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The Post Narcissist Hangover
Every zeitgeist has its drug. That’s the secret code, the tracer bullet through history. You don’t chart the eras by wars or presidents or hairstyles — you chart them by the highs. By the chemicals, rituals, and psychic contraband that lit the fuse and kept the engine howling. You want to know what decade you’re…
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Crypto: A Password Manager at a House Fire
I’m starting to feel like crypto is a solution designed for a different era—specifically the post-9/11, pre-Occupy moment when fear of institutional collapse and distrust in centralized systems reached a kind of fever pitch. The trauma of the 2008 financial crisis birthed a thousand libertarian dreams of algorithmic salvation. But here we are, over a…
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Lu-Tze and the Tao of Non-Engagement
A Radical Simplicity Terry Pratchett’s Lu-Tze, the humble sweeper-monk, embodies a philosophy that transcends the binaries of control and chaos, order and entropy. His approach echoes the Taoist principle of wu wei—effortless action—where effectiveness arises not from force or rigid doctrine, but from alignment with the natural flow of things. In a world where systems…
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Architectures of Contradiction
Let’s get one thing out of the way: the plagiarism debate is a red herring. It’s a convenient distraction, an intellectual sleight-of-hand designed to keep us arguing in circles while the real game unfolds elsewhere. Framing the conversation around whether AI “plagiarizes” is like asking if a vacuum cleaner steals the dust. It misunderstands the…
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Minecraft
I went to see Minecraft and couldn’t help noticing a pattern in recent blockbusters—from Mario Bros. and Everything Everywhere to Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, and The Batman: every character is hustling, struggling, or just scraping by. It signals how economic precarity has been normalized in American storytelling—and not just in dramas or indie films, where you’d expect…
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Notes on TPOT/RATS
One of the defining features of the TPOt crowd was that medium rat was running on such obscene levels of dopamine and peer validation, basic brain functions like memory got completely fried. The social high was so unrelenting it turned executive function into background noise. What emerged was a closed-circuit attention economy: ideas weren’t tested…
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The Non Existent Knight
Of Empty Armor and Absurd Quests The first time I read The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, I imagined I had stumbled onto a lost Monty Python script—one written in secret, translated from the Italian, and perhaps smuggled through time in a hollowed-out codpiece. There it all was: the self-serious knight with no self, the…
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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…
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