Stephen Reid presents his ongoing work on Technological Metamodernism, a book he’s developing with an unusual co-author: Hilma Church Turing, an AI-assisted fictional persona who emerged during a meditation retreat.
Stephen maps the deadlock between techno-skeptics like Yanis Varoufakis (whose “techno-feudalism” frame critiques the replacement of markets with cloud rent) and two strands of techno-optimism: Effective Accelerationism, with its post-humanist indifference to biological life, and long-termism, which shares most of those assumptions except on AI risk.
From there, he sketches a metamodern alternative - drawing on proto-metamodern thinkers like Ivan Illich, E.F. Schumacher, and Murray Bookchin - before turning to contemporary frameworks: Vitalik Buterin’s Decentralized, Democratic Accelerationism (d/acc), the Plurality project’s work on augmented deliberation and quadratic voting, and cosmolocalism’s vision of locally-produced goods underpinned by globally-shared knowledge.
He closes with thoughts on “metamodern psytech” like jhana meditation apps, ultrasonic lucid-dreaming headbands, and biofeedback wearables that could scale inner development practices.
Stephen Reid is a technologist, facilitator and coach who has trained in the fields of AI/ML, complexity science, physics, transformative coaching and insight meditation. Current projects include writing a book on Technological Metamodernism, hosting courses and residencies as a founder of Futurecraft, and leading the development of Dandelion (Ruby/MongoDB) as a founder of not-for-profit worker co-op Symbiota.
