Thank you M Hope, Courtneye, KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, katie teague, Nancy Baker Cahill, and many others for tuning into my live video with Cy Canterel! If you want to participate in the Lives, ask questions of the guests I bring on, etc., do us both a favor and subscribe now and make sure Reality Studies isn’t getting filtered in your inbox. That way you can join me for my next live video in the app:
Audio versions of this episode can be found here on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
My guest today is Cy Canterel.
Cy Canterel, in her own words: Artist. Feral scholar. Raised by computers. Ex-tech (infrastructure, IoT, AI/ML). Alumna: Institute for the Future of the Book. Fmr. visiting scholar @NYU. Decoding systems of power and meaning. Big time crayon fan.
Cy also runs Abstract Machines with Cy Canterel and the Omnishambles podcast with Virginia Heffernan. Both are great and you should subscribe right now! Look, I’ll even make it easy for you:
I was lucky to meet Cy a few years ago during the downslope of hype around NFTs and web3—a moment we actually dive into during the episode—fully aware of the ways many people will hear those terms an instantly tune out. My hope here isn’t to valorize the aforementioned (though we do discuss how there were seeds of something meaningful that were drowned out by all the grift and greed); I bring it up because it highlights the intellectual curiosity and expansiveness that threads all of Cy’s work across tech, art, culture, power, and philosophy. More than most people I’ve met, Cy trusts her intuition to lead her to new ways of thinking and perceiving, and her intense research practice then creates the scaffolding and texture to give her ideas weight.
All of which is why it’s especially fun for me that Cy has emerged as a leading media theorist and communicator on Substack, with a particular eye toward decoding systems of power and meaning. As you can gather from the title, that includes a whole lot of contemporary concerns as well as more evergreen ones. When I say this conversation is free-wheeling, I mean it; but I’ll let you experience it for yourself.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Kyle McDonald about his Apocalypse Early Warning System & creative tech interventions:
