Psychopolitica

ON PRISON plus A CARD GAME FOR THE END OF REALITY

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit psychopolitica.substack.com [https://psychopolitica.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] For the past year and a half, I’ve been using palm-sized cards as the central medium to organize my work, life, ideas, and projects. This is one of the first batches of “idea cards”: These are monthly decks/stacks that accumulate from my visits to the local cannabis club. And in today’s episode of Kosmopolitika, you’ll see the latest version of the medium: a kind of a game board Boris and I are starting to use to organize our biweekly conversations. Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of the two-hour stream: Here’s what it looked like at the end: And here’s what it looks like right now [https://admin.psychopolitica.com/kp/table]: The texts on the other sides of the cards are drafts of ideas and stories I don’t think I want to share widely, but any PsyPol member can play with the cards on the site [https://admin.psychopolitica.com/kp/table]: read their contents, drag them around, stack and unstack them, etc. If Boris or I change or add something, it is reflected on the site in real time. You won’t be able to edit cards or save their positions, but I plan on adding real interactivity in the coming weeks. You’ll find the password at the end of this message. Here is an excerpt from a draft in the Escapism deck. ON PRISON The Lukiškės prison was at the very cutting edge of the Russian correctional system when it first opened in 1905, my Lithuanian guide tells me. The main innovation wasn’t so much the design (a panopticon) and the architecture (neo-Romanesque), or the heating, ventilation, and sewage systems, which were all quite impressive for their time, but the very idea of “correcting” the prisoners, rehabilitating instead of simply punishing or isolating them. He cites the beautiful Orthodox church we’re in as evidence — why would you need a church, if not to improve the souls of the inmates? There are also a Catholic church and a synagogue on the premises. The change he’s pointing to is a sequence of reforms to the Russian criminal code that phased away corporal punishment and introduced prison confinement as a penalty in itself — before then, imprisonment was only a temporary measure as one awaited his sentencing, and usually didn’t last long. The actual punishment came mostly in the forms of death, physical pain, katorga (forced labor in harsh conditions), and exile (most commonly to Siberia). Given the kinds of hell prison replaced — whipping, nose-slitting, beating with rods, among others — it’s hard to argue this innovation wasn’t a positive one. Still, I can’t quite see it as such. There’s something uniquely bleak about it: walking through Lukiškės, I see a whole little world built entirely around the idea of stripping one of his freedom and making that fact the center of his existence; there’s nothing else going on. A katorzhanin went to the mine to extract gold, silver, or coal (somebody’s gotta do it?), but a prisoner only extracts the experience of what it’s like being trapped. The “correctional” narrative rings hollow even now, at least in the Russian and, it appears, Lithuanian settings, and it’s been more than a century since Lukiškės first opened its doors. This is my first time in a prison (a night at the police station followed by a day in court is the biggest trouble I’ve gotten from my own state so far), so it’s strange how familiar everything about it feels: the grey and muddy-green paint on the walls, the musty smell, the sickly light that gets dimmed at night but never fully goes out, the hole-in-the-floor shitters in the corners of cells. The guide looks at those in the group who were born in the USSR: “You guys had those in school too, right?” He’s right, schools are one of the environments this reminds me of. Also kindergartens, trains and train stations of my youth, state hospitals, the state itself. Lukiškės was in operation between 1905 and 2019, and at different times belonged to the Russian empire, Poland, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and, finally, after the fall of the Union, independent Lithuania. After Covid, it reopened as a cultural hub: there are bars, cafes, concert venues, open-air movie screenings, and guided tours in Lithuanian, English, and Russian. I wonder about the vibe at the parties. We play a game: the guide shows us different objects and invites us to guess whether they were allowed or banned on the premises. To wired headphones, I say “banned: one could strangle a cell mate or hang himself with them.” I’m wrong: the guide explains that the right way to strangle yourself is by tying yourself to the bed, by the neck, with a wet towel or bed sheet, after several days of sleep deprivation. You fall asleep, you never wake up. He has a polite look on his face, which says “I thought you might find that interesting,” and I nod with appreciation, as if saying “right, that makes sense, thanks.” He gives a chance to ask a follow up to the rest of the group, but nobody has one, and he moves on to the next object: a tiny cell phone, maybe 1/6th of my iPhone, with buttons. We are invited to guess the maximum number of phones that was recovered from a man’s rectum at one time. I think, “Six? Four?” Somebody else gives their guess. The guide lights up: “Very close! Eight.” I spend more time than the rest of the group looking at drawings and reading the writings on the doors and walls of the tiny box-like rooms for preliminary detention: a third, maybe half are in Russian, but I also recognize Georgian and Armenian letters, there’s some Arabic and, of course, Lithuanian. In the bigger cells for long-term confinement, Russian dominates. “Business language,” the guide shrugs, “lingua franca.” The biggest graffiti turns out to be fake though, put on the walls during the filming of Stranger Things 4. Taking pictures in the cells is prohibited except for the one with a cardboard cutout of Putin (Vilnius is absolutely covered in Ukrainian flags). Most are empty, maybe a dozen were turned into some kind of art objects, and one preserves a frozen image of what life here actually looked like: a TV in the corner, light erotica on wall posters (Russian pop bands from the 90s and 2000s, which I recognize), books, bedding. Two men step in to look around, the guide asks how they like it, one says “I could live with this,” and the guide responds by shutting and locking the door. People chuckle. He delivers the next bit of trivia to us, with his back to the door. It’s all very playful, gently immersive, with smiles, raised eyebrows, an occasional sigh, a thoughtful nod. None of this is about the Lukiškės prison for me. It’s about the fact that, a week or two before this excursion, I was looking at tickets to Russia. I hadn’t been home in three years.

Kosmopolitika #301. Ideas Are Like People, Demons, and Stray Dogs

Nikita and Boris explore a set of wild ideas and lay out the foundations for a new kosmopolitikal ideology. This particular conversation was meant to follow an agenda: a reintroduction of Nikita & Boris; some thoughts on what we take Kosmopolitika to be; and explorations of particular ideas that have occupied our attention recently. We mostly managed to stick to the plan, though there were more than a few tangents. We returned to our touchstone question: whether ideas can be thought of as alive in their own right, and what it might mean if ideas are not only alive, but are entities that we summon into our everyday world, with all the danger a word like “summon” suggests. Seeing ideas as peers that we’re in dialogue with also conveniently provided us with a metaphysical justification for all of the tangents we tend to follow in our conversations: following tangents is our way of acknowledging the pull of the ideas themselves. Finally, we spent time with Nikita’s idea of “alienism”—linking the alienness of UFOs/UAPs, AI, and psychedelics—which Boris glossed as the alienness of the heavens, the alienness of rocks and metals, and the alienness of multicellular life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Introducing KOSMOPOLITIKA

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit psychopolitica.substack.com [https://psychopolitica.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7] Happy Cosmonautics Day! A week ago I, Boris Shoshitaishvili of the Berggruen Institute (the Noosphere guy), and Robert Wright [https://substack.com/profile/3952006-robert-wright] of the Nonzero media empire, hosted a livestream, the recording of which you can see in this post. We talked amongst ourselves for the first hour and responded to questions and comments from the audience for the second. (There was also a memorable intrusion of a Nazi porn bot about halfway through, but I edited it out of the recording — for the most part.) Boris and I are doing another one — the inaugural episode of the show we’re calling KOSMOPOLITIKA — next Monday, at 1pm ET / 7pm CET, here: This time, I expect it to be less structured. Figuring out the right flow for an online conversation with many participants, most of whom don’t know each other, will take more than a few iterations; but it’s an exciting project to work on. The theme of the next stream is BELONGING. If you plan to attend, please RSVP by clicking the button below — this would put the event on your calendar and let us know how many people we can expect. Early in last week’s conversation, I played the My People card. When Bob asked for a one-line description of what this new show is about, I said it will be different for different people — and I will add now, it is many different things for me — but one of them is it’s my way of “meeting ‘my people’, dispersed throughout the world, and living through history with them”. Naturally, Bob followed up by asking who these people I refer to as “mine” might be; and to that question, I don’t have an answer. I know that I feel a sense of kinship to many of you — those with whom I’ve exchanged letters or had one-on-one conversations — but I don’t know where this feeling originates. You’re young, old, middle-age, men and women, religious and not, living (I’m trying to remember the chats that I’ve had so far) in Serbia, Ireland, Italy, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Germany, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. You’re all very different. One thing you do have in common is you’re reading this missive, and so might attend the Monday gathering. I’ve never identified too strongly with any group of people, large or small. My social network rests on one-on-one relationships, and what those rest on is anyone’s guess. I’ve always felt very Russian, but it is the outcasts and outliers within my culture that I resonate with the most; when my president said, some days after I left the country, that Russia is cleansing itself from “traitors and scum”, that it will spit us out “like gnats”, I did not feel surprised — there is a whole multi-generational lineage of Russians with a challenging relationship with their state and, oftentimes, broader society. There isn’t a cult or political party that I belong to. I like to study them (I went to the now-defunct Scientology center in Moscow twice after I ran out of documentaries on the topic), but I’ve never encountered one I would think about joining. The only club I’m technically a member of is my local cannabis club — the only legal way to buy weed in Spain… I wonder about these questions of group identity. My Russianness does define me in many different ways (though, of course, never wholly); more than that, whether I want to or not, I do have ties with the Russian state — for one, that’s who issues my passports, without which no other state, and, for that matter, no airline company, are willing to do business with me. There’s no set answer to the question “What does it mean to be Russian?”. My life is, among other things, an on-going articulation of my response to it. I know that my government is working with ideologues and political technologists on formulating a different answer. We’ll have to wait to find out who plays this game better. The nation state has become such a prominent force in the world, something we’re so very used to, that it can be hard to imagine how group identity worked before its emergence — when nobody felt particularly French or Russian, when in place of a nation there were towns and villages, faith, and fealty to a lord or a king. At the same time, it could be that soon, we won’t have to imagine: many national identities are in a crisis, struggling to redefine or maintain their people’s identity as migration, separatism, political and religious polarization, and technology challenge the old definitions. Bob says it was the printing press that allowed for the rise of the nation, ironing out the dialectic kinks of language over long distances; the Internet and AI are similarly disruptive technologies pushing towards globalization. But who knows! Watching the Internet, which in my childhood was assumed to be a wild, lawless, and borderless place, balkanize — break down into segments with functioning borders around them, and different laws of engagement within — and watching at the same time ChatGPT and its ilk creep into everyone’s life as all-purpose employees, home doctors, therapists, educators, and artists-in-residence, I imagine a sci-fi novelistic scenario: The world governments take the threat of malevolent information as or more seriously as they do biological viruses. They inoculate their populations with chips that allow telepathic connection to sanctioned chatbots — ostensibly, for fact checking. This is Bicameral Mind 2.0: you do some of your thinking yourself, but whenever you pause, a second inner voice takes over, treating your thinking as prompts. For most, the line between “their” and “bot” thinking quickly gets very blurry and then disappears. China achieves impressive social cohesion with their highly effective state-issued thoughtbot. The US is as polarized as ever, as two or three corporate ones compete for the domination of the thought market. Europe uses slowed-down, heavier-regulated versions of the American product, limiting its output to work hours (the further south you go, the less reliable the schedule). Israel’s bot, trained on the Torah, goes through constant fine-tuning via conversations with the rabbinic class. Russia has one for public consumption — so filled with low-quality propaganda people learn to tune it out — and another for the elite, dubbed Putin-2, that is given total control of the mind of the human who sits on the throne at any given moment. The country finally develops a reliable system for peaceful rotation of power, except that it’s only the human substrate that is rotated. Boris and I were both born in the Soviet Union only three years before its collapse. His family left Russia for the US when he was just 5 years old; mine, or what’s left of it, is still there, while I’m building a new one in voluntary exile. Social upheaval and dissolution of past realities do get tiresome, but, at some level, they feel like home turf for me. There is a coziness to “living through history” with people whose company I enjoy. That’s where I think the Monday conversation — 1pm ET, 7pm CET, RSVP [https://www.addevent.com/event/qu25471265] — will begin. Where it will go from there depends on you. Here are some more ideas that were brought up in the one from last week, which you can watch above:

The Game of Ideas

I see the words “January 2025” in the sketch above, and my eyebrows climb up as I think of how long I’ve been working on the project I’m now inviting you to join. My sense of time has been totally out whack since 2022. The video part of this post is a kind of a dress rehearsal that I did with Boris Shoshitaishvili (I had previously published his piece on Bannon & the noosphere [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/steve-bannons-noosphere-warfare]) in preparation of a Psychopolitica X Nonzero livestream event that will take place next Friday, April 4, at 1pm ET. Boris, Robert Wright [https://substack.com/profile/3952006-robert-wright] of the Nonzero newsletter, and I plan to talk for about an hour before spending another hour taking calls from you. If it goes well, Boris and I will work on making it into a regular feature. Here is the link to the stream [https://youtube.com/live/D4jOfcLJWvA]. I keep changing my articulation of what this project is about every time that I talk or write about it. Here’s how I put it in an email to Boris on the day of our recording: One dimension is community and identity building. We want to start and maintain an on-going conversation about where we are, what we are, what’s going on with and around us, what we’re doing and what we should be doing instead; and the “we” here refers to * you, me, Bob, guests, viewers as individuals; * the Nonzero and the Psychopolitica communities, which already exist but don’t necessarily understand themselves as such, don’t necessarily have a shared identity (Bob’s Tribeless Tribe is something of a placeholder for where a positive identity should be instead); and * humanity, or life, or the planet, or consciousness itself. We think that we can develop an understanding of ourselves on all three of these levels by gathering together on a regular basis and exchanging ideas, experiences, and perspectives. The second dimension is ideas. One of the ways we can understand who we are, where we are, etc. is by continuously articulating ideas we are engaged with: some we develop ourselves, others are things we notice around (the simulation theory and the notion of an NPC are good examples). The idea card is central to this part of the project. We’re simultaneously mapping out our respective corners of the noosphere and conducting experiments in meme magic: what happens if I bring my ideas, and you bring yours, and everybody else brings theirs, and we let them interact? How will the interaction change these ideas, what new ones will emerge?.. When I say “the idea card,” I mean these things: Btw, check out the current stage of evolution of the Escapism one: I’ve been mostly posting these cards on Notes [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/notes], but one made into a post [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/flying-a-plane-is-all-about-the-ego] all the way back in December (my sense of time has really, really been slipping): They’re nothing more than an approach to note-taking (except we can make them into something much bigger). The card gives each idea a title, a short description, and an image to represent it. At first, the image can be missing, the title may be off, and the note may be barely intelligible even to myself; but I work on them iteratively, improving them step by step, rewriting, redrawing, re-understanding what it is that they’re on behalf of. I want to use these cards in our live-streaming project. With some regularity, Boris and I will get on a call and exchange ideas with you and with one another — and after we hang up, I’ll work on these cards for ideas that were brought up. The first time we talk about an idea, the card will not be much to look at; the tenth time we return to it, it might become something cool. Over time, whole decks may emerge, representing different species of ideas. Here are a couple of early sketches for the project’s identity: I hope to see you at the next stream, and I hope that you bring your ideas with you. I want this all to feel like a game. Here are some of the cards I had time to make, in a noticeably rushed manner, for the conversation in this post: The are more ideas in there! Listen to get to know them, and join us next time, on Friday, April 4, at 1pm ET, at Nonzero’s Youtube channel. Here is the link: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Soothing Chit-chat at the End of the World

I did a call-in livestream last night as Americans were starting to cast their votes. This election was supposed to be a historic event, and over the years I have found that, when history’s happening, it’s nice to be around people you like. I didn’t know if anybody would show up, and what happens if they do. But some people did, and what happened was a very cozy, heart-warming conversation about the strange and oftentimes alienating world of big-scale events and the grounding role of human connection. When I listened back to the recording, I was struck by the soothing effect that it had on me. I think it’s an “everybody’s homeland is childhood” kind of thing: when I was three, the country I was born in dissolved, and two years later, the new country’s President ordered tanks to fire at the Parliament building, which they did — so the TV box was always on in our little apartment, reporting the latest troubling news, and my parents discussed them endlessly over coffee or tea, and many times I have fallen asleep to the soothing cadence of their concerned voices. This must be the reason why, every time the world burns, I notice, mixed in with my grief, pain, or anxiety, a subtle sense of belonging or recognition. I don’t know if you’ll feel the same when listening to this chat — it’s hard to say how much of a niche thing it is. I’m very grateful to all who participated in this inaugural stream or listened in to it silently. Let’s do it again sometime soon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe [https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]