This application is for funding to help turn the upcoming Technological Metamodernism course (which finished top of the recent OpenCivics Collaborative Research Round) into a book 📘

The emerging philosophy of metamodernism offers crucial tools for grappling with technology's transformative impacts on self, culture and society. It charts a path beyond the polarized debate between techno-utopian accelerationism (the belief that rapid technological progress will solve all our problems) and despairing pessimism (the belief that our technological trajectory is fundamentally destructive and irredeemable).

Through provocation and practical examples, the book will invite readers to adopt a metamodern mindset - embracing both/and thinking, an awareness of allergies and a focus on reconstruction - as we explore tech's leading edges. How might metamodernism inform the development of AI, DAOs and transhumanism? Can it help us to bridge tech with the realms of nature, art and spirituality? What new and ancient narratives and mythologies might we call on to cultivate a metamodern relationship to technology and its role in our individual and collective evolution?

Outline of the course that the book will be based on:

Week 1: Introduction (Tuesday 17th September 2024)

Current mainstream discourse around technology: e/acc, doomers and technofeudalism

• What is technology? Exploring definitions and the history of technology
• What is metamodernism? Origins and key ideas
• Technological metamodernism, and metamodern technology: Why the tech and metamodern communities need each other

Week 2: Metamodern Takes on Technology (Tuesday 24th September 2024)

• Vitalik Buterin's d/acc
• Daniel Schmachtenberger's Axiological Design and Third Attractor frameworks
• Hanzi Freinacht's views on technology, and other explicitly metamodern takes

Week 3: Technological Metamodernism, Myth and Magic (Tuesday 1st October 2024)

• Ritual and initiation in tech: From ancient traditions to modern rites of passage
• Hyperstition and the role of imagination in shaping our relationship with technology
• Technology through the lens of myth and magic: the work of Josh Schrei
• Sophie Strand's Flowering Wand: Reconceiving technological archetypes

Week 4: Metamodern Tech Futures (Tuesday 8th October 2024)

• Solarpunk, lunarpunk and the role of art, design and speculative fiction
• Metamodern DAOs, metamodern AI
• Reality Switch Technologies: DMT, lucid dreaming and the jhanas
• Governance, ethics and wise innovation
• Building the metamodern tech community

About the author:

Stephen Reid (https://stephenreid.net/) is a transdisciplinary technologist and experienced educator who has trained in the fields of AI/ML, complexity science, physics, transformative coaching and insight meditation. Current projects include hosting courses and residencies as a co-founder of Futurecraft, and leading the development of Dandelion as a member of not-for-profit worker co-op Symbiota.

Previously, he founded The Psychedelic Society, taught the Introduction to AI, Introduction to web3, How to DAO, Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance, The Promise of Decentralisation & Life as Practice courses, and served as the youngest ever board member of Greenpeace UK.

Stephen has an MPhys in Physics from the University of Oxford, where he specialised in quantum field theory, an MRes in Complexity Science from the University of Bristol, and a Professional Certificate in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence from UC Berkeley. He lives with his partner Laura in Stockholm, Sweden.