MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Tag: Tech

  • 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…

  • The Certain Uncertainty

    Lord Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, had discovered that there were only three truly dangerous things in the world: Dragons, People who believed strongly in destiny, and People who believed strongly in spreadsheets, especially those who used the ‘Auto-Sum’ function as a substitute for a moral compass. The third category was currently seated in the…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Moorcock

    Moorcock’s multiverse is the first one that isn’t built like a strip mall of IP franchises. Before Marvel turned “infinite worlds” into an excuse to recycle plotlines forever, Moorcock treated parallel realities as a way to ask better questions. His multiverse isn’t rent-seeking; it’s curiosity-seeking. It doesn’t exist to justify more product—it exists to make…

  • 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 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…

  • Feudal Optimization

    We often imagine the fall of Rome and the onset of the “Dark Ages” as a catastrophic failure of intelligence—a great forgetting, a descent into blissful ignorance where the poor dears simply couldn’t figure out how to keep the water flowing and the laws coherent. I talk about this a little in this post. Dark…