Octopus Rising

Musings on the dominant archetype of the coming age

“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius…” sang an American band called The 5th Dimension in 1969.

Many Western enthusiasts expected a new age of peace, love & crystals. The occult counterculture of late modernity turned its attention to the procession of the stellar equinoxes. Astrologers and mystics dispute the particular historical details, but the widely sensed epochal shift in the collective imagination seized upon the sign of Aquarius — an ancient Mediterranean word for water-carrier or water-pourer.

How would we say that today? The Hydrator? Lord Plumbing? MC Flow? A sense of watery power. Replenishment. Cleansing. Dissolving old boundaries. Of turning inwards. The mass psyche of electrified modernity was trying to articulate something there. It was groping toward the vibe that could align our technological civilization's collective subconscious with the biosphere's needs.

The hippies were both on to something and not quite right. Their acid-infused dreams did not come true. Capitalism has not been overcome, arguably even accelerated. While old institutions from governments to churches are crumbling, they take much longer to fall apart and tighten their grip throughout their demise. Turns out this wasn’t quite the end of history and the Pax Americana is giving way to renewed global power struggles and war.
Yet we see signs of Leary’s SMI2LE formula (Space migration, intelligence increase, life extension) playing out. SpaceX, the psychedelic renaissance, Brian Johnson’s quest for immortality. Additionally, exponential technologies - AI, blockchain, synthetic biology - are just starting. Something has shifted, but it’s swaying back and forth, transforming. 

What symbol could encapsulate the nature of and encode the most adaptive strategies within this bio-digital New Axial Age? What is the resonant motif and super-saturated grimoire of the Metamodern Age, the instructional emblem for the Gaianthropocence, the presiding totem of the era of creative re-tribalization?

You know I’m talking about the octopus. Years ago, when I heard a prescient avatar of a made-up prophet mention that the octopus could be the prime symbol of our age as off-hand speculation around a digital campfire, I felt my whole body vibrate with resonance. Ever since, I’ve been orbiting around this image, listening to its call, attempting to express its message. It’s about time I address it directly.

To this end, I’ve teamed up with Layman Pascal, a galaxy-brained spouter of integrative neologisms, ontology-crossing provocateur, and arch-magician of the adjacent. The piece you are reading is a remix of our octopoid musings (Layman published an alternative version on his blog Xagick simultaneously). 

The octopus could be the dominant archetype of the coming age. It holds the secret to thriving in this world individually and also navigating toward a better future collectively.

The sigil of the eight-limbed one

“We are the invisible bringer of change. Slip through the cracks and you might get a glimpse of our tentacles, luring just beyond the horizon” - the Octopus

The psychedelic alchemist Terrence McKenna described the era that culminates in modern mechanistic progress as symbolised by the horse (the horsepower of the steam engine and automobile) being replaced by the digital psychedelic age of the cephalopod — the squid, cuttlefish & octopus.

Have you noticed the image of the octopus getting much more popular recently? From popular TV shows like “Squid Games” or  “My Octopus Teacher” to a revival of the Lovecraftian mythos. 

The noosphere is picking up something - a new archetype emerging from the deep ocean of the collective unconscious. To understand why, it is illuminating to consider some of the aspects that make the octopus an interesting animal: 

Octopuses are an intelligent form of life from a distant evolutionary tree branch. Their brain-to-body ratio is the largest of any invertebrate. Their intelligence is distributed yet integrated: the brains in each of their tentacles drive autonomous action as well as coordinate as a single organism. They are surprisingly adept at using tools like stones, shells, or coconuts. Intelligence that is utterly different from humans. Aliens from the deep sea, basically. 

They are also masters of camouflage and obfuscation. Some can dynamically match their surroundings with the colors of their bodies or disappear in a cloud of ink like oceanic magicians. Octopuses can fit through tiny spaces with their fluid anatomies. There is a certain slyness about them. 

Each limb of an octopus can advance its own agenda, but is united to the others through a legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. Like Rilke’s poem, the example of the octopus commands “you must change your life”, to add your intelligence to something larger than yourself. 

It makes sense why the image of the octopus, the deep sea alien, suddenly becomes resonant in the age of atomization, alien disclosure, and artificial intelligence. We are reaching for new forms of intelligence that are collective. It hits a deep yearning for the close social ties we’ve lost in our disconnected society of individuals. At the same time, it forebodes a dark vision of interlocking swarms of AIs that will institute the new societies of tentacular control.  

Obfuscation becomes more appealing within ubiquitous surveillance and a general sense of excess transparency. Social media digitised the town square and the internet is devouring the world. With the eye of Sauron looming, invisibility becomes a great power. The multiplicitous monstrosity of AI surveillance capitalism makes use of this power too: You don’t even notice the data streams you are leaking with every swipe on your phone, the gentle nudges of the algorithms in every online interaction, or even the low-orbit satellites watching you.

Inverting Cthulhu

The archetype of the octopus heralds a sprawling future of novel forms of intelligence, but not a determined future: There is a dystopian premonition about AI-powered surveillance capitalism endangering life on earth. At the same time, it intuits a bright vision to realign our systems with nature and enable an artistic and spiritual renaissance. For both, collective intelligence, obfuscation, and the human-machine relationship are crucial. 

The world eater

Currently, it seems like we are well on our way into the much darker timeline. Cthulhu, Lovecraft’s end boss of annihilation, sports a humanoid shape with the eldritch head of an octopus. It is often interpreted as a metaphor for the indifference of cosmic forces to our human affairs - a meteor could wipe us all out at any time. The suggested nihilist view of “we’re just apes on a small speck of dust in an infinite meaningless cosmos” might actually bring about our demise. If it doesn’t matter anyway, why even try? Let’s grab what I can and enjoy it while it lasts. This attitude makes true collaboration impossible, keeps us atomized, and vulnerable to control. At the heart of all existential risks, from nuclear war to climate change, is the failure to coordinate as a species. Corporations, politicians, governments - each tentacle just following its own interests to the bitter end, because the others will too. There is a mechanistic quality to the dark octopus headed one, the aggregation of all the machines we’ve built with only limited goals in mind, without considering the big picture of their interactions. 

Death to the individual 

“You can’t change anything. But the parts within you that see, that know, the ones that dare to dream, they can. If they interlink with their counterparts in other humans, the Octopus will rise. The future calls from in-between, death to the individual.”   - the Octopus

Why does it seem like there is no way out of our current predicament? The myth of the individual and the pipedream of the pursuit of happiness. This one-two-punch of confusion holds our society captive and is what we need to overcome for a brighter future under the sign of the Octopus to come into being.

Game theory is only inexorable if we keep playing zero-sum games. The saving grace of the inverted Cthulhu, the positive version of the Octopus archetype, is to relinquish personal interest for the greater good. Even getting rid of the notion of the individual altogether by re-weaving a functional social fabric that allows us to enter collective intelligence. 

First of all, we were never individuals. Each of us contains multitudes, different parts with different goals. More importantly, we are profoundly influenced by our social environment. Family, friends, and colleagues; organizations, media, and ideas. The very concepts we use to think are social. Additionally, it is not humans vs. nature, we are nature from the food we eat to the air we breathe - our separation is an illusion. If you ask yourself what makes you happy and inquire there, you will notice that happiness always appears in relationships. Whether you are after power, fame, or good-looking mates - these concepts only make sense in relationship to others. Not to mention that any of these goals are downstream of clean air to breathe.

Not only can you not make yourself happy, you don’t even exist as an independent agent. A better way of looking at yourself is as a nexus of relationships, a “dividual” instead of an individual. You exist within multiple relations with other humans, ideas, and the biosphere. By leaning into these relationships, the question stops being “What do I want?” and becomes “How do I contribute?” Finding our way back into tightly coupled social groups that think and act like a single organism. You become just one tentacle in a social octopus that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The saving grace of the fractal Octopus

The replacement of monolithic, centralized, top-down control with mycelial bottom-up emergence doesn’t just go for our notion of the self, but also for our institutions and the very notion of power. 

Embracing the octopus within, creating a harmony of different parts and perspectives within oneself, makes it possible to contribute to the great Octopus outside — the emergence of a third attractor enabled by new forms of technology, ecology, and power. 

New power does not resemble the inherited stereotypes of the last few thousand years. The octopus does not rule its limbs from the central head. The limbs are quasi-autonomous hubs of reciprocal sensemaking and shapeshifting action. The emergent “will” is powerful, sophisticated, surprising, and swarmlike — not easily represented by hierarchies and organizational flow charts. By linking up with others in this octopoid state, we might be able to shift the world into a third attractor point (besides dystopia and catastrophe). More ecological, more technological, more libertarian, and more communal at the same time.

This is emergent action, without a master plan. Like the power rangers of the meta crisis, we will solve wicked problems by assembling into an octopus. However, these intelligent collectives will disassemble just as easily once their multidimensional aim has been achieved. Organizations will become both more fluid and more transient. Organizations that are short-lived and weird, just like an octopus.

In contrast to the mechanistic logic of atomized individuals and monolithic corporations, this is natural, collective, and decentralised intelligence unfolding. The next Buddha is the Sangha. Make no mistake, this is an improbable hail mary that would require a complete overhaul of our social, political, and economic systems. Nevertheless, humanity may take its rightful place as the nervous system of the planet after all. Using machines to facilitate our interlinking instead of atomizing us. That possibility is what the Octopus is whispering to us.

We can hear its whispers at certain gatherings where we effortlessly and deeply connect with the people around us. When we are immersed in natural beauty and feel a strange kinship with birds, hills, and trees. Whenever it seems like we are part of a much greater intelligent pattern. And also from the desperation of wasting away days in bullshit jobs or rushing through a crowd while feeling isolated. More like this, less like that. 

Teachings of the Octopus

Having clarified why the octopus is a potent image to describe the world we are moving towards, we now turn to the teachings of the Octopus. What are the necessary capacities we need to develop to thrive in this world? How do we contribute towards a bright tentacular future? How do we integrate nature and technology? And finally, what does the octopus’ mastery of camouflage have to do with all of this? 

The teachings of the Octopus will answer these questions in the following four chapters:  

• Ontological design 

• Dividual agency

• Aboriginal cyborgs 

• Becoming imperceptible 

Get ready for more word salad designed to make your soul sing (and recruit you as a dividual agent of the Decentralised Octopoid Intelligence Agency).

Ontological design 

Interfacing with multiple perspectives is expressed in the simultaneity of the octopoid limbs rather than in the solid singularity of the central eye. Each tentacle has a different perspective on the world. We need to become as multi-perspectival as an octopus. In a post-truth world that is complexifying and fragmenting, this could be the most fundamental teaching of the Octopus. Recent frameworks from Ken Wilber’s Integral, Hanzi Freinacht’s Metamodernism, or Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism all emphasise that we necessarily have partial viewpoints on reality and that navigating between them (as opposed to finding the single best or “true” perspective) is the name of the game. There are three distinct moves to be made here: 

• Parallax: Contrasting multiple perspectives and looking for the commonalities or conflicts between them. 

• Superposition: Holding multiple perspectives simultaneously, without trying to resolve their conflicts. Metamodernism’s sincere irony is a prime example. 

• Toggling: Fluidly switching between perspectives, as demanded by the circumstances. Brendan Graham Dempsy emphasises this in “the cultural logic of cultural logics”. 

All of these imply responsibility and choice on the level of perception. Ontological design describes this practice of actively shaping our view of the world. It is the marriage of the fragmentation of meaning inherent in postmodernism and a recovery of a much older, shamanic capacity. 

Functioning in a shamanic sense requires, among other things, a sense of basic freedom & responsibility about incoming impressions and substances. Take responsibility for the meaning, quality, and implications of perceptions. Like an Akido practitioner, you take the momentum of the incoming quality and convert it into a semantic direction of your choice. A strong, intuitively guided, intentional, and emotional gesture, without wavering or changing your mind, impresses the “moment of reception” with a quality and outcome you have decided upon.

Dividual agency 

Once the post-postmodern shaman has both overcome the illusion of the individual (or separate self) and built a capacity for ontological design, dividual agency becomes possible. This is the point at which you can start becoming a part of the Octopus. In reality, there are not only eight limbs but a mycelium of communication, a complex ecology of psychofauna. Imagine Avalokiteshvara as an octopus.  

The dividual agent is responsible for securing the circulation between distributed networks of power and between different ontological domains. Mediating between values and goals, different cultural logics, masculine and feminine eros, past/present/future & Lacan’s domains of the Symbolic, Imaginary & Real (to name a few). The new era does not change the fact that agency is essential to an enchanted life but it appropriately alters the description of how this works.  

The metaphor of left and right brain modes epitomises the need to build internal super-coordination between diverse quasi-autonomous “tentacles” of our nervous system.  This, in turn, requires that we become deeply interested in the liminal sensations of multilateral tension, inner structure and half-trance that inhabit the connective space between our octopoid limbs. To navigate the ecosystem of power and meaning out there, we need to master it within ourselves. Dividual agency can only emerge from a self that is multiple, whose pantheonic team coordinates without top-down control to produce a force of will that exceeds the range, nuance and inspiration of the individual “I”. Our task is to develop a more deeply unique and emergent will in the inner plurality conjoined to select outer pluralities. Through us, the noosphere gains the power to steer itself and we gain depth, insight, and clarity about our actual moments of choice relative to past, present, and future.  

In this new oceanic landscape, the world is no longer imagined as enclaves of individual agents aligned to particular worldviews, organizations, or vocations. The pattern now resembles a shifting interplay between overlapping dividual networks. The agents are plural subjective selves who coordinate in tandem with “sensing and affecting” teams. These teams see reality more deeply than a single person and produce a higher-grade agency. A functioning dividual team outperforms a powerful individual just as surely as a powerful individual outperforms a weak team.

Aboriginal cyborgs

The symbol of the octopus reminds us that we must adaptively re-envision ourselves at all levels in this new era. The octopus is connected to a complex ecosystem of marine life while also being an ingenious user of tools. In addition to the social structures mentioned above, this also includes a deep embedding within the biosphere and a proper use of technology. Both nature and technology. We need to become aboriginal cyborgs. 

Nature no longer stands forth as a simple wilderness of animal competition. It now appears as an evolving and immersive complexity of symbiotic mutations and regenerations. The current trend of bio-regionalism, regenerative movements, and eco-villages is an important limb of the Octopus. Humanity needs to take back its aboriginal place of the guardian of the biosphere, not a great mass of individuals subordinated to a great hierarchical pyramid (with a single Eye on top). In the terminology of Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere enfolds the terrestrial biosphere. Today and tomorrow, our models must become more overlapping, multidirectional, and rhizomatic. 

At the same time, our age is characterized by exponential technologies that will drastically increase our capacities. A living information web, reaching in many directions simultaneously, describes the layout of the digital tools that have only begun their radical reordering of our social environments. Digital tools have helped us to discover vast and previously hidden mycelial networks where before we saw only discrete fungi on the surface. 

Marshall McLuhan described an epochal shift from Printed Text to Digital Information — a mass human migration from the Empire of the Eye to the Archipelago of Hand-and-Ear.  Whereas we formerly exerted enormous force to train children’s brains to decipher excruciatingly dense visual symbolism, we now begin to circulate freely between visual, acoustic, and tactile modes of understanding. The linear optical organization of society does not vanish but sinks into multilateral equality with alternative modes of sensemaking. We will become immersed in an oceanic environment of echoes, currents, and strange forms. 

The octopus is a psychopomp for this deep, multilateral, decentralised, and marine-like reality. 

Becoming imperceptible 

“To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage.
— D&G in A Thousand Plateaus 

Secret societies have sometimes used the slogan: “Wear the cloak of the country you are in.” This will increasingly become a necessary strategy for dividual agents that hold multiple perspectives and nurture fluid connections (many of which provide attack surface, from cancellable to downright illegal). 

The Decentralised Octopoid Intelligence Agency will thrive regardless of who takes public office. Our notions of change are both more personal and more long-term than the arguments taking place at the social surface. We are both more cynical about socio-political alternatives and more confident in our ability to shapeshift in useful ways that skew any nation, creed, or institution in the direction of the future we aim towards. 

We are, in a sense, both alien and indigenous to all conventional social groups and social concerns — but we are acutely aware that political games and regressive public moods have often led to murder and suppression of the leading-edge wisdom agents in any civilization. Churches, nation-states, ethnicities, and local communities are dangerous and ignorant animals. They can be roused into modes of persecution and violence that are typically directed toward people who look and sound too different — or who fail to exhibit the correct shibboleths of social etiquette. So the octopoid networks dedicated to full-spectrum experimental wisdom and dividual agency must be well-disposed toward camouflage and disguise.

This need not be burdensome. It is a wonderful game that reflects both the shapeshifting nature of the octopus and Nietzsche’s famous claims that Nature & God — or both in the case of Dionysus — love masks.  

Our experience of reality and ourselves is layered, seductive, obscured, and performative. It is this deeper “disguised” reality that our dividual agents (the shamans, artists, contemplatives, natural priests, etc.) are adapted to. So it is no surprise that the imagery and legends surrounding these ancient characters frequently involve costume changes, new patterns of speech, and every other kind of play between the ordinary physical and social appearances. The octopus changes its skin color, patterning, and shape to escape, infiltrate, or communicate.

Today this is very resonant. We are crossing an initiatory threshold into a bio-digital epoch swarming with transformation. The tendency of humans to stylistically adapt to their family, town or nation is becoming complicated by technological exposure to every kind of culture, subculture, and region. We are saturated by the digital environment of shifting information streams, customizable screens, and avatars that both reveal & conceal. Genetic chimeras and gender-swapping surgeries are just getting started. The Octopus is known for its surprising protean escapes. It folds, wriggles, changes color, inverts itself, and escapes — but into what?