Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE
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Museum of Unseen Futures
Perhaps that is the final limit of visionaries: they do not conjure the future but instead craft its museum, arranging their dreams as exhibits for an audience yet to exist. Each boulevard, policy, or technology is less a step forward than a carefully placed relic, not built to withstand the future, but to be observed…
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Parasocial Tapeworm Blues
The parasite doesn’t knock. It doesn’t ask permission. It slides in smooth, coiling itself around your attention, threading through the soft tissue of your mind. You invited it, didn’t you? A friendly voice in the void, promising connection, promising meaning. But now it’s here, lodged deep, humming its endless tune. This is the Parasocial Tapeworm…
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On the Beach
The beach is the edge of the known world. It’s where land meets water, where certainty dissolves into chaos, and where you’re left barefoot, staring at the horizon, wondering if the tide is coming in or going out. It’s both arrival and departure, the place where Polynesians shoved off and where shipwreck survivors wash ashore.…
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Faking it Forward
The Gamification of Truth Metrics The brutal irony of the cryptosphere: as we fight to identify signal amidst the noise, every innovation we cling to as a “truth metric” inevitably collapses under the weight of its own gamification. The early metrics were simple: active wallets, social engagement, total value locked. But anyone who’s spent more…
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Startup Inflation
Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is…
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Soviet Sci-Fi, and the Dream of Hyper-Organicity
This piece draws continuity from Venkatesh Rao’s excellent Contraptions post, “We Are The Robots” which begins with Kraftwerk’s iconic ode to the machine age and moves through fascinating detours on technology, systems, and culture. It felt like a natural fit for my “Music in Phase Space” playlist—a space where a music lede meets deeper questions…
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Exile in the Wild Earnest
Engineers. Always lurking at the edge of the frame, smoothing their tees, hands in pockets full of patents they didn’t quite invent. They didn’t write the symphony, but they’ll take credit for the piano. They didn’t build the cathedral, but they’ll swear they taught the stones how to sing. It’s their gift: rewriting the wiring…
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You’re so worried about imploding like a blackhole that a gravastar gets you
You’re so worried about imploding like a black hole that a gravastar gets you instead. Not the collapsing, all-consuming kind, mind you, but the particularly smug sort of gravastar. The one that sits there, perfectly balanced between collapse and explosion, radiating just enough existential snark to remind you it knows something you don’t. “What are…
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Hard Problems
In the current cultural landscape, we are inundated with the effects of hot media, where everything is designed to captivate and engage as quickly and intensely as possible. This is the world of easy engineering—where technologies and systems are designed for maximum efficiency and accessibility, often at the expense of depth or complexity. The focus…
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The Art of Writing
The Business of Being Read There’s a new breed of prose jockey out there, and they’re hell-bent on cornering the market on words. They’re not journalists, not novelists, not even the rugged, chain-smoking bloggers of yesteryear—no, they’re Substackers. These digital scribes have proclaimed themselves the saviors of the written word, promising to deliver insights, frameworks,…