Episode 26: Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield

Stone, bronze, iron... glass? In his recent thought and writing, transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield defines modernity as an age of glass, arguing that the entire ethos of our era inheres in the transformative enchantments of this amorphous solid. No one would deny that glass plays a central role in our lives, although glass does have a knack for disappearing into the background, at least until the beakers or screens crack and shatter. Glass is weird, and like a lot of weird things, it can serve as a lens (so to speak!) for observing our world from strange new angles. In this episode, Michael joins Phil and JF to talk through the origins, the significance, and the fate of the Glass Age.

Michael Garfield is a musician, live painter, and futurist. He is the host of the brilliant Future Fossils Podcast.

REFERENCES

Michael Garfield's website + Patreon + Medium + Bandcamp
Michael Garfield, "The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic" (This is the essay we discuss that was unpublished at the time of the recording)
Michael Garfield, "The Future Acts Like You"
Michael Garfield, "The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast"

Artist David Titterington's Patreon page
Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
Corning, "The Glass Age" (corporate video)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
John David Ebert, "On Hypermodernity"
John C. Wright, The Golden Age
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon?
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Spinoza, Ethics
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality
John Crowley, Little, Big
Jose Arguelles, Dreamspell Calendar
William Irwin Thompson, Lindisfarne Tapes
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
Karl Schroeder, “Degrees of Freedom,” in Heiroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future
Michael Garfield, “Being Every Drone”
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution

Special Guest: Michael Garfield.