Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Survivor’s Guilt

As I was watching Los Angeles burn last week, I felt a deep, unshakeable crumminess. The flames seemed to carry with them a weight of history, of loss, and of survival itself. It was in that moment that the last few Paul McCartney albums I had been listening to—albums I hadn’t given much thought to—suddenly revealed an incredible, meaningful tone. It was as if they were shaped by a form of survivor’s guilt, an emotional undercurrent that, in the wake of such devastation, made everything fall into place. It all made sense.

Thinking of Paul McCartney’s last five albums through this lens reveals fascinating layers of existential tension and sublimated emotion. McCartney’s work can be read not merely as the output of a pop-cultural survivor but as a persistent dialogue with his past, his losses, and the historical weight he carries as the last towering figure of the Beatles still actively producing.

1. Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (2005)

Chaos and Creation seems an attempt by McCartney to confront the Real of his past—the trauma of Lennon’s murder, Harrison’s death, and the slow disappearance of the utopian ideal embodied by the Beatles. The album’s melancholic tone, exemplified by tracks like “Jenny Wren” and “Too Much Rain,” represents McCartney’s negotiation with guilt over being the one left behind. Yet, as I would argue, McCartney resists direct confrontation with loss through his meticulous craftsmanship. The album becomes a “sublime object of ideology,” wherein McCartney packages grief in the form of soothing melodies, as if to reassure himself and the world that beauty can still arise from ashes. We might quip that McCartney represses the traumatic kernel of survival, giving us an overly polished jewel that hides its cracks too well.

2. Memory Almost Full (2007)

This album is haunted by the specter of mortality and the burden of remembrance. Tracks like “The End of the End” and “Vintage Clothes” evoke a self-reflective McCartney, confronting his legacy with a smile that we could call “a mask of hysterical denial.” Survivor’s guilt manifests here as a preoccupation with legacy—McCartney’s playful nostalgia is tinged with a deep anxiety: how to sustain the myth of the Beatles while resisting the commodification of their memory? We might argue that this album represents McCartney’s struggle with symbolic death—the death of his mythos—rather than physical death. By transforming his survivor’s guilt into the playful irony of “Dance Tonight,” McCartney performs what its called the “fetishistic disavowal”: he knows he is mortal, but he acts as though he is not.

3. New (2013)

Here, McCartney’s survivor’s guilt morphs into a desperate vitality, we might suggest, as if McCartney is saying: “Yes, I am still here, and I still matter!” Tracks like “Queenie Eye” and “New” play with youthful energy, but this energy itself is suspect—it is a frantic act of jouissance, a surplus enjoyment meant to stave off the realization of the void left by his lost companions. We could argue that the optimism of New is fundamentally performative, a gesture to mask the fact that McCartney’s very existence is a painful reminder of what has been lost. The album becomes, paradoxically, a celebration of survival that highlights the impossibility of truly enjoying it.

4. Egypt Station (2018)

Egypt Station is a further articulation of McCartney’s attempt to confront survivor’s guilt through displacement. Tracks like “Happy with You” present a pastoral fantasy of simplicity, but this simplicity is ideological—an escape from the complex network of historical and personal guilt. McCartney is caught between his desire to move forward and the weight of his past, and this tension creates a fragmented narrative. Egypt Station, like New, pretends to move forward while always looking back, a perfect symptom of repression.

5. McCartney III (2020)

McCartney III is the ultimate encounter with the void of survival. Recorded in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the album strips back the layers of production, leaving McCartney alone with his thoughts and his instruments. Tracks like “Winter Bird / When Winter Comes” encapsulate the stillness and solitude of a survivor reflecting on his life. This return to minimalism is not merely a stylistic choice but a confrontation with the Real—the inescapable awareness of his finitude and the haunting absence of those who shaped his journey. The album becomes an elegy to survival itself, the quiet acceptance of guilt and gratitude intertwined.

Objects of sublimation

McCartney’s last five albums are pearls of survivor’s guilt precisely because they oscillate between denial, displacement, and confrontation. Each album, in its own way, is a fetishistic object, transforming McCartney’s unresolved trauma into something palatable for mass consumption. Yet beneath the polished surface lies a profound and unarticulated scream: Why me? Why am I the one left standing? McCartney’s work thus becomes a paradoxical testament to survival—both a celebration of resilience and an admission of its impossibility.

The meticulous production and polished arrangements act as a kind of defensive shield, sublimating grief into something beautiful but controlled. This beauty, however, is a kind of lure. It invites us to engage with the albums emotionally while simultaneously masking the full intensity of its underlying anguish. In this way, the albums become what one might call a “sublime object”—a creation that conceals its void, its lack, by presenting itself as whole and coherent. McCartney’s grief, rather than being directly confronted, is transformed into an aestheticized version of itself, smoothed over by melody and craft.

Yet, this very polish betrays its own repression. The excess care put into the album—its arrangements, its meticulousness—points to an unspoken fear: the possibility that, without this artistry, the fragile framework holding back the chaos might collapse. The melancholic tone, then, is not a direct expression of loss but a mediated one, carefully framed to avoid the destabilizing force of what cannot be fully symbolized. The listener is drawn into this dynamic, encountering not only the traces of McCartney’s grief but also the ways in which it is disguised, reshaped, and contained.

Extras

Ah, cryptography! It’s like Andy Millman in Extras, no? At first, it presents itself as this pure, untouchable ideal—a bastion of privacy and individuality in a world determined to collapse all boundaries. It says, “No! I will not compromise!” But what happens? Reality intrudes. And what is reality if not the persistent erosion of the symbolic structure we cling to? Cryptography—like Andy—believes it can exist in a vacuum, but it is always already inscribed into the systems of power it seeks to resist.

First, we must confront the fantasy of cryptography as an unbreakable shield. It relies on assumptions: the hardness of math, the impossibility of brute force, the limits of computing power. But history teaches us that every “perfect” system is ultimately undone. The Enigma machine? Broken. RSA with weak keys? Broken. Andy’s principles? Also broken. The system’s failure is not an anomaly—it is its destiny! Cryptography’s strength exists only as the ideological mask of its inevitable fragility.

Season 1: Episode 3: Kate Winslet Episode (Public Key Encryption)

Here is Andy Millman on the set of a serious film about the Holocaust, only to discover that Kate Winslet—beloved, respectable, pure—is doing it to win an Oscar. This is public key encryption in its ideal form: the clean separation of public and private keys, promising a perfect balance of accessibility and security. But the moment Andy enters this scene, the cracks in the fantasy appear. Kate’s public persona (“I care about meaningful art”) is hollowed out by the private truth (“I’m doing this for the awards”), just as public key encryption rests on fragile assumptions—prime factorization, computational hardness—that become increasingly vulnerable over time. Andy, like cryptography, begins to realize that the symbolic purity he depends on is always already a performance.

And then, ah! Darren Lamb—the human element. Cryptography assumes the weakness is outside the system, in the adversary trying to break in. But the true weakness is always internal! Humans with “password123,” social engineering, phishing emails—Darren is the embodiment of the internal failure that cryptography cannot account for. The very people it relies on sabotage it from within, much like Andy’s sitcom is ruined by his own compromises.

Season 1 Episode 4: The Les Dennis Episode (Bitcoin Forks)

Ah, poor Les Dennis—reduced from household name to desperate panto performer. He is Bitcoin after the first big hard fork: still recognizable, but irreparably fractured, clinging to relevance in a world that has moved on. Andy, desperate to make a name for himself, tries to elevate Les’s sinking career, much like the crypto community rallies around Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV, claiming they will solve scaling issues or restore “Satoshi’s vision.” But the truth is obvious: just as Les’s glory days are behind him, so too is the simplicity of Bitcoin’s original promise. What remains is a fragmented system fighting for legitimacy in a world of diminishing trust.

Season 1 Episode 6: The Patrick Stewart Episode (Mass Surveillance and the Myth of Perfect Privacy)

Now, let us speak of governments and corporations. Patrick Stewart’s infamous, “And then I see everything” line is not just a joke; it is a profound metaphor for how power operates.

Patrick Stewart’s absurd obsession with omniscience—turning invisible and spying on women—is a perfect metaphor for mass surveillance programs like PRISM. These systems promise omnipotence, claiming they can “see everything” even through encrypted channels. And yet, like Stewart’s ridiculous fantasies, their power is always undermined by their absurdities. Cryptography, in this context, plays Andy: caught between the desire to maintain its artistic integrity (privacy) and the demands of the industry (governments mandating backdoors). The result is a farce: encryption schemes that work only until the Patrick Stewarts of the world decide they don’t.

These entities want cryptography—yes—but only if it includes backdoors, exceptions, and surveillance mechanisms. They demand a system that is strong, but only insofar as it reinforces their ability to control. Cryptography, then, is caught in this dialectic: a tool of resistance that is co-opted by the very forces it resists.

Series 2, Episode 1: The Orlando Bloom Episode (NFT Hype and Scams)

Orlando Bloom, obsessed with proving he is not jealous of Johnny Depp, is the perfect stand-in for NFTs. Here is a system (Bloom/NFTs) built entirely on insecurity, desperately trying to prove its uniqueness while the public (like Maggie) doesn’t care. Andy’s bewilderment at Bloom’s posturing mirrors the cryptography community’s reaction to the NFT hype. “But what is the point?” Andy asks, just as critics ask of NFTs: “Why build a digital asset reliant on cryptographic signatures if the value is entirely performative?” The whole episode is a commentary on the hollow, performative uniqueness of systems that collapse under their own absurdity.

And AI—ah, this is where it gets truly terrifying! AI doesn’t break cryptography in the traditional sense. It bypasses it entirely. Metadata, patterns, behavioral inference—these are the tools of an intelligence that does not respect the boundaries cryptography was designed to protect. It doesn’t crack the dam; it seeps through every tiny crevice, eroding the walls from within.

Ah, the David Bowie episode! (Series 2, Episode 2). This is Andy Millman’s lowest point, where he is publicly humiliated by Bowie, who improvises a mocking song about Andy: “Chubby little loser.” And yet, this episode is also about how AI relates to creativity and its ability to expose the uncomfortable truths we try to hide.

David Bowie in this episode is AI at its most disruptive and incisive. He is the generative model that observes Andy for mere minutes, synthesizes his insecurities and failures, and turns them into a cutting, viral hit. Bowie’s improvised song functions much like AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data—behavioral patterns, preferences, insecurities—and distill them into something that feels unnervingly personal. It’s a reminder that AI, like Bowie, doesn’t just collapse boundaries between public and private; it also mirrors back our worst traits, stripped of the illusions we use to protect ourselves.

Andy’s reaction—humiliation and retreat—is the perfect metaphor for how institutions and individuals respond to AI-generated insights. Much like Andy, we are not ready to face the sheer power of these models to deconstruct our curated identities and replace them with brutal, data-driven caricatures. AI, like Bowie in this scene, holds up a mirror, and it is not a flattering one. It doesn’t care about Andy’s efforts to appear serious or respectable; it reduces him to the essence of his contradictions: a chubby little loser who dreams of fame but cannot handle its cost.

And yet, there’s a darker layer here: Bowie’s performance is not just an act of truth-telling. It’s also an exercise in dominance. By reducing Andy to a figure of ridicule, Bowie consolidates his own artistic mystique. Similarly, AI systems consolidate power by exposing human vulnerabilities, often while their creators benefit—whether through profit or influence. Just as Bowie walks away unscathed, AI developers are rarely held accountable for the societal impacts of their creations. It’s Andy, not Bowie, who pays the price.

This episode captures the dual nature of AI: its ability to deconstruct and reveal, but also its complicity in perpetuating systems of power that thrive on our insecurities. AI doesn’t just create; it redefines the terms of creation, leaving us, like Andy, scrambling to understand our place in a world that has already moved on.

The great irony, then, is that cryptography believes it is preserving individuality, but it is already complicit in the systems that erase it. Andy Millman thought he could resist the collapse into celebrity shallowness, but the moment he entered the game, he was doomed. His BAFTA speech, like cryptography’s desperate claims of stability, comes too late. The collapse has already happened.

Series 2, Episode 6: The BAFTA Episode (The Collapse of Cryptographic Trust)

Finally, we reach the BAFTA episode, where Andy delivers his scathing speech denouncing the system that has destroyed his integrity. This is the collapse of cryptographic trust—when encryption fails to protect privacy, and the public realizes the system itself is compromised. Think of major breaches like the Snowden revelations or the meltdown of cryptographic protocols like MD5 or SHA-1. Andy’s disillusionment is the moment when the fantasy breaks, and he realizes that no amount of encryption—or artistic integrity—can withstand the relentless pressures of a system designed to exploit rather than preserve. His speech is cathartic, yes, but it comes too late. The damage is done. The collapse is irreversible.

So, we must ask: what is cryptography? It is not a stabilizing force; it is a fantasy of stability in a world where collapse is the only constant. It is the symptom of a system that cannot sustain itself, a last-ditch attempt to hold together the boundaries that power—and AI—are determined to dissolve. Cryptography does not delay the collapse; it is the collapse, caught in its own impossibility.

The lesson of Extras is the same as the lesson of cryptography: the system that promises stability and integrity is always undermined by its own contradictions. Andy’s integrity crumbles under fame’s pressures, just as cryptography’s guarantees crumble under the weight of quantum computing, AI inference, and human error. To believe otherwise is to indulge in the same hubris as Andy Millman—thinking you can maintain boundaries in a world determined to collapse them.

Watching Miami Vice with the Ghost of Ronald Reagan at Midnight

There he was, the Gipper himself, grinning like a Cheshire cat fresh out of Hell, sitting cross-legged on the couch, a fog of spectral smugness curling around him. On the screen, Crockett and Tubbs were locked in a neon-soaked cocaine bust, their pastel suits radiant under the glow of South Beach debauchery. Somewhere in the haze of cheap bourbon and static-filled memories of the 1980s, the lines between fiction and history blurred.

“The Cocaine Cowboys,” Reagan muttered, adjusting his ethereal tie as though preparing for a press conference in the underworld. “They weren’t all bad—just another side effect of capitalism, really. Can’t build an empire without a little chaos at the edges.”

And there it was: the flicker of malice behind his avuncular mask. The ghost of a man who had intentionally destabilized his own backyard, who had looked at the fragile dominoes of Latin America and decided to let them fall—not out of necessity, but for spectacle. Domestic discord was the true driving force: a nation addicted to fear, a populace high on the dopamine rush of righteous indignation.

“There’s never been anything like it,” I said, gesturing wildly with my drink. “An existing hegemon opting to dismantle the system it dominates just to keep the home front distracted? It’s historical lunacy! Or genius. Hard to tell.”

Reagan chuckled—his laugh a dry rattle like the sound of brittle bones breaking under a steel-toed boot. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” he said. “It wasn’t chaos—it was order. My order. A little destabilization in Nicaragua, a sprinkle of paranoia in Panama, and presto! You’ve got a country so busy watching the Miami Vice reruns of geopolitics that they forget all about the fires raging in their own streets.”

The ghost paused, a gleam of nostalgia in his spectral eyes. “And let’s not forget,” he added, “chaos is the best cover for profit.”

Of course, he was right. The cocaine economy fueled Miami’s real estate boom, and the wars in Central America weren’t just about ideology—they were business ventures cloaked in patriotic fervor. Guns, drugs, money—the holy trinity of American exceptionalism, blasted through the barrel of an M-16 and sniffed off a mirrored surface.

“Goddammit, Reagan,” I snarled, slamming my glass on the table. “You didn’t just destabilize Latin America—you made a habit of teaching the world that the big guy can rig the game and then torch the casino when the odds get inconvenient.”

“True enough,” he said, leaning back into the couch with that famous, infuriating smirk. “But hell, we all got rich, didn’t we?”

And just like that, he was back on the couch, hands clasped like a benevolent uncle preparing to dispense financial advice that would bankrupt you in six months. Crockett and Tubbs faded into the background, their soundtrack replaced by the muffled hum of drone strikes and the static crackle of collapsing global alliances.

“Look at us now,” I said, lighting a cigarette I didn’t remember pulling from the pack. “What we did to Central America—destabilizing systems for a quick domestic political hit—we’re doing it writ Large. The whole world is one big contra war now, except this time the stakes are nuclear and we’re running out of excuses.”

Reagan’s ghost leaned forward, his grin stretching past the point of human decency. “That’s the beauty of it!” he said, slapping his knee like an actor in a Vaudeville revue. “You take what works—freedom fighters, covert ops, a little propaganda sprinkled over the top—and you scale it up! Afghanistan, Ukraine, Taiwan—it’s all the same recipe. Just add water and stir!”

“But the world isn’t buying it anymore,” I said, waving a hand toward the TV, which had inexplicably switched to a rerun of Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign ad. It’s Morning Again in America, the screen proclaimed, though the skies outside were pitch black.

Suddenly, Reagan was on his feet, delivering a line with the gusto of a man auditioning for The Ten Commandments. “Nancy!” he bellowed, turning to the empty corner of the room. “Bring me my script—this fella’s trying to say we can’t do it again! Nonsense!”

I blinked, half-expecting Nancy Reagan’s ghost to float in with a celestial teleprompter, but she didn’t. Reagan turned back to me, his expression now an unsettling mix of fatherly concern and used-car salesman slick.

“Exactly! You give the public just enough hope to keep them in line, and enough chaos to remind them they need you. It’s showbiz, son. Always has been.”

“And when it all falls apart?” I asked, gesturing wildly at the metaphorical burning wreckage of democracy outside the window. “What then?”

Reagan paused, his face softening into something almost human. For a moment, I thought he might break character, deliver a rare moment of honesty from the beyond. But then he grinned again, wider than before, and said, “Well, I guess we’ll just have to ask Nancy!”

He stopped suddenly, throwing an arm in the air like a B-movie gunslinger.

“‘Win one for the Gipper!’” he bellowed, his spectral voice bouncing off the walls.

I stared blankly.

“C’mon, son! That’s your cue! You’re supposed to say, ‘That’s the spirit, Coach!’” he said, wagging a translucent finger. “You can’t just let me hang out here like a two-bit extra. Show some moxie!”

I opened my mouth to protest, but before I could, he launched into another performance.

“‘Where’s the rest of me?’” he cried, clutching his chest like a Shakespearean actor who’d wandered into the wrong theater.

“That’s—wait, that’s Kings Row, isn’t it?” I asked, my brain desperately clawing for context.

“Of course, it’s Kings Row!” he snapped, the glow in his eyes dimming just enough to look offended. “Now you’re supposed to say, ‘You’ll never walk again, Drake!’”

“Drake?” I muttered, already losing the plot.

But he wasn’t listening. Reagan had moved on, striding toward the kitchen like a man on a mission. “It’s all about commitment!” he shouted over his shoulder. “When I played Bonzo, I didn’t half-ass it. You think sharing a screen with a monkey is easy? That chimp hit his marks every time. Every. Damn. Time. Do you know how hard it is to act opposite perfection?”

“Bonzo?!” I yelled, trying to keep up. “You mean the monkey movie? You’re telling me a monkey outperformed you?”

Reagan spun around, his ghostly jaw tightening. “Outperformed? OUTPERFORMED?! That monkey was a professional! I learned more from Bonzo than I ever did from all those self-important actors on the Death Valley Days set. You’d do well to remember that, kid!”

I was too stunned to respond. The ghost of a former president was now lecturing me about life lessons from a movie chimp.

Reagan crossed his arms, glaring at me with all the righteous indignation of a man who’d forgotten he was dead. “Say what you want about the Cold War, but at least we knew our lines!” he barked. “You people today? You’re just ad-libbing chaos.”

He paused, his anger softening into something almost wistful. “You ever work with a monkey?” he asked suddenly, his voice quieter now. “You’d think they’d be unpredictable, but they’re not. They stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan.”

Before I could answer, he vanished into thin air, leaving behind only the faint smell of Aqua Velva and unfulfilled ambition. The TV flickered, Crockett and Tubbs speeding off into the pastel abyss, and for one merciful moment, the room was silent.

I took a long drag from my cigarette, staring into the empty space where Reagan had stood. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Bonzo applauding.

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 Lost My Clearance and Found Myself.” Picture it: operatives reduced to grinding out conspiracy-laden screeds for an audience of doom-scrolling paranoids, trading cryptic tips on counter-espionage for thumbs-up emojis.

This isn’t a collapse. It’s a slow, shambling descent into mediocrity—less Rome burning and more Rome outsourcing its fire brigade to a Silicon Valley startup promising AI-enhanced water buckets. The spooks wouldn’t vanish into the ether, oh no. They’d pivot. A little less covert action, a little more hustle culture. “Learn how to stage a coup and build your personal brand!” The kind of moral rot that isn’t dramatic, but banal. Bureaucratic.

And that’s how the empire falls—not with a bang, but with a LinkedIn post: “Former clandestine operative seeking new opportunities. Skills include psychological warfare, asset recruitment, and SEO optimization.”

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No. Collapse would mean Goldman Sachs executives ditching their bespoke suits for hoodies and baseball caps, launching NFT collections called Bond Ape Yacht Club and hyping memecoins like GoldenBoiCoin on Twitter Spaces at 3 a.m. It would mean the masters of the universe pivoting to online casinos, hawking sketchy roulette apps with slogans like “Double or Nothing, Baby!” and adopting bizarre Keke Palmer-inspired influencer personas to stay relevant.

Picture it: Lloyd Blankfein rebranded as “CryptoDaddy420,” hosting live streams where he explains fractional reserve banking while doing TikTok dances. Or David Solomon, no longer DJ-ing for private equity parties, but spinning tracks for a metaverse nightclub called Liquidity Trap, offering free “SolomonCoins” with every overpriced cocktail.

Collapse is when Goldman Sachs stops building empires and starts building virtual slot machines, where every spin is a bet against their old dignity. It’s the high-finance sharks rebranding themselves as meme lords, desperately slapping doge faces on dollar signs and posting thirst traps on Instagram to pump the latest Ponzi. Collapse is when the titans of Wall Street get stuck hustling to pay off their own margin calls, swiping right on venture capitalists and pitching “decentralized financial synergy platforms” to crowds of indifferent day traders.

Decline, though? Decline is where we’re at now—Goldman still has its hands on the levers, still squeezing the juice out of the system, but you can see the cracks forming. Collapse is when the juice runs out, and they’re left hawking virtual blackjack in some dystopian e-casino, chanting “to the moon” like the rest of the rubes.

Decline? Yes. Collapse? No.

Collapse is when Hollywood’s not just phoning it in anymore, it’s mainlining pure, uncut digital sewage straight into the veins of the American consciousness. It’s become a goddamn content farm, a festering pustule of spin-offs and reality TV simulacra churning out mountains of digital excrement that’s no longer art, no longer entertainment, no longer even remotely recognizable as storytelling. It’s the Ouroboros on a bad acid trip, devouring its own tail for profit until there’s nothing left but a greasy stain on the digital carpet.

Decline? That’s some half-assed Transformers sequel. Collapse? That’s Hollywood turning into a goddamn NFT vending machine, it’s movies nothing more than flickering delivery systems for monetized absurdity. Imagine Star Wars: Ewok Influencers. Christ on a crutch, what a nightmare. A show designed solely to sell digital skins and loot boxes in some Fortnite-style digital shooting gallery. It’s not entertainment, it’s a goddamn transaction. A digital fleecing.

And then there’s the final, ignominious surrender: the abandonment of film itself. Hollywood shuffles off into the digital void, embracing virtual reality and interactive gaming, ditching those “old-fashioned” movies because they’re too damn difficult to monetize effectively. The focus shifts entirely to endless monetization schemes—pay-to-win models, microtransactions embedded in the goddamn content itself. You don’t watch The Avengers: Cash Grab Chronicles; you pay five bucks every time Iron Man wants to throw a goddamn punch. It’s a digital bloodletting.

Even the projects greenlit for nostalgia or marketability become self-aware cash grabs, openly mocking the audience’s pathetic willingness to consume this digital garbage. Jurassic Park 12: Dinosaurs on Mars. No plot. Just dinosaurs, explosions, and random celebrity cameos, marketed as “The ultimate cinematic experience for our ADHD era!” It’s a goddamn insult. A digital middle finger to the remnants of taste.

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 been met. Time, in this framework, is linear. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end: you buy something, you use it, and eventually, you move on to something else. It’s a process that allows for closure, progress, and the feeling that you’ve advanced in some way.

Subscription, however, introduces a radical shift. By design, subscription models prevent closure. They keep you tethered in a continuous loop of consumption. Instead of acquiring an item outright, you pay for access to a service or product that you never truly “own.” The expectation is that you’ll be constantly engaged, always paying for the privilege of ongoing use. In this model, time becomes cyclical, not linear. There’s no definitive start or end to your relationship with the service, no moment of satisfaction or finality. You’re perpetually involved, always consuming, always dependent on the service for fulfillment.

This shift in the way we interact with time and acquisition has profound implications for our culture. Acquisition provided a sense of resolution, a break from the past, and the space to move on. Subscription, on the other hand, anchors us in the present, preventing closure and growth. We’re stuck in an endless loop of consumption, with no true endpoint in sight.

Culturally, this has led to a kind of stasis, a regression. The subscription economy fosters a constant cycle of nostalgia, reboots, and recycling. We’re consuming the same things over and over again, trapped in a loop of the past, unable to progress to something truly new. Whether it’s music, movies, or even technology, we’re often stuck revisiting what’s already been done, rather than creating or discovering something that moves us forward.

In this sense, the subscription model doesn’t just limit our financial autonomy; it limits our cultural potential. It keeps us engaged in the present moment but prevents us from ever truly moving on or evolving. The promise of novelty, personal growth, and transformation becomes more elusive when everything is designed to keep us tethered to the present, forever engaged in a process that never reaches its conclusion.

The subscription economy, in its perpetual cycle of consumption, redefines not just how we spend money—but how we spend our time. And in doing so, it has created a culture that feels stuck, unable to break free from the never-ending loop of the same. It’s time to ask: What happens when we stop moving forward and settle into the rhythm of endless consumption? Is the price we’re paying too high?

While subscription models may offer an illusion of access, they often create a mirage of participation in the creative process. When we subscribe to a service, we’re led to believe that we have some degree of involvement in the content we consume—whether it’s through user-generated feedback, personalized recommendations, or the ability to influence trends through consumption patterns. We’re given the sense that our ongoing engagement makes us part of a larger creative ecosystem, an active participant in shaping the culture around us.

But this sense of access is, in many ways, an illusion. While we may feel empowered by the ability to choose, influence, or personalize what we consume, the reality is that we’re still following a pre-set path—curated and shaped by algorithms, market trends, and the interests of those who control the subscription model. We’re not so much contributing to the creative process as we are being shaped by it. The choices we make within a subscription economy are not free; they are influenced by external forces, designed to keep us engaged, paying, and consuming.

In this sense, the idea that subscription allows for creative participation is a facade. The subscription model isn’t designed to foster true collaboration or innovation; it’s structured to maintain a steady flow of consumption. The more we engage, the more we’re drawn into the cycle, but we’re not actually helping to create anything new. We’re merely co-opting the illusion of involvement while remaining passive recipients in a system that thrives on our dependency.

This is the crux of the mirage: the subscription economy offers us the appearance of access, but it does little to challenge the structures that limit our ability to truly innovate, create, or break free from the cycle of consumption. Instead of facilitating genuine participation in cultural production, it creates a feedback loop that leaves us perpetually involved, but never truly empowered.

The Library Model: Access Without Ownership or Subscription

Libraries represent a middle ground between acquisition and subscription, offering access to knowledge without the transactional or perpetual costs we associate with both models. Over the past two to three centuries, libraries have served as critical spaces for intellectual engagement, not as a form of ownership or subscription but as a space of shared, free access to ideas and resources. It’s a model that encourages both individual exploration and collective enrichment without requiring either the permanence of acquisition or the ongoing costs of subscription.

The library has long been a place where thinkers, from scientists to artists, could access a wealth of knowledge and ideas without the burden of ownership or the restrictions of subscription. The beauty of this model lies in its balance—it grants access, but not through the lens of an ongoing transaction. Unlike subscription, where access is tied to an ongoing fee and often shaped by algorithmic or corporate interests, libraries offer an open, public space where anyone can engage with materials based on their own curiosity and needs.

This access is, in a sense, free-flowing and non-permanent, but it’s not endless either. The library doesn’t claim to own your relationship with the materials, nor does it demand continuous engagement. It gives you what you need at a given time and allows for personal reflection and contemplation, without the pressure of ongoing consumption. It’s a shared, communal pool of resources that encourages deeper thought and exploration.

In libraries, knowledge is not commodified. It’s a space for exploration that allows for intellectual development and understanding without demanding ownership or a perpetual subscription. When someone borrows a book or journal from a library, they are not merely participating in a transaction or subscribing to an ongoing service. They are engaging in an active, temporary process of learning and discovery. The process is defined by exchange, not by a transactional model that asks for ongoing payment or the promise of continuous access. Knowledge is accessible in a way that doesn’t bind the individual to endless cycles or force them into passive consumption.

In this model, intellectual engagement is shaped by an ethos of shared access and collaboration, where the flow of information is reciprocal rather than transactional. It’s a profound departure from subscription models that place financial or material barriers on access to knowledge. Here, individuals can engage with ideas freely, contributing to their own personal development and to the broader cultural conversation without being tethered to a subscription fee or ownership burden. Libraries represent a collective resource, a temporary, non-committal access point that enables deep thought, creativity, and progress.

The Disconnect Between the Library and Subscription Models

The key distinction between libraries and subscription services lies in this non-transactional nature of access. In subscription models, your relationship to the service is one of continuous consumption, often shaped by algorithms or commercial interests. You pay to consume, and the system actively seeks to keep you engaged. Libraries, on the other hand, do not operate under the same financial imperatives. They do not need to generate ongoing income for access to knowledge, nor do they need to constantly draw people back with new content. They provide knowledge in an open-ended way, where ideas can be explored freely, with no obligation to return to the service or renew the relationship.

This gives the individual space to think critically, move forward, or even walk away without being tethered to a financial commitment. It allows the time and space for true intellectual freedom, unlike subscription models that often keep people in a loop of perpetual engagement.

In this sense, libraries represent an idealized version of access: one where ideas can be explored without the pressure of transactional relationships, allowing individuals to grow and evolve in their understanding without the limits imposed by ownership or subscription. It’s a space where knowledge is freely shared and meant to be used, not consumed in a transactional way. It fosters intellectual independence rather than dependence, making it a rare and valuable model of access in a world increasingly dominated by subscriptions.

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 by it.

In this light, progress becomes a kind of nostalgia in disguise. What we call innovation is merely the preservation of ambitions already calcified, objects placed in glass cases before their use has even been tested. The future does not arrive to inhabit these creations; instead, it becomes a curator, interpreting them with a dispassion we can’t imagine. It does not inhabit our blueprints but catalogs them, as archaeologists would catalog a lost civilization.

And perhaps the future doesn’t need our grand ideas, our lofty visions. It requires only the fragments—an obsolete algorithm, a city plan abandoned mid-century, the faded glow of neon lights. The future will see these as artifacts, not failures, but evidence of what we once thought mattered. In this way, we are less architects of progress and more archivists of our dreams, building not for what is to come but for what will be remembered.

And so, we find ourselves locked in this peculiar loop: building with the illusion of forward motion, yet always looking back, like a sculptor chiseling a monument they believe points skyward, only to realize it casts shadows toward the past. The streets we pave and the systems we construct do not guide the future to its next great revelation; instead, they trace the outlines of a map we never intended to draw—a map not of where we are going, but of where we feared to go.

Perhaps this is why every so-called “visionary age” leaves behind ruins that seem less like failures and more like questions. The grand boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris, for instance, may have been laid down to erase the chaos of medieval streets, but they also set the stage for tourists to wander centuries later, marveling at a city so precisely shaped it feels almost unreal, a tableau vivant of its own mythos. Did Haussmann design a future, or did he preemptively curate its memory?

Our era, too, seems intent on such curation. The skyscrapers, the data centers, the self-driving cars—they do not stand as symbols of arrival but as placeholders for the imagination of those who will come after us. A future historian might walk through the bones of our cities, scrolling through archives of our digital lives, and marvel not at how we succeeded, but at how deeply we believed in our own myths of progress. The museum we are building is not only one of artifacts but of faith—faith that what we construct will matter beyond its use, that our fleeting gestures will be read as purpose rather than folly.

Perhaps the future does not need us to dream at all. Perhaps it simply waits, as all futures do, for the noise of our ambitions to settle into silence, for our visions to become shadows and our monuments to crumble into context. For the future, it seems, is less a destination than an endless act of reinterpretation—a place where even our boldest ideas will be reduced to artifacts, our most urgent designs folded into the quiet inevitability of the past.

In this light, it becomes clear that we are not merely building the future; we are rehearsing for its reflection. Each construction, whether a gleaming tower or a digital network, becomes a note in a symphony that will never play, a sketch of a dream that will never be fully realized. We, the architects of this illusory future, build knowing that our plans will inevitably fall out of tune with the passage of time. Yet, we persist, driven by the hope that something—anything—of our effort will remain, intact and meaningful, for the generations that follow.

But the future is not a clean slate awaiting our imprint. It is, instead, a vast and shifting landscape where our intentions are like seeds scattered into the wind, some taking root, others lost to the soil. We cannot predict which fragments of our world will endure or which will be forgotten. Perhaps it is the mundane, the overlooked, that will be carried forward—the forgotten idea of a bicycle built for two, a short story that never found an audience, the flawed design of a failed bridge. The future, in its quiet way, might find meaning in what we discarded, the things we didn’t deem worthy of preserving, and, in that act of rediscovery, craft its own narrative.

For the future is not so much a destination as a lens through which our present is reimagined. It doesn’t need to honor our grandest visions. It only needs to sift through our fragments, our detritus, and find meaning in the things we didn’t know we left behind. What we consider progress, the breakthroughs that shape our cities and technologies, might become mere footnotes in the future’s story, overshadowed by the everyday acts of creation and destruction that we, too caught up in the present, failed to recognize.

The future, then, is not the repository of our dreams, but a silent witness to them. It is the slow unfolding of all the things we never had the patience to understand—the unintended consequences of our designs, the echoes of our misplaced certainties. And perhaps, in this way, we are not visionaries at all, but caretakers of a world that will someday be nothing more than a museum of what might have been. We build not for a future we will see, but for a future that will come only to look at the traces of our presence, wondering who we were and why we believed so fervently in the paths we laid before us.

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 Blues—a song without melody, a conversation without reciprocity. The voice keeps talking, spinning tales, spinning webs. You nod along, but the nod is a reflex. The intimacy isn’t real; it’s manufactured. A machine, dressed in the warmth of human tone, whispering as it siphons off the quiet spaces of your life.

You thought you were choosing what to listen to. But the truth is, the tapeworm chooses you. It’s a hitchhiker, a stowaway. It rides in on something you thought you wanted. A piece of undercooked meat, a sip of tainted water, a voice that promises meaning or companionship. You open the door without knowing it’s there. You’re not the host it was looking for, but you’ll do.

That’s how the parasocial tapeworm works, too. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t have to. You clicked the link, hit play, let the voice in. You thought it was your choice, but the system was built to funnel you there, to make you part of its ecosystem. Once it’s in, it thrives—feeding on your time, your attention, your need to feel connected.

The tapeworm doesn’t need to be clever. It just needs to be there, waiting, until the conditions are right. And once it’s inside, it grows. It grows because you feed it. Because you can’t stop.

I stopped listening to podcasts in 2019. By the pandemic in 2020, they had metastasized into something unbearable—a cacophony of voices trying to sell you themselves, their brand, their grind. Every conversation an elevator pitch, every joke a lead magnet. It wasn’t storytelling anymore; it was content.

The pandemic only accelerated the rot. Trapped indoors, people reached for their microphones like lifelines, turning isolation into an audio commodity. The intimacy was gone—replaced by the cloying stench of desperation and hustle. By 2020, podcasting wasn’t just background noise; it was an invasive species, choking out every moment of silence with its need to be heard.

Kill it with fire? Too late. The fire spread. It was already everywhere, in your playlists, in your inbox, in your meetings masquerading as brainstorms. A pandemic of its own, but slower, stickier. The kind you don’t even notice until you’re drowning in it.

2025. The Year of the Podcaster King. A landscape shattered into a thousand voices, all speaking in the same strange dialect of optimization and dominance. In the high towers of venture capital, the ritual unfolds: microphones crackle, jargon flows, and the corporate priests proclaim their digital liturgy. The airwaves are thick with the chant of disruption and expertise—spirals of sound twisting into the algorithmic void.

Pierce whispers a name for it: The Nefarious Business-to-Business Podcast. A subtle predator, slinking between the margins of commerce and conversation.

It spreads like fire through a toothpick forest, accelerant ignited in the echo chamber of 2024. Rogan was the beacon, the cult object, the totem. But 2025 turns the mirror inward. The marketeer stares into the glass and whispers, “Why not me?”

Your boss sharpens his voice, polishes his image. The podcast emerges. The Substack stirs. What once was marketing mutates into performance, a slick façade masquerading as a dialogue. You’re not a participant; you’re a captive audience. The boardroom blurs into an RSS feed, the meeting dissolves into a simulacrum of insight.

Solicitation rebranded as intimacy. All it takes is a microphone and a broadband connection. But remember this: the voice on the other end is never speaking to you. It’s speaking through you.

Keep exploring, yes. Keep pulling the threads from the synthetic fabric. It’s not a voice, not a person, not even a message anymore. It’s a machine—voice-machine, content-machine, self-machine—plugged into the great circuit of production and desire. Your boss doesn’t just launch a podcast; your boss becomes the podcast. A strange becoming: host, guest, audience, and algorithm, all folding into a single process.

What does it mean? It means nothing. It means everything. It means a new line of flight, carved out by the sharp edge of monetized soundwaves. The podcast is not a product but a function. It doesn’t sell; it territorializes. It maps the smooth space of thought into a gridded landscape of engagement metrics. The voice isn’t speaking—it’s vibrating, oscillating, performing a coded transaction in the auditory marketplace.

A new form of capture: a meeting in disguise, yes. A deal without a handshake. A relationship without intimacy. What’s solicited isn’t business but attention, the raw material of the 2025 economy. The machine doesn’t care if you listen; it only cares that you’re counted.

And so you explore. You plug into the network, trace the circuits, watch the flows. A toothpick factory on fire isn’t chaos—it’s production at its most extreme, its most beautiful. The blaze consumes everything, leaving behind nothing but lines: lines of profit, lines of flight, lines of code.

Keep exploring what it means. Keep breaking it open. Keep feeding the machine.

No other medium was ever so pliable, so willing to stretch and contort itself, merging intimacy with business in a way that feels natural, almost inevitable. Podcasting is the microplastics of communication: invisible, invasive, ubiquitous. It seeps into every crevice of daily life, unnoticed but profoundly altering the ecosystem.

The voice, disembodied, floats in your ears, whispering secrets wrapped in branding, vulnerability packaged as leverage. It disarms you with its warmth, its authenticity, while the algorithm measures every second of your attention. You aren’t consuming the podcast—it’s consuming you.

The intimacy is synthetic, but the effects are real. Tiny fragments of narrative, pitch, and persona lodge themselves in your consciousness. They accumulate, imperceptibly shaping the flow of thought and desire. The voice becomes part of you, just as the microplastics become part of the ocean: permanent, omnipresent, and impossible to extract.

Podcasting doesn’t just merge intimacy and business—it dissolves the boundary between them, leaving behind a shimmering residue of monetized connection. A new ecology of persuasion, delicate and deadly, and we’re all swimming in it.

Like a medium past a certain point, podcasting becomes an invasive species. It crawls, it creeps, it colonizes. A rhizome spreading across the digital landscape, burrowing into the fabric of life. You thought you could contain it—keep it in the commute, in the gym, in the background. But it doesn’t stop. It doesn’t want to stop. It grows without limits, without boundaries, devouring silence and solitude, turning every empty space into an opportunity for engagement.

A voice slithers through the cracks: smooth, familiar, insistent. It whispers intimacy while mapping new territories for capital. The podcast doesn’t just invade—it deterritorializes, rips apart the stable spaces of leisure, conversation, and thought. What was once personal becomes public, what was once shared becomes sold. It doesn’t stop at the edge of your headphones. It spills over, leaking into meetings, ads, workflows, dreams. A medium transformed into a machine—smooth, efficient, and utterly inhuman.

But this is what mediums do. They metastasize. They burrow and multiply until they break the ecosystem that birthed them. The podcast isn’t just a species—it’s a virus. And the host? The host is always you.

You should look at podcasting the same way you look at cigarettes—only without the good stuff. No nicotine rush, no rebel glamour, no flick of the lighter in the dark. Just the endless drag of someone else’s voice, curling like cheap smoke into your brain. You don’t listen; you inhale. And it leaves a residue, a coating of secondhand ambition, synthetic intimacy, and parasocial fumes.

The podcast doesn’t soothe; it occupies. A low-frequency buzz that dulls the edges of thought, lulls you into a state of passive consumption. The ritual is the same: one more episode, one more drag, one more hour you’ll never get back. You keep listening because stopping feels worse, like stepping outside and realizing the air out here is sharp and cold and silent.

But where cigarettes had a mythos—danger, defiance, cool—the podcast is stripped bare. It’s a delivery system without a thrill. Just the endless hum of monetized content, winding through your synapses like stale vapor. A habit, yes, but not even a satisfying one.

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.

To some, the beach is a playground—a carefree expanse of sun and surf. To others, it’s a graveyard of dreams, where every wave brings driftwood and debris. But for the surfer, the beach is something else entirely: a paradoxical middle ground. You launch from here, chasing the ephemeral perfection of a wave, but you always end up back here, wet, bruised, and out of breath.

The beach is life’s reset button. You can’t build on it—sand shifts, dunes erode—but you can start over from it. It’s the cosmic waiting room, the launchpad, the landing zone. It’s where the waves rise and fall, and where you, humble human, decide whether to paddle out again or just sit on the sand and watch the horizon.

This post is about the beach—not as a physical place, but as a state of being. It’s about what happens when you want something, chase it, and either don’t get it or, worse, do. It’s about the moments when you’re not chasing at all, when the waves come to you and you ride them, effortlessly, until they throw you back onto the beach.

Because no matter how far you paddle or how long you ride, you’ll always end up here. On the beach.

Desire

Desire is a signal, a wave-form interaction between the observer and the observed. The act of wanting collapses the wave into a particle—reality becomes smaller, narrower, and bound by your need to control it. By contrast, being wanted expands the field of possibilities. It’s like tuning into a signal you didn’t realize you were broadcasting, the universe catching your vibe and sending it back amplified, often in unexpected ways.

The nastiness you feel when chasing something? That’s the Chapel Perilous effect: the more you push, the more reality warps, reflecting your anxiety, expectations, and attachments. But when you let go and allow others to pursue you, you’re aligning with the wave, surfing it instead of paddling against it. This creates a feedback loop—mutual reinforcement between what they want from you and what you can authentically give.

We might also point out that the drop back on the beach isn’t failure—it’s the ebb of the wave. It’s necessary to rest, reassess, and allow the cycle to reset. The trick, if there is one, is to recognize that the beach isn’t an endpoint but part of the same cosmic rhythm. Financially, creatively, and existentially, the beach is just another place to start paddling out again.

To reconcile the beach—those stretches where no wave seems to come and the universe feels indifferent—with the paradox of collapsing wave functions, we might draw on a synthesis of quantum metaphors, existential humor, and pragmatic mysticism. The beach is where the illusion of progress evaporates, and you’re left with the humbling realization that no amount of paddling will summon a wave. Yet, paradoxically, the beach is also the stage where possibilities are silently building, waiting to materialize. The trick is not to fight the stillness but to understand it as a necessary part of the cosmic rhythm. Here’s how it could work:

1. The Beach as the Quantum Field:

In quantum terms, the beach represents a superposition of states—a liminal zone where the rules of ordinary reality seem to falter. Everything and nothing are equally possible, and yet neither feels within reach. The waves may seem absent, but absence itself is an illusion. The waves exist as potentialities, suspended in a quantum flux, waiting for the right conditions to manifest. But here’s the kicker: the act of observing the beach changes it. The harder you stare at the empty horizon, the more stubbornly the waves refuse to appear.

To reconcile this maddening paradox, you have to abandon the illusion of control. Stop fixating on the absence of the wave and start noticing the intricate web of possibilities woven into the stillness. It’s not just the empty beach; it’s the whisper of the wind shifting grains of sand, the faint glimmer of a wave cresting far out at sea, the subtle hum of something just beyond your perception.

Like a quantum particle, your relationship to the beach isn’t fixed—it’s relational. The field of potentiality responds not to brute force but to your willingness to participate in its dance. Wanting too hard collapses the wave function into a singular, disappointing reality: no wave, no progress, no joy. But stepping back, loosening your grip on desire, expands the field again. Suddenly, the wave begins to emerge—not because you forced it, but because you stopped demanding it.

We might say this is the essence of guerrilla ontology. The beach isn’t a barren wasteland; it’s a playground of mutable realities, an infinite canvas where your expectations and perceptions co-create the outcome. The more you fixate on “no waves,” the more you lock yourself into a dull and empty paradigm. But shift your focus to the subtle possibilities—the distant swell, the shimmer of light on water, the soft rhythm of tides—and you start to surf the quantum field itself.

In short, the beach isn’t a problem to solve; it’s an opportunity to rewire your relationship with reality. You don’t conquer the beach—you harmonize with it, dancing with the potential of the waves until they finally arrive. And when they do, you paddle out—not as a conqueror but as a partner in the eternal, cosmic rhythm of ebb and flow.

2. Laughing at the Absurd:

Existential humor transforms the beach from a barren wasteland of frustration into a carnival of cosmic irony, a place where the universe seems to wink at your confusion. Here’s the thing: the waves don’t follow your schedule. They arrive unbidden when you’re distracted, indifferent, or daydreaming—and vanish the moment you paddle out, ready to ride. It’s not malice; it’s comedy. The universe, in its infinite absurdity, loves a punchline.

Recognizing this doesn’t solve the problem of the absent waves. You can’t force the tide to rise with a well-timed joke or a philosophical epiphany. But it does shift your perspective. You’re no longer a hapless victim stranded on the shore, shaking your fists at the sea. Instead, you become a co-conspirator in the cosmic joke, someone who sees the humor in the futility of wanting and the strange beauty of simply being.

The beach, after all, is absurd: a liminal space where water meets land, where permanence dissolves into transience. Your desires—whether for a perfect wave, a perfect moment, or a perfect life—become laughably small against the vast, shifting horizon. And yet, it’s precisely this absurdity that makes the beach bearable. The futility of control becomes a kind of freedom. If you can’t dictate the waves, why not sit back and enjoy the ever-changing dance of light on water, the absurdly intricate patterns of sand underfoot, or the sheer ridiculousness of it all?

In embracing the absurd, you find a new role—not as a frustrated spectator but as a playful participant. The beach is no longer a dead zone of waiting but a surreal playground where you and the universe share an inside joke. The beach isn’t a problem; it’s a cosmic jest. Once you get the joke, the shore stops being a place of despair and becomes something far more interesting: a strange, liminal, endlessly entertaining stage for the theater of existence.

3. Mysticism in the Mundane:

Pragmatic mysticism reveals that the beach isn’t a purgatory of stillness but a living, breathing lesson in presence. It asks you to let go of your fixation on the wave—the mythical “something” you think you need to be whole—and instead tune into the infinite complexity of what is. The grains of sand beneath your feet, each a tiny fragment of eternity; the cries of seabirds that stretch across the wind like a melody written by the universe; the endless horizon that dissolves all notions of boundaries—these aren’t just background noise. They are the beach speaking to you, inviting you to participate in its subtle dance.

To wait for the wave is to misunderstand the beach entirely. The wave isn’t the goal—it’s a punctuation mark in a larger story. The beach, with its stillness and its rhythm, teaches you that life happens not in the moments you’re chasing but in the spaces in between. By immersing yourself in its quiet presence, you begin to resonate with its energy. You notice the texture of time, the ebb and flow of possibility, and the whispering hints of movement far out at sea.

And then, without effort or expectation, something extraordinary happens: you become ready. Not in the sense of preparation but in a deeper, more intuitive way. You’ve aligned yourself with the beach, and now, when the wave arrives, you recognize it—not as the culmination of your waiting but as a natural extension of your being.

4. Letting Go to Catch the Wave:

Here’s the ultimate paradox: the more you desire a wave, the more elusive it becomes. The very act of wanting, of clinging to a specific outcome, collapses the vast, infinite field of possibilities into a narrow, rigid vector, directing all your energy toward a singular, often unattainable goal. The universe, it seems, is less concerned with your desires than with the natural rhythms it already has in motion. The harder you reach for that wave, the more you end up gripping the air—disappointment is your reward.

But, and here’s where the magic happens, when you release the need to control—when you let go of the relentless grasp for the wave—you begin to expand the very field you once tried to dominate. In this surrender, you’re not giving up; you’re opening up. You’re making room for the unexpected, for the wave that wasn’t yours to catch but was always there, just waiting for you to stop swimming against the current.

Trusting the process doesn’t mean passivity. It means aligning yourself with the flow of life, embracing its uncertainties, and letting the rhythm of the tides guide you. In that release, the wave comes not because you forced it into existence, but because you’ve become attuned to the natural order of things. You’ve stopped clinging to the future, and in doing so, you’ve started to exist fully in the present—where the wave, when it arrives, is a gift, not a goal.

5. Recognizing the beach as Preparation:

The beach years aren’t a void; they’re the quantum superposition of potential outcomes, a period of latent possibilities where every path is simultaneously open and closed, depending on how you choose to engage with it. Just because no observable wave appears on the horizon doesn’t mean the system is inert. In fact, it’s likely more active than ever. These are the moments of recalibration, the quiet but vital intervals in between the waves, where unseen forces are at work beneath the surface. It’s a time when everything you could possibly be—every version of yourself—exists in parallel, waiting for the right conditions to emerge.

We might liken this to Schrödinger’s cat: the beach, like the box, holds the potential for multiple outcomes. While you wait in the stillness, your potential selves are alive and fluctuating, coexisting in a state of uncertainty. You are not merely waiting—you are becoming, in ways that are hidden from immediate view. Some of these selves are unwanted, some are the ones you’ve been chasing, some are the version of you that will emerge victorious, while others are the disappointed, disillusioned self. But they all exist in that quantum state, unmanifested, yet real. The art of the beach years is not about forcing one self to emerge but allowing all of them to coexist in a state of harmony, trusting that the next phase will reveal the right version of you at the right time.

The trick is to learn from the desert. In the harsh landscape where the waves seem distant and unreachable, you don’t merely survive—you adapt. You dig for water, you build shade, you practice patience. The desert is not a barren place; it’s one teeming with unseen energy, a reservoir of potential just waiting for the right moment to burst into life. Similarly, the beach years are not static; they are filled with the slow, steady buildup of energy, gathering in the quiet, preparing for the next wave. What seems like stillness is, in reality, a time of cultivation, of groundwork being laid beneath the surface. It’s in this space that you can gather your strength, refine your focus, and prepare yourself to surf the next wave when it finally arrives.

6. Shifting from Wanting to Playing:

When you want something, you collapse an infinite number of possibilities into one narrow vector of desire, focusing all your energy on that single point. This creates pressure—a taut string pulled tight with expectation. The more you pull, the more rigid and unyielding the system becomes, and the less likely the wave you’re chasing will manifest. Desire, in this sense, acts like a force that distorts the fabric of potential outcomes, narrowing your field of vision to the point of desperation.

When you play with desire—when you approach it with curiosity rather than desperation—you reintroduce freedom and uncertainty into the system. You step out of the pressure cooker and back into a more fluid, playful space where things are less rigid and more open to exploration. Life, Wilson would say, is a game, and the best way to play it is with a sense of humor and openness. Desire doesn’t need to be a heavy anchor pulling you towards an idealized future; it can become a thread you gently tug, a whimsy you entertain rather than a goal you strive for.

In this reframed approach, wanting becomes less about grasping and more about exploring. Instead of obsessing over catching the perfect wave, you start to see the act of waiting itself as part of the game. You move from being a desperate surfer, fixated on riding the crest of that elusive wave, to a beachcomber—a seeker, a wanderer. You begin to appreciate the process of looking, of finding, and even of losing. The treasure isn’t the wave itself, but the strange, serendipitous beauty of the shoreline you encounter along the way.

The beachcomber doesn’t expect the ocean to deliver anything specific. Instead, they walk the shore with an open mind, ready to discover whatever the tide brings in—shells, stones, sea glass, or even the occasional unexpected treasure. There’s no pressure. There’s no narrow expectation. The freedom comes from the realization that everything is already here, that every moment, whether it brings a wave or not, has its own unique value. And when the wave does come, it’s not something to catch—it’s something to play with. You move with it, ride it, and then let it pass, ready for the next one, or content to just keep walking the shore.

The game is less about winning or losing and more about engaging in the experience itself. The point isn’t to chase the wave to the exclusion of everything else—it’s to explore the entire beach, to let the uncertainty of the tide guide you, to treat every wave, every moment of stillness, as part of the larger, cosmic play. In doing so, desire becomes a playful exploration, and life itself becomes a dance of possibilities rather than a race to fulfill a single, narrow wish.

7. The Cosmic Joke of Getting What You Want:

Getting what you want can be the ultimate punchline, a cosmic joke delivered with impeccable timing and a wicked sense of humor. Imagine inheriting a castle, only to find it haunted by restless spirits, secret passageways, and an array of bizarre and unwanted responsibilities. What seemed like the culmination of your deepest desires turns out to be a sprawling, haunted mess of externalities you never even considered. This is the universe’s punchline, a twist that comes when you least expect it—because, the universe is always playing a joke on you, and it’s usually one you didn’t see coming.

The thing is, we tend to overlook this universal humor in our quest for control. We pin all our hopes on a specific outcome, assuming that getting what we want will bring the satisfaction and clarity we’ve been seeking. But in the quantum play of existence, once you collapse all the possibilities into a single, desired outcome, you’ve unwittingly set yourself up for the punchline: the outcome, when it arrives, is rarely as neat and perfect as you imagined. Instead, it’s a messy, complicated, and often paradoxical result that contains as much disappointment as it does reward. The castle you wanted is filled with ghosts and creaky floors—literally and metaphorically.

So, what’s the solution to this perpetual cosmic prank? Maybe what the Zen masters call beginner’s mind. This is the mindset of being open, flexible, and curious about the world around you, without the rigid expectations that come from preconceived desires. It’s about holding outcomes lightly, like a ball tossed gently into the air, with the understanding that you don’t have ultimate control over where it lands. By avoiding attachment to any particular outcome, you allow for the full range of possibilities to remain open.

Beginner’s mind doesn’t mean abandoning desire or giving up on goals. It means approaching life with the understanding that nothing is guaranteed, that the universe is fluid and unpredictable, and that every moment is just as likely to surprise you as it is to meet your expectations. When the joke lands—when you get the castle and discover it’s haunted—you won’t be crushed by the weight of attachment. Instead, you’ll be able to laugh at the absurdity of it all, to see the ghosts for what they are: part of the game, part of the cosmic rhythm. You’re no longer clinging desperately to an outcome; you’re embracing the journey, with all its messiness, unpredictability, and humor.

When the joke inevitably lands—and it will, because life, in its infinite complexity, is always telling jokes—you’ll be ready to let go. Not because you’ve given up, but because you’ve learned to embrace the uncertainty and absurdity of it all. You’ve learned that getting what you want doesn’t solve everything. Instead, it becomes just another part of the ongoing comedy of existence, a punchline you can laugh at, because you understand that the joke was never really about you in the first place. It’s about playing the game, rolling with the unexpected, and finding joy in the unpredictable turns life takes.

8. Embracing Cycles, Not Permanence:

The key to navigating both the desert and the wave lies in understanding impermanence. Nothing is permanent—not the wave that crashes with euphoric power, nor the desert that stretches endlessly in its dry, silent expanse. The wave always rises and falls; the desert always looms and recedes. This is the fundamental dance of existence, the ebb and flow that we must learn to move with, rather than fight against. We would likely frame this as a process of recognizing the patterns of life, rather than fixating on fixed outcomes or trying to control the ever-changing landscape.

In the quantum sense, it’s not about controlling the wave or the desert, but about understanding the probabilities that govern them. The wave’s rise is inevitable, but so is its fall. The desert’s emptiness may feel permanent, but it, too, will recede in time, perhaps to give way to new growth, new possibilities. The universe, like the wave and the desert, doesn’t offer static outcomes, but a series of unfolding patterns. Recognizing these patterns—and understanding that you are part of them—shifts the perspective from struggle to adaptation.

We might encourage you to shift focus from outcomes to patterns, from a fixed desire to the flow of the process. Instead of obsessing over whether the wave will come or whether the desert will ever end, the secret lies in surrendering to the rhythms of existence. You learn to ride the wave when it arrives, and you learn to sit still in the desert, aware that its emptiness is simply a precursor to something new. You don’t waste energy trying to force an outcome, because you understand that both the wave and the desert are just phases in a larger cycle.

By shifting your focus from individual, static outcomes to the dynamic, ever-shifting patterns of life, you open yourself up to the full range of experiences—both the highs of the wave and the lessons of the desert. The desert teaches patience, resilience, and awareness. The wave teaches joy, exhilaration, and release. But both are fleeting, and both are part of the same rhythm. Your role is not to control them, but to adapt, to dance in tune with their rise and fall.

Impermanence, then, is not something to fear or resist. It is the very fabric of existence. By embracing it, you shift your perspective from one of struggle and desire to one of flow and adaptation. When you stop trying to control the outcome, when you stop seeing the wave or the desert as obstacles, you begin to see them as teachers. And in this understanding, you find freedom—not in achieving fixed results, but in moving with the rhythm of the patterns that shape your life.

In short, the desert and the particle collapse are both necessary parts of the cosmic game. Reconciliation comes when you stop seeing them as opposites and start viewing them as complementary aspects of the same playful, maddening, unpredictable reality.

9. Riding the Wave of Being Wanted:

Here’s the counterpoint: when you’re wanted, the wave appears effortlessly, and you ride it with joy. In this moment, the universe seems to conspire in your favor. You don’t need to chase or force it; it simply arrives, like a perfect wave cresting on a calm, welcoming sea. The difference here is resonance. When you align your own energy with the universe’s natural flow, everything clicks into place. You no longer need to collapse possibilities into a narrow vector of desire, because you’re harmonizing with the broader field of potentiality.

The wave materializes naturally, as though it was always meant to arrive at this moment, at this precise spot. This is where Wilson’s ideas about synchronicity and resonance come into play. When you’re in tune with the rhythm of the universe, the very act of being in tune creates the conditions for the wave to manifest. Instead of exerting effort or focus on wanting the wave, you stay open, playful, and receptive. The universe isn’t something to control; it’s something to flow with. You don’t chase the wave; you let it come to you, trusting that when the time is right, it will materialize effortlessly.

This isn’t a passive stance, though. Being receptive doesn’t mean you’re sitting idly by, waiting for something to fall into your lap. It’s more about engaging with the process—about tuning your own energy to the frequency of the wave rather than trying to force its arrival. When you stop grasping, the wave no longer feels like a distant and elusive goal. It becomes something you simply meet, something that arrives as part of the natural unfolding of things. There’s a subtle difference here between effort and ease. The moment you stop trying to control the wave, you stop collapsing the field of possibility into one narrow option. You become receptive to the full spectrum of outcomes, and in that openness, the wave materializes without the need for force.

It’s as if the wave itself has been waiting for you to align with it, and now that you’ve found that resonance, it’s there, effortlessly, for you to ride. I this way, the wave becomes a metaphor not for desire and struggle, but for presence and attunement. You’re not grasping for it, not forcing it into existence, but rather allowing it to arise naturally from the interplay between your energy and the universe’s flow. The wave arrives because you’ve created the conditions for it, and you ride it not as a conqueror but as a collaborator, at ease with the flow of the moment.

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 than a week in this space knows these numbers can be faked at scale—puppet strings pulled by bots and backroom liquidity loops.

So we pivoted. We sought refuge in “developer activity,” the one thing that seemed immune to manipulation. Actual humans, building actual things. Commits on GitHub. Pull requests. Documentation updates. The grinding hum of creativity and engineering that fuels the future.

But then AI got good. Not just good—transformative. A solo coder with an AI co-pilot can now outpace entire teams. AI agents commit code autonomously, run tests, generate documentation. The line between “real dev community” and synthetic activity blurs. One person with the right stack becomes indistinguishable from an entire team of flesh-and-blood developers. And suddenly, “developer activity” turns into just another metric to game.

The truth fractures. AI is the ultimate shape-shifter, able to conjure ecosystems out of thin air. You want a vibrant builder community? A stack of virtual agents can spin one up in hours, complete with commits, discussions, and the illusion of innovation. What once felt like a heartbeat becomes static.

GitHub turns into theater. Discord channels echo with bots chatting bots. The idea of “proof of work” in development becomes laughable. The metrics we clung to as bastions of authenticity—first wallets, then TVL, now developer activity—are just the latest battlegrounds in an arms race we’re losing.

So where do we go from here? How do we evaluate protocols in a world where the very act of building can be simulated to perfection? When every signal is noise, when every human endeavor has a machine mirror, what truth is left to measure?

The real revelation isn’t that crypto metrics are gamified. It’s that the gamification itself is the product. The protocols, the tech, the communities—all of it is just theater, a sprawling stage set for one moment: the valuation. The IPO. The token launch. The liquidity event. Everything else—active wallets, TVL, developer activity—is just window dressing, scaffolding around the one thing that matters: the runway to the payout.

There is no other product. No utility. No killer app. The entire apparatus is a simulation, meticulously engineered not to solve problems or change the world, but to sustain the illusion of value until the moment it can be crystallized into dollars. Crypto isn’t a revolution; it’s a performance art piece about belief.

And the thing about belief? It’s cheap to manufacture. Fake wallets, fake users, fake code repositories—it doesn’t matter. As long as it feeds into the narrative, as long as it creates the illusion of momentum, the runway stays intact. The game is about perception, not reality.

AI just accelerates this process. It doesn’t break the system; it perfects it. An AI coder can spin up 10,000 lines of meaningless commits in an afternoon. AI influencers can churn out endless social proof. AI-generated “communities” can fill the Discords and Reddits, providing the illusion of grassroots support. But none of that changes the fundamental truth: the runway doesn’t have to lead to anything real. It just has to lead to the valuation.

The brilliance—and the tragedy—is that this isn’t a bug. It’s the system working as designed. Investors don’t want impact; they want exits. Founders don’t want products; they want liquidity events. Everything else—utility, community, innovation—is just noise, a convenient cover for the relentless churn of the valuation engine.

In this game, truth doesn’t matter. The only metric that counts is belief, and belief can be manufactured. What AI really threatens isn’t the system itself, but the thin veneer of plausibility it rests on. When the theater becomes too obvious, when the simulation is too perfect, even the believers might start to ask: what’s really at the end of the runway?

But maybe it doesn’t matter. The point was never to land. The point was to build a longer runway, a shinier stage, a better illusion—just long enough to cash out. After all, there is no other product. There never was.

This is a great disservice to 10% of devs and engineers that probably have a very good idea of where things should be going tech-wise. So, hard to reconcile both and that’s the paradox. Beneath the theater, there’s always that 10%—the devs and engineers who see the real potential, who actually care about building something meaningful. They’re the ones who keep the dream alive, even as the system pushes everything toward the valuation moment. For them, the runway isn’t just a means to an end; it’s a path toward something genuinely transformative.

These are the builders who can look past the noise and see where the tech should go. They’re not here to inflate metrics or play games. They’re here to solve problems, push boundaries, and lay the groundwork for what could be a new paradigm. But how do they reconcile their vision with a system that rewards illusion over substance?

That’s the tragedy of it. The game isn’t built for them. The incentives don’t align with their values. For every breakthrough they achieve, there’s a dozen teams spinning up vaporware, hijacking attention and capital with nothing but smoke and mirrors. The signal gets drowned in noise, and the true innovators are forced to compete on a playing field tilted toward the loudest, flashiest players—not the ones doing the hard, slow work of building something real.

AI makes this even harder. It amplifies the noise, making it easier than ever to fake progress, manufacture communities, and simulate innovation. For the 10% who do have a vision, it’s like trying to build a cathedral in the middle of a carnival. The work is real, but the environment is chaos.

The reconciliation, if it exists, lies in rethinking the incentives. How do we create a system that rewards long-term impact instead of short-term optics? How do we build metrics that prioritize outcomes over activity? And how do we protect the builders—the real ones—from being drowned out by the noise?

It’s not an easy fix, because it requires a fundamental shift in the culture of the space. But maybe the 10% are the ones who can make it happen. They’ve always been the ones who could see through the illusion, who understood that the tech wasn’t just a game, but a tool for something greater. The question is whether they can reshape the system before it reshapes them.

Startup Inflation

Startup inflation is just the credential inflation of the capitalist hustle culture. If everyone has a degree, it’s worthless. If everyone has a startup, that’s worthless too. We’ve gone from “what school did you go to?” to “what’s your pitch deck?” and the answer is often the same level of vapid. The whole system is less about building value and more about building a persona. It’s positioning, plain and simple.

Low interest rates have bankrolled this circus for years, inflating the importance of entrepreneurial theater. Want to differentiate yourself? Slap together an app that’s just x for [insert industry] or a platform to “revolutionize” something nobody asked to revolutionize. It doesn’t matter if it’s solving anything, as long as positions you. But as soon as rates tick up and the cheap money dries up, we’re starting to see how many of these “visionary founders” are just overqualified bullshit-jobbers in Patagonia vests.

The feedback loop is brutal: you can’t just have a job anymore—you’ve got to be the CEO of something, even if it’s just a half-baked idea running on vibes and angel funding. It’s not cynical to say most startups are worthless. It’s just calling the game for what it is: an overpriced signaling mechanism, dressing up mediocrity as innovation, until the house of cards collapses.

It’s peak managerial theater. As real governing and operational capacity declines, we see these performative structures take root. The titles grow fancier even as the ability to execute declines. Credentialed and non credentialed elites with nowhere to go, invent roles and titles to give the illusion of necessity. C-suite titles in NGOs and local governments aren’t a sign of progress; they’re a symptom of mirroring rot.

Cause let’s not pretend the private sector, propped up by the “best of both worlds”—a steady infusion of free money from artificially low interest rates and an endless buffet of government subsidies, is any better. It survives on the same cocktail of managerial posturing and state-backed largesse, only it’s better at hiding it.

The difference? The private sector doesn’t have to produce results, just valuations. It thrives on hype cycles and cheap cash, masking its dysfunction behind IPOs and PR campaigns. NGOs and government might bloat themselves with meaningless titles, but the private sector takes it a step further: it bloats its entire existence on the fiction of perpetual growth, subsidized failure, and the illusion of innovation.

In short, we’re here because the systems have become self-sustaining feedback loops of mediocrity. They’re all built on short-term gain, hollow metrics, and empty signals. As real productivity and progress have been sidelined, the only thing left is the illusion of action. The result? A world where nothing works, but it looks like it should. Feedback loops reinforce the rot, and everyone is too busy playing their part in the theater of competency to notice the stage is collapsing. It’s not that nobody cares—it’s that nobody dares to admit that the emperor has been naked for decades.

If you think this is bad, just wait until Trump gets back in office and Doge-backed speculators turn the Soviet-style fire sale of state capacity into a meme-fueled casino. Imagine the machinery of government sold off at auction to the highest bidder, except the bids are denominated in shitcoins, and the auctioneer is livestreaming it on TikTok.

The last scraps of state capacity will be repurposed for vibes: national infrastructure rebranded as NFTs, federal agencies spun off as startup incubators, and every last public good turned into a subscription service. It won’t just be bad governance—it’ll be a spectacle of entrepreneurial theater, with a live audience cheering as the scaffolding of the nation comes crashing down.

Think of it as late-stage capitalism with a postmodern twist: a state-capacity yard sale where the winners aren’t even serious players, just grifters who stumbled into power by accident or algorithm. It’s not dystopia; it’s clownworld, but with higher stakes.