Category: Economics
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The Rerouting Reflex
There’s this persistent consensual hallucination floating around American boardrooms and think-tank server farms— that empire, the whole blood-soaked apparatus of extraction, coercion, and hegemonic mindfuck, somehow booted up on American soil sometime around 1945, as if the Republic had invented the very wetware of domination. As if Bretton Woods was the Genesis block and everything…
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Software Eats Itself
Late 2010s, somewhere in the protocol stack. A quiet panic went terminal. The smart money—the money that used to be smart—caught the scent. It wasn’t a bug. It was the feature, finally fully expressed: software, in its commodity state, wanted to be free. Not libre. Gratis. Worthless. But this was the hidden corrosion in the…
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East India Company
I first read The Anarchy by William Dalrymple in the early days of the Trump administration—back when there was still a fleeting concern of malevolent competence, a sense (however misguided) that the machinery might be steered, however clumsily. That mirage evaporated fast. What followedu wasn’t some masterclass in autocracy but a clown car of…
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Crypto: A Password Manager at a House Fire
I’m starting to feel like crypto is a solution designed for a different era—specifically the post-9/11, pre-Occupy moment when fear of institutional collapse and distrust in centralized systems reached a kind of fever pitch. The trauma of the 2008 financial crisis birthed a thousand libertarian dreams of algorithmic salvation. But here we are, over a…
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Big In a Texas
Once upon a time, being big in Japan meant you’d failed in America but succeeded in myth. These days, we’ve moved the mirage inland. Now it’s Texas — the South Capital of Soft Capital — where every hustler, coder, and half-famous band gathers to pretend they’re building something that matters. I wasn’t looking forward to…