Tag: Crypto
-
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…
-
The Wrong Room
This started as a Farcaster post. Halfway through writing it, I realized it didn’t really matter — not the ideas, but the channel. There’s something faintly ridiculous about posting a critique of abstraction layers onto yet another abstraction layer, as if the medium itself isn’t part of the problem. What exactly is the hoped-for outcome…
-
The Age Of Compensations
An agnostic education in a catholic environment trains you to recognize a crucial distinction: the difference between the Real Presence and a symbolic gesture, between a sacrament and a simulation. It’s the discernment between bread that has been transubstantiated and bread that’s just… bread with exceptionally good marketing. This theological framework—with its vocabulary of immanence…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Crypto Strategic Reserve: A Chronicle of Hybrid Collapse
Act I:The Golden Mirage The U.S. Empire, armored in Fordist steel and atomic swagger, once anchored the global economy to a sacred lie: the dollar as gold’s Siamese twin. Bretton Woods was less a financial system than a state religion—fixed rates, convertible faith, the handshake of empires. But by 1971, Nixon, that grandmaster of realpolitik,…
-
Make Communism Great Again
The pearl-clutching over Vitalik’s comment seems to imply that all those crying foul are the ones who’d be out of moves and scrambling for a new hassle if crypto ever manages to design democracy as a self-executing machine. After all, if the system runs itself, transparent and fair, with smart contracts automating policies like universal…
-
How Crypto Lost to DraftKings
There was a time when men gambled like savages. They staked their fortunes on dice and horses, whiskey-stained cards in desert casinos run by men with deep voices and dead eyes. But those were better days. Now, we have apps. We have algorithms. We have blockchain. Or so I thought. For the past month, I…
-
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…