introduction

[ 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. 

Hay is a quaint little Welsh town that transforms once a year into a kind of literary Shangri-La — if Shangri-La was sponsored by The Guardian and smelled like wet tweed and fair trade espresso.

The Hay Festival is the Glastonbury of the liberal intelligentsia.

My book — billed as a passive-aggressive break-up letter to the Left by one of its darlings — opened with an entire chapter set at the previous year’s event, where I shadowed Christopher Hitchens through the green rooms, scotch sessions, and panel clashes. Hitchens and I had become close when I started developing a film about one of his books, Letters to a Young Contrarian.

But he hated Wolves, which was essentially a psychopolitical deconstruction of his (and other elite Liberals’) pro-Iraq War stance.

The last words I ever got from him were in a terse email shortly after reading the galley: “Unfortunate. For a moment, I thought you had a spark.”

By some turn of Fate, he wasn’t there that year —  sparing me the potential of the god coming down from his mountain to rhetorically disembowel his former disciple. Instead, I was programmed into a debate on “the state of liberalism” opposite Nick Cohen — a high-profile, pro-war Observer columnist and one of Hitch’s ideological proxies.

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 presenter 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 Lord 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, or even 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 primetime 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 it 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. She wrote:

Stephen Marshall was from an entirely different school of discourse, a place where ‘the truest thing I ever heard was from a 17-year old’ doesn’t make people want to be sick… Unequal to the task of unpicking Cohen’s scarf-dance coherence… Does look like Rob Lowe, though. Which has to be good for something.

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 wrong and I needed to find out what the fuck it was.

[ 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 IDFA in Amsterdam.

[GNN was relatively grounded compared to my first media project — an indie video-magazine called Channel Zero — which I somehow 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 deeper was at work. Something more fundamental than nerves or burnout. I had a creeping sense that some part of me was rejecting — at the root level — the trained monkey part of me that had spent decades building a 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.

And in that space, things started to surface.

Starting back in the late 90’s, I had been initiated into secret, parallel life of inexplicable experiences that I had compartmentalized. Keeping the weirdness at bay so I could stay credible in the dissident political space. But now, in the stillness of refuge from that world, the carefully maintained boundary couldn’t hold.

Something had been trying to get through. For years.

And it wasn’t subtle.

I’m not talking about vibes or woo kismet. I mean persistent, incrementally more direct experiences that hammered home one very specific beat:

You can’t change the world because you have no fucking idea what this thing you’re living in is — or how it works.

To be clear, this wasn’t the consequence of a journalistic off-road into ayahuasca or UFO podcasts. My beat was deep state intelligence ops and conflict zones. These experiences had come unsought. Their implications radically challenged my hardcore materialist-activist political paradigm:

There is a presence.
It’s sentient.
It’s intelligent.
It’s operating outside the frame of spacetime.
And it’s trying to make contact.

Not for some cosmic cuddle. But to deliver instructions — tactical protocols for manipulating spacetime.

Yeah. I know.

It sounds insane. But only when these experiences are taken in isolation. Taken as a whole — as a continuum — they started to feel less like delusion and more like a cosmic-insurgent communiqué.

And honestly? I found that incredibly hopeful.

For someone whose mission has always been change — not just awareness, but actual structural transformation — the implications felt revolutionary. Which is probably why I made the rookie mistake of sharing them with mainstream journalists… right around the time I was negotiating with CNN to launch a new channel.

I paid for that transgression.

So why open that can of crazy all over again?

Because I think we’ve reached a point in this rapidly destabilizing world order where stories like this no longer sound like madness. If anything, they might represent one of the only viable offramps from our collapsing paradigms.

What if the levers of true political and global transformation aren’t in spacetime at all — but in some adjacent layer that actually generates it?

That question only surfaced in my conscious mind years later, after I’d re-invented myself as a Silicon Valley tech founder and game designer working on generative systems modeled after quantum mechanics. But it started here. In the wreckage of identity. In the cracks of consensus. In the whisper that there was more.

And it wouldn’t go away.

[ 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. Academic.

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 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 guerrilla contingent among us should stop looking for the exit and just focus on the heating element.

Or, in tech 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 activist movements.

So, led by a kind of 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.

This wasn’t theory. It was fieldwork.

Some of it was informed by previous “non-ordinary” experiences. Some of it came through the works of thinkers like David Bohm. But most of it emerged through a solitudinal, often nature-based, process of direct experimentation. A radical deprogramming from the standard model of reality. A conscious choice to treat life itself as a kind of game — a wild, high-definition immersive sim.

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 about writing myself spiritual checks or manifesting parking spots.

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 not accounted for in the current instruction manuals for Earth.

Especially in a world society that has now entered a Matrixian techno-feudalism that rivals any pre-revolutionary moment in history.

Through a process of trial and error, I learned how to initiate processes and 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. Both for their individual liberation, and that of the collective.

And that is the impulse, intention, and raison d’être behind Speedrunning the Spacetime Continuum. A field guide for the insurgents of this shark-jumped reality TV show.