i think his theory on novelty diminishing is bunk we are seeing more and more of it

he didn’t say it would diminish, he said it would increase until we reached a singularity, which he pegged to 2012. not that i’m a mckenna devotee but i always thought it was interesting that he speculated the final push would be a “device that a small group of people use to generate infinite novelty” and then the smartphone really took off exactly around 2012. the “small group” is just you and your buddies making endless memes and new inside jokes.

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zuzululu a day ago | parent | next [-]

Terence McKenna predicted that the universe's accelerating accumulation of complexity and novelty would hit its absolute maximum, or "zero point," on December 21, 2012

On the contrary we've seen a surge of novelty since.

Smartphone took off before 2012, a few years after iphone's release around 2010 when social media converged on it

	▲	sibeliuss a day ago \| parent [-]
		In my opinion he nailed the timeline. It just needed to take off, and it is.

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antonvs a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> which he pegged to 2012

He picked the date because of the Mayan calendar. Bullshit all the way down.

	▲	buildsjets 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		To expand on the levels of bullshittery, he initially picked “sometime in 2012” based on noting the number of elapsed days between 3 events in his life that he considered significant. (death of his mother, meeting a woman, and the date of the La Chorrera experiment with said woman.) He claimed that these events formed a sequence that could be found hidden in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching. By curve fitting these 3 data points and extrapolating to the end of the King Wen sequence, he predicted an event of peak novelty and the termination of history in 2012-ish. A computer (Apple ][) was used therefore the method is clearly scientifically sound. He later refined it to align specifically with the Mayan Calendar because that was getting trendy, and he had a public speaking business to support. He pretty much says so in some of his later recordings. Note he always claimed the end of his “Timewave” was the end of history, not the end of the planet or the end of the universe, or the end of humanity. He speculated that one potential event that could thus end history would be the invention of a time machine.
	▲	carljungslabtek 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I wasn’t arguing his methods were scientific or anything. They’re not.