cosmogenesis

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction proposes a new story of evolution by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars. This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.

Long, long before the Information Age ended, young Hildegard of Bingen finds beauty in the moral and spiritual ruins of her medieval world. In her forty-third year, she inscribes her cosmic visions into Scivias, an indescribably beautiful codex of writing and illuminations thought to be destroyed during the evacuation of Earth. In a sea cave with cracked amethyst walls on Avaaz, Pinky Agarwalia discovers fragments of this visionary text containing hitherto unknown pathways to a lost vision of human co-existence with plants and non-humans – and the seeds of its rebirth on Avaaz. Bursting with mythic quantum energy, Hildegard's vital linguistic potion viriditas, threaded throughout her communiques, is a lush, verdant, renewable life-force. Her ecological message may be just the magic needed for rebirth on Avaaz. Hildegard's mystic toolkit for the future includes a cosmology, medicine, a morphology of crystals, recipes – and the symbols of a new language. As Pinky Agarwalia traces the diagrams with her fingertip, she suddenly understands – a vision that appears without warning in her own mind – that she must first immerse these materials in water, a guarded substance. In the water, the molecules of the hidden language dissolve, freeze then reconfigure into new shapes, the crystalline language communicated not through sound but by feeling and light. ?Lingua Ignota, Hildegard's mysterious invented 'unknown language', arrives just in time for a world in flux, one whose coordinates are being recast.

Ignota Books publishes the original white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto on its tenth anniversary, providing a guide to the blockchain technology that is transforming our lives. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto published a revolutionary white paper that described a simple peer-to-peer electronic cash system that would later become Bitcoin. In the decade since the launch of the digital currency, the nascent blockchain technology behind Bitcoin has been heralded as having the same radical potential as the printing press or the Internet, in particular presenting extraordinary challenges to traditional banking. Yet the paper contains no reference to existing political ideas, monetary or economic knowledge. Why? The White Paper returns to Nakamoto's canonical text as a Rosetta Stone that can serve as the compass for a rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary techno-politics. Crypto-economist Jaya Klara Brekke provides a guide and commentary, contextualising the paper for a wide readership and revealing the far-reaching implications of decentralisation. Also includes an introduction by acclaimed artist and technologist James Bridle situating Bitcoin within an obscure historical movement of decentralisation, showing how blockchain is part of a wider project to redraw the maps of political possibility.