Zone Ghost in the Machine: Terence McKenna’s Cyberdelic Reanimation

Institute for Network Cultures longform article by Graham St John.

"It's like trying to capture the lightning of Zeus and selling it in a jar at the local drugstore," says Terence McKenna in his near incantatory lilt on 4 Oct 2024. Prompted to comment on the “psychedelic renaissance,” McKenna shares his views on the commodification of psychedelic molecules, and evaluates the implications of microdosing psilocybin. “Interviewed” by Jake Kobrin in the first instalment of his 2024 “cybernetic séance” podcast series, the McKenna with whom Kobrin exchanges is an AI generative model.

Today, the thoughts of Terence Kemp McKenna (1946-2000) arrive care of advancements in speech recognition, voice simulation, and deep language learning architectures. With an inbuilt recursivity, ChatGPT is the latest means by which this oracular advocate of cognitive liberty has been reanimated. Partially drawing upon research conducted for a biography of McKenna, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna, forthcoming with MIT Press (on 30 Sep 2025), here we’ll explore his career as a virtual psychopomp, meta trip-sitter, and cyber-oracle. In the process, we’ll approach McKenna as a uniquely hauntological phenomenon.“ ..... Read the full the article at Zone Ghost in the Machine