Toward a Participatory Digital Gnosis

It is emperically known to me, through neurological experiment, that every time I manage to change the focus of my nervous system, a new Me appears, and a new External Reality, and that these mingle in curious ways, and each grows steadily bigger, weirder, more mysterious and more humorous as my researches proceed.

Robert Anton Wilson

And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

Antonin Artaud

The art of social control has, it seems, always been a matter of the non-conscious lives of subjects: the subtle exploitation of altered states in order to assign ontological power and significance to reality structures that the conscious subject will then take for granted as inevitable.

The pre-subjective and under-subjective life of money, family, nation, religion might be a greater site of resistance if it didn’t suffer from a core tension that makes it inaccessible to mainstream humanist discourse: when it comes to coercion and control, there is no pristine subject waiting underneath; it is turtles all the way down. [1] Any attempt at agency necessarily has to surf the structures of control and enclosure that will persistently be its ground; to find in the inevitable and endless ordeals of indoctrination and deprogramming a subterranean rhythm, a fluidity that might defang the process — an anonymous or general intention, a ghost of renewal to trust-fall into: the groundless ground, immanence, a life.

Dissident cultures have long known the affordances of deconditioning and imaginative restructuring allowed by the deliberate invoking of this pre-subjective place, the mauve zone of experience cognitive science today might associate with states of heightened plasticity or absorption, and what the hermetic tradition might broadly refer to as gnosis. There is a rich and often untold history of the underground and folk traditions that have developed and nursed this occult science; they’ve spread and mutated through esoteric and psychedelic print cultures and mass market music, and have grown into a mature and diverse library of tactics since the birth of the web.

And yet, when we look around, we notice along with everyone else the crisis of collective agency wrought by the machines of mass media, the feeling of imaginative impotence, complacency and doom in the culture. The third decade of the twenty-first century is one where social technology, in its most powerfully intrusive and entrancing form ever, seems to have fallen totally to the prerogatives of control and spectacle.

For those of us who have been in the trenches of decentralized web technologies, and have seen the blossoming of c.r.o.p.s. (censorship resistant, open source, private, secure) alternatives to the corposlop hegemons, the acutely psychological nature of this era of imprisonment is painfully clear. That is, it isn’t for lack of means: the basic infrastructure is here. Truly, all we lack is the imagination to make use of them.

If media technologies have ever been ready for a mass experimentation with the pre-subjective plane to the end of a more democratic, participatory, and open-ended construction of reality-programming structures, it’s today. From hardware to software to hard-won social protocols, the ingredients exist for a rich set of mass online technical communities — what we are experimentally referring to here as Distributed Metaprogramming Communities — that could make use of immersive media to reflexively program new forms of life, exploiting a pre-subjective underneath in the full light of day.

It would take a lucid awareness of the power of these strategies, and their obvious and well documented vulnerability to capture, charisma, ideology, supernatural belief, and (at their worst) acts of community sanctioned violence to build a responsible programme for their deliberate enaction in the digital realm. (Then again, the need for this awareness is likely to grow in urgency for all facets of digital life, as commentators note that we are entering a cognitive wild west.) Research into the strategies of underground subcultural and dissident spiritual communities for cautiously and ethically exploring the rich capacities of neuroplastic states (a body of work we have proposed in the metacogsec project) can lead the way.

In addition to those social technologies, a suite of digital tools and protocols for distributed collectives will be necessary to establish a thriving culture of DMCs, reminiscent of the prolific open source development of DAO tooling circa 2018-22 but with an emphasis on the necessary infrastructure for participatory digital gnosis. These tools would be carefully engineered to exploit both excitatory and inhibitory gnosis states to the end of deconditioning, ontological creativity, and intersubjective “imprinting.”

Some early sketches for what this suite would require :

• optional “proof of state” encryption - gating of chats, AR environments or organizational entry based on EEG registration of sustained neuroplastic states or other relevant biofeedback [2]

• local-first processing of EEG and other neural signals, zero-knowledge proofs of state (demonstrating entry into a gated condition without transmitting the raw registration), and explicit non-retention [3]

• curated consumer grade open source hardware for AR/VR, Audio-visual stimulation (AVS) and Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

• software for collective generative AR/VR environments (including axiomatic governance of the generative “physics” involved), eventually evolving into a library of templates correlated to different needs

• cryptographic provenance of AVS sequences, generative rulesets and environment templates, such that any participant’s actual exposure path is auditable and repeatable after the fact

• anti-capture protocols to guard against charismatic or cultic capture, group psychosis, externally sourced psychological warfare and other acute risks of group neuroplastic states (one could imagine psychosocial red-teaming projects [4] to expand the diligence of the community - happily, cogsec red-teaming doubles as deconditioning and restructuring praxis, a sort of metaprogramming resistance training)

Open Machine will be working in collaboration with friends at ATLAS (a community to which much of the thinking here owes a debt) to chip away at the research and software infrastructure for this future, but the project remains ambitious beyond any one group. An age of participatory digital gnosis will need an authentic cultural movement and a new technological renaissance, as ready to exploit and revive the decentralized tech of the last 20 years as it is to build in the new language of the intelligence age.

When the occulted knowledge that the fabric of reality is ours to cut comes to the fore, imagination becomes both the goal of our liberation and the means to attain it. At quis modo animam dabit imagini et vivificabit lapidem aut metallum aut lignum aut ceram atque “ex lapidibus suscitabit filios Abrahae”?

[1] Judith Butler concludes her The Psychic Life of Power: “The power imposed upon one is the power that animates one’s emergence, and there appears to be no escaping this ambivalence. Indeed, there appears to be no “one” without ambivalence, which is to say that the fictive redoubling necessary to become a self rules out the possibility of strict identity.”

[2] The formalization of these states on a p2p basis would itself be an ambitious and controversial research programme.

[3] Our friends at Sensoria Research have developed a Sovereign Data Research Fabric for just these purposes.

[4] More friends: Last Psyop is going deep on this practice, check out their September Psyop hackathon in Austin. (cc: Wizard Defender )