🍄 Break The Toy!

Let’s get our hands dirty.

Jan 03, 2025

🍄 AudioDose Alice on Sonic Mushrooms: Listen to Fellow Travelers
🎧 Alice podcasts
📘 Alice books

We’ve reached an era of false relaxation. We live as if history has paused, believing progress is inevitable and permanent. But this illusion cracks with every headline, every crisis. Technology, once a marvel, has become an opiate. The screens that promised connection now deliver alienation. Walter Benjamin foresaw this—the moment when we would stand on the brink of our own destruction and gaze upon it as a sublime spectacle. We approach human disconnection not with terror but with voyeuristic awe, as though we are a curiosity for AI to consume and repackage.

Calling all hands-on designers, academics with questions that defy the curriculum, artists who paint with unseen colors, scientists scribbling notes in invisible ink. Break the toy! Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. There’s beauty in the broken. The discarded, the forgotten, the overlooked—these become the raw materials of art and life.

Let’s Get Our Fluxus On!

In a world where technology and artificial intelligence have woven themselves into the fabric of daily life, it’s worth looking back at the Fluxus movement as a way to recalibrate. Fluxus was never about efficiency or precision—it celebrated the messy, joyful, and unpredictable flow of human creativity. It treated art as an everyday act, inseparable from life itself, valuing the handmade, the fleeting, and the strange over the polished and commodified. Today, as AI systems optimize and streamline everything, we risk forgetting that creativity thrives on surprise, on error, on moments that can’t be planned or predicted. Fluxus reminds us that not everything can—or should—be reduced to an algorithm. It’s a reminder that art and innovation are as much about connection and play as they are about function. Revisiting Fluxus might help us rediscover the parts of ourselves that technology overlooks: the awkward, the absurd, the wonderfully human.

This is the cut-up culture: a world where nothing is truly new, but everything can be recombined. Music born from failed machines, soundscapes forged from fragments, performances crafted from simulacra—all speak to a creativity that thrives on limits. In the ruins of the old, the seeds of the future take root. Assemblages of trash transform into statements of resilience. Recycled suits, junkyard sculptures, and patchwork fashion reflect a culture reassembling itself from the wreckage of overconsumption. The ordinary becomes extraordinary when we treat it as such, finding meaning in multiplicity and repetition.

Even art itself becomes a mirror, reflecting the tension between the real and the fake. Hyperreality blurs the line between truth and illusion, making it harder to tell where one ends and the other begins. Yet, in exploiting the fake, artists remind us of what is real. They use plastic, simulations, and staged performances to pull back the curtain on authenticity, asking us to reconsider our assumptions. Disney’s animatronics age and rust, revealing the fragile wires beneath the fantasy. The spectacle crumbles, and we are left longing not for perfection but for something genuine.

As the spectacle crumbles, we are left longing—not for perfection—but for something genuine.

Toward Living Archives

The archives of the future will not be books or films but immersive experiences. Sound, light, and memory will converge in living museums, preserving not just what was said but how it felt. The past will no longer be static; it will breathe, inviting us to relive it and learn from it anew. This noise of ideas is deafening, but it is not chaos—it is a symphony in the making. To listen, truly listen, is to begin shaping the future from the shards of the present.

Beneath the clamor of progress, something primal stirs. There’s talk of a reckoning. Some call it freedom, others chaos, but all agree it’s here, lurking in the margins. There’s a rising tide among the young, a sense that the old frameworks are crumbling and something new—perhaps something long buried—is clawing its way to the surface. Those who can see it understand that this is not chaos—it is balance, an unmaking to make way for something else. The Rise of PeaceTech

Technologists, once architects of dreams, now haunt the commons like specters. Detached, parasitic, they shape lives without responsibility, hollowing out the social contract. However, a class of minds—visionaries too early for their time—see through this charade. Like prophets in the wilderness, history will prove their foresight. They reimagine what could be, not from incremental tweaks but from first principles, daring to redesign the conversation, the system itself. The world grows quieter in some ways, noisier in others. It is the paradox of the Anthropocene—a cacophony of voices layered atop a shared desperation for order. Amidst this, signs of hope emerge like seedlings taking root in cracked pavement. Enter PeaceTech.

PeaceTech is the quiet hum of humanity's desperate attempt to wrest order from chaos, a sprawling, fragile effort to turn the tools of the digital age into instruments of reconciliation rather than division. It begins with algorithms—those cold, mechanical sentinels parsing oceans of data for the faint tremors of conflict: the sudden rise of hate speech, the sharp peaks of vitriol on social media, the invisible frictions of a community grinding toward eruption. These systems, clumsy at first, begin to predict what we once thought unpredictable: the slow build of tension before violence ignites. But technology alone cannot hold the weight of peace; it is only the scout, the signal flare. The real work falls to the mediators on the ground—human bridges armed not with weapons but with words, stepping into volatile spaces to diffuse tensions, to listen, to heal. The work is uneven, imperfect. Misinformation, like a hurricane, swirls through cyberspace, fueling division and distrust. Entire industries rise to counter it, crafting stories of unity to replace narratives of fear, planting seeds of resilience in communities hardened by manipulation. The architects of this fragile ecosystem—visionaries too early for their time—labor to keep it inclusive, resisting the creeping forces of autocracy and exclusivity that threaten to hollow out their mission. It is a practice, not a panacea, a slow, painstaking effort to bend the arc of the Anthropocene toward justice. And yet, amidst the din of progress and the specter of collapse, something begins to shift. It’s not utopia—never that—but the flames of hate grow harder to stoke, the algorithms learn, the mediators persist, and the fractured communities start to heal. PeaceTech, imperfect and incomplete, stands as a reminder that even in the digital ether’s cold, vast expanse, humanity’s longing for connection and reconciliation still stirs, still breathes, still fights for its place in the algorithmic tide.

The Creative Interplay: Habit and Innovation

Every society finds itself structured by the habits and customs that define its identity. These grooves, worn into the landscape by centuries of repetition, hold things together, providing familiar rhythms. Yet within them, the restless pulse of change beats quietly. Creativity, like a river seeking new paths, presses against the established banks. It’s an old story: new ideas emerge, alien and unrecognizable, and face the monolithic opposition of orthodoxy—the guardians of the old ways.

Orthodoxies cling to survival with the stubborn persistence of gravity. Yet cracks appear where the old fails to encompass the new. In these fissures, creativity takes root, awkward at first but growing stronger. Habit and creativity, order and chaos—bound together in restless interplay—are the twin engines of the cosmos, driving it toward the new.

What else we are wandering…

☮️ PeaceTech Lab (PTL) drives action-oriented solutions by bringing a diversity of experts together: data scientists, social scientists, engineers, MBAs, global influencers, media ambassadors, and creatives. It is through these alliances that we can collectively develop effective peacebuilding solutions.

📘 e.e.cummings free poetry archive: A collection of the work of Edward Estlin Cummings, as it enters the public domain. Four books are now available.

🏛️ Peter Cook discusses the rise of Archigram in the 1960s in exclusive Dezeen interview for VDF, here.

🎨 The Art of Fluxus: Emerging in the 1960s and operating globally, Fluxus was an interdisciplinary and experimental approach to art that emphasized blending different artistic media and breaking down traditional boundaries between art and everyday life. Fluxus artists encouraged a playful and open-minded approach to art-making, creating a wide range of unconventional works, often using ordinary objects and actions to challenge traditional notions of art and engage audiences in interactive experiences. George Maciunas, the primary founder and organizer of the movement, described Fluxus as, "a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp”.

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
🎧 Alice in Futureland podcasts