MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: SYSTEMS IN PHASE SPACE

  • Hubs

    There is a peculiar form of reasoning that emerges when someone discovers they are standing at a chokepoint. It goes like this: “Networks need hubs” somehow always becomes “and therefore I’m destiny.” The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork had observed this phenomenon many times. It was especially common among the heads of the various Guilds, each of…

  • The Digi-Baroque

    Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ornate Collapse. The Baroque was Feudalism’s most glamorous costume party before its apparent death. Fast forward three centuries — and for whom do the bells toll? They toll for you. Forget the tired, minimalist dream of the digital future. That sleek, chrome-and-glass utopia is a…

  • The Alchemist’s Lever

    Right. So you want to grease the rails for a margin-lift. A classic maneuver. But you don’t just announce it. That’s brute-force. This is social archeology. You’re not raising prices; you’re re-engineering the consumer’s reality-tunnel. The goal is a psychic event in the customer’s limbic system. The click. The feeling that they’ve outsmarted the system,…

  • Mr Feedback

    Danny… the code boy… the syntax priest… fingers tapping a binary prayer wheel… a real precision saint… Präzisionsheiliger… Input… output… consequence… the holy trinity of the machine… But the machine had a sickness… a bad spark in the wire… Funken im Draht… a jolt from the junkyard data-fields… static crawling under his skin like Ungeziefer……

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • East India Company

      I first read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple in the early days of the Trump administration—back when there was still a fleeting concern of malevolent competence, a sense (however misguided) that the machinery might be steered, however clumsily. That mirage evaporated fast. What followedu wasn’t some masterclass in autocracy but a clown car of…

  • Messianic Hype

    How can the crypto/Web3 ecosystem believe its own messianic hype when it’s entirely built on a fragile global capital structure it doesn’t understand—and can’t survive without? At its core, the illusion of crypto’s divinity is just a derivative trade. They sell it as destiny—“the future of finance,” “a decentralized revolution.” But the reality is more…

  • Atomkraft

    Nuclear power looks cheap—right up until you factor in the part where you have to mothball the reactor for a hundred years, entomb the waste in some geologically stable crypt, and pray your great-grandkids don’t get irradiated by a budget cut. The sticker price on a kilowatt-hour is a joke, a little accounting fiction that…

  • The System Was Always Failing—You Just Chose Not to See It

    The first 45 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been a bloodshot fever dream—wild, erratic, and laced with the kind of incoherent bravado that only a man utterly convinced of his own infallibility can summon. The air reeks of bad decisions and cheap cologne, as if the entire White House has been transformed…