Voicecraft Dispatch | Progress, Influence, & What's Worth Giving Life To?
Plus bonus content and final invitations for Underground Philosophy: Technofeudalism Thursday 12 June
There are two full conversations I’d love to share with you today.
The first is with
and titled Mythos After Progress and the second is the recent release with Michael Levin, Influence, Value & Transhumanism: Questions for the frontier of techno biology.Plus, there’s a 30 minute part 2 follow up to Mythos & Progress with the Voicecraft Network, shared on the VC Network channel.
If you’re here for tickets to Underground Philosophy: Technofeudalism, please follow this link. More on that below.
What does progress mean? How do our stories about progress influence consciousness and our perceptions of value, quality and emerging mythos? Can we think beyond it? Welcoming paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and integral philosopher Jeremy D Johnson, author of ‘Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.’
I find both Michael and Jeremy to be outstandingly generative voices to dialogue with and I look forward to them returning to the context.
To watch the reflections segment, go to Mythos After Progress PART TWO. Spotify version of the full convo below.
E129 | Influence, Value and Transhumanism: Questions for the frontier of techno-biology
Dr Michael Levin's pioneering research on bioelectricity, morphogenesis, and cognition is reshaping our understanding of how living systems self-organize and regenerate. He explores how cells and tissues communicate through bioelectrical signals, guiding the formation of complex structures without relying solely on genetic instructions. He is a Distinguished Professor in Biology at Tufts University, working at the intersection of biology, computer science, and cognitive science.
This dialogue may be most interesting to those already familiar with Levin’s work. It’s not that it requires any more knowledge in advance relative to other Voicecraft dialogues. It is just that, with only one hour (and it was a 2.5 year process for that hour!) I felt there wasn’t time to spare on a recapitulation of some of the concepts and advances that really situate Levin in the zone of maximum public interest. There are a number of interviews on
’s TOE channel that do this very well which I recommend. And then there’s this Lex Fridman podcast which is a broad and solid overview.I was hoping to get to the Levin Lab’s key research on bioelectricity and the notion of cognitive glue, and in from there, given the basis we established, into some terrain connecting questions of participation across multiple ‘levels’ of reality, in relation to evolution, perenialism, platonic forms, orientation, and more on the 2nd person relation, which was only noted briefly. Whack in questions of goodness, truth, beauty, and additional concerns about reductionism in there.. and there’s a bit more on the table to work with.
Michael has explored much of this with
in several places. I enjoyed this dialogue titled Taming the Technological Dragon and Re-Minding the Universe as well as here on Third Eye Drops. And for some additional high quality reflection on Levin’s work with Tim Jackson, check this one out.In fact, as Tim Jackson is a guest for next week’s Voicecraft event in Melbourne, that brings us on to Underground Philosophy: Technofeudalism. We’ve had a few dialogues on this topic in the Voicecraft Network recently, one of which may be shared publicly on the VC Network YT channel soon. And if the tech permits we’ll be sharing some clips at the event to try and connect the worlds a little bit, too.
Popularized by economist Yanis Varoufakis, technofeudalism describes a world where tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta act as digital overlords, extracting "rent" from users’ data and attention, replacing capitalism’s markets and profits with platform dominance and behavioural control.
But to understand the implications of technofeudalism more comprehensively, we need to integrate more than Varoufakis’ focus on economics and power—crucial though it is. We also need to understand how power and technology are effecting changes to our social and moral imaginations, our relation to value, and indeed our very contexts for belonging with each other and the world.
What creative potential can we discern in our own lives and relations that can support a meaningful, empowered response?
For more on the invitation of Underground Philosophy, this post has the first 20 minutes of May’s event on the topic of Future Melbourne.
Underground Philosophy: Opening to Future Melbourne
Earlier this month Voicecraft hosted its first Underground Philosophy of 2025 at a new venue in Melbourne. The topic was Future Melbourne. This was the opening 20 minutes.
Finally, one upcoming podcast in the calendar will be with
As always, thank you to everyone who makes this context what it is. And at least one theme linking all of the above, really, is a question which came through in the dialogue with Michael and Jeremy: what are we choosing to give life to?
Discernment on the Way,
Tim