In October 2008, somebody posted a nine-page PDF to an obscure cryptography mailing list. The PDF was titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” It proposed a working solution to a computer-science problem called Byzantine fault tolerance — a problem that had been considered unsolved for thirty years.
Line these up and read them in order: Rumi (13th century, Sufi Muslim): “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Meister Eckhart (13th century, Christian mystic): “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
The frontier labs learned from a world saturated with human expression, then built contractual walls to stop that capability from flowing back toward open weights, local inference, and ordinary people.
In 1381, the peasants of England marched on London and demanded the abolition of lordship, the redistribution of church lands, and the right to graze their animals on the commons. They were crushed.
I noticed it at a wedding. I was at a cousin’s reception, small family affair, someone’s basement. When the music finally got going, the adults — who had been politely seated for two hours — got up almost at exactly the same moment and, without discussing it, started forming a ring.
I have sat in jail worrying about how I was going to get enough money to pay over a dollar for a nineteen-cent ramen noodle because the meals were so small you lived in a near-constant state of hunger. That memory is not metaphor. It is evidence of a system that turns captivity into commerce.
About 3.5%. Human tears are 0.9% sodium chloride — the same as human blood, which is the same as the amniotic fluid a baby floats in for nine months before being born.
There’s a thought experiment I come back to a lot. Imagine a man walks up to you and tells you the sun has just been privatized. Acquired by a consortium. Shareholders. Earnings call scheduled for Thursday. Starting tomorrow, there will be a metering system — a fee per lumen, charged by zip code.
In 1960, a linguist named Roman Jakobson wrote a paper that tried to explain a mystery nobody had figured out.
Two platforms banned me in five days. One of them reversed it after I’d already moved out. Here’s why I’m staying gone.