As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on maintaining a condition of permanent siege—through the systematic encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities… When the sieges ended, the balloonists chose to fly on, free now of the political delusions that reigned more than ever on the ground, pledged solemnly only to one another, proceeding as if under a world-wide, never-ending state of siege.

“A taste for the living concrete and for a plural universe.”

It feels like I spent all of my waking hours in 2023 preoccupied with the crypto space -  its problems, its politics, the potential metaphysics and cosmology that compliment it. This meant everything I read and encountered was seen through its lens, for better or worse. This is a short list of some of those encounters - Happy New Year.

Sameness is just the prologue to difference. Analogy is just the prologue to the power of alliance.

DAOs, in other words, are temporary strategic vehicles for furthering the core project of the substrates - generative pluralism and flight from capture.

{Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude.

A Cosmic Case for Distributed Autonomous Technologies

As pluralists, avant-garde explorers in intelligence and network intelligence, and overall tinkerers and believers in the open field of reality, I believe the Ethereum world - or should I say, the Ethereum world of my vantage - should take an active interest in the UAP question. Better put, we should be interested in the specter and promise of high level non-human intelligence, in whatever form. \[In lieu of an overview of the UFO thing, I’ll simply link to three major articles: the 2017 NY Times piece, the long-form 2021 New Yorker expose, and the recent Grusch whistleblower revelations (less serious coverage so far, but here it is in The Guardian).] I’ve argued elsewhere that web3 design practice should be a kind of applied psychedelia, ever-concerned with the question of other forms of life. But that question is not the subject of this note.