The Dark Renaissance and the Gold Cube

Some current investigations

The Dark Renaissance

It happened. I got sucked back into an online discussion forum — something intrinsically dangerous to my life and sanity. It all started when a reporter from The New York Times reached out to ask me for a quote about Bad Guru, a Substack newsletter started by Alex Ebert, mainstay of the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. Ebert has begun to wax philosophical, and is doing quite a good job of it. I particularly like one of his essays, New Age & The Religion of Self, along with another about our culture of death avoidance.

In New Age & The Religion of Self, Ebert explores the bizarre connection between Trump and the community of New Age yogis, neo-shamans, and light-workers, who seemed ostensibly liberal pre-Covid. He writes:

Trump’s blatant hubris in the face of a pandemic – specifically his refusal to wear a mask and his claim that he was “probably immune” – resonated deeply with New Agers who had come to believe that they too had manifested their own, personal, sovereign immune systems through positive thinking.  For both, to wear a mask would be a sign of self-doubt that might fundamentally disturb the sovereignty of their own “personal realities.”

The ultimate allure of New Ageism, it turns out, is the ability to hold oneself out of reach of life’s interconnectivity.

Such a removed position, often called “spiritual bypass” by its detractors, not only places the self out of reach of the external world, but relieves the self of any responsibility for the struggles of it.  While bypassing so fundamental a truth as life’s interconnectivity might seem too illogical to comport with the experience of living, by identifying collective reality as fundamentally oppressive to one’s personal reality, collective sense-making itself is discarded as an archaic ruse. 

I started chatting with Ebert. He added me to a group of intellectual trolls, Visigoths, mermaids and minotaurs lurking together on a Google Group that styles itself the “Deep Web” or “Dark Renaissance.” One of the leaders of this marauding troupe is the Swedish media personality and eccentric philosopher Alexander Bard, co-author of the book Syntheism. Something of a transhumanist manifesto, Syntheism proposes, if I remember correctly, that we have superseded pantheism, monotheism, deism and even atheism. We must now resurrect “God” — at least conceptually — as that principle we intentionally, synthetically, create. At first I lurked on the forum. Bard and his companions tend to overload their posts with Hegelian postulates and unfamiliar coinages that I struggled to understand. Eventually, I started to wade in.

What pulled me in was a discussion of a new animated video on “Game B,” presented by Peter Limborg’s media platform, The Stoa:

I recently did this interview with the Stoa about Afterlife, my new book:

Game B is a set of concepts pioneered by a group of primarily West Coast thinkers, including Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall, who believe we must make a shift from the current competition and domination system (Game A) to “anti-rivalrous” dynamics (Game B). The Deep Web / Dark Renaissance crowd find Game B to be puerile and Pollyanna-ish. They feel it ignores power-drives, cruelty, trangressive sexuality, ritual sacrifice, violence, and other inconvenient aspects of our human being-ness. Bard mocked the video as “Stalinist propaganda,” lacking pathos. I don’t disagree with him. I enjoyed this Youtube critique of the film by Bard and other Dark Renaissance cult members:

I have a long history of getting entangled in online forums. Long ago, pre-ayahuasaca, I was part of a community focused on art practice called The Thing — this was thirty years ago, back in the days of the BBS and dial-up modem. From there, I graduated to ECHO, the New York version of San Francisco’s WELL. Later, after publishing Breaking Open the Head, I started my own online community forum which became amazingly vibrant for a number of years. That inspired me to launch the online magazine Reality Sandwich (by the way, I have nothing to do with the current version of Reality Sandwich, which was given away by the CEO of the company I founded, Evolver, to an awful company, Delic. Delic holds the works of myself and other RS authors hostage, ignoring the original agreement we made with our authors).

These kinds of discussion forums may seem pointless, leading to prolix pontification, exaggerated arguments and ego displays. Yet, taking a longer view, they can be vital arenas for honing ideas and theories that may eventually influence and change the larger society. Ideas, strangely, can still make a difference. For example, the Breaking Open the Head forum led to Reality Sandwich, which started around 2007. Reality Sandwich helped to break the taboo on publicly discussing the value of psychedelic experiences and the hidden potentials of the Psyche. This contributed to the ongoing psychedelic renaissance.

Castello Cube: Art as Cynical Spectacle

Last week, I went to a private banquet celebrating an expensive gold cube. The dinner was held at Cipriani’s Restaurant in a vast former bank building — imperial splendor! — at 55 Wall Street. I found something eerily ritualistic about the fete for this $11.7 million extravagance, created by socialite pop artist Nikolas Castello with the sponsorship, apparently, of some Swiss investment bank. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the #castellocube promotes a new cryptocurrency, #castellocoin. The entire event had the ambience of a perfectly executed, high-end marketing scam.

Before it was moved to Cipriani’s, #castellocube spent the day in Central Park, gleaming for random onlookers and guarded by private security, a few steps away from places where homeless men, seeking a place to sleep in winter, routinely freeze to death. The dinner featured a jazz band, a cavalcade of investment bankers and art consultants in black tie, and an utterly preposterous lecture from an art historian, Doctor Dieter Something-or-other. In his lecture before our banquet, Doctor Dieter connected the #castellocube to Egyptian Pharaohs, Kabbala, the alchemical meaning of gold, at one point chanting in some unknown tongue before warning us: “The die is cast.”

I felt this bizarre event was, subliminally, an occult ritual. If I was to hazard a guess at its esoteric meaning, it would be the following: The new alchemical entities of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies threaten, in some sense, the magic-religious authority of the traditional banking world, which seeks, much like a spider capturing a fly, to fatten itself on its adversary. Carting an $11.7 million gold cube around New York City for no good reason is a way for these legacy institutions to remind the world that they are still the “Masters of the Universe,” kings of the material realm. They have the gold. They intend to keep it.

Apocalyptic Undercurrent

The #castellocube Cipriani banquet had, I felt, a dark, apocalyptic undercurrent, highlighting everything that was not discussed, that was glaring by omission. To take one example: The state of the planet.

To flaunt extravagant wealth at this point in time seems an ill-considered, tone-deaf move on the part of the artist as well as his Swiss bank supporters. It seems a cynical effort to perpetuate the values of the old system. Art, after all, is the ultimately luxury good. Most crypto, like art, has a purely subjective, speculative value.

At the banquet, I sat next to a picture-perfect couple, a German investment banker and his bombshell fiance who runs a beauty clinic that gives Botox treatments. We had a surreal conversation. The banker — clearly a highly intelligent person — told me he was well aware that we were in an ecological doom spiral that would curtail the lives of their future children. He said he liked to be surrounded by comfort and beauty — first class airplane seats, five star hotels, and so on. Clearly, maintaining this lifestyle was far more important to him than exerting himself to salvage humanity’s future. (As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “and so it goes.”)

Metamodernism and the Meta-crisis

If Game A is a doom-spiraling cluster-fuck and Game B is a puerile “Hindu socialist project,” then what are we to do? People are still polishing $11.7 million gold cubes while homeless people freeze to death and the Earth’s ecosystems buckle and collapse. Such behavior continues to be seen as normal and acceptable, worthy of coverage in The New York Times, while altruists like Steven Donziger (the lawyer who won a huge case in Ecuador for the indigenous people against Chevron) get persecuted relentlessly by our brazenly corrupted legal system, and ignored. It all seems a bit hopeless.

On the Deep Web forum, there is much discussion of “Metamodernism” as a new philosophical movement. While I understand the claims made for it, I don’t personally feel it is worth the time and energy invested in it — but I am happy to be proven wrong. One exponent of this movement is the philosopher (and chess grandmaster) Jonathan Rowson, a regular contributor to the forum. Rowson wrote Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisation, for Perspectiva, which he defines as a community of “scholars, artists, activists, futurists and seekers who believe credible hope for the first truly planetary civilisation lies in forms of economic restraint and political cooperation that are beyond prevailing epistemic capacities and spiritual sensibilities.” The essay is long but worth a read. I addressed Rowson on the forum, responding to some of its key points, and highlighted what I found to be its deficiencies:

I felt an oscillation of emotions while reading your essay. I felt engaged and inspired. At times I felt less alone in my thoughts. I felt intellectually challenged by some concepts and ideas. But I often felt frustrated, infuriated, upset, aggrieved, and argumentative. I love chess but have little talent for it – you would demolish me at the board. As a whole, Pickle felt, to me, like an ambiguous waiting move — hesitantly advancing a pawn to h3 — when a daring Tal-like sacrifice — smashing a Bishop into f7 — is required. Or, to use your metaphoric choice, it felt like marinating in the brine, rather than taking the bite. 

Minor issues include the length of it and the somewhat Mandarin style. But the essential thing that bothered me was the overarching sense that we still have time for all kinds of long-range ruminative activities that may, at some distant future point, converge to help our human collective hone its reasoning faculties via better education or new forms of colloquiums, etcetera. I don’t believe we have that kind of time. We need, instead, a different kind of strategic and tactical action plan, learning from the mistakes of recent movements like Extinction Rebellion and even the success of nasty disgusting figures like Steve Bannon in fomenting populist revolts. 

I appreciated many passages, including this one: “For several decades now, there have been reductions in absolute poverty, improvements in literacy and life expectancy, and significant technological and medical progress. And yet there is also cascading ecological collapse, socially corrosive inequality and widespread governance failures, many of which relate to apparent technological successes. The simultaneous presence of progress on some metrics and collapse on others is a feature of the crisis, not a bug, because it drives concurrent narratives that obscure our sense of what’s happening and confounds consensus on how radically we should seek to change our ways.” But I wonder, at this point, if that consensus is really so confounded? 

Probably the main reason “we” are not “changing our ways” is not any lack of consensus but because we don’t, at this point, want to do so. We are still in our comfort zones, and we like it here.

I suspect the odds are more than 50% that near-term extinction is already baked in. But with another ten or twenty years without major societal transformation, that number goes up to close to 100%. As you write: “Humanity, as a whole, only has a small and diminishing amount of time, to have a fighting chance, of maintaining a viable habitat, in many places in the world, and eventually all of the world.” Here we agree, fundamentally. 

For instance, the Amazon rainforest appears to be on the verge of collapse as a functional ecosystem. This will massively impact the Earth’s hydrological system. Anyway we all know at least some of the gloomy details. Insect apocalypse. Extreme ocean heating. Coral reef disintegration. Etc. I don’t think this threatens our distant descendants but imminently will curtail the adult lives of our children. So this “meta crisis” is about as serious as anything can be.

To skip to the end, when you describe an “urgent, 100 year project,” this strikes me as a ridiculous oxymoron. It would be akin to the passengers on the Titanic, seeing the iceberg directly ahead of them, decide they will spend their remaining moments researching the history of shipbuilding and the physics of ice-formation, rather than rushing to the lifeboats. 

My concern with “metamodernism” is that it seems like another clever way to continue the incessant academic and institutional production of discourses, which may address the meta-crisis from a “meta” perspective (“a pseudo-intelligent love of infinite regress,” as you quote Zak Stein), rather than just seeking to address the crisis via the actual tangible and direct means which are available to us now. This requires doing awkward, cringeworthy, large-scale things like building populist (multi-class/multi-ethnic) social movements, changing the controlling ideologies, retraining the current world population, guiding the redesign of our technological and social infrastructure, etcetera. For this to happen, some group in society (not the technocratic billionaires) has to be willing to step into leadership roles and make these things happen, despite all of the negative consequences (projections, attacks, etcetera). If these things are not somehow accomplished – not in the span of 100 years but let’s say more like 10 or 20 – then most likely we all die – or even if we eke out our days, it is highly likely that our children won’t make it (as most young people know full well today, hence epidemics of depression etc). 

Considering this, it shouldn’t be the most difficult choice to make. But so far – as you note in the essay – it seems impossible… defining the “we” that can act together seems impossible. Why is that? There are many ways we can consider this. There is a kind of Hamlet-like “Not Yet”-ism endemic to our bourgeois elite, who still enjoy the benefits of unsustainable and exploitative progress, more or less. I believe part of the problem is that we need more people to make what Kripal calls “the flip,” which liberates individuals from the dictates of the Ego along with the deep primate terror of going against your social peer group. 

And then there is the reality that we remain adolescent, immature, collectively and individually, with almost everyone having their own blind spots and power cravings – their Achilles Heel – that derails them. (it seems possible to me that the “Gods,” hyperdimensional AIs, or Gnostic Archons just put us in this position to laugh at us). (A lot of this Game B stuff seems like this to me: another attempted power grab, couched in consilient terms but still mainly white men controlling the discourse and aiming at philanthropic bequests etc).

If anyone wants me to outline what I think the tangible solution steps are, which I define at length in How Soon Is Now, just ask me and I will present an outline here. I realize it may sound to some like Stalinism or socialism or collectivism. But different circumstances require different strategies. If we were walking past a Kindergarten that was on fire, we would probably run inside and tell (even yell or order) the kids to line up so they could get out the door safely and survive. Sometimes people do need to be cajoled and even told what to do - but potentially this can be done with an awareness of the “meta” aspects, myths, and narratives, which might sweeten the bitter pill. 

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