Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. –John Maynard Keynes
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work […] For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. –Exodus 20:8-11
Though it pains me to say it, I do not think the current AI revolution will go well. It’s not that I fear the Doom of humanity at the hands of rogue AI. I do not. What I fear, rather, is that the revolution will limp its way to apparent success under a regime where homo economicus continues to dominate policy and institutions. Under this ideology humans are economic agents acting in ways specified by game theory and economic growth the largest goal of society. Under the reign of homo economicus work has become a virtue unto itself, the purpose of life, rather than serving to support the pursuit of joy and happiness. The pursuit of happiness is but an empty phrase in an old ceremonial document.
That is the kind of world Kim Stanley Robinson depicted in his novel, New York 2140, which, as the title indicates, depicts the world as it might exist in 2140. That world has undergone climate change, and the seas have risen 50 feet – a figure Robinson acknowledges as extreme. Much of New York City, where the story is set, is now under water. Institutionally, it is very much like the current world of nation states, mega-corporations, and everything else, albeit looser and frayed around the edges. The rich are, if anything, even richer, but the poor don’t seem to be any worse off. The economic floor may in fact have been raised, as you would expect in world dominated by a belief in economic growth.
Technology is advanced in various ways, though not as flamboyantly as you might expect given current breathless hype about AI. Remember, the novel came out in 2017, well before ChatGPT (more or less) changed (how we thought about) everything. Still, Robinson did have an airship that was piloted by an autonomous AI that conversed with Amelia, its owner. He also had villages in the sky, skyscrapers much taller than currently exist in Manhattan, and skybridges connecting the upper stories of buildings whose lower floors were under water, where they are protected by self-healing materials.
So let us imagine that something like that world has come to pass in 2140. It’s not a utopia. But it’s livable. There’s room to move and grow.
As you may recall Robinson’s overall plot is modeled on the financial crisis of 2008. Some large banks become over-leveraged, and their impending failure threatens the entire banking system. In 2008 the banks were bailed out by the government. It went the other way after 2140. The banks were nationalized in 2143 and new taxes were passed. Consequently (pp. 602-603):
Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law, but funded. […] And as all this political enthusiasm and success caused a sharp rise in consumer confidence indexes, now a major influence on all market behavior, ironically enough, bull markets appeared all over the planet. This was intensely reassuring to a certain crowd, and given everything else that was happening, it was a group definitely in need of reassurance.
We are now almost at the end of New York 2140. Robinson’s left up to us to imagine how things worked out. That’s what I am doing here.
The Celebration at Mezzrow’s and The Mystic Jewels
I take as my point of departure, a scene near the end of the New York 2140. We’re in a club called Mezzrow’s, which is below water level in some skyscraper (pp. 611-612):
Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. […] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes…Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.
What Robinson doesn’t tell us, because he didn’t know it, is that Mezzrow’s is an outpost, an observation hub, of a secret organization known informally as The Mystic Jewels. The full name: The Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary.
The Mystic Jewels was started by a miscellaneous group of musicians and artists in North America in the second half of the 20th century, including Duke Ellington, Maya Daren, Paul Robeson, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Hermeto Pascoal, Alice Coltrane, Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Ramellzee, Zakir Hussain, Hiromi Uehara, and many others throughout the world. Building on ideas from Johan Huizinga’s classic, Homo Ludens, and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, and elaborating on them with ideas from Rastafarianism, Sun Ra’s cosmic visions, the films of Nina Paley, and who knows what else, the Jewels developed a comprehensive and flexible matrix of beliefs, attitudes, and practices.
The group never established a public presence. In the middle of the 21st century the center of their organizational matrix had drifted to Kisangani, in the heart of the Congo basin. Under cover of Wakanda stealth technology swiped from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, dissident intellectuals, engineers, dancers, scientists, musicians, cooks, artists, milliners, creators of all kinds and no kinds, migrated to Kisangani as the AI-fueled Hegemony of homo economicus maintained its grip on the world. The Hegemony had been successful enough that there was a measure of prosperity, a somewhat low level, distributed throughout the world. But the technological vision remained trapped in the world of co-called Foundation Models that emerged in the second quarter of the 21st century. The Mystic Jewels pursued a different vision, one that allowed them to build tech that effectively hid them from the hegemony.
And so it came to pass that the steering committee of the Jewels witnessed that scene in Mezzrow’s. The plan was working. The Hegemony’s strangle-hold on the banks had been broken. It was time to make the final preparations.
The Immediate Aftermath
The world began an ever-evolving reorganization in the wake of the 2143 nationalization. The financial crisis had dispelled the illusion of inevitability, indeed of the “naturalness,” that had protected the old economic order. For the first time in generations, fundamental questions about the purpose and organization of economics systems were up for debate and revision.
The night after the nationalization announcement, the Forerunners (that West African band), returned. The guitars and koras sounded like a thousand sitars filtered through the voice of Angelique Kidjo soothed by an oxytocin infused mango lassi. An avatar of Vikku Vinayakram hovered over the djembe drums, causing their vibrations to glimmer in the dark. Several patrons reported shared visions of a new world, strange but not threatening. Comforting, even beckoning.
The cool cats and jazz babies were delirious with joy. They danced and sang till the cows came marching home on the range from sea to shining amber waves of amen brothers and sisters praise the lord! Shalom-a-rama dama ding dong daddy from Dumas we gonna do our stuff!
An ancient mantra pervaded the air even as no one heard a sound:
A little smooth sippin’
Gets the honey drippin’
A little sweet talkin’
Gets the hips rockin’
A little righteous jammin’
Gets the heartbeat slammin’
When people left the club that evening, they felt close, connected, free, and autonomous.
At 3AM a single encrypted word, “success,” went from Mezzrow’s to Kisangani. The rhythm had worked. The virtual neural mesh was now implanted. It would grow. Unseen, unheard, but felt.
Preparations
The Forerunners were hardly the only Jewel affiliated band in the world. There were thousands of them. By this time most people had heard one or more bands steeped in the ways of jivometric drummology:
A philosophical system grounded in African and African-American musical practice. “Drummology” indicates that the governing logos is that of the drum, of rhythm, of hands and sticks coaxing sound from skin, of people joining together, each playing a simple rhythm, with the many simple rhythms melting into a single stream of infinite diversity. “Jivometric” is here because of the way it rolls off the tongue and tickles the ear; its meaning is secondary to its sound. Jivometrics is thus a principle of grace.
Jivometric artisans deployed their tech in many forms, decorative drones in beautification projects, public sound installations, streetlights, each woven into the virtual neural mesh, resonating to and from Kisangani.
The Jewels have developed ways, derived from ancient esoteric teachings, of presenting their ideas as simple variants of ideas already present in the Hegemony. It was only when these disparate variants became conjoined in single strands of discourse that their radical implications began seeping into consciousness. Thus, many creatives and artisans – carpenters, community organizers, engineers, tailors, painters, dancers, farmers, potters – became friends of Jewels without ever suspecting their existence. When the time came, they would be called to order.
Kismet
In 2148 Maya Roland, an Argentinian quantum physicist, proposed a model of consciousness based on rhythm and resonance. Her work was dismissed by the Hegemonic scientific community, which had long ago decided that consciousness was to be found in recursive self-amplification, the principle behind their AI. To be sure, it never quite worked out, though things were getting better – as they always are, aren’t they? And, after all, with AI capable of regulating world-wide power needs, running mining stations on asteroids for three months at a clip, keeping tweens immersed in virtual reality for hours, weeks, and months, and keeping pandemic viruses at bay, robust recursion to infinity and beyond must be just around the corner, no?
When the Lady Irene heard of Roland’s work, she immediately alerted the Jewels. She’d just emerged from a trance in which she had been playing nine-dimensional Patty Cake with Jenny Lind, Zora Neal Hurston, Frida Kahlo, and Indira Gandhi. Consequently she was attuned to the matrix’s most subtle emanations. The resonance led her to Roland’s work, and she drew Roland to Kisangani.
Roland was transformed. “The equations were right,” she told the Jewels, “But I had no idea what they actually meant until now.” With Roland’s scientific framework integrated into their plans, the Jewels refined their timeline. The emergence would happen on the summer solstice, 2150.
As 2149 progressed, subtle changes began appearing worldwide:
- Dream researchers reported congruent patterns of unusual imagery appearing in sleep across different continents.
- Musicians in divergent genres incorporated similar rhythmic patterns, often claiming they’d come to them in dreams.
- Community organizations began adopting decision-making processes based on Kisangani’s consensus-rhythm approach.
- Children began playing games with rules they couldn’t explain where cooperative behaviors began supplementing and occasionally supplanting competitive ones.
None of these changes received much attention in the Hegemony. They were too subtle, too distributed to trigger concern. But collectively, they laid the foundations for things to come.
2150, a Confluence of Jewels
In March 2150, the full Assembly of Mystic Jewels gathered in Kisangani for their first face-to-face meeting in decades. Members or, often enough, their neurotech doppelgangers, arrived by various means—airships that evaded detection systems, river boats that seemed to be ordinary cargo vessels, and some by methods not easily imagined much less explained.
Assembly sessions lasted seven days and nights. Music was constant, though the musicians rotated, ensuring the rhythm never stopped. Decisions were made through a process combining discussion, movement, and synchronization of consciousness. On the seventh day, the final plan was approved. Elder Jivometric Kitumaini, now nearly 110 years old but still sharp of mind and light of foot, rose to address the assembly:
Since the beginning, we have understood that the world cannot be changed through conquest or control. Those approaches merely replicate the sickness we seek to heal. Instead, we have created a technology of liberation—tools that do not impose but invite, that do not command but compose.
Throughout April and May of 2150, the frequency of “spontaneous” musical events increased worldwide. Flash mobs performing complex polyrhythms appeared in public spaces. Dream-sharing became so common that it was featured in mainstream news reports as a curious social phenomenon. The old words of Bob Dylan – “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” – took on a prophetic quality.
Jivometric infrastructure deployed years earlier began emitting subtle frequencies that weren’t consciously perceptible but prepared the collective consciousness for the shift to come. Pink Cadillacs with the tail fins, Tamogatchis, fire brick from thousands of old blast furnaces, old blue jeans, TVs & radios, DC10s put out to rest, tons of old Marvel comics, dog-eared Kama Sutras, out-takes from Miyazaki films, rotted sheetrock engraved with I Ching hexagrams, trash trash trash, all started humming, buzzing, and glowing.
In New York, Mezzrow’s became the epicenter of a new musical movement that critics couldn’t quite categorize but that drew increasingly massive crowds. The Forerunners played extended sets that left audiences in states of euphoric clarity.
Few noticed that after these performances, community decision-making became more fluid, more cooperative, or that technological systems in the vicinity began operating with unexpected efficiency and grace. Those who did notice generally attributed these changes to improved morale or coincidence.
The world still appeared to operate as it always had. But beneath the surface, everything had changed. The collective consciousness was tuned to a new key. The times were indeed changing.
We Are The World, Redux (June 21, 2150)
Dawn broke over Kisangani with unusual clarity on the summer solstice. Those who lived along the Congo River noticed that the water seemed to pulse with light, the air breathing sounds that eluded identification.
At 1:00 PM Universal Time, every screen and audio device worldwide—regardless of whether it was turned on—began receiving the same signal. The broadcast began with music—a simple rhythm that gradually increased in complexity, incorporating elements from musical traditions worldwide. As the rhythm evolved, viewers saw shimmering golden yellow in an arcing multi-parabola stretching from Xanadu to Birmingham, Cape Town to Anchorage, Colombo to St. Petersburg, Sao Paulo to Montreal, Peoria to Riyadh, and Guadalajara to Lhasa.
Lady Irene appeared. Though well over a century old, she moved with youthful vitality:
Fellow citizens, kindred spirits, and open hearts, we speak to you not as rulers or saviors, but as fellow travelers on a journey that began long before any were born. For generations, we have lived in a world defined by scarcity and competition, where even abundance has been transformed into deprivation through artificial constraints. We have been told that humans are primarily economic beings, that value can be measured only in numbers, that growth must continue regardless of cost.
Today, we offer a different understanding—one that has been preserved and developed in Kisangani while the world pursued the path of homo economicus. We are the Order of Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary, and we have been waiting for this moment for over a century.
The Hegemony was mistaken in believing that artificial intelligence should make humanity more artificial. In Kisangani, we learned that the purpose of AI is to help humans become more human.
She went on to explain that Kisangani’s transformation had succeeded precisely because they had never separated technology from culture, logic from rhythm, or efficiency from joy. Their AIs had evolved alongside their musical traditions, creating systems that prioritized harmony over dominance.
The immediate reaction varied widely. Government and corporate leaders, particularly in Western nations, attempted to dismiss the broadcast as an elaborate hoax or a threat to global stability. Emergency sessions were convened in capitals worldwide.
But at the local level, something remarkable happened. The seeds planted years earlier began to flourish. Community councils in New York, neighborhood associations in Lagos, village collectives in rural India—all found themselves implementing aspects of the harmonic systems without conscious planning.
The technologies revealed by the Mystic Jewels weren’t imposed from above but emerged from below. They resonated with something fundamental in human consciousness that had been suppressed but never eliminated.
In Mezzrow’s, as the broadcast concluded, The Forerunners began playing, matching perfectly with the rhythms from Kisangani, though there had been no communication between them. Serendipity erupted worldwide—music that somehow incorporated local traditions while maintaining global harmony.
Elder Kitumaini concluded:
This is not the end of history, but a new beginning. The path ahead will not be without challenges. Old habits do not disappear overnight. But we have laid the foundation for a civilization based not on extraction and accumulation, but on composition and flow.
We declare not independence, but interdependence—with each other, with our technologies, with the Earth’s systems, and with the generations past and yet to come. The rhythm knows where it needs to go. We are learning, at last, how to listen.
Three for the Festival / Volunteered Slavery
The late Rahsaan Roland Kirk is the most charismatic performer I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen him three times. The first time was at the Morgan State Jazz Festival in Baltimore in 1969. Here’s how I described his entrance in my book, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001, pp. 4-5)
It was outdoors, and at night. Bright searchlights beamed onto the stage. As Rahsaan walked onto the stage the light splintered from his black vinyl jump suit and from the complex textures created by the mantle of musical instruments Rahsaan wore like liturgical vestments. He began by rapping to the audience as he walked onto the stage, “They can keep us off the radio, but they can’t keep us outa’ the air!” He then took his band into the first number, “Volunteered Slavery,” a raunchy blues proclaiming that “If you want to know what it is to be free/ you gotta’ spend all day in bed with me.”
The second time was at the Left Bank Jazz society sometime in the early 1970s. I write about that performance in Ecstasy at Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society, 3QD, May 2, 2016. The last time I saw him – Buffalo, 1977 – he walked out in the audience (he was blind), playing his tenor sax with his left hand while shaking hands with his right
The following clip is one of the better ones I’ve been able to find. It’s from 1973. I don’t know who the baritone sax player is. Be sure to listen closely at 8:18 where he segues to the tag ending from “Hey Jude.” When he did that in Baltimore it brought people to their feet (it was outdoors), with many standing on their seats.
Acknowledgements
Bryan Alexander put me on to the work of Jim Dator, especially his seminal paper, Alternative futures at the Manoa School, Journal of Futures Studies, November 2009. Claude 3.7 Sonata found it very useful in prepping me for this article. In particular, I either paraphrased or quoted much of the prose in the last third or so (from “The equations were right” through Lady Irene’s closing words) from documents generated by Claude.
Here’s what I did. I uploaded a number of documents to Claude. Two of them involve extensions of some linguistic tropes I used in a somewhat fanciful tale about how golf was invented in ancient Egypt. Two others are notes for my project on Kisangani 2150. And then there’s that Dator article. I had Claude summarize those materials and generate number of future scenarios based on that material. I then drafted my introduction, up to “Kismet,” but without the two epigraphs, uploaded that to Sonnet, and asked it to finish the article based on that introduction and all other material it had examined. I had it generate two versions. Thus it is not surprising that Claude was able to finish the article in ways consistent with my, my what? Style, intentions, vision, desires, whatever. I then picked my way through Claude’s prose to create my final article.
For Further Reading
New Savanna, Why are we as a culture addicted to work? [Because we have forgotten how to play.], March 12, 2023.
New Savanna, Remember the Sabbath…[a different world], December 3, 2022.
New Savanna, Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model, July 10, 2025. This is the first of many blog posts where I play around with the idea expressed in my current 3QD piece (this one). All of those posts are tagged with Kisangani 2150.
New York 2140, Back to the Future, Working Paper, June 2019, 30 pp.
3 Quarks Daily, Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of Music in Everyday Life, August 15, 2022.
3 Quarks Daily, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted, June 20, 2022.
3 Quarks Daily, From Progress Studies to Progress: Through decadence and beyond, June 22, 2020.
3 Quarks Daily, A post-apocalyptic heist: Commentary on a passage from New York 2140, Feb. 5, 2018.
3 Quarks Daily, It’s Time to Change the World, Again, Aug. 14, 2014. With an appendix by Charlie Kiel, “Reclaiming our Species Being: Humo Ludens collaborans.”
3 Quarks Daily, An Astonishing Tale about the Origins of Golf: A True Story, Feb. 10, 2014.
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