Giordano Bruno

There's stuff on the French occult revival, theosophy, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Renaissance stuff, you know, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Trithemius, Lazzarelli, Ficino, all these people and how it kind of dovetails.

There's even a little bit on Giordano Bruno and stuff like this.

You get a good amount of history.

And another point I wanted to show is that occult history is the history of the world.

The earth revolves around the sun.

Giordano Bruno faced even harsher punishment than Galileo from the same inquisition.

Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy after proposing that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets and that the universe was infinite.

Two thousand years before those three astronomers decided that everyone was wrong, Socrates asked himself, What if everyone is wrong? He was sentenced to death for his teachings, but his Socratic method of using cross-examination to uncover truth evolved into our modern scientific method, as well as our modern legal system of adversarial cross-examination in courtrooms.

A blurred video, a ring of light around a lens flare, a headline in capital letters.

all shareable in seconds to a million screens artificial intelligence can now fabricate fleets of saucers over any city with a prompt and an afternoon in an information ecosystem like that sensation is cheap and getting cheaper and the market fills with it accordingly against that background the cosmonaut's accounts stand out as a wonder of plainness a man describes an object the size of his own finger dim elliptical he calls a colleague to verify the colleague goes for the camera the thing comes apart into two pieces joined like a barbell and dissolves into smoke he reports it to the ground in the tone of a shift report and he spends the rest of his life refusing to embellish the story by a single adjective it was probably a ufo but it was not mysticism no dramatics no invitations to believe no merchandise in a warehouse flooded with counterfeits an account like that is like finding one real screw small gray unlovely machine to specification and therefore more valuable than the whole glittering stock around it it proves nothing about visitors it proves something about witnesses that even at the moment of maximum surprise in some people the habit survives of reporting exactly what was seen and no more and that habit is the rarest material in the entire ufo literature nor should this question be mistaken for a modern age it is one of the oldest questions the species has asked itself and the history of asking it is written in fire as often as in ink the atomists of ancient greece reasoned that with infinite worlds life elsewhere followed by logic lucretius versified that argument into latin a century later In 1600, in the Campo di Fiori in Rome, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, and among the charges was his insistence that the stars are other suns ringed by other worlds inhabited.

A few decades later Christian Huygens wrote a book imagining the oceans and inhabitants of other planets, and a century after that Immanuel Kant calmly described the nebulae as island universes, other milky ways at a time when telescopes could barely support the claim each of those positions was in its day an act of believing past the data each was eventually vindicated not by testimony but by instruments and each stands in the file as precedent for the same pattern the question of life in the sky has a long history of first being heresy then hypothesis, then homework.

The four cosmonauts belonged to that lineage as much as to the space program, people who took the risk of saying the question aloud while it was still unfashionable, and the discipline of not pretending the answer was in hand.

The surest way to profit off of someone's actions is to control them.

As Giordano Bruno understood centuries earlier, this is done by manipulating the conditions that shape what people want, fear, and choose.

The well had been conceived as a feedback loop in which people shaped the technological environment, and the environment in turn shaped the community.

The commercial system Zuboff describes also operated through feedback, but increasingly that feedback could be used to make the behavior of individual users more predictable.