155 - Michael Morgenstern on Fictions as Weapons and 21st Century Media Literacy

FUTURE FOSSILS

This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes.

While I’ve been speculating on the ominous (albeit numinous) social and psychological consequences of deepfakes since my 2017 sci-fi short “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’” and discussed the more hopeful possibilities in last week's episode with Stephanie Lepp, this conversation takes the futurist speculation to a whole new level to examine:

• How convincing and deceitful information-age fictions pose a risk not just to the fabric of society but even our personal relationships;

• How deepfakes will turn the logic of waking life from something sober and tangible to something more like a dream or shamanic journey;

• How Michael and his team based the execution and roll-out of this project on an industrial fake news factory and open-source software community;

• How electronic media function like a parasitic alien intelligence;

• The ethical concerns they had to consider and enact in producing something intended to create good but capable of accidentally causing serious harm;

• And so much more...

Visit Michael's website:

https://everythingisfilm.com

Check out Team Zander, the looking glass through which you can experience this kaleidoscopic weirdness:

https://teamzander.com

Copious additional resources related to this project here:

https://mailchi.mp/24cbc646d833/this-is-definitely-real-let-the-game-begin?e=11fc71d569

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Big Announcement: I've just released all of the Future Fossils Book Club call recordings from behind the patrons-only paywall! Help yourself to eight newly-available discussions on some of my favorite works of psychedelic science fiction and non-fiction, including Blindsight by Peter Watts; Xenolinguistics by Diana Slattery; Liu Cixin's The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End; Jeff VanderMeer's Borne; and Octavia Butler's trilogy Lilith's Brood (Dawn, and Adulthood Rites, and Imago).

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Intro music is from my new release, "Löwenmensch," part of an archaelogical research project on cross-domain knowledge transfer from prehistoric sculpture to modern electronic art and music, which you can read all about (and watch me perform) here. Find it on major streaming platforms at https://smarturl.it/lionman.

Outro music is from Skytree’s new LP of spacey downtempo electronica, Infraplanetary, which I highly encourage you to purchase.

Go deeper into the fractal rabbit hole of related media we reference in this episode:

My new essay, "The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputees"

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-4-augments-amputees-92075fabd5a6

"On Coronavirus, Complex Systems, and Creative Opportunity"

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/on-coronavirus-complex-systems-and-creative-opportunity-b82e227a22e7

"We Will Fight Diseases of Our Networks By Realizing We Are Networks"

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/we-will-fight-diseases-of-our-networks-by-realizing-we-are-networks-7fa1e1c24444

"Advertisement is Psychedelic Art is Advertisement"

https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/advertisement-is-psychedelic-art-is-advertisement-c4b000f4bbd0

Future Fossils 81 - Arthur Brock of Holochain on Rethinking Currency & The Future of Distributed Systems

https://shows.acast.com/futurefossils/episodes/81

On Becoming Aware: A pragmatics of experiencing, by Natalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch

https://books.google.com/books?id=iYJy_2909NAC&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false

"A Calculus for Self Reference" by Francisco Varela (DOI, PDF)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03081077508960828

http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/recordings/varela_calculus.pdf

"The Science & Technology in Futurama That Everyone In Ad-Tech Can Appreciate," by Bryan Bartlett

https://www.business2community.com/marketing/science-technology-futurama-everyone-ad-tech-can-appreciate-01028949

Enjoy, and thanks for listening!

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