MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE

Tag: Tech

  • 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…

  • Mother Goose

    I’ve been living in California since 2007. I used to come here before, and I always had this feeling that it’s like people come here because of an album. Some people came for Crosby, Stills & Nash. Some people came for Hotel California. Some people came for Linda Ronstadt, some for The Grateful Dead. I’m…

  • The Post Narcissist Hangover

    Every zeitgeist has its drug. That’s the secret code, the tracer bullet through history. You don’t chart the eras by wars or presidents or hairstyles — you chart them by the highs. By the chemicals, rituals, and psychic contraband that lit the fuse and kept the engine howling. You want to know what decade you’re…

  • Butler

    You wake up. Reach for the phone. Thumb scrolls before brain boots. Load me up, Jack. Infinite feeds, infinite loops. A dopamine drip straight to the veins, a carnival of blinking lights. You don’t even know what’re looking at. Doesn’t matter. The Machine knows. The Machine feeds.   And the screen hums like a cicada…