I melted into the other bodies on the mattress, forgetting where my limbs ended and theirs began. What used to be called “arm” or “head” dissolved into breathing warmth and moving textures. It was the end of a co-living week in the storied Spanish villa and the bearded wizard on the synths had done it again: he turned the knobs of our nervous systems until we became a single humming field of tranquil affirmation. An excited thought broke out of the background bliss: is this why he likes the Prigogine quote so much?
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” — Ilya Prigogine
Did a week of deepening relationships, some neurochemical support and the brutalist glamour of the sound machines turn us into a small island of coherence? Or were we just a pile of underemployed hippies on horse tranquilizer?
Since I regained my individuality, the two possibilities have kept flickering back and forth. Was this house a prototype for a new type of institution, a stop on the emerging Camino of meaning, or just a guesthouse with a Twitter presence?
The cutting edge flickers
It’s not the first time I’ve experienced the flickering, an oscillation between grandiose possibility and cynical deflation. Working with startups has thoroughly acquainted me with narrative bootstrapping. My first job was at a growth startup pretending to do machine learning in logistics. When a VC asked how they knew they were not overfitting, the founder replied, “What, do you mean, like, the trucks?”
My cynicism about the bullshit circlejerk of startups got interrupted when some of the founders I met actually built transformative businesses. I gravitated to crypto because rebuilding the financial system from scratch excited me. Eventually I got tired of watching promising ideas turn into the same degenerate casino over and over. You might currently be flickering between seeing AI as the next stage of human evolution and as just a giant mirror made of language.
And it’s not just tech: the communities I’m happy to be part of flicker too. Is TPOT the synthesis of rationalism and spirituality or a two-way street between autism and schizophrenia? Is Evolving Ground successfully bringing Vajrayana to the West or just a bunch of nerds cosplaying medieval Tibet (but in a “metasystematic” way, mind you)?
As I’m going through examples that flicker, I notice the pattern all over my life. I seem to sniff out and follow the flickering like a truffle pig. That makes me step back and wonder whether I’m the one flickering… After all, I’ve dealt with psychological oscillation before, like my old buddy special/not enough.
But I don’t think I’m just projecting, because the main quality of the flickering is uncertainty. Psychological flip-flopping, on the other hand, tends to come with utter conviction. I’m God’s gift to humanity in one moment, and unquestionably a piece of shit in the next. Similarly, people who guru-project onto their spiritual leaders go from kissing their feet to a life mission to bring down that cult leader. The need for certainty compels people to collapse the flickering into one possibility, even if they whiplash between them until they walk away with an epistemic concussion. AI is either bringing forth the singularity or an overhyped bubble about to pop, and few people can resist picking a side.
Not everything new flickers. Nobody agonizes over USB-C or Apple’s M5 chip (Tailscale is just obviously awesome), and penicillin was ignored for a decade, not flickered over. So the flickering isn’t merely psychological; the things that flicker are the ones that interact with people’s beliefs about them: social movements, art, technology, spiritual practices. Banksy turned graffiti into “street art” by getting others to see it that way. In 2018, Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby’s for £1.04 million, and a shredder hidden in the frame destroyed half of it the moment it was sold. Three years later, the dangling remains resold for £18.6 million because the retitled Love is in the Bin is a better story than Girl with Balloon. Spiritual practices also depend on a certain type of belief from the practitioner: Buddhism even names “doubt” as one of the major hindrances to progress in meditation.
Your landlord doesn’t care about your Marxism
If belief shapes reality, can we harness that power on purpose? Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to repeat affirmations or Think and Grow Rich. The first issue is that you can’t simply decide what to believe. You can tell yourself all day that jumping from this height won’t hurt you, but it’s ultimately up to gravity (and your skill in ninja rolls). The type of belief that shapes behavior is deeper than opinions. It emerges from a dance between yourself, other people, and reality at large.
The most relevant kind of belief is often social and reflexive: it’s about what you believe others believe. I’m sure you’ve seen through money: on some level it’s ridiculous that we organize our lives around little papers and numbers on a screen. Even if you convince your landlord of your Marxism, they will still collect rent, because the bank still wants the mortgage payment. The cutting edge flickers because, depending on the constellation of self, others, and world, it looks one way or the other. Twitter can seem like a serendipity machine or a waste of time from moment to moment, and whichever you believe it is tends to become true for you.
The second and more interesting complication is that the dance between belief and reality is more like a tango than a waltz. Depending on the situation, different moves are adequate, and both partners get a say. Being a starry-eyed dreamer will get your ass kicked until you flip into cynicism. Being a cynic from the get-go will not just make you miserable but also ineffective because you won’t dare anything interesting. That’s the flip-flopping again, grasping at certainty in either direction.
The alternative is what John Keats called “negative capability”, the ability to be with uncertainty without having to resolve it. Whereas certainty is projecting your beliefs, not knowing is listening. Negative capability is needed to notice the flickering. It affords deeper contact with reality because something can be revolutionary in one moment and disappointing in the next. The king consort of a futurecrafting castle community admitted that sometimes, he thinks that “we’re all just a bunch of hedonistic dweebs.” Whether the castle is building the future or its contributions will be limited to costume raves in bathrooms will only be clear in hindsight. For now, it flickers.
Pills labeled “placebo”
Steve Jobs was said to have a reality distortion field around him. His conviction was so deep that it didn’t just shape his perception but that of those around him too. How can you cultivate such strong belief? The wise answer is that you don’t, since it either happens to you or it doesn’t. For the hungry and foolish, there are ways to tinker with your own mind. Hypnosis, psychedelics, and chaos magick all act on the unconscious mind. Psychedelics loosen up the mind so deeper material can come up and restructure itself. Hypnosis and chaos magick both use somatics, image, and symbolism to reach into the unconscious. It’s unconscious belief that changes the world, not opinions and arguments.
Your conscious beliefs don’t have to cooperate, and chaos magick makes a point of it: practitioners don’t just mix and match religious systems but borrow from fiction, from Lovecraft to Marvel. Rituals are often silly or even absurd because the attitude is a practical agnosticism (the question is whether it works, not whether it’s real). I suspect that the absurdism is not just postmodern flexing but contributes to the efficacy. If we evoke a spirit we know we just made up, there is no internal debate about whether or not it’s real. That not only takes the pressure off but creates internal alignment and a state of ease and play. The conscious mind can relax, making the unconscious more malleable.
I was playing chess with my brother and as he was shuffling the pawns behind his back for me to pick from his closed fists, I was joking he should just let me have white because I was gonna pick it anyway. Having studied psychology, he lectured me that it was selective memory that made it seem like I picked white too often. On a whim, I asked how many times I’d have to pick the white one in a row for him to believe me. He said seven, and I proceeded to pick it eight times in a row. The odds of that are 1 in 256. Obviously, this was just a coincidence.
A less rational part of me suspects our attitudes collaborated: on the surface, his skepticism pointed to luck and I was just playing. But on a deeper level, we both believed that something unusual could happen, like an unconscious handshake.
That’s my theory of magic: conscious skepticism reinforces unconscious belief.
Consider the open-label placebo: in 2010, Ted Kaptchuk’s team at Harvard gave patients with irritable bowel syndrome a bottle of pills labeled “placebo” and told them plainly that the pills contained no active ingredient. After three weeks, 59% of them reported adequate relief, compared to 35% of a group that got no pills at all. Knowing it was fake didn’t stop it from working. My friend Sofi’s performance piece Dr Leon used the same principle with a brain chip that doesn’t exist. Participants signed an in-depth consent form, and Dr Leon implanted a “Better Chip” with physical stimulation and a sound experience designed to feel like anesthesia. Nobody thought there actually was a chip, yet Sofi kept getting testimonials that unironically called it life-changing.
I think this combination works because the conscious skepticism soaks up the resistance and doubt, freeing the unconscious (which doesn’t do logic anyway) to believe. A psychological rationalization works similarly: “it’s just influencing my unconscious” allows me to do the ritual anyway without letting go of my self-image as a reasonable person with sound metaphysics. In open-label placebos, the active compound is the unconscious belief in the ritual of taking a pill handed to you by someone in a white coat, even if you doubt whether this will work on you.
The optimal stance to effect change mixes belief and skepticism across different levels: the conscious mind is skeptical; it can see all the reasons why this isn’t going to work. At the same time a wordless, gut-level belief pervades the background. Between the two, negative capability rests in not knowing and sees that it’s neither one nor the other nor both nor neither.
Probably fake (possibly real)
It’s the fool that precedes the magician in the tarot. The chaos magician Ramsey Dukes argues in his essay The Charlatan and the Magus that fraud and trickery create a sort of bootstrapping effect: the fake version might be how the real thing gets started. The trickster who pretends to be psychic by cold reading and watching microexpressions will gradually develop their intuition until they just know things. More importantly, it works on the audience: even if they think that the conjurer on stage is almost certainly fake, the small chance that it’s real changes what they feel is possible. That shift in the window of possibility is how the charlatan becomes the magus.
In July 2023, a Korean team posted a video of a gray flake levitating over a magnet and for three weeks the timeline flickered between the discovery of room-temperature superconductors and a fraudulent dud. Labs all over the world dropped what they were doing to replicate it until, a month later, it was clear that copper sulfide impurities explained the effect. The flicker moved thousands of people to try something they’d have dismissed a month earlier, even if it didn’t lead to the discovery of the century. If the material science had cooperated, it might have looked like 1986, when Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller at IBM found a ceramic that lost all electrical resistance at 35 kelvin and published a carefully titled paper about “Possible high-Tc superconductivity.” Once a group in Tokyo reproduced it, everyone wanted in. A few months later, physicists packed a New York conference session that ran until 3 a.m., later nicknamed the Woodstock of Physics, and Bednorz and Müller got their Nobel Prize that same year. Descendants of their ceramic are now wound into the magnets of fusion reactors under construction.
In both cases, the flickering shifted the window of possibility — the futures people felt were possible and therefore worth trying for. That’s why it makes sense for startups to fake it until they make it. Belief has to come first, because it unlocks the resources needed to have a chance: the trillions committed to data centres only unlocked once most people bought into the utopian promise of AI. Every startup is in a state of superposition between failing (the default outcome) and making it big. If a few believers invest, the valuation is built around that improbable possibility: a 1% chance at a billion-dollar company is worth $10 million, even if there is barely a prototype.
Nothing interesting happening here
What if the cutting edge doesn’t just flicker because of indeterminacy and bootstrapped belief, but is the cutting edge because it flickers?
Gurdjieff apparently walked around in bad disguises and spoke with fake accents. Did he want to be taken for a charlatan? I once told the lead facilitator of a neo-tantric training program that it sometimes felt like a poorly done LARP (and at other times, despite myself, like a genuine initiatory current). His trickster eyes lit up, and in his next speech he encouraged us to wonder whether we were all just LARPing.
A mix of belief and skepticism is an ideal engine to pull a possibility into probability and maybe even actuality. Gut-level believers are what move others to contribute and make things happen (the reality distortion field). The plausible deniability of the skepticism works on two levels: “it’s probably fake” gives the doubt an outlet while the “probably” leaves enough room for the window of possibility to move. The conscious doubt also acts as a defense system and wards off the tourists and exploiters by handing them every reason to leave. Leaning into deflation and self-irony makes a movement antifragile. Google’s onboarding told new hires it was “just a website”, while the true believers really did want to aggregate all the world’s information.
Fiction does the same trick at an even larger scale to seed hyperstitions, ideas that make themselves real. Robert Goddard was inspired by The War of the Worlds as a teenager and later launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. Neal Stephenson made up the “metaverse” in Snow Crash, and almost three decades later Facebook renamed itself after it. A piece of fiction can be more influential on the collective psyche than an argument, because it works on the unconscious with image and symbolism while having the plausible deniability of idle entertainment. The suspension of disbelief that lets us engage with movies and books first requires disbelief.
So yes, we are just a bunch of hedonistic dweebs, nothing interesting happening here. As long as unconscious belief and open curiosity are also present, that kind of public story makes success more likely because it lowers the stakes and enables more radical exploration.
Groundless faith
In this mix, the wordless belief grounds me while skepticism and curiosity get to play on top. My life has become much better since I stopped either suppressing my magical thinking or taking it at face value. The character names from a novel I was reading turning up at the same time in AI-generated example contracts and a TV show probably hold no occult meaning. Knowing at our first meeting that I would end up with my partner was almost certainly my memory improving the story.
In a way, I don’t care, because I want to live from a listening that only ever reveals the next step without the mind having to understand. The mind can still add perspective and steer me away from paths unlikely to work out. The gut-level belief becomes less about specifics (a particular outcome, or whether karma or synchronicities are real) and closer to a sense that everything will turn out okay. That sense is still fed by the pixie dust of synchronicities, the small islands of coherence in the psyche, whether or not they mean anything. Even if all my efforts fail, my life will have been meaningful looking back. At this point, it’s less belief than faith.
I’m a good truffle pig for the flickering because I can’t help seeing both at once: how comically inadequate we all are, and the insistent cloud of ambition I feel beneath our fumbling attempts. I have faith that we are expanding what’s possible and moving towards more beautiful futures. And I’m just an underemployed blogger spitballing about cuddle puddles and copper sulfide, so this is probably nothing.
Ink trails:
The Menu is the window of possibility for personal agency
Gut-level belief cuts will-lines into the future through internal alignment
Indeterminacy leads to high weirdness in the séance-room version of this essay