Artifacts of Persistence: Cosmological Becoming and the Sedimentation of Consciousness — 10/9/2026 Lecture

Artifacts of Persistence

Cinema, Baseball, and the Sedimentary Record of Modernity — 10/9/2026

So this one will be called Artifacts of Persistence. I’ll probably be pretty quick here. But I love this period of time when I was younger—the aughts, I guess you could say, of the 2000s. Movies like Fast and Furious or The Matrix. And what I want to grab from that is what’s so great about these films, and I would say cinema in general: it captures the specific intercourse of the technological modes, the reproducible technological modes. Both in terms of the state of human evolution, which really has been unchanging since 2000 or 2003—that’s barely 20 years. Human evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years longer to make significant structural changes; that’s not even a generation.

But it’s the intercourse—the interrelationship between the status or the paradigm of the channel one architectural mode, which is the genomic mode (the genomic technological system intercoursing with nature and world), and the cultural infrastructural: the metallic or digital grid of information, which is changing in relationship to that channel one architecture. This we know as modernity, which begins with the industrial and technological revolutions, including the harnessing of the steam engine via thermodynamics, and which hyper-accelerates through the end of the 1800s into, obviously, where we are now, 2026.

So, watching something like Fast and Furious , you have the exact architecture of the early-2000s racing cars, combined with even the typography of the signs, all of which is deeply coded into, and coded as, the early 2000s. It is a specific moment in time in this technological incursion—the wrapping around of representative modes of technology in relationship to the genomic technological primary operator for humanity. Which is to say, human evolution has been unchanging, for the most part, for hundreds of thousands of years. We talked about the forebrain epoch.

But you have—and this is what’s beautiful about human history and cultural archival work, which has really been primarily my background ever since I got into it as a young person with the Smithsonian and baseball—the ability to track through these technological modes of representation, whether that’s film or photography or even literature. These cultural forms come into being and themselves, in a sedimentary sense, mark historical time. Which is to say, the aperture of the being peering out twofold: first from the genomic operator of the technological body of the human being, and then further into the technological apertures which that body creates in space and time, which are culture and civilization.

These technological artifacts—whether it’s film, the quality of the film reel itself, the quality of the camera eye. I’ve traced this back substantially through the history of press photography and journalistic photography in terms of baseball, and the art-historical revolution therein depicting proletarian figures: extremely poor, even destitute, baseball players on this mass cultural stage, which is then being reproduced through newspapers, baseball cards, et cetera. These image-representational documents are an art-historical revolution at the democratic heart and center of American history. I’ve gone deeply into that. It’s a fascinating topic.

But what that represents on a larger scale is this: when we’re looking at historical artifacts—the cultural detritus that human history leaves behind over the past couple tens of thousands of years, anything from hieroglyphs on a temple wall to the Fast and Furious movie of the late ‘90s, early 2000s—you’re looking at the aperture through which there is a twofold gazing. There’s the gazing of the cosmological self, or the aion at play with colored balls, in the Heraclitean sense, down through the technological aperture of persistence against constraint in terms of genomic revolutions, stellar revolutions, happenings in spacetime at the galactic level, all the way down to the organismic level. But then that organism itself gazes through the chamber of the telescope, or the camera, or the film reel. And then there is the population therein of all of these linguistic architectures, civilizational architectures—we could say the Washington Monument, or the typography from these Matrix and Fast and Furious films. You’re watching the interweaving, historically, of two technological strata, which we’ve gone into in depth: channel one and channel two architecture.

But what happens in modernity is, again, what we discussed in the past lecture: the profusion of novelty. The hyper-acceleration of novelty, as McKenna puts it—it’s a great way of thinking about it—that comes with the human innovative, or you could say innovatory, capacity, which explodes through the steam engine, explodes through thermodynamics, explodes through quantum mechanics: everything from the atom bomb to color cinema captured in IMAX, typography digitally generated, the politician. These are all innovations of persistence architectures in space and time, which are interrelated and interlaced with the channel two symbolic-representational, industrial, digital architectures—even down to the invention of the hieroglyph, or of language itself.

And so when you’re looking at and through and down into history through cultural artifacts, even through fossils, you’re looking at the interlocution of this fundamental cosmological architectural mode—which is to say, persistence against constraint, or the insect within the amber. But then, furthermore, you have this recursive constructive model, which becomes possible through the forebrain technologically, and then you have culture, civilization, philosophy, and so on, all of which are reflecting upon, down within, and into the fundamental condition of beings. All of these things are basically inquiries into being at various strata of depth, perception, and consciousness.

Then you have the historical cultural artifacts—civilizational artifacts, everything that is left behind and literally sedimented into the earth along with the very fossils themselves. Any pottery, ostraca, et cetera, that are admixed—understand this: admixed. These are relics and artifacts of consciousness in relation to channel one and channel two technological modes of possible perception, articulation, and expression. The forebrain interlaced with cinema produces Fritz Lang—or the artifacts of Fritz Lang, which themselves capture a very specific moment in time of the human species interlaced with its own genomic revolutionary and evolutionary possibilities, and furthermore imbued with the historical, civilizational, cultural time of the technological possibilities therein. Anything from AI to black-and-white film, silent film, et cetera.

So you are taking a trip down in and through the substrata and the geological structure of spacetime when you participate in these artifacts, and that’s what I mean when I talk about artifactual consciousness. These artifacts are imbued not only with the genomic architectural—or neurological—status. This is what you get when you read Spinoza: even if it’s a recently republished or reprinted book, you get that status admixed with the moment in historical, technological, cultural time which allowed for that aperture to manifest itself in a specific way. This is the difference, maybe, between a Shakespeare play and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet hundreds of years later.

So understand what I’m saying here: Fast and Furious and the single-celled organism are fundamentally the same thing, but with the excess of technological apertures overlaid on top—not only the sophistication of the genomic architecture, the nervous system, the synapses of the forebrain, et cetera, but furthermore the prosthetic of the film camera, and the historical development of technologies from the Model T to, maybe, the Japanese race car. These themselves create the modern city of, let’s say, Los Angeles in the early 2000s. This is a network of interrelated phenomena which emerge directly from, again, the advent of the forebrain as the major technological development in human history since the opposable thumb.

So this is what’s fascinating when there’s a real critical interrogation of culture from that ontological root of the persistence operator. My primary enjoyment is the cultural artifact—particularly baseball history, as you would understand if you listen to my baseball-historical and cultural-theoretical lectures, as well as my baseball-historical, interwoven epic books, so to speak. With sufficient depth, with sufficient historical gravity (which is to say, attention to the development of cultural architectures over time)—and this is the benefit baseball has: a longer-scale history in terms of cultural artifacts, almost 200 years now, which is pretty significant—you can trace, through the aperture of the recurrent superstructural phenomenon, i.e., the baseball diamond, the transformation of technological artifacts.

This is why baseball is so important and so essential: it begins really at the birth of industrial modernity, which is to say the end of America’s Civil War, and continues all throughout the industrial and technological revolutions therein, including the digital and AI. So you can see through the aperture of the superstructural phenomenon of the baseball diamond. The cultural artifacts that emerge from this superstructural repetition allow one to actually see through the screen, or the veil, of history. To see not only how the human being has remained fundamentally, effectively the same—genomically, over that 250-year time scale—but how the way in which the human being is seeing and being seen has undergone an utter, absolute infrastructural transformation by way of the technological apertures, which change the way of seeing itself. This, of course, is well written about in John Berger’s history of painting, Ways of Seeing.

And this is what technological cultural history allows us to avail at a cosmological level. Human history is rather straightforward and rather simple. There are paradigm shifts that occur evolutionarily through the genome—shifts at the level of the species: consciousness, forebrain, opposable thumbs, et cetera. We have already gone over these things. This is the long history of genomic evolution, as described by Darwin. But furthermore, within these paradigm shifts, there’s a very recent transition that occurred at industrial modernity and has progressed until the contemporary moment. A history of mere milliseconds in relationship to cosmology, which is the history of the breakthroughs of the prosthetic technological apertures that emerged through forebrain sentience—forebrain experimentation in the field, which has now been created in reality. This forebrain has made possible a new interrelationship between beings and the world, and world itself, we could say conceptually, that is changing and has changed perception. This is everything from fashion to literature to photography. It is the entire mass cultural artifact of humanity and human history itself.

The being is not only seeing through the primary genomic aperture—which is to say, survive and reproduce, with, you could say, increasing revolution over historical time. If you just look at evolution, that’s the case, with forebrain and opposable thumb as primary indicators and artifacts of that process. But what is made possible therein is this: there is the eye through which one sees, which we could say is the genomic body, and then the telescope or the microscope through which that eye sees again, technologically, which is the second artifact of historical reproduction. It is the reproduction of the genomic body which, in turn, reproduces technological artifacts through which seeing is filtrated, represented, and moved across spacetime in terms of artifactual consciousness itself. This is everything from MP3s in a zip file to the historical baseball cabinet photograph of an early Black baseball team in the early 1900s.

These artifacts themselves, their very preservational quality, and the fact that they exist configurationally in space and time—we’ve discussed this deeply in my other work, lectures, essays, and documents alike, including literary—these configurational forms persist in space and time and recall, through historical digestion (returning to the Fast and Furious film, or returning to an old Black baseball photograph from the early 1900s), the intercoursing and the interlocution between channel one and channel two architectures. And this itself produces the historical vision of reality in which beings—particularly, at the species level, human beings—are imbued. It is the way of seeing genomically, channel one, intercoursing with the existent and available technological architectures which are scaling existence at any particular moment in time.

This is very new to human history—as of maybe the 1850s—as opposed to the entire sweep of the tens and hundreds of thousands of years prior, where there was very low-resolution, low-frequency technological development: anything from fire to cave art to the printing press. Very slow technological revolutions in reproducing these mediating images, objects, and artifacts in space and time and circulating them—again, primarily circulated locally, whether that’s mythology or a literary document. You can even look at the case of Percy Shelley and the piracy of his works in England, and even in America.

This circulation of cultural-historical information technology, through the scaling of what we now understand as industrial-digital technological modernity over the span of really 200 years, has been so exponential, so sweeping, that the vision of the human being in space and time is an artifactual consciousness traceable through such extreme contrasts. The movement, in barely 100 years, from the first airplane to the jet plane. From the Model T to the iPhone—an AI-enabled iPhone. These are moments of the snap of the finger, which do not exist in genomic time, but which occur due, again, to the availability of the forebrain and forebrain-articulable consciousness, which is a technological-artifactual revolution at the level of the genome, and at the level of the cosmological transformation of energy since the birth of the universe. And this is all traceable in a stellar fashion.

This is the making transparent, or making apparent, of exactly what we’re talking about here in terms of the persistence operator, technological recursion, and the awakening of the human being: this cracking into the codes of nature through scientific revolutions, which then become technological revolutions, and then become embedded in cultural-civilizational memory and articulation. This is similar to writing a novel and having it published by a printing house in the 1800s, as opposed to publishing a lecture via iPhone voice messages on Substack and YouTube. These are technological revolutions which change the way that information is represented, presented, circulated, and ultimately expressed. This is cosmological. This goes down to the technology which enables, and is fundamentally imbued with, the transformation of energy, which creates new apertures, which then reorganize consciousness, reorganize space and time.

And to examine these historical artifacts—I would say particularly for me, obviously imbued with nostalgia in terms of the artifacts I experienced as a young person—these artifacts themselves are imbued with what Walter Benjamin would call the aura. The aura of this presence of nascent, I would say, even possibility of technological interrelationship between the human channel one organism and this emergent channel two technological artifact. This is, again, the relationship between regulational and configurational persistence. It is the human being carving into the rock face, or painting onto the rock face, which we now know as the Lascaux caves. Or the human being chiseling into pottery, which is then uncovered hundreds, even thousands, of years later: the Olmec statues, jade artifacts, the jade were-jaguar, the Cuban cabinet photograph from the turn of the twentieth century of baseball players gathered in a field.

These are historical moments in time, and to truly understand history, you have to understand this recursive, recombinative process and the interrelationship between these newly emergent technological grids of modernity and the long-time-scale evolutionary process of the genome. And what is created therein is an enlightenment of relationship, which is to say representational possibilities, capturing through expression. This is the dialectical relationship between the organism and, we could say, the machine, which then allows for expressive capacity, which is fundamentally linguistic. We have already discussed the genome as a linguistic possibility in stellar nuclear physics. That’s what the genome fundamentally is as an information technology: a languaging device which unfolds structurally in space and time, as the body of the organism or the being itself.

And this is the fascination for me of watching Fast and Furious : it’s a recall of 20 years. And what the gap of 20 years really is, is the gap of a species transformation which is almost inarticulable and unutterable in a grand historical, cosmological sense, precisely because of how quickly it accelerates. Even down to the quality of the film reel. The technological acceleration that emerges when you look back through this sedimentary document of history—it’s effectively a geological document of the explosion, or the rocket ship, of human culture as it transformed even over 20 years’ time, from the internet to artificial intelligence. This is really a remnant, or a shard; it is itself the amber of cultural consciousness, or of ecological time. A world which existed and no longer exists 20 years later, but which is held within the cultural artifact.

Even as the human being itself, structurally and genomically, remains effectively—really absolutely—the same (there hasn’t even been a generational transformation within that time), there has nonetheless been a paradigm shift in the technology of the species itself, through glacial genomic revolution. The world that existed and was created through the interrelationship of the unfolding process of the forebrain has become so hyper-accelerated, so exponentially accelerated, that the world of 20 years prior, as depicted in pop-cultural cinema such as Fast and Furious , actually no longer exists. The sedimentary folding-over of technological acceleration at the level of channel two architecture has become so quick, due to these increasing, cascading technological revolutions—even as scientific revolutions are perhaps emerging more slowly. That’s even debatable.

But this period of 250 years—from, we could say, the moment Percy Shelley began writing to the release of Fast and Furious —is obscene. It’s not articulable, because of how quickly the transformation has happened, all the while the technology at the level of channel one architecture, the genome, has remained exactly the same. And gazing down through history—the history of modernity, really—through cultural artifacts, we could pull anything from Picasso’s Weeping Woman to Fast and Furious to Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound , to baseball radio, to a 1975 Topps baseball card, to Chia Pets. This is high strangeness, if you can understand the technological unfolding of modernity through cultural artifacts. I think the Chia Pet, or the Nerf gun, in relationship to the Model T car—or even Nickelodeon slime—these are fantastic and perfect examples of the high strangeness which emerges.

And then, of course, we have AI-generated images of really whatever you want, and then the issue of the death of photography in the wake of that, or even the death of painting, which is a whole other discourse. This acceleration comes precisely because of technological ability, which produces these endless fascinations of novelty, which really are the belly of capitalism itself. And this is why, when we look at technological innovation and capitalism, the two are irrevocably intertwined. These things are produced almost purely because of the excitement of novelty, and perhaps survivability, which is then justified, maybe, after the fact.

This is no longer, it seems, a race towards surviving an agrarian winter, but a race towards creating an artifact so fantastic that humanity no longer perceives itself to be existent—at least not in the way it was. And this is, I think, the fear that is seen in so much of our [thinking about] artificial intelligence: that it’s no longer technology built to survive, but technology built to supersede survivability. This is very different from Dust Bowl economics, when we look at the stock market for artificial intelligence, or even the dot-com boom that happened 20 years earlier.

So it is an entirely new—again, this is perceptual. And this is visible at any given moment in culture, including the contemporary moment. But it’s easier to see when you’re looking back at history, because you’re seeing down through outdated and outmoded cultural geographies and prosthetic technologies which articulate the status of the human being in relationship to the profusion and interlocution of channel one and channel two architectures.

So I think that’s what I’ve got here. I hope you enjoy.