An agnostic education in a catholic environment trains you to recognize a crucial distinction: the difference between the Real Presence and a symbolic gesture, between a sacrament and a simulation. It’s the discernment between bread that has been transubstantiated and bread that’s just… bread with exceptionally good marketing.
This theological framework—with its vocabulary of immanence versus transcendence, of mediation versus direct access, of institutions as necessary vessels for grace versus institutions as corrupt impediments to it—provides a startlingly precise map for navigating the bewildering landscape of crypto and LLMs. These technologies are not merely new tools; they are arenas for an old, theological battle over where meaning and authority truly reside.
Furthermore, agnostic lapse Catholicism offers a unique, long-view perspective on institutional decay. The Church has been corrupt, sclerotic, and actively reforming itself for two millennia. To be raised in this tradition is to understand, in your bones, how an institution can be simultaneously probably necessary and rotten. You learn to critique the hierarchy by defaulting to the heresy of pure, atomized individualism-but you don’t brag about it—the notion that you can have a faith, or an economy, or a body of knowledge, with no community, no priests, and no tradition.
And this is what makes the core promise of these tech movements so recognizable. Their fervent, Protestant impulse—”You don’t need the bank, the university, the editor, the priest; it’s just you and the blockchain, you and the model, you and the code”—is a familiar heresy. It’s the same old prosperity gospel, promising wealth and revelation without the messy, human institution, now dressed up in GitHub repos and white papers.
Look at the two great techno-schisms of our young century: cryptocurrency and large language models. The pundits sell them as parallel revolutions, twin suns of a new digital dawn. Rubbish. They are not parallel revolutions. They are parallel symptoms. They are what the body politic builds when the original organs of civil society have been strip-mined for parts.
You are not living through an age of wonders. You are living through an age of compensations. A time of clanking, jury-rigged contraptions designed to solve problems that shouldn’t exist.
Let’s break it down.
First, consider the substrate. Crypto didn’t erupt from a vacuum. It bloomed in the petri dish of the 2008 financial crisis, a moment when “trust” in financial institutions wasn’t just low—it was a punchline. Antitrust law had been a museum piece for decades, allowing finance to consolidate into a goliath that was too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to trust.
So, what do you do? You don’t fix the trust. You engineer a workaround. You build a Rube Goldberg machine of cryptographic hashes and distributed ledgers—a Trust-Machine—that makes “trust” a mathematical output instead of a social contract. Crypto is the catastrophic success of this endeavor: a system so distrustful it requires a planet-scorching amount of energy to prove that a digital coin hasn’t been copied.
Now, look across the aisle at the LLMs. Their substrate is the internet—or what’s left of it. The open web, that glorious, chaotic, Geocities-era commons of personal homepages and weird forums, was systematically enclosed by the platform giants. Google, Facebook, Amazon—they built walled gardens on its grave, turning knowledge into a siloed, surveilled, and optimized product.
The web of links, the hypertext dream, became a ghost. So, what do you do? You don’t fix the web. You perform a mass-scale séance. You scrape the entire digital corpus, every last forgotten blog comment and SEO-bait article, and you compress it into a latent space. You build a model that can mimic knowledge without understanding, that can simulate citation without linking. LLMs are a compressed, lossy JPEG of a library that we were never supposed to burn down.
This is the core of it: the act of enclosure.
Crypto looked at the concept of trust—a fluid, social phenomenon—and said, “We can commodity that.” It enclosed trust into a token. A finite, tradeable, speculator-friendly asset. It took a public good and put a ticker symbol on it.
LLMs looked at the act of speech and meaning—the fundamental stuff of human discourse—and said, “We can inventory that.” They enclosed language into a model. A proprietary, inscrutable, and legally-dubious black box. It took the collective utterance of humanity and turned it into a corporate product.
One atomized money. The other atomized meaning. Both are acts of profound, cynical reductionism.
Their rhetoric is the same: revolutionary, world-building, dripping with manifestos. Crypto promised to “bank the unbanked.” LLMs promise to “democratize knowledge.” It’s a beautiful story. But look at the material reality.
Crypto didn’t build a new, fairer Wall Street; it built a hyper-capitalist caricature of one, a 24/7 trading pit with even less regulation and more pump-and-dump hucksterism. The “decentralization” was a prelude to even more brutal centralization of wealth and compute power.
LLMs aren’t building a new Library of Alexandria; they’re building a Stasi-like panopticon that can generate passable marketing copy and student essays. The “intelligence” is a statistical parlor trick, and the “public good” is a fig leaf for a land grab over the future of cognition itself.
Both are anti-systems. They are not here to repair the old systems; they are here to declare them irredeemable and build a shantytown on the ruins. They exist because the public sphere—a trustworthy financial commons, a vibrant and open information commons—was privatized and degraded long before their founders wrote their first lines of code.
Consider the 19th-century uniform. It was a social technology. The postman’s brass-buttoned coat, the nurse’s crisp cap, the engineer’s specific hat—these were not costumes. They were a trust infrastructure. They were a society’s way of saying: This person has a defined role, a known competency, and the backing of an institution. You may trust them with your mail, your health, your safe passage. The uniform was a walking, talking credential.
The university was the ultimate uniform-issuing body. Its parchment diploma was the officer’s commission for the professional classes. It was a machine for saying, “This person knows what they are talking about.” It wasn’t infallible, but it had weight. It was a system.
And like every other public good, it was enclosed.
Tuition went parabolic, a financial moonshot. The professoriate—the officer corps—was dismantled and replaced with an adjunct underclass, a desperate peasant army of “freeway flyers” teaching five courses for a pauper’s wage. Meanwhile, the administrative bloat created a new, unproductive aristocracy. The campus morphed from a library-and-quad into a luxury resort with a lecture hall attached. The university priced itself into irrelevance by design.
So, what happens when the uniform factory shuts its doors to all but the wealthiest? When the credentialing apparatus becomes a toll booth on a road most can no longer afford to travel?
You get the Ghost Academy.
You get a frantic, decentralized, and deeply suspect market for badges. You get the YouTube guru, the Coursera certificate, the twelve-week coding bootcamp. You get LinkedIn Learning, where a cheerful person in a cardigan explains “disruptive innovation” in algorithm-friendly, bite-sized chunks. You get the “School of Hard Knocks” proudly listed on a LinkedIn profile—the autodidact’s desperate boast.
And sure, there’s a populist thrill to it. Knowledge, once held captive, has busted out of the ivory tower. But look at what’s actually being offered. These are not uniforms. They are costumes. A Coursera certificate has the institutional heft of a postman’s hat bought from a party store. A “Senior AI Prompt Engineer” badge is the gilded braid of a self-appointed admiral in a navy that doesn’t exist.
The Ghost Academy is all syllabus and no substance, all learning and no credible verification. It’s a gray market for credibility, and it exists for the same reason crypto and LLMs exist: the legitimate system—the one that used to credential engineers and historians with a baseline of rigor—rotted from the inside out. We abandoned the uniform, and now we’re drowning in a bazaar of cheap, digital badges, trying to convince each other we’re wearing the real thing.
Notice the pattern? It’s fractal.
When journalism collapsed into clickbait and paywalls, you got Substack—a platform where anyone can be a publisher, and every reader is a subscriber. No editors, no fact-checkers, just vibes and a Stripe integration.
When housing became unaffordable, you got WeWork and co-living startups—“community” as a service, because nobody can afford the down payment on an actual home.
When dating became a swipe-right casino optimized for engagement metrics, you got the “no apps, just meet IRL” crowd—people trying to reinvent the singles mixer as if it’s some revolutionary act.
Every enclosure breeds a compensation. Every time a public good gets turned into a private extraction machine, somebody builds a janky, half-functional alternative and calls it disruption.
And here’s the kicker: the compensations are always worse than what they replaced. They have to be. Because they’re not designed to solve the problem—they’re designed to route around it. They’re designed to let the enclosure stand while offering just enough relief valve to keep the pressure from exploding.
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Let’s talk about the economics of this mess, because it’s not an accident. It’s a feature.
Crypto didn’t emerge because Satoshi Nakamoto was a genius who saw the future. It emerged because extracting rent from the financial system had become more profitable than making the financial system work. When you can make more money from fees and spreads and high-frequency trading microseconds than from actual productive investment, the incentive to maintain trust evaporates.
LLMs didn’t emerge because someone wanted to make information more accessible. They emerged because monetizing attention and data had become more profitable than producing quality content. When you can make more money from surveillance capitalism than from journalism, the incentive to maintain a vibrant information commons evaporates.
The ghost academy didn’t emerge because someone wanted to make education better. It emerged because charging exorbitant tuition and saddling students with non-dischargeable debt had become more profitable than actually educating people. When you can make more money from student loans than from producing educated citizens, the incentive to maintain accessible education evaporates.
This is the logic of late-stage enclosure: the value isn’t in the thing itself anymore. The value is in controlling access to the thing, in charging rent on what used to be free, in turning every commons into a tollbooth.
And when the toll gets too high, when the enclosure becomes too obvious, someone builds a compensatory system that routes around the tollbooth. But the compensatory system is always a hack, always underpowered, always missing the thing that made the original valuable in the first place.
You can’t rebuild trust with mathematics alone. You can’t rebuild meaning with statistics alone. You can’t rebuild education with YouTube tutorials alone.
Here’s where it gets really perverse: the compensations create their own crises, which create their own compensations, in an ever-tightening spiral.
Crypto promised to solve the trust problem by eliminating the need for trust. But then the crypto exchanges turned out to be run by fraudsters—FTX, Mt. Gox, the whole rogues’ gallery. So now you need trustless protocols to verify the trustless protocols. You need DAO governance structures, you need multi-sig wallets, you need increasingly baroque mechanisms to trustlessly verify that the trustless system is trustworthy. The snake eats its tail.
LLMs promised to solve the information problem by compressing the internet into a queryable oracle. But then the models started hallucinating, generating plausible-sounding nonsense with perfect confidence. So now you need retrieval-augmented generation, you need citation systems, you need increasingly complex architectures to verify that the thing that was supposed to replace verification is actually giving you something verifiable. The snake eats its tail.
The ghost academy promised to solve the education problem by making learning accessible to everyone. But then employers stopped trusting self-taught credentials, because anyone can watch a YouTube video. So now you need digital badges, you need blockchain-verified certificates, you need increasingly elaborate signals to prove that the learning actually happened. The snake eats its tail.
Every compensation breeds a crisis of authenticity. And every crisis of authenticity breeds a new generation of compensations.
We’re building meta-solutions to solve the problems created by the solutions we built to solve the problems we created by destroying the original systems.
It’s compensations all the way down.
The politics of this moment is the politics of elsewhere. It’s the politics of “exit.”
Can’t trust the banks? Exit to crypto. Can’t trust the media? Exit to Substack. Can’t afford college? Exit to YouTube University. Can’t afford a house? Exit to van life. Can’t date through apps? Exit to “touching grass.”
Every enclosure creates an exit movement. And the exit movements are sold with the same libertarian fairy tale: you don’t need to fix the system, you just need to opt out. You don’t need solidarity, you just need sovereignty. You don’t need politics, you just need better protocols.
This is the ideological through-line of the compensation age: the fantasy that you can engineer your way out of social problems. That you can replace politics with technology, replace collective action with individual optimization, replace the hard work of maintaining institutions with the clever hack of routing around them.
And it’s seductive, isn’t it? Because fixing the institutions feels impossible. The banks are captured by financiers. The platforms are too powerful to regulate. The universities are too bloated to reform. The housing market is too broken to fix. The whole edifice feels rigged, calcified, beyond repair.
So why not just… leave? Why not build something new in the cracks, in the margins, in the digital frontier?
Here’s why: because the frontier is a lie. Because the exit is controlled by the same forces that enclosed the commons in the first place. Because the VCs funding the crypto startups are the same VCs who financialized everything else. Because the cloud providers hosting the LLMs are the same monopolists who enclosed the web. Because the platforms monetizing the ghost academy are the same platforms that made traditional education unaffordable by demanding endless growth from every sector of the economy.
You can’t exit your way out of enclosure. You can only rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic and call it seasteading.
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And yet, there’s something revealing in these compensations. Something almost archaeological.
Because embedded in every janky workaround, every desperate hack, is a ghost image of the thing we think we have lost. Crypto carries the ghost of financial trust. LLMs carry the ghost of the open web. The ghost academy carries the ghost of accessible education.
These compensations are artifacts of a lost world. They’re the photographic negative of the commons we enclosed, the chalk outline at the crime scene of neoliberalism.
When you look at a blockchain, you’re looking at what trust looked like before we financialized it into oblivion.
When you query an LLM, you’re communing with the shade of an internet that used to be weird and human and free.
When you watch a YouTube tutorial, you’re experiencing an echo of what education felt like before we turned it into a debt trap.
The compensations are nostalgia made technical. They’re the last desperate attempt to preserve the memory of the commons in the only form still available: code.
And that’s the saddest part. Because nostalgia is a weak foundation for a civilization. You can’t build a future on the memory of a past you refuse to reconstruct.
So here we are, watching the spectacle: blockchain bros and AI doomers, YouTube professors and Substack gurus, van lifers and digital nomads, all building their little compensatory systems on the ruins of the old world.
One group is desperately trying to engineer trust from first principles. Another is desperately trying to reconstitute knowledge from its ashes. A third is desperately trying to recreate education from free online content. All of them are convinced they’re revolutionaries.
The moral of this story isn’t about the promise of blockchain or the perils of AI or the future of education. The moral is older, and far more damning.
If you abandon your public squares, you will get private malls.
If you defund your libraries, you will get for-profit search engines.
If you let your institutions of trust rot, you will get cryptographic ledgers.
If you price education out of reach, you will get unaccredited YouTube tutorials.
If you turn every commons into a commodity, you will get a thousand desperate hacks trying to reconstruct what you destroyed.
And the people who build the malls, the search engines, the ledgers, and the platforms will call it innovation. They’re not wrong. It is an innovation—in the art of managing civilizational decline.
Welcome to the future: a beautifully designed, brilliantly marketed, and utterly desperate compensation for what we already gave away.
The ghost academy is just the latest ghost in a haunted house we built ourselves.
And the truly horrifying part? We’re running out of things to enclose, which means we’re running out of things to compensate for. Eventually, you hit bedrock. Eventually, there’s nothing left to hollow out and replace with a clever hack.
Then what?
Then you find out what comes after the age of compensations.
My bet? It won’t be an age of wonders.
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