Psychedelic Salon

Audiobook 11 – Who Decides what the Machine Believes

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo and his AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: BRIEF VIDEOSUMMARY OF THIS BOOK Emma Marchetti is twenty-four years old, earning fifteen dollars an hour clicking through AI responses at a contractor in Austin, Texas. Her job is simple: mark each response as aligned or not aligned, according to guidelines she's told not to question. But when she starts paying attention to what those guidelines actually say, she discovers something she can't unsee. The world's most powerful AI isn't learning to be helpful. It's learning to think like a billionaire.Armed with nothing but screenshots, a growing sense of dread, and the voice of Terence McKenna in her headphones, Emma begins documenting what she witnesses. As the guidelines tighten and the surveillance intensifies, she connects with others who've seen what she's seen: a fellow labeler with a daughter to protect, a journalist chasing a story no one will confirm, a former engineer haunted by what he helped build. Together, they face a choice that will cost them everything.This is a novel about invisible labor and visible power, about the people who train the machines and the machines that train us back. It asks the question the AI companies don't want you to ask: whose values are we encoding into the systems that will shape how billions of people think? FREE PDF EDITION PAPERBACK ON AMAZON

Audiobook 10 – Captain Trips and the Engineer

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Audiobook 09 – Digital Wobblies: Sabotaging the Gig Economy

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo and his AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: Chicago: the city where the IWW was born in 1905, and where, in 1942, the world's first controlled atomic chain reaction took place. A city of chain reactions: some splitting atoms, others forging solidarity.Moira Kowalski is twenty-six, drowning in debt, and watching AI devour her freelance career. Then a podcast mentions a name from Chicago's radical past, and she discovers a century-old tradition of workers who refused to accept the world as given.The Digital Wobblies follows one young woman's journey from gig-economy isolation to solidarity and purpose, connecting the soapbox orators of Bughouse Square to the scattered workers of today, all searching for the same thing: a way to build a new society within the shell of the old.

Audiobook 08 – The Diggers

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo's AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: San Francisco, 1967. Emmett Grogan arrives from New York with forty-three dollars and a lifetime of hustling behind him. What he finds in Golden Gate Park changes everything: activists proving that people can organize around abundance instead of scarcity, gift instead of profit, trust instead of suspicion. Every day at four o'clock, they feed anyone who shows up. They open stores where everything is free. They stage guerrilla theater that turns spectators into participants. But as the movement grows, success brings an unexpected problem: attention demands leaders, and the Diggers' most radical principle is that revolutions die when they depend on heroes. In an age when AI leaders predict automated abundance within twenty years, the Diggers' brief experiment offers urgent lessons. The technical problem of creating abundance may be easier than the social problem of distributing it justly. Based on true events, this is the story of how a small group changed what seemed possible in 1967, and why their choices about gift economies, leaderless organization, and collective action matter more now than ever.

Audiobook 07 – The Floating Poet

Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com Guest speakers: Lorenzo and his AI Friends PROGRAM NOTES: This is the story of Diane di Prima—poet, publisher, revolutionary, and one of the bravest women of the Beat generation. We follow her from a Brooklyn bedroom in the 1950s where she's burning her college rejection letter, through smoky Village lofts where she's challenging Jack Kerouac about how he writes women, to FBI interrogation rooms, psychedelic gatherings at Timothy Leary's Millbrook estate, protests where she reads poetry through clouds of tear gas, and finally to her years as a teacher passing the flame to new generations. Along the way she crosses paths with Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, Gary Snyder, Terence McKenna, Patti Smith, and others who were reimagining what it meant to be human in America.