Writing the New Myths, Anthems, and Manifestos for the Regenerative Age

Singer-songwriters and visionary activists Alex Ebert and Kimbra join our upcoming seminar

“Culture” is one of the six areas covered by Building Our Regenerative Future, our new six-week seminar, starting January 7. Speakers include Douglas Rushkoff, Jamie Wheal, Jem Bendell, Quanita Roberson, Alnoor Ladha, and many more. All course information is here. We’ve extended our sale of $200 tickets, available here.

For Building Our Regenerative Future, we’ve just added two more fabulous speakers: Alex Ebert and Kimbra. Kimbra is a celebrated singer/songwriter who has released four albums and was also featured on Gotye’s massive hit, “Somebody I Used to Know” (2011). Kimbra has a deep interest in Christian mysticism and consciousness exploration. She writes a beautiful newsletter of her ongoing reflections, including songs and poems.

Kimbra

In a recent essay, “All I Want Is Life to Move Me”, she writes:

I don’t think it’s about the completion of perfection.
It’s the attempt toward it. It’s the longing. And seeking to make art of a moment. Seeking the ultimate beauty. Seeking unity. Seeking family. Seeking belonging.
The attempt toward the dream of Oneness. Then beautifully missing it and something else swooping in and doing it with us. With our help. What grace is that? What a collaboration. The dance with the Divine. That leaning in.
That blessed leaning in and finding firmness up against your touch.

But, you have to be willing to let go, to feel what it’s like to be caught, by Love.

We met years ago at a cramped cafe in the East Village where she was reading Gurdjieff, and became friends.

Alex Ebert

Best known as the singer/songwriter of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Alex is a wonderfully idiosyncratic thinker (I recommend following his inspiring Instagram), cultural critic, activist, and philosopher who writes an entertaining, if intermittent, Substack. I encountered Alex when a New York Times reporter contacted me to comment on a story they were running about his newsletter. Apparently Alex cited me as one of his influences. We struck up a friendship, although we have yet to meet in person.

I find Alex is one of the only people on social media who say things I was thinking, inchoately, needed to be said but couldn’t quite articulate yet. As one example, I enjoyed his recent manifesto, “Suboptimization Revolution”, where he fights back against the contemporary drive toward entrepreneurial efficiency and optimization:

Lately I’ve been thinking about human “depth”. By depth I mean that sense of a “whole world” contained within an expression—a world varied and arborescent, transformative and rhizomatic, full of rich topography: ingresses and recesses, peaks and valleys, dark and light, moments replete with digressions and recursions or stark and baring only the pithy bones of truth, a vibrant network of difference and notional relation. You know, depth…and how it is constructed.

And here’s what I’ve come to:

Human depth is generally a coincidence of suboptimal processes.

Inefficiencies, limitations, and ignorances which necessitate the erection of the unnecessary complexities we enjoy as “depth”. I call this process of suboptimal construction depth scaffolding. So, again, depth scaffolding is the idea is that human depth is constructed via suboptimal processes.

As an inveterate sup-optimizer myself, I couldn’t agree more.

I am delighted to include Alex and Kimbra in Building Our Regenerative Future because I think they are both awesome and, also, I am deeply curious about artists who are awake and aware and who possess substantial followings: How do they navigate this increasingly difficult time? What responsibilities do they feel to their communities, considering the deepening ecological emergency and the abject failure of governments and corporations to address skyrocketing wealth inequality and the biospheric crisis as a whole? How does the role of the artist change as the climate crisis becomes an inescapable aspect of daily life and thought?

Our seminar posits the ideal of a “regenerative future” as something we can embrace and move toward. If this is going to become our collective reality, we need artists and visionaries to write the new anthems and manifestos, tell the new stories, to make it alive and meaningful for people. What are those new stories? What power of inspiration and imagination can we draw upon to find a new, better vision for our future?

If you haven’t signed up for the seminar yet, please do so now. We are extending the 1/3rd off sale a few more days. Also, if you want to be part of the six-week seminar but can’t afford it, even at the sale price, please email me and let’s work something out. In particular, I want to see young people get access to the ideas and resources the course will provide, as I think it will be valuable for them. Please message me, if this happens to be you.