I’ll Drown In The Para-Real

Thirty years ago in Davos, John Perry Barlow declared cyberspace independent of the material world, reading his manifesto to a room of the same Epstein-adjacent billionaires who would spend the next three decades buying it. But Barlow was wrong. There is no independent cyberspace, there is only the Para-Real – the space that appears when digital interfaces and material conditions collapse into each other, where the so-called border between the two stops holding and the two worlds start bruising each other’s bodies.

This is a talk about the great convergence of power inside the Para-Real: how two trajectories collapsed into the current spectacle, why the technocratic-authoritarian apparatus scrabbling to plant a Palantir flag on the ruins is as brittle as the civil society it replaced, and why the expertise who know exactly what to do are still building, still exiled, and still ignored. What they’re building is exilic – venueless, consent-forward, rebuildable by hand, accountable to no platform that can turn on them.