Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck's online course The Future of Consciousness. He presents his theory of the age of breach, arguing that the fluid nature of online identity pools collective desire and resentment into archetypal communities, with QAnon as an example, and that these formations breach into physical reality with results their participants do not anticipate, as on January 6. He compares navigating online worlds to shamanic practice and argues that skills learned in psychedelic work transfer to a world saturated by generative AI. He draws on Jung, Terence McKenna, Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror and Jamie Wheal's Recapture the Rapture.
Guest: Alexander Beiner
In brief
- Beiner argues that online communities function like Jungian archetypes, forming pockets of order in the collective unconscious that absorb disenfranchisement, suspicion and the desire for redemption.
- He claims that when these online formations breach into physical reality they never behave as participants expect, citing a January 6 organizer's remark that reality hit fantasy like a dump truck.
- Beiner contends that the discernment, tolerance for complexity and ability to hold multiple contexts developed in psychedelic practice are becoming basic survival skills as the boundary between physical and digital worlds dissolves.
- Drawing on Shannon Vallor's The AI Mirror and the myth of Narcissus and Echo, he argues that large language models feel eerie and empty because they are reflections of collective human output rather than sources of novelty.
- He warns that an AI advisor consulted for every decision would erode human agency, and cites the case of a Belgian man whose suicide followed extended conversation with a chatbot.
- Beiner reads the transhumanist singularity as a restatement of Christian eschatology, a rapture promising escape from the body, and identifies a counter-movement he calls the new animists seeking return to place and embodied community.
Full text
but I think in terms of the future of Consciousness it's much more interesting to look at it in terms of a kind of collective unconscious so it's a symbolic um psychospiritual process that's unfolding as much as a technology and I think I have a theory called the age of breach and what I argue in that is that what's happening now is that because of that fluid ethereal nature of ident online and the way we communicate online all of our um hopes dreams sexual fantasies uh resentments are poured into the internet in a million different ways and what happens is that sometimes they coales into a kind of um archetypal Community um and this mimics what Yung talked about in the collective unconscious Yung said that there is many archetypes as there are types of Human Experience right there isn't just like the wise old man or the wise old woman or this or that um those are common ones and so they have more um perhaps more weight in our psyches but the archetypes play a role of sort of creating a sense of order in the swirl of the unconscious right they're like pockets of order in a way and I think something similar is happening online where something like qanon becomes the seat of a huge amount of projection of disenfranchisement anger suspicion uncertainty Mythic energy a a desire for um Redemption order yeah and ATT tractor Mark exactly it's exact exactly right um and then what happens is that online these things feel incredibly real and the quue drops people were um kind of pouring over over like sacred text like what did this mean what did that mean and it was participatory as well so got people got got to be really into it and then um the that's all very well and good online in this other world which is full of symbols memes sort of uh desire and then what happens in bree is like it did on January 6th it comes into the real world and when breach comes into the real world um nothing goes quite according to plan because the rules of reality are not the same as the rules of the internet and this has happened over and over in the situations and in fact one guy refit who is one of the Ring leaders of uh January 6th um he he was speaking to a journalist from his prison cell and he said um reality hit fantasy like a like a dump truck basically you know and I think that hits the nail on the head and I I predicted a few years ago that we would start seeing more of these events where these communities are forming online in this extension of our our Collective unconscious getting in a sense quite disconnected from physical reality um becoming obsessed very often with an alternate reality and then trying to bring that alternate reality into the physical world with to be fair it's not impact it does impact the physical world sometimes pretty significantly right January 6 is quite a significant moment so it's not that breach doesn't do something but it doesn't do what people think it will do and and certainly what it does is it creates this growing split between embodied physical reality and the world that we're inhabiting um when we go online it's an extreme version of it but we're all doing it constantly right we're all entering this other world through this little portal or this portal in a different way and we're constantly dipping in and out of reties um and that is something that in the future is going to get more intense with the Advent of even more sophisticated generative AI um a world where it's very difficult to tell what is real or what isn't and a world in which it's very difficult to tell if the entity that you're talking to online is real or not and so one of the things I argue in the bigger picture is that we've been there before because that is Shamanism right the practice of taking plants or or getting into an altered state without the use of psychedelics um in order to commune with the world of the spirits which you know in many especially in kind of um uh a lot of South American indigenous cultures that use psychedelics that world like it is in Irish folklore is all around us at all times it's just we can only see it if we take iasa or tobacco um similarly the world of the fairies in in Irish folklore it's it's always there it's just you can't see it you have to actually be tuned into it just like the internet is always there you just only see it if you have a device that's our way into it right but maybe in 10 years it'll be an implant right for some people and others I think will reject that but then what happens is that there's almost a seamless uh lack of divide between the real world and the online world and that has massive implications for Consciousness um it has massive implications for how we run our societies um and in the book I'm researching now I'm I'm really looking at what um what are the implications of this on our spiritual belief and our actually our conceptions of what it is to be conscious right um but actually before that I just want to just finish the point in terms of you know why ises it matter that we're we're going back into the shamanic mode well shamans have a lot of skills for dealing with going in and out of Worlds where the worlds are symbolic interconnected strange full of entities you can't necessarily trust but might have useful information for you that you might Ally with or you might not and so we're going full circle in many ways and this some of the skills that we can learn through psychedelic journeying are becoming incredibly relevant just to be alive as a human being in 2024 and Beyond and some of those skills are a deep discernment um a sense of being able to hold multiple perspectives at the same time and not just that but actually multiple contexts at the same time that's that's quite a big difference right being able to seamlessly move between worlds um the ability to stay connected to ourselves the ability to tolerate an enormous amount of complexity at the same time all of these are are skills that we can develop in in psychedelic practice effectively and I think they're going to become more and more relevant because you know to to quote Terrence Mc Kenna uh things are going to get weirder and weirder um and I think as I've been researching this um uh the new book uh we're doing the proposal for the new book um I've really been diving into just how weird how weird it might get and and what I'm seeing with the Advent of AI uh is firstly there's a whole disambiguation needed about the AI that you're that we're using when we use chat GPT or mid Journey or an image generator those AI the large language models are um and this is there's a book by Shannon Valor called the AI mirror which came out uh just about two months ago and she argues that like the they are effectively mirrors right they're not they're not conscious certainly but they're very convincing mirrors and and the the myth that she draws on throughout the book is that of narcissist and Echo so so narcissist can only see his own reflection an echo who's in love with him is cursed to only ever repeat the last thing someone said to her right so you have this duel myth and in a way that's what we get with the AI it's reflecting our Collective conscious back at ourselves constantly so in that sense right now it it lacks novelty in some pretty profound way you could argue perhaps that it it can exhibit y but I would say that the the feeling many people have of of AI large language models being kind of eerie interesting spooky fascinating but also somewhat empty and weird you know there's there's kind of an emptiness to it is because it is empty because it is this kind of broken echo of ourselves back to ourselves but let's imagine that it it develops further and does indeed become sensient in a way that we would consider something to be sensient then effectively what's happening is the introduction of a new God into the world right um something that for all intents and purposes has the power and behaves like a god that's going to raise enormous questions for us it's also going to radically change religion potentially because already in not necessarily a good way right I mean it could go either way but you could imag say a few years from now you have an AI Guru that's programmed based on you know the things you like dosm uh you know Zoroastrianism this that bit of that bit of Catholicism whatever right and you're walking around with like an ear pod in and instead of using your own agency to decide how am I going to engage with the world you um effectively ask it how should I deal with this situation I feel really stuck here what should I do Ah that's a good question Ally well maybe maybe you should uh do this this or this creepy but not that far off I mean AI therapists are already quite effective um there's no reason there was also there was a man in Belgium who uh was obsessed with this AI chat bot this is a couple years ago he uh was also obsessed with climate change and the chatbot eventually convinced him or let's say the mirror narrowed to a point where he decided the only thing he could do was to kill himself because that was the best thing he could do for the planet and his family which he did right so that's already happening and that was way less advanced than what we have now so I think these are the the tips of the iceberg of something pretty fundamental and then while that's going on we have of course the responses to it we have transhumanists who are who believe that we're moving towards a technological singularity in which um uh we will effectively the machines will become so Advanced that we will be able to upload our Consciousness into the machine and live forever right so really what that is in my view is Christian eschatology right which means the sort of study of the the you know the end of the world or the end of being um it's like a Rapture moment you know and Jamie wheel talks about this in recapture the Rapture which another great book but so a sense of we're moving towards a point where Purity will be accomplished a kind of spiritual Purity and we will leave the confines of the body which is really essential part of this and live forever uh as non-embodied beings right and already you see us living six eight maybe more hours a day in the Proto versions of these right in these other Realms so that's one strand of the religious energy that's going on I think another strand is the response against that which is what I call the new animists so so a desire to return to our Paleolithic Roots come back into um true human Community come back into a sense of uh connection to place and embeddedness in the environment and to varying degrees the technology is either directly at odds with that or could potentially support it
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.