[ ego death on the big stage ]

In May, 2008 I was invited to present my second book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, at Hay-on-Wye. 

Billed as an attack on the Left by one of its darlings — with its opening chapter set at the previous year’s festival (and starring Christopher Hitchens) — I got slotted into a debate on the ‘state of liberalism’ against Nick Cohen, a high profile pro-war Guardian columnist.

This was the pinnacle moment of four consecutive years at Hay. What started back in 2005 with an invitation from Nick Broomfield to screen my award-winning Iraq war doc Battleground, led to a last-minute invite for a panel with luminary war correspondents hosted by BBC presented Nik Gowing. A strong showing there put me in the good graces of Hay director Peter Florence and I was minted with a spot amongst the up-and-comer contingent, becoming an annual regular on Hay’s smaller stages and in its hallowed green room. 

Now I had my own book to sell and could not have asked for a better shot to break into the intellectual mainstream.

The tent was packed and buzzing. As the moderator prepped my opponent and I with the format, I looked over the edge of the stage as some of my favorite authors took their seats in the front row. Behind them, a sea of faces looked up at us expectantly. 

And then it came. The quickening of my heart. The tightening of my throat. The burning in my temples.

A wave of dread flushed my system as I felt my brain going offline.

Oh fuck. Oh please God not NOW.

It’s hard to explain the unique terror of a panic attack that comes moments before public speaking, unless you’ve been through it. 

Which I had. 

Back in February at the start of this tour, I was ambushed by my first ever full-on panic attack. That day I was a keynote speaker at a nu-media conference in Brussels. Just as I was asked to introduce myself, my neurobiological system went haywire.My heart started pounding. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak, nor barely form a thought.

So I sat there, mute — staring helpless and wide-eyed at the audience — unable to access the neural-verbal operating system I had instinctively wielded to bludgeon adversaries and pimp my intellect since high school.

Mercifully, I eventually managed to blurt out a few phrases, and then, when the format shifted into a conversational mode, I recovered and salvaged the panel.

But the incident haunted me. Over the following months — on smaller stages, in television studios, on the phone to radio hosts from my New York apartment — similar episodes of varying intensity hampered my performances and shook my confidence.

I did therapy. I meditated. I took Xanax. Which all helped, but I could not shake the dread that I could be struck down at any moment, in any venue.

As the Hay gig approached, I thought about pulling out. But I knew I was indebted to Peter for securing me a prime time spot. The program had been set and pamphlets printed. Withdrawal was not an option.

So I convinced myself that the familiar surroundings would mollify whatever was causing my anxiety. Now that I was here, on one of the biggest stages of my career, it was happening again. 

My brain had gone offline. 

There were no thoughts, no recall of my planned remarks. Just the certainty that my entire nervous system was being hijacked by a mental and verbal paralysis that would not lift by the grace of box breathing exercises.

When the moderator invited me to the podium, I told him (and the crowd) I preferred to stay seated. He looked at me quizzically for a moment and then shrugged. It came off as a prima donna move but also somehow worked to stave off the attack. I was able to fill my part of the hour with an underwhelming introductory presentation and weakly argued debate about American liberals being the good cop wing of an ultra-violent imperial duopoly.

The next day The Guardian’s Zoe Williams wrote a scathing review of my performance, calling me a Rob Lowe lookalike airhead and mocking the programmers for staging an unserious person for such an important issue. I tried to salvage it with a groveling essay that The Guardian put on the door of their site titled How Hay Can Save The World.

That was my last invitation to Hay-on-Wye.

But it didn’t matter. Just beneath the edge of my self-loathing and humiliation floated a thin layer of relief. The last four months had convinced me that something was very fucking wrong and, whatever it was, I was just happy it was over.

[ a cosmic insurgency? ]

My ascent to that stage at Hay-on-Wye had come at the end of a highly prolific and public decade. 

Guerrilla News Network (GNN), the political/countercultural website and production studio I co-founded and creative directed (which Vice Magazine called “Salon with balls”) struck a pre-YouTube virality with our graphics-heavy, music-driven newsvideo format. Awards at Sundance’s online film fest brought offers to direct music videos for Eminem, 50 Cent, and Beastie Boys. Then came back-to-back book deals and financing for three feature films (two conflict zone docs and one narrative starring Rosario Dawson) that premiered and won at major festivals from Sundance to Amsterdam.  

[GNN was relatively grounded compared to my first media project — an indie video-magazine called Channel Zero — which I moonshotted into an acquisition offer from CNN’s chairman Tom Johnson in the late 1990s.]

On a personal level, I had been sober since 2000 and more focused and healthy than ever. Which made my ego death at Hay so perplexing and scary. 

I investigated bipolarity, somatic trauma, neurological disorders. But outside of performance contexts, I was fine: no fugue states or lapses in cognition, no impulse-control issues or signs of depression.

My instinct was that something more intrinsic than nerves or burnout was at work. All I knew was that some part of me was rejecting — to the point of system failure — the trained monkey part of me that was my carefully constructed public persona.

So at the age of 40 and at the peak of my journalistic and filmmaking career, I hit the pause button and stopped doing anything at all. We closed GNN and I decamped to Vancouver to do yoga, walk in the woods — and yes, more therapy. 

In that space and silence, I was forced to reckon with a legacy of extraordinary experiences and phenomena that I had rigidly compartmentalized from my professional life. 

Experiences and phenomena which, when viewed holistically, all pointed to something that had no place in the dissident political culture I was playing in:

The existence of nonlocal intelligence operating from beyond the parameters of our 4D framework, actively trying to communicate strategic instructions for manipulating the fabric of spacetime itself.

Yah. I know. 

But this wasn’t some woo shit that came from reading books on UFOs and flat earth. In every case these were unsolicited and unsought but direct encounters with some ‘thing’ — that came through objects, people, entities, and experiential states — drumming one very consistent beat: you have literally and figuratively no fucking idea what this thing you’re living in is and how it works.

Speedrunning The Spacetime Continuum is, in part, a story of these experiences and encounters. There is a dimensionality and profound nuance to them that can only be flattened in the short form of an introduction, so I have used the writing excerpt to elaborate them.

When taken in isolation, they can easily be rationalized as random and pathological. But when presented as a continuum, some will interpret them within the envelope of a cosmic-insurgent communiqué, as insane as it sounds. 

I actually believe it is incredibly hopeful. 

Given the earnestness of my activist mission, I believed the implications were of revolutionary utility. Which is likely why I made the rookie mistake of sharing them with mainstream journalists right around the time I was negotiating with CNN for the launch of a channel.

I paid the price for that transgression.

So why open that can of crazy all over again? 

Because I think we may have reached a point in this current and rapidly destabilizing version of our global political reality that these experiences will no longer be seen as crazy or fabulist. If anything, a case can be made that they offer at least one potential offramp from our apocalyptic paradigm.

At their root they open up a very provocative line of enquiry:

What if the actual levers of radical political/global transformation aren’t in spacetime at all, but in some adjacent ‘place’ that generates it?

This question — which was only able to surface in my conscious mind after I re-invented myself as a Silicon Valley tech-founder and game designer developing ‘generative’ systems that mimic the quantum field — hijacked my attention toward an entirely new theory of change. One rooted in a field of study at the cross-section of quantum physics, consciousness research, and esoteric alchemy. I still felt called to activism, but suddenly I could no longer focus one kilojoule of my energy on the discussion of revolutionary solutions within the binary political constructs we inherited like club-wielding apes at the base of Kubrick’s monolith. Now I only felt drawn to ingest material that pointed to the same emergent conclusion: 

Spacetime is not primary, it is recipient. 

Meaning: our reality is the downstream output of a generative field that precedes and conditions it. And therefore, from an insurgent perspective, mutable. 

Alterable.

Hackable.

Fuck-up-able.

Redeemable.

[ speedrunning spacetime ]

My awakening to these magical thoughts was all happening just as Nick Bostrom was lighting up the Academy with his simulation hypothesis. But Nick’s version (sim as constructed by future humans running ‘ancestor simulations’ in the face of an extinction event) was purely theoretical. As an activist who had lived and worked in more than sixty countries, developed multiple disruptive information platforms, and risked my life and freedom repeatedly in service of some global paradigm shift, mine was way more utilitarian:

If spacetime is a simulation— i.e. a form of computational-experiential platform with algorithmic mechanics — then it is being generated. From somewhere. By something.

And, I surmised, as a collective of somnambulist frogs being cooked in a proverbial pot of heating water, the awakened cohort of us should stop looking for the exit and just focus on the heating element.

Or, in coder terms: we need to locate the source code and hack it. 

Immediately.

That may sound like nu-mysticism, and if this was the 1920s I’d agree with you. 

But it’s 2025. Even grade schoolers understand that our experiential reality is the product of a wave-to-particle conversion inside a probabilistic quantum substrate. And while most quantum physicists refuse to expand the applications of their field to the sociopolitical construct… for people who are actually trying to change the world, we may not have a choice.

If spacetime is being generated from another “place,” then that is where the actual power of reality-authorship resides. For the [r]evolutionary agent, this points to a locus of transformative potential we have barely begun to consider in modern political theory — especially not within mass liberation movements.

So, led by a kind of sentient superNatural intelligence (sNi) I encountered in the redwood forests where I moved my family during COVID, I began a process of experiential research into the nature of reality. In equal parts informed my previous “non-ordinary” experiences, ongoing study of thinkers like David Bohm, and partially through the guidance of the aforementioned sNi, I began a radical deprogramming from the standard model of reality and started playing in ‘reality’ as a wildly high-definition immersive game. And what I kept being shown — in the direct experience of my own life — was that there are hidden mechanisms in spacetime that can be accessed to orchestrate outcomes in the lives of trained agents. 

I’m not talking about mundane causal physical processes like kicking a stone and watching it roll. Nor random acts that generate fantastic outcomes, like buying a lottery ticket and hitting it big. 

No. 

I mean intentional combinations of informed thought and precise action that activate organic programs embedded within the fabric of ‘reality’. Programs that offer humans a level of agency and self-actualization that are not explained in the current instruction manuals for Earth. And specially, a world society that has now entered a Matrixian techno-feudalism that rivals any pre-revolutionary moment in history.

Through a solitudinal (and often Nature-based) process of trial and error, I learned how to jump levels, trigger trajectory shifts, and initiate material outcomes that simply cannot be explained within the current materialist-reductionist paradigm that rules our world.

This reconfiguration of how spacetime responds to conscious interventions is the most authentically [r]evolutionary modality I’ve ever encountered. It is also probably the oldest and coolest game on the planet.

More people need to be playing it.

And that is the impulse, intention, and raison d’etre behind Speedrunning the Spacetime Continuum.