Category: All Watched Over
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Arsenal of Democracy
When filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky began assembling his legendary, never-made adaptation of Dune in the mid-1970s, he ran into a problem with the future. The future, as Hollywood had begun to imagine it, looked suspiciously like the United States military.Much of that visual language came from the work of designer Ron Cobb. Cobb was an unlikely…
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Nowtalgia
Four days into the war with Iran, I was still getting confident answers. I had been checking in with the major models — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini — asking about shipping risk in the Strait of Hormuz. For days, across multiple conversations, the answers clustered around the same framework: patrols would continue, insurance premiums…
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Belief Production
Recent DOJ documents confirm: Jeffrey Epstein invested ~$3M in Coinbase’s 2014 Series C round, exited by 2018 with significant profits. No operational role, no alleged wrongdoing—just elite capital quietly entering the “decentralized revolution” through the most opaque channels possible. This isn’t a scandal. It’s a structural reveal. The crypto story: engineers building freedom tech, disrupting…
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Journey to the Center of the Blockchain
I went to the blockchain because my coins were screaming. Not metaphorically. I mean screaming. A high-pitched, margin-call shriek echoing through the fiber-optic desert like bats trapped in a Bloomberg terminal. You don’t ignore that kind of noise. You load up the laptop, spike the coffee with whatever’s left in the cabinet—two Modafinil, a microdose…
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Value Maintenance
The Farcaster news is being framed as a rare moment of honor in tech: Merkle stands down, infrastructure is handed to Neynar, Dan Romero and Varun “V” return roughly $180 million to investors, and the VCs applaud the discipline. On the surface, it does look clean. No slow rug. No zombified runway bleed. Capital comes…
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Honestly Fake
I live in Venice, and Abbot Kinney is a little deal with the devil we’ve made. Every shop there is paying for the privilege of make-believe — pretending not to have to be really organic while performing it anyway. Santa Monica doesn’t pretend to be organic. That’s the difference. Abbot Kinney says: You may skip…