This is a story about dangerous ideas, and words’ magical power to heal and to harm. It’s about AI, Charles Manson, dubstep, Neo-Nazis, occultism, and a lot of amphetamine, but it’s mainly about Nicholas Land. In 1993, techno-feminist Sadie Plant set up a research unit in the philosophy department at…

A cult of the entrepreneur mushroomed in the last two decades, but there are signs the cult may have peaked. Being an entrepreneur is arguably the highest status job in the world at the moment. In the 1960s, it was the rock star. In the 1980s-1990s, investment bankers were the…

At the moment I live in a town in Costa Rica called La Fortuna. There was nothing much here apart from farming until the 1980s, when the nearby volcano of Arenal erupted, and it kept on erupting for the next 20 years. Suddenly all the springs and rivers around Arenal…

Googleplex, the Google HQ in Mountain View, California, is an incubator for new religious movements. Ten years ago, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, prophet of the Singularity. In 2015, Google engineer Anthony Levandowski started The Way of the Future, a church to worship super-intelligent AI. And now we have the Religion…

Anyone hoping to ‘solve’ the mental health crisis should think very carefully: am I going to make it worse? Unfortunately, every decade a new intervention becomes the hot new thing, the magic bullet that is going to save the world, and the people promoting it become wide-eyed evangelists. ‘We are…

There are at least four definitions of ‘mindfuck’: 1) People fucking with other people’s sense of reality via disinformation or pranks for their own purposes (which could be to amuse themselves, to liberate other people, or to advance some other agenda) For example: ‘Cambridge Analytica mindfucked the British voters…

My girlfriend Kattya at a bookstore in Porto, Portugal I quite often get asked for advice on bringing a book to market. I’ve written four books so far, and had very different experiences with each of them. My first book, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations, took a long…

In 2016, while working on The Art of Losing Control, I conducted a survey on spiritual experiences. The results were interesting — 85% of participants reported having one or more such experience, but 72% said they thought there was still a taboo around such experiences. One evening in the winter…

Last weekend I took part in the Beyond the Brain conference, run by the Scientific and Medical Network, a venerable organisation to which I’m proud to belong. Their annual conference gathers together leading scientists, philosophers and paranormal investigators who are committed to venturing beyond materialist theories of consciousness into a…