survive is misdirected into trying to keep things exactly as they are. Like the tech bro uploading his current data profile and saving it the way we preserve the latest version of a Word document to a hard drive. When we commit to that permanence, we shield ourselves and reduce our capacity to feel or act. The real opportunity is to recognize that our time here is limited, which encourages us to fully expand our capacity to find the others and dance with them in this thing. That’s what gives us the unshakeable peace —what Spinoza called beatitude working from Latin, or what Buddha called nirvana—that transcends the fear of death. Just find the others, and be open to the change they create in you.

And we can do this both individually, and collectively. The problem with this whole pyramidal civilization we’re trying to prop up is that it doesn’t have the capacity to tolerate its own demise. It can’t content with its own temporary nature. Maybe we need more people who can model a graceful exit.

After that whole experience, I made sure to connect with the young man—the one who said he was so honored to be witnessing my experience? The one who made me feel like having written all these books and done all this work has created a community who will be there when it’s my time?

I wanted to thank him for having shown up for me like that, and I asked him, just to be sure, “do you know who I am?” And he said he had no idea. He just saw my face, felt my essence, and it put him in a state of appreciation for sharing this moment together. It had nothing to do with my books or achievements.

In other words, he really did know who I am.

Thanks for being in this swirl with me. I know it’s been a ride lately. I hope you’re as affected by me as I am by you.

Let me tell you a story that makes this painfully clear - at least for the guy I’m telling you about. I don’t generally real names when I’m criticizing someone—not unless they’re presidents or billionaires. In my first non-fiction book,Cyberia (a gonzo ethnography of 90’s San Francisco) I held back from critiquing anyone because they were all young and earnest and had great intentions. But I followed that book with a novel called Ecstasy Club, so that I could tell the deeper, darker truths about what I was seeing without ridiculing anyone. That’s I’m going to leave names out here, while still telling a true story. You can always do searches if you simply have to know, but I want to offer you the opportunity to consider not doing that, or posting links about who this “really” is in the comments area. Just let the story do its thing without necessarily tying it to anybody in particular.

Because this is a critique of people, not AI. I feel like I’m getting the reputation as someone who is against AI. Like, some, AI curmudgeon. I really don’t think I am. I’m not. And I’m not just saying this in fear of the future AI robot overlords that will parse these words, determine I’m antagonistic to their goals, and have me eradicated or, more likely, audited. No, I feel okay about using it for some of the stuff I don’t want to do, like organizing files. But not the real stuff. Not the things I want to do or things that are going to represent me in the world. Or anyone else, for that matter.

What I’m against, what has always irked me, is grift. Maybe that’s too strong a word, because I don’t mean it in its original sense of illegal con artists so much as people who exploit a cause for financial gain. Or influencers, even pundits, who play off people’s insecurities or rage or greed to get followers. In Generation X, we equated “selling out” with becoming a grifter. Trading soul for sales. Leaving the temp job and artistic pursuits for a career in advertising. This background means I may be a drop over-sensitive to this stuff, tagging every business book or advertising agency as a form of grift just because it’s got primarily a profit motive. I feel guilty for speaking at a conference called “The House of Beautiful Business” because the oxymoron of “beautiful business” feels like something out of the grift factory: you can do exploitative capitalism but save the world. We’ll make you feel good about your worst externalities.

But something happened that has really clarified all this for me. The difference between people doing stuff for money (which is really fine), and people compromising their integrity for money (which is something else entirely).

Here goes: I had agreed to do an interview for a guy, let’s call him Dave, who was writing a book about how AI was going to impact our relationship to truth. It was a typical, one-hour zoom call where I answered pretty typical questions about what we should use AI for and what we shouldn’t. I told some stories, used some examples, and then went on about my life.

Maybe a month or two later—shorter than usual—he sent me the final galley of the book, hoping I would support the publication. He added “As a note on process, our interviews were conducted on Zoom, and I worked carefully from the transcripts to represent our conversations accurately and in context. I hope your voice comes through clearly and adds an important perspective to the larger conversation about truth.”

I immediately went to my chapter to check on my quotes and the accuracy of the transcripts he was working from. All my quotes were way off. There was one about “preventing theater from being made” and another where I was insisting on the importance of “ground truth.” I’ve never used that term, and am not really sure what it means. The quotes were all either things I disagreed with, or things I wouldn’t say in those words.

I emailed him right away, telling him that his transcribing program must have made some errors. “I think if you listen to the audio, you will be able to hear what the correct words are.”

He replied that we should get on the phone to “walk through” my notes and get them “cleaned up.” I replied, explaining “I can’t really walk through the notes without a recording of some kind. Do you have that? I can listen to the recordings and try to find the places you quoted from, and then tell you what I said.” I was already annoyed. It was a really busy time, and I’d have to cancel someone else to help him with this.

Back and forth and back and forth we went, with me asking for transcripts that had my quotes or misquotes, and Dave obfuscating in one way or another, sending me audio files in formats I couldn’t open. I eventually opened the audio files, used Descript to turn them into text, searched for the quotes and couldn’t find anything close.

I wrote him again, telling him none of the words in the quotes are anywhere to be found in the text. He finally replied, “I did take a look at the text and your bibliography, so it may have come from one of your other works, and it may be a paraphrase that’s getting us stuck.”

Wha?? “It may have come from one of your other works, and it may be a paraphrase that’s getting us stuck.”???

Duh. I know you got it way before me. The guy wrote the book with AI. I looked back at the manuscript. All the wording, the organization, the analyses. They all read like AI. Jesus. I didn’t know what to do anymore. Fix the quotes so this book doesn’t misrepresent me? Stop responding and leave those misquotes for posterity?

“Most importantly,” his email went on, “is that the book accurately represents your thinking. So, probably easer to change the quote than to hunt for it. After all, you’re the author of your ideas.” At least that makes one of us.

Like a fool, I read the whole chapter and created new quotes that fit the argument his AI had constructed for me. Not great ones, but at least they were the kinds of things I would actually have said. I put them in an email, holding back my rage, but then offering my heartfelt warning: AI does not produce real quotes, and this way of working could come back to bite you. Particularly in a book that’s supposed to be about the way AI can distort the truth.

I was so deflated. Disgusted. I told one friend in confidence, someone else who had been questioning this guy’s virtuous empire all along, but then held my tongue. I’ve done well enough speaking and writing my truth not to begrudge those who take the other path.

A few months go by and the book finally comes out, with all the accolades of an important work. It’s endorsed by UN leaders and digital luminaries… He even got a Nobel prize winning journalist to write the preface.

Within a week, the friend to whom I disclosed the saga sent me a text. It was a link to a New York Times article about the book: “Book on Truth in the Age of AI Contains Quotes Made Up by A.I.” A couple of people misquoted in the book had apparently complained to the Times. The Times writers concluded that the book had “misattributed and invented quotes scattered throughout.” Dave said he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints.” Of course, that’s not the problem here. It’s that he chose to let ChatGPT fabricate the words we used to express our viewpoints, because finding actual quotes would require actual work. And it turns out ChatGPT could not fabricate our perspectives in ways that were recognizable to us.

In a statement (written by someone or something) he told the paper he was “now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.” May as well just start over and write it with a keyboard.

And all this, from an author who is positioning himself as an expert on truth in the age of AI.

There’s a lesson in all this, but maybe not only the one you think. Sure, it’s a case study in how not to use AI. It’s the lesson my freshmen students learn when they turn in a paper with citations that don’t actually exist because of Claude’s inability to generate real quotes from sources the user hasn’t manually submitted. Claude puts the lines in quotations marks, but they’re just guesses based on summaries. On a first offense, I just circle the quotes and tell the student to find real ones. Even if Claude writes the paper for them, at least they get exposed to the original text as they hunt for supportive quotes.

But the lesson here was different—at least for me. It has something to do with enthusiastic consent, and trusting my own sense of when and why to participate in something. It’s not that I should have known better. It’s that I did know better.

A year or two ago I got a phone call from Dave, who was an acquaintance in the tech-for-good world. I’ve seen him at some conferences, maybe I’ve been on a panel with him. Nice enough guy, talks the talk, and networks really well. He goes to a lot of events, I think, because I only go to a few and whenever I do, I seem him there. He’s part of the growing list of people and organizations dedicated to democratizing the internet, preventing harms, and promoting human values. All of them compete for the same funds from the same shrinking list of billionaire and foundations who haven’t yet decided fascism is the better, or at least a less dangerous path.

So Dave calls me from out of the blue. He was let go as executive director of a media non-profit, and looking for something else to do that could replace his six-figure salary. My heart went out to him. I know what it’s like to have kids in school, and every day thank the fates for my professor gig at CUNY, which gives me fuck you privileges for gigs I don’t want to do. But more importantly, this privilege obligates me to take a “hell yes, or no” approach to offers. Not that anyone should have to do stuff they don’t feel right about, but I’ve actually been put in a position to survive without doing it.

Dave had come up with a phrase—a name for a new non-profit media organization—but had no idea of what it could be or do. He wanted to know what I thought it might do, what need it could address, and how. Rather than starting with an actual need he identified in the world, he started with a name that he thought could raise money. First clue of a grift-in-the-making. I didn’t have a lot for him. He wanted to know if I would be on the Board.

“Of what? There’s no thing,” I said. “Exactly,” he replied. “That’s why I need you.” He wanted to know if I would please please come to a zoom meeting to help figure it out. I told him I would do the zoom, just to get him off the phone and get on with my work.

That’s when the emails started. “I saw you were going to Dave’s zoom meeting. I wouldn’t have agreed but when I saw your name I figured…” Classic. Use one name to get another, and another, until you have some genuinely important people there.

I showed up as I said I would, and pondered the luminaries in their little zoom squares as the inane conversation continued. Twenty digerati in search of a cause for Dave to tag with his new non-profit’s name. I didn’t attend any others, and I didn’t let him use my name as a board member, in spite of ongoing high-pressure requests.

I got invited to some events, and even went to a dinner that made my stomach turn when a young “advisor” just out of high school was honored and asked to stand up and speak about the harms of social media. She was eloquent, but in that pandering way high achieving young people use when they’re learning to play that game. The combination of conformity and preciousness that has turned the Ivy League schools into such monumentally boring institutions.

Still, more luminaries and dignitaries joined the organization, which was purportedly about protecting kids from the ills of social media. I couldn’t see much coming out of the work beyond a bunch of zoom meetings and dinner parties, but at least Dave had a job. I figured these folks must see and know something that I don’t. Maybe I’m just being a GenX curmudgeon, and letting perfect be the enemy of better-than-nothing.

So when Dave called to interview me for his book on how AI will distort the truth, I said yes. You see? Instead of listening to my own gut, to whatever it is inside me that’s let me become whoever it is I’ve become by now, I looked at the outward signs: the names and positions of the people who were supporting this organization. I knew what it was, and wasn’t. But some part of me feared I had missed the boat. Worse yet, I told him I’d join his advisory board. There must have been fifty people on it by now. My absence felt almost conspicuous.

When the manuscript came back and saw it was an AI-generated pile of…grift, I realized my own participation in this fiasco derived from the same insecurity and strategic energy as Dave. It was a lazy delegation of my judgement to a symbol system, combined with a fear of missing out. I was not behaving in a way that was aligned with my own integrity.

I don’t begrudge Dave for what he did, or anyone for grifting or compromising when they have to. It’s hard out there. We can’t all do jobs we like, or even work on assignments we agree with. We’re often cogs in companies whose impacts we disdain. Sales clerks at the GAP upselling items customers don’t need; or health insurance claims adjusters looking for ways of denying claims. It would be nice if everyone had the liberty of living true to their deepest convictions, but most of us don’t.

Still, there are certain kinds of work, of creation, of interaction that do demand we rise to the occasion. And AI really helps us distinguish them. What would you relegate to AI? And why? And what does that say about your relationship to the task itself?

Someone who uses AI to bang out reports or organize folders or even do a meta-analysis on some data sets? I’ve got no problem with that. But to write a novel, a letter to a lover, or to substitute for the human judgment someone is paying you for? That’s over the line. Writing a book is hard and time-consuming, but that’s the job.

And while it’s bad enough to misrepresent an AI’s writing as one’s own words, it’s even worse to represent an AI’s fabrications as someone else’s words. Besides: we gave our time and words. They’re all recorded. Just feed those into the agent so the AI can use direct quotes in the book you have it write for you. At least give the AI what it needs to do right by us, even if you can’t.

But that’s Dave’s problem. I’ve got my own, which is that I didn’t trust my own Spidey sense that the whole enterprise was a grift. I wasn’t in it to help him out, but to make sure I wasn’t left out of what I mistook for an “important project.” It was ego. FOMO. I didn’t want to be left out of the list of important people. That’s how a confidence game always works: the mark thinks they’re getting something.

As we move into a world with more simulations, more fabrications, and more permutations of the grift they engender, it’s going to become all the more important that we trust what our bodies are telling us. We know. We always know. Deep down inside us, we really do know.

We can go against that inner voice, that expression of our will, our actual soul, when we absolutely must. Gotta eat. Gotta protect the family. Gotta pay the rent (or if you’re lucky, mortgage). Gotta keep a job. Our civilization was built this way in part to get us to do stuff we know is wrong, to externalize discomfort, to see other human beings as less important than us, and instruments for our own survival. Our president and our billionaires do it, so why shouldn’t we? Because it will kill your soul. You don’t have to die on the sword of your own integrity, but there are ways to navigate this terrain.

The object of the game, particularly when you have the degrees of latitude to play, is to keep the meaningful stuff in-house. “In-heart.” Our books, our art, our institutions of care? These are not of that outsourced realm. They’re the stuff we render to God, not to Caesar. And the stuff we do with people we actually trust, no matter their apparent status. You already know inside who they are, and who they are not.

I even have certain people that I use as warning signals. People I’ve met at one thing or another, done a panel with them, or observed them in a professional setting, and gotten a really bad feeling about. Not that they’re evil or dangerous. Just that they’re off, or misaligned.

I may still give them a chance, but after a couple of confirmations, I start to use them as negative indicators. Like, if there’s a party or a conference and I see they’re going, I take it as a sign from the fairies or the universe that I shouldn’t attend. Or maybe a startup asks me for some advice and I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth the time. Then they mention that they’re also talking to one of my negative indicators? That’s my cue. Their presence is like a gift. A warning sign like “thin ice” or “road curves ahead.” It’s that clear. The universe is that clear. And we don’t even have to spend extra effort to see these things. We all see them all the time.

The effort comes in actually listening to what our hearts and our bellies are telling us when we do. There’s no short cut. We have to learn to obey our selves.

I went to Princeton University for all the wrong reasons. A Jewish public school kid who got in on grades at a time when the bulk of students were still members of a legacy I didn’t even know existed until after I got there. People with the same names as retail stores, corporations, even a colonized country or two. I went for dream of inclusion in the preppy elite, thinking that’s where the smart successful people were. But I quickly found out it was teeming with a lot of prep school trust fund kids and Young Republicans and southern rock fans who hung confederate flags out their dorm room windows. Not everyone, of course, but that’s the keg culture that dominated.

Princeton had this strange tradition where on the first night before class, everyone surrounded the original campus building, and someone tried to steal the clapper from the bell in the bell tower. Like, they either climb up the building from the outside, or find a way in. And whoever steals it is remembered somehow, I guess. Whatever.

So all these students, almost all guys (Princeton had a worse than 2 to 1 ratio of men to women at that time), they’re all milling around this building. And I lock eyes with a guy in ripped jeans wearing red bandana over messy black hair. Not a preppy. And there I was, practically in preppy drag, wanting to prove to him that I wasn’t one of these dudes. I was a fellow public school artsy outsider to this insular sea of privilege. I guess I wasn’t pulling off the preppy thing, because he just came up to me as if he recognized me as an ally and said “yo - I have an idea.”

We found a big stick shaped like what we imagined a clapper must look like, and made it look like we had emerged from the building with it. We ran into the woods screaming that we had the thing, and were pursued by a couple of upper classmen we couldn’t outrun. When they got to us, they said they represented some alumni and would give us $1000 for the clapper. Wha? What kind of sick world had we signed up for?

Steven and I talked most of the night, and vowed that whichever one us of was alive in 50 years would come back and prank these people in some awful way. We figured we would be too old to get prosecuted for a prank. But it was a real pact.

We were partners in crime after that. Maybe not so much partners in crime as partners in justice. Like, one day we offered our resident advisor’s pet gerbil its freedom. We explained in four languages that we would open its door for one minute to give it the opportunity to escape. But we informed it that with freedom came great risk, like being able to find food and avoid predators. The gerbil chose to remain domesticated. We also did graffiti protests when the school closed the library to the public, screened bootleg movies, and did other stuff that risked our status there. Steven more than me.

We’d go to punk clubs in New York, hang out with the Dead Boys at Max’s Kansas City, do drugs, make art, and live in ways we felt defied the elitist wealth networks of the Forbes and Rhodes who graced our classes. In those days, just having an earring or a bit of red dye in one’s hair was a statement of protest. We made music bouncing tracks back and forth on cassette recorders; I directed a play Steven wrote about an exchange student who was actually a bowl of jello; we took an impromptu trip to Montreal where we met a band of Haitian drummers, and then got them across the border to the US — apparently holding a lot of mushrooms because they gifted us a big bag when we dropped them off in Maine. I’m not sure how much of that I would have done without Steve and his confidence.

Steven was always a notch or two more adventurous and righteous than I was. I’d attend an illegal protest, but he’d cut the chain link fence barricade. I was aware of racism, he ate at the college’s Third World Center, where people of color gathered and forged solidarity. He was like a cross between Lou Reid cool and Naomi Klein leftism. And increasingly intolerant of anything contaminated by establishment approval. I wanted to be as confident in my convictions as he was, but it appeared to come at a cost. No compromise. Lots of conflict.

Things got a little strained between us after I came back from a semester at a theater school. I got almost too into theater for him. One time I didn’t take a hit of a joint because I had a play rehearsal coming up, and he said something like “What happened to you? I barely recognize you.”

We stayed friends, but I had chosen the “establishment” route of pursuing theater and an MFA program in California, while he went total indie: working temp jobs and living off lentils while playing bass and doing graffiti. And some hard drugs.

But we wrote letters, and I told him about all the stuff I was doing at CalArts, the insanely wonderful school that launched PeeWee Herman and Tim Burton and Don Cheadle and me! We had digital music, devised theater, and gamelan.

Something about that tempted him. I think he had his fill of the harder drugs, as well. We had too many friends who went over the edge and weren’t coming back. He also had a younger brother who had gone into a business in a bottom-up entrepreneurial way. He was working on a business plan for a movie theater that was also a cafe and a motel. An honest business serving culture…and dating. And it felt to Steven like a cool place to try to do something.

So he offered to come out, see what CalArts was all about, and then drive cross-country with me back to New York for the summer. We’d use the trip to reconnect and write a screenplay together, that I could then direct and his brother could screen at his theater.

And we had a great couple of days. He loved CalArts — everyone does. It’s one giant building of insane art and play. The motto is “no technique before need.” So it’s a supported free-for-all, a best-of-both-worlds celebration of weird. Steve could see the appeal, as well as the kind of discipline I was developing as an artist. Committing to craft is not selling out.

This is where the bad part happens. Steven wanted to see the Grand Canyon on the way back to New York. His grandmother said to watch sunrise from the south rim. But this meant getting to there from LA by sunrise. We were having a great drive from LA through Death Valley, reconnecting on every level from psychedelics to Buddhism to Wittgenstein. We didn’t even have any drugs or weed or anything with us. Just pure joy. Love, true love.

It was really late. Like 2am. We pulled into a rest stop for gas and food, but all they had was a candy machine so we got this big brownie. It was maybe two in the morning, and I was just too tired to drive. But we were close enough to make it by sunrise, so Steven took the wheel, using the brownie for an extra boost. Well, I guess you know how that went. Trigger warning.

I felt us going off the road as Steven shouted “oh shit.” He tried to navigate for a moment or so then plowed into a large juniper. It wasn’t as soft as it looked. It was a loud hard BAM. Blood, glass, everywhere. Everything hurt but nothing hurt. I looked over and Steve was unconscious, pinned in there with metal and branches. I managed to get out of the car. It was accordioned, squished. Glass in my hands and face, a fucked up leg. I made it around to his side, and pulled back a piece of metal that was pressed against his neck cutting off his windpipe. But instead of coming to, he just slumped over and blood came out of his nose and ears. I sat him up again, but I knew what was happening. He wasn’t in there anymore.

I went out into the highway. It was like four in the morning and there was no one to wave over. I just stood there in the road, under the sky, and screamed. There was nothing to do. Eventually the truckers came. Sat me down against something. Then the ambulance. The paramedics kept working on me, assuming I was thrown from the car because it was too squished for anyone to survive. And I kept sending them back to Steve. They said not to worry about him. A special crew would extract him.

It was in the ambulance that I got weird. I imagined there were drugs in the car and that the cops were going to find them. Should I take responsibility? Say they were Steve’s? He couldn’t get in trouble anymore. I guess I gave my mind a fake problem to work on. (Weeks later, I remember: there were no drugs. Steven had gone clean.)

The siren was on. The EMT was asking questions about how many fingers he was holding up or what I had for breakfast, and I asked him if people ever get over stuff like this. He was barely my age at the time—maybe 20—and looked at me like the question was beyond his pay grade. Then he said something like “people go on with their lives. They live on.”

And it was at that moment I decided I would live on—not just for me, but for Steven as well. I’d live for the both of us. Incorporate his life mission, his soul, into me.

It was a tough summer, but when I went back to school I leaned into Brecht and more political theater. Marx, Artaud, and Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. Everything indie. Proletariat. I merged my own love of the arts and spirit with Steven’s commitment to absolute integrity and never surrendering to the compromised values of the status quo.

It’s made for a tough path all these years. I eventually quit theater because so much of it catered to the elites who paid for it. It was at best apologist, or a substitute for on-the-ground activism. I could hear Steven’s voice condemning the fancy productions. I turned to interactive art. After all, back then the net offered an indie, bottom-up alternative to that high-brow arts scene, but—as you all know—it ended up being anything but an anti-corporate safe haven for anarchist art and culture.

I spent 20 years trying to live and write at the intersection of culture and social justice. Holding the double agenda—never leaning totally into art or culture or reverie as long as there was one person suffering somewhere else. It wasn’t even always conscious. It’s just, after a couple of decades living like this, it’s who I became. Smart, but always conflicted. You can even hear it on some early Team Human shows, like the conversation with Omaha Nebraska artist Brigitte McQueen. I’m asking her if it’s okay to make art and have such fun like that while there are still people suffering and starving. She said it’s even more of an obligation to joyfully make art, but I didn’t quite understand what she meant. Not in my body, anyway.

Until I did a ceremony a couple of years ago—yeah, a facilitated mushroom journey. I was lying there, experiencing the mycelia as if they were feeling around inside my body. The tendrils reaching up from my gut. And when they got to my heart, they just held there. It was really painful. A terrible, squeezing. Like the mycelia had wrapped around my heart and were clenching. I thought maybe they were hurting me, but then they said, in that silent way a plant can talk, “You have a broken heart.” Huh? I assumed they were talking about my marriage. But it was even older than that. “You are broken-hearted.”

The distinction mattered. I was back there at the accident. I saw Steven in the car, bleeding out, and realized what the pain was. Not just mourning. It’s that my heart was broken from trying to hold his heart along with mine. It was too much. I had taken responsibility for him. Not to him, but for him. Trying to fit two lives, two hearts, in the space of one. The mushrooms weren’t squeezing my heart like that; they were just showing me what I was doing to it all the time. It was pain I was carrying with me. I couldn’t hold his heart in mine anymore.

I gave consent to let him go, and the pain in my heart stopped. It was like I could feel him going. I had to let him go. It wasn’t good for him either.

I cried a bunch. It may have been the first time I cried about this since I was there in the middle of the highway. And as I wept, I started to feel like the tears were no longer my own. They were infinite. An ocean of tears beneath us all the time. This shared, almost infinite well of trauma and grief. It goes on forever.

All we can do is make like a mushroom and metabolize it. We’re all in this churn, this swirl, together. It’s painful, violent, pathetic. Unnecessarily cruel. It’s us, it’s the babies getting blown up in wars, the refugees being turned away, the people caught in the gears of the machine or its toxic clouds.

We’re all in the swirl. This insane, violent swirl. And as I considered that, I started to see some old friends. Ones who had passed on, and were now bobbing around in this swirling ocean. Not Steve, but Robert Anton Wilson—he had this Alfred E Neuman “what me worry” face on. As if to say, it’s not so tragic; it’s really just ridiculous. I saw the great satirist Paul Krassner in the swirl, too—with that gentle knowing smirk of his. Harvey Pekar shrugging that shrug. Terence McKenna, with his wry smile; and Genesis P-Orridge with mock demonic laughter. Each of my departed friends and mentors in the swirl, metabolizing the tears in their own, painful but joyful ways. Each one discovering how to do this processing, this metabolizing, not with anguish but in something like bliss. Accepting the cycle of death and life and death.

I released the stubborn, punk insistence and resistance of my 20-something best friend, and accepted the possibility that I really do have a different mission. I mean, what if art is our way of metabolizing all this grief, of joining this collective swirl as the bliss. Think Happy Buddha. After realizing that all existence is pain and suffering, he starts to smile? That’s his middle age wisdom? But that’s precisely it. True compassion allows you to metabolize this grief and sorrow, and transform it into something else. Death into life.

I’m not saying Steven was wrong. He was as true to a cause as a human could be. I’m just saying his path wasn’t my path, and trying to do both became an unnecessary source of conflict. And holding onto his heart and mission was a way of delaying the pain. Not letting him die. Steven died.

I think our resistance to death is a big part of our problem right now. All the tech bros and wealthy folks working on life extension or the end of death altogether? Like that’s gonna be fun? If your life expectancy was 10,000 years like some of these folks are suggesting, then the only way you could die is in a freak accident. So who’s gonna even go outside or go in a car? The price of eternal life is that everything becomes a risk. Your highest probability of dying 9000 years early. Better stay inside and not move.

The precious scarcity of this existence—the brevity of life—is part of what makes it so beautiful. Part of what gives us the opportunity to recognize how special each of us is. Something that the wealthiest sociopaths at the top of our civilization’s pyramid would do well to accept and celebrate. Because the swirl is coming for them, too. No matter how high up the pyramid you go, if you’re alive you’re still in the swirl. If you exist you’re in the swirl. Hell, if you used to exist, you’re in the swirl.

We’re all in it, and we’re all in it together. That’s the Team Human awareness I’ve been pitching all these years. That’s what no amount of machines or wealth can deny, not for very long. Whether we tear down the towers with protest, reveal their faulty foundations with art, or melt them with love, we’re all doing our part in our own ways. That’s why there’s so many of us.

Anyway, I love you Steve. I’ll see you in the swirl.

Twenty-five years later, I realized I was in need of a break. Not a break from life, but from the Google Calendar and all the pings. I’ve had some success with yoga and other practices, and wanted to explore this more embodied, somatic approach to experience more deliberately. I’m a PhD in media theory, but a perpetual beginner in metabolizing.

So I signed up for a weeklong workshop in shamanic spirituality down in Costa Rica. It wasn’t easy to make that choice. It wreaks of privilege, jet fuel, retreat, self-indulgent New Age altered states…. But some good friends of mine had done this same workshop and genuinely believed it would be of benefit, while giving us a shared vocabulary for a different level of experience: One that isn’t captured in the language of technology, social change, political activism, or even literature and the arts. I justified the expense as a teacher going back to class to learn some of what I missed. This would make me better at what I do. Even beyond that, am I allowed a week? With everything else going on in my life and in the world? And I said, fuck it, I am.

That choice alone, to take the time and space to get good with existence, may have been the most important part. I’ve been doing some workings here, a bit of magical practice and pauses to meditate on things for a moment. But not really. It’s more like an occasional yoga class. It’s great that I get a lot of stuff done and help lots of people (or at least answer a lot of email) but it’s also a bit disrespectful to this incarnation not to live in appreciation of the physical reality I’m being afforded. Air, gravity, touch, even the people who built the servers and devices to bring this to you. So yeah, I took a week to reclaim my body, my breath, my vital energy…and my eros.

And it was spectacular. It still is spectacular. From the outside, I guess it looked like a bunch of people doing psychodrama exercises during the day, and more tantric, shamanic openings in the evening. There’s no need to go into the details. It wasn’t drugs or sacred plants, but practices that involved some touch and energetic exchange. Not like dating, but what you might call transpersonal experiences. Still, they were intimate — the same way doing mushrooms in a small group is intimate, with everyone co-metabolizing everyone else’s traumas. Only here we were co-metabolizing some joy and opening along with the traumas.

But more important for me, living in the body and led by more somatic impulses than the ones in my head, changed something for me. I stopped strategizing, manipulating, and controlling things. In these mental and physical spaces there were no street signs to read or maps to negotiate, so I started to trust a different navigational sensibility. I decided to just let what was going to happen, happen.

I had a really good time, opening and sharing and being and even just dancing in ways I hadn’t before — not in front of other people, anyway. And there was one person there who created a field around them that made it so much easier to do this. They were just connected to the earth and the moon or whatever it is. Their mere presence created a permission structure for being real, vulnerable, open. At least for me.

And there was one big exercise, one shamanic experience that I had heard about beforehand that I was kind of nervous for. It was going to be intimate on lots of levels, and while I love all humans, there’s limits to what I — in my current state of development — feel great about all those humans doing with me or to me. The facilitators set up a ritual through which partners for this ceremony were selected. They put pairs of matched items from the jungle on a big platter. You picked an item off a plate while blindfolded, and then everyone takes off their blindfolds, holds up the leaf or flower or whatever they took, and then look around to see who got the other one. That’s your partner.

I picked my leaf, opened my eyes, and looked for my partner. And sure enough, it was them. This creature of light. And they were crying. Not because they were bummed, but because they had been hoping it would be me. And in that moment, that little lucky coincidence, it hit me that the universe really has my back. Whether it’s Anael, (the archangel that my Team Human guest Arden Leigh connected me to, or God or just the fractal order of things…I’ve been held all this time.

The experience itself, well, thank God it was a person who I trusted could hold me in all ways. It was an ordeal — on the order of a heroic dose — and I was totally emotionally and physically overwhelmed. I felt a buzzing electricity, a numbness in my hands and head like when you hyperventilate, except then it turned into this surge, like a sustained electric shock going from the base of butt right up my spine and out the top of my head. I thought I was maybe having an attack of some kind, and I ended up curled up in a ball on the floor as this stuff cycled through me. One of the facilitators later said it’s called a “kundalini awakening,” where all this dormant, coiled up energy at the base of the spine rises and rewires the nervous system. But it happened at the right time in my life, in the right place, and connected to a person in a moment so profound — it felt like I had incarnated during the same lifetime as them in order for that moment to happen between us.

Yeah, I get it. It sounds like “just” a high. But a heightened state — particularly one achieved through a practice rather than a chemical — isn’t inaccurate, it’s just specifically revelatory. And this experience or opening or whatever it was created for me a new reality tunnel. One that suggested something about the way my whole life, and I’d argue all life works.

Throughout my life, and definitely more in my awareness right now, the right opportunities have opened at the right times for me to grow and become alive. And the right challenges have come at precisely the moments I was ready to confront my shadow. There’s a way in which the universe has been perfect to me. It has my back. That doesn’t mean I’ve always recognized it. To the contrary. Any true success I’ve had in this life has occurred in spite of my best efforts to resist it or to make something else happen. I got that loud and clear from this experience.

But more importantly, I started to become aware of this other way of perceiving and navigating the world. A different, somatic compass. This other way of perceiving and navigating the world that we have been calling “magic,” because it’s not so easily identifiable what’s making it work. Spidey sense? ESP? Somatic awareness? Shamanic wisdom?

I want to be so bold as to assert that this shamanic/somatic awareness I’m describing here is the natural state. It’s not officially spiritual or religious. It’s not made up of symbols or superstitions. It’s a level before that, below that. It’s pre-linguistic, and pre-symbolic.

It’s the feeling you get when you put your palm on a tree trunk. Or when you feel physically drawn toward something or someone you don’t even know is there until you turn the corner and see them. Or conversely, the feeling you get when you know you’re off-track. The gentle nudge from the universe, like the nudge you get from the seat of a fancy rental car when you drift too close to the lane dividers. It’s another way of orienting to the world. There’s a farmer I know who picks up a rock in order to know where to plant or find water. As if holding the rock puts the farmer’s body back into relationship with the entire history of the field. On an elemental level.

Language and math and symbols are great inventions, but they are maps not territories. They have their own biases, and they necessarily draw our attention off our lived experience and into the many grids of interpretation. Even spiritual systems do this. Spheres with names, and levels of awareness, and diagrams, and phases with colors. Great stuff, but not what I’m trying to share here. I believe there is an alternative way of navigating reality that involves finding one’s core — heart, gut, kundalini, whatever you want to call it — and then using it lean into what’s in harmony. Sorry if that sounds esoteric, because it’s really quite tangible and intuitive compared with the way we usually calculate our choices.

It’s subtle and inexplicable, but quite natural. Like the way the upper branches and crowns of trees in a forest will avoid mashing into each other in a behavior called “crown shyness.” They somehow sense each other and create gaps so they won’t collide as they grow and sway in the wind.

Many people will try to access this sensibility in an explicit way through a modality of one sort or another. Like Tarot or I Ching or a pendulum, or even looking for those overt “signs” as they move through life. And that’s cool, but it still involves an interpretation layer. Does that black cat mean wrong way or right way? Is it on the left or the right? Does the storm mean danger or cleansing? If I’m going to play that game, I’d rather get the acknowledgment like a wink of affirmation after something than some sign from the ether I’m supposed to be actively decoding beforehand. I don’t want to be so actively “reading” phenomena all the time. Feels more like paranoia. I’d prefer a set of signs that make sense to me after something had come to fruition. Like a validation.

The phenomenon I’m trying to describe here is more of a real time thing, with no thought layer. Like standing in the ocean and feeling the warm current. And it’s there in every choice, from what food to put in your mouth—if you’re privileged enough to have that choice - to which gigs to accept or who to sleep with. It’s a subtle sensibility or sensation at first, but it gets really loud, really fast. Doing the “wrong” thing starts to feel intolerably “off.”

And then once you do the “off” thing you can feel it ripple through the rest of everything. For me, it might be agreeing to some podcast interview because I think it will get me something silly like “exposure” instead of it being something I really want to do. Then, of course, at the very same time slot I’ll get an opportunity to meet someone or do something special. And it will throw my Google Calendar out of sync, leading to a cascade effect where every appointment is now in the wrong place and time, and I can no longer even go to the best ones. Like a parking lot where all the cars have to fit together just so, and one in the wrong place means you have to move all of them.

These tools themselves, apps like Google Calendars, but even more so, maps and GPS, or metrics like wealth, or any other numerical value system—Likes—they all suggest we make our choices, navigate our paths, experience our success or satisfaction through external measures. Ones devised by people who do not have our best interests at heart, and cannot even know our hearts. These are systems that can’t know what we find beautiful, how it is we can best contribute to the collective welfare, how we can harmonize with the greater organism and play our part in everyone else’s shamanic journey.

When it’s working, it’s a like a dance, but with no official steps.

Our AI-driven world is a pseudo-reality. A symbol system based on a symbol system based on a symbol system. Predictions based on written language based on mouth noises. Or opportunity, based on agency, based on worth, based on jobs, based on corporatism, based on interest-bearing currency.

One’s life becomes about making oneself legible to these systems, through credentials or metrics or cash. And those who have become successful in those terms have a vested interest in negating and repressing the subtler but ultimately much more powerful ways the natural world really works. You can only disinfect nature for so long. You can only repress the feminine for so long. The indigenous. The kundalini. It’s more powerful than the prison of metrics with which we try to contain and control it. We look at its signals and nudges as noise to quiet or paranoia to ignore, rather than love and light guiding us to more harmonious ways of being. We’re too busy talking to shut up and start resonating—which is paradoxically louder and more impactful.

Our modern technologized world is a symbol system we learn about in school so we can navigate or manipulate it as adults. We learn the street names instead of the terrain, value job titles instead of the social contributions, and pursue growth over wellness. And that’s a great example: Why do we pursue growth? Because we use interest-bearing currency, a money system devised by monarchs to turn cash into a utility they could charge for. Nations care about the GDP—growth—because it means banks can get paid for lending us the money we use. But it’s a metric that guides choices in ways that don’t serve the planet or people or anything. Sometimes, even the best-intentioned of us can make our choices and measure success—development goals—based on metrics, reinforcing the dominance of the maps that got us out of alignment in the first place.

I’m aware how this feel-your-way through, use-the-force-Luke, Joseph Campbell “follow your bliss” approach to reality can come off as privileged. Of course it is! And while I’m not saying it’s impossible for a person in a refugee camp to surf the shamanic waves effectively, it’s whole lot harder. This hierarchical tyranny under which so many of us live was constructed to make it harder.

I navigated the maps well enough, and was born lucky enough, to get to a place where I have the latitude to make choices. But given that I do, if anything, it’s not my privilege but my obligation to make choices in ways I feel are consonant with the greater, or more essential reality in which we live together. If a tree is struggling just to grow, it may not have the energy or wherewithal to engage in the dance of “crown shyness” I was describing before. But those that do end up providing that struggling tree with a gap of sunlight in which to fortify itself.

Yes, it’s fun and rewarding to move through life in this shamanic way. And if you don’t have to work on someone else’s schedule, or live in a prison, or beg for charity, it’s a whole lot easier to let go and let the universe sweep you up in her arms and bring you to all the right places and people and experiences. You still have to spend energy and effort and overcome obstacles and metabolize trauma, but you get to do so with a prevailing sense of rightness and integrity of being.

And the benefits extend to others. Because once you start moving through life this way, you come to understand how coordinated the whole dance is. If you seize the privilege to act appropriately in any situation, you’re letting the karmic dance do its thing. You’re removing the points of friction, lessening the exploitation, reducing the overall quotient of striving, lowering the collective cortisol, and freeing yourself to help metabolize everyone else’s suffering.

If anything, not acknowledging and celebrating one’s privilege in the moment—for however long it lasts—is the affront to those who don’t have it.

So if you are privileged enough to turn off the pings on the phone, or to schedule fewer bad meetings, or earn less money, you damned well should. This whole capitalist and technological infrastructure has been fine-tuned for its ability to keep us off the path and alienated from our deeper sensibilities. A person with a mortgage is a more manageable citizen. Just like a person with an Instagram account, or an immune disease requiring a biologic.

And all those systems feed on each other, fast packaged food, industrial agriculture, adolescent colon cancer, medical debt, click counts, AI, teen suicide.

And that’s not even the real world. That’s the virtual world. The world built on language, money, politics, power, metrics, and other dead things. It’s the world our media and technology and corporatism and colonialism want us to mistake for reality. It’s the supposed “real world” we return to after watching a great movie or doing a ceremony or having a dream or making love. But it’s not. It’s the enforced illusion, the grid pattern of the city, the worth of a retirement plan, the notifications on the smart phone.

Those of us who have the privilege of escaping that virtual reality for moments at a time? For moments long enough to navigate soulfully and somatically rather than selfishly or strategically? Yes. We ought to do it. Because it’s not even a personal activity.

What you quickly realize is that we humans and other life forms are navigating this wave collectively. How well we do is dependent on how many of us can retrieve these more essential sensibilities. The ratio of free living people to captive or unconscious ones. We don’t have to rely solely on propaganda to convince people to make appropriate choices. Effective memes. No. Not when we have effective means.

When we act with compassion and resonance in appreciative surrender to the way things are trying to unfold, we model something else. A collective shamanism. A shared awe. A glimpse of what it feels like to live on Team Human.

Well, not the first time. We’re all using AI all the time, or AI is using us, through our social media feeds, web searches, email solicitations, streaming media recommendations… If you’re touching a smart phone, you’re interacting with AI.

But I did my first real AI project this week, both as a way to get something done that’s just been too big a lift for too long, and as a way of engaging with technology I’ve been avoiding for way too long. I think I was motivated in part by a bunch of campaigns saying not to use AI: AI is the enemy, it’s unethical to ask a single prompt, AI will destroy the environment, you’re taking away someone’s job, you’re feeding the thing that will one day become conscious and kill us all.

As the original spokesperson for Team Human against transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who argued we should pass the evolutionary torch to our robot successors, I felt it was my responsibility to really learn this thing rather than just opine on its impact.

I admit, as an older GenXer, I was kind of just hoping I could sit this one out. I’ve learned every new tech since programming memory addresses for hardware control of 8 bit systems, through basic and fortran, to C++, html, and css style sheets. I learned databases, social media platform architectures, algorithms, TOR networks, and even blockchain from the inside-out, just in case people came to their senses and used crypto for something better than extraction.

I learned MIDI, linear editing, non-linear editing, Macromedia Director, Maya, Adobe blah blah blah. And every time my wealth of knowledge about one tech was obsolesced by the next one. Who can keep up with everything? I was thankful when they got rid of Flash because I’d never had time to learn it.

It’s not that I’m a programmer, but if I’m going to speak about these landscapes, their biases, and what they may or may not do to humanity, I should know how they work. Program or Be Programmed, right?

So I was hanging out with my friend Benjamin, who runs a terrific Meta-Crisis Salon in Brooklyn that I’ve been attending, and he had just taken a course in vibe coding. Vibe coding is when people build a whole app or platform without any coding knowledge — just an AI partner. And he was jazzed, showing me all these dashboards he’d created to find trends in his communications impasses, scour the web for events he’d be interested in, monitor climate change, model social networks… you name it. It was like he caught a bug.

And I’m thinking, yeah this stuff is cool, but at what cost? I’ve got friends who are now making animated movies about really deep stuff, in highly crafted detail. There’s real thought and hours going into these creative expressions. We got into the question of whether these cool, potentially useful and socially beneficial programs could be worth the unseen costs of AI, such as the environmental damage and resource depletion and labor displacement. It was hard to know.

So we decided to convene a “hackathon” the next weekend, in the back room of a vegan restaurant in the East Village called Caravan of Dreams that we’re trying to rescue. A hackathon would bring a bunch of new customers into the space, while also seeing what a group of mutual aid and social good pioneers might think to do with AI.

As one of the conveners, I figured I should find out something myself. And I have this website sitting on Wordpress, with a bunch of custom code for its little features and every time Wordpress does a security update, one of those things breaks. And I’m stuck thinking, is it worth the time to fix this one, or do I just make a new site? I could go on one of the for-pay platforms like Wix or whatever, where they actually have AI’s assisting you in the building of your website, or I can build it from scratch with the coding module of an LLM (Large Language Model) like Claude. Use it as an opportunity to get my hands, or even my soul, a little dirty. See what the fuss is all about before the hackathon.

And, to be honest, the first thing I thought was “what will people think if they find out my website was coded by AI? Will they think I’m a turncoat? What about the web design job he just destroyed?” And so on. Part of the reason I needed to turn to AI is that I am dealing with a lot of data here. A few thousand articles, reviews, interviews, book chapters, videos, podcasts…all in different file types, disorganized. Archives from previous websites in proprietary formats…. A curatorial nightmare I would not wish on any of the students I hire for help.

As for the environmental destruction, well, that’s part of the test here. I wanted to see just how much money it cost to get a job like this done. I am fully aware of the oil, rare earth metals, cobalt, and unseen labor we are leveraging to prompt an AI system. But how much are we really taking, and what can we create in the process? Could the destructive impact of using AI ever be outweighed by the creative output? And how much better or worse is it than all the other ends-justifies-the-means compromises we make in our choice of meal, clothes, energy, entertainment, or transportation? Who uses more energy: me building a website, or the person protesting against that website by serving video on Tiktok?

Instead of using a website and asking questions, I installed an AI called Claude into the Terminal of my Mac computer. This way, I could have Claude do tasks for me with my files on my own machine, and then publish those files to my website on Github, which is just a place on the Internet where it’s really easy to upload files and test things. I put a folder on my desktop with all the stuff I wanted on my website, and told Claude the basic architecture: what I want on the home page, my books page, an archive of my articles…and so on. Claude kept the website’s local files on my computer until I was ready to publish them on the net. It’s there right now, at Rushkoff.com. Responding to my desire for transparency, Claude posted a menu of the themes we rejected along the way.

It took about five hours, all told, instead of maybe a month. The real achievements are the searchable archives of articles. And now, it’s a totally changeable website. I can go to the website editor on my laptop, paste the link of a talk I’m going to do, and it will create an upcoming event with all the information. I can even say “add a new page for Team Human, with an embedded YouTube.” Or “let’s create a prompt for people to query my entire body of work, that includes a meter showing how many kilowatt-hours of electricity it took to generate the response.”

Speaking of which, when I was done, I held my breath and took a look at how much energy it cost to do all that work. How much water? Not just building the website, but organizing and categorizing all those thousands of files? Given all I’ve read and been told about AI’s massive energy costs, I figured it would be the equivalent of a round trip flight to Istanbul. So I checked the tokens I’ve used so far for my entire Claude experience? Just under five dollars worth.

Even if Anthropic is effectively subsidized and getting energy cheaper and hiding certain externalities, even if we want to be super pessimistic and say that the company is somehow using four times as much energy as they’re charging me for, we’re looking at twenty bucks of energy. And as far as intellectual property, my AI web designer partner was benefiting off the design and user interface strategies of a myriad of human designers, as was I. So were all the alternative platforms I might have tried. It was getting hard to take an absolutist stance against this tech.

I finished just in time to go to the hackathon. People came up with some really good ideas. One person was using AI to do a meta-analysis of intentional communities, to see what the few successful ones had in common, and what were the biggest reasons the great majority of them failed—a research project that could take a dozen grad students years of analysis, and they may still miss the truly relevant variables.

My favorite project was the simplest: an “I have/I need” bulletin board - basically, the original Craig’s List on digital steroids. An Amazon killer, where people list what they are willing to give away or provide in service, as well as what they need. The kid who needs a bike gets one from the kid who outgrew hers. And because it’s built on AI, it can be a dynamic database that matches people geographically when it’s a thing like a bike, linguistically when it’s verbal, or stylistically when it’s clothes.

Moreover, because it’s being conceived by social activists instead of a team of hired engineers, it’s valuing horizontalism, mutual aid, and trust instead of expedience, profitability, or scale. At worst, they get a working prototype for something they can bring to a non-profit, who can bring on real engineers to build the more durable version. Their working prototype didn’t even cost the five bucks of tokens.

If their vision holds, more and more people start functioning in the peer-to-peer economy we imagined in the 1990s, before Airbnb and Uber replaced what we used to call couch-surfing and ride-sharing. The excitement in that otherwise unused room in back of Caravan of Dreams reminded me of the early cyberpunk infused Internet era. Are we in the same place? Can we learn from our earlier mistakes?

Is it foolish to think can we use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house? I want to believe. Are we in another moment of great potential, or is this another momentary mirage in the endless march of capital through new incarnations of exploitative technology? Is it already too late? Is this just another ends-justifies-the-means rationalization?

Can we beat them at their own game by bringing our best and brightest to the fore? Or has this technology already been monopolized by those who mean to colonize our last bits of attention and coherence? Can we de-colonize the eschaton?

It won’t be easy. We’re working against some powerful countervailing forces using the same technologies. I don’t just mean the obvious players like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, but tech billionaires who have been working behind the scenes for decades. The scariest one to me is Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle.

Oracle’s first customer was the CIA — the company is named after a CIA database project from 1977. Between 2014 and 2024, Oracle acquired companies like BlueKai (browsing tracking), Datalogix (linking online behavior to purchases), and AddThis (device fingerprinting) and merged them into the Oracle Data Cloud. By 2016 Larry Ellison said that Oracle had data on five billion consumers. What’s he doing? (Drey Dossier covering this beat the best.)

But there’s more: Project Stargate, Larry Ellison’s joint venture with OpenAI and SoftBank, funded by all sorts of sovereign wealth funds and announced by President Trump on January 21, 2025, at the White House, was billed as a $500 billion AI infrastructure project. It’s essentially a massive buildout of data centers to power next-generation AI. Ellison says it’s mostly a healthcare database to prevent or cure cancer. But Ellison has also publicly spoken about AI-powered surveillance — telling investors in 2024 that citizens would be “on their best behavior” because of constant recording and reporting. Ellison’s AI would act as an “ever-present supervisor,” analyzing every police body cam and doorbell camera. Nations would unify all citizen data, including genomic data, into a single AI-accessible database.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle published a blog post announcing the U.S. government authorized it to run generative AI on federal government data, including Medicare records and military systems, at the highest civilian and DoD security clearance levels.

Are we contributing to these efforts when work or play with AI, pay for pro accounts, or just even watch Ellison’s Paramount media channels or Oracle-owned TikTok? Does building on AI platforms work against even the best intentions of the projects we build? Not to mention the untold amounts of human labor and energy and water being extracted under the most exploitative, usurious conditions?

I really, honestly, don’t know. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is supposed to be the good guys—dedicated to human-centered AI and strict guardrails against all this nastiness. And while they’re putting up a pretty good fight against Trump’s efforts to commandeer all AI technology for his crackdown on dissent, they themselves admitted they have to rescind their initial promise not to release AI models if they can’t guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance.

Now on the one hand, it’s a more honest stance. Who can guarantee anything about a technology like AI, which has emergent properties and behaviors no one can really predict? If they spend time and energy on guardrails that may not even work, they will be outpaced by all the companies who don’t give a shit about such things. But if they don’t, then is it a safe place to build the pro-human, pro-social applications my friends and I are conjuring together in the back room of a vegan restaurant?

I like to think Anthropic’s refusal to become part of the US government’s militarization and surveillance apparatus is more important, and a better place to draw their red line. I’m less afraid of a rogue AI than I am a rogue president or a dozen rogue tech billionaires using AI.

As I see it, the object of the game is to weigh the positive potentials of these technologies against their extractive and sociopathic ones. To treat them like any other technology with dangerous downsides: Is this car trip worth the gas, the pollution, the oil wars? Is this YouTube post worth the algorithms and data servers? Is this vibe-coded program worth the AI cycles?

But the bigger question remains: Can we lean into the liberating, pro-human capabilities of these technologies before they become unrecognizably incapacitating? In a lot of ways, this feels like the internet in 1994, before it became AOL and then Facebook, when it was still driven by a counterculture looking to expand the collective human imagination. Or the blockchain, when it was characterized more by Occupy Wall Street’s drive toward mutual aid than the investor’s fixation with token speculation. Could this moment be different? Did we learn our lessons? Instead of using AI to make cheap, soulless replicas of Hollywood movies and putting creatives out of work, might the real opportunity here be to build platform cooperatives and community-created, worker-owned alternatives to Uber and Amazon?

You tell me. Let’s decide this together. Use the comments to let me know: have you used AI? Was it worth it? Do you think we can use these technologies to beat those who would control us at their own game? Can we use them to help build widespread networks of sharing and mutual aid? Is the true Luddite position still okay? They were not against technology - just its use to exploit labor. Could we use AI to move toward an increasingly jobless society with Universal Basic Income and optimized for leisure? Or should we turn the other way, refuse its shortcuts and its ability to do pattern recognition on a scale beyond anything we’ve known before? How a about small language models run on public or community servers?

The negativity surrounding AI today is justified, but it may be too early to write AI’s epitaph. Can we use it to re-invent the virtual infrastructure for good? Even if it starts out small, anything that actually works can be modeled, templated, and shared. Is this our moment, or is it another mirage? Am I seeing something here, or am I just high on my own supply? You tell me.

I’ll be moving this whole Substack over to Patreon in June. The advantage is that with one membership you’ll get access to all my writing, ad-free versions of my podcasts and videos, access to the my Discord server, participation in premieres of new episodes and interactive salons with me, and even free access to live events in NYC and beyond. Plus, a little birdie told me that things are Substack may get funky really soon.

“I don’t even wear a kippah anymore,” he said, between sobs. “I know what it means to the people who see me on the street. Whatever it might have meant to me, they see a yarmulke and they think Zionist. Murderer.”

The one who called last summer, at the height of the starvation crisis in Gaza, took it further: “I think Israel may have made Judaism untenable for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever.”

It was stunning, coming from a rabbi. I just sat on the phone with her and listened. It was weird, very regrettable confirmation of some of the ideas I wrote about in a book called Nothing Sacred, back in 2003, which is part of why the rabbis were calling me now.

To be clear, up front: neither these rabbis nor I, nor any Jew for that matter, is any more responsible for what Israel is doing than any white person is for what Donald Trump is doing in their name. Or any Christian is for the officially Holy War America has waged on Iran in the name of bringing on armageddon.

But these rabbis are concerned that the way in which Israel conducts itself — in the very best light, defends itself against atrocity — by committing atrocity of its own. That these atrocities have so undermined the Jewish project, tarnished the Jewish “brand,” and compromised Jewish institutions, that it’s hard to embrace one’s own Jewishness, much less do so in public. Or even harder to offer one of Judaism’s intellectual or spiritual gifts to the world, now that they come with the baggage of Israel and Zionism.

It’s really the same feeling as being an American under Trump. I know I didn’t vote for him, and I know I may not be directly responsible for him. But he calls the entire American project into question, and reveals some of the genocidal colonialism, slavery, racism, and extraction required for this country to get where it did and stay this way.

That’s why I’m not sure how we could have prevented any of this. I was trying when I wrote Nothing Sacred twenty years ago. (I’m gifting the new 2026 edition to Patreon and Substack subscribers.) What I argued is that Judaism was meant less as a religion with sacred things to worship than the process by which we get over religion. God evolves from idols to big scary monster to angry daddy to ethereal presence to “which way did he go?” God recedes, leaving people to find the sacred in one another. Not in place, not a name, and certainly not in some nation state.

The point I was trying to make back then — the thing that got me in a lot of trouble — was that Israel is not the realization of Jewish ideals. Rather, it was at best a necessary compromise of Jewish ideals in order to save Jewish lives. They were living in a world where first Europeans and then Arab peoples really did want them eradicated. So while it would have been nice to find a way to get those peoples to welcome some Jewish residents, it made a certain sense to get a place of one’s own. But UK-mandated partition or a modern political boundary in the post-colonial Middle East has nothing to do with God’s plan for humanity. You think God gives a shit about the treaty of Westphalia?

Taking a transcendental mythical narrative like Torah and using it as a real estate deed, kills the whole project. Once you take the text literally, or as a historical record of events that actually happened in the past, you lose access to the timeless, multidimensional experience it describes. If it has to say this one thing, you lose the ability to argue about what it means. To the extent that Torah is true or valid, it’s not because it happened at some moment in history, but because it’s happening all the time, in every moment.

Man, that got me in a lot of trouble. Famous Jewish intellectuals wrote articles saying I was the latest incarnation of self-hating Jew. The head of America’s biggest Jewish federation actually blacklisted me. For years later, any synagogue that hired me to speak was told to cancel the appearance, or risk their funding. I’d get a call from the rabbi saying “we’re really sorry to do this, but…” It was always a call. Never in writing.

So I got my first taste of the vindictiveness and pervasiveness of this other supposedly Jewish project. One for which the defense of Israel was more important than Judaism itself. Those of us who saw Judaism as an ongoing, never-ending discussion and collaboration, were pushed aside for those who helped the politicians set in stone Judaism’s national identity. Israel became the God, or at least the new Temple. This thing we’re not supposed to even think about until the messiah comes? It’s now right there, right now—with a chair in the United Nations and a nuclear bomb to defend itself. Holy holy holy.

This literalism kills the interpretative dimensionality of a spiritual tradition as surely as scientism and materialism kills the humanities. When we set things in stone, lock down their ownership, assign them monetary value, make them material and absolute truths to defend, we lose the liminal, creative, living, human layers. To hold anything with absolute and permanent certainty, we have to kill it.

And then we start killing other people, too.

I was originally going to make this piece about the latest rise in antisemitism, particularly around the War in Iran. See, there’s two main kinds of antisemitism. Two justifications for hate. The traditional one, the one that I always knew about, was the hatred of foreigners. Jews had no country, so they were always immigrants. And their religion was so abstract that they never respected the local gods of the peoples they visited. In Judaism God is unknowable, so the local idols and gods people worshipped didn’t mean much. Jews were hated because they were universalists, globalists, non-local, and the face of immigration.

But Israel and its behaviors led to another kind of antisemitism: anger from the Left that Jews were colonialists. England couldn’t control its colonies after WWII and gave part of Palestine to the Jews, and part to the Palestinians. No one else wanted the Jews there at all, so war broke out and Israel has been….aggressively defending its right to be there ever since. Maybe unwittingly, in addition to reclaiming its homeland, Israel continued the violent colonial project of its predecessors.

So now, Jews get it from both sides. The Right generally sees us as immigrant, slightly-brown people who undermine local gods and maybe killed Jesus. Yes, the Bible study class for the US Cabinet teaches that the Jews killed Jesus. And the Left sees us as the white zionist colonizers of an indigenous people’s territory. Go back to Poland.

But this also corresponds to two extreme kinds of Christianity in the United States, vying for dominance. There are the Christian Zionists, who are the people in Trump’s cabinet and military right now. People like Hegseth, Huckabee, or White House faith officer Paula White-Cain. They believe they are in a Holy War against Satan that will bring back Jesus. And they’re telling this to each other and the troops. In just one of many official allegations, a commander briefed his troops by saying, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Or from the free thought caucus in Congress, military commanders are being instructed to tell their troops “that the American and Israeli attacks will hasten the return of Jesus Christ, and have cited passages from the Book of Revelation and instructed officers to tell their troops that current combat operations are all part of God’s divine plan.”

So these folks believe that bringing on Armageddon in a Biblically ordained alliance with Israel will summon the second coming of Jesus, after which the Jews are unnecessary but the Christians all go to heaven. That’s American Taliban. And like some of the Jews of Spain in 1491, most zionist lobbies think that siding with the great Empire against the Arabs will work out. As if they don’t remember that back in Spain, the expulsion of Muslims through 1491 was followed the Inquisition against Jews in 1492.

But opposed to the Christian Zionists are the Christian Nationalists, like Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, who believe the United States and Trump are just hapless puppets being guided by a global uber wealthy cabal of Rothschilds and other Jews. The idea here is that Israel has wanted to attack Iran all along, and is using its money and influence to force America’s hand. When he announced the war, Marco Rubio said something (later denied by Trump) about how Israel was going to attack and so America had to follow along. Further reinforcement came from counterterrorism chief Joe Kent, who resigned citing how the Israeli lobby forced American into the war. The more extreme version of the story is that Jeffrey Epstein (Jew) and Ghislaine Maxwell (Jewish father) were working with Mossad, and using the real Epstein Files to blackmail Trump into doing Israel’s bidding. (One that never made sense to me because I have a hard time believing Trump is really scared of being outed as a sexual predator. There’s already ample testimony in the record. I think his followers would shrug off a video as a deep fake, or not care.)

But the theory of Israeli blackmail gets amplified and further distorted by MAGA influencers like Tyler Oliveira — the guy who took video of closed Somalian-owned daycare centers in Minnesota to launch the conspiracy theory now touted by Trump that Somalians are stealing billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers? That guy is now making videos about The Great Noticing, to help people recognize signs of Jewish control of…everything. He says the word “goyim,” the Jewish word for people, actually means that non-jewish people are “cows.” It doesn’t. (And no, I’m not providing links. He doesn’t deserve your clicks.)

So on the one hand, Christianity is being used to justify initiating World War Three against Iran in the hopes that the fire will summon Jesus. And on the other, it is being used to expose Jews as the killers of Christ who are secretly responsible for the entire sweep of western civilization, colonialism, and capitalism making America possible in the first place but now standing in the way of white Christianity’s divine right to dominate this continent and impose its white supremacist religious values on all Americans.

I expect some calls from priests and ministers just as upset as my rabbis, wondering if America’s holy war makes Christianity untenable. To which I’d say, don’t worry — the Crusades already took care of that a thousand years ago.

So is it time we retire these religions before they kill us all? In a certain sense, yes.

All kidding aside, I have always loved the idea of graduating from a religion. They may begin as great mythical or spiritual insights, but the institutional containers we create for them are anchored in a particular moment in our evolution as a species. The spiritual truths are living, changing things—just like we are—and eventually outgrow even the best and most well-thought-out containers.

This is where my experience as a media theorist may be useful.

The spiritual impulses informing Judaism are not bad or destined for violence and self-destructive behavior. But they are not of our era and may be obsolete. Judaism is an Axial Age development. Christianity and Islam came later, but continued that same impulse. What was the Axial Age? It was a media environment characterized by the invention of scripture. Writing.

Writing changed everything. Like social media, but times 100. Once people could write instead of just speak, they had the ability to record history. They could write down their story, and say what happened. They also gained the ability to create contracts into the future. The Bible itself was called a Covenant. That’s an agreement. A Holy Covenant between Abraham and God. God says “you do this stuff for me, and I will do that stuff for you.” It’s linear. Cause and effect. Past, present, and future. You do something now for the reward in the future. Save now, get interest and growth later. Follow these rules now, and the Messiah will come someday in the future.

Before this, everything was circular and present-based. We had seasons, but we didn’t have a concept of progress or a future or linearity. This development wasn’t all bad. The great beauty of the Axial Age religions was that they took on the mission of social justice. Once you have a future, you can think about making the world a better place tomorrow than it was yesterday. We can heal, improve, advance. But this focus on advancement was also the impetus for colonialism. And the justification for capitalism.

The downside of all this future focus was to lose track of the present. You gotta break a few eggs today to get a cake tomorrow. If we’re bringing everything closer to the messianic moment, then the ends justify the means. We are marching toward the inevitable finale. We have a goal of righteousness and purity. We can get there once we kill the last enemy, redeem the last sinner, clean the last dirty spot. The telos the goal the end of the story is worth whatever pain and suffering we need to endure, or create, along the way. So say we all.

In case you haven’t noticed, we have migrated to a new media environment. The age of the book—and I say this as someone who has made my career as an author—the age of the book is ending. Text and books no longer define the media environment in which human beings grow up and operate.

As one of the original “people of the book” I understand why Jews are getting some heat in the difficult transition away from messianic stories to whatever is next - and religious extremists launch into a suicidal mission to end the story before we find a way through it or past it. They’d rather the world end than face life beyond the confines of this Axial Age construction.

While I’m not yet convinced of AI’s enduring value to humanity or the planet, at the very least it suggests we are at the dawn of a new media age. One defined less by the linearity of the book, than the all-at-onceness of perfect recall. The retrieval of obscure ideas that would have remained on inaccessibly forgotten stacks in the library annex. The cut-and-paste mashup of practices and insights from anywhere on the globe at anytime in history.

And these AI iterations are not set down as if they were etched in stone, inked on papyrus or printed in a book. They’re arising through inquiry, through call and response, as part of an iterative process. You don’t use a thinking, interactive technology for answers, or at least you shouldn’t. You engage with these new media for better questions, in a generative practice much more like the music of Brian Eno than the 19th century ballad with beginning, middle, and end.

The spiritual questions of the Axial Age prophets can be retrieved and re-asked in this new media and cultural environment. We don’t need to end the story, but rather to liberate from it. That’s what my comic book Testament was about, and I really should re-issue that thing, too, because it’s coming true.

Honestly, this moment was easier to foresee than it looked. Even the prophets and apostles could see it, and gave fair warning: When this era ends, there’s gonna be some fucked up people trying to end the world. You will know them because they will be really into possessing land and building towers and making gold stuff and fighting big wars. Don’t follow them.

The beauty of these moments of extreme clarity is that we have the opportunity to transcend the story. Not transcend physical reality, community, people, love, connection, the earth, the cycles of nature. But to transcend the linear story of progress, conquest and telos that flattens our experience, motivates our violence, and destroys everything truly sacred about life.

To the extent that Judaism contributed to this mayhem, I’m sorry. Just as I’m sorry for how Enlightenment values within their period “container” ended up inadvertently justifying slavery, capitalism, and a society based on individuality. Just like I’m sorry for America. These all seemed like good ideas at the time.

But you know what they all have in common? They’re ideas. They’re abstracted from ground. They’re based in goals, not experience. They have the power of the strategist, and the weapons of the scientist, but lack the wisdom of the lived, social and circular experience.

That’s going to require learning how to be still. How to breathe. And how to metabolize what’s going on right here, and right now.

So what do you think? Should we retire our religions? Should Judaism be the first one on the block to say “we’re done?” Or, as my grandma used to say when I suggested such things, “you may say you’re not Jewish, yet they will come after you all the same!” But seriously, can we rescue ourselves and our planet from our own faiths? Or is “holy war” just a way of motivating soldiers and cabinet members to drop bombs, while other politicians and businesspeople loot the coffers and pile up riches in Qatari bank accounts?

Can we bring forward the best of our faiths into a new context? Rescue them from the war-mongers and conquistadors, or even use them to recognize and liberate ourselves from the sociopaths bombing children in our name?

I think so. I think that’s what Team Human is for. And I’m glad you’re here to work through some of this together.