LAND AMONG THE STARS:
an interview with @prada_horse_shoeIn early May we sat down with @prada_horse_shoe, the founder of the Russian Cosmism Circle in New York, at the European Coffee Bar. She is also a writer and a DJ, among other things. We discussed the philosophy of Russian Cosmism, the likelihood of Radical Life-Extension, how concerned should we really be about AI?, and mankind’s ultimate objective: Defeating Death.
CO: So what is Russian Cosmism?
PHS: Russian Cosmism is a political movement and an ideology that was founded around the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s. If you were to boil it down to its two fundamental pillars, the first one would be defeating death and resurrecting every single person who has ever lived. And secondly, space exploration, like becoming an interplanetary, intergalactic civilization.
Marx wanted to abolish the family, the state, Capitalism, pretty much all the organizing principles that had been dominant up until that point. Russian Cosmists want to go further and fundamentally alter the most fundamental fact of human existence, which is that we die, and overcome that. So Russian Cosmism is a movement that seeks to defeat death, bring back everyone who has ever lived, and also become an interplanetary species that goes forth into the cosmos and beyond planet Earth into the far reaches of the universe.
CO: Why do we want to defeat death?
PHS: There’s Russian Cosmism as something you subscribe to, and there’s Russian Cosmism as something you read to engage with it. The reading group is trying to do both. First of all, it’s trying to get people to consider these questions primarily because our Silicon Valley billionaires, the people who rule the world—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others—certainly read those texts, and they quote them, and they cite them in their own visions for humanity, so at the very least we should be reading about the ideology of defeating death because it is being championed by our new tech overlords.
And secondly, it’s becoming increasingly scientifically viable. I’m not sure that we’re gonna defeat death, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that we see radical life extension within this century. Whether or not you wanna get behind that project, it’s already being pushed by people who have a huge amount of power, influence, and money, so we should start preemptively thinking through the implications.
I think it’s quite important for us on the Left to engage with this discourse because I feel like the general reaction so far has been a collective eye-roll, but it seems very strange to me to dismiss the idea of extending life. Like, it’s all we have—life. And most people are really happy to be alive, and they would at least like the option to stay around for longer, especially if that means being healthy.
Recently I’ve become very interested in politics around the body. Whether it’s RFK or Luigi Mangione, or even the Alex Jones/Gwyneth Paltrow horseshoe overlap, biohacking stuff…, debates about hormones. It’s not just trans people who are using HRT. The population that uses it the most are cis people, whether it’s menopausal women or men in their middle ages. Joe Rogan and Jeff Bezos are on hormone replacement therapy. So it’s a reality, you know? Like, look at Ozempic. I think we need to understand that the more these pharmaceutical technologies become available to the general public, people are going to want to experiment with them. People are injecting peptides into themselves that they’re getting off the dark web or China without supervision. They’re going on Reddit, they’re finding protocols based on whatever health influencer they’re following. And I think that, fundamentally, it’s because many people want to be healthy. And in the spectrum of health, what is maximum health? It’s not dying.
I don’t think it’s realistic that we’re gonna defeat death anytime soon, but in trying to do so you will find ways to diminish disease or the frailty which comes with old age, so even if you’re not defeating death in the foreseeable future you will, I think, as a byproduct of that aspiration and research, drastically diminish the physical suffering that people go through as they age or as they deal with illness. So to answer your question of why we would want to defeat death, we can reframe it as “why would we want to defeat illness?” And I think the answer to that is obvious: people don’t want to be a frailer version of themselves.
CO: We’re certainly in this moment where once immutable aspects of our humanity are now subject to be overcome. It seems like a lot of these tech billionaires are adopting a transhumanist worldview that appears to have a lot in common with Russian Cosmism. If Russian Cosmism is rooted in Marxism, isn’t it a bit counterintuitive that the people we see most aligned with this idea of radical life extension are the wealthiest?
PHS: I don’t think it’s an offshoot of Marxism. Marxism helps you to understand economics, local class structure, modes of production, and how they impact societal relations, and I think Cosmism is complementary to that. Many Cosmists were Marxist because they were in Russia during the Russian Revolution and they found it compelling and they supported it. The Soviets invested huge amounts of money into space exploration, and that wasn't simply because of competition with the United States, but also because Marxism and socialism have a humanist, bold worldview. Marx spoke about dominating nature in the Communist Manifesto. Subduing and dominating nature was part of the boldness of the vision, and I think that naturally translated into a society state that was very in favor of space exploration.
CO: For the Cosmists, is part of the reason we need to invest in space exploration because once we resurrect everyone who has died, we're gonna need somewhere to put them because they won't all fit on Earth?
PHS: Yes, partly, there is a real estate problem. There is a limited amount of space on Earth. But also, when your program is that you wanna defeat death, that is a level of scientific, technological advancement that is hard for us to even imagine.
They saw it as part of the responsibility of mankind to spread consciousness, because as far as we’re aware, we’re the only conscious intelligence. So I think wanting to spread consciousness throughout the universe is also a motivating factor for space exploration. And also expanding our understanding of the universe, you know? A society that prioritizes science and technology to the point that they can defeat death is such a curious civilization that it would necessarily want to go forth and explore more and more and gain more understanding of the universe that we live in.
CO: Defeating death is one thing, but resurrecting everyone else who’s ever died is another question. What if someone killed themselves and they don’t want to come back to life?
PHS: That’s something that people ask about a lot. One reason that it’s important to defeat death is that we love to be alive and it’s sad and tragic when people die, generally speaking. But it’s also that death itself, the mere fact of death, leads to a lot of suffering. Could you have war without death? Death is the currency of war. So if you no longer have death, then you can’t have war, right? And if you think about all the means through which people have historically been subjugated and oppressed, it often ultimately ends in either some kind of physical punishment, or subjugation via the threat of death. And related to that, there’s also states of scarcity.But when you’ve overcome death, you probably have also overcome scarcity. There’s probably enough food for everyone, people don’t need to work—no one’s doing an office job because you’ve figured out food, we’ve figured out materials that can create housing and make it basically free, you’re kind of living in this state of abundance. So would a person who committed suicide pre-death get to that point in this new world where maybe the conditions that led them to want to end their lives don’t exist? Not to say that everyone ends their lives because of material conditions, there’s also the psychological, but we may come to the point where we can address those as well.
CO: If the end goal is to overcome death, and then you successfully do it and transcend to this transhuman state of eternal life and you start expanding, what is the new end? I’m interested in the ideological element, because in other ideologies like Marxism the end is defeating the bourgeoisie and seizing the means of production, and in Christianity the end is dying and going to Heaven or Hell. So to take away the end and you’re just eternally expanding, then what is the meaning, or what is the narrative meaning? A lot of suicidal ideation also comes from the burden of meaninglessness.
It reminds me of this Dino Buzzati novel The Singularity—which predates Ray Kurzweil’s understanding of singularity—basically these Italian scientists create a machine that replicates consciousness, but in order to make it as human as possible they make it believe it possesses the ability to kill itself because the fact that we have the option to get out of life provides us meaning: we choose to live every day. Without having the option of suicide or death as a force to give life meaning—
PHS: —It’s interesting because Russian Cosmism is very different to, say, Marxism, and even liberalism, in that it’s both materialist because they were scientists and they wanted to use science to achieve this mission, but they were also spiritual. They were rooted in a Christian tradition, so this whole idea of resurrection is inspired directly by Christianity in the Chrisitian view of world history: at some point everyone is resurrected and they live in this state of Heaven. And you live eternally, but there’s no longer suffering, there’s no longer illness, there’s no longer death. And so the Cosmists believed that eternal life was part of God’s plan, except that it was humans doing it instead of God. I think it’s fair to say that the end is some kind of Heaven, where there is no more suffering. It’s not something that is offered by any other political ideology. And in a world like this, you could just endlessly create new things, and the universe is infinite and so you could infinitely explore, and infinitely create, and infinitely grow and learn and expand—I don’t know, I mean I have no idea what Heaven is like or what Russian Cosmists’ type of Heaven is, but I think it’s a good problem to have. If the problem is like, “damn what if we get bored in, like, UTOPIA?” It’s honestly way better than any other problem we’ve ever had to deal with.
CO: Would you consider yourself a techno-optimist? Or, rather, do you think that those on the Left should be techno-optimists?
PHS: Marx was very clear that technology could be used to exploit workers, but it could also be a way to limit the toil and burden of work. We used to do physical labor that destroyed our bodies and was oppressive and led to endless hours of toil. Ultimately he envisioned a world where there was no longer this toil, and machines played a really important role in abolishing toil. He’s often accused of being promethean and of being anti-nature and pro-technology, and there’s been various defenses of Marx, like Kohei Saito, who tries to retroactively green Marx and say he wasn’t as pro-technology as people say he was, but my read was that technology was central in any aspiration to free man from toil and to enable us to have lives where we can flourish and where we can just be artists or philosophers and not subject ourselves to endless labor.
The most notable example of this was with the New Deal in this country, when we secured shorter working weeks and the weekend, etc. That’s enabled by technology. I’d like to get to a world where there’s zero hours to work, personally. That doesn’t mean I want us to sit around and do nothing, but I just think no one was put on this world to be an accountant. You know what I mean? I just don’t think that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. So if we can just free ourselves from these kinds of jobs that occupy the vast majority of humanity, that’s a good thing, and we will only get there through change. You either have a subjugated class of people who are enslaved or exploited, like outsourcing, or you outsource it to a machine. And I obviously don’t support exploiting human beings, but the question of exploitation just doesn’t apply to a machine. I know that some are debating if AI is conscious like blah blah blah. At this current stage I’m not concerned with that. I’m not concerned with getting a machine to work 24/7 around the clock for millennia. I don’t think that’s a problem.
CO: We don’t need labor laws for AI.
PHS: Yeah. So if by techno-optimism we’re saying “having a vision of human flourishing and emancipation that is in part enabled through technology,” then yes I think it’s really important for the Left to embrace that. There’s many reasons why I think it’s important to embrace the prometheanism and pro-technology position of Russian Cosmism. One of them is that the alternative that’s being pushed right now is this degrowth movement which is really exemplified by this book Degrowth Communism by Kohei Saito—he’s like a Japanese, Marxist, ecologist, eco-marxist. And his book became a bestseller, and it’s essentially arguing—and this is common, you hear people saying this, especially post-Covid. When Covid hit, so many people said “oh, this is a good thing, we’re flying less, we’re consuming less, nature is healing—”
CO: “We are the virus.”
PHS: “We are the disease,” or whatever. And they were arguing that, because we were all cooped up at home and not flying anywhere and not going out and not manufacturing as much, that this is somehow good because emissions were down, and this is the path forward?
CO: It came at the cost of human life.
PHS: Yes it did, and they were arguing that we should make a political choice to just do this ourselves. Just degrow and stay at home and whatever. And they argue that it’s a political and moral imperative to do so because of the climate—I think that’s the most dangerous thing that we could do at this moment, to turn away from technology right now. It would cause us to spiral if we decided to degrow, and there’s a word for that: recession. And generally that’s not a good thing. But also you start to immiserate people, and that’s how you actually get fascism. That’s how you actually push us over the brink, if you seriously deprive people. If we are in a degrowth world, my fear is that it creates a death spiral where there’s less and less money to innovate so that at some point you get locked into spiraling away from progress. You’re just regressing. And that’s dangerous politically because that creates opportunities for the far-right to take hold because they flourish in moments of economic collapse.
But also our most pressing concern right now globally is climate change, and we will not address climate change by not flying on planes. The way we will address it is through technology. We’re gonna have to find a new source of fuel that is not fossil fuel. That is a technological question, it is not a moral or ethical question of “if I become a vegan or do I not become a vegan.” It is a question of research, and we want to have as much economic growth as possible to allow that research to be funded so we can get to that breakthrough as fast as possible.
Maybe it’s fusion energy that will deliver that to us. Fusion energy would be limitless free energy with almost no potential side effect in terms of risk of nuclear meltdown. So it’s the dream scenario, which is why all of Silicon Valley—like Sam Altman and Bill Gates and all of these tech CEOs are investing in fusion energy research because they understand that AI has vast, rapacious energy needs, and the far-leftists look at that and say “we should consume less AI.” That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that we should expand our use of AI and make it such that because our energy needs double, we will be forced to come up with something new. And that is what’s happening. We’re leaping forward in our energy consumption at the same time as putting huge pressure on us to find a fucking solution for our energy needs.
And if our tech CEOs understand that the future is fusion or fission or something that’s not fossil fuels then that’s a really good thing. The amount of money that Sam Altman is personally investing in fusion is like the same amount that the US Government invested in fusion research last year. Why is it that one man is investing in the most critical technology on earth? More than our government which is the most powerful government on earth? Our previous President should have been going in front of the American public every day saying, “this is our moon shot, this needs to be our number one mission.” We should be in a war state of mind, like this is absolutely critical for us to sort out. The public needs to be invested—most people don’t know what fusion is.
CO: What is fusion?
PHS: So fission is where you break atoms apart and by breaking them you release huge amounts of energy that can be used for powering a grid but you can also use it to bomb people. It’s dangerous and it can create Chernobyl-style accidents. But fusion is where you fuse atoms together, and by fusing them it also releases vast amounts of energy that can then be used to power a grid. And it’s extremely difficult to do. It essentially requires building a reactor that is replicating what happens inside of the sun, so you’re basically replicating a star on earth. We have fusion reactors, test ones, that have been able to produce some energy. It’s not anywhere near enough energy, but they’re testing this technology now. And there’s enormous engineering challenges. The material is almost as hot as the sun. So how do you contain this liquid that would melt anything that it comes into contact with? So they have these, I think they’re called tokamaks, they’re these reactors that are shaped like donuts, and they hold this liquid or whatever it is with magnets so it’s not touching the reactor. It’s such a genius engineering solution to the problem.
They’re working on it, and I have no doubt that we will solve this question of how to do this as long as we don’t become annihilated by nuclear war or pandemic or whatever, and we’ll have unlimited energy through fusion. It’s just unclear when we’re gonna get it. And Cosmism, it’s not just about this pie in the sky, defeating death, interplanetary aspirations, it’s about becoming as promethean and maximalist and ambitious as possible, which comes with science and technology, and applying that to the here and now. I think having a society where we are coming together to collectively solve these scientific and technological challenges that affect us all as humans and would benefit us all as humans. That to me is Cosmism. And this is not just my spin on it, the Cosmists were very very concerned with climate. Once you adopt a planetary Cosmist vision, you immediately understand that we’re on a frail planet, we’re just on this rock, and you immediately become concerned with the climate and how the planet is doing and how we can make sure that it survives and then you start to think about what you do when it inevitably isn’t around anymore.
In the very first paragraph of Federov’s Common Task—he was the father of cosmism—he argued that humanity has a task, one thing we all have to do, and that is to defeat death. So Common Task starts with a description of what we would today call geo-engineering, where you basically engineer and manipulate the climate and the planet to change its weather. And so he talks about how before, we would take weapons and we would shoot guns horizontally at each other and we would kill each other this way. But he envisions a world in which one day we would point the weapons upward, and shoot at the clouds to make the clouds rain, and to end famine.
CO: Woah.
PHS: Yeah. This is what we may have to do. We may have to deploy these kinds of technologies to deal with climate change. We’re so vulnerable. If our planet overheats, we’re fucked. Why would we not want to get to a point where we’re so technologically advanced that we limit the heat? It’s dangerous, and people are rightly concerned about intervening in the climate systems. But we’re already intervening in our planet through emissions. And when there’s a volcano that erupts, it’s an intervention and it changes the climate systems. Personally, I think it’s irresponsible to not do some kind of research into the worst case scenario. Russian Cosmists have been thinking about this before geo-engineering was even a concept. I think the degrowth people of this world—whatever they have to offer pales in comparison to the Russian Cosmist answer. And the thing about Elon is that he was considered a big climate advocate, but he said that the environmental movement was all about cutting cutting cutting, and don’t buy this, don’t do this, etc., and his argument is that we should just expand our technological powers and deal with this crisis through a technological approach, and that’s why he founded Tesla. And he’ll say that his two companies, Tesla and SpaceX, were founded specifically as a response to climate change. Tesla was meant to limit emissions, and he said if for whatever reason we’re not successful and this planet becomes inhabitable, then in the worst case scenario we need to be prepared to leave this planet, and that’s where SpaceX comes in. There’s a lot that I disagree with Elon on, but I do agree that ultimately it’s the correct response, and the most politically feasible.
There’s been major protest movements against climate policy. In France there was this whole yellow vest movement where Macron put taxes on gas and fuel, which your typical liberal eco-person would be like “yeah that’s great,” but it hit the working class and poor people the most, and it was effectively a tax on the people who could least afford it and it created a huge backlash that was captured by the right-wing. And the Right was giving voice to all the populist anger, and I think you’re gonna see more and more of that if you try to push eco-austerity onto people. That’s a losing proposition. Nobody wants to hear that they have to consume less and their gas is gonna cost more. They want to hear that you will make it cheaper through technology. We’re in an era of nostalgia, but what we need to have is a politics of the future. People need to be inspired into believing that things are gonna get better. I don’t understand why we don’t have political leaders who are trying to package this kind of message, and this kind of politics. Elon has that kind of techno-optimism and people have obviously soured on him now for many reasons, but five, ten years ago people found him very inspiring. And that was because he had this compelling vision of the future, and I think it’s really essential that politicians can give that. I see this growing out of Russian Cosmist commitments.
CO: I tend to be skeptical anytime possession of a potentially world-altering technology is concentrated in the hands of the few, who have little incentive to change the structure of society that elevated them to power in the first place. You said promethean a lot, and I can see how technological development can be good but I fear that in practice it might be less promethean and more icarusian. AI, for example, is this amazing technology that can do so much to liberate the masses from modern toil and allow everyone to be an artist by automating all work, but what incentive do men like Sam Altman have to do that? With SpaceX, if we are able to colonize other planets, then why would that opportunity be extended to the many? At what point, then, does technological development fulfill this promethean promise and bestow freedom upon the masses as opposed to making the poor scramble to find something else that won’t soon be replaced by technology?
PHS: Yeah, that’s why I think it’s important not to—for me, I’m not replacing explicitly leftist theory or Marxist theory with Cosmism, I don’t think one replaces the other, I think of them as complementary. There’s a long history of people—like J.D. Bernal is a good example of this. He was a British, Marxist, crystallographer (like, a chemist who studied crystals,) and a really respected leading scientist in Britain, but also a member of the Communist Party, and a Stalinist committed to the socialist project, and for him the project of ensuring that people are truly free and the project of science and expanding science went hand in hand, and whether you prescribe to his particular strand of leftism the point is that there’s many left-wing figures who have been able to be committed to both of those things. Committed to the political project of ensuring that people are not subjugated or exploited, and also committed to being, yeah—promethean. I think it would be naive to think that simply by progressing technologically that we will necessarily be better off. One doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.
The Left, labor unions, have always fought for less work. It was the labor unions that gave us the weekend, it was the labor unions that gave us the work day that ended at 5, and as long as we are getting advancements that are negotiated for us on behalf of either unions or left-wing politicians, I think that’s what our safeguard is. Our safeguard is not technology, our safeguard is working people organizing.
CO: The Left would be remiss to ignore the fact of technological development and leave it in the hands of the Right.
PHS: Yeah, and to also not have a vision around how it could look. There are two worlds we could live in. One is all that we’re all out of work and drinking soylent and living on bare minimum caloric intake—
CO: We would be so skinny.
PHS: Yeah. But it doesn’t have to go that way, and I’m not saying it’ll necessarily go one way or another but I’m saying we should do everything we can to get to a world where we don’t have to be engaged in useless toil, but we can flourish in a true sense of the word.
CO: That sounds good. I always thought we should just live in a world where technology takes all the jobs nobody wants to do and we can all just do whatever we want but there’s always someone who’s like Noo...
PHS: Also, the nature of work has changed so much. If you ask high school kids what their top five jobs they’d want to do are, a content creator is one of them, being an influencer is one of them. Think about podcasting: you have people making hundreds of thousands of dollars just shooting the shit with their friends. That’s not even high tech. They’re making more money than some CEOs of small companies while they’re hungover and have bad vocal fry. Then you have people like Pinkydoll and all these twitch streamers who go on livestreams and spend hours a day interacting with their viewers and just spout in this mechanical way the most incomprehensible catchphrases and make millions. Basically what I’m saying is that work will evolve. It has evolved, and it’s impossible to predict the ways people make money and occupy themselves. I’m not saying that’s where I want us to be, but it’s to say that we’re endlessly creative and new things will always come up. Accounting is not a job that a medieval peasant would understand.
We need to mobilize for the future that we want, and we can’t do that if we’re completely dejected, without hope, and doomers. And that’s one thing I’m trying to snap people out of: doomerism. When you’re reading Russian Cosmist literature it’s impossible to be pessimistic. It’s really inspiring whether or not you ultimately sign onto the ideology or movement, it still inspires some kind of vision for the future that’s better than the one we’re in. We can’t defeat the existential challenges we’re facing without a public that feels some hope.
CO: It is so easy to get caught in the cycle of passivity and jadedness. I think a lot of people feel that if they have no autonomy whatsoever over their conditions of existence, over politics, over the country and that world history is gonna just follow whatever course it’s on so it’s easier to just not give a fuck. It’s good that there’s a space for people to get together to read and think about these kinds of things in a more hopeful way.
Do you address the doomerist topics of where AI could go—like AGI or gray goo—in the reading circle?
PHS: That stuff concerns me a lot. Even the most techno-optimist people—like, Elon is concerned about that. You’d be a fool to not be concerned about AGI because humans are only able to be dominant on this planet because we’re the most intelligent life force. But if there’s a more intelligent entity on earth, what’s to stop it from treating us the way we treat cockroaches? We’ve never been in a situation where we’ve been confronted with an intelligence that’s greater than us. I think it’s important that we ensure that AI serves human beings.
AI is on its course no matter what. And I think it’s essential that we push governments to make sure that we’re safe from AGI.
CO: In March 2023 there was an open letter that Elon cosigned that was like, “we need to pause AI development now,” and nothing happened. Do you think we should pause AI development until all the AI guys can get together and figure out what to do about AGI?
PHS: I mean, I think that the speed with which it's happening is terrifying. I don’t want us to wake up one day and find that it happened. I think that it’s possible. It’s interesting because some of the critics—one of the biggest critics of Russian Cosmism is this woman Timnit Gebru, and I sort of discovered Russian Cosmism through her. She’s a Google researcher who resigned and became a Google whistleblower, and accused the algorithm of being racist and sexist. Since stepping down—or maybe she was fired. Either way, since she left Google she’s been one of the most vocal critics of Silicon Valley and she came up with this acronym TESCREAL, which is this whole bundle of Silicon Valley ideologies [Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalist ideology, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism]. Cosmism is the C in the acronym. Someone like Timnit Gebru will say that concern about AGI is actually just hype from the industry, and we shouldn’t take it seriously.
CO: To make their project seem really important.
PHS: Yeah. I just think it’s interesting how the Left has this conflicting— how on the one hand we’re like “oh, this is bullshit,” and there’s definitely a section of the Left that she represents: “this isn’t gonna happen, this is just the tech bros trying to pull the wool over our eyes, whatever.” And there’s other people who are like “no, this is terrifying and we’re all gonna die.” But it shows that we’re not on the same page, even with something fundamental like whether or not we should be concerned. But even if there’s a tiny percent chance that this could control us, it seems like a good idea to control it.
CO: Existential human doom is a pretty big risk. I saw this paper that said 30% of AI researchers agree that AGI could cause existential human doom. But unless they all agree to pause then none of them will pause, cause what if China gets it first?
PHS: This is where transhumanism comes in, because what if we fuse with AI? Neuralink is already being used. So if we are the AI and that’s integrated into our heads and into our brains, how does it change this conversation?
CO: Someone might say, “you can just turn it off, just flip the switch and it’ll be all fine.” Is that a good enough argument?
PHS: No. There’s no way you can turn it off. It’s like we’re in kindergarten and there’s an adult in charge. Our brains cannot even comprehend an off-button. There’s no way a house fly can scheme and win against a human. It might think it can, but it can’t. And that’s the position we’ll be in if it’s more intelligent than us. And we likely won’t know when it’s crossed that threshold, and at that point it’s too late, if we’re trying to turn it off.
CO: Do you have a message of hope for the reader of Clocked Out?
PHS: Don’t be defeatist, don’t be doomerist, even a small dose of promethean utopianism is salutary for your mind, for your critical outlook, even if you don’t necessarily subscribe to it fully, even if you’re not ultimately persuaded, it’s worth reading these texts and it’s worth thinking about what a world would look like if we were radically advanced technologically. And how life could be better in such a world, and how to get to that world where we’re flourishing.
CO: For anyone interested in Russian Cosmism who wants to learn more, where can they sign up?
PHS: We have public events and public programming as well as reading groups. Our reading group met last weekend and we meet once a month, and we read from Boris Groys’ Russian Cosmism anthology. Those reading groups are open so anyone can either message me or go to the Russian Cosmism circle Instagram and message us there and ask to join the reading group. That’s open to everyone. And there’s public events, which we will announce soon. If you’re in New York those are available to you, if not, get on that fucking Wikipedia page. It’ll blow your mind.
Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity.
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