Dealing with Death
On Tuesday, April 24th, I was interviewed on BBC Radio about technology, the pursuit of immortality, and the meaning of death. In the middle of that night, we were awakened by a call from an out-of-st…
Human
Feedback Loops
Recently, I’ve realized that feedback loops have been one of the most important things in my life—and are perhaps one of the most important things in the world. Most of us are aware of negative feedba…
Two Kinds of Power: Why Fascists Can't Make Art
I believe that there are two kinds of power in the universe. The first one is control—the ability to constrain action. The second one is freedom—the ability to act. These two kinds of power are in dee…
Crisis
Today marks a year since the Orlando nightclub shooting. On June 12, 2016, a single gunman walked into a Florida nightclub and killed 49 people, wounding 58 others. A few days later, I wrote down some…
Why the Lego Batman Movie might Save Civilization
The other day I saw The Lego Batman Movie, a great addition to both the Batman movie franchise, and the Lego movie franchise. It had action, adventure, drama, romance—and more cameos from familiar goo…
What would you have done?
I’ve spent my entire life wondering what I would do at certain junctures in history. Would I have followed Jesus—or stood with the Pharisees? Would I have worked against slavery—or argued that it was …
What is Happening in the World?
Here is what I believe is happening in the world. Accelerating technological change has unleashed an era of unprecedented prosperity, freedom, and opportunity. The necessity of extreme poverty is vani…
How to Become Immortal
In the last few years, a number of different organizations have launched projects to end aging and radically extend human longevity. Google’s Calico Labs is perhaps the most well-known effort, followe…
How Self-Help Really Works
At the beginning of last year, I inadvertently found myself listening to an interview with self-help guru Tony Robbins. That interview made me curious, and pretty soon I had listened to several interv…
The Revolutionary Story
In the movie Elysium, some people live in a paradise city in the sky, while…(can you guess the next part?)…some people live in a hell on earth. I bet you could have guessed the second part even if I h…
My TEDx talk: We All Live in the Developing World
Back in March, I had the privilege of speaking at a TEDx event in the Cayman Islands. My topic? We all live in the developing world. The idea is simple. When we say “the developed world”, it suggests …
Terror and Awe, Faith and Freedom
We often encounter new things in very different ways. Sometimes, new things are terrifying—even demonic. Sometimes, new things are freedom. Talking to Emily the other day, I was struck by how quickly …
The Creative Process of God
For quite a while now, I’ve been suffering through something I might call abstraction angst. It’s hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it, but you might get a little of the flavor if you …
I Was a Teenage Existentialist
When I was 12, I began to wonder whether I was becoming an atheist. I couldn’t tell, of course, because while I knew I was exploring things that had turned other people into atheists, I didn’t know wh…
The Dark Side of Knowledge
The other day, I explored the story of Genesis, and its perplexing account of the corruption of mankind through the knowledge of good and evil. I tried to unpack some of the overlooked dynamics of the…
The Three Jobs in Our Future
The other day I posted a hypothesis I was working on, and stirred up some wide-ranging discussion on Twitter. After a while, this kind of thing becomes difficult to squeeze into 140-character chunks, …
My Grandfather
Last week, I lost my grandfather. Two years ago, I lost my grandfather from the other side. This is what I wrote at the time. — My grandfather died in December. For me and my siblings, this was the fi…
Existentialism
If you’ve ever thought deeply about life, or perhaps experienced something that set you back, and disrupted everything you thought you knew — you might have ended up floating in despair. In this state…
What I Would Write
Right now, my mind is a flurry of thoughts, ideas, and questions. This is typical for me, at this time of year, when there’s downtime, when everything is nominally starting over, when I’m reconnecting…
Spaceships & Christmas
For some reason, I’ve always associated space exploration with Christmas. No, I don’t think it’s because of that movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I think it’s deeper, going back to something e…
Medium vs Message
For me, there is a deep philosophical conflict that runs underneath everything I do and think. It makes me constantly question and measure and analyze — holding everything I’m doing up to inspection, …
Politics is Metaphysics
I watched Atlas Shrugged last night. Not a great movie. Nevertheless, it was thought-provoking in several ways. One might be forgiven for thinking that this movie was about politics. The cameo appeara…
Aspirations
I hear a lot about how our society sells us on consumerist wants, how magazines convince us we look ugly and need to look better, how car commercials make us lust after cars we don’t need, how our who…
Why I’m a Conservative Fundamentalist Liberal Progressive
I’m a conservative in that I know the world is complex, and I know that simplistic and feel-good solutions don’t often fix things. I look for the mechanisms that make the world go. I know there is a d…
Consumerism
When I think of consumerism, I think of companies without values — or more precisely, companies without opinions. That is, they’re not doing anything wrong, but they’re also not fighting for anything …
Being Human
It’s very common to hear people re-iterate the fact that we are human. “I’m only human” “I’m finally getting in touch with my own humanity” “The inhuman treatment of prisoners…” But nailing down just …
Iron Man and the Modern Identity Crisis
A year ago, I was traveling across the world. I had just moved out of my house, taken a leave of absence from my part-time job, and left without a lot of money or a good sense of whether I would be em…
The Poison of Empires
Lately I’ve been reading about technology in the ancient world, and just how close Greece and Rome came to kicking off the industrial revolution 1500 years early. Why didn’t it happen? Nobody knows th…
The Darkness and The Light
I have always been drawn to things which are bitter-sweet. Well, at least since I was 15. I remember hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as a kid, and wanting to turn it off because it was so depressing…
Gardeners of the Stars
I hope that one day humanity will assess its gifts, its skills, and its history, and come to the conclusion that our purpose in this world is to cultivate and create life. Certainly, this is what we h…
Thoughts about the accident
On Thursday night, Emily and I were driving along a five-lane road when a truck in front of us suddenly squealed its tires, jerked hard to the left, hit some debris, and then sped off. My first though…
Email is universal
Lately, there has been a flurry of discussion about email, from the “email is broken” thread to the “we’re solving the wrong problem” theme. Some people want to upgrade email clients to handle email a…
The Mountain That Bested Me
From my trip journal - Monday, May 21, 2012 Aguas Calientes, Peru. After a day of climbing around Machu Picchu, hiking to the Inca Bridge, and then through the many many terraces of the little stone v…
I'm back
I’m back. I’ve been back in the USA for about a week now, and in that week, I’ve had to re-adjust to life in a country where walking in front of buses is not a good idea, where the primary and only si…
The Process
I’m in the middle of a 40-day, 16-stop, 14-country tour of the world. This has become our process. Arrive at the airport. Make it through customs. Explain that no, we’re not carrying any baggage excep…
First day in Peru
I’m in the middle of a 40-day, 16 stop, 14 country tour of the world. These are my experiences. So perhaps my pen will behave. We have just missed a flight to Singapore, and I’m guessing we will be sp…
Exile
In some ways, this trip is a vacation. In other ways, it’s a self-imposed exile, in which we must slum around the world, often without food, showers, or the benefits of clean clothing. The terms of ou…
Carrying Cash
I’m in the middle of a 40-day, 16 stop, 14 country tour of the world. The most annoying thing about this trip so far has been using currency. Carrying cash does not make me feel powerful. Carrying cas…
Itinerary
I’m in the middle of a 40-day, 16 stop, 14 country tour of the world. We’re currently in Chilé. Here’s our full itinerary: Lima (LIM) May 18, 2012 04:30 AM. Cuzco (CUZ) May 19, 2012 02:00 PM. Lima (LI…
I don't speak the language
I’m in the middle of a 40-day, 14-country tour of the world. Our first two countries were Peru and Chilé. I do not speak Spanish. I like not speaking the language. I keep being told that I would enjoy…
Something wrong with the world
In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus prods Neo to think about his emotions over the course of his lifetime. Hadn’t he always felt out-of-place? Hadn’t he always felt that something was not quite right? O…
The Singularity: Why the Future is Closer Than You Think
This past Saturday, Ryan Hogan, John Yates and I delivered a presentation and panel discussion on the future of accelerating change at Nashville Podcamp. The session went well, and we had a lot of gre…
Aliens among us
I believe there are aliens among us. That is, I believe that there are non-human creatures deeply involved in our own existence. Of course, you believe in them too. You may call them things like schoo…
The Flip
When you flip a coin, it’s customary to ask the other person, “heads or tails?” That choice is meaningless. You picking “tails” doesn’t change the probability of you getting what you want. It could ju…
The Morality of The Rational, and How We Shape Meaning from The Void
I was recently talking to someone about how uncertain everything is. There are different opinions on everything - from what’s really happening in politics to the healthiest diet to follow. With so man…
The Solipsist's Fallacy
Solipsism is the belief that you can never truly know if anyone else is real. This is a common endpoint for philosophy, the reductio ad absurdum at the end of long chains of reasoning. It’s what Desca…
The Skulls, Bones and The Power of Law
The Skulls is a fictitious movie based on Yale’s notorious secret Skull and Bones society. It follows the path of a new initiate through the process of getting picked, going to clandestine meetings, e…
Wisdom
I need wisdom. More than anything in my life, I need to be able to see my way forward, to evaluate the choices ahead of me. I’ve always been a consumer of knowledge, someone who couldn’t leave well en…
The Vast Economy
Increasingly, I have come to believe that the world is best understood as a Vast Economy, an ecosystem encompassing all the small economies we know about and measure, utilizing our every choice, from …
New year's resolve: change
This year, my only resolution is to change. I’ve made my share of resolutions, goals, and ambitions, and so my relationship with such things is firmly in the “it’s complicated” category. I may talk mo…
Artists, Developers, and The Deep Structures of The New World
Software is swallowing the world. This is nothing new. From the moment human consciousness sprang into being, it has been trying to remake the world in its image. Consciousness is, after all, fundamen…
A decade of being vegetarian - and why I chose to stop
This is an excerpt from my email list. Click the link to get more memos like this one. I’ve been a vegetarian for just about a decade. The other day, I decided to stop. Around ten years ago, a conste…
Productivity is just work
The other day, I wrote a post declaring that I will no longer try to increase my productivity. This doesn’t mean I won’t read productivity blogs, and tweak things, and manage my “system”. It means I n…
I will not increase my productivity
New resolve: I will not attempt to increase my productivity. For years now, sites like Lifehacker and the original 43 Folders functioned by telling us small tips and tricks for improving our productiv…
What I want in my backpack
As conversant as I’ve been with the minimalist world, you’d think I might have achieved some level of minimalism by now. Far from it. I’ve rid myself of lots of things, moved a lot of stuff from my ho…
Who I will be
I do not yet know who I will be. Maybe I won’t know until I get there, maybe I’ll only know in retrospect, that in that moment I was and I was truly. But I think somehow it comes down to this, that I …
Disrupt
We’re all looking for something to disrupt our life - to lift from us the heavy weight of free will and personal choice. Don’t settle for the easy answers to this longing.
Why I hate business
I actually love enterprise. I love the idea of individuals and small groups of people getting together and building something wonderful, and having that wonderful something produce prosperity for them…
Libertarians and Airport Body-Scans
I’ve been thinking about the libertarian position on airport full-body scans. It might be a little tricky at first to decide what that position would be. After all, libertarians are known, above all, …
Year Zero
I started writing this in February. Time to hit publish. :) -Micah This year, for me, is Year Zero. Why? Well, one good reason is that it’s year zero of the new decade. Calendar nerds will tell you th…
Different kinds of Mementos
I tend to collect clutter - a LOT of clutter. Most of the things I collect fall under the broad category of “mementos”, and I keep them for that reason - to remind me of things I’ve long forgotten, to…
Twilight and the burden of free will
I watched the movie Eclipse recently. I’m not a Twilight fan, but - well, we all have people in our lives, don’t we? One moment in particular stood out to me. In the middle of the one of the most inte…
The Structure of Human Hope
There are many philosophies of the future, many perspectives on how society progresses, and many thoughts on what gives us hope. It seems by now to have been well-established that humans need hope in …
Night Sky
Tonight I looked up at the clouds, and the sky beyond them, and the stars beyond that. And I thought that people were not meant to live only under the clouds, but that one day, we might climb up a lit…
Building The New World
The earth is an open globe in a wide-open universe. We do not have to be constrained. We do not live in a world of scarcity. We are free. We must realize that humanity lives by cooperation. From super…
Empty Pockets
My dream is to walk out of my house with nothing in my pockets (no keys, no ID, no credit cards) and to walk into the world a free and unencumbered person. And to have this be perfectly fine. I’m a lo…
Paddling into the waves
I wrote this on October 8, 2008, 10:51pm. It has been here waiting ever since. It has been long enough. -micah — Today I set out to understand myself. My peculiar mix of emotions and thoughts and atti…
every moment is valuable
Every moment is valuable all by itself. But sometimes other moments help us see that. At one point in my life I was extremely distressed. I walked out into the darkness, and eventually laid down behin…
converge
Ever since I was 15, I’ve identified myself primarily as a songwriter. It is what I do, and who I am. And ever since I began performing, I’ve begun segmenting myself. There is the side of me that perf…
One mind?
Yesterday, it occurred to me how much of our human relationships are characterized by guilt or judgment. Guilt and being judgmental are two sides of the same blade, and that blade separates people int…
3 things that have inspired me
Just a short list of things that have inspired me to really feel life, even if only briefly. A New Earth …made me look at leaves differently, made me feel alive http://eckharttolle.com/a_new_earth The…
The Golden Compass: Killing God?
I just finished the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, of which The Golden Compass is the first book. I know, I’m late on this one. The first book came out in 1995, and the movie caused a big uproar last C…
Patterns
Many of the things we are tempted to chalk up to goodness and decency are really just patterns.For example, being “masculine” or “feminine”. In the past, these were seen as characteristics that decent…
Quality of Light
I was walking down the block to check my mail, and I noticed the light. It was just before night, just before twilight actually, and the ambiance of the sky mixed with the streetlights. It illuminated…
Unintended Consequences
Greg Newton posted a good piece about the Uncertainty of Justice over at Emergent Village.It’s easy to talk about justice. It’s harder to actually do justice.As he points out, even something like givi…
Beyond Polarization
People often say, “God is not a democrat or republican”. This is a welcome change from a few years ago, when people often claimed that a Christian could only vote for a particular political party, or …
King of Nature
Today, I walked beside the lake. It was pretty - and I use that word only because “beautiful” is overdone. Beside the lake was anything but overdone. The grass ran right up the water’s edge, and a hab…
Starbucks in the Middle East
Today I went to Starbucks. This was a Starbucks on a last-stop base in Kuwait, where soldiers come before finally reaching Iraq. My brother came through here when he went through his deployment.I’ve g…
The Last Night in Africa
Tonight was our greatest show so far - and to think it would be in the African desert.I got up this morning, and walked 4 miles in the blazing sun, in a place where humidity reaches 100%. I’m not a su…
Music as Community
For a while now, I’ve been quite aware of the whole “Musician-as-Entrepreneur” community. This community revolves around re-visualizing the artist as the small business-person. And it has done some pr…
What is Community? Part 2 : Community is Creation
What IS community? Is it shared location? Shared experiences? Shared beliefs? Is it even possible to have significant community without the benefit of physical presence?I think so, but I think we need…
What is Community?
What IS community?This is something that I’m going to be thinking about for awhile.Community has traditionally referred to a geographically integrated group of people. This kind of community shares co…
Babies see pure color, or, Why Pink?
Scientists have discovered that babies see colors differently than adults. Where babies see things are they “are”, adults process colors through the filter of their language. Apparently, people who sp…
The Rules of Pull-Throughs
To the uninitiated, the term “pull-through” may not mean much. But it is a term ripe with meaning. Sometimes it masquerades as “pull-thru” or “pll-thrgh”, but the latter is only prevalent among people…
The moment is perfect
One night this past Fall, it was a bit warm in my bedroom. Outside, though, the temperature was just perfect. So I pushed open the window and lay in bed with the perfectly tuned breeze wafting through…
A Vast Wilderness
Every day I teach, I take a 20-minute drive from Nashville to Murfreesboro. This drive is nothing at all compared to the pain of the morning commute into Nashville everyday.In fact, the drive just fli…
I'm Not There: Bob Dylan and The Spirit
I watched I’m Not There last night at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville. It’s a film based on the many lives of Bob Dylan, who is played by six different characters, including Kate Blanchett. I ‘m not…
Kings among Stars
This weekend, I was in Iowa City, Iowa for a conference in which hundreds of college students from tons of colleges gather to find entertainment to bring to their campuses. For the entire weekend, per…
The Most Basic Human Desire
The most basic human desire is to “have” another person, to possess the essence of someone else.But you can’t.You can come close sometimes. You can marry someone. You can have a child, which depends o…
Scarcity vs. Abundance
I am troubled by the rise of the belief in the “closed system”.As I see it, the world and the universe are an “open system”. We are not defined by a limited set of alternatives and resources available…
How Wearing Jeans Can Save the World
I ran across this article about healthy habits you can develop, and interestingly enough, one of the twelve habits listed was “wear casual clothes whenever possible”.No, this is not a joke. Researcher…
How to be a weekend Rock Star
1. Grow your hair long - but not long enough to get you fired from your day job.Tuck it behind your ears during the day to make it seem shorter. Joke about how you’ve been too busy working to go in fo…
Do We Need Hierarchies?
A guy named Sig talks about why we don’t need hierarchies in companies, and a friend of his challenged him with a few objections…* Hierarchies are the natural, programmed organizational model hard-wi…