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Decline? Yes. Collapse? No.
Decline? Yes. Collapse? No. Collapse would mean CIA spooks scribbling op-eds on Substack and hawking $10-a-month subscriptions like two-bit grifters at a carnival sideshow. The agency boys in their ill-fitting suits, slumped in coffee shops from Langley to Lincoln, churning out think pieces titled “The Death of American Empire: A Personal Journey” or “How I…
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The Subscription Economy
The shift from acquisition to subscription models has changed more than just how we acquire goods and services—it’s reshaping our relationship with time, identity, and even culture itself. Acquisition, traditionally seen as the ultimate form of possession, is a finite experience. You acquire something, use it, and then move on, satisfied that the need has…
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The Space Merchants
The Space Merchants—a book that captures today’s farcical present and inevitable future better than any Orwellian or Huxleyan fever dream. Forget 1984; this is a world where satire from 20 years ago gets picked up by the tech industry and polished into grim reality. What was once a joke is now a business model, and…
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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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The Great Christmas H1-B War
The Great Christmas H1-B War of 2024 is the inevitable crash when Tech, high on its own self-congratulatory bullshit, thought it had meat space in lockdown. These are the same people so tangled in their pitch decks they actually believed they could hitch a ride on the venomous wave of Jacksonian nativism—stoking the flames just…
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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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No Exit Christmas Special:
Locked in a suffocating room, a Jacksonian, a Neocon, and a Techno-Libertarian stew in a surreal cacophony of complaints, each convinced the others are the root of all the world’s misery. The Jacksonian, clutching a tattered American flag, howls about the “pussification” of America, blaming the Techno-Libertarian for flooding the country with “goddamn H1B visa…
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Ben-Hur
The brilliance of Ben-Hur, and its simultaneous duplicity, lies in its quiet realignment of cultural identity for the sake of narrative expedience. Judah Ben-Hur, ostensibly a Middle Eastern Jew in the Roman province of Judea, is unmistakably reframed as an Ashkenazi Jew—a Jewishness that is Western, assimilable, and, crucially, palatable to mid-century American audiences. Charlton…
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