This was a fun one! In most recent episodes, I’ve had conversations with builders from the Nostr/Bitcoin community about other rabbit holes they’re interested in. In today’s episode, I sat down with Jack Heart, a longtime blogger and veteran of high strangeness and esoteric rabbit holes galore.
Although we focus primarily on themes from Jack’s blog and recent book, we do spend some time discussing the principles of Nostr and how they align with Jack’s view of building an open source insurgency. I’m hoping to do more conversations with thinkers like Jack from communities philosophically adjacent to Nostr.
You can learn more about Jack’s work on his blog, Tekgnostics, and in his new book, Brave Noo World: A Guerrilla Ethnography of High Strangeness.
Here are some of the other topics we cover:
High strangeness and the acceleration of technology, society, and novelty
Tekgnostics - a balance of artifact and epiphany
J. Allen Hynek - coined the term high strangeness
The origin of Foo Fighters - UFOs
Cosmic triggers - the atomic bomb - UFO craze after the war - term UFO coined after lights over Mt. Ranier
2012 as omega point for Terence McKenna and the Mayans
High strangeness going mainstream as dominant paradigm: politicians calling each other weird
Synchronicity as meaningful coincidence
Vernor Vinge’s singularity and the end of the human era
Humor as the highest and most human form of intelligence and the great weapon against bureaucracy
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere as the omega point of human thought and the next layer of biosphere
Humans will ultimately be all right because of our creativity
Humans are tool and model builders
Early internet was the first model of what the hivemind might look like
Nostr and gnostic — a happy synchronicity ;)
Digital evolution and DNA
Philip K Dick’s view of DNA as a binary system of memory coils which gnosis allows us to read
The workaround - humans’ core ability to adapt to whatever circumstances
Jung and the ability to catch ideas from the noosphere
The Buddha is in the Park
Discordianism: seriousness vs humor - don’t take the world too seriously
Humor is the highest form of intelligence; perhaps AI will struggle to mimic or understand humor
“When I dress like a clown, the cops won’t hit me”
The clown and jester archetype; the fool and the trickster (Prometheus , Krishna?)
Meme magic and memetics as mind virus
Memes are a big reason Trump won in 2016 (Pepe the frog)
The open source / decentralized insurgency
The ebb and flow of everything
Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, chakras, and the 8 brain model of psychology
Crowdfunding a billboard for Brazil all over nostr
Nostr as the open source / decentralized insurgency against bureaucracy
PKD and blows against the empire
Bureaucracy lacks a sense of humor
Gnosticism as the mystic arm of Christianity
Overview of gnostic thought
The great Yin/Yang, masculine/feminine, binary dichotomy of the universe
Why something instead of nothing (manifest vs. unmanifest)?
The mythology of Ancient Civilizations - civilizations rise and fall all the time
Creating substrates for data redundancy and preventing human amnesia (Nostr/Project Alexandria and The Internet Archive)a
Jack’s Book: Brave Noo World and blog: Tekgnostics
Learn more about Brave Noo World
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