Psychopolitica

About Psychopolitica

Russian psychedelia in exile 🍄 psychopolitica.substack.com (https://psychopolitica.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Nikita Petrov

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Jan 2021

Latest episode

26 May 2026

Latest episodes

11 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   26 May 2026

   Metaphysical Implications of Telepathic AI

   This is a conversation I had with Jeremy Eliosoff, artist (https://www.jeremyeliosoff.com/) and Canada’s main Pause AI (https://pauseai.info/) guy, sometime late last year. We talked about telepathic AI, DMT, lucid dreaming, art, and dogs watching TV (these are the topics I remember; dogs watching TV is a metaphor for our level of understanding reality). It was a lot of fun. I think we’ll talk again soon: Jeremy is planning to lead discussion groups at Robert Wright (https://substack.com/profile/3952006-robert-wright)’s Discord server, which I invite you to join (https://discord.gg/C9t2ghW6aF) — because any place and any conversation is cooler when you’re there. I mean it. Earlier today, I talked to Bob on his podcast (https://www.nonzero.org/podcast): mostly about the Pope’s new AI manifesto (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html) and the way modern warfare melds humans and robots into one creepy gamified vortex of violence and suffering. The episode is not out yet, but it will air later tonight — check out Bob’s Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@Nonzero). Finally, this Thursday, at 6:45-ish pm CET / 9:45-ish am PT, I’m talking live to Boris the Planet Guy (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo273773675.html), as we do every couple of weeks; I plan to go on and on about my pilgrimage to Ancient Greek oracular sites that I’ve just came back from, and the exciting new undertakings already stemming from it. I hope you will join us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   7 May 2026

   ON PRISON plus A CARD GAME FOR THE END OF REALITY

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit psychopolitica.substack.com (https://psychopolitica.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) For the past year and a half, I’ve been using palm-sized cards as the central medium to organize my work, life, ideas, and projects. This is one of the first batches of “idea cards”: These are monthly decks/stacks that accumulate from my visits to the local cannabis club. And in today’s episode of Kosmopolitika, you’ll see the latest version of the medium: a kind of a game board Boris and I are starting to use to organize our biweekly conversations. Here’s what it looked like at the beginning of the two-hour stream: Here’s what it looked like at the end: And here’s what it looks like right now (https://admin.psychopolitica.com/kp/table): The texts on the other sides of the cards are drafts of ideas and stories I don’t think I want to share widely, but any PsyPol member can play with the cards on the site (https://admin.psychopolitica.com/kp/table): read their contents, drag them around, stack and unstack them, etc. If Boris or I change or add something, it is reflected on the site in real time. You won’t be able to edit cards or save their positions, but I plan on adding real interactivity in the coming weeks. You’ll find the password at the end of this message. Here is an excerpt from a draft in the Escapism deck. ON PRISON The Lukiškės prison was at the very cutting edge of the Russian correctional system when it first opened in 1905, my Lithuanian guide tells me. The main innovation wasn’t so much the design (a panopticon) and the architecture (neo-Romanesque), or the heating, ventilation, and sewage systems, which were all quite impressive for their time, but the very idea of “correcting” the prisoners, rehabilitating instead of simply punishing or isolating them. He cites the beautiful Orthodox church we’re in as evidence — why would you need a church, if not to improve the souls of the inmates? There are also a Catholic church and a synagogue on the premises. The change he’s pointing to is a sequence of reforms to the Russian criminal code that phased away corporal punishment and introduced prison confinement as a penalty in itself — before then, imprisonment was only a temporary measure as one awaited his sentencing, and usually didn’t last long. The actual punishment came mostly in the forms of death, physical pain, katorga (forced labor in harsh conditions), and exile (most commonly to Siberia). Given the kinds of hell prison replaced — whipping, nose-slitting, beating with rods, among others — it’s hard to argue this innovation wasn’t a positive one. Still, I can’t quite see it as such. There’s something uniquely bleak about it: walking through Lukiškės, I see a whole little world built entirely around the idea of stripping one of his freedom and making that fact the center of his existence; there’s nothing else going on. A katorzhanin went to the mine to extract gold, silver, or coal (somebody’s gotta do it?), but a prisoner only extracts the experience of what it’s like being trapped. The “correctional” narrative rings hollow even now, at least in the Russian and, it appears, Lithuanian settings, and it’s been more than a century since Lukiškės first opened its doors. This is my first time in a prison (a night at the police station followed by a day in court is the biggest trouble I’ve gotten from my own state so far), so it’s strange how familiar everything about it feels: the grey and muddy-green paint on the walls, the musty smell, the sickly light that gets dimmed at night but never fully goes out, the hole-in-the-floor shitters in the corners of cells. The guide looks at those in the group who were born in the USSR: “You guys had those in school too, right?” He’s right, schools are one of the environments this reminds me of. Also kindergartens, trains and train stations of my youth, state hospitals, the state itself. Lukiškės was in operation between 1905 and 2019, and at different times belonged to the Russian empire, Poland, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and, finally, after the fall of the Union, independent Lithuania. After Covid, it reopened as a cultural hub: there are bars, cafes, concert venues, open-air movie screenings, and guided tours in Lithuanian, English, and Russian. I wonder about the vibe at the parties. We play a game: the guide shows us different objects and invites us to guess whether they were allowed or banned on the premises. To wired headphones, I say “banned: one could strangle a cell mate or hang himself with them.” I’m wrong: the guide explains that the right way to strangle yourself is by tying yourself to the bed, by the neck, with a wet towel or bed sheet, after several days of sleep deprivation. You fall asleep, you never wake up. He has a polite look on his face, which says “I thought you might find that interesting,” and I nod with appreciation, as if saying “right, that makes sense, thanks.” He gives a chance to ask a follow up to the rest of the group, but nobody has one, and he moves on to the next object: a tiny cell phone, maybe 1/6th of my iPhone, with buttons. We are invited to guess the maximum number of phones that was recovered from a man’s rectum at one time. I think, “Six? Four?” Somebody else gives their guess. The guide lights up: “Very close! Eight.” I spend more time than the rest of the group looking at drawings and reading the writings on the doors and walls of the tiny box-like rooms for preliminary detention: a third, maybe half are in Russian, but I also recognize Georgian and Armenian letters, there’s some Arabic and, of course, Lithuanian. In the bigger cells for long-term confinement, Russian dominates. “Business language,” the guide shrugs, “lingua franca.” The biggest graffiti turns out to be fake though, put on the walls during the filming of Stranger Things 4. Taking pictures in the cells is prohibited except for the one with a cardboard cutout of Putin (Vilnius is absolutely covered in Ukrainian flags). Most are empty, maybe a dozen were turned into some kind of art objects, and one preserves a frozen image of what life here actually looked like: a TV in the corner, light erotica on wall posters (Russian pop bands from the 90s and 2000s, which I recognize), books, bedding. Two men step in to look around, the guide asks how they like it, one says “I could live with this,” and the guide responds by shutting and locking the door. People chuckle. He delivers the next bit of trivia to us, with his back to the door. It’s all very playful, gently immersive, with smiles, raised eyebrows, an occasional sigh, a thoughtful nod. None of this is about the Lukiškės prison for me. It’s about the fact that, a week or two before this excursion, I was looking at tickets to Russia. I hadn’t been home in three years.

3. 

   4 Dec 2025

   Kosmopolitika #301. Ideas Are Like People, Demons, and Stray Dogs

   Nikita and Boris explore a set of wild ideas and lay out the foundations for a new kosmopolitikal ideology. This particular conversation was meant to follow an agenda: a reintroduction of Nikita & Boris; some thoughts on what we take Kosmopolitika to be; and explorations of particular ideas that have occupied our attention recently. We mostly managed to stick to the plan, though there were more than a few tangents. We returned to our touchstone question: whether ideas can be thought of as alive in their own right, and what it might mean if ideas are not only alive, but are entities that we summon into our everyday world, with all the danger a word like “summon” suggests. Seeing ideas as peers that we’re in dialogue with also conveniently provided us with a metaphysical justification for all of the tangents we tend to follow in our conversations: following tangents is our way of acknowledging the pull of the ideas themselves. Finally, we spent time with Nikita’s idea of “alienism”—linking the alienness of UFOs/UAPs, AI, and psychedelics—which Boris glossed as the alienness of the heavens, the alienness of rocks and metals, and the alienness of multicellular life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

4. 

   12 Apr 2025

   Introducing KOSMOPOLITIKA

   This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit psychopolitica.substack.com (https://psychopolitica.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7) Happy Cosmonautics Day! A week ago I, Boris Shoshitaishvili of the Berggruen Institute (the Noosphere guy), and Robert Wright (https://substack.com/profile/3952006-robert-wright) of the Nonzero media empire, hosted a livestream, the recording of which you can see in this post. We talked amongst ourselves for the first hour and responded to questions and comments from the audience for the second. (There was also a memorable intrusion of a Nazi porn bot about halfway through, but I edited it out of the recording — for the most part.) Boris and I are doing another one — the inaugural episode of the show we’re calling KOSMOPOLITIKA — next Monday, at 1pm ET / 7pm CET, here: This time, I expect it to be less structured. Figuring out the right flow for an online conversation with many participants, most of whom don’t know each other, will take more than a few iterations; but it’s an exciting project to work on. The theme of the next stream is BELONGING. If you plan to attend, please RSVP by clicking the button below — this would put the event on your calendar and let us know how many people we can expect. Early in last week’s conversation, I played the My People card. When Bob asked for a one-line description of what this new show is about, I said it will be different for different people — and I will add now, it is many different things for me — but one of them is it’s my way of “meeting ‘my people’, dispersed throughout the world, and living through history with them”. Naturally, Bob followed up by asking who these people I refer to as “mine” might be; and to that question, I don’t have an answer. I know that I feel a sense of kinship to many of you — those with whom I’ve exchanged letters or had one-on-one conversations — but I don’t know where this feeling originates. You’re young, old, middle-age, men and women, religious and not, living (I’m trying to remember the chats that I’ve had so far) in Serbia, Ireland, Italy, Canada, Russia, South Africa, Germany, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. You’re all very different. One thing you do have in common is you’re reading this missive, and so might attend the Monday gathering. I’ve never identified too strongly with any group of people, large or small. My social network rests on one-on-one relationships, and what those rest on is anyone’s guess. I’ve always felt very Russian, but it is the outcasts and outliers within my culture that I resonate with the most; when my president said, some days after I left the country, that Russia is cleansing itself from “traitors and scum”, that it will spit us out “like gnats”, I did not feel surprised — there is a whole multi-generational lineage of Russians with a challenging relationship with their state and, oftentimes, broader society. There isn’t a cult or political party that I belong to. I like to study them (I went to the now-defunct Scientology center in Moscow twice after I ran out of documentaries on the topic), but I’ve never encountered one I would think about joining. The only club I’m technically a member of is my local cannabis club — the only legal way to buy weed in Spain… I wonder about these questions of group identity. My Russianness does define me in many different ways (though, of course, never wholly); more than that, whether I want to or not, I do have ties with the Russian state — for one, that’s who issues my passports, without which no other state, and, for that matter, no airline company, are willing to do business with me. There’s no set answer to the question “What does it mean to be Russian?”. My life is, among other things, an on-going articulation of my response to it. I know that my government is working with ideologues and political technologists on formulating a different answer. We’ll have to wait to find out who plays this game better. The nation state has become such a prominent force in the world, something we’re so very used to, that it can be hard to imagine how group identity worked before its emergence — when nobody felt particularly French or Russian, when in place of a nation there were towns and villages, faith, and fealty to a lord or a king. At the same time, it could be that soon, we won’t have to imagine: many national identities are in a crisis, struggling to redefine or maintain their people’s identity as migration, separatism, political and religious polarization, and technology challenge the old definitions. Bob says it was the printing press that allowed for the rise of the nation, ironing out the dialectic kinks of language over long distances; the Internet and AI are similarly disruptive technologies pushing towards globalization. But who knows! Watching the Internet, which in my childhood was assumed to be a wild, lawless, and borderless place, balkanize — break down into segments with functioning borders around them, and different laws of engagement within — and watching at the same time ChatGPT and its ilk creep into everyone’s life as all-purpose employees, home doctors, therapists, educators, and artists-in-residence, I imagine a sci-fi novelistic scenario: The world governments take the threat of malevolent information as or more seriously as they do biological viruses. They inoculate their populations with chips that allow telepathic connection to sanctioned chatbots — ostensibly, for fact checking. This is Bicameral Mind 2.0: you do some of your thinking yourself, but whenever you pause, a second inner voice takes over, treating your thinking as prompts. For most, the line between “their” and “bot” thinking quickly gets very blurry and then disappears. China achieves impressive social cohesion with their highly effective state-issued thoughtbot. The US is as polarized as ever, as two or three corporate ones compete for the domination of the thought market. Europe uses slowed-down, heavier-regulated versions of the American product, limiting its output to work hours (the further south you go, the less reliable the schedule). Israel’s bot, trained on the Torah, goes through constant fine-tuning via conversations with the rabbinic class. Russia has one for public consumption — so filled with low-quality propaganda people learn to tune it out — and another for the elite, dubbed Putin-2, that is given total control of the mind of the human who sits on the throne at any given moment. The country finally develops a reliable system for peaceful rotation of power, except that it’s only the human substrate that is rotated. Boris and I were both born in the Soviet Union only three years before its collapse. His family left Russia for the US when he was just 5 years old; mine, or what’s left of it, is still there, while I’m building a new one in voluntary exile. Social upheaval and dissolution of past realities do get tiresome, but, at some level, they feel like home turf for me. There is a coziness to “living through history” with people whose company I enjoy. That’s where I think the Monday conversation — 1pm ET, 7pm CET, RSVP (https://www.addevent.com/event/qu25471265) — will begin. Where it will go from there depends on you. Here are some more ideas that were brought up in the one from last week, which you can watch above:

5. 

   28 Mar 2025

   The Game of Ideas

   I see the words “January 2025” in the sketch above, and my eyebrows climb up as I think of how long I’ve been working on the project I’m now inviting you to join. My sense of time has been totally out whack since 2022. The video part of this post is a kind of a dress rehearsal that I did with Boris Shoshitaishvili (I had previously published his piece on Bannon & the noosphere (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/steve-bannons-noosphere-warfare)) in preparation of a Psychopolitica X Nonzero livestream event that will take place next Friday, April 4, at 1pm ET. Boris, Robert Wright (https://substack.com/profile/3952006-robert-wright) of the Nonzero newsletter, and I plan to talk for about an hour before spending another hour taking calls from you. If it goes well, Boris and I will work on making it into a regular feature. Here is the link to the stream (https://youtube.com/live/D4jOfcLJWvA). I keep changing my articulation of what this project is about every time that I talk or write about it. Here’s how I put it in an email to Boris on the day of our recording: One dimension is community and identity building. We want to start and maintain an on-going conversation about where we are, what we are, what’s going on with and around us, what we’re doing and what we should be doing instead; and the “we” here refers to * you, me, Bob, guests, viewers as individuals; * the Nonzero and the Psychopolitica communities, which already exist but don’t necessarily understand themselves as such, don’t necessarily have a shared identity (Bob’s Tribeless Tribe is something of a placeholder for where a positive identity should be instead); and * humanity, or life, or the planet, or consciousness itself. We think that we can develop an understanding of ourselves on all three of these levels by gathering together on a regular basis and exchanging ideas, experiences, and perspectives. The second dimension is ideas. One of the ways we can understand who we are, where we are, etc. is by continuously articulating ideas we are engaged with: some we develop ourselves, others are things we notice around (the simulation theory and the notion of an NPC are good examples). The idea card is central to this part of the project. We’re simultaneously mapping out our respective corners of the noosphere and conducting experiments in meme magic: what happens if I bring my ideas, and you bring yours, and everybody else brings theirs, and we let them interact? How will the interaction change these ideas, what new ones will emerge?.. When I say “the idea card,” I mean these things: Btw, check out the current stage of evolution of the Escapism one: I’ve been mostly posting these cards on Notes (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/notes), but one made into a post (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/flying-a-plane-is-all-about-the-ego) all the way back in December (my sense of time has really, really been slipping): They’re nothing more than an approach to note-taking (except we can make them into something much bigger). The card gives each idea a title, a short description, and an image to represent it. At first, the image can be missing, the title may be off, and the note may be barely intelligible even to myself; but I work on them iteratively, improving them step by step, rewriting, redrawing, re-understanding what it is that they’re on behalf of. I want to use these cards in our live-streaming project. With some regularity, Boris and I will get on a call and exchange ideas with you and with one another — and after we hang up, I’ll work on these cards for ideas that were brought up. The first time we talk about an idea, the card will not be much to look at; the tenth time we return to it, it might become something cool. Over time, whole decks may emerge, representing different species of ideas. Here are a couple of early sketches for the project’s identity: I hope to see you at the next stream, and I hope that you bring your ideas with you. I want this all to feel like a game. Here are some of the cards I had time to make, in a noticeably rushed manner, for the conversation in this post: The are more ideas in there! Listen to get to know them, and join us next time, on Friday, April 4, at 1pm ET, at Nonzero’s Youtube channel. Here is the link: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

6. 

   6 Nov 2024

   Soothing Chit-chat at the End of the World

   I did a call-in livestream last night as Americans were starting to cast their votes. This election was supposed to be a historic event, and over the years I have found that, when history’s happening, it’s nice to be around people you like. I didn’t know if anybody would show up, and what happens if they do. But some people did, and what happened was a very cozy, heart-warming conversation about the strange and oftentimes alienating world of big-scale events and the grounding role of human connection. When I listened back to the recording, I was struck by the soothing effect that it had on me. I think it’s an “everybody’s homeland is childhood” kind of thing: when I was three, the country I was born in dissolved, and two years later, the new country’s President ordered tanks to fire at the Parliament building, which they did — so the TV box was always on in our little apartment, reporting the latest troubling news, and my parents discussed them endlessly over coffee or tea, and many times I have fallen asleep to the soothing cadence of their concerned voices. This must be the reason why, every time the world burns, I notice, mixed in with my grief, pain, or anxiety, a subtle sense of belonging or recognition. I don’t know if you’ll feel the same when listening to this chat — it’s hard to say how much of a niche thing it is. I’m very grateful to all who participated in this inaugural stream or listened in to it silently. Let’s do it again sometime soon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

7. 

   13 Mar 2023

   A Year of War / Unfreedom of Chatbots

   Here’s my latest conversation with John Horgan. For the first 50 minutes, we talk about our felt lack of agency when it comes to the world’s biggest injustices. Here’s how I set this up: I'm going to start on a depressing note today. My plan is: let's dig a little emotional hole in the beginning and see whether we can get out of it by the end of the conversation. It's been a year since the war started. We talked about it at the time, when I was still in Russia. Looking back at this year, it hasn't been a good one. The war is still going on. It's not clear who is winning. The good thing is Ukraine stands. The bad thing is it's been a year of cities being destroyed, people being killed, people being tortured — that's military personnel and civilians both — people being kidnapped… There are children who lost their parents in the war, were brought to Russia, and are now being used for propaganda purposes... So, an incredible suffering on the part of Ukrainians. It's not clear how long it's going to continue, and how much worse it is going to get. And then on Russia's part, there’s a complete degradation, as far as I can see, of the state and of the country. The latest little story I saw was — I was just reading this today — there’s a single father whose daughter drew an anti-war picture at school, and FSB showed up, and the father is under the house arrest now, and the girl is in a government facility, in an orphanage. I think they were supposed to let her out but didn't. I dont’t know if they're going to. It's just one small story out of many, many stories of that sort. There are people who are serving jail sentences — long jail sentences — for making anti-war statements… So, it's not good. And then, on a more personal note, it's been almost a year since I left Russia. One of the things that I remember saying — we were at this bar in Yerevan, and there was this obnoxious drunk Russian (luckily, the only person of that sort that we've seen here so far) — this annoying guy who wanted to challenge us on our views and decisions and "Well, why did you leave?" One thing I told him was, I think my country is committing atrocities; and I think my country is going to a very, very dark place itself. I can't imagine staying in Russia, putting the blinders on, pretending nothing is happening, and simply living my own life. Instead, I would like to do something about this. And I can't see what a person can do from inside of Russia, because, if you try something, you’d simply be jailed. So I said: I hope that I could be of more use on the outside. I believed that. I still do. But. It's been almost a year. I can't say that I've been very useful. I then generalized this problem: it’s not just me, and it’s not just this war. I don’t know anybody who is making a real, concentrated effort — as in, rent an office space, buy a whiteboard, get some smart people together, brainstorm, put in the hours, day after day, week after week, try many ideas, reject those that don’t work, improve on those that seem promising, and, over time, start showing real, measurable progress — to solve whatever problem they think is the most important or urgent one to address. And frankly, it’s worse than that: I haven't met a person who I'm in awe of in regards to their ability to navigate the world; certainly nobody who's making a real dent in solving these is big planet-wide issues. But the bar's not even there. The bar is like, “Spend you time on this planet effectively.” I don't know anybody who's really good at that. I know people who inspire me by not getting totally bugged down... But we all seem stuck to me. I feel we're unhealthy. Our energy levels, our ability to concentrate, to think straight, to navigate a conversation — it's like we're all stunted in different ways. That is the hole I dug at the beginning of our conversation. By the end of it though, we were some place else: talking about Plato’s Cave, happy prisoners, chatbots, meaning of life, cults, unfreedom of thought, brain implants, and in general, being bozos on this bus. John ended the chat on this note: You know, it’s funny. I was just working on the end of my book about quantum mechanics, talking about being a part of the mystery, and what do you do about it… And as long as you have friends, also in the hole, or the cave, or whatever you want to call it — the aquarium — and you’re looking at them now and then, and you go, “Are you seeing this?” And they go, “F**k yeah, man.” Or maybe they say, “No, I don’t see it. Tell me about it.” That makes it tolerable. Friendship. I agreed with this. So, thanks for being with me in this aquarium, and for saying things like “Are you seeing this s**t?” and “F**k yeah, man” to me every now and again. You can always reach me at nikita.s.petrov@gmail.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

8. 

   18 Feb 2023

   (What If) Putin Does Not Exist

   On January 19, Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky said this about negotiations with Putin: “Today, I don't quite understand who it is I should be talking to and about what. I'm not sure the Russian President that we sometimes see in front of a green screen is really him. I'm not sure he's alive, whether it's he who is making decisions, or somebody else. I don't have this information.” Ukraine’s chief of intelligence, Major General Budanov made more extensive remarks on this in 2022. “The Putin they used to show from 1999 to 2010—though sometimes body doubles were used then too—that person is definitely different from the person we see now. They have different habits, mannerisms, gait; sometimes, even different height, if you look close enough. The shapes of the ears are different—and that’s like a fingerprint, every person has their own ear shape. Who plays the role of Putin today is absolutely an open question. It’s a ‘Collective Putin,’ that’s most appropriate way to say it.” I have brought up this idea of Putin not being real, which has been around for at least a dozen of years, numerous times here in Psychopolitica (1 (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/putin-doesnt-exist), 2 (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/ais-take-on-putin-doesnt-exist), 3 (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/the-trickery-of-understanding)). In this episode, I discuss it again with my friend, science writer and fellow psychonaut John Horgan. We also talk about censorship in ChatGPT and the dark desires of Microsoft’s new chat bot (as reported (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html) by the New York Times). Psychopolitica is a reader-supported publication. Please consider subscribing: I will spend all the money made in 2023 to pay artists who contribute their work here. “What I'm struggling with, as I've been struggling with over the years, is formulating my own understanding of why this idea is important. I feel there is something about it. Just the fact that it's so persistent and it has so many different shapes and it pops up in different places suggests to me that it articulates something important about either the Russian reality, or the nature of power, or politics, or something else. It might be a deeply held belief that is hard to put in words, it might be a truth, it might be an intuition, a suspicion about how the world works. Sure, it is trippy and weird and interesting, but what I want to do is to come up with some interpretations for it that would actually be useful, that could give some kind of an actionable insight, one that can inform one's relationships with these realities. I've written out a few approaches to this, my favorite of which could be called psychological. I don't know if I believe it, or... You know, it's what I'm thinking about. And the way I'm thinking about it is: Putin is this faceless man—his nickname in the KGB was The Moth—and the narrative goes, he was put into power by the oligarchs of the 1990s, who thought they could control him, who thought he's just a functionary. They needed somebody reliable, and this guy seemed to fit the bill. It didn't quite work out: some of these oligarchs are dead, some were jailed and then exiled... The way I'm thinking about it is he might be—whether it's his conscious strategy, or it just so happened that he navigates the world this way—but he allows people to project a whole lot on him. Different people see different things when they look at Putin. And the Russian people at the end of the nineties, when he came to power—and still now, I think—were, broadly speaking, a deeply traumatized bunch who didn’t feel a sense of agency in their own lives, either on the individual level or on the political one. Like, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This was a decision made by three men, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The same year, a few months prior, there was a referendum held in the Soviet Union. Not every republic took part—I think it was nine that did. And the results were that 70 something percent voted for the preservation of the Soviet Union—there was some formulation, "the preservation of the USSR as a renewed union (or federation, or something) of independent states where human rights are gonna be protected and whatnot." But the question was: Do we preserve the union or not? And overwhelmingly, the people who took part in the vote said yes. And then a few months later, after a failed coup attempt, there was what I see as a successful coup by Yeltsin. He and the other heads of Soviet republics got power for themselves. If there is no Soviet Union, then they are leaders of independent states as opposed to regional leaders within a larger country. So that's an example: people did go to the polls to exert their political will, and then, a few months later, they were told that their vote didn't count. They were not the ones who had agency. I just finished watching this series by Adam Curtis that came out last year, called TraumaZone (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6RgR4uJNvL). He works with the BBC archives—there are these vast archives of footage from Russia and the Soviet Union filmed by the BBC crews—and he just documents what the country had gone through from 1985 to 1999, when Putin came to power. He shows the system completely collapsing in all of these different areas, and the population going through extreme poverty, extreme corruption, and, again, a sense of a lack of agency. You're just thrown in different situations by these big historical forces. And I know it from personal experience with people from that generation: a lot of them didn't feel they were defining their reality, at all. They were just thrown about by time they were living through. So this is my psychological interpretation of the "Putin does not exist" or "Putin is fake" idea: the people who had no sense of agency in their own lives sort of collectively hallucinated this person who had all the agency in the world. He's the powerful guy. He's the top dog. And he allowed them to project all this power onto him. And then he became this runaway hallucination. It's like in Fight Club: the Narrator unconsciously invents this Tyler Durden character, this assertive macho guy, and outsources all the decision making power to him. And then the question that I don’t have an answer to is: If you entertain the idea in this way, what do you then do with it? How do you restore the people's sense of agency? How do you integrate this hallucination into the collective psyche and get to a place where the people do decide their own fate and take responsibility for it, instead of submitting their will to this weird character?..” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

9. 

   10 Feb 2023

   The Washing Machine of Awareness

   I’ve finally assembled a little podcast studio in my rented apartment in Yerevan, and I’m going to try to bring the talk show back on a semi-regular basis. I’m starting with a conversation I recently had with my friend, science writer John Horgan. We talked about ChatGPT, John’s new book My Quantum Experiment (I’m finishing up the cover design), psychedelics, the Chinese room mental experiment, the early Internet, Socrates, friendship, and, inevitably, the war. Please let me know what you think in the comments, at nikita.s.petrov@gmail.com, or in Psychopolitica Substack Chat (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/chat). I also told John my washing machine story. When I moved to St. Petersburg from Moscow, I rented an apartment that only had a kitchen and a washing machine. And there was a problem with the washing machine. I would put my clothes in, I’d start the machine, see that it started to work and leave satisfied. Then I’d come back three hours later thinking it would be done. But it was never done. It was always in some early part of the cycle. I even bought a new washing machine. I paid half the price and the owners of the apartment paid the other half—because it wasn't f*****g working; I was told there was going to be a functioning washing machine—well, there wasn’t. So they chipped in. But the problem persisted. So it wasn't the washing machine. It took me a long f*****g time to figure out what was happening. What was happening is whoever did the electric wiring in the apartment made it so that the light switch in the bathroom also controlled all the outlets inside the bathroom. And so I would come in, switch the light on, everything's working. Then I’d leave, turn the light off, go back to the room, and nothing was happening behind my back. I come back two hours later, I turn it on, it's working. But it was supposed to be done by now. I leave, turn the lights off, and so on, in perpetuity. I have this tendency, which is probably related to my use of psychedelics, to turn everything into a metaphor for everything else. So when I understood what the issue was, I felt: Is this how my life is? I figuratively turn the light switch on in some part of my psyche, I take a look around and feel I’ve got things under control. But then I turn my attention elsewhere and not notice the order disintegrating behind my back. Is that why I can't get myself to exercise? Is that why I’m fumbling through life, stumbling over all these obstacles? Is that because there are actual obstacles or because I can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and when I’m not paying attention, things simply stop working? This was five years ago. The household problem I’m dealing with now is with the water heater. It’s powered by gas. When I turn the hot water on, the gas starts flowing, and a few seconds later, a spark is supposed to appear and fire it up. It takes a little time for the water to warm up. Sometimes, the spark doesn’t come. By the time I realize that it didn’t—standing in the shower, pouring water over the palm of my hand, waiting for it to get warm—there’s quite a bit of gas that has gone through into the heater. I turn water off, wait a little, and turn it back on. The gas explodes loudly, scaring my wife and my dog. The water starts to heat up, and I take a shower, thinking, that’s how my life is. Either I’m dealing with the most minor of modern life’s inconveniences, or I’m risking blowing the apartment up on any given morning. And I’m too tired, distracted, or high, to figure out which it is. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

10. 

    30 May 2022

    What Is Psychopolitica For?

    These Monday posts, in which I’m sharing unfinished ideas, are going to soon become exclusive to paying subscribers and those who have contributed to Psychopolitica in the past. I invite you to consider doing either (or both) by clicking the Subscribe button below and by sending me your art, thoughts, or ideas to nikita.s.petrov@gmail.com. Below you will find a conversation I had about a month ago with Psychopolitica’s cover artist Giorgos Terzakis, when we were working on Fear and Power in the Russian Dreamscape (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/p/fear-and-power-in-the-russian-dreamscape?s=w). It was intended as a private chat—Giorgos wanted to hear my thoughts on the war in Ukraine—but we decided to tape it in case we veer off into some unexpected territory and end up saying something we’d want to go back to. That’s exactly what happened. A new subscriber, an 85 year-old MD and professor of ophthalmology named Frank, recently asked me in an email about “my mission.” I said I am yet to formulate it clearly. Listening now to this conversation I had with Giorgos, I’m realizing that this was a central theme: what are we trying to do with Psychopolitica? What is it for? And how is it supposed to accomplish it? I’m planning to listen to the full thing tomorrow and reflect on it further. I will be grateful if you share your reflections as well. Here is the video and an (edited) transcript of a segment I picked more or less at random. NIKITA: …so, yeah, I haven't figured out yet what the origin point of the reality that I'm going to be constructing day after day is going to be. Like, where do I stand safely? Everything is in flux. But I think it is a challenge that needs to be taken up. With all of these narratives being forced on me by journalists or politicians, who are actively trying to shape the way we see the world, and even by my own emotional composition… Like, the shame that I feel about things happening in Russia—that's not because some journalist put that on me. It's a normal human reaction, to feel ashamed for all of this. But I don't think succumbing to that is the way forward. You need to find some place to stand on, and figure out a way to continue shaping your own reality in a way that's productive, in a way that's not going to just keep you thinking "the world is horrible" or "I'm a part of a horrible situation." The way you create your reality needs to lead to your actions being helpful as opposed to damaging or stifling. GIORGOS: I totally get your sentiment, and of course that's part of my understanding of the world and of reality too, but most of the time, I get this feeling of hopelessness. I have this feeling that there's nothing I can do that's enough. There are systems in place that have been set decades ago that cannot include me. Let's say I'm not aligned with my country's policies. Maybe my country starts a war and I'm ashamed about it. I get this feeling that there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do that matters, that would create a separate reality from that. Yeah, I understand what you mean. I have the same, or at least similar, feelings too. And I guess I've always had them, except that they've become harder to ignore since the beginning of the war. The general feeling I've always had about the human civilization is... Well, it's fucked up. The systems of power that we have are—you know, I'm not impressed. I see shades of unfreedom. I'm rarely inspired by a system of governance. I mean, maybe if I’m watching a really good American movie, and Edward Norton is making a speech about the First Amendment in the Supreme Court... But generally, it's shades of frustration. I'm thinking back to my childhood. I'm six or seven, and I'm overhearing a conversation between my parents—if I'm six, that means it's 1994, so that's a year after the President’s tanks shot at the building of the parliament, so we had a lot of political talks at home... Even then, and ever since then, I’ve always had this feeling that I don't want to give up on this reality and just say “It's all fucked up, politics is dirty business, so just don't engage.” I never liked that. I always wanted to be a part of some kind of a productive force that actually can accomplish big things. At the same time, I've always felt, with an oscillating degree of conviction, that feeling of hopelessness that you're describing. One strain of thought that has been helpful to me is when I think about people in history—like, kinds of people in history—that I could feel a certain belonging to, a connection with, a sense that we're in a similar position. In pre-Enlightenment times, there is an Alchemist who's sitting at home, trying to figure something out by mixing things in his little laboratory, and he has some kind of a mythopoetic view of the world, and he's looking at what mercury is doing in his retort, and he's keeping in mind that mercury is a representation of the human mind... That guy was not aligned with his society. He's in a minority, he's a fringe actor. And yet, what he was doing did not go in vain, because now, in 2022, I have this vague sense that there were people like me before. And wherever you look, whatever period of time you choose, there's always that character. It's a shaman in a hunter gatherer village. It's an alchemist in medieval Europe. It's some fringe religious group. It's a lot of artists throughout the world and throughout the ages. I can pick up something that was written 2000 years ago in a culture that I don't really understand, and it speaks to me. And I feel like, "Oh, this is what my people were doing at that time, in that part of the world.” And none of those have ever succeeded at building a state—like, here it is, we figured out how to do human society—but just knowing that those people existed, and that they exist still, and feeling that I'm a part of this way of struggling with what the human incarnation is, that I'm not alone in it that—it inspires me. It helps me. So that means that, if I do my part, somebody else will be inspired, or have an easier time with the day-to-day. That gives me some amount of strength and energy you to carry on. But the hopelessness is definitely a part of it. Maybe addressing that hopelessness, incorporating it into your work... You know, I'm writing and drawing and talking. If I take that hopelessness and turn it into the next issue of Psychopolitica, and you and I make a drawing that will, on the one hand, address that hopelessness and express it, and on the other, make it so that, upon reading the whole thing, the reader doesn't feel hopeless… Then we're doing our job. It's hard for me to seriously contemplate the possibility of me playing a big part in building a world, or even a country, that is straightforwardly good and makes sense—like, we're going to build a beautiful system where no oppression and no suffering are going to take place. That's hard for me to consider realistic. But to create a way for people to gain some amount of freedom from the overall unfree system—that seems doable. And part of the reason that seems doable is because I've benefited from the work of people who've done this before me. To paint a picture... I'm a kid, I'm ten or something. I don't like school. My living situation is there are five people in a three-room apartment. The home life makes me feel suffocated. I have a bad relationship with my brother, we have to share a room. So my overall feeling of the world is I would love for it to leave me the f**k alone, and I don't have a corner to hide from it. And in that reality, I'm going to bed and I'm putting headphones on, and I'm listening to heavy metal. And that music takes me out of it. It gives me a sense of freedom, a sense that there is a reality that I am connected to, where I'm freer than I am here. That's a stereotypical teenage or pre-teens story. Maybe a clearer example is Terence McKenna… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

11. 

    21 Jan 2021

    Pay Attention | PsyPol talk show

    I’m starting a regular podcast—new episode every other Monday—with my friend, science writer John Horgan. (There should be a subscribe button in the bottom-right of the player.) Over time, I’m hoping to get to a weekly schedule, with other Mondays occupied by other guests. In this first episode, John and I talked about John’s new book and hockey career, the 60s, my escape from the city, Russian new laws about “foreign agents” (and my case for not being one), my amanita muscaria project, the interplay between art and politics, Patti Smith and Adam Curtis, inner emigration, Psychopolitica, and more. There’s a video version too: Below is a transcript of a 5 min segment from our conversation, which starts with John plugging his book—Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (https://www.amazon.com/Pay-Attention-Sex-Death-Science/dp/1949597091/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=pay+attention+horgan&qid=1611105765&sr=8-1)—and quickly veers off into a disjointed monologue by me on politics, freedom, art, and the absurd. The drawings are some of the illustrations I made for the book. They’ll seem out of context here, but maybe they’ll intrigue you enough to get the book on Amazon. JOHN: People are sort of going, "Well, what is it? Is it like your other books? Is it a work of journalism?" And I'm not sure. It's hard for me to describe it. So I'm just trying to get people to go and read it, and then tell me what they think it is. But as I said: kind of a stream of consciousness account of what a science writer thinks of over the course of a typical day. NIKITA: I was actually a little skeptical when you told me the premise—a stream-of-consciousness thing, a day in life of a science writer—I thought, "Is a day in life of a science writer so captivating?" But I loved it. I'm always happy when a big, important, lofty thing—something you're supposed to care about, political or philosophical or whatever—is contextualized in the actual experience of life, and it turns out that these ideas about whether consciousness or matter is the primary thing and the other secondary are right there next to... I think the book starts with the question "Who farted?" Like, that is how it actually works. The big philosophical opinions, decisions and ideas are right next to the mundane and the absurd. And I love that. I once had an experience of the same kind of thing, but in the political realm. I went to three different events in the course of a week. One was this thing called Monstration. It’s a weird tradition that started about 15 years ago in Russia. It's something that looks like a political rally that's done on the 1st of May, which was this huge thing for the Soviet state and ideology—Labor Day, you know, workers of the world unite—and then the holiday carried over, so everybody gets a day off; but the ideology is not there anymore, so it's sort of unclear why this is a big holiday. And these rallies still take place, various political forces do their thing, but, again, it's not always clear why. And so somebody came up with the idea of doing something that looks like a political rally, but with all the slogans being puns, or absurdities, or something, the meaning of which is hard to be sure about. Some of these are political jokes, but most are just a way to appreciate the absurd. The one I participated in, in St. Petersburg, was interesting in format. They couldn't get a separate permit for the Monstration, but the city allowed to make it a part of everybody else's demonstration. And this made it even better. You had these Stalinists—who were not making any jokes, they were actually proudly carrying porters of Stalin, marching down the street—and after them there were anarchists, and after them nationalists, and then you had these other people, and it wasn’t clear what they were up to. It made things even more absurd. You could see the faces of the cops watching the thing: they could place the communists in one bucket, and the anarchists in another, and then they saw us, and we made them confused (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyM-f31dSzY&ab_channel=HappyToast). They’d see one poster that did mention Putin among a dozen of nonsensical ones, and discuss: Should we grab that person? Is that a violation of whatever it is that we're defending here? Somebody waved from a window of a nearby building as the crowd was walking past. People started chanting: That dude in the building! That dude in the building! So the man hears a whole procession of people just chanting his presence. At some point, the rally made a turn in a direction people didn't expect. So the Monstration crowd started chanting, Where are we going? Where are we going? It seemed like a beautiful metaphor both for this march—not just this subset of it, but the Stalinists on the anarchists and everybody else too—and also the country itself, not knowing where it is headed, confused about the purpose of it all. Sorry, I'm taking a long time to get to my point. I went to this thing, and the second event was a music show by this young singer (https://youtu.be/Y5MUjirSDgs)—a girl who had just finished high school, she must have been 18 or so at the time. She was not assuming a political pose of any sort. She wasn't not trying to be heroic and stand up to Putin. But politics is present in her songs as references, as something to make a joke or a rhyme about. And there were things in those songs that could be framed as inciting violence against the police, but they were situated in between the first love and getting drunk as a teenager, and whatever else an 18 year old girl has on her mind. First love, stealing whiskey from dad—and then, Putin, the war in Crimea, and the police state. And finally, there was an actual political rally, organized by Navalny's people, against Putin's inauguration for his new term at a time. And my sense was that the people at the overtly political rally looked like people who really want to be free but can’t. They live under this oppressive regime. So they need to get Putin out, and then they’ll be free—at some future point. While the people at the absurdist rally and these young kids at the music show seemed like people who are already free, despite Putin and his police state. They're not held back in terms of their individual freedom. They're not scared to be honest in their self-expression, to do what they want to do, be what they want to be—as opposed to this other approach, "First we're going to fight Putin, and then afterwards we're going to be able to do what we want to do." So your book has that quality for me. It's not in the political realm. It's in the philosophical, scientific area of thought. But there is that quality still—the big, important thing is contextualized in the actual lived experience. And the actual lived experience is more important to me than these systems of thought that we construct. Thank you. I think you, maybe more than anybody, get what I was after, and I'm sure it helps that we've had these conversations over the years. I've always been struck by the disconnect between ideas in my head—in the way that I think about them and the way that they're all entangled with all this other stuff that's going on in my head... Like, if I'm writing an essay about free will, there's my argument for free will on the page, and it doesn't even have that much to do with what's actually going on in my head when I'm thinking about free will. When I'm having all these doubts, and then thinking about my girlfriend or about my kids, having all these emotions swirling around... So the older I get, the more it seems to me that, when ideas are lifted out of their human context and presented in papers and books, they are phony somehow. They're not real when they're pulled out of their context. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe (https://psychopolitica.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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