MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

  • Auctor, Author, Auteur

    I went to see One Battle After Another, and it hit that this was a collision of auctorish chaos, authorish genius, and auteurial precision—a live-fire test of what happens when a literary virus meets a human operating system. The film is based on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—one of his most authorish works, a sprawling, jittery tangle…

  • The Flow Wars

    “A system that treats every component as a piece to be owned will crawl. A system that treats every component as a flow, to be shared, will run.” There was a time we told ourselves a comforting story: that while American politics might be messy and its culture divisive, its business psyche was a bastion…

  • Ilium

    So, having lurked around the crypto social protocol Farcaster, I’ve always found the name ironic. Years ago, I joked it was a real-world “Torment Nexus”—the classic tech blunder of building a dystopian thing from sci-fi because it sounded cool. They took the name from Dan Simmons’s Hyperion novels, where the Farcaster is literally the nexus…

  • Feudal Optimization

    We often imagine the fall of Rome and the onset of the “Dark Ages” as a catastrophic failure of intelligence—a great forgetting, a descent into blissful ignorance where the poor dears simply couldn’t figure out how to keep the water flowing and the laws coherent. I talk about this a little in this post. Dark…

  • Mother Goose

    I’ve been living in California since 2007. I used to come here before, and I always had this feeling that it’s like people come here because of an album. Some people came for Crosby, Stills & Nash. Some people came for Hotel California. Some people came for Linda Ronstadt, some for The Grateful Dead. I’m…

  • Dark Ages

    The “good old days” fallacy assumes that the past is always better. That’s not what I mean. For every Sgt. Pepper squeezed out of a four-track, there were mountains of forgettable slop pressed on the same machines. The real point is that history isn’t a steady line of progress. A medieval town might not have…

  • Four Track Fascism

    Using the word “fascism,” even ironically, is a high-risk, low-reward strategy. It is not a trivialization of historical evil but a precise metaphor for absolute, inflexible authority. The word “fascism” is used here with intentional, tongue-in-cheek irony. The four-track machine was the opposite of actual fascism—it was a constraint that enabled rather than oppressed; it…

  • Bonzo Weimar

    History isn’t repeating. It’s been kidnapped, gutted, and dumped on the freeway, twitching in the headlights. Every smug political scientist with a bookshelf full of Weimar Republic tomes thinks they’ve got the playbook, but none of that fragile German handwringing prepares you for the lunatic spectacle unfolding now.  Everybody in Substack is trying to lecture…

  • Ulysses

    So Ulysses finally comes rowing back into Ithaca. Long trip, longer than advertised, and the shoreline isn’t olive trees anymore — its server racks humming, whispering, belching out cloud exhaust. The suitors have multiplied in his absence, and none of them are men. They’re LLMs. Not one or two scribblers competing for Penelope’s attention, but…

  • Hillbilly Elegy

    Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy was never just a bad film. It was an artifact of a broader failure — the inability of America’s dominant elites to speak across the country’s fracture lines. Howard brought his Blue America toolkit: polished narrative arcs, Oscar-ready casting, and the belief that empathy is itself a cure. His film told…

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