OK, you got me. That post earlier was an April Fool’s.

OK, you got me. That post earlier was an April Fool’s. Join the conversation. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_ok-you-got-me-that-post-earlier-was-an-share-7444844243656785920-xzgt?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAADUV_eUBZSxZvFpx70OV050F6K5HM2MhTMo

OK, you got me. That post earlier was an April Fool’s.

But there was a true element: I have received some funding, and I’m entering a new phase of work.

I’m grateful to have been awarded a grant by the Late Phase Research Foundation, which specialises in identifying individuals who begin exhibiting late-career characteristics, and supporting them to formalise these tendencies before they become socially disruptive. I believe they’ve been around for some time.

In my case, the panel noted:
• a deepening preoccupation with 1970s cyberneticians, philosophers, and therapists whose work improves with obscurity
• a drift from ‘projects’ to ‘questions’, and from questions to ‘what is going on, really?’
• a growing tolerance for diagrams that attempt to explain everything
• consistent beard maturation (despite active countermeasures)
• interests that have become simultaneously narrower, stranger, and more ambitious

The Foundation’s purpose is straightforward: to support the transition from delivery to synthesis – reconciling governance, state and system, cybernetics and metaphysics, public service and the noumenal.

My own directions of travel, for now:

• connecting public service transformation with second-order cybernetics and political economy
• taking systems seriously enough to ask what kind of reality they imply
• and testing whether anything useful sits between institutional practice and whatever passes for wisdom

There are, as ever, conditions.

These include:

• a spiritual ‘journey’ (I’m told ‘journey’ will become quite a theme!), requiring a plausible spiritual source (shortlisted options currently include second-order cybernetics, obscure strands of Eastern Orthodox thought, deracinated Shamanism, and something half-remembered from Marhsall Berman – anyway – some kind of relationship with a beard-forward wisdom tradition)
• producing a Theory of Everything of sufficient coherence to be taken seriously by at least three people and seven podcasts
• maintaining light but credible contact with the counterculture as represented by Stewart Brand, Terence McKenna, and, where appropriate, the ghost of Buckminster Fuller – I will be guided in this endeavour by regular sessions with an on-faculty character they call ‘the Central Scrutiniser’, who apparently ‘was there at Esalen’)
• and undertaking a modest programme of psychedelic inquiry (psilocybin, LSD, or prolonged exposure to late-period systems literature)

I’m a little nervous about the requirement I host ‘live-ins’ in my home (haven’t told my wife yet :-o) but I’m sure it’ll be fine. They send a druid first to balance the ley-lines….

Funding is said to originate from a loose alliance of ageing longhairs, systems mystics, and at least one person who was ‘there at Esalen’. I have not asked further questions.

The expectation is clear: less novelty, more synthesis, and a growing willingness to say simple things that turn out not to be simple at all.

More… when the energy is right.