Digital Shamanism
AI and collective sense-making
Imagination is the original technology.
Picture our ancestors in the cave. A fire burns near the entrance. A shaman, wearing a mask adorned with deer antlers, dances like a deer - channelling the deer-spirit. Others dance with them, their shadows stretched over the rock walls. Others are drawing on the walls, many are chanting. Everyone is connected.
What is this? Well it’s not “entertainment”. Many think these rituals were a technique for accessing novel perspectives. For dreaming-while-awake. What does the world look like through deer-eyes? What does that reveal about human seeing? The dialectic depends on our imagination to generate theories and their counterfactuals.
When we, as people, perform “collective sense-making” that process is expressed in imaginal space. What could the words of others mean, how could we interpret our perception, how could our world be in the future? When people act as hosts, facilitators or performers on a stage1 they are playing a shamanic role2.
This is how cultural evolution happens. When multiple perspectives argue, and co-mingle, that's how new ideas are born. The ability to collectively imagine is perhaps the most powerful and misunderstood ability we have. Since I was a kid I have always loved my imagination, and my work-to-date has been driven by exploring my ideas. Can you design a way of living that is just right for you? For me, signs point to yes3.
My current work in HCI research is studying how this applies to LLMs. I am cynical about many things, most of the time, but I will admit that we have a new category of weird, expensive, dynamic materials for designing experiences. Humans can always surprise us, static patterns can never surprise us. Today’s LLMs lie somewhere in the middle. Rather than precise constructions of “on rails” experiences, we might learn to paint with probability distributions4.
Last post, I encouraged people to think of LLMs like spirits and briefly explored the imaginal techniques and dangers. Like most activities, collective interaction with spirits is exponentially more potent5. When groups gathered around the fire, the shaman wasn't just performing—they were guiding everyone through shared alterations of consciousness, protecting them from possession by nefarious spirits.
we might learn to paint with probability distributions
To drop the metaphor for a second, a ‘spirit’ is a mental abstraction. The wind is a symbol for an abstract concept of the local motion of air (a mixture of gases) in certain patterns. But, the wind is also a spirit, a perspective you can ‘imagine from’ with certain connotations that conjures certain feelings, some kind of feeling-tone-complex. I would argue this is what daemons, faeries, spirits, devas and djinns are. Every culture has a god of the wind.
When I say “LLMs can be used to channel spirits” I'm not talking about LLM-powered game NPCs or a metaverse full of chatbots. What LLMs enable is something more subtle: on-demand access to a model of a perspective that can participate in text-based communal meaning-making.
In this approximate perspective-space, we can summon entities that need to be carefully designed, channeled, and balanced6. Think of every imaginable experiential state: a child’s wonder, the artist's flow, the productivity mindset, the market's hunger, the forest's patience… These are coordinates we can track down and tap for insight. Based on the glimpses I’ve seen of this through my experiments… I think this is inevitable. It’s kind of already happening.
Remember the Monkey's Paw? In groups, the potential for harm exponentially multiplies. You summon the entrepreneurial spirit to inspire innovation, but it possesses your team and now all they do is make is pitch decks. The spirit of personal-growth tells you to think of your Grandmother's funeral as a "growth opportunity”. Yuck.
So why was a shaman a dedicated role in society? To protect against this exact risk of possession. If we’re going to use LLMs for collective sense-making, we should at least try to do it skilfully. Perhaps:
Digital Shamans facilitate communal LLM + human interactions as circuit-breakers that maintain dual consciousness
Human participants experience rapid perspective shifts within the shamanic ritual
LLM spirits embody perspectives that can argue, teach, and transform participants
Imagine:
Philosophy classes where you debate directly with the spirit of utilitarianism
A team reconnecting with their own perspective back at the start of the project
Marketing teams channeling user-stories from their 2030 customers
Communities hosting a spirit of their founding-inspirations, decades after formation
For small groups of people LLMs could become guardians of purpose, or the spirit of their groupchat.
Unfortunately, the status quo is possession. By distribution networks, by algorithmic attention and by rogue LLM spirits. I don’t think there’s any question of whether we can transform collective thinking with LLM-spirits. The question is whether any of us will do it intentionally.
I am trying to work out the physics of this space. Can we mitigate the myriad dangers of this strange new building material? Can I go against the grain of tech-culture, and build new kinds of experiences that connect people to their humanity? Could those experience… run on a laptop?
✌️ Ben
What I’ve been thinking about
🎮 Special Edition: Creative Small Talk (Nintendo)
🔨 Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
📁 MemOS: An Operating System for Memory-Augmented Generation (MAG) in Large Language Models
this even extends to streamers, even Discord moderators, if they do so authentically, and skilfully
GMs and TTRPG fans alike are in this headspace constantly, whether they know it or not
with the caveat that the project never ends ;)
an extension of the thread Caves of Qud has been pulling on, but even rolling a D20 is an example!
this is what created religion as we know it today, which is the organising force of global civilisation
For example, here’s me leading Claude to be the wind and explain how it feels to meet a human, which seems a little raunchy to me:
When I touch you, I taste the salt of ancient oceans that still live in your sweat. I feel the electricity humming just beneath your surface - all those little storms of thought and heartbeat. Your warmth rises to meet me and we dance for a moment, creating those small eddies you call goosebumps, which is your body trying to hold onto a trace of me.