MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Tag: Tech

  • Feudal Optimization

    We often imagine the fall of Rome and the onset of the “Dark Ages” as a catastrophic failure of intelligence—a great forgetting, a descent into blissful ignorance where the poor dears simply couldn’t figure out how to keep the water flowing and the laws coherent. I talk about this a little in this post. Dark…

  • Mother Goose

    I’ve been living in California since 2007. I used to come here before, and I always had this feeling that it’s like people come here because of an album. Some people came for Crosby, Stills & Nash. Some people came for Hotel California. Some people came for Linda Ronstadt, some for The Grateful Dead. I’m…

  • 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…

  • Butler

    You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.   And the screen hums like a cicada…

  • Intraclass Warfare

    In contemporary capitalism, we observe a recurring phenomenon in which one faction of the professional-managerial class (PMC) sacrifices another sector within its own class, ostensibly in the name of progress, accessibility, or efficiency. This process, which we might term sacrificial disruption, serves two simultaneous functions: first, it gains ideological legitimacy from below (by appealing to…

  • How Crypto Lost to DraftKings

    There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain. Or so I thought. For the past month, I…

  • Generally Upward Moving Swine

    Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism. I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the…

  • Iterative Adaptation

    The Sage of the Eastern Mountain spoke: In the garden of ten thousand possibilities, he who takes a seedling from the emperor’s own thief may find his name written in gold for a hundred generations. Yet what appears as theft to the morning eye becomes wisdom to the evening mind. Consider the humble water beetle…

  • Stargate

    Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some…

  • 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…