MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Category: SYSTEMS IN PHASE SPACE

  • Nostalgia For Capital

    The nostalgia isn’t for decentralization, censorship resistance, or user ownership. It’s for the ignition—the moment when capital concentrates, detonates, and creates a brief window where everything glows white-hot. The technical language (decentralization, permissionless, trustless) is just the safety protocol you recite before the test. It’s not what anyone’s actually there for. Revival is Capital Migration,…

  • 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…

  • Jumping the Shark

    There’s a moment—somewhere between the last viable business model and the first desperate publicity stunt—where an ecosystem stops being an ecosystem and becomes a carnival ride with broken hydraulics. In the 1970s it was Fonzie on water-skis; in 2025 it’s Web3 shoving “social trading” into your feed like a malfunctioning vending machine. That’s what “jumping…

  • Hubs

    There is a peculiar form of reasoning that emerges when someone discovers they are standing at a chokepoint. It goes like this: “Networks need hubs” somehow always becomes “and therefore I’m destiny.” The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork had observed this phenomenon many times. It was especially common among the heads of the various Guilds, each of…

  • The Digi-Baroque

    Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Ornate Collapse. The Baroque was Feudalism’s most glamorous costume party before its apparent death. Fast forward three centuries — and for whom do the bells toll? They toll for you. Forget the tired, minimalist dream of the digital future. That sleek, chrome-and-glass utopia is a…

  • The Alchemist’s Lever

    Right. So you want to grease the rails for a margin-lift. A classic maneuver. But you don’t just announce it. That’s brute-force. This is social archeology. You’re not raising prices; you’re re-engineering the consumer’s reality-tunnel. The goal is a psychic event in the customer’s limbic system. The click. The feeling that they’ve outsmarted the system,…

  • Mr Feedback

    Danny… the code boy… the syntax priest… fingers tapping a binary prayer wheel… a real precision saint… Präzisionsheiliger… Input… output… consequence… the holy trinity of the machine… But the machine had a sickness… a bad spark in the wire… Funken im Draht… a jolt from the junkyard data-fields… static crawling under his skin like Ungeziefer……

  • The Flow Wars

    “A system that treats every component as a piece to be owned will crawl. A system that treats every component as a flow, to be shared, will run.” There was a time we told ourselves a comforting story: that while American politics might be messy and its culture divisive, its business psyche was a bastion…

  • A Better Future

    One of the risks in demanding a “better” media — smarter, fairer, more truthful — is that you might get exactly that. Or rather, you might get something that looks exactly like that: a more intelligent system, but also a more evasive, more adaptive one. Harder to dismiss, because it now knows how to perform…

  • 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…