Digital Capitalism to Acid Communism

2 min readJul 13, 2021

Digital Capitalism to Acid Communism with Emma Stamm & Oshan Jarow - Musing Mind

6:30 - What role do technology and data play in the centuries-long dynamic between consciousness and capitalism? How…

musingmind.org

Last month I was interviewed for the Musing Mind podcast; the episode went live on Saturday. Copy-pasting the following from the website — this was written by Oshan Jarow, the founder and host of Musing Mind:

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Our conversation explores the relationship between data capitalism & consciousness, using psychedelic science as a way of illuminating those aspects of consciousness that cannot be rendered via data’s language. We also discuss:

How psychedelics provide an “empirical refutation of digital positivism”
Whether consciousness exists on a spectrum from ‘less to more’
What data capitalism is, what psychopower is, and how this new paradigm might impact consciousness

Enjoy!

Time Map

6:30 — What role do technology and data play in the centuries-long dynamic between consciousness and capitalism? How are digital technologies ushering in a new era of how capitalism interacts with subjectivity?

18:00 — What is “digital” capitalism? What makes it different from previous forms of capitalism?

29:40 — What can psychedelic drug research tell us about the consequences of digitization?

33:00 — What is “digital positivism”?

36:30 — Can we measure the ‘vitality’ of consciousness, and represent it in data format?

41:40 — On the ‘reducing valve theory of consciousness’

48:50 — The relationship between data capitalism and psychedelic consciousness — how algorithmic determinism mirrors hyper-priors in predictive processing models of cognition.

56:00 — Why capitalism is a fundamentally ‘conservative’ system, and how algorithms reinforce this conservatism.

58:15 — On acid communism.

1:24:48 — What is “psychopower” in the context of digital capitalism?