EDITOR’S NOTE: With this post we welcome a new contributing writer to the Teem. Dominik Irtenkauf is a freelance writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with art, mythology, cultural philosophy, media theory, the occult, and avant-garde music. He also writes about the boundaries between art and science, and recently he has been combining his literary…
Category: Science & Technology
The new psychedelic renaissance: Science, psychology, and the sacred
It’s not that you, and I, and all of us, don’t already know that the consciousness revolution is back on, and that the psychedelic research that was aborted in the 1960s has now returned with a vengeance, and that it’s not just the medical and scientific aspects but the general cultural effects of the whole…
Recommmended Reading 42
THIS WEEK: A report on the riots in Sweden and what they may portend for affluent liberal-democratic nations that have thought themselves insulated from such crises. Thoughts on how the Internet is using us all. The crumbling facade of mainstream authority and received wisdom in public health pronouncements, along with internal strife in the medical…
John Gray on ghosts, Walter de la Mare, and the limits of scientific materialism
The relationship between supernatural horror and scientific materialism is a neverendingly fascinating subject, not least because the enormous and ongoing popularity of supernatural horror stories among the thoroughly secularized Western consumerist democracies, where scientific materialism has a cultural stranglehold, represents a striking philosophical fault line. One may say, as everybody from H. P. Lovecraft to…
‘Koyaanisqatsi’: A warning not just for America but for China
I first watched the film Koyaanisqatsi as an undergraduate student at Mizzou, in the company of other students, in the context of a student Philosophy Club meeting. And the film flat-out blew my mind and rocked my world. I have no idea if any of the others present at that viewing were as deeply affected…
Recommended Reading 41
This installment of Recommended Reading might almost be described as a special Apocalypse and Extinction edition, as evidenced by the first four items below. Today: A new book about the reality of mass extinction and the human race’s best strategies for survival. John Michael Greer on the entrenched historical tendency, especially among Americans, to posit…
Paranormal orbs and the dark side of Phil Collins
One of the defining societal and psychological traits of electric media culture, stretching back many decades, is its collective wholesale infatuation with the cult of celebrity, which is of course a severely debased form of traditional hero worship. For a surprisingly riveting look behind the curtain and smokescreen of the whole sorry phenomenon, see the…
Frankenstein wept: Algorithms unleashed, Matrix rising
Here’s British author and journalist Steven Poole, writing for Aeon magazine in an article published just today and titled “Slaves to the Algorithm“: Our age elevates the precision-tooled power of the algorithm over flawed human judgment. From web search to marketing and stock-trading, and even education and policing, the power of computers that crunch data…
Flying cars and the “world of tomorrow” that never was
You know all of those excellent articles and essays that have appeared in recent months to explore the rosy science fiction-esque visions of our real-world future that characterized American culture during most of the 20th century? (Recall that we noted one of the best of them, David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate…
‘Sirius’: A film about the scientific reality of UFOs, ETs, and advanced energy technology
Tonight will see the official premiere in Hollywood of the new documentary film Sirius, which promises to be one of the more interesting — and perhaps more starkly significant? — UFO-related film projects to emerge since, well, ever. The film brings together the enduring “UFO disclosure” meme with the equally enduring theme of our planetary…