Writing

Welcome to the American Diamond Age

Memory agents, trillion dollar warbands, and your official invitation to the Nockchain launch party in December.

November 14, 2024

Zorp Introduces zkPoW: A New Asset Class

We do not yet know what mining can do.

November 07, 2024

Jock and Awe

Monumental problems, opportunities, and sculptures.

October 31, 2024

The Protocol vs. The Plantation

On the cold war brewing between Crypto and AI.

October 24, 2024

Pining for Proofs

While Big Tech goes for the jugular, Proof-of-Stake declines.

October 17, 2024

Heads in the Cloud

They don't know what to do with the computers.

October 10, 2024

Nockchain Syllabus Vol. 2

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

Split Futures

"Squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem." —Nick Land

September 26, 2024

Autism Is All You Need

Why ZK rollups are a dead end, and what comes next.

September 19, 2024

The World Stack

"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

Introducing NockApps

Plus intelligence-run oligarchies, Jock, and Buzz Aldrin's Lunar Communion.

September 05, 2024

Barbarism and Divine Providence

Vico, historical cycles, and the proof-of-work blockchain.

August 29, 2024

Can Weaponized Autism Save America?

Frontiers, Chips, China, and the Two Great Civilization-Grade Chains of Texas

August 22, 2024

Challenge and Destiny

Everything is about technology except technology, which is about philosophy.

August 15, 2024

Protocols, Art, and the Post-Marketing Era

What I learned this week in East Texas.

August 08, 2024

Ideal Manufacturing

How to fix "the workshop where ideals are manufactured."

August 01, 2024

Coasian Cults

A theory of the cognitive firm

July 25, 2024

Futurist Tribalism

"WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it’s crude energy flowing through us." —Wyndham Lewis

July 18, 2024

A Secret History of Collective Intelligence

On Plato's Thousand-Year Academy

July 11, 2024

Stephen F. Austin and the Telos of Texas

"We shall go for Independence, and put our trust in our selves, our rifles, and——our god." —Stephen F. Austin

July 04, 2024

The King and the Messenger

On permissionless and scalable kingmaking.

June 27, 2024

Human Rites

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

The Self-Destruction of Nihilism

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

The Rising Returns to Courage

On power, value, and responsibility futurism.

June 06, 2024

The Hamlet and the Steeple

"Now it is not the devil but DOS that sits on my belly." —Ivan Illich

May 30, 2024

The Light and the City

"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

General Acrobatics

"Man is a rope, stretched between beast and Übermensch—a rope over an abyss..." —Nietzsche

May 16, 2024

The Desert of the Real

"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

Immanence Machines

"Nature loves to encrypt." —Heraclitus

May 02, 2024

Nockchain Syllabus Vol. 1

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

Sam Houston's Silent Slope to Texas

On silence, record-keeping, and the obscure geographical teleology of American freedom.

April 18, 2024

Aristocratic Information Markets

On Hernán Cortés and informal capital formation.

April 11, 2024

Faith, Exodus, and Decentralization

"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

Inhibited Synthesis

"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

How to Pass a Torch

"Sovereign is he who commands the compute." —James Poulos

March 21, 2024

Sacrifice, Festival, and Proof of Work

"The festival... is an aspiration for destruction... but there is a conservative prudence that regulates and limits it." —Georges Bataille

March 14, 2024

Freedom and Silence

Everyone talks about "freedom of speech," but we forget the freedom to say nothing.

March 07, 2024

Apples From a Tree

"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