For many years now I’ve written essays on the culture and politics of Bitcoin. In each one I try to explore a new angle on the phenomenon. This is my latest, covering some themes I’ve been wanting to grapple with for some time now. It was partly inspired by the recent New York Times investigation that attempted to unveil Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous founder of Bitcoin. I hope you enjoy!

Paying subscribers can listen to the audio essay here! (38 minutes)

In 2018 I stood before a urinal in a convention centre in Tokyo, and unzipped my fly. It was late at night, and I was at Satoshi’s Vision, a big gathering hosted by a breakaway sect of Bitcoiners. They’d assembled there from around the world to make a claim on the future of Bitcoin. They’d forked its code in a new direction, and saw this as staying true to the path set out by Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of the crypto-token.

A man stumbled into the space to my right. He was sloshed and started taking a piss while swaying from side to side. This was Craig Wright. He was at Satoshi’s Vision because, for a long time, he had claimed that he was Satoshi.

Few believed him, but this question of Who is Satoshi? is more like a religious rite for the Bitcoin community. It’s always been an integral part of the myth-making around the token, and the point isn’t actually to answer the question. The point is to continue asking it, forever.

Like all good symbols, the shrouded figure of Satoshi is supposed to be simultaneously defined-yet-vague. You’re supposed to see the outline of a figure, solid enough to be real, yet open-ended enough to allow you to project your own imagination into it. To pull back Satoshi’s hood, and to reveal a specific face, would be to destroy that open-endedness.

Standing at the urinal, I reflected on what would happen if Craig were to be Satoshi. Rather than being transcendent and mystical, Satoshi would be stinking of booze, struggling with his fly, splashing water on his face to clean up before returning to the hall to have a string of slightly cringe conversations. Satoshi would be revealed to be a somewhat awkward Australian guy with a frumpy suit.

Earlier in the evening, Craig had been given a speaking slot, and he’d insisted on entering the auditorium to the soundtrack of Metallica’s Enter Sandman. He ran down the aisle towards the stage with his hands in the air like a rock star, but the sound-man cut the track too early, leaving Craig with a good fifteen seconds of silence as he struggled to get his microphone set up. It was more than enough time for a wave of embarrassment to wash over everyone. Nobody wanted this guy to be Satoshi.

Anybody claiming to be Satoshi should learn from the playbook of old emperors. At a biological level an ancient Pharaoh is just a random guy who has to go to the toilet like anyone else, and who’ll smell if he doesn’t bathe, and who has good days and bad days. If he had to walk among his followers and make normal conversation, they’d be forced to recognise this, so he mustn’t do that. Rather, he must adorn himself in alienating garb, walk in a theatrical manner, hold a ridiculously ornate staff, and say perplexing things while talking about himself in the third person. These weird performances are designed to make him seem part of another world. He is a God-King, not a human.

Aristocrats throughout history have trained their children to behave like this, and these ritual modes of behaviour are designed to project an image of being on a higher level to other biologically-identical members of the species. Cult leaders do a similar thing. Take, for example, a guru like Osho, who was very good at creating an image of transcendent holiness - of occupying a higher spiritual plane - a practice that involves a lot of acting skill. Osho would take long pauses while holding a person in a stare, and then open his hands slowly like a rising sun and speak with a hypnotic tone of voice that made everything he said seem deeply reasonable and profound.

These are techniques for becoming a living symbol - simultaneously real yet unreal - but Craig Wright is not going to pull this off. Craig is a mathematician who makes dad jokes about his PowerPoint slides.

I don’t say this to be mean, or to pick on Craig in particular. The majority of candidates for being Satoshi are cryptography nerds, and the chances of any of them being able to maintain a sense of transcendent holiness is very low. For example, last week the New York Times published an investigative article claiming that the British cryptographer Adam Back is Satoshi. Adam has denied the claim, which is good for the mythological storyline, because if he actually said ‘oh yes, it is me’, people would throw up their hands in disbelief, and quickly move on in search of the next candidate. The ritual practice is to speculate on an answer that nobody truly wants answered.

But why is this the case? Why is the the unanswered question so symbolically important within Bitcoin culture?

Here’s why. The eternal mystery of Satoshi is one of five pillars that hold up the Bitcoin token. I will unpack this statement in the article that follows, but at their core, Bitcoin tokens are hollow, and that hollowness needs to be padded out in order to give them a feeling of substance. The myth of Satoshi is one of those padders.

Step back for a moment, and clear your mind of all the rhetoric, imagery, news reports and claims made about Bitcoin by supporters, detractors, politicians, tech bros, journalists or anyone. Travel back in time to a world where it doesn’t yet exist, and watch how it begins.

In the beginning, some unknown person simply digitally wrote out the number 50. This number was the first known instance of ‘bitcoins’.

The number was written out in the context of a particular architecture, and that architecture had very interesting characteristics. Firstly, the system was designed to have an arbitrary limit on how many times numbers like this could be written out. This created a sense of scarcity of numbers, like there was a finite supply of them that could ever be written into existence.

Secondly, the system allowed for the numbers to be moved around. The 50 could be split into two 25s which could be sent to different destinations.

Thirdly, the most ingenious element of the system was that it had a mechanism for linking those two acts. People got to write out new numbers as a reward to themselves for recording the movement of the old numbers.

Fourthly, the system also had a mechanism for managing the incentives that emerged from that. To prevent the system from being flooded by new acts of writing out new numbers, it made it deliberately hard to write them out, and the difficulty would increase as more people tried. This means energy had to be used.

These four elements make up the deep ontological core of the Bitcoin system. If we push away all the jargon around it, ‘bitcoins’ are just limited edition, movable numbers written out after energy is expended.

Once you start to see this, though, the obvious question to ask is, what exactly are these movable numbers? Are they just numbers?

To answer this question, it’s worth meditating upon a physical metaphor for the same process. Imagine hiking up Mount Everest and then etching out the number 50 on a small piece of flat rock when you’re on the summit. This is a number written out after energy is expended. Now imagine hiking down with that and showing people. Here is a piece of rock with the number 50 written on it. Let’s split it into two portions of 25.

Are these just numbers, or are they something else?

The act of writing something down creates a series of etched marks, but the context in which this is done makes a very big difference. Imagine a child scrawling out letters to create the sentence ‘I will build a skyscraper’. Those words are an imaginative leap for the kid, but in the end they are just words. Now imagine a construction company writing out similar words on a legal contract. These are now a speech act, a binding promise which will be recognised by a legal authority. If the company fails to do what they’ve promised, they cannot say to a judge, ‘but your honour, these were just words’.

No, those words have been activated by the legal system, and imbued with real power.

Similarly, if your bank had a massive data hack, and found that it had lost all the records of balances in its customer accounts, it couldn’t go to the judge and say ‘but your honour, those were just numbers’. No, those were not just numbers. Those were legally recognised credit instruments - IOUs - etched into accounts, with active legal power.

In fact, the entire US dollar system is a vast, multi-layered system of credit activated under systems of law and military might. The US dollar, and the national currencies beneath it, is not mere numbers, and it doesn’t need mysticism to work. It’s a giant vortex, like a globe-spanning economic tornado, and like any tornado, it doesn’t care whether you feel it to be real or not. It is real, and any attempt to imagine otherwise is just fantasy.

The numbers written out in the Bitcoin system, however, are not credit instruments recognised under systems of law, and they do not form an economic tornado. They literally are just numbers - so in their pure form - they are very fragile. Once you see this, it becomes apparent why mysticism is so important within Bitcoin. It is needed in order to build up a cult around the numbers, and to make them feel more solid than they really are.

This process has been highly successful, so let’s look at the five key pillars of this cult. Each pillar is a cultural adornment used to give the numbers more substance or body.

Pillar 1: Mathematical beauty

The 2008 Bitcoin white paper, where the original plan for the system was sketched out, is short, neat and remarkably simple, but you sense that the simplicity has been wrenched out of decades of complex work. It’s a recipe that brings together different components, forged in different contexts, and combines them into a striking new fusion.

If you’re a mathematically-minded person, this design has beauty in itself. It is incredibly elegant.

So, for a certain small sub-set of people - maths nerds, engineers, physics students - this elegance was enough to imbue the early Bitcoin system with a kind of mysticism. Maths does have a history of being associated with mystical thought: for example, Pythagoras and his followers saw certain numbers and geometric arrangements as being spiritually important. There is sacred geometry.

More generally, though, maths is unique in treating numbers as nouns - object-like entities with some kind of thing-ness in themselves. A pure mathematician who does pure abstract maths, exists in a world where numbers don’t reference external things. When they say ‘2 + 3 = 5’, they are speaking as if 2 and 3 each had a self-contained life-force that was combining to create a new being called 5. Numbers are seen as actors, or - at the very least - objects that can be acted upon.

So, one early constituency that was drawn towards Bitcoin were these mathematical mystics who loved numbers for their own sake. They saw in the Bitcoin system a beautiful playground, a way to create numbers as defined objects and make them move around and interact with each other. The system’s consensus mechanism could overcome chaos, and sync into unity a harmonious single record of action between numbers, like a mystic rose.

Pillar 2: The Faceless Face

To a mathematical mystic, it doesn’t matter that much whether or not the numbers are connected to anything in the real world, but for the average person it does matter.

When most people look at the number 50 standing by itself, they don’t see some kind of actor in a mathematical universe. They just see 50, and then think ‘what is this?’ In the practical real world, numbers are supposed to point to something. 50 years. 50 kilometres. Room number 50 in the hotel. 50 people at the party.

By itself, 50 is just an empty signifier. It’s an adjective without a noun. It is hollow.

So, in the early days, Bitcoin’s pristine mathematical world seemed detached from anything of substance on the real planet Earth. A person encountering the system could see the numbers being created, and moving around, but would sense that they referenced nothing in particular, or alternatively, that they referenced something we could not fully grasp. They seemed to point to an abstract empty centre.

The term ‘empty centre’ draws in the history of theology, which is an old academic discipline that builds itself around some unprovable article of faith that cannot be experienced by the senses. Christians, for example, speak about a God that cannot be directly seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled, but nevertheless create an entire culture around this unknowable centre.

I know this, because I was brought up as a Christian. For Christians, trying to push the your mind to see God is like trying to see the horizon in a black hole. You are told that it exists, but you’d never presume to actually fully grasp it.

Some religious groups even prohibit trying to fully grasp god. Jewish mystics, for example, write the name of God as YHWH, and refuse to pronounce it. The letters are seen as an abbreviation, because the true nature of the deity cannot be held in a word. You’re supposed to just leave it as an article of faith. In fact, mystics within many religions will try to draw close to the empty centre through ecstatic dance or meditation, but will only ever hope to catch tangential moments of union with it.

There’s a peculiar bodily sensation associated with this. People within religions are immersed in a culture that constantly references something that can never been fully touched. You’re always on the edge of grasping it, and can take part in discussions about it that seem scholarly, but the empty centre itself always remains just out of reach.

Within religions, these discussions can be used to give form to the empty centre - the act of talking about an unknowable entity can make it appear more concrete - but the average person still wants some imagery for their mind to hold onto. So, when I was in church as a little boy, we would paste an image over the discussion. When asked to imagine ‘God’, we’d think of an old bearded guy in the sky.

Nobody presumed that this image was accurate. It was a metaphoric stand-in. You were not supposed to try to build an accurate picture, or to be so presumptuous as to imagine you could hold it in your puny little mind.

This gets us a little closer to understanding the ritualistic use of the question Who is Satoshi? within Bitcoin culture. Satoshi functions as a face put over the empty centre of Bitcoin, but the face is not supposed to be accurate. It is supposed to give some symbolic form to the empty centre of the system.

Every popular representation of Satoshi always features a figure without a specific face, shadowed by hoods or masks. This concrete-yet-ephemeral being stands in as a totem for the otherwise abstract numbers. It has historically also been used to give the numbers a little bit of mystery and zing, like the number 50 with a crackle of spark rippling through it. It can be used to germinate a wider sense of intrigue.

The importance of the shrouded Satoshi figure cannot be overstated, because the little crackle of mystique behind the number 50 draws the mind of an adherent to the question Who is Satoshi, rather than the much more straightforward question of what is this number?

Back in 2018, the reason I was at Satoshi’s Vision was to ask that latter question, and it wasn’t a welcome question. A passionate community had built around the numbers, debating new methods to secure them, or to build more user-friendly apps for moving them around, and they believed the question of what are these to be irrelevant, something to be brushed aside with annoyance. Nowadays we now have hundreds of thousands of pages written about all the cryptography around them, and countless Youtube videos giving their ten cents about what you should pay for them. Waves of pseudo-scientific analysis are written about these numbers every day, but the dark secret at the core of Bitcoin is that nobody truly knows what the numbers are.

This, though, takes us to the third pillar. Words.

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Pillar 3: Just Words

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God

This is the opening line of the Gospel of John in the Christian Bible. It references Genesis, in which God speaks the world into existence.

This is but one of many religious texts concerning the power of words to create or shape reality. For example, the ancient Aramaic phrase Abracadabra reputedly means I create as I speak (or, I create like the word). In Taoism the act of naming is seen to create objects, breaking them off from some otherwise infinite whole that cannot be named.

The moral of the story here is that many ancients across the world sensed that words have power beyond mere description. They can be used to charge stuff up and make thing happen. They can have a kind of life of their own.

With this in mind, let’s look at the opening words of the Bitcoin white paper.

There are two very important acts of naming here. The first is the word ‘coin’, found within ‘Bitcoin’. The second is ‘cash’, found in the subtitle. Both are used to evoke the broader concept of money.

What’s fascinating about this is that the paper goes on to lay out a system for writing out numbers and moving them around in chains, but Satoshi just calls these ‘coins’.

Forget the technical jargon above. What Satoshi is talking about is that process of taking a 50, and then passing it on to another, and so on. This is a ‘coin’.

So, from the very outset, the Bitcoin system has always had a separate linguistic layer used to give metaphoric substance to the numbers.

The next act of naming was the term ‘token’. It was not found in the original paper, but it came into widespread usage in the years after. In the pre-digital world, a token would be imagined as a small symbolic object. In its most primal form, it’s a blank token like this (to see the other forms, see The Six Tokens).

To create an image of a digital ‘token’ in your mind, you have to take that original ‘50’ that was written out in the Bitcoin system, and imagine it as 50 units of 1.

You then zoom in on a 1 and imagine it as a discrete object.

This is a Bitcoin Token. I have 1 of them.

Of course, what you actually have is the mathematical object called ‘1’, but by affixing that term ‘token’ to it, you now turn it into an adjective, freeing it from its previous life as a noun. It now refers to something beyond itself. 1 token, rather than just 1.

This is a simple yet profoundly effective linguistic move. It makes the numbers seem like they are referring to objects.

The next linguistic phase was to build an entire vocabulary of monetary language around these ‘tokens’ or ‘coins’. This was a purely cultural practice. The growing Bitcoin community introduced words like ‘crypto-currency’, ‘digital gold’ and so on. Equally important was the addition of a little acronym - “BTC” - after the numbers. 1 BTC. This mimicked the cultural conventions around monetary systems.

These are just linguistic operations separate from the system itself. They are used to generate mental imagery around the numbers, adorning them as it were.

Here’s a thought experiment. Try to imagine yourself as a bitcoin, and imagine yourself moving around the system. In your own terms, you are a number within a mathematical universe that places rules for how you can move and interact with others. The linguistic layer is detached from you. It’s like something you hear muffled in the distance, the clamouring chatter of some community of people beyond the mathematical world. They speak about you as being something other than a number. They say, “That 1 is a token. It is money. It is digital gold.”

Pillar 4: Golden JPEGS, and energy

Physically, Bitcoin is colourless and textureless binary code etched onto computer drives around the world, so it has no real sensory information that a human can detect. We can, however, place stand-in sensory information over it. Here, for example, is a PNG file of something totally unrelated to Bitcoin, which is used to visually represent it.

While words like ‘coin’ can generate metaphoric imagery in the mind of a listener, a picture like this simply forces an image into the mind of a watcher.

Here is a bitcoin. It is literally a golden coin with digital circuitry on it.

Effectively it is a logo, but one that actually purports to show the ‘coin’. The Internet now hosts millions of these JPEGs, PNGs and GIF files, and by now a big percentage of the world’s population has seen this visual representation. It’s the primary image of ‘Bitcoin’ that comes up from a web search, and almost every journalist uses it when writing an article about the subject.

Notice of course that the image is rendered in a gold colour. This is a not-so-subtle attempt to create a metaphor of ‘digital gold’.

There is a lot to say about gold, but the first thing I’d stress is that you need to make a distinction between the actual history and cultural life of gold - which is very interesting - and the symbolic usage of the mythology of gold in present-day politics (which is also very interesting).

Those are two different things, but when it comes to Bitcoin, we’re talking about the latter phenomenon. The vast majority of people know absolutely nothing about the actual history of gold and how it functioned, but they do harbour a mental image of gold as a kind of platonic ideal for how money is ‘supposed to be’, even though none of them have ever experienced as such.

More specifically, this phenomenon is very important within conservative libertarian culture. If you’d like to explore why, check out my piece The Archipelago: Why your inner libertarian dreams of digital gold. In that piece, I explain how gold mythology functions within the conservative imagination to promote the (false) idea that economies are just collections of sovereign individuals engaging in voluntary trade.

That’s quite a complex topic, so for now, let’s just accept that there’s a conservative political valence to the use of gold imagery in Bitcoin.

That said, this imagery was also chosen because there weren’t many other options. As mentioned earlier, the numbers found in the actual monetary system - such as those you might see on your bank balance - are written out in the context of a huge credit vortex that gives them incredible coercive power. The numbers in your bank account can literally make people do things, and its not because they’re ‘gold’. It’s because they are activated and operate within a much bigger institutional system that everyone is forced to use whether they want to or not.

The numbers written out in Bitcoin, by contrast, are just numbers. And, while the various aspects of mythology - such as the figure of Satoshi and the words - go some way in giving them form, they still feel pretty flimsy to many people. They are not given form by a globe-spanning credit structure, so the best chance they have of mimicking ‘money’ is to associate themselves with that folk imagination of money-as-gold.

Nowadays of course, actual gold does not function as money - it is bought and sold for money - but it does have a huge and resilient market, much of which is based upon a historic fetish for the colour and texture of the polished metal. In fact, actually useful metals tend to get called ‘base metals’ and are less culturally valued, while ‘precious’ metals are associated with vanity, status and religious ritual.

So, the community around Bitcoin settled on imagery of textured gold, trying to evoke the idea of a ‘precious’ digital object.

The final piece of this cultural move, however, calls back the architecture of the system. Bitcoins are limited edition numbers written out after energy is expended.

This provides a neat real-world similarity to gold extraction, which also requires energy. The final masterstroke was again linguistic. The community began to call the process of writing out new numbers ‘mining’, and the metaphor was complete. You ‘mine’ these numbers out of some kind of mathematical ore, and they come out looking like golden digital medallions.

Pillar 5: The Story of V

So, let’s look at what the first four pillars leave us with. Mystical gold-branded limited edition movable numbers with the linguistic conventions of a monetary system pasted over them.

So much of this ‘padding’ around the numbers is testament to the human capacity for storytelling. Bitcoin is a fascinating case study in this ancient art-form. So much storytelling work has been done to create a thick culture around an otherwise thin, or hollow, foundation.

The storytelling effort involves different specialist classes of storytellers building out different elements of the mythology. There are the mathematical mystics, and the cultists interpreting the word of Satoshi. There are crypto-economists using technocratic monetary language to create a story about it as just a rational economic phenomenon. There are the golden myth-makers who speak about it as my precious, and they dovetail with the cult of Bitcoin energy usage, whose stories pretty much amount to if we use so much energy to get it, it must mean it is worth it.

There is one very important early story-telling community that we haven’t covered yet. This was the one that tried to make out that Bitcoin was a rebellion against the system. These storytellers pasted a particular mask over Satoshi. It was that mask from the film V for Vendetta.

In that film, a masked hero becomes a symbol of resistance to an oppressive fascist regime that attacks immigrants, minorities, gay people and other ‘undesirables’. The mask comes to represent a heroic everyman, not so much a cult leader as a Robin Hood character, fighting from the bottom-up on behalf of the underdog. V is an anonymous vigilante who stands for everyone.

We find a similar phenomenon with the figure of Satoshi. While some created an image of Satoshi as a mystical guru, many others projected an image of a freedom-fighter. This created a story both mystical and rebellious, the kind of thing that could capture the minds of the young, and in particular those young men who felt trapped in a system that seemed to have declining opportunities. In those early years we saw something like a millenarian movement form, one that imagined a revolution, and a sweeping away of an old order.

Cracks in the foundation

Over time, the mythology of Bitcoin has found itself under strain. The story of a mystical Vendetta token on a mission to destroy the corrupt fiat system was exhilarating for many, but as the years passed by, the story started to crack.

You see, ‘fiat currency’ is the basis of the entire capitalist system, and it’s extraordinarily powerful. If you underestimate its power, it will eat your rebellion alive, and no amount of V masks is ever going to change that.

So let’s look at what actually happened. The branded limited edition numbers of Bitcoin were swallowed by the dollar system and turned into tradeable collectibles with a dollar price.

This means the emergent new generations of Bitcoiners started emphasising a different story, one in which the token was a dollar-priced asset rather than a dollar-killer.

The Bitcoin priesthood - all the influencers and industry leaders around it - have for years tried to reconcile these fundamentally incompatible stories. They use all sorts of linguistic and conceptual contortions to try to make out that a dollar-priced asset can indeed take down the US dollar. Some of their moves can indeed be seductive, and if you’d like to see how they work, see my piece The Art of Crypto Kayfabe.

In 2018, however, this strain between the stories actually led to that very Satoshi’s Vision gathering I found myself in. That event was designed to bring together the Bitcoin Cash community. They believed that the mainstream Bitcoin community had lost its way, and forgotten that Satoshi wanted digital cash for commerce, not digital gold for dollar speculation. They split away from the main Bitcoin system and forked their own system into being.

In the end, all of this was totally performative, because the Bitcoin Cash system had exactly the same basic structure as the Bitcoin system, so it also got eaten and became just another dollar-priced token, trading at a discount to the main one.

Looking back, this debate seems kinda quaint, because in years that followed the 2018 squabbles, the Bitcoin scene was taken over by ‘degen’ and HODL culture. Degen stands for “degenerate gambler” while HODL was a cult of holding onto the tokens at all costs. Crypto Twitter became inundated with swarms of lazer-eyed HODLers shaming anyone who doubted the act of speculating on the tokens.

For outsiders this new culture felt very toxic, but it had an internal logic. The jeering bands of nihilistic speculators were performing. If you actually met them at a dinner, they might be polite normal people, but online they indulged in a group fantasy, a bit like a massive multi-player online game. In their imagination, the entire world was rigged against them, but rather than calling out the injustice of that, the idea was to lean into it and play the game harder and dirtier than anyone else.

So, while there have been Bitcoin promoters like my friend Alex Gladstein who have tried to push a progressive story about Bitcoin helping the poor and the oppressed, the degen wing of HODL culture jeers at such do-good-ism. They still hold onto some vestige of that V for Vendetta rebellion idea, but now see buying Bitcoin as a way of saying ‘fuck you’ to both the powers-that-be but also to any well-meaning person who cares about climate change, equality or veganism. This turns up in the pictures of steaks and Lamborghinis deliberately posted by the community to provoke outrage. Here’s a representative example, from Bitcoin evangelist Saifedean Ammous.

This new twist in the culture caught the eye of populist politicians, who fed upon that same kind of nihilistic charge (for more on this, see Making Capitalism Bad Again). They formed an active alliance with the broader crypto industry, and began symbolically supporting it as a means to signal rejection of the mainstream.

For a long time now, Bitcoin culture has been carnivalesque - a kind of clanging fantasy procession making its way through the Internet - but what’s changed over time is how politicians have exploited it. They now pretend to join the procession, and this is how we’ve ended up with the former UK conservative chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng launching his own Bitcoin treasury company, and why - last month - Nigel Farage invested into it.

Bitcoin is perhaps one of the greatest acts of storytelling of all time. An entire cult built around an empty centre, a black hole, which has come to suck in mainstream business execs, venture capitalists and politicians, none of whom are able to describe what it is. That number 50, so hollow and meek, turned into mystical objects with a giant, and increasingly corrupt, industry around them, with the Trump sons cashing in and Joe Rogan and a thousand other podcasters blah blahing on about it.

Amazing.

In the background, a colossal amount of real world energy is burned to keep this procession going. Look out your window, though, and ask yourself a simple question: has this procession ever passed down my actual street?

Of course not. The procession is built around a pristine mathematical world that does not point to anything in your street. It points only to itself.

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Dear Super-Subscribers,

Here is the audio edition - exclusive to paying subscribers - of my latest essay, The Cult of the Black Hole: The Five Pillars of Bitcoin Mysticism

It’s a big essay, so this one comes in at 38 minutes.

For many years now I’ve written essays on the culture and politics of Bitcoin. In each one I try to explore a new angle on the pheno…

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Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this here

Every time I go through an airport, I’m reminded that they are condensed microcosms of the worst parts of global capitalism. We’re herded through body-scanning surveillance checkpoints before being steered into the scented consumerism of perfume alley. The rich peel off into the flagship stores to browse the Rolexes and Chanel bags before retreating into the hidden airport lounges. From these luxury bunkers they can look down on all the economy-class commoners getting price-gouged by the chain restaurants.

Sitting in one of those chains, I’m also reminded of the stark division between workers and bosses in our system. The branded uniform of my waiter marks him out as an appendage of some larger entity that owns his time. In my piece Bufferland, I explored how these service staff are used as an emotional shock-absorber - a buffer - to absorb all the frustration of distressed customers so that conspicuously absent managers and shareholders will never have to experience it.

From their distant perches, bosses seek to cut costs and raise prices if they can. This inevitably leads to tension between frontline workers and customers, who are the ones left to deal with the lived reality of that. In this crowded airport, stressy flyers and stressy staff encounter each other in restaurants and boarding gates, while - sitting in the comfort of the world’s 5-star lounges - the major shareholders scrape the residual profit from that without having to experience the angst of either side.

Despite their invisibility, the mark of these bosses is everywhere. I see their decisions in all the automation tech pushed out to enshittify the customer experience under the guise of convenience. Almost every chain restaurant in a London airport now has a touchscreen self-service system, or a QR code on the table for ordering via your phone. These are no longer optional, and their purpose is not to make your life easier. Their purpose is to reduce the amount of labour the corporation has to buy. After all, self-service means that you now get to do the service.

Over time, it’s cheaper for bosses to buy machines than to hire people, so that’s what they will do like clockwork. The automation spreads, not because there’s some great upwelling of human desire for it, but rather because it’s the default path of least resistance in our economic system. Like a gravity well that pulls you in, it only takes effort to go against automation.

So, when the senior managers of a restaurant chain take the decision to start buying self-service kiosks they’re not being ‘innovative’. They’re simply slavishly following the expected path to optimise profits. This inherent systemic tendency for bosses-as-a-class to foist automation tech at consumers-as-a-class means the latter largely has nowhere to escape to and no choice but to comply. The customer might grumble about it at first, but eventually they’ll have to release resistance and just go along with the touchscreens, after which they will slowly forget what it was like before and come to expect the tech. For the kids who are born into it, they will know nothing else.

The end result of this is that people slump into a loveless marriage with all the self-service machines. They vaguely think that maybe this marriage was the result of their desire, but they cannot recall any point in time when some active choice was made to get engaged. That’s because there wasn’t a point in time when a choice was made. The economic system simply defaulted to this.

Nevertheless, the senior bosses of firms do loosely have to think about how to introduce new waves of automation without antagonising customers too much (at least at first). That’s why the management of Goodman and Filippo - an Italian restaurant chain here at Frankfurt Airport - have decided to buy a machine with a cat face and ears.

The machine is a motorised tray delivery system that carries pizzas from the kitchen to the dining area. It’s an automated waiter. It is the BellaBot Pro from Digpanda Robotics. It’s a machine programmed to pretend to not be a machine, primarily by having big doughy eyes on its screen and a cutesy digital voice. I hear its speakers playing stock messages like, “Here I am! Please take your plate from my tray” and “Dear guest, your meal is ready.”

Its use of first-person pronouns irritates the shit out of me, but that’s also because I can be a dark existential type of person. I imagine the engineers programming it to appear ‘warm’. This simulacrum of friendliness inspires warlike feelings in me.

Not everyone is having this response though. I notice that kids are laughing and pointing at it and that their dads are taking videos of it with big grins. It is a novelty after all.

It occurs to me how disturbingly easy it is to hack our brains. We have an ancient faculty for recognising faces, forged in the prehistoric wilderness. Now, a motorised computer with shelves and a speaker gets mistaken for a sentient being simply because it has cartoon eyes and a smile.

My inner animist finds this arbitrary. If it’s true that computers have feelings, then they should all be given equal amounts of affection, regardless of whether they have a face pasted over them (hell, why stop at computers, why not recognise the feelings of the table and chairs and menu?) Nevertheless, the payments terminals and screens showing the flights are receiving no love, because they’re not programmed with fake emotional responses, like the shy blush that BellaBot Pro gives when you wave at it.

As with all automation technology, the novelty of BellaBot will wear off once society becomes dependent upon such machines. After all, a ‘novelty’ is something that can cause delight but which is not required. The Internet, for example, was novel in the 1970s. It was something that could cause wonder and make people point, but that’s only because nobody’s life depended on it back then.

Now, however, the Internet is dark, precisely because it holds your entire life hostage, and because everything around you will fall apart if it stops. We got sucked into its proverbial gravity well, a process during which the entire economy recalibrated into total dependence upon it, which means we now cannot escape it.

So, in a future world where these bots are the only means of service, the programmed smiley faces will bring us no more joy, and the emptiness in the voices will ring loud. For now, though, I see a family cracking up with laughter after their daughter pats BellaBot on the head, and it says: ‘Don’t touch my ears!’

On its website, Digpanda Robotics claims to ‘serve your service staff’. That’s a classic piece of corporate spin, because of course the purpose of the BellaBot is to reduce the need for service staff. A Bellabot Pro costs €14,250 ($16,500). Company bosses are not laying out such sums to do their staff a favour.

The spin has a perverse logic though. It is true that if a boss fired half of their staff without buying the machine, the remaining staff would have to do double the amount of work, so, from some twisted perspective, buying the machine does ‘help’ the survivors. It stands in for their old colleagues.

There’s something particularly grim in this restaurant. Families are take selfies with the machine while an actual waiter stands unnoticed in the background, receiving no pats on the head. He finds himself not only an appendage of this chain, but bound as an unwilling caretaker of the BellaBot, a machine that’s in fact not very helpful at all.

I know this, because I ask him. There’s a bitter streak in his voice - a real voice - when he tells me that the robot doesn’t make his job easier. In fact, it’s obvious to see that it makes his life harder. It keeps getting stuck in the aisles - reversing backwards and forwards like a small lorry trying to negotiate a corner - and repeating the same phrase over and over again in its plastic voice.

Once you’ve been in the restaurant for more than half an hour you start to realise that BellaBot’s human touch is gratingly thin, especially as it seems to only have about five stock phrases. This man, however, has to spend his entire eight-hour shift listening to that same automated laugh on repeat hundreds of times. It probably classes as some form of torture under the Geneva Convention.

I imagine him fantasising about smashing that automated waiter in its furry little face. It would be a symbolic way of lashing out at the faceless shareholders that made the decision to acquire it, and who instructed him to humiliate himself by helping it around, facilitating a machine whose explicit purpose is to eventually make him redundant.

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Being the moody existentialist that I am, I think about the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and his story of the waiter. Existentialist types like to sit in cafes and make observations about the world, but back in the 1940s when Sartre was doing this, his attention focused on the figure of the waiter who behaved too much like a waiter.

Much like the urban yuppie who buys all the gear to look like The Hiker, or the amateur who clads themselves in Lycra to conform to the image of The Cyclist, the person bringing Sartre his coffee would mould themselves into the outlines of some stock character called The Waiter. To Sartre, their gestures, voice and movement felt staged. Rather than seeing themselves as a subject with radical freedom, the person was treating themselves like an object.

Sartre felt this was inauthentic, and he referred to this phenomenon of denying your own subjectivity as ‘Bad Faith’. Picture him saying “Just be yourself man! You’re not a Waiter, you’re a radically free human being!”

I wonder what Sartre would think now, however. My human waiter might still be acting out the part of The Waiter, but he’s 100% more authentic in his bad faith than this fucking machine put here by the capitalist class. In fact, while he plays out his part, my man is proud, trying to hold onto his dignity.

That dignity is tragically set against the fact that his distant bosses will not know his name, but will know the name of this robot, and will value it more. In fact, for a long time now, corporations have wanted their human employees to behave more like robots - obedient, unquestioning - and for their robots to behave more like humans - warm, approachable. We see this most starkly in call centres, where the radical freedom of a human employee is shut down by scripts that they cannot veer far from, while the AI bots that are replacing them are increasingly designed to handle open-ended free-form conversations.

The key difference between workers and robots is that it’s only the former who need to take toilet breaks, and only the former who harbour feelings of rebellion and who might join a union. Machines require an initial outlay, but are often cheaper and more predictable in the long term. Buying a machine is like a buying a slave - you pay once - whereas buying increments of human labour power is an ongoing subscription, and one that’s more volatile.

So, bosses will find themselves browsing the brochures of the bot companies, calculating the return on investment over time.

There is something disgusting about that, but I don’t necessarily judge these decision-makers. After all, they don’t really perceive themselves as having any agency to do anything else. They are in a war against other bosses, so they must go with the gravity of our system and act out the automation drive like any other. They might be aware that BellaBot sucks, but they’ll get it anyway, and hope that somewhere some new startup is figuring out how to upgrade it with a more convincing voice and a larger library of stock phrases. Maybe, one day, there will be fully AI-driven Bellas that can hold entire conversations.

I look at my laptop. My dad has forwarded me a promotional email. He’s worried about my future given the proliferation of AI, so he thought it might be relevant:

In a world where AI is doing more and more of the thinking… the differentiator isn’t how smart you are.

It’s how human you are.

For years, relational skills were treated like the “nice to have.” Soft. Secondary. Optional. Not anymore. Now they’re the edge.

Can you truly listen? Can you empathise without rushing to fix? Do people feel safe, seen, and respected in your presence?

AI can analyse. It can prepare. It can even coach.

But it can’t show up.

It can’t sit across from someone and make them feel understood.

It can’t build trust through presence.

The email is from Justin Cohen, a motivational speaker and author of business self-help books. He’s on tour selling speeches about how to commodify and sell your human touch like a product to differentiate yourself in the market.

There’s big money to be made selling tips about how to survive in the future marketplace. People like Justin can get paid tens of thousands of dollars to appear on stage at the big business conferences, and he’s but one of many in this hustle. If we reversed time and went back a few hundred years, though, there wouldn’t be much need for keynotes like this, because capitalism was a much simpler game back then.

In the 1800s, in the old days of the industrial proletariat, workers sold their labour power to factory owners as a generic product. Over time, however, as industries and specialisation have skyrocketed, we’ve been asked to sell ever-more niche elements of our labour. In the eighties people would reach into themselves and find marketable hard skills and traits to commodify on CVs. Later, with the rise of isolated gig economy work, we were told to build a ‘personal brand’ and a social media presence. Now, in the age of AI, we’re being told to locate the essence of our humanity - the soft parts of us, not the hard skills - so that we can sell those.

As Justin and many others will be arguing right now, you must lean into your humanity, package it, and present it as a sellable product.

All those old companies that used to boast about their edge in selling software-as-a-service must now pivot to selling humanity-as-a-service to differentiate themselves from the juggernauts of AI. Individual workers are being told to commodify their empathy, their listening skills, their stories about their kids and family, and anything that marks them out as not a machine.

As the territory of Mind gets taken over by the AI giants, Deep Humanity becomes the new product for the refugees. You are pushed to find this new commodity within yourself, and to haul it out like felled logs drawn from your inner, hidden rainforest.

Ah, but like all frontiers of capitalism, beware. The default in our system is, firstly, to push people to create new commodities, but secondly, to cheapen their production. That latter process always eventually entails automation, to increase the scale and speed at which commodified units can be pumped out.

So, as you raid your inner humanity for a new market edge, the automators are right there behind you. They are studying your product, noting down the face gestures you make when empathetically listening, or the tones of voice you use when comforting someone. They are waiting to build a new machine that can streamline and speed up the production of these intangibles, and they are waiting to sell that to Digpanda, so that BellaBot can eventually sympathise with you if you’ve missed your flight.

This is why the Great Innovator Elon is dreaming about advanced humanoid robots. Like all servants of capitalism, he follows the pre-ordained path, which is to cheapen the production of the commodity, but he presents it as a visionary adventure undertaken by the inspiring and the bold. In reality, though, his bold thoughts are the human equivalent of a rock that drops to the floor in response to gravity - they go exactly where you’d expect them to go.

In fact, the entire venture capitalist class and startup sector are like this. I guarantee right now that all the Silicon Valley big-shots are getting hard-ons about funding some new group of data scientists, robotics grads and AI wizards to further simulate the human touch. They’re out there in all the incubation hubs with their pitch decks, dutifully laying out their latest plan to automate the commoditised world.

I leave a cash tip for my waiter, and as I walk out I take a photo of the BellaBot machine. I think about the VCs behind all these bots across the world. I imagine them popping champagne in their penthouses in Palo Alto, while my waiter goes home to his small rented flat on the outskirts of Frankfurt.

Thinking about those billionaires, my parting thought is, slow clap to you all.

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Dear super-subscribers,

I’m happy to present to you the audio edition of my latest essay Humanity-as-a-Service: Commoditizing the Human Touch in the Age of AI.

It’s 19 minutes long.

You can find the images mentioned in the audio below

Cheers!
Brett

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Dear readers, in this piece I offer a metaphoric framework for thinking about the mindset and actions of US president Donald Trump, but it can be applied to other world leaders too. I don’t see it as perfect, but I invite you to extend upon, or nuance, the metaphor in the comments. I hope you enjoy!

The audio version for paying subscribers can be found here!

In 1995 a moody anime series called Neon Genesis Evangelion was released, and it quickly became a cult classic. It revolved around an alienated boy - Shinji Ikari - who is recruited to pilot a huge robot warrior called Eva Unit 1. The fighting machine has been designed by his cold and estranged father for the Japanese government, in order to battle a mysterious race of monsters called the Angels.

The series follows Shinji as he struggles with the emotional and physical strain of controlling this giant appendage. That strain is particularly acute because the Eva only works if it’s harmoniously synced with Shinji’s own nervous system. Any panic attacks he might have in the cockpit can send it reeling into a berserk frenzy, and any damage done to it by an Angel can wreak havoc on his own body.

Evangelion is a classic in the mecha genre, a branch of anime and manga that focuses on human pilots manning robot bodies. The genre extends beyond Japan - for example, the American series Power Rangers featured teens controlling mechas called Zords. Evangelion, however, is unparalleled in exploring just how dark and emotional this fusing of human and robot can be. The creation of a cyborg taxes both sides.

In sci-fi culture, the cyborg is a melding of human and machine. The combined entity has both greater reach and greater power than its human component. In this sense it represents extension and amplification of human capacity. As Shinji flexes his puny chest to thrust his arm forward 40cm in the cockpit, Eva Unit 1 delivers a 40 metre power-punch with the force of a freight train.

The mecha extends and amplifies the will of its pilot, and in many ways this a broader metaphor for technology more generally. The axe, for example, is an extension of the human arm. It amplifies and focuses a muscle’s energy to leave a gouge in a tree. Likewise, a Caterpillar excavator uses fossil fuels to turn the hand of its pilot into a powerful robot claw that can gouge whole chunks out of the earth. The excavator is, basically, a small mecha.

The figure of the cyborg in sci-fi culture doesn’t merely represent an extended and amplified human, but also a human that has become dependent upon external appendages, and therefore enmeshed with the machine. In the case of Evangelion, humanity’s survival is dependent upon the fusion of Shinji’s nervous system with the Eva, but this same phenomenon occurs in our lives. We cannot make it through a day without recourse to our technology, for we have lost the ability to survive without it. In many ways, we already are cyborgs.

A simple machine is an assemblage of components linked together under some common system of management, and powered by some energy source. We can, however, extend that concept to refer to larger and more complex assemblages, which may be held together under more sprawling management systems. For example, a corporation can be pictured as a globe-spanning assemblage of subsidiaries which collectively own an even vaster assemblage of assets, all tied together under some management structure.

Think, for example, about an agricultural corporation. It might own tens of thousands of combine harvesters - each a small mecha - tethered together through a common management system that’s presided over by a big boss somewhere. At some abstract level, we have here a mecha-of-mechas, a sprawling legal machine tethered to an army of smaller physical machines.

The CEO of a corporation - like the controller of an excavator - can try to make the corporation do things by sending out executive orders from a boardroom. The boss of an oil firm, for example, can instruct the entity to gouge out a thousand kilometre long trench in the earth to lay a pipeline.

These orders, though, have to filter through many layers of sub-management. By the time the message reaches the frontlines of the entity it might be bogged down by all manner of glitches, short-circuitings, unresponsive parts and unintended feedbacks.

We see a contradiction here. While it’s true that the theoretical power of the controller goes up with the scale of the assemblage, it’s also true that greater scale brings greater unpredictability, with the orders holding less direct purchase over the actions of the entity. While I can be pretty confident in swinging an axe towards a precise target, a CEO of a multi-national corporation cannot guarantee that their instructions will translate into a precise outcome.

One of the main reasons for this is not only the complexity of interlinkages, but the fact that a corporation isn’t merely an assemblage of mechanical parts. Rather, it’s also an assemblage of human beings, who all have their own sense of agency. They do not like being treated as mere ‘cogs in the machine’. They wish for their humanity to be recognised.

Most modern corporations are explicitly hierarchical and often authoritarian, in the sense that they have supreme leaders who have the ability to simply cut loose anyone who disobeys their orders. Most CEOs, however, understand that they cannot simply treat their staff as appendages of a supreme controller, because it creates bad morale and rebellion, and stifles feedback from the frontlines which is needed for good management.

So, while it is possible for us to metaphorically attempt to imagine a corporation as a kind of ‘mecha’ that’s fused into the will of its supreme leader, most CEOs cannot afford to think of themselves as a mecha pilot. They cannot walk around the offices as if they were the only agent, as if their entire staff were simply there to extend and amplify the body and mind of the CEO.

In fact, by the time you’re at the helm of a large corporation, you’re supposed to see yourself as being a team leader in a human organisational structure that involves tens of thousands of others, and you’re supposed to be taking in their feedback and recognising their humanity.

This applies even more when we go up another level to the modern nation state. The person at the helm of a government does have a theoretical ‘mecha’ that they can manipulate via a whole range of mechanisms - policy, law, violence, soft power etc - but the average democratic leader isn’t supposed to think of themselves like that. They’re supposed to see the State as being an entity above-and-beyond themselves that they serve. They’re supposed to see themselves as a temporary caretaker granted power by a body-politic who is the true ‘agent’, and they are supposed to subordinate themselves to that body-politic.

That’s the theory at least, but of course it’s a helluva lot more complex than that in practice. Executive power always justifies itself as being enacted on behalf of a body-politic - all presidents claim to be acting as instruments of their voters - but this can never be separated from the private and personal interests of the person wielding the power. That’s why checks-and-balances are supposed to exist: they are designed to reign in any rogue pilot who is riding the state machinery too hard.

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In the case of the US, however, the state machinery extends far beyond its own borders. The US is an empire, and its power is embedded in a gigantic assemblage of murky connections throughout the world. The US state acts not only through networks of proxies, and alliances, and foreign military bases, but also through its corporate sector, media and cultural influence. If you zoom out, the US ‘mecha’ extends across the globe, with the capacity to strike directly through missiles or indirectly through films and music.

The sheer scale of this assemblage means that most US presidents cannot picture themselves as a mecha pilot. It’s simply untenable to imagine that this complex is a mere extension of its leader. Indeed, for a president to imagine that the US state simply exists to reflect his personal desires and dreams would be the deepest form of narcissism. It would be to imagine that other consciousnesses are simply mechanical parts that have no purpose beyond enacting his own desires. It would be to imagine that voters are not primarily instructors granting a task, but rather loyal devotees recognising a supreme divine power.

I’m not going to come out and say that Trump overtly thinks of himself as a divine mecha pilot. I’m not going to claim that he is unable to process the fact that other people have wills and consciousnesses that do not reflect his own. I will, however, say that he does use a lot of rhetoric, and display a lot of behaviour, that suggests that he might view himself like this.

Certainly we can say that, compared to other US presidents, he’s coming a lot closer to seeing the state as an extension of his own body, as if he has only a hazy sense of a distinction between himself and its powers. A defining feature of his presidency has been to centralise power into a ‘unitary executive’. It often does seem that he sees the White House and Mar-a-Lago as cockpits of a planetary scale mecha fused with his own nervous system, a colossal exoskeleton that he controls through executive orders, which turn his small thoughts into giant globe-spanning punches.

This attitude applies beyond immediate state institutions. For example, he sometimes seems to imagine that US corporations exist to enact his broader plan for the world, and that allies are subordinated appendages. This is reflected in the casual language of his speeches, in which complex, interdependent systems that have billions of connections - like the global economy, or the bond market - are spoken of as if they were easily manipulatable limbs, as if shifting the future of the world could be done through a phone call to a few mates.

He doesn’t seem to treat tariffs, military strikes, and sanctions as complex actions involving tens of millions of players that have wide-ranging and unpredictable consequences. Rather, it often appears as if he sees these and other mechanisms as fists that he can use to deliver precise blows across the globe from his desk.

If he does have this mentality though, he will also find himself with a problem, which is that this mecha wasn’t actually designed to fuse with him. He’ll often experience it as faulty, as it frequently fails to obey orders. It will seem to have components designed to frustrate his intentions. He might think the interface between his nervous system and the machinery of state has been infiltrated by a virus he calls the ‘deep state’, which is severing the connection between himself and the fists, weakening them. He might have tantrums, trying to shake pieces off the mecha that are not aligned with his being. Maybe he’ll feel an impulse to discard the soft power mechanisms because their connection to his body is just too diffuse. Maybe that’s why he will jettison USAID and try to shut down Hollywood and so on.

But, even if he was able to shake off those components that don’t sync up with him, he still finds himself at the helm of an extended imperial body that has - de facto - many decentralised centres of power. Regardless of what he imagines, he’s not in control of the stock market. He cannot push a button and make the Chinese - or the Iranians - do what he wants. He cannot simply subsume the interests of Big Tech, Big Oil and Big Finance under himself. He cannot simply ignore the fact that the mecha itself has a nervous system in the form of the US dollar - and petrodollar - and that such a system is constantly being affected by outside ‘pilots’. He doesn’t have nearly as much control of the machine than he imagines.

In fact, it may be the case that he himself is simply a reflection of the fact that the mecha has already gone berserk, unable to process the grief and angst of its own imperial decline.

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Dear super-subscribers,

Here’s the audio of me reading my latest essay Neon Genesis USA: Is Trump a Mecha Pilot? It’s 14 minutes long.

In this piece I offer a metaphoric framework for thinking about the mindset and actions of US president Donald Trump, but it can be applied to other world leaders too. I don’t see it as perfect, but I invite you to extend …

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Dear Reader. This is one of those slightly geeky pieces that I do occasionally for the curious non-expert. For those of you who aren’t into my more technical stuff, you can find my more social-political-cultural work in sections like Big Techtonics and Winging It.

In this piece I’m going to wade into Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) again - building on my MMT primer video from last year, and the follow-up piece Levelling up my MMT (Part 1). In this piece I’m going to build out my own idiosyncratic way to approach the theory via 10 steps.

I don’t characterise myself as an MMT campaigner, but I do feel an affinity towards the broad paradigm behind it. That’s probably because I come from an anthropology background, and anthropology has a similar historical battle going on with mainstream economics.

In short, mainstream economics metaphorically speaks of money as a commodity, and does so for ideological reasons (see, for example, The Archipelago), whereas both MMT and anthropology are much more attuned to seeing money as a system of credit, with IOUs or promissory instruments (which may or may not be hosted in commodity bodies). If you want to delve a little into the background battle around that, check out 5D Money and The Anthropologist in an Economist World.

Given that much of my work is public-facing, and intended to try bring in non-experts, I enjoy doing stylisations, simplified and abstracted but useful portraits that can give a person neural scaffolding so that they can go and complexify the issue for themselves at a later date. So, I’m going to lay out 10 stylised sketches of different concepts below. Don’t see them as perfectly accurate. See them as components that you can modify and recombine for yourselves.

1: The interdependent economy

Let’s start with a meta point. All ‘economies’ throughout time are interdependent networks of people who draw upon the earth to survive. Interdependence, however, can be structured in different ways:

• In the case of a hunter-gatherer band, we have a tiny, tightly knit network with relatively fixed and stable relationships. Life might be frugal, but you’re pretty much guaranteed a role in the society (i.e. you’re not going around begging powerful people for a ‘job’)

• In the case of horticultural and pastoral tribal societies we have larger, more stratified groups, but the relationships remain relatively stable. You might enter positions through rites of passage, and be expected to take on certain roles

• In the case of a feudal or caste-based society we have a much larger-scale, and also much more hierarchical system. It’s still interdependent, but there’s a distinct parasitism within it, with the top of the hierarchy skimming a lot from the bottom. That said, feudal systems have relatively fixed relations, which means there’s a degree of security for the people within it (think, for example, of the aristocratic statement ‘know your place’, which implies that there are set positions for different people)

• In the case of modern capitalism we have a massive-scale, transnational network of people with insecure (fluid, breakable, reconfigurable) connections. People have to compete-to-cooperate (i.e. compete to forge connections, or compete to enter the society). Within this we find large inequalities in power developing, and the stratification of people into classes with highly unequal property ownership. In this sense it bears resemblance to feudalism, but is more fluid. You can be ejected from your position at any point (‘thrown out of the society’ as it were). This insecurity is cast as ‘freedom’ by ideological defenders of the system, and is imagined to be a source of dynamism (aka. if you have to constantly fight to stay in the society, you’ll constantly be on the lookout for ways to secure your place, and ways to secure advantage)

Let’s take that last system, and heavily abstract it by removing the inequalities in power, and just representing it as a big ‘horizontal’ network of interdependent people. The lines represent ties of interdependence, but these ties are being constantly reconfigured (e.g. if you decide to get bread from the local baker rather than the supermarket, you’re re-configuring a relationship of interdependence).

2: Money as a scaler

Traditional economics has a serious conceptual problem when it comes to money. 18th and 19th century economists basically looked at the image above - in which we have a large-scale network of strangers who are all entangled together - and then used it as an explanation for why money must exist.

I wrote about this in my piece How to Write a Flintstones History of Money, which explores presentism, the process in which you imagine the past as a half-formed version of the present.

In the case of traditional economists, this turns up in the notorious (and still very popular) ‘barter myth’, in which they imagine a scenario in which random strangers are trying to trade specialised goods in a market, but - somehow - have no monetary system, and so must clumsily ‘barter’ the goods, a situation that everyone finds very inconvenient, until they finally stumble on the ‘innovation’ of money to ‘solve’ the problem of barter.

In this worldview, economists basically imagine that large-scale, specialised markets full of strangers naturally exist, and then imagine money as a spontaneous invention that springs from the frustrated participants. This is a ‘solutionist’ account of money, in which it is imagined as a market solution to a pre-existing problem (for more on this, see Money as Addiction).

This is why anthropologists find mainstream economics ridiculous, because this isn’t a pre-existing problem. Tribal societies, for example, had many non-market ways of distributing goods, and were able to survive for a very, very long time without money, so all the imagined scenarios used to explain the ‘spontaneous’ market origin of money are largely ahistorical.

Here’s a metaphor to help you understand the conceptual error.

Imagine you see an elephant, and then you say ‘what would happen to this elephant if it had no nervous system?’ Then you say ‘well it would really struggle to coordinate its huge body’. Then you say, ‘oh, so the reason it has a nervous system is so that it can do that!’

What’s wrong with this? Well, the reason an elephant can have a large body with many moving parts is precisely because it already has a nervous system which has co-evolved with the body. You cannot use the presence of the body as an explainer for why the nervous system has come into being.

Similarly, you cannot use the presence of a large-scale market economy (full of strangers with specialist skills and diverse goods) as an explanation for why money exists, because - much like there is no world in which elephants walk clumsily around without nervous systems - there is no world is which we find large-scale networks of trading strangers without monetary systems already being present.

Unfortunately, that’s the exact fantasy used by traditional economists. They looked at the large-scale economies they were already in, and then said ‘what would happen if there was no money?’ This leads them to fantasise about an ahistorical scenario in which all the people have to now clumsily barter goods (the elephant without a nervous system), and then they use that to describe why money must have been ‘invented’ to make things easier. It’s like imagining a fully grown elephant ‘inventing’ a nervous system for itself to deal with the problem of being a fully grown elephant without a nervous system.

This fantasy in turn underpins broader commodity theories of money, in which the traditional economists speculate about which commodities would have the correct ‘natural’ features to deal with this ‘naturally occurring’ problem (for more on this, see The Archipelago). Not only are these commodity theories of money underpinned by an ahistorical thought experiment, but they often assume that humans are ‘naturally’ detached individual agents on markets, which is a modern ideology not a historical reality.

How do we disrupt this then?

Well, the first step is to invert the economist perspective, and say: money is not a ‘product’ of markets. Markets are a product of money.

I’m aware that this is a full pendulum swing to the extreme polar opposite view, and we don’t have to stay wedded to this, but - if you want to be able to think creatively about money - you have to open your mind to the possibility that it could pre-exist, or catalyse, or co-evolve with markets (much like the overall body of an elephant co-evolves with its nervous system). To do this, though, you basically have to be able to imagine that money might have a non-market origin.

I’m not going to pretend to give some robust historical account of this right now, but I’m going to ask you to entertain the idea that, rather than being something that spontaneously leaps out of markets of strangers, money is a political innovation that had the effect of creating markets of strangers, in particular by dissolving smaller interdependent groups who previously did not depend on money (e.g. tribal societies etc), and recombining them into larger, more diffuse interdependent networks that did.

In this framework, money is catalytic - it has a non-market origin, but sets in motion processes that start to snowball markets into being, which in turn feed back into greater need for money.

This process of dissolving smaller into larger is also associated with the rise of kingdoms and empires, so we should be prepared to look at money and state power as being ‘two sides of the same coin’, both acting in conjunction to break down older ways of being - such as tribal life - and to reconfiguring them into larger feudal, and then later market, societies.

Now, I’m well aware that this is glossing over a lot of stuff, but - remember - this is just a high-level alternative conceptual scaffolding for you to explore from (and it’s probably less bullshit that the high-level conceptual scaffolding traditionally used in standard economics).

3: MMT on the political foundation of money

So, having laid out that generic framework above, I’ll now note that MMT has a particular account of it. I’m not saying that all MMT economists agree on all the exact details, but the basic idea is that:

1. Money is a political innovation, rather than the spontaneous market invention

2. That it has a role in catalysing large-scale markets that otherwise wouldn’t naturally exist

3. And, as a result of this, there is no hard distinction between State and Market (which is a core dogma within much traditional economics and libertarianism etc)

From here, there is a more specific MMT-ish claim, which is that money is something used by warlords as an alternative means of extracting resources from a population, rather than merely pillaging them.

It’s worth noting that this style of thinking is not unique to MMT. Anthropologists like David Graeber have made similar claims (for example, in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years).

Rather than the direct, explicit violence of riding in and looting stuff, there’s a switch to indirect, implicit violence in the form of a pseudo-‘exchange’, in which the warlord sovereign issues credits to subjugated people in exchange for real goods and services.

• The way that the sovereign gets the people to take the credit in the short-term, though, is to demand it back from them in the long term (with the threat that if they fail to hand it back, violence awaits)

• In the MMT framework, taxation is seen to have this function. A government doesn’t tax to ‘raise’ money’, but rather to artificially create demand for the money that it will issue out to get things

Here’s a concrete example from my birth country South Africa, to help make this clearer. Let’s talk about colonial ‘Hut taxes’.

In 19th century South Africa we find tribal Zulu people living in non-monetary economies. Colonial authorities, however, wanted them to work in the mines, but tribal people did not depend upon money, and so had little requirement, or desire, to go ‘get a job’ in the mines.

It would of course be possible for the colonial sovereign to simply force them to work in the mines, but that’s a risky gambit that can easily lead to uprisings. The more indirect and subtle method was to impose a ‘Hut Tax’, telling the Zulu people that they had a tax obligation, which requires them to hand in money credits at some point in future, and that they would be punished if they didn’t.

This creates artificial demand for the credits. The Zulu people must now go find the credits, but where? Well, the bosses of the mines have them, so the Zulu people must now labour to get them from the bosses. The net effect is that the colonial sovereign gets labour, and the Zulu get credits, which they later must hand back to settle the Hut Tax.

Just in case you don’t believe this, read the inscription on the image above, where the mine managers literally spell it out.

“It is suggested to raise the Hut Tax to such an amount that more natives will be induced to seek work, and especially by making this tax payable in coins only”.

This is a fairly recent example, but this basic principle extends back in time. Taxation by ruling monarchs has this effect of pulling subjugated people into dependence on money.

The two lives of money

So, in this framework, money has a primary life and a secondary life

1. In its primary form, money credits are a political tool used by a sovereign to extract stuff from a population. This is the true meaning of ‘seniorage’: it’s the actual labour and resources obtained by a state in exchange for issuing credits

2. This, however, gives rise to a secondary life for money, in which it starts to get used between ordinary people. This can come from at least two sources

   1. The taxation obligation (e.g. the Hut Tax) is imposed across the board, which means that if you don’t wish to work for the sovereign, you must find the credits from someone else who will. Picture a Zulu pastoralist trying to enter into a tit-for-tat deal with someone who has been working in the mines, in order to obtain the credits

   2. Because a common system of credits is now moving across territories that might have previously hosted relatively discrete smaller-scale economies, we find that relative strangers are now able to engage in low-trust interactions with each other. The common credits issued out by the almighty, distant, sovereign, can breach previous boundaries between different groups, allowing for arms-length forms of market exchange to spread

The basic picture then, is one in which these political credits start to catalyse larger scale market structures. Over time, the primary political origins of these credits get obscured as that secondary market life takes root. They begin to appear as ‘economic’ ‘means of exchange’.

This benefits sovereign powers, because as large-scale markets start to boost up production, the sovereign ends up with more stuff being produced than if they were merely pillaging existing stuff (a process that undermines production and which isn’t a lasting, sustainable source of extraction).

So, fast-forward into the modern era, and the moral of the story is that state power, money, markets and capitalism are all intertwined.

With this in mind, we can start to see that the imagined battles between The State vs. The Market (e.g. as imagined by Reagan and Thatcher) are just shallow modern skirmishes between two inextricably linked factions of the same system. ‘Free markets’ are an ideological fantasy hallucinated by capitalist elites whose billions would not exist without state structures, but who constantly want the state to back off (a bit like a young teenager who fantasises about running away from home to escape their parents).

So, let’s bring this full circle, and superimpose the aforementioned ‘double-life’ of money over our ‘horizontal’ interdependent network we started with. We now have two dimensions:

• Money issuers occupy a vertical dimension, issuing money down to ordinary money users, and pulling it back up (DISCLAIMER: this is a piece about state money issuance, and I’m going to avoid talking about bank money issuance here - for anyone who wants to pick that thread up, see this piece)

• Money users occupy the horizontal dimension, using the vertically issued credits horizontally between themselves as a means to forge and maintain ties of interdependence

4: Proletarianization

Having described some politico-economic mechanisms via which monetary markets can start to take root, we can then start to talk about network effects in which the markets grow and begin to take over, and eventually hit a tipping point in which they suck people in, and eventually become mandatory.

In Marxist speak, this gets described as proletarianisation: the process by which people who previously did not depend on fluid capitalist markets are (often forcibly) integrated into them. After this happens, survival becomes tied to doing deals with total strangers via money systems.

This often goes hand-in-hand with the removal of alternative ways of being, such as the removal of common land. This is why Marxists spend a lot of time talking about the Enclosures - a historical period in which European elites wrested control of common land and privatized it, thereby creating ever more pressure for peasants to leave the land and drift into subordinated positions within urban markets as a landless ‘working class’. Picture those 18th and 19th century images of people crowding into city slums, and facing destitution if they failed to secure a role in the Dickensian factory owned by some powerful magnate.

Let’s focus on two elements of the picture here:

1. Entering the market network is becoming mandatory as people lose alternative means of survival. In libertarian fantasies of ‘free markets’ there’s an implicit assumption that there is an exit option, as if a person simply had the capacity to live a self-sufficient life outside the market, and that the market is therefore voluntary. This is totally bogus, because the vast majority of people cannot just detach themselves from society and live in the wilderness by themselves, so must find a way to fuse into the market system

2. A huge amount of insecurity emerges from this, as people must cling for any connection into the market they can find. If they can’t, they end up crowding around on the outskirts of it, trying to get in (a bit like a kid who want to get picked for the team but who find themselves increasingly desperate as all the positions get filled up)

From a political perspective, this creates the conditions for class conflict. Those most able to offer access to the network are those who own ‘capital’, or productive assets (the proverbial factory), but this puts them into a position to exploit those who have a mandatory requirement to enter. ‘Capitalists’ like this can get the precarious working class to hand over much of what they produce as a type of rent for the privilege of entering the market, a process that yields even more to those with capital, who can in turn reinvest that to further dominate the productive assets (a process that culminates in what Marxists would call ‘owning the means of production’).

This is why we have a fundamental ideological disagreement between those with a libertarian view and those with a Marxist view. The libertarian view imagines that market interactions are all voluntary and ‘free’, whereas the Marxist view would argue that this freedom is illusory, and that it disguises a deeper process of systematic rent extraction in which wealth flows from those who work to those who own (hence, the concept of Labour vs Capital).

5: Money as a means of connection

We are trained to imagine that market systems are primarily systems of competition, but it’s crucial to primarily imagine them as systems in which people compete-to-collaborate. This ‘cooperation’ is not necessarily egalitarian - for example, when workers are competing for a job, they are often fighting for the right to cooperate with a capital owner, but this can simultaneously be the act of fighting for the right to be exploited.

Nevertheless, regardless of whether it is parasitic or mutualistic, interdependence is the prime reality of all economic systems, but in large-scale market systems this is obscured simply because of the sheer insecurity (and scale and modularity) of the interdependent structure. This means perceptions of ‘independence’ rise: a person perceives themselves as a solo individual, fighting to get in.

So, at an ontological level, a capitalist market system is de facto interdependent (albeit with many parasitic elements), but - at a phenomenological level - it often doesn’t feel like that. You feel detached, as if you were a solo atom, because - firstly - you literally do have the option to constantly detach from one producer and re-attach to another, but - secondly - that same thing can be applied to you as a producer by others. There is no fundamental security of place. Not only do you have to fight to get into the structure, but you have to fight to stay in.

At this point it’s worth reiterating that conservative economists wish to characterise this non-voluntary and often precarious structure as simply being the spontaneous outcome of daily voluntary decisions by independent self-contained individuals who ‘choose’ to come together to trade to pursue their mutual self-interest (think, for example, of Thatcher’s infamous saying ‘there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women). This background imagination, in turn, leads us back to commodity theories of money: conservatives have an in-built ideological tendency towards wanting to see money as some kind of apolitical commodity that these imagined individuals use to induce each other to trade.

This is also why standard economists try to use these models in which money is described as some kind of rational tool with obvious ‘functions’, and one of those imagined functions is that it is a ‘means of exchange’.

Once we move past the background conservative imagination that informs that description, however, and move towards seeing markets as politically-underpinned, non-voluntary, fluid structures of interdependence that are preceded by money, those economistic ‘functional' descriptions of money start to break down.

In fact, the only functional description I’d ever use for money is to say it’s a ‘means of connection’ to an interdependent network. If I was putting it into quasi-metaphorical terms, I’d say that money is the means via which you ‘dock’ into the structure. In other words, you are fusing with someone when you’re handing over money to them, but disconnecting from them when you don’t. So, when I buy bread from the supermarket rather than the local baker, I’m cutting off my collaboration with the latter and re-forging it with the former.

Needless to say, once proletarianisation has occurred, we have loads of people clamouring to enter the network, a process in which they wish for people to fuse with them by offering credits in exchange for labour, and then using the resultant credits to fuse into others to get things they need.

6: The concept of “unemployment”

In a hunter-gather band, ‘unemployment’ is not really a thing. You don’t find the members of the historical Hadza or ǃKung people trying to convince each other to give each other ‘jobs’ in order to get credits to redeem back for part of the communal hunt. Rather, there are relatively safe roles, clear paths to get into them, and non-monetary means of distributing things collectively produced.

Unemployment, though, is a very real phenomenon in monetary market systems. It basically refers to those situations in which a person depends on the network but cannot fuse into it, primarily because nobody is willing to become dependent on them (to ‘fuse’ into them, as it were)

• In the case of adults, these are people who want and need to enter but who can’t, and are therefore cut off from their means of survival

• Kids, who nowadays aren’t allowed to enter, get called ‘dependents’ rather than ‘unemployed’. They have to be tethered to another person who has a place in the network. At some point, the kids will come of age and will join the ranks of the unemployed looking for entry

Let’s represent the unemployed as a shadow ring of people around the network, trying to get in, with hypothetical but dormant ties of interdependence that have not been activated as it were.

This helps us to see some of the power dynamics of historical capitalism: an urban working class has nowhere else to go for safety, so not only can they be exploited by those with capital, but they also pose a problem for authorities if they remain ‘idle’, because they may become desperate, and might be pushed toward crime (for example, forcibly extracting goods from the elites of the network), or ‘black market’ activity.

Hard conservatives have a tendency to imagine that the poor and unemployed are just dangerous deviants that have only themselves to blame, and that they need to be controlled by firm Law and Order (think about the rhetoric that surrounds ICE agents in the US). That said, the rise of capitalism has also historically been accompanied by the rise of liberal reformers who were often concerned about the plight of the urban poor, and this continues to this day (for more on liberal reformism, see Making Capitalism Bad Again).

Having noted that this shadow zone of unemployed people poses serious problems, it also represents an opportunity for the overall system to expand, as capitalists - and others - can draw upon this unused labour pool for new production.

7: Expansion and contraction

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Some people view the 1% as demonic supervillains, while others idolise them as inspiring superheroes. In this video I make a case for why we should see them as neither, and why we should cast them as tragic figures.

In doing this I’m echoing Bob Marley’s famous quip that some people are so poor, all they have is money, but I’m well aware that it’s a difficult and ambiguous argument, so I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!

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Dear readers. I debated whether I should add to the hot-takes around Epstein, and what I might meaningfully contribute to the already saturated discussions. I decided to explore a topic that has long been of interest to me - what the files might tell us about elite loneliness and fragility. There are many aspects of the Epstein saga that I don’t write about below, so please don’t think of this as an attempt at anything comprehensive. It’s just one thread to consider among many.

At first glance, the network of power players featured in the Epstein files seem totally detached from our everyday reality. These people appear to occupy a realm above the law and beyond the state, living in a parallel universe with its own morality. They pull strings and make deals like demi-gods trading favours.

And yet, I feel this ‘supervillain’ interpretation of elites is unsatisfactory, and I’ve always harboured an intuition that it’s better to highlight elite weakness rather than strength. People who end up in positions of power are often not there because they’re particular profound, or strong, or even nefarious, but rather because they’re trauma-ridden vessels who offer the least resistance to the inhuman forces of our economic system, and who are therefore, almost evolutionarily, ‘selected’ by it.

Put differently, it might be the case that stronger people actually do worse in our system, because they’re less likely to bend themselves to its demands.

I know that perspective is a bit simplistic, but the alternative interpretation - in which the rich and powerful are seen as either angelic superheroes or demonic supervillains - is equally simplistic. The reality is probably somewhere in-between: many of the world’s high-flyers throw themselves into obsessive power-mongering to compensate for frailties elsewhere in their lives.

It’s in this context that Epstein slowly entrapped many elites into structures of complicity, and at the dark centre of that was an abhorrent core of sexual abuse and trafficking. In folk mythology, this leads to those sensationalistic Satanic paedophile stories in which we imagine a dark cult of vampiric overlords.

This certainly is one angle on the story, but I’m personally more interested in the much more mundane ‘banality of evil’ layers that lie around that dark centre - the thousands of daily practices that seemed innocent, like the insecure-but-vain university professor who feels flattered by getting an email from Epstein, and who quickly shoots back a response, or the business mogul who desperately wants to seem more bad-ass than he actually is, and who really thinks that hanging out at shit parties on islands makes him a cool kid.

I’m interested in the insecurities of elites, and how they’re all subject to very normal human vulnerabilities, like the desire for inclusion, status and connection.

It’s very obvious that many powerful individuals wanted to be in Epstein’s orbit out of FOMO, because they felt like it was the place to be, and that they might be missing out on something if they weren’t. To use the words of Paul Caruana Galizia and Kaye Wiggins, a figure like Epstein operates a social Ponzi scheme, where his earlier waves of connections become attractors to bring in more.

All sorts of jet-setters - from lawyers to academics, CEOs and journalists - were clearly attracted to Epstein’s connectivity, and wanted to be in his good books. And he - like the arch-villain Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes - wanted to be in the centre of such a spider’s web, catalysing meetings, job opportunities, political favours and deals via email and soirees.

I think what we struggle to wrap our heads around is the simultaneity of power and fragility in these interactions. For example, there is something deeply messed up about the former UK business secretary Peter Mandelson casually emailing Epstein saying it would be useful for JPMorgan to ‘lightly threaten’ the British chancellor in order to water down legislation designed to tax banker’s bonuses. And yet, the chumminess of their interactions also smacks of that vibe you get in groups of teenage boys, where they’re anxious to please and impress each other. There’s even something strangely endearing about the fact that the masters of the universe want to joke with each other, or send each other memes, or have selfies together.

When looking at that table full of photos collected by Epstein (see above), you sense that while this super-connected power-broker was a master manipulator in a web of influence, he was also simultaneously like that kid who tries to get his status by being seen around the in-crowd, and placing himself in the middle of it.

In fact, it reminds me a lot of sections of Donald Trump’s 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal (yes, I have read it), where Trump sits in the high reaches of his Trump Tower, name-dropping all the important people that he likes to phone up from there, talking about what a big man he is and all the important stuff he’s going to do with all his important friends. It seems simultaneously impressive and pathetic. You sense that behind his loud boasting about bigness, there’s a lonely little boy sitting by himself wanting to be loved, concealing his underlying insecurity about smallness.

I’m not necessarily judging that - hey, we all want to be liked - but while some people seek status by being brilliant at some niche skill, others, like Trump and Epstein, seem to seek it by being super-connected. The tendency of such a person is to obsessively showcase their personal relationships with other powerful people, so that their conversations can turn into long bouts of humble-bragging, full of anecdotes about so-and-so CEO or financier or newspaper owner or film star or quarterback.

Now here’s a little twist. It seems that in order to position himself as an elite-level practitioner of super-connectivity, Epstein took advantage of the fact that - for most elites - being on top of the world is literally lonely. His social grift was based on offering them some kind of relief from that, by giving them the chance to enter a transnational green room.

Green-Rooming

Anyone who has ever been involved in performance of some kind - whether you’re a keynote speaker, a politician or a member of a band - will know about the green room. This is the specially designated backstage space where a performer can relax before or after a show. It’s designed to be free from the pressures of fame, a little enclave in which it’s a faux pas for attendants to ask for an autograph or selfie.

There are many ‘green room’ spaces in the world. They include private members clubs and elite nightclubs, where the bouncers are tasked with getting rid of fans who wish to worship the idols, so that the celebrities can pretend to be normal human beings for the night.

There’s a reason why celebrities are attracted to such spaces, and why they become cagey when normies are let in. It’s because they feel that the public only see them as abstract symbols or sources of reflected status to be consumed. In a Beatles interview, George Harrison noted that the main problem with fame is that people you meet:

… forget how to act normally. They are not in awe of you, but in awe of the thing that they think you've become

Many elites find this phenomenon, in which they are treated as objects rather than subjects, to be a dehumanizing experience. In fact, if they allow themselves to only be surrounded by sycophantic hangers-on, they can start to lose a grip on reality. Being swamped by fawning or extractive yes-men can amplify delusions of grandeur, but can also make them feel deeply isolated and unstable.

In this context, when someone like Epstein pops into your DMs and treats you as an equal, or offers a sympathetic ear, or promises confidentiality and straight-talking advice, it’s appealing. In many ways Epstein was running a vast green room operation for anyone who was performing on the transnational stage of the global economic system. This might include partners at Goldman Sachs, but it could also include prominent left-wing radicals like Noam Chomsky and far-right strategists like Steve Bannon.

In fact, the three-way relationship between Epstein, Chomsky and Bannon is probably one of the most fascinating things to come out of the files so far. Epstein not only formed close relationships with both men, but introduced them and got them to interact and, almost, to collaborate. In 2019 Bannon started working on a documentary with Epstein to help rehabilitate the financier’s image, suggesting that Chomsky get involved too. Epstein messaged Bannon, saying “cant get further left than him or right than you. . its like hitler and ghandi. Sharing a hotdog.”

Chomsky and Bannon do appear to be polar political opposites, but they are united in the fact that they both specialise in shaping public opinion. Influencing the public is a specialist elite role, and the people who do it - on both the left and right of the political spectrum - have a common outlook in which they view the public as a kind of prize to be won over. Indeed, many elite intellectuals see themselves as being in a big public boxing ring, and, like boxers, they might diss each other in public while having grudging admiration for each other in private.

People like this are intellectual warlords, fighting for followers, and two warlords can feel an affinity for each other that’s not based on political orientation, but rather on shared circumstances. They are part of the same class, and after they leave the fiery television debate with each other they’re going to end up hanging out in that green room, off camera, away from the public eye.

At a simple human level, celebrities like this are prepared to share space with each other not so much out of vanity, but simply because they tend to feel more understood around other celebrities, less put on display, and more treated like peers. This can help us to understand the weird combos of people hanging out in the Epstein circles, and why we find emails between Chomsky and Bannon, or pictures of Bannon chilling with Woody Allen.

Many doors to the Green Room

Epstein, though, was always but one high-level node in this elite network, and it’s not like he was the only access point into it. For example, I have a well-known left-wing friend who occasionally got to chat with Bannon in an upmarket workspace in New York, where a weird mix of psychedelics influencers, blockchain grifters, venture capitalists, Burning Man event organisers and edgelordy philosophers would rub shoulders.

I remember being there when Brock Pierce - Bannon’s former employer, and co-founder of the stablecoin company Tether - decided to launch ‘Puertopia’, a crypto-currency ‘utopia’ in Puerto Rico. Brock was swanning around the salons of New York, running shamanic ceremonies, talking about sacred geometry, extolling free markets, and talking about the tax advantages for the super-rich to relocate to the island. There was a frenzy among all manner of minor elites to be in on this batshit scheme, and before long they were booking their obligatory plane flights and posting their vapid Instagram pictures from the island, talking about the new society they were going to build.

There are 180 pages worth of search results for ‘Brock Pierce’ in the Epstein files. A lot of that is just LinkedIn updates, but there’s also extensive evidence of the two men having meetings and calls, some of which bring in Bannon…

The point, however, is that Brock himself is an elite purveyor of green room connectivity. Hell, Brock even invited me to connect on Facebook (we’re still ‘friends’) so yes, even I am in this globe-spanning network.

The reality is that the global ‘green room’ has many entry points and many layers, like a members club with gold, platinum, silver and bronze tiers, offering status to everyone from mid-level influencers to startup founders, journalists, academics and basically anyone who is in the business of trying to alter the course of society in some way. This becomes the grounds for sociality, gluing together many unlikely actors.

For example, the British left-wing journalist Laurie Penny encountered Brock when she infiltrated a luxury blockchain cruise to do an exposé of it. Brock was a guest of honour on the cruise, and they end up partying together, forming that shared sense of camaraderie that comes from getting fucked up with other people. Despite occupying very different points on the ideological spectrum, they end up fond of each other, and she gets an invite to an after-party at his house:

I promise not to write about what happens at this party, because I’m off the clock, and I keep my promises, even though it was the only part of the whole adventure that gave me any hope whatsoever for the future of humanity… I may have got hammered and chalked some socialist poetry on the walls. I may have listened to straight-laced, lost-looking businessmen tell me about their secret sexual predilections as hippies played the same songs hippies always play on the guitar at four in the morning. I may have fallen asleep in a puppy-pile of half-dressed futurists. I promised no more details.

Another journalist who captures this very same sense of strangely vulnerable elite insider-ness is Jemima Kelly of the Financial Times, when - in August 2025 - she hung out with the far-right edgelord king, Curtis Yarvin, at an elite invite-only party in London.

Yarvin has long been a figure on the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’, and is a key node in the ‘neo-reactionary’, anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment movement, which includes figures like Peter Thiel, Nick Land and JD Vance. Jemima’s story starts with a scene that encapsulates the global green room, with supposed enemies - the ‘liberal elite’ journalist, and the ‘anti-woke’ agitators - hanging out in the taxi together.

She goes on to detail the various characters at the party they go to, and - like Laurie Penny with Brock Pierce - it ends with that shared sense of comfy solidarity between unlikely protagonists. Jemima notes that:

When we finally say goodbye, Yarvin gives me a warm hug. Shortly after, he texts asking me not to mention a salacious story he told about a celebrity. (Yarvin talks so much that I don’t really recall which story he means.) “My philosophy,” he writes, “is that the relationship of a source to a journalist should be long term and not a quick, cheap bang.” A few moments later, he follows with: “I don’t want to have to use a condom. Metaphorically speaking.”

To many on the political left, Yarvin is seen as a kind of bogeyman, a high lord of neo-fascism, but in social life he’s a ‘liberal elite’ like any other, taking the taxi, turning up at the cocktail parties, and sending cheeky messages to his journalist friends and anyone else who feels like community. He, like Jemima, is in that position of shaping public opinion, and he undoubtedly prefers to hang out with her in the green room than to sit down for a meal with the distant people whose opinion he shapes (ya know, the Christian moralists or white supremacists).

The Frailty of Power

There is something elusive that I’m trying to put my finger on. Maybe it’s this simultaneously gross-yet-endearing way that supposedly powerful, god-like figures really often just want to be liked by their peers. We see it in people like Trump, and we see it in photos of the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia with his arm around Epstein, as if they were university mates on a night out.

Perhaps this is the surreal through-line that connects someone like Noam Chomsky via Steve Bannon to Elon Musk. There is much correspondence between Epstein and Musk, but the latter insists that he never tried to get onto Epstein’s island. It’s clear though, that Musk is riddled with the very same desire for acceptance into in-crowds, so let’s conclude with a curious case from 2022, when Elon turned up at the door of the legendary alternative nightclub Berghain in Berlin, bastion of the counter-culture, but didn’t get in.

Elon claims that he refused to enter, due to a peace sign being painted on the wall, but the true story for Berliners is that he got bounced by Sven Marquardt, the infamous doorman of the club, a person over whom Elon has no power.

I can picture Elon’s feelings of humiliation at being turned away, partly because I too am a white South African, and I can imagine all his childhood memories from his boyhood in Pretoria, when all the mean, thuggish 1970s rugby jocks of apartheid picked on him. We grew up in a fascist country, surrounded by Christian nationalists, and such people are not friendly to nerdy types.

Yes, there is of course some ‘homecoming’ story to Elon’s own turn towards fascism in the last several years, but whenever I see him I see that strange interplay between power and frailty. The supposedly almighty Musk feels humiliation like anyone else, and has to get up the morning and take a piss like billions of others for the last 200,000 years, and will eventually disintegrate into the ground like they did. Through the eyes of the vast universe, Elon is tiny and fragile. In the grand sweep of millions of years, there is literally no difference between him and a rural peasant farmer of the 15th century. They are equally ranked.

As they say, a monkey in silk is a monkey no less, and - likewise - a person with an 11-figure bank account still experiences exactly the same vulnerabilities as all others. The main difference, however, is that they can use such a bank balance to express those vulnerabilities in the form of ridiculous displays of ostentatious spending, or delusions of immortality, or fantasies of space travel, or private parties where the boundaries between utopian fantasy and nightmare can be very thin.

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Dear Super-Subscribers,

Here is the audio version, read by myself, of my latest essay The Green Room. It explores the elite fragility at the heart of the Epstein saga, with some personal anecdotes along the way. I hope you enjoy.

Much love,

Brett

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Dear super-subscribers,

I’m happy to have finally finished video 10 of my Econ Life course! The entire video series has taken waaaay longer than I expected but at least it’s now done.

Having finished this video, however, I’m now a little unsatisfied for two reasons

1. In the last year my video creation and sound design skills have been improving a lot, and I …

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Dear readers,

We’re in a new year facing new battles, but also old battles, and one of my old battles is to protect the cash system against the encroachment of digital giants. This issue is now beginning to dovetail with the unstable geopolitics of our time, as Trump seeks to promote digital US dollar stablecoins to spread US dollar hegemony.

If this is something you’d like to learn about, or brush up on, I recently spoke to the Dutch documentary channel VPRO about this (see the video above). In it, I explain - in under 20 minutes - all the issues at stake with cashless society (aka. a bank-dominated society) and also how stablecoins, CBDC and Bitcoin fit into this schema.

Here’s a breakdown of the topics covered

1. 0:00 My metaphor of cash as the bicycle of payments

2. 2:57 The growing digital ‘oligopolization’

3. 3:45 The structure of the money system, using my casino chip metaphor

4. 6:01 Bearer instruments vs ledger instruments

5. 6:42 Payments surveillance and censorship

6. 7:43 Resilience, and cash in times of crisis

7. 9:31 Inclusion, and the use of cash for budgeting in low income communities, and how digital payments increase spending

8. 10:17: Protecting the small-scale peer-to-peer informal economy

9. 11:09 The myth of cash and criminality

10. 11:50 Understanding CBDC

11. 14:44 Understanding stablecoins, and their new role in US geopolitical strategy

12. 16:49 Understanding Bitcoin vs. stablecoins

13. 18:04 The future analog revolution, and rebellion against digital life

The video is published as a collaboration between VPRO and my own YouTube channel. I do cross-post some of my YouTube videos to Substack, but not all of them, so please do subscribe to me on YouTube too!

Check out Brett's YouTube

Cheers!

Brett

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Paying subscribers can listen to me reading this essay here

Dear readers,

In this essay I’d like to introduce you to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ work on kings, and how it can help us to understand not only the relationship of Venezuelans to Trump, but also the relationship between US Americans and Trump. Sahlins was the doctoral supervisor of the late David Graeber, who is one of my inspirations. Let’s begin with a review of one of Sahlins’ core concepts.

The Stranger King Myth

Reach back into history, and you’ll find mythological tales of the Stranger King repeated across different cultures.

These Stranger King stories have a common structure. They are generally set in some troubled ancient regime in which a local despot rules, surrounded by bickering elites. The despot finds himself challenged by a foreign stranger with mysterious, even supernatural, origins. The stranger is often young, handsome and violent, and has a willingness to bend societal norms (or step outside of them). The despot tries to outwit or outfight the newcomer, but is defeated by their trickery or sheer force. The outsider usurps the power and founds a new kingdom.

There are many examples of the Stranger King myth. Anthropologists have found them in Polynesia, Melanesia, Sulawesi and the East African Rift Valley, and Classicists can find many examples in Greek and Roman mytho-histories. See, for example, this overview by Olaf Almqvist in which he demonstrates the stranger-king credentials of rulers like Aeneas, Pelops, Cyrus the Great, and Sargon of Akkad (even the mythical founder of Rome - Romulus - has a Stranger King vibe).

In fact, dynasties will often seek to trace their origins back to an ancient Stranger King. For example, the 16th century Mexica ruler Moctezuma reportedly said that he descended from a lineage of “strangers who immigrated hither from a very distant land”1.

If we talk about Stranger Kings, however, we also have to talk about the legendary anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021), who took time to analyse them. His writing on Stranger Kings began in 1982, but his last work on the topic was a collaboration with the late David Graeber in 2017, in a book called On Kings (you can find an open access version of it here). In it, Sahlins and Graeber note some key features of the Stranger King:

On his way to the kingdom, the dynastic founder is notorious for exploits of incest, fratricide, patricide, or other crimes against kinship and common morality; he may also be famous for defeating dangerous natural or human foes. The hero manifests a nature above, beyond, and greater than the people he is destined to rule—hence his power to do so…. (T)he monstrous and violent nature of the king remains an essential condition of his sovereignty. Indeed, as a sign of the metahuman sources of royal power, force can function politically as a positive means of attraction as well as a physical means of domination.2

In some ways this is a more sophisticated take on the ‘might is right’ concept. The stranger king might be monstrous, but by stepping outside of normal rules, he creates a mystique, a sense that he has access to powers beyond the ordinary world, and this can become a source of legitimacy.

Equally important, however, according to Sahlins, is that the Stranger King enters into some kind of social contract with the conquered people.

…there is invariably a tradition of contract: notably in the form of a marriage between the stranger-prince and a marked woman of the indigenous people—most often, a daughter of the native leader. Sovereignty is embodied and transmitted in the native woman, who constitutes the bond between the foreign intruders and the local people. The offspring of the original union… thereby combines and encompasses… the essential native and foreign components of the kingdom.3

Not only will the woman domesticate the otherwise dangerous outsider, but local elites see opportunities to reform themselves around the Stranger King, seeing in this external power the potential to overcome their own internal divisions or turmoil.

So, while Stranger King myths might involve heroic, violent, or otherworldly power grabs, they aren’t necessarily stories of straightforward conquest. In fact, they are often stories of usurpation, and Sahlins notes that this pattern actually occurs in various, fairly recent, historical situations.

Given their own circumstances—including the internal and external conflicts of the historical field—the indigenous people often have their own reasons for demanding a “king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). Even in the case of major kingdoms, such as Benin or the Mexica, the initiative may indeed come from the indigenous people, who solicit a prince from a powerful outside realm. Some of what passes for “conquest” in tradition or the scholarly literature consists of usurpation of the previous regime rather than violence against the native population.4

This framing of Stranger Kings gives us a more multi-faceted lens through which to view colonisation, because, in the words of Sahlins:

European colonization is often in significant aspects a late historical form of indigenous stranger-kingship traditions… besides Captain Cook in Hawai‘i… there was James Brooke, “the White Rajah of Sarawak,” whom local Iban considered the son or lover of their primordial goddess Keling; and Cortés, greeted by Moctezuma as Quetzalcoatl, the returning king and culture hero of the legendary Toltec city of Tollan.5

The take-away point is that colonists are seldom experienced in black-and-white terms, precisely because they often arrive into the already grey context of pre-colonial politics, with different sections of an indigenous population - with different agendas - seeing in them different things.

At this point it’s important to flag up that colonists always have a vested interest in claiming that they are warmly welcomed by the local population. European colonists, for example, imagined themselves as ‘bringers of light’ on a mission to ‘civilize savages’ living in a ‘primitive’ state of turmoil and godlessness. That said, anti-colonial narratives face the opposite problem, in that they can overemphasise the lack of agency in a colonised population. Sahlins’ discussion of Stranger Kings highlights the ambiguity in foreign takeovers, because the arrival of the violent outside ‘King’ might present opportunities for local elites, who may be prepared to collaborate with, or take a chance on the external power. They may see certain uses in the distant, aloof, strangers, who don’t seem to be subject to the same rules of engagement as the locals are.

This approach was applied by David Henley, for example, when he found evidence that the indigenous Minahasa on Indonesia found a certain usefulness in the 17th century Dutch East India Company, in particular because Stranger Kings tend to have “aloofness from local rivalries” and an “ability to provide relatively impartial conflict resolution”. The Dutch East India Company was unambiguously self-interested, colonial and extractive, but the point is that, rather than being mere meek bystanders to its history, local people had ambiguous entanglements with the corporate giant. They experience the coercive violence of the colonist, but may still take a gamble on a Stranger King.

King Donald the Strange

On January 12th 2026, Donald Trump posted a picture of himself on Truth Social, with the tag ‘acting president of Venezuela’. His takeover of the country is unambiguously colonial. Like all colonial ventures, however, there are many who will find ways to justify it.

For example, the conservative press has predictably fixated on the pre-existing dictator - the figure of Maduro - and his spectacular humiliation and overthrow at the hands of a cunning outsider brimming with almost supernatural vitality. There are stories about the jubilation of exiled Venezuelans, weeping with joy and thanking Trump.

Then we have all the stories about the blatant geopolitics of this. Unlike George W. Bush during the Iraq War, Trump has made almost no effort to disguise the fact that the regime change is all about THE OIL. In fact, he’s loudly proclaimed that it’s about the oil. He’s gone out of his way to talk about how US multinationals will literally take over the country. This makes it very easy for the left wing press to point out the very obvious imperial dynamics of this resource grab. Hell, even the centrist and conservative press are struggling to ignore that.

Let’s forget about the global press response, though. Through the eyes of many Venezuelans, we have here all the elements of a potential Stranger King situation. Ok, Trump isn’t a young, handsome challenger, but he certainly is a foreigner who doesn’t feel encumbered by traditional rules. In fact, the blatant impunity of his oil grab adds to the sense of awe and mystique around him, and he has certainly deposed a local despot.

At the risk of pushing the framework too far, we even find strange echoes of the mythological ‘marriage to the daughter’ element of the traditional Stranger King story: the female power players of Venezuela, like Delcy Rodríguez and Maria Corina Machado, must now domesticate the irascible outsider by entering into deals with him.

Crucially, while it’s true that the US actions have thrown the Venezuelan establishment into turmoil through violence, there already was turmoil in the pre-colonial situation, so this new incursion has simultaneously opened up new opportunities for local elites (and exiled elites), some of whom have long been seeking some way out of the situation. This could be a usurpation, rather than conquest, with potential for elites to strike a new ‘social contract’ with the foreign power.

Let’s take a moment, however, to unpack that loaded phrase, and how it relates to the Stranger King concept.

Social contract theory vs. social contract reality

The term ‘social contract’ is heavily associated with classic liberal theory, and classic liberal theory is a heavily abstract way of thinking about the world. When I say ‘liberal’ here, I don’t mean it in the modern US political sense, but rather in the original philosophical sense: early liberal philosophers - like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke - basically started from the assumption that humans are:

1. Individuals

2. Rational

3. Possessing of some kind of natural ‘individual rights’

From that opening position they then describe social formations as collections of individuals who have rationally come together. This sets the scene for mainstream economics, which basically says exactly the same thing, but applies it to economic interactions.

In the case of standard economists, they imagine individuals ‘choosing’ to ‘come together’ to ‘form markets’, but in the case of our 17th century Hobbes, he imagines rational individuals choosing to come together to form… well… a kind of absolutist monarchy to rule over them (which is partly why Hobbes is often misinterpreted as being ‘illiberal’).

In his Leviathan (1651) he explains that a monarch is a creation of individuals, who have chosen to give up part of their freewheeling-but-chaotic freedom (which they would have in a ‘state of nature’) in order to enter into a more constraining social contract with a monarch, in which the monarch will provide some structure - like property rights, law and order - so that the individuals can pursue their self-interest without being disrupted by disputes, theft, instability or in-fighting.

In it’s own context, Hobbes’ Leviathan was an attack on the idea that monarchs derive their power from a god (hence him being accused of atheism), but by describing kings as the secular creation of individuals, he also implied that individuals could dissolve the social contract if necessary, and return to being in a ‘state of nature’.

This was a politically radical statement to make in the context of 17th century England, but as a generalised account of actual human history it is kinda bullshit, precisely because - like all classic liberal theory - it starts from the ahistorical assumption that humans are individuals and that social formations are ‘chosen’. In reality, every person in history has always been born into an existing social context (aka. societal enmeshment always precedes any perception of being an individual, rather than the other way around) and it’s only in edge cases that we find a random collection of fully-grown adults who are somehow untethered and able to explicitly make some new ‘social contract’ with each other (for example, the only time I’ve ever experienced a ‘social contract’ was when I became naturalized as a British citizen, and - in the ceremony - was given a literal list of my rights and obligations, but of course no British-born person has ever seen this, and none of them ever ‘chose’ to ‘enter into’ the contract).

Still, the edge cases are important, and in many ways Stranger King myths describe one type of edge case. In a pre-existing society in a state of turmoil, it is possible for a foreign ruler to appear as a type of ‘Leviathan’ figure that can be ‘contracted’ with by allowing them to usurp. This might make some kind of rational sense to people entangled in an otherwise intractable conflict, who can dissolve some previous entanglement by jumping ship to the new one.

This is not to say that this will work out for the people involved, but this does help us to move past binary perspectives on the current Venezuela situation. On the one hand, I find Trump to be an obnoxious narcissist - and he’s now upping the stakes to being an unapologetic coloniser too - but I can still understand the gamble being taken by, for example, a Venezuelan exile who agrees to grant some leeway to him.

The Returning Stranger King

Let’s conclude by going one layer deeper. Perhaps the Stranger King myth is crucial to the entire Trump show, beyond his current Venezuelan adventures.

Think about it. In the run-up to his political campaigns, Trump has always presented himself as some kind of heroic outcast - a prodigal son in exile, shunned by The Establishment. The twist here is that he’s not technically a foreigner in the US, but he fashions himself as a local son that’s estranged from his true home, unfairly misrepresented by the New York Times, mocked by Hollywood, disrespected by Time Magazine.

From this starting point, the mythology unfolds. The estranged son returns as a Stranger King with a celestial mandate, on a mission to form a ‘contract with the people’ against the despotic ‘deep state’. This justifies overriding all pre-existing norms, checks and balances.

In Making Capitalism Bad Again, I noted that at least part of the euphoria that surrounds Trump comes from the fact that he gave permission to people to ignore the cognitive dissonance that characterises liberal versions of capitalism - the sense that you’re supposed to be a Good Boy and a Bad Boy at the same time - and, by taking on the ‘bad boy’ mantle, he indeed appeared as a monstrous outsider not subject to the niceties of the society.

In presenting himself as above and beyond existing norms, he could take on that Stranger King immunity. Through this lens, actions previously considered reprehensible - like attacking the press, centralizing power into the executive, threatening the judiciary, defunding the universities, sending in the National Guard to quell protests etc - can all be framed as signs that the Stranger King isn’t subject to the rules of the realm, and thereby draws his power from some distant, mystical source. That becomes a sign of his legitimacy in the eyes of his followers.

Returning the Sahlins, the Stranger King often comes to power not through conquest, but by usurpation aided and abetted by a local population who see in them a certain usefulness. There are many people who voted for Trump not because they particularly like him, but simply because they took a chance on him, seeing him as the proverbial Stranger, and ignoring his obvious inconsistencies, hypocrisies and flaws, while focusing on his outsider status, which gives him a quasi-supernatural vibe that may be worth taking a gamble on.

Given that Trump is heavily narcissistic, however, this Stranger King story probably plays out in his own head. He is now triumphant, yet remains deeply vulnerable, incredibly thin-skinned and increasingly maniacal. The Trump show might fly in 2024, but as time goes by, and as he gets increasingly lost in his own mythology about himself, he loses sight of those that brought him to power.

As he screws over the US shale gas industry by flooding the US with Venezuelan oil in an attempt to deal with inflation caused by tariffs, or sides with the Big Tech barons who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the rust belt, or disses the CEO of Exxon Mobil, he makes more and more enemies of those who took that gamble on him. Everyone smiles deferentially at the Stranger King, but it’s entirely possible that they’re all waiting for that moment when a newer, younger, and more handsome stranger sets foot in the land.

Dear super-subscribers,

Here is the audio version of The Stranger King of Venezuela: An anthropological lens on Trump’s American Colonialism.

In this essay I introduce you to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ work on kings, and how it can help us to understand not only the relationship of Venezuelans to Trump, but also the relationship between US Amer…

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I don’t know about you, but 2025 seemed a helluva bumpy ride. I put this down to the collision between two topics, one a long-term trend, and the other a short-term reaction.

The long-term trend is the ongoing march of capitalist automation, which is currently manifesting in a near-obsession with AI, and all-out gold-rush between all the giants of big tech, who have long since dropped any pretence of having any social responsibility or doing no evil.

The short-term topic is Trump, and all the reactionary stuff his team has been unveiling this year.

To me, the biggest story of 2025 isn’t actually AI, or Trump, but rather the merging of the two. We’re seeing the fusion of the long-term automation drive in the global economy with the short-term America-First story. The US big tech class has managed to hitch their interests to the clash-of-civilizations mythology coming out of the US far right, and have pushed the idea that the a US capitalist class free from regulation will become standard-bearers for a revival of ‘Western Civilization’.

If there’s one thing I think y’all should read soon, it’s David Graeber’s amazing 2007 essay called There Never Was a West, in which he demolishes the idea of there being something called ‘The West’, and also the idea that democracy was ‘invented’ within it. It has a lot of relevance for the current moment.

Each year I also release a list of my most popular essays. In 2025, my most successful pieces have all reflected the AI-Trump nexus in various ways. Here’s the Top 5.

1) The global money system in 10 pictures

Many people would love to be able to understand big macroeconomic topics like the 2025 Trump tariffs and the geopolitics of stablecoins, but picturing the processes of our global economy is mind-boggling. This is one reason why I often literally try to draw pictures of otherwise invisible systems.

So, in September I sketched out 10 images that allow you to glimpse the global monetary system, starting from first principles and then abstracting upwards to the transnational US dollar reserve system. I also made a video version of it here.

2) Making capitalism bad again

A big story of 2025 was the attack on so-called ‘woke capitalism’ by Trump, and the subsequent wave of corporate spinelessness, as all the giants of big business dropped previous commitments to diversity or sustainability, revealing that those commitments were always just aesthetic rather than deep.

In my essay, Making Capitalism Bad Again, I dived into this. What we call ‘liberalism’ is the nice face of capitalism, but the liberal face of capitalism presents us with an impossible ideal - to be a good boy and a bad boy simultaneously. You’re supposed to be a self-interested market competitor but to simultaneously care about those you outcompete or the resources you swallow up. In the language of sustainable or responsible capitalism, you’re supposed to ‘do good by doing well’.

This creates deep cognitive dissonance, which creates a desire to escape the dissonance. This helps us to make sense of Trump’s re-embrace of ‘badness’, now framed in positive terms as ‘the warrior ethos’.

3) Against the factory farming of creativity

We live with this story that the corporate sector is ever-so innovative, and yet the innovation is incredibly predictable, almost as if it operates on auto-pilot. The standard path is just automation, to take some previously organic process and to render it as an industrial one, making the subsequent things produced feel increasingly ‘factory-farmed’.

In my essay Against the Factory Farming of Creativity, I show how this plays out in the world of generative AI. Generative AI is a machine purpose-built to take any form of human creativity that comes out of any organic process of production, and to industrialise it.

I cut through the idea that this ‘democratises’ creativity, and also show how this is leading to a general distrust in creativity. Many people are now struggling to detect AI, which means they’re also struggling to detect its absence, a process that - to use the terminology of Walter Benjamin - is eroding the ‘aura’ of creative works, their sense of authenticity and backstory.

4) An open letter to all those building AI in 2025

Continuing in the AI theme, I decided to write an open letter to all those involved in developing the platforms, explaining to them their actual historical role in the global economy - which is to serve the interests of shareholders and military commanders - and urging them to be authentic about this, rather than just burying their heads in the sand.

Here’s a little excerpt:

I’d like you to not fall into the trap of those people who pioneered the Internet. They were full of optimism, but later cried tears at the fact that it’s now used for massive surveillance, data extraction and centralisation of power. So many of them are now very wealthy from those very processes, but still tell stories about how they naively hoped that somehow the tech wouldn’t be enlisted to enrich small groups of elites while empowering increasingly authoritarian regimes.

Those people were, in the nineties, in the same situation that you find yourself in now. You’re having fun developing AI, and you’re probably getting very rich off it, and you want to tell yourself, and others, some feel-good story about this.

Here’s a request. Please don’t.

5) How to turn your phone addiction into a ripped body

Coming in at Number 5 is a more optimistic piece. Right now, social media platforms are like portals left constantly open, through which all sorts of digital pollution constantly leaks into our worlds. In this piece, I turn to the anthropology of fetish objects to offer a little life-hack, showing how we can develop rituals to both open and close the portals, and to minimise the pollution.

And yes, it is possible to develop rituals that allow you to transform your phone addiction into a ripped body.

Honourable mentions…

I’d also like to mention a couple other pieces that have done pretty well this year:

In which I show that libertarian ideology is built on the totally ahistorical idea of humans being detached individuals rather than attached group animals (and also show that capitalism is an ‘anxious-avoidant’ style of economy).

In which I show how corporations use their frontline employees as emotional shock-absorbers - a bufferland between the public and senior management - and how the latter benefits when the public vents their frustration at the employees rather than at the managers.

In which I show how the Bitcoin market lacks a true class of fundamental traders who authentically assess the underlying ‘fundamentals’, and how this makes that market incredibly vulnerable to massive downswings.

Finally, I’ve got into video

You might have noticed that I made a lot more videos this year. That’s because I’m diversifying, and also because I find video an interesting creative format. My top three video pieces this year were:

In which I help a beginner to get a start in understanding the controversial world of MMT, or modern monetary theory.

In which I help you to understand the four key moves used by tech evangelists to promote endless automation, and how to begin deconstructing these.

In which I go through 10 core reasons why you should continue to resist cashless society.

In closing, thanks for your support this year, and I look forward to continuing the journey with you again in 2026.

Much love,

Brett

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Every day we’re told that AI, digital tech, automation and cashless society represent progress, and that they’re leading humankind to an ever higher score in the great game of history. In this video I’ll explain how this ‘high score’ mentality works, why it benefits Big Tech, and how to free your mind from it.

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High finance is often, literally, high.

Fifteen years ago, when working in the financial sector, I’d stand on the street looking up at these skyscraper behemoths. Then I’d push through their rotating glass doors, check in, pass through the security gates, enter the elevators, and press the button. I’d watch the floor indicator lights ticking up into the double digits.

Then the lift would stop, ding, and the door would open into an investment bank division, or an open-plan fund management office, or a real estate finance company. I’d walk past desks with traders and analysts, and enter meeting rooms. Once in there, I might be greeted with a view like this…

Or like this…

My first skyscraper adventure took place on the 35th floor of the former Lehman Brothers offices in Canary Wharf, mere weeks before they collapsed. Later I’d visit 18th floors and 39th floors, and many more above, below and between.

The higher you go in a skyscraper, the more you look out onto the world with a bird’s-eye view. As the ground floor grows more distant, you too grow increasingly ungrounded. People on the streets below begin to look like scurrying ants. They become a distant, faceless collective.

The opposite view to the bird’s-eye is the worm’s eye. The most down to earth positions in our society are literally down in the earth. Picture miners working underground, or farm workers, far from the city, with their hands in the soil. To labourers like this, the distant towers of finance are just abstract symbols of city-based power.

Economic statisticians sometimes split the activities of people in our economy into broad ‘sectors’ - primary sector workers are involved in extracting raw materials, secondary sector workers get involved in processing those materials and manufacturing stuff, while tertiary sector workers provide services around that extraction and manufacturing base.

If you project your mind back in time to, for example, 20,000 years ago, the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors were integrated. A person might dig up clay - a primary activity - mould it into a figurine and bake it - a secondary skill - and then use it to perform religious rites for a community - a tertiary service. As our economies have scaled up, though, these once unified spheres have been stretched out, ripped apart, and delegated across time and space to separate classes of people who often no longer have any knowledge or experience of the big, integrated picture.

At a global scale, the world’s poorest countries are often those who are stuck ‘digging the clay’ in the primary sector. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, relies on its people extracting cobalt, which will be passed on to the mid-tier manufacturing nations - the ones who ‘bake’ it - but the high priests of capitalism who chant the rites will cluster in those big centres of finance, tech and statecraft.

This global picture, however, hides more localised pictures. Even in rich countries, you’ll find primary sector rural areas, and as you move towards the outskirts of their urban sprawls, you’ll find those secondary manufacturing zones that process stuff from the raw material peripheries. If you go on into the centre of a city, you’ll find yourself surrounded by tertiary retail store-fronts, with people trying to sell the manufactured stuff, or to cut hair with scissors forged from metals, or to mix processed flour, refined sugar and churned butter to make a croissant.

At a global scale, the tertiary sector might be seen as relatively high status, but at this local scale it’s rife with its own class dynamics. Let’s think about a baker kneading dough in a deli under a skyscraper. They’re operating somewhere between the secondary and tertiary spheres, but they do so at a small scale, at ground level, with localised impact. They wake up early, prepare the bread, sell it to people walking past, and then start the cycle again the next day. Their world is one of small-scale short cycles with immediate impact.

The opposite to that is the world of large-scale long cycles with deferred impacts. That’s the kind of thing that might happen in the skyscraper above the deli. People entering those offices with their croissants, are - nine times out of ten - going to be entering the realm of professional services, the world of overseers, managers, strategy, communications, accounting, and - eventually - finance.

Unlike the baker, who makes no assumption that his activities will have a distant impact beyond the here and now, the elites high up in offices picture their impacts stretching out into the distance, and into the future. The baker gains his sense of achievement from impacting the lives of small numbers of people directly right now, but a core characteristic of an elite mindset is that the person imagines that their single actions will affect large numbers of people indirectly and diffusely over time.

The people in skyscrapers might have close human connections with other elites, phoning them up and meeting them for lunch, but the business they discuss eventually always concerns distant people over spans of months or years. They sign documents that affect the future livelihoods of strangers they’ll never meet. They reduce countless ground level activities to numbers on spreadsheets. They write research reports that present entire countries as sets of statistics. Everything scales up and de-personalises.

So, when the elevator dings, and the doors open out into the offices of an investment banking securitization division, you’re not going to find people in there who care about getting dirty building a single house for a family. No, their role is to write and trade contracts that will indirectly induce tens of thousands of ground-level workers to build thousands of houses over the course of a decade.

Pyramidal Amplification

When an ancient pharaoh issued orders to tens of thousands of workers to build a pyramid, he was directing their energy down a particular path, but also stopping them from using their bodies and minds to do something else, like building schools for their children, for example. He later might claim to have ‘built’ the pyramid like this, but really he activated and steered others who did the actual building.

Similarly, financiers create contracts that activate particular pathways that steer human energy away from some things and towards others, and they do so from the tip of our economic pyramid. That positioning means individual people within the financial sector get to earn at vast multiples of the actual work they do.

Primary sector labourers can slog away with their bodies for an entire day and yet still struggle to survive, while a single click on the mouse by a hedge fund manager can yield tens of millions of dollars in profit. It’s not because he’s doing a lot of work, or being highly productive. No, it’s because there are billions of others below him, amplifying his returns.

This Pyramidal Amplification can be understood by thinking about a ship. A captain might exert a small amount of energy turning the steering wheel to make a 100,000 tonne ocean liner change direction, but in reality the structure only moves because hundreds of thousands of others extracted the metals for the hull, built the thing, and now staff the engine rooms. His present day actions only have impact because of millions of other actions that extend across both time and space.

The power of the captain does not reside in himself. It resides in the fact that he’s sitting on the apex of a singular productive unit, with his own labour being massively amplified by those below him.

He does, however, get to claim an outsized cut of the glory, because his positionality means his individual actions have higher consequence within the structure than the individual action of a single person stoking the engines, even though the captain’s actions would mean sweet fuck all if those engines weren’t there.

This is something I became acutely aware of in the financial sector. High finance is an apex-level industry, which means it operates at enormous scale, but the human beings within it are just normal people who find themselves in an abnormal position in the high reaches of the global economy. There’s only so many people needed to staff the top of the pyramid, but their systemic positionality means their pay is horrendously distorted. The bonus of $5 million given to a Goldman Sachs trader might seem vast from their puny human perspective, but from a corporate perspective it’s tiny.

That’s why hedge funds will pay single managers $100 million just to join their firm, and it’s the same reason why Big Tech companies will now pay AI engineers the same. It’s because their little human actions contribute to apex infrastructures that yoke in billions of others underneath them.

This positionality distorts more than just pay. It bends those people’s sense of normality. Let me illustrate this with an anecdote.

The Charity Ball

When I was working in the finance sector, a colleague of mine hosted a charity ball to raise money for a sports team. He asked some of us to help out, and I was given the job of selling raffle tickets to the assembled elite in the luxury dining hall.

After dinner, a Sotheby’s auctioneer got up to auction off various donated prizes. He started with smaller items, enabling the more junior bankers to prove their philanthropic status by bidding a few thousand pounds, but at some point he moved on to the bigger ones. One of them was a day in an exclusive private booth at a fancy horse race. The auctioneer started the bidding for that one at £16,000 ($21,000), but he’d miscalculated. He was met with awkward silence. Nobody wanted it at that price.

It’s worth mentioning here that the sports team wasn’t some underprivileged group. It was… wait for it… the British national ski team, a community of athletes drawn almost exclusively from the upper classes. The assembled fund managers and private equity bosses were weighing up whether they really wanted to hand over 16k to such a group.

The silence seemed to stretch towards eternity. The auctioneer looked around, unsure of what to do. Finally, in a corner of the room, a man reluctantly raised his hand and spent £16,000 to ease the tension.

I’d met this man earlier when I sold him a raffle ticket. He was quiet and polite, but he was also a manager at an infamous commodity hedge fund called Armajaro, one that made over £10 million in a single trade to corner the cocoa market (an exploit that earned the founder the nickname ‘Chocfinger’, after the Bond villain Goldfinger). For these guys, throwing away £16,000 was like tossing a single banknote, but what struck me was that he was going to do this because he was experiencing some ordinary emotion - that feeling of group embarrassment that leaves everyone silent - and he felt like maybe he should take the lead in breaking the awkwardness.

But, given his position in the pyramidal structure, the scale of his response was, to an ordinary person, absolutely insane. Here was our hedge fund trader, spending more than six times the average annual income of a cocoa worker in Cote d’Ivoire to buy something that he didn’t want, or need, to help an elite auctioneer save some face.

The Hierarchy vs. The Underarchy

It’s not surprising that people’s blood pressure goes up when they hear media outlets reporting on high finance with numbers that seem so deeply alien to us. Consider a phrase like ‘trillions move through the FX market daily’, or ‘high-frequency trading operates at nanosecond speed’, or ‘the value of the global derivatives market is ten times the size of world GDP’, and so on. High finance feels at once omniscient - like it permeates everything - and yet simultaneously feels abstract and meaningless.

But, as I sketch out in The Ten Layers of Finance, even the most ‘high’ of high finance is always connected back to the low earth. If I walk out of the city, lie in the grass and look down, I’ll see mites crawling through soil particles, and if I could sink deeper into that soil I’d see microbes, fungi, spores, and little drops of water falling in from the sky, pulled by gravity. This is the underarchy, the foundation which births the plants, which give life to countless creatures.

All our economies throughout history are predicated upon the simple reality that we must eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants, if we wish to survive and care for children, and it’s only upon this foundation of ecology, care and sunlight that we can be kickstarted into directing our own energy towards more abstract things.

So, people, raised by other people, raise barley from the soil, which others later input into a new production loop to raise vodka, which eventually might be inputted into the body of a stressed out derivatives broker, sitting in a rooftop bar in London, trying to raise his spirits. He’s on the high rungs of a hierarchy built upon the earthy reality of mud and human labour, but - unfortunately - people who scrape the sky like this are the most distanced from the grubby foundations of their existence.

Here, swilling my cocktail while looking out over the city, I might become confused. I might imagine that the techno-futural world could sever itself from its foundations. I might fantasise about transcending natural cycles, uploading my consciousness into the cloud and living forever.

That though, is just a grandiose delusion inhabiting a fallible human body, stuck too far up the pyramid to have any grip on reality any more.

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Dear super-subscribers,

Here’s the audio essay version of my latest piece Scraping the Sky: Life on the Tip of the Economic Pyramid.

I’m experimenting with sound design, so this is probably my most immersive audio piece so far. Give it a listen!

The piece adds more colour and cultural dimensions to The Ten Layers of Finance essay that I published for payin…

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I’ve finally managed to produce video 9 of my 10-part Intro to Econ Life course. I was derailed for six months due to… well… life (and trying to get a new book proposal out for my agent). Better late than never, as they say.

The good news is that video 10 is almost complete too, so that will be out in the next couple weeks.

The othe…

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Dear super-subscribers,

I’m no fan of Black Friday, and to mark this I’m releasing an essay about it here, alongside this audio essay. This particular audio essay is derived from a video version that I’m also releasing on YouTube, so check that out if you’d like to watch me in my lounge with my winter plant grow-light shining in the background to give it…

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