We are living through accelerating technological advancements tied to deep existential global uncertainty. It’s not unlike the conditions of 2020, the last hype cycle and the year FWB—and many of our peers—came into existence. Retail audiences flocked to crypto in search of alternatives futures—both financial and ideological—amid global chaos. We were resource rich as an industry.

That summer of 2022, we did something that seemed impossible post-pandemic: bringing together 1,000 internet friends to the woods of Idyllwild, CA for a music festival and collective cultural inquiry, all through the lens of emerging technology.

FWB FEST returns for a fourth year. We’re embracing a technological and cultural tension: data-driven predictions and unquantifiable human experience, technological precision and chaotic reality, algorithms that map our past and the uncharted territories of our shared futures. FEST is our annual opportunity to examine how we optimistically move forward at the junction of seemingly oppositional forces.

In collaboration with longtime FWB member and FEST mainstage alum, Ruby Justice Thelot, we developed the narrative driving our FEST25 programming: "Syzygy: Predictive Models, Unpredictable Futures.”

A syzygy (pronounced “si·zuh·jee”) is the alignment of celestial bodies and a tension of opposites. It’s an apt word representing our current technological and cultural context. Our FEST25 programming across ideas, workshops and experiences covers four essential questions:

• How do emerging technologies script cultural trajectories?
• How do algorithms, data, egregores and AI function as modern oracles?
• How do creatives and technologists serve as contemporary mythmakers?
• How do memes and internet-driven conspiracy theories drive cultural production?

If this excites you and you’d like to pitch an idea for programming or want to bring your brand to FEST, send mail to partnerships@fwb.help. Tickets for FEST25 arrive soon.

Syzygy: Predictive Models, Unpredictable Futures by Ruby Justice Thelot

On November 11th, 1793, known in those highly rational years as “20 Brumaire, Year II”, the second year of the first French Republic, a group of Parisians gathered to celebrate the Festival of Reason. Amongst them was the mathematician and Engineer-in-Chief of the National School of Bridges and Roads, Gaspard Riche de Prony, who was tasked with building logarithmic tables that would help the government conduct a large census and create a countrywide cadastre, a “register of property showing the extent, value, and ownership of land for taxation.” Prony, eager to demonstrate the newfound capabilities of calculations, employed “score of calculators”, at the time meaning individuals who performed calculations, to help him erect what he aptly called “a monument to calculation”.

Prony’s tables, powerful and precise, extended to the 19th decimal, though they were sadly never used, in part due to budget cuts, and, in part, due to their impracticality for everyday business use. Prony’s tables and his project can help us elucidate what occurs when engineers are relieved of the burden of computation.

“This analysis is the true secret of discoveries, because it makes us ascend to the original of things… It does not investigate the truth by the assistance of general propositions, but by a kind of calculation; that is, by compounding and decompounding the ideas, in order to compare them in the most favourable manner to the discoveries we have seen.”

• Etienne Bonnot de Condiillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge

Prony did not do his own calculations. He came up with the idea, and, subsequently, broke down the labor into skilled mathematicians and a subordinate group of calculators who performed the arithmetics. By the early 1800s, the idea of what it meant to “calculate” began to shift. Calculation, once the domain of scholars and theorists, started to split into two distinct categories: the intellectual work of producing abstract models and the mechanical labor of executing them. What had previously been considered a scholarly pursuit was reframed as rote, repetitive labor, something outsourced to the unskilled rather than the learned.

At this time, a rift occured between the conceptual and the computational, the abstract and the operational. The birth of modern bureaucracy and industrialized science relied on this division, institutionalizing a hierarchy between thinking and doing, modeling and making.

A similar fragmentation is happening today, as we fully step into the age of AI. The role of technologists is evolving and is being reframed by the rapid technological advancements. From code to design and strategy, tasks once considered high-skilled are now being split into ideation, oversight and execution, with AI overtaking the last and slowly gaining terrain on the second. Just as the human “calculators” of the 19th century were instrumentalized to scale up state projects, today’s AI agents are instrumentalizing entire workflows, altering not just who makes technology, but how it is made, leaving the technologist in the role of ideator.

To change the function of an occupation is also to change its culture. The composition of people attracted to the work in mathematics upon the segregation of labor in the 19th century drastically changed. Notably, the calculators were mostly women. “Horizons” is a concept coined by German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss meant to “describe the encounter between text and audience”. Roughly, this term “refers to the framework through which an individual understands, interprets, and evaluates a text, relying on the cultural norms and standards specific to their historical period.” An unspoken truth in horizons is that the historical period, the marker of the horizon, is highly influenced by the emerging technologies developed within it. The horizon is recursive, with each new technology updating past and previous readings in real-time. Updates are not always backward compatible. Every new grid of knowledge, every new technological plane leaves behind illegible horizons as new ones emerge. The question to beg, with each step, is what is lost and what is won?

There is a historical violence to this recursion. Technological change always implies epistemic reorganization, and reorganization always implies an oblivion. What is discarded in the name of novelty? What forms of knowledge, care, or interpretation fall away as new systems dominate? The move from calculator to AI is not merely a shift in interface, but in culture and, thus, worldview.

Using datasets like publicly available cadastres, the open internet and all published written material, algorithms hold a not-insignificant portion of past human possibilities. They possess the drawn map, detailed to the n-th decimal. The project of the Common Crawl is as ambitious as the census or cadastre, a total survey. I suppose the problem with great gestures is that their greatness overtakes their original purposes, the problem with great maps is that they sometimes engulf the territory. Data infrastructures have become the conditions for legibility, transitioning from mere representations to infrastructural realities. They determine existence by mapping and risk erasure by unmapping. In this context, algorithms have evolved beyond data sorting to legislating visibility, echoing Borges's fictional map that swallowed the territory.

Drawing the connections within the existing possibilities, linking the embedded vectors between words, the probabilities between events, understanding the mathematical connection between the bygone data-points, could we accurately extend the map to unknown fronts, to new Americas? Could the monuments to calculation become contemporary oracles? The promise of contemporary AI is that, with high reliability, data, algorithms can form xeno-technological entities capable of digital haruspicy amidst the fumes of a virtual Delphi.

Nonetheless, even the most precise oracle cannot escape interpretation, the sibylline words require a decipherer. Every prediction, every model output, still needs an act of belief. And for every belief, there is a preacher. In 1956, social psychologist Leon Festinger published his book (along with Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter) When Prophecy Fails, documenting a UFO doomsday cult whose apocalyptic forecast never materialized. Rather than abandon their beliefs, members reinterpreted the failed prophecy as a spiritual success. The event became formative not despite its failure, but because of it. The prophecy’s collapse created a new myth.

This is the strange paradox of predictive culture: accuracy matters less than coherence. When the future is unpredictable, all that tethers us to reality is the story. The narrative must survive, even when the signal breaks. In our own era, surrounded by models, metrics, and maps that claim to predict the future, we still return ineluctably to myth. AI-generated texts, algorithmic recommendations, and statistical forecasts don’t just predict: they persuade. They require human interpreters who frame their outputs, wrap them in metaphors, and render them legible within our horizons.

This, perhaps, is the evolving role of the creative technologist: not just as builder, but as mythographer. The Mythic Technologist. Not merely optimizing toward truth, but shaping the fictions that make systems feel meaningful, livable, persistent, coherent.

Myths, classically, were not mere stories. They were ontological frameworks, narrative architectures that gave shape to the invisible structures of the world, they were the scaffolding on which culture was built. They explained causality, purpose, fate, and more. In the absence of formal models (and maps), myths mediated the relationship between the seen and the unseen, between the individual and the cosmos. They were not judged by their factual accuracy but by their symbolic resonance, their ability to provide coherence in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability. In our contemporary moment, myth persists as folklore, but also as interface. Images, moving or still, operate through hyperstition, not just describing the futures, but summoning them like a swarm of daemons.

The mythic technologist, thus, is not merely a fabricator of tools, but a sculptor of belief. They operate at the intersection of symbolic systems and technical infrastructures, reaching to create the imaginable. To myth-make is to select, frame, and elevate certain narratives over others. It is to imbue technical artifacts with purpose, ethics, and emotion. Think of the way we talk about neural networks as “learning,” as if they possess interiority or how we describe decentralized networks as “liberating,” without questioning what liberation looks like in practice. These framings aren’t accidental. They’re cultural constructions, forged through language, metaphor, and design. They are myths. As Rosemary Jackson reminds us, myths are the inverse of fantasy.

Even the aesthetic of neutrality of Steve Job’s Apple—white interfaces, sans-serif fonts, smooth animations—is a form of myth. It constructs an illusion of objectivity, of cleanliness, of inevitability. But beneath that smoothness are countless decisions: what to show, what to hide, what to make easy, what to make impossible.

The Mythic Technologist is attuned to these decisions, not as constraints, but as opportunities. They understand that meaning does not emerge automatically from technology: it must be coaxed, cultivated, curated. Every interface is a worldview. Every API is a politics. Every algorithm is a myth in motion.

Myth is not a retreat from rationality. It is a recognition of the fact that systems of reason themselves require scaffolding. Every monument to calculation needs a face and a story. That meaning must be made, and that the tools we use to make it are never neutral. In a world of accelerating abstraction, mythmaking becomes a kind of epistemic anchoring: a way of keeping symbolic coherence amid the collapse of shared reference points. To myth-make in the 21st century is to hold the tension between speculation and structure, between poetics and protocol.

But the technologist is not alone. As media theorist Henry Jenkins notes, contemporary culture is increasingly participatory. Wretched anonymous imageboards, viral core-core TikToks, endless Twitter threads, secret Discord servers. Digital egregores spawn new myths with every page refresh. From conspiracy theories to ecologies of cascading memes, the distributed psyche generates collective fictions.

Collective fictions are narrative formations created by distributed networks of creators, reposters, and interpreters whose power is derived from their virality and emotional impact, rather than coherence or factual accuracy. They propagate not because they are true, but because they feel like they could be, spreading like electricity and igniting symbolic voltage across platforms, fueled by the ambient anxieties of the current era.

Memes in this context are more than jokes or aesthetic morsels. They are fractal compressions of fragmented worldview containing, however in an instant, a scroll, a click, a stance, a mood, a critique, a prophecy. They are participatory myths: open-source, fast-evolving, impossible to immobilize. They function as vectors for frail ideologies, fresh parodies, novel nostalgias, and indelible dreads. A meme can be both a punchline and a political position. It can juxtapose irony and sincerity in the same post. It can function as a critique of power or a tool for its reinforcement.

Similarly, conspiracy theories today are algorithmically centered, serving, in many cases, as the narrative residue of predictive systems. In an era where so much of life is governed by invisible computation, where decisions are made by models no one can see, conspiracy provides a distorted form of interpretability, the structure once engendered by myth. They give shape to uncertainty. It fills the vacuum left by institutional opacity and technical complexity. As Shoshana Zuboff notes, the infrastructures of surveillance capitalism produce what she calls “instrumentarian power”, a form of behavioral governance not through coercion, but through prediction and nudge. The rise of folk theories, digital mysticism, and algorithmic folklore is not a failure of modernity, it is one of its side effects.

We must recognize these collective fictions do not simply reflect culture: they produce it. Like monsters from The Ring and Videodrome, they crawl out of screens and effectuate their will onto the world. They script behavior. They shape aesthetic norms. They provide social cohesion in fragmented environments. They give language to feelings that have not yet found their official names. They rewire desire.

They do what traditional media no longer can: move at the speed of feeling. Respond to the world not with analysis, but with affective precision. They are simultaneously reactive and generative, remixing fragments of the past into visions of a future we can no longer see.

The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher once wrote that “capitalist realism” is the predicament in which it becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But the internet, in its weirdest corners, imagines the apocalypse every day, thusly, allowing for the proliferation of potential worlds. This is the generative edge of collective fictions: their refusal to be bound by what is reasonable or acceptable. They speculate without permission. They myth-make without credentials.

Consequently, memes and conspiracies are not distractions from cultural production, rather they are cultural production. They are the folk practices of the digital age. And like all folklore, they contain wisdom and folly in equal parts. So the task, then, is not to dismiss these fictions unilaterally, but to study how they function, what they encode, who they serve, and how they move. To peruse their glitches and understand their bugs.

The tension remains: between the predictive and the unpredictable, the calculated and the improvised, between the monument and the meme, between the map and the myth.

We are living through a syzygy: a celestial alignment of technical systems and symbolic structures, of oracles and errors, of datasets and dreams. The future, as always, is a fiction, but the present is filled with unfinished monuments and still not a reality.