What sticks with me most about Shanken’s paper is the tension he builds and then doesn’t quite sit with long enough. He names technoshamanism as both a creative practice and a problem, acknowledging the extraction of indigenous knowledge by global art worlds and wellness industries, but then the case studies move pretty quickly toward celebration without really reckoning with who gets to theorize “dual consciousness” after participating in someone else’s ceremonies. That flattening bothers me. But the section on Pauline Oliveros genuinely shifted something in how I’m thinking. She sidesteps the appropriation question entirely because her practice isn’t borrowing shamanic aesthetics or translating ceremony into installation art. Her improvisational music-making already operates in that register: the body as channel, sound arriving through her rather than from her. And her wish list for a future AI chip is almost absurdly beautiful, asking not for processing power but for spiritual perception, interspecies empathy, the ability to sound the far reaches of the universe the way whales navigate the ocean. It made me realize how narrow our collective imagination for technology really is, how fixated on optimization and extraction, when what Oliveros is describing is technology oriented around relation and care and deep listening. That reframing, where shamanism isn’t a metaphor layered onto tech but a fundamentally different understanding of what tools could be for, felt like the most alive idea in the whole paper, and I wished Shanken had let it be the center instead of one thread among many.