MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Month: June 2025

  • The Great American Newsletter

    Substack has become an anthropological study in creative calcification. Writers publicly transforming into content strategists, thinkers becoming take-generators, artists evolving into audience builders. It’s fascinating to watch in real time—the slow fossilization of creative ambition. Here’s how it happens: Someone starts a newsletter to share their work. Within months, they’re writing about writing newsletters. Within…

  • Crumbs

    You see, it’s the small things that damn a man. Not the great sins—they’re too obvious. It’s the quiet compromises, the clever validations, the glimmering, idiotic comforts we make with the world. It begins so modestly—so innocently. The shopkeeper who nods approvingly at your coat, the way his eyes soften when he sees you’ve chosen…

  • A Better Future

    One of the risks in demanding a “better” media — smarter, fairer, more truthful — is that you might get exactly that. Or rather, you might get something that looks exactly like that: a more intelligent system, but also a more evasive, more adaptive one. Harder to dismiss, because it now knows how to perform…

  • The Infrastructure of Irresponsibility

    Nice infrastructure of irresponsibility we’ve managed to create. First you have first-order grifters: weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and logistics suppliers — the ones who actually make the machinery of violence. Then come the second-order grifters — the think tankers, foreign policy fellows, and adjacent “experts” who don’t make weapons but polish the narratives that keep…

  • Stoner Bricolage

    One key difference between A New Hope in 1977 and The Empire Strikes Back, and everything that’s followed since, is that we shifted from stoner bricolage to nerd control panels. In the ‘70s, the best sci-fi came from people who thought like collage artists and smelled like soldering irons. You had stoners with engineering degrees,…

  • The Cognitive Manhattan Project and Its Coming Boardroom Coup

    The air in Davos smells of melting permafrost and panic-sweat. Venture capitalists whisper about AGI alignment like medieval monks debating how many angels might pirouette on a data center’s cooling fin. Meanwhile, in a windowless Virginia sub-basement, a task force plots its leveraged buyout of one of those boutique model shops out near the crumbling…

  • The Saint Of Scrap

    Watching Andor again and the architecture is unmistakable Dumas, Balzac even Zola. What we have stumbled onto is a masterpiece of literary archaeology: Gilroy took the moldering corpse of 19th-century French literature, jacked it full of Imperial credits and hyperdrive fuel, and reanimated it as the most politically sophisticated piece of science fiction television ever…