Jurassic Worlding:

A Paleontology of the Present

with Michael Garfield

Six live, online classes hosted on Zoom

Starts August 1st @ 4 pm PT / 7 pm ET

All sessions recorded and made available for later viewing

We need a paleontology of the present, a rethinking of our condition in the perspective of deep time, in order to produce a synthesis of the arts and sciences adequate to the challenges we face.
– W.J.T. Mitchell

All roads lead to Isla Nublar — and the fictional if all-too-plausible, and doomed, amusement park John Hammond built upon it. In the decades since their publication, Michael Crichton's best-selling novel Jurassic Park and Steven Spielberg's best-selling film adaptation both transformed the world, setting in motion revolutionary technological developments and accelerating the breakdown boundaries between the real and the virtual, the past and the future, civilization and the natural world.

Intended as a cautionary tale, Jurassic Park backfired by seeding the imagination with a gripping narrative that lit the world on fire with interest in the possibility of de-extinction...as well as the commercial opportunities enabled by an arms race to create and own new monsters of modernity: the AI, biotech, and VFX that ratcheting attempts at regulation and surveillance only help to fuel.

This daring and ambitious synthesis maps the intersections of the techno-thriller, chaos theory, complex systems science, the history of computation, emerging media, and culture...an ode to all the promise and the peril of the portals that we open and the self-fulfilling prophecies we midwife through our digital devices and scientific innovations. More than just another desperate plea to shut it down or face the consequences, this course speaks from a Jurassic World in which "dinosaurs" (our rampant tech and institutions) and humans must find better ways to live together. It's a manifesto for the dawning Technocene and playbook for the strategies required of us to survive (and even thrive amidst) this phase transition into What Comes Next: an age inspired and haunted not just by Jurassic Park but also visionary works of science fiction such as Westworld, Star Trek, and The Matrix.

Bundling together insights from more than 300 podcast interviews and 20 years of independent scholarship, Michael Garfield's debut Nura Learning course is a potent collective sensemaking experience for residents of an increasingly weird future populated by chatGPT, COVID-19, deep fakes, and resurrected mammoths. The raptors are already on the mainland...how, then, can we coexist?

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
- Buckminster Fuller

Course Details

This Nura Learning cohort will meet on six consecutive Tuesday nights starting on 1st August to have watch-along parties for each of the six Jurassic Park/Jurassic World films, with live commentary by Michael and a concurrent group text chat and followed by short open group discussions. Meanwhile in the Mighty Networks group, we'll share in an ongoing series of related short reading and video materials, supplementary podcast episodes, and art to deepen the network of correspondences and emergent insights.

Additionally, everyone enrolled in this course gets access to the patrons-only Future Fossils Jurassic Park Discord server channels, where he and his listeners have been workshopping this book and sharing recordings from their own book club calls about Michael Crichton's novels Jurassic Park and The Lost World, and even more supplementary writings (including notes and draft chapters for the new book). It's double the fun for the price of one!

Jurassic Park: Establishing Themes (& Birthing Monsters)

Week 1 – Jurassic Park Science/Magic, Discovery/Profit, Analog/Digital, Kids/Adults
Week 2 – The Lost World: Jurassic Park Chaos/Complexity, Wilderness/Built Environment Inversions, Pattern/Variation
Week 3 – Jurassic Park III Trauma, Charisma + Greed, The King Is Dead, Interspecies Kinship/Discourse

Jurassic World: Once More With Feeling (& Self-Referentiality)

Week 4 – Jurassic World Accelerationism & Jouissance, Postmodern Monsters, The Entelechy As Action Hero
Week 5 – Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Fugitivism, The Amusement → War Pipeline, Digital Humanity, The End of History Revisited
Week 6 – Jurassic World: Dominion Boundaryless Fractal Conflict, Cyborgs + Dinosaurs, Society-Scale Shadow Work

Join the Class

About Your Host

Michael Garfield is perhaps uniquely qualified as tour guide to the intertidal zone between the entertainment world and complex systems science. Paleontologist turned futurist, he grew up an amusement park brat frequenting the backstage entrances and new attraction launches at both Universal Studios and Disney World. Discovering the first edition of Jurassic Park at seven, he had already been mentee for four years to the legendary Dr. Robert Bakker — maverick dinosaur researcher, consultant to the book and film, and one of the main inspirations for the character of Alan Grant.

Michael saw the movie's private world premiere in 1993 and won his first commission helping Disney draft an ad campaign for The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at age twelve. He spent each summer as a teen on Bakker's expedition crew in Como Bluff, Wyoming, then graduated from the University of Kansas (an alma mater that he shares with Barnum Brown, the scientist who found T. rex) with an ecology and evolutionary bio bachelor's degree and job as scientific illustrator for the KU Natural History Museum.

Over the next thirteen years he worked on everything from prehistoric reconstructions to speculative fiction and toured as a performance painter, avant-garde musician, essayist, and public speaker at the front lines of technology and art. In 2013 he set several world firsts while beta testing Google Glass, inspiring an essay series on the interplay of conflict, innovation, and cognition. Motivated by his growing popularity as an independent scholar, he co-founded Future Fossils Podcast in 2016 and has since produced more than 200 episodes exploring science, art, philosophy, and culture.

In 2018 he signed on full-time with the world-leading independent complex systems research group (and Ian Malcolm's academic home) The Santa Fe Institute, where for 4.5 years he ran all its social media, launched and admined the largest online forum for complexity discourse and launched, hosted, and produced 106 episodes of the internationally-charting Complexity Podcast. Meanwhile he worked part-time for The Long Now Foundation as a regular contributor to one of the Web's oldest blogs.

By 39, his prolific career boasts more than 1.5 million podcast downloads, 100 hours of independent music including numerous documentary film scores, 750 original paintings (one of which, by sheer coincidence, was purchased by Jeff Goldblum), hundreds of articles for both online and print editions, and a wildly diverse and global fanbase. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his companion, their two children, and a small menagerie of prehistoric creatures. He left the SFI in March of 2023 to work on this book, course, and podcast series.

Poetry is the beginning and end of all scientific knowledge.
— Friedrich Hölderlin

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