High Strangeness, Memetics, and the Open Source Insurgency

This was a fun one! In most recent episodes, I’ve had conversations with builders from the Nostr/Bitcoin community about other rabbit holes they’re interested in. In today’s episode, I sat down with Jack Heart, a longtime blogger and veteran of high strangeness and esoteric rabbit holes galore.

Although we focus primarily on themes from Jack’s blog and recent book, we do spend some time discussing the principles of Nostr and how they align with Jack’s view of building an open source insurgency. I’m hoping to do more conversations with thinkers like Jack from communities philosophically adjacent to Nostr.

You can learn more about Jack’s work on his blog, Tekgnostics, and in his new book, Brave Noo World: A Guerrilla Ethnography of High Strangeness.

Here are some of the other topics we cover:

* High strangeness and the acceleration of technology, society, and novelty 

* Tekgnostics - a balance of artifact and epiphany

* J. Allen Hynek - coined the term high strangeness

* The origin of Foo Fighters - UFOs

* Cosmic triggers - the atomic bomb - UFO craze after the war - term UFO coined after lights over Mt. Ranier

* 2012 as omega point for Terence McKenna and the Mayans 

* High strangeness going mainstream as dominant paradigm: politicians calling each other weird 

* Synchronicity as meaningful coincidence 

* Vernor Vinge’s singularity and the end of the human era 

* Humor as the highest and most human form of intelligence and the great weapon against bureaucracy 

* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere as the omega point of human thought and the next layer of biosphere 

* Humans will ultimately be all right because of our creativity 

* Humans are tool and model builders 

* Early internet was the first model of what the hivemind might look like 

* Nostr and gnostic — a happy synchronicity ;) 

* Digital evolution and DNA

* Philip K Dick’s view of DNA as a binary system of memory coils which gnosis allows us to read

* The workaround - humans’ core ability to adapt to whatever circumstances 

* Jung and the ability to catch ideas from the noosphere 

* The Buddha is in the Park

* Discordianism: seriousness vs humor - don’t take the world too seriously 

* Humor is the highest form of intelligence; perhaps AI will struggle to mimic or understand humor 

* “When I dress like a clown, the cops won’t hit me”

* The clown and jester archetype; the fool and the trickster (Prometheus , Krishna?)

* Meme magic and memetics as mind virus 

* Memes are a big reason Trump won in 2016 (Pepe the frog)

* The open source / decentralized insurgency 

* The ebb and flow of everything 

* Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, chakras, and the 8 brain model of psychology 

* Crowdfunding a billboard for Brazil all over nostr 

* Nostr as the open source / decentralized  insurgency against bureaucracy 

* PKD and blows against the empire 

* Bureaucracy lacks a sense of humor

* Gnosticism as the mystic arm of Christianity 

* Overview of gnostic thought 

* The great Yin/Yang, masculine/feminine, binary dichotomy of the universe 

* Why something instead of nothing (manifest vs. unmanifest)? 

* The mythology of Ancient Civilizations - civilizations rise and fall all the time 

* Creating substrates for data redundancy and preventing human amnesia (Nostr/Project Alexandria a