"The surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly." —Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
December 19, 2024
The first official status update on the development of Nockchain, the Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Work blockchain.
December 13, 2024
From monastic orders to Nietzsche's typewriter to Nockchain, the forms that shape our thoughts and deeds.
December 05, 2024
As the material world becomes trustless, trust in something beyond this world becomes more difficult—and more pure.
November 29, 2024
Introduction to the new Cold War.
November 21, 2024
Memory agents, trillion dollar warbands, and your official invitation to the Nockchain launch party in December.
November 14, 2024
We do not yet know what mining can do.
November 07, 2024
Monumental problems, opportunities, and sculptures.
October 31, 2024
On the cold war brewing between Crypto and AI.
October 24, 2024
While Big Tech goes for the jugular, Proof-of-Stake declines.
October 17, 2024
They don't know what to do with the computers.
October 10, 2024
In April, we published a syllabus of sources for the 14 essays published at that point. In this post, we've compiled our sources for the 22 pieces we've published since. If a source already appears in Vol. 1, we do not repeat it here. Baudrillard, Jean.
October 03, 2024
"Squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem." —Nick Land
September 26, 2024
Why ZK rollups are a dead end, and what comes next.
September 19, 2024
"Capitalism is inseparable from the movement of deterritorialization... Capitalism is constructed on the ruins of the territorial and the despotic..." ——Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972)
September 12, 2024
Plus intelligence-run oligarchies, Jock, and Buzz Aldrin's Lunar Communion.
September 05, 2024
Vico, historical cycles, and the proof-of-work blockchain.
August 29, 2024
Frontiers, Chips, China, and the Two Great Civilization-Grade Chains of Texas
August 22, 2024
Everything is about technology except technology, which is about philosophy.
August 15, 2024
What I learned this week in East Texas.
August 08, 2024
How to fix "the workshop where ideals are manufactured."
August 01, 2024
A theory of the cognitive firm
July 25, 2024
"WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it’s crude energy flowing through us." —Wyndham Lewis
July 18, 2024
On Plato's Thousand-Year Academy
July 11, 2024
"We shall go for Independence, and put our trust in our selves, our rifles, and——our god." —Stephen F. Austin
July 04, 2024
On permissionless and scalable kingmaking.
June 27, 2024
When Proof of Work is abolished at the anthropological layer, it reappears at the managerial layer: A theory of Higher Education and signaling games run amok.
June 20, 2024
On technology, the Übermensch, and "the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical... passing into the service of an excess of life." (Deleuze)
June 13, 2024
On power, value, and responsibility futurism.
June 06, 2024
"Now it is not the devil but DOS that sits on my belly." —Ivan Illich
May 30, 2024
"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." ——Matthew 7:14
May 23, 2024
"Man is a rope, stretched between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss..." —Nietzsche
May 16, 2024
"It is up to us to again become the nomads of this desert... a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand." —Baudrillard
May 09, 2024
"Nature loves to encrypt." —Heraclitus
May 02, 2024
We're currently working on a technical statement about our market thesis. In the meantime, we thought we'd publish a list of sources for the 14 essays we've published in the past few months. (We've always taken care to cite our sources, but
April 25, 2024
On silence, record-keeping, and the obscure geographical teleology of American freedom.
April 18, 2024
On Hernán Cortés and informal capital formation.
April 11, 2024
"May not and ought not the children of these fathers rightly say: 'Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity...'" —William Bradford
April 04, 2024
"The increasingly rigorous differentiation of marriage from trade, or politics from economics, finds its ultimate conceptual definition in the thought of a moral agency which is utterly impervious to learning, communication, or exchange." —Nick Land
March 28, 2024
"Sovereign is he who commands the compute." —James Poulos
March 21, 2024
"The festival... is an aspiration for destruction... but there is a conservative prudence that regulates and limits it." —Georges Bataille
March 14, 2024
Everyone talks about "freedom of speech," but we forget the freedom to say nothing.
March 07, 2024
"It is precisely in times of ‘laxness’ that tragedy runs through the houses and streets, that great love and great hatred are born and the flame of knowledge blazes up into the sky." —Nietzsche
February 29, 2024
Western civilization is an esoteric war of religion masked by an exoteric media history.
February 22, 2024
On Marx, Burnham, and the future of capitalism.
February 15, 2024
After control society, the zero-knowledge society.
February 08, 2024
On the end of Mass Media Man.
February 01, 2024
McLuhan predicted computers would program a new society. What happened to that?
December 18, 2023
On Ernst Jünger, James C. Scott, and escape from the great interrogation.
December 09, 2023