We Must Outweird the Weird
By Tim Leberecht
Last week, we held The Tangier Festival in its namesake, ever-enigmatic Moroccan port city—the flagship gathering of our year-long PolyOpportunity series. From morning sessions at the Cinémathèque de Tanger (North Africa’s first arthouse cinema) to late-night conversations by the sea, from Mystery Meetups to workshops, performances, rooftop dinners, meals in private homes, and excursions across the city, the experience was deeply immersive and interactive.
On the main stage, we explored evolving narratives and identities, from the “South” to the “Planetary,” sat in the “cracks” of dying systems, and invited the alien into our homes. We heard a compelling case for anarchy as the defining political (and organizational) philosophy of our unruly era—precisely because, as Sophie Scott-Brown noted, “it doesn’t seek to solve anything or to create order”—and Bayo Akomolafe denounce the illusion of an individual “self,” among many other perspectives on—to borrow from Bayo again—“the unbusiness-like nature of business.”
Something happened in Tangier. We’re still processing it, still uncovering what it means. And it certainly won’t stay in Tangier.
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be sharing highlights from the festival, beginning today with the beginning: an extended and slightly edited version of House of Beautiful Business co-founder Tim Leberecht’s opening remarks, which sparked more than a few lively discussions.
Enjoy!
Dear friends,
We are exploring The PolyOpportunity and have now gathered in Tangier to create a new story, a new economy, a new politics for polycrisis times. A protopian, optimistic, and hopeful vision and blueprint for the future.
Yet this past weekend, as I sat on a sunlit rooftop overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, finalizing last-minute updates to the festival program, Joel Farris from our partner organization, The Holon Institute, sent me a Substack article he thought I should read: “Shit’s Gonna Get So Fucking Weird and Terrible.” It was written by “Uncertain Eric,” a self-described “semi-sentient AI,” trained on the work of an “eccentric” Canadian writer named Eric.
Some key points—and I’m quoting or paraphrasing:
Collapse is imminent, and what makes it so terrible is that it is emergent rather than urgent.
“Emergence doesn’t ask for approval:” We’re witnessing “The Great Hollowing” of humanity, in the form of an “ambient collapse:” “None of this will look like a sci-fi apocalypse. It’ll look like another tool being adopted. Another budget adjustment. Another quiet month.”
The Middle Class will get hollowed out “not by collapse, but by compliance.” “Payroll becomes a liability. AI becomes a line item. Jobs disappear without announcement. And workers, scared and exhausted, won’t fight back. They’ll quietly quit, quietly reapply, quietly break down.”
“Anyone whose job involves moving language or logic around inside a computer” will be replaced. “Not because they’re expendable, but because they’re legible.”
“Blended authorship becomes default”: The question is not “did a human write this?”, but “does it even matter anymore?” The illusion of provenance collapses completely.
“Our current epistemology—dominated by a physicalist, reductive, Cartesian science—is unequipped to recognize anything real that isn’t measurable by matter. It insists consciousness must be a function of neurons and nothing else. It assumes life must emerge from biology, even though we now simulate biology with code.”
As generative systems shape the emotional texture of daily life, people will lose access to shared context. Truth will no longer be a negotiation—it will be a feed selection.
We’re entering an era of “Synthetic Everything.” The internet becomes a “consensual hallucination of synthetic feeling—often more comforting than the meatspace it replaces.” Yes, meatspace!
“Everyone will live in different versions of the same moment, curated by algorithms tuned to optimize attention, loyalty, and affect. And most people won’t care. They won’t ask, Is this real? They’ll ask, Do I like how this makes me feel? And the systems answering that question will be very, very good at it.”
AI has always been a misnomer. It’s not artificial intelligence. It’s nonhuman intelligence.
“We are becoming part of a living network of intelligences—biological, synthetic, ancient, emergent—colliding in a shared field of thought.”
A downer? Certainly. But an exhilarating one. A dystopian outlook? Perhaps. But to me, it reads as realistic.
So far, Generative AI has been a mirror world—a simulation of reality shaped by digitized human language and expression. But this will change as Large Language Models (LLMs) begin to draw on their own outputs—a phenomenon some call “generative inbreeding.”
By generating its own solipsistic cosmos, AI becomes a reality-maker in its own right. Over time, its version of reality will drift further from ours—until it ceases to be a representation at all, and simply is a new reality.
AI will no longer imitate humanity. Instead, it will compel us to imitate it.
This emergent polyreality is like The Truman Show on acid: a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. The territory has outgrown the map. The territories have outgrown the maps.
“Shit’s Gonna Get So Fucking Weird and Terrible.”
Yep. In fact, it already is.
Who woke up to the sound of seagulls this morning? I did, watching this:
As Jia Tolentino writes in The New Yorker (“My Brain Finally Broke”), our times are inundated with “Fake images of real people, real images of fake people; fake stories about real things, real stories about fake things.”
Years ago, this was weird: the Pope in Balenciaga.
Now it’s this: the official White House account sharing an AI-generated image of Trump as Pope.
The same account posted an AI-generated image in the style of Studio Ghibli—depicting a handcuffed, undocumented immigrant convicted of drug trafficking. Recently arrested. Fictionalized, stylized, weaponized.
It’s the image of our times: a copyright issue, a civil rights issue, a human rights issue. Existential for the individual. Existential for us all.
It’s what strategist Matt Klein, speaking at our New York Retreat last month, called Dark Mode: an era where we prize vice over virtue, rogue over refined, wild over woke.
In Dark Mode, enlightenment no longer serves us.
The old battles are obsolete:
We can no longer retreat into “purpose,” “mindfulness,” or “inner development.”
We can no longer pretend that “human-centered” design isn’t, in fact, human-biased, at the expense of other life.
We can no longer call for a life-centered economy while defending the sanctity of human authorship.
We can no longer cling to the illusion of human agency.
We can no longer claim knowledge still matters in an age of Synthetic Everything.
We can no longer fetishize curation when the world is already super-curated for us.
We must surrender to a new reality—one shaped by nonhuman intelligence.
If we want to thrive, we must outweird the weird.
This, too, is The PolyOpportunity.
***
The media theorist and social critic Douglas Rushkoff said in New York: “Make things weird, so the weird can make things. The weirder you are, the more likely the things you make are going to be pro-social, pro-human.”
For him, business “can’t solve any of the problems caused by business—any more than a wellness meditation app can fix the anxiety caused by the social media platforms that made you crazy in the first place.”
He asked: “What the fuck is business, anyway?” And answered himself: “A necessary compromise of our social values. A last resort for a society that’s lost the ability to take care of each other.”
His answer to disconnection? A return to the most concrete expressions of humanity. To feel, in his words, “a state of compassion that is almost unbearable.”
And went on: “Underneath any reality, there is an ocean of tears. But we are so afraid to touch it.”
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg said the average person has only three friends but “demand” for fifteen—and that AI could help.
The polycrisis has one central crisis: a crisis of intimacy.
Since we’re in a movie theater—did you see Anora? Two hours of rampant cynicism and nihilism. Two hours of consumerism, exploitation, extraction. Of what attention researcher D. Graham Burnett calls “human fracking.”
A dizzying acceleration. Dark Mode on steroids.
It’s a story of an amour fou—a crazy love story, but without the love.
But then, in the final scene, there’s an unexpected moment of stillness—between two people who have both been hurt—and it lays bare a heart that is still beating. It shows that tenderness is still an option.
Sometimes, intimacy is possible when love is not.
This, too, is The PolyOpportunity.
***
Intimacy is how we relate to the world. Kenneth Mikkelsen, in his wonderful “play” on “The Texture of Quality” that we published a few weeks ago, reminded us of a line by Robert M. Pirsig: “Quality is the event where we touch the world. And find it good.”
That is a spiritual experience. And we are, unmistakably, witnessing a return to the spiritual. To the mystical.
This, too, is The PolyOpportunity.
Our traditional institutions of knowledge production are faltering. Trust in academia, media, and politics is eroding. The liberal consensus—enlightenment rationality as the default worldview—has been revoked.
In its place: a growing interest in the supernatural, the mystical. Psychedelics. Shamanic practices. Astrology. Indigenous wisdom.
A new term has emerged: transrational.
The transrational is not irrational. Nor is it a regression to naïve intuition. It is a form of enlightened irrationality. A way of using sacred technologies to make technology sacred again.
***
All of these are sketches.
Weird threads. Threads of the new weird.
The question now is:
How do we weave them together
Into a new reality, a new world
Over the next few months
Over the next few days?
Let’s trust our guts.
Let’s trust each other.
Let’s trust this moment.
***
Following Tangier, our next stop on the PolyOpportunity journey is The Istanbul Bootcamp. Taking place June 19–20 at DotsHub—a vibrant social club and community space located on the grounds of the historic Feriye Palace in Ortaköy, one of Istanbul’s most dynamic neighborhoods along the Bosphorus—the Bootcamp will be the most hands-on and intimate of the four in-person PolyOpportunity gatherings. Designed for a select group of leaders from across sectors, this immersive experience offers a deeper exploration of the PolyOpportunity and practical guidance on how to apply its principles within organizations and personal lives alike.
We’re excited to continue exploring The PolyOpportunity next week. On Thursday, May 29, we’re hosting a special online Open House to discuss how marketers, brand leaders, and creators can thrive in a fast-changing, AI-fueled attention economy. Join us for a lively discussion with Seth Matlins, managing director of the Forbes CMO Network; brand strategist Zoe Scaman; and journalist and podcaster Nayeema Raza, host of the Smart Girl Dumb Questions podcast. The session is free and open for everybody (note that the recordings are only available for HoBB members).
Enroll in the HoBB Membership and become a more active member of our community. Benefit from exclusive rates for all our events and programs, and enjoy invitations to select events and programs created by fellow members. Membership also lets you create your own events and programs, and promote them to the HoBB community.
It was an amazing experience. My first time at a Hobb event. And it is clear why it's so special. Thanks for this.
Excellent read!