Category: MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE
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The AI Winter Cometh
The AI Winter Cometh (Because Winter Is Always Coming for Yesterday’s Disruption)—In Which Even the “Next Big Thing” Gets a Pension Plan— Let’s get real: AI is already wearing dad jeans. You heard me. The same neural nets that once felt like rogue agents hacking the creative matrix are now just corporate middleware, churning out…
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The Internalization of Constraints
There is paradox with Paul McCartney, the melodic genius, the Beatle who could conjure pop perfection with the ease of a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, is at his most compelling not when he is in control, but when he is out of control. Or, more precisely, when he is challenged, when his polished…
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Perspective: Psychedelics for the Modern Man
Modernity, as we know it, began when humanity first embraced the idea of depth and dimension. In a Medium post I wrote back in 2020, https://ramurrio.medium.com/the-end-of-perspective-and-the-new-amension-gebser-picasso-36a55f429f48 I explored the “end of perspective” and the arrival of a new dimension, inspired by the ideas of Jean Gebser and the fragmented forms of Picasso. Gebser famously argued…
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Inca Zirp
The American gold and silver that flowed into Spain from the 16th century onward functioned, in effect, as a form of zero-interest money — a steady injection of liquidity into the imperial economy that enabled a dramatic expansion of state power without requiring the structural reforms or productive investments necessary to sustain it. Like the…
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A New Way of Smelting
Bribery is a relic of a bygone era—a Bronze Age mindset, if you will. It’s a tool of self-preservation for those clinging to ill-gotten gains, a desperate attempt to maintain power and control within a system on the verge of collapse. But as history teaches us, no amount of bribery can stop a system from…
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Stargate
Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…