I was introduced to Steem by a wrestling libertarian hypnotist and Discordian magician who's one of the very smartest people I've come across. And I figured, if Jake Shannon is into this, then I need to check it out. Not being very tech savvy, I've been aware of the technologies involved in this place without having got involved at first hand. It's time for that to change.
More than that, this feels like a time of change more generally. I'm very much influenced by Robert Anton Wilson, and one concept he explored was how information acceleration led to some kind of crunch point in 2012, when information was accelerating so fast it resulted in some kind of transformation. And 2012 came and went, and Wilson looked like he was wrong once again, as he had been with the stuff about space migration and the rest.
Only, it's 2016. Here in the UK we've left the EU, lost a Prime Minister, had a new one slither her way into power without the courtesy of an election. Over in the States, the Republican Presidential candidate looks like he's popped off the pages of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, Trump surely a satire in approximately human form even if nobody's sure what the punchline will be.
And space migration? Elon Musk, another comic book character - to an extent that the movie version of Iron Man is a take on him as filtered through the neurology of Robert Downey Jr - is planning to put a million people on Mars in our lifetime. He's funding that trip with electric cars that will soon be self-propelling solar power generators, and hacking away at our addiction to fossil fuels. Elsewhere, Luxembourg has established itself as the go-to place if you're serious about asteroid mining; Disney now owns Marvel and Star Wars meaning they get to furnish the contents of kids' heads worldwide for a long time to come; Syria has been torn apart and its people have fled to make way for oil drilling by a company that has Rupert Murdoch and some senior US politicians on the board; and cancer will be defeated either by new technologies or the scrupulous application of coconut oil and turmeric, depending how you skew.
So, you know, maybe Bob was just premature in his predictions.
As for how I come into all this...
On July 23rd I was in a field in Yorkshire because of a dream Jung had. He recounted the dream, perhaps the most significant in his life, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and it seemed to be about Liverpool. A Liverpudlian bohemian decided to identify just where in his city that dream referred to, and came across the crossroads that he reckoned fit the bill. At the spot, there was space for rent, which he duly did - it became the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream, and Pun.
Ken Campbell created a theatrical version of the Illuminatus books by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, which played at that venue and was noted as one of the most powerful pieces of theatre in the seventies. The legendary production included Bill Drummond, later of the KLF, as set designer, among many other fascinating collaborators. And after Ken died, his daughter Daisy Eris Campbell - conceived backstage at the venue the play was performed - continued in a similar vein by creating a stage adaptation of Cosmic Trigger, the autobiographical book Wilson wrote after Illuminatus.
A festival in Liverpool, Find The Others, featured the premiere of that play on November 23, 2014. And I did a talk at that event, which you can find on YouTube if you search for Press When Illuminated. It's a mix of personal experience and research covering magic, medicine, mesmerism, and more, and I've performed the piece at a few other events too. I was invited to do so for that event in Yorkshire, Festival 23: Convergence of Disco, and was tempted but wanted to come up with something new without having the time to do so. Going there, I got glimpses of new in various forms, which provided inspiration that feels in tune with Steem.
As well as Press When Illuminated, I've scripted short films, TV, theatre, and comics. And I'd like to write about all of those things and more here for anyone who'd be interested. This first piece will give you some idea where I'm coming from.