It looks like this. And you’re the first to get the link.

The first time I read this novel I was one hundred pages in before I realized it wasn't a memoir written anonymously by some poor victim of our lustful, pathological super-elites. This is a scary accomplishment, this book, because it could be true but shouldn't be. Guard your soul and plunge in. — Walter Kirn

Yes, there’s a backstory.

In 2020, writing as Kayley Kling, I made I Know This Sounds Crazy the first book published on Bitcoin with its release at canonic.xyz. That edition — now a one-of-a-kind collector’s item — is still available for those looking to put their Bitcoin to good use, as should we all.

Now, for the very first time, I Know This Sounds Crazy is available in a beautiful new edition at Amazon.

I waited four long years to see if anyone else would give us a real piece of art giving Epstein and the era he defined the treatment it deserved. Here at the end of 2024, it feels like time to stop waiting.

This book was a long time in the making. Its origins go back to 1999, as I’ve written about in a few places over the years. It’s not for the faint of heart, although the darkness is shot through with some purer and sweeter moments. It captures the essence of a long and difficult spiritual journey that played out amid the great decline of the United States from its millennial peak as a beacon of violent and erotic might.

Drawn at the height of the 1990s into the looking-glass universe of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, Kayley begins a journey of dark discovery through the fake identities, toxic lovers, and impossible assignments of the transatlantic underworld.

As the Epstein operation collapses, pulling Kayley and America down with it, the killer circuit of superyachts and private jets brings her home at last, now in hiding, to pass deeply personal judgment on a past with no escape — achingly vulnerable one moment, coldly calculating the next. Through it all Kayley lays bare the power and glamor used to betray generations of women and men — and to corrupt countless girls and boys.

Proof that each look behind the curtain has its price, I Know This Sounds Crazy tears the mask off of a world we always knew was beyond what we dared believe.

I personally believe artists and audiences alike thirst for a fresh, bold, and enduring new cultural mainstream — attuned to this moment, uncompromising in vision, and rich in spirit. This is only the beginning. Especially here and now, our attention is precious. For yours, you have my great thanks!

Yes, it’s Frontier magazine by Blaze Media — a thick, rich adventure into the outer reaches and inner secrets of the new American frontier.

I seriously mean it when I say you’ll want to hop on over to theblaze.com/frontier to subscribe. Here’s just a taste of what you’ll …

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Under digital sway our love-hate relationship with complete classification leads to bizarre deformations of body and soul.

We thirst for spiritual authorities we can trust to lead us out of the labyrinth.

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Hope you enjoy. Thanks for riding alongside.

James

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This is occasionally discouraged. Some authors have included among their self-imposed rules a prohibition on working on books other than the one they’re writing.

This feels aspirational. I think I’ve always had other books in various stages of development while writing extant manuscripts. And this year has been no exception.

Next month brings the third anniversary of Human Forever, a book that — unfortunately for us humans — is more accurate and urgent than it was in 2021.

But much that has unfolded since then looms over the landscape in a way that (again, unfortunately) calls for some kind of treatment that just feels absent today.

Plus, time, as usual, is pressing. More than ever, we don’t need more books for books’ sake. Nor do I need to indulge myself for my own.

And so, I ask YOU:

Much obliged! One way or the other, big things are on the horizon that I’M enthused to share, real real soon now.

At some point, Lawrence of Arabia was on the TV. There was the charge on Aqaba, “Nothing is written,” Lawrence blowing out the match. Staggering. I recall he left the Seven Pillars of Wisdom manuscript on the train and had to write it over from scratch, from memory. What he began — not the book, the great deed, in the desert — was never properly completed if such a thing was ever possible, as today it still seems not to be. Gnarly rumors still swirl about his proclivities, last time I checked. But David Lean’s sprawling, staggering masterpiece has always stuck with me.

The most recent private screening I attended really leaned in and screened it whole, intermission and all. During that time I was reminded of why it stuck: not the runtime, not the exploits, not the history or the exoticism or the death and the robes and the glittering blue eyes. It was this:

“I like it because it’s clean,” he adds. End of conversation.

Of course now I’m reminded it was my first encounter with this, another touchstone of cinema in my life:

There’s a desert California, and I spent New Year's Eve Y2K there. I woke up to the twenty-first century in a campsite folding chair surrounded by bees. I recorded my most recent LP, the self-titled Vast Asteroid, in the desert, in the freezing rain, at Rancho de la Luna studios, the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration and the release of my first book The Art of Being Free. I turned 40 in this desert. The view from that campsite folding chair, mountains stretching from end to end of the horizon, became my laptop wallpaper when I returned; I’m looking at it now.

The list goes on. It will go on. The desert is clean. Open, not blank. Vast, not empty. This is not a void. The desert reminds me there is no such thing as a genuine void. Each one you think you see is only a mirage. (Yes, some mirages are invisible.)

At this moment, the call of the desert has grown stronger than ever. I’m going to be spending a lot more time out there, in the broad sunned zone stretching from the Mojave through the Sonoran desert and out into the Basin and Range Province. The past isn’t there begging to be belabored, nor the future to be predicted. Presence of mind increases. Presence of heart:

The Athonites of St. Anthony’s Monastery outside Florence, Arizona, just south of the Gila and east of Cactus Forest, understand spiritually both the visibly inhospitable and the invisibly life-giving aspects of the desert, forested as the physical eye can see with xeromorphic succulents, sometimes referred to as resurrection plants.

More and more people I talk to nowadays want to live in the woods. A lot more, judging by population, the Census and Electoral College votes are turning to the desert. There’s plenty to go around. You can go from downtown in America’s fifth-largest city to the manifest middle of nowhere in around 30 minutes. Even hyper trendy Joshua Tree yawns into the heat-shimmered sands after a handful of miles. A ghost town named Siberia has as its neighbor one called Bagdad. Due east, at the foot of Mojave Trails National Monument, sits Amboy, Pop. 4.

Between the last settlements of the L.A. megalopolis and the fringes of metro Phoenix, we have a genuine real-life frontier, befitting the place where the last U.S. territory between Canada and Mexico became the most recent of the contiguous 48 states. Here tribes and empires have vanished, and lavish cities that never were. Beyond the deep Southwestern desert, things change; the altitude, the vibe; it can get bone-chilling at not-necessarily winter times of the year, and that’s not my desert. Those places are not where I want to be watching the present, as opposed to the past or the future, with invisible, spiritual, eyes. No offense, but I do get much more freedom, and far better an anchor, from the Gadsden Purchase and its anchorite-graced environs than from the headspace of the Gadsden Flag. I’m not interested in treading on anyone but snakes.

Which means I’m most inclined to lean out, opt out, nope out on the tail-eating snakes dominating so much of tech and politics now. One does not simply walk away from tech and politics, both of which ate the world long ago, or, really, just keep on eating it, a cannibalistic impulse at cosmic odds with the life-giving spring of the desert-traversing Lord. But lessons need to be learned and administered, not with mere words but actions, with the taking up of incarnate positions, not abstract ones. I said most of what I had to say on tech and politics over the past three years, in Human Forever, in speeches on the road, and here in this newsletter. It’s a hopeful sign that many are coming around now, but while the words on the screen are catching up, too many, in life, fall further behind, or, really, away. “Mind-blowing” events, sects, manifestos, cultic lore, warring factions — you have to seek the desert to lift a rock and not find a host of those formerly marginal things crawling and crowding beneath.

“Governance is the administration of Power,” my brother in matters technological and spiritual, Ardian Tola, wrote not long ago. “Power is not derived from the seat of the philosopher but from the crucible of the frontier. Government is always adjudicated by competition on the frontier.” But he also wrote “Go to the frontier to hear the silence of the Sky Father. Only the Monasteries will reopen your frontier. The frontier, where God merges with man, awaits you.” These words are rough approximations of what I experience in the desert, where the boundaries of our temporal and spiritual frontiers meet in an arena of beautiful paradox. It’s a presence that hums with a vitality the futurists and nostalgists alike can neither force nor fake.

And so, THE BUILD becomes SUCCULENT. You’ll notice changes in content and emphasis consistent with the themes above, and probably not much more for a while. If you liked THE BUILD, I think you’ll love SUCCULENT, more and more as time goes on. Everyone knows the worshippers of justice and knowledge who pass for politicians and technologists worship fragments of God, as if elevating these now-twisted parts above the Whole offers Promethean redemption through sin. The myth of the holy theft crumbles before the words of the Good Thief amidst the Holy Gift. This is no time for cultish and sectarian violence, in word or deed, although that, it seems, is what we will get. It’s a time to artfully produce beautiful but true work that shows people the eternal resonance of what’s going on with us here and now. Perhaps all our talk will be a little less, and a little less cheap, if we focus it in around that.

Happy trails. Some things do never change.

There’s a war on. Commercial. Cultural. Technological. Global. An information war for control of the soul; being waged with propaganda. Which causes propaganda to be more readily recognized and seen through than perhaps ever before. 

One result is a propaganda glut driving its per unit value toward zero. 

But there are other problems. 

Propaganda isn’t all…

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I’ve been living out of a suitcase again. No midair mishaps unless you count what you see while scrolling at 40,000 feet.

There’s a lot to catch up on. Let’s begin.

NEVER NUKE

I’ll leave it to you to catch up on the yet-again-renewed controversy around ending World War Two with a bang. The inciting event this time is Tucker Carlson stopping by Joe Rogan to say, among other provocative things, that dropping The Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was Bad, Actually. Since then, plenty of enterprising Xers have pulled the receipts: turns out plenty of unimpeachably masculine and patriotic Americans, both in the military and the government, didn’t like Truman’s choice. The following lament more or less sums up where things now stand:

I have learned from conservatives that Eisenhower, MacArthur, Hap Arnold, Patton, George Marshall and Admirals Leahy and Halsey were all wrong to oppose nuking Japan and some Democrat hacks - Truman and his advisers - were right. The conservative movement is morally bankrupt

At the heart of this perpetual debate is the territory I plowed thoroughly enough (for me anyway) in Human Forever — The Manhattan Project inaugurated the principle and the practice of a state-within-a-state owned and operated by a priestly class of technologists devoted to mechanically mastering control over the life and death of the planet; and while, out of one side of our collective mouth, we like to champion that development as a testament to our well-earned Zeus-like dominance over all known life, out of the other, we fretfully insist that we had to do it, we didn’t have the luxury of adopting a more “trad” or “conservative” or “Christian” endgame to the festival of mass murder that the “Good War” entailed for so many millions.

If you’re not building the bomb first, you’re letting the Nazis do it; you’re literally Hitler — all this rubs me, and not just me, the very wrong way, and we’ve been slowly reaping the whirlwind ever since. We really ought not do our fellow humans, our fellow Americans, our tech industry, or our beleaguered country so dirty. It’s not even as if we’re enjoying some outsized benefit of sacrificing so much for such tremendous power (which we’re now losing anyway, through neglect and incompetence). The price we’re paying exceeds what can be tallied in lives lost.

It exacts a spiritual toll on us every day, in a manner visible since William F. Buckley’s opening manifesto at National Review. This, too, is well-plowed ground, but we’ll have to give it another run to clarify people’s understanding of how we’re doing the same thing but worse these days with AI—not because “smart” machines are evil, but because we keep letting tech trump America in unnecessary and destructive ways.

In my chapter on the need for a Digital Rights Amendment in Up from Conservatism, I addressed Buckley’s problem and how it infested all of the established movement Right. I was honored and heartened to deliver an of-the-moment updated and extended version of this message at Hillsdale’s National Leadership Summit last week. This was live streamed but not archived; I can’t post the whole thing here, but I can tee it up:

in William F. Buckley’s 1955 mission statement for National Review […] he claims it’s “the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property.” In wartime, there’s another job: fighting utopian social engineers at home and abroad. “We consider ‘coexistence’ with communism,” Buckley continues, “neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.” For Buckley, and the movement he forged, centralized government’s primary role was to win world domination.

The quiet part, which went unsaid, was that war for the world led easily to a large, unaccountable, all-controlling government. After all, the Manhattan Project had created a massive and secret state within a state, covertly employing over one hundred thousand people across military installations nationwide. Global dominance required an explosive and unaccountable expansion of government, which alone could push technology to create a weapons system capable of destroying anything in the world and, at its limit, the world itself.

Buckley wanted conservatism to elide this scandalous principle. President Dwight Eisenhower was not so subtle or shy.

NVIDIA NANCY

Speaking of doing wrong by tech and our form of government, you might have noticed Nancy Pelosi — or, officially, her husband — making bank on superbly-timed stock market bets on chip behemoth Nvidia. You might even have noticed Blaze Media noticing and pulling together the likes of Unusual Whales, George Santos, and me, your host, for a tight, scandalous documentary on the ways Members of Congress can and do profit off of their privileged inside position.

Watch and learn.

MONK MONEY

Not long ago, Jonathan Pageau was kind enough to host me for a discussion about everyone’s favorite two topics:

It’s all fun and games until resistance to Bitcoin becomes the topic of conversation, as it did a while later with another kind of host, the Doomer Optimist. I’m not much for debate at this point in my life, but if you’re new to the issue (or a glutton for punishment), you’ll want to not just come for the fellowship but stay for the friction:

BITCOIN BAALERS

I admit, it’s not always easy charting a path between Christians who reject Bitcoin out of hand, as above, and pagans who worship Bitcoin, as below:

#Bitcoin is God

The White Paper is the new, New Testament.

Once you understand this, all your old beliefs become idolatry.

This is the actual Word Of God

This from Max Keiser, known (in some circles) as the “high priest of Bitcoin” and serving, if his X bio is accurate, as “Sr. Bitcoin Advisor” to El Salvador’s President Bukele. Painful as it is to behold such a thing, this is also a reminder of how, under digital conditions, the returns on debate and discourse continue to diminish. You can’t argue someone out of this kind of misbegotten belief. You can’t destroy them with facts and logic. You have to reach the heart, and, as the saints testify, that can’t be done by beating people about the ears with words.

LENT LIFE

By no coincidence, cultivating silence even about the difficulties of one’s struggles toward spiritual discipline receives special emphasis at this Lenten time. When someone asks, however, about more general matters, it’s more fitting to answer, which I did here:

Without the discipline of humility there is no possibility of acquiring careful discernment as to one’s level of spiritual strength or weakness. The acquisition of such discernment may be aided or supplemented by reading and contemplating spiritual texts, but even the very best of these can never substitute for the development of one’s own spiritual experience. Humility is in this sense not at all an abstract virtue or ideal, approached by recalling past examples or imagining future accomplishments, but an experience now, year by year, day by day, moment by moment, rise upon fall, fall upon rise. 

This is the spiritual battle heightened and clarified by the Lenten fast, which extends (or should extend) far beyond what goes into one’s mouth or doesn’t, incorporating all things visible and invisible which one has fashioned into a sort of substitute home, a den of false and fleeting comfort we delude ourselves into pretending we can abide in so as, if only for brief moments, to take a time out from abiding with our Lord in the temple of his that we are. For this abode must, like the room inside the four walls of one’s residence, be properly purified, tidied, and ordered to receive the King.

“Stone Age or Space Age. Never been a clearer divide.” Thus spake Cernovich — a few days ago, though he’s been on this one for a while.

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It’s a little early to write about California Forever, the massive new tech-funded effort to spin up a Golden State city — sorry, community — that’s not, like, disgusting and stuff. Imagine. In the meanwhile, it’s always a good time to buy Human Forever.

To the matter at hand:

CURB YOUR ICONOCLASM

For months now, I’ve been driving past an L.A. billboard — what a dying art form — advertising the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You might have seen this in your own neighborhood: Larry David, the apotheosis of ironic bemusement, shrugs atop a smallish chunk of ice at sea, a beleaguered iceberg inexorably melting away behind him.

THE LAST OF HIS KIND, runs the tagline — funny, in a way David and Curb can’t achieve, because he and the show and their signature humor and affect have become so oversaturated, so fully commoditized, that the show’s final season is above all a tribute to the first of his kind, not a lone auteur like Woody Allen but a “whole vibe”.

It’s on account of Larryism that, in the wake of his “show about nothing” Seinfeld, it can be said by many and sensed by many more that “nothing ever happens”… despite, or maybe because of, just how much always seems to be trying to happen, trying to make itself happen. Nothing that our more perceptive scholars haven’t noticed before:

For Baudrillard, the hyper-realization of history coincides first of all with the process of total diffusion of the event by information… with the excessive proximity of the event and its diffusion, with the impossibility of isolating the historical event from its model of perfection and simulation — a process that in turn is part of an overall social transformation characterized by the multiplication and saturation of exchanges, by the hyper-density of cities, commodities, messages and circuits.

A transformation that Baudrillard… defines not only as an acceleration, but also as a sort of “slowing down”: the rise of a force of inertia and immense indifference, overflowing with an “inert matter of the social” due precisely to the mad acceleration of circulation and information, and which prevents history, meaning and progress from finding their own speed of liberation, events from exercising the negative action in which historical transcendence consists. And as with all the other phenomena in which the “dialectic” of hyperreality is declined (language, exchange, otherness, sexuality, freedom, etc.), the historical hyper-realization also generates, by means of a radical denial, a violent abreaction, a negative countertransference, an unamendable derealization of its own object: the “strike” of events, i.e. their no longer having time to take place, and therefore the absence of future, the historical future’s implosion on the present, in the obsession of real time.

And since, as Heidegger said, the past springs in a certain way from the future, this deformation implies also for Baudrillard a corresponding deformation in assuming of our past, whose eminent expressions are in his eyes the archaeological fetishism (recording, filing and memorizing everything of our own past and the past of all cultures), the fossilized irony that accompanies this museum-like hypostatization of objects and subjects, the mania for trials and responsibility towards everything that has been.

The whole ethos of the rebel, the breakthrough, the moldbuster, the heretic, the icon smasher — Larry David was something of its terminal form, the ethos in its “golden years” but not quite able to enjoy retirement, and its commodification has shown as well as anything that our explosion of progress has not led to blastoff but to a mysterious and maddening deceleration and derealization, culminating in what to anyone very online is a very pregnant phrase: the mania for trials.

JEWISH CIVIL WAR

No surprise David himself is now on trial. “I never liked Larry David,” Charlie Kirk recently announced on his show; “he’s your typical kind of New York Woody Allen-type that is constantly complaining.” This, too, is the theological-political problem, the latest reverberation in what attentive readers will know is a globalized Jewish civil war — one I’ve been tracking actively since late summer when all that is now unfolding was visibly building to a head.

By November, in my Wyoming remarks, I suggested “you don’t have to spend any time on the internet to look around today and see that Judeo-Christian Nationalism is crumbling.”

These debates that are now springing up in the wake of the October 7th attacks by Hamas in Israel, these are foundational criticisms, questions, challenges, and they’re arising because this technological force is thrusting us into a world where these foundational theological questions are inescapable. This is the reckoning that’s coming, the reckoning that is here, and it is in this context that we need to understand it. I think this is a clue to why Christian Nationalism, whatever it means, is now very hot. After all, Judeo-Christian Nationalism has been America’s civil religion for a very long time, possibly since the beginning.

Those tracking events in The Daily Wire Expanded Universe will understand why I don’t feel an inclination to wade into the discourse about this particular discourse. What we are dealing with is not the kind of situation that is more improved upon or more ameliorated the more one talks about it.

The harsh lesson that discourse and intellect don’t save, and indeed often can’t even excuse or justify themselves, is a theological lesson of a piece with what Americans and other “Westerners” are so unprepared to learn (through painful experience) about how the digital medium and the digital age have decelerated us away from the ultimately theological presumptions about technology and progress that, until so recently, gave “us” our “we-ness”.

WHAT DIDDY DID

Speaking of, a longstanding question I’ve heard bandied about in high Silicon Valley circles is why Jeffrey Epstein’s work seemed so limited to the power fields of the East Coast. Was California, playing against type, miraculously spared?

Certainly, I, a one-time turn-of-the-millennium Bret Easton Ellis protege, couldn’t believe that. But when Quiet on Set dropped last week — the last episode is coming April 7 — it unveiled to me for the first time the kind of entertainment-industry elite psychosexual horror that I’d previously only seen between the covers of Bret’s books.

And now, this P. Diddy situation is evidently far from over and quite possibly implicating Universal music mogul Lucian Grange. If you’re not up to speed, I won’t torment you, but if you want a feel for where things are going in the culture if not necessarily in the case, spend a minute (advisedly) here.

SBF’S 25-YEAR SLAP ON THE WRIST

One more thing to flag for the Jewish Civil War file:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange who was convicted of stealing billions of dollars from customers, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the crypto industry and became a cautionary tale of greed and hubris.

Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentence was shorter than the 40 to 50 years that federal prosecutors had sought after a jury found him guilty of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering — charges that carried a maximum penalty of 110 years behind bars. But the punishment was far above the six and a half years requested by his defense lawyers.

…Mr. Bankman-Fried was also ordered to forfeit about $11 billion in assets.

… “At the end of the day, my useful life is probably over now,” he said.

At least some Bitcoiners are already seeing red: “SBF stole billions of customers money, lied in court, and only got a 25-year sentence. Ross Ulbricht created a website and is still serving two life sentences in prison.” Who will do time the longest—SBF or Ghislaine Maxwell?

There will be much to unpack here, although it’s unclear whether anyone will be able or permitted to do so. It’s just so difficult to look at SBF’s behavior over the course of the saga and not associate it with protection by very powerful interests—protection that characteristically disappears in the blink of an eye.

I was raised in a decidedly Anglophiliac household. This meant a lot of Churchill around: the complete Folio Society editions of the multi-volume histories, the biographies and the autobiography, the resolute formal photo portrait. It is hard to say in 2024 that Churchill succeeded in his aims, although, of course, his defeat is a lot easier to pin on h…

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I’ve been out in the field the past few weeks, including our nation’s capital. The collapse of retail on display inside the Beltway is jarring to anyone who so much as passed through during the false dawn of the Obama years.

I found myself in need of some business casual footwear for a few scenes to be shot on the Hill. Union Station is virtually abandoned by commercial tenants. Almost every mid-tier menswear shop I searched for was Permanently Closed. Finally—the Johnston & Murphy on Connecticut, right across from Brooks Brothers, a stone’s throw from DuPont Circle. The lights were on, but no one was home. Doors locked shut at 2 pm on a weekday. Not a lunch break. Squarely in the midst of the work day and posted hours. I knocked, fool that I was.

Let’s get back in the saddle.

INVITE THE UNDERWORLD

Legit the edgiest Elon post I’ve seen to date: “We have imported the criminal underworlds of 100 different countries.” The inevitable consequence, no doubt, of the all-but-standing policy to “invade the world, invite the world”. Elon is talking about the results of our “immigration policy”, which is not a policy about immigration but a politics of inundation. At that volume, 100 mafias sounds like a reasonable ballpark estimate.

But they’re not all here because of “the border” (what’s left of it). The deliberate dissolution of the line on the map and the line of law ostensibly written in place is only one piece of the underworld puzzle—that seamy mystery being, it seems, the one story we’re permitted to least report on, talk about, speculate around.

This is because penetration by foreign crime organizations is characteristically quite orderly, a systematic inflow into the host body of a late-stage empire. As these behemoths begin to deteriorate, losing the mystique of dominance, everyone rushes in—not just opportunistic bad guys, not just rivals and adversaries, but allies, too, especially allies with the weakest impediments to the well-structured establishment of influence, preferably lucrative.

We’ve got Jay Newman’s Undermoney out there as a recent signpost to the dark caves subject to a fairly durable regime and state-affiliated media omerta. That’s about it.

APPLE’S EVIL TWIN

Don’t be Google, Tim Apple:

Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry. 

The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.

At this point, it’s hard to be sure which model is the lesser of two evils. Altman holds a steady lead over Pichai in personal malevolence, but OpenAI is just not as much a part of the USG’s post-Constitutional regime as Google, and its products haven’t catechized its bots into the woke religion to the same ludicrous degree as Gemini.

The lesson here is clear enough. The race to dominate everything with an app for everything has kicked into a still higher gear. Would that AI gave ordinary American citizens the ability to access and use fundamental digital tech to protect their livelihoods, their way of life, their constitutionally guaranteed form of government, their free association and worship, and, ultimately, their humanity. But the automated simulators don’t work that way, at least for now. Bitcoin still offers what is needed, which is why Bitcoin is being gobbled up at speed by the regime.

BREATHLESS AI

Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you? Surveillance is so last decade. Simulation completes the circuit. Chat GPT is now mastering the subtle art of humanesque vocal performance: “You can hear it take breaths, it’s insane.” Well, it’s not insane, or mind-blowing, or whatever. What’s insane is debasing our language to characterize simulated breaths as “it” “breathing”.

People still talk about those greedy social media oligarchs “hacking our brains” by telling algorithms to give us content likely responsive our content desires. Few talk about our terrible susceptibility to abuse analogies, a product of our fallen desire to worship false gods and false idols and to steal the creative powers of God.

MEME IS MURDER

Just to be clear about where things are going—a single, seamless experiential apparatus fusing surveillance, simulation, and spiritual warfare—Googling “french jokes” now leads to a warning:

Memes about groups of people might be disturbing or hurtful

“How much loss of market share is that nudge worth to you,” George Hotz asks Google. He doesn’t quite get it: we are far beyond the world of market share. I guess I’ll have to keep on noticing that the primary use case for this cluster of technologies is compulsory.

Wake up, folks. These tools are optimized for cyber theocracy. Companies are scrambling to exit “muh marketplace” and become part of the established church of the Borg. They’re willing to pay an incredible price to get there. Peter Thiel got a lot of attention for pointing out that Google was hoarding money. His thesis was they couldn’t figure out what to build. Current events suggest another explanation.

If you want to have algorithmic markets, you have to stop the cyber theocracy. If you want to stop the established Borg church of the cyber theocracy, you need to show people the real thing: real Church, real God, real Spirit moving through people body and soul. Do that and the rest will follow.

It’s a leap year, all right. Let’s proceed.

GOOGLE’S EVIL TWIN

By now, most people on social media probably have heard the news about Gemini, Google’s evil AI twin that reveals just what the company means by “organizing the world’s information”. For three years or so now, I’ve done my bit warning that Google search became broken on purpose, that the “permissionless” digitization of the world’s people via their information is a kind of cyborg breeding program (“googenics”). That wokeness is impossible to institutionalize without a woke supercomputer — all foul ingredients in the witches’ brew of Gemini’s code are now on naked display. “This news cycle is an easy primer for those who want to adopt @jamespoulos Thought.”

Pirate Wires has the full response from chief Googler Sundar Pichai. It’s probably exactly what you’d expect — the workshopped-to-death corporate-speak damage-control document that an AI might as well have produced. The early reviews are bad — not that Pichai cares or can help it.

Jon Stokes said, “he’s ‘holding frame’ — critics are having one conversation about Gemini, but he’s like ‘no we’re going to keep all our terms & premises, & have the conversation WE want to have.’“ “I said, “it reads like a government document”, the subtext being Google, in more ways than one, is the government. Ardian Tola did me one better: “It reads like a DMV document with the word Sacrosanct in it.” And sure enough:

Our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct.

Translation: we are building a universal church that is also a universal regime because it is built on our reassembly of all of your information into an order that we control and in which you must participate, as both consumer and consumed. Welcome to the cyborg theocracy, Gemini critics.

EISENHOWER’S BLINDNESS

Of course, we are here because first we tried worshipping criticism — critical theory, critical thinking, discourse, debate, “how to think, not what to think”, analysis, psychoanalysis, deconstructivism, postmodernism, pretty much every intellectual trend since the radio or electric light. (Another time, I’ll go into more detail about this obsessive belief that our most basic and cherished freedoms depend utterly on an incessant public and private stream of “heretical” content.) Has there ever been a more overeducated and hyperattentive civilization? No wonder people are begging for the Borg to take the pain, the responsibility, and the humanity away.

And no wonder Eisenhower’s famous Farewell Address continues to elude the critical attention it deserves. (Its unsung anniversary sailed by in mid-January among the usual MLK Jr. “discourse”.) Let’s pull the key quote:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Emphasis added! What do you notice? Alertness and knowledgeableness were not, and today, they still more clearly are not enough! Overclocked overeducation has put the definitive lie to the once-inspiring mantra that “knowledge is power”. (I’ll go into more detail another time about the origins and consequences of “smart power”.) These things, alertness and knowledgableness, are “safely” emptied of spiritual content — no surprise they have also been emptied of the spiritual power of watchfulness and discernment.

MODLIDANI

Perhaps you’ve seen the recent wave of people online enthusing over how cool we once were — just look!

I, too, look wistfully back on my days spent sipping a large order of Modlidani fries. But what was the name of that ice-cold cola again? It’s on the tip of my tongue…

It’s easy to criticize people who don’t notice how fake and unreal this is — specifically, it's easy to call them stupid. Intelligence is not the issue here. What we are dealing with is a problem of memory, not just the loss and breakdown thereof but, too, the yearning for a recollectible past, and the desperation to cope with its digital disintegration by settling for, well, the McDonald’s — I mean Modlidani — version.

CHOOSE YOUR MOUNTAIN

Speaking of nostalgia for a recollectible past, remember bands? Vanishingly few of which have anything worth saying about the world we’re in? And why? And how to face it all? One of my favorites, Everything Everything, has a new album (remember those) coming March 1, called Mountainhead. A quick glance at the lyrics to one of their lead-in singles, “The Mad Stone,” provides useful context:

Let the wizard-talk come
At the peak of Choice Mountain, you’ve been saving up
Are you really this old?
I can make it a business

Come with me to the Mad Stone (run all night, all night, never get free)
Above you
Mad Stone
Let it control you

At the very top, there was a screen that showed a picture of a
Man who stood there looking at a picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a picture of a man on a screen
And he was looking at another picture of a man who stood there
Looking at a picture of a man who stood there looking at a
Picture of a picture of a man who was the double of me

So you scrimp and you save
I got wild in the aisles, son, let me tell you that
Did you set me aflame?
I can sell you a firehose, put out all of it now

Do you think it’s all true?
Nothing quite so romantic, there’s no oxygen
I’m a Mountainhead too
What is that? A religion?

Come with me to the Mad Stone…

It’s art like this that made me want to be such a Musichead, ten short (?) years ago. All that’s been swept away now, of course. Music — a great way to spend money, a terrible way to make it. Another seeming foundation revealed to be sand by a tidal wave of silicon.

Choose your mountain carefully!

The thoughtful and intelligent Jonathan Haidt has a book coming, bearing the resonant title The Anxious Generation:

Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by wh…

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A richness of embarrassments this week. Let’s do this.

TUCKER/PUTIN BOREDOM

You didn’t think I’d let this one slip. What’s most interesting to me is how, after allowing the fanfare to rest a little, the lingering “story” is Putin’s semi-ironic remarks to Pavel Zarubin on how it all went:

I believe that your Carlson — “your” as a member of the journalistic community — is a dangerous man, and here is why. To be honest, I thought he would be quite aggressive and ask so-called tough questions.

I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond with equally sharp answers, which would add a certain character to our conversation. But he chose a different tactic. He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he remained patient and listened to my lengthy monologues, especially when I spoke about history. He gave me no cause for doing what I was prepared to do. That is why, to tell the truth, I did not fully enjoy that interview. But he acted strictly according to his plan, and he did what he intended. As for how informative it turned out to be in the end, that is not for me to judge. It is for the viewers, listeners and possibly readers of this material to judge.

Yes, a mix of patient silence and historical memory is bad TV — even for those in front of the camera! Maybe only a 49 percent ironic judgment there. As pornography addicts lose the capability of arousal, addiction to remote excitement leads reliably to insuperable boredom. But as pornography well understands, talk is not naturally all that exciting in a visual format. One has to strain the limits of words and meanings to create must-watch talk-driven videos. One reason everything’s always a “crisis”, and the ultimate, these days, narrative ones.

STARSHIP STUPORS

Speaking of narrative crises, people are trying to interpret Starship Troopers on the internet again. I’ll spare you the laundry list of takes — there are a lot — but garfieldbot offers probably the most tempting:

it might just be me being in a bad mood already, but this whole several days of starship troopers really nails down how petty and stupid and pointless all of this is. dont you feel ashamed for caring what any of these dumb bastards think about anything

Too weary even to punctuate… who hasn’t been there? And yet, we must go further. Psychologists speak of the narcissism of minor differences — physicians of souls and bodies might observe that what’s so often going on there is the gargantuan pride of people for whom the acrimonious distance between them is tiny compared to their acrimonious distance from God.

So many debates and narrative wars are fights over how best to distract ourselves from God and the consequences of our distance from Him. So many are themselves distractions from internal struggles to convince one’s mind that there’s a right way to justify the distracting and the distancing. If space is the final frontier of anything, it’s the terminus of our scrambling desperation to escape a confrontation in our hearts with the presiding love of the Lord.

Men will literally argue about Starship Troopers with strangers on the internet instead of going to Church. Is this not itself a conscription into a losing war waged in the outer darkness?

THE FOUNDAGER

You’ve heard of the momager (moms who manage their children’s entertainment industry careers) — now, beware the Foundager! From our friends at Nock:

Capitalism has morphed into a bizarre and perverse managerialism: Massive government spending, unsustainable public debt, and deranged ideologies—all created by managers. The distributed ledger abolishes managerialism and heralds a new kind of entrepreneurial state.

Human Forever readers know the upshot of Mariana Mazzuccatto’s book The Entrepreneurial State — tech innovation is a creature of government, and that’s good — itself heralded a new kind of entrepreneurial state, one where the Cold War had been won. The next step was the terraforming of the domestic population by transforming high-tech weapons into “mind-blowing” entertainment.

The latest twist has been an effort to brand founders and the founder lifestyle as the ultimate amaaaaazing experience — arbitraging entertainment back into high-tech weaponry! Complete vertical integration, just like the Golden Fang… an effort that seeks, cultivates, automates, and scales the production of pocket ubermenschen, a diversified portfolio of world-eaters… ambitious young men who are party in the front office and business in the back, founders on the street and managers in the sheets. “You and me, we’re not so different, Mr. Bond,” but for PMCs pushing different panes of the revolving door. Beware!

GET OUT!

I’ve been trying to figure out for a while how not to bore you with an obvious diatribe about What’s Wrong with Obsession — how the internet is really a machine for terraforming us by reorganizing our identity according to our obsession and how the borgification of creation proceeds from the internet’s filling up all space by surfacing all possible obsessions with all possible things and sorting everyone accordingly.

For now, I’ll just quote Noah from the Mars Review of Books:

Whenever I have some free time it occurs to me that life is ideally meaningful and we are all interconnected nodes of the divine, and then I get really into like arbitrage sports betting strategies or British quiz shows, and forget

In its mix of awfulness and awesomeness, even as it encourages us to forget so much, our breakneck digitization reveals many obvious things it’s far past time we remember — one of which is how readily we all fall prey to the subtle temptation of being “into” things. Beware!

Pretty much everyone now has seen the Travis-Taylor Super Bowl Kiss, and the squabbling over whether it is or isn’t the picture of good old-fashioned All-American thriving will likely continue unabated for weeks, if not months, possibly years. This recent post gives a strong sense of where things stand:

I don’t even listen to Taylor Swift…

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Like many people, I go to a gym full of TV screens. Sometimes the biggest challenge isn’t the discipline of a lift but of keeping my eyes off the ads, the local news, the sports, the chattering heads. Earlier this week, on the treadmill, I noticed the “news” about an NHL player’s Instagram rant about a fresh injury and his resulting frustrations.

“Trying to stay calm and positive, but it’s impossible. After doing everything right I get this. The universe is unpredictable I guess, and has its own plans , but f— the universe man, I know I’ll come back stronger and I know I’ll play better than before, but it’s tough right now, and it’s gonna be tough tomorrow.”

This was Mikhail Sergachev—unbeknownst to me at the moment, a two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Tampa Bay Lightning, but, clearly enough, a Russian, cursing the universe. I silently said a prayer for his health and recovery, spiritual as well as physical. The very next day, it was my turn to suffer, along with him, in an unexpected way.

At a few different times since shattering my collarbone in college (self-inflicted, yes), my back has blown out, or whatever you want to call it, necessitating physical therapy at home or a professional’s. Older and wiser, this time around, I caught it early and made it onto the floor mat, where I spent the next hour and a half running gingerly and patiently through the quotidian humiliations of the simple stretches and exercises required to get it together.

I was reminded once again of the ways discipline in physical things reflects discipline in spiritual ones, not just when bulking up or pushing oneself but in the inevitable troughs and setbacks. And so the multi-day healing process began. For an instant, I was tempted to say I had to wait until Tucker’s Putin interview was up to send this week’s brief. But though the truth hurts, it’s that much the sweeter.

To the matter at hand!

—

CODING DIGNITY

You can’t legislate morality, they say, or said, but can you code it? Lots of high-fiving this week over Dignif.AI, a bot of sorts that covers up immodest women and strips trashy men of their neck tattoos, among other dignifying things.

Just one problem, of course — it isn’t real. The temptation is strong to “catechize the bots” by simply programming to do things that make people fist pump and say virtuous! or based! But these things can’t be counted on to reach the secret chambers in our hearts where our deepest and most difficult spiritual struggles take place.

But surely you don’t want to cede control of social media culture to those visually projecting dark, depressing, disturbed, and disturbing visages… right? Especially when you can outsource the coding to innumerably little automated platoons? Well, if the underlying pics just go on proliferating, the picture that emerges is one of endless automated wars over pixels waged by unmanned armies. It’s not as if Dignif.AI actually goes to battle under orders to smash idols, transforming the original disapproved-of pics into whatever the user or creator wishes to see purified or ennobled. Not yet, anyway.

And, alas, on the internet, the whole idea of “original” pictures is becoming increasingly quaint. At a certain point, you have to remember what is still possible face to face and heart to heart — what has now become possible — in a world not only glutted with copies of copies of copies but with phantom clone wars among them. The digital battlefield is also a content farm, and the content farm is also a battery charger drawing its energy from you and me: a consensual partnership, “technically”, but do any of us really still believe that? And what happens when this moral economy of created souls in clone wars becomes the legislated code?

MUH SCROLLS!

I can’t say my heart sings to the sight of so many thoughtful, clever people geeking out over the use of AI to decode an ancient scroll too fragile to simply unspool and read. Muh traditionalism! Muh classicism! Muh human ingenuity!

“This was a cultivated Roman aristocrat’s country villa, and Piso would have had lots of books there, especially Latin ones, of which so far very few have been found in the villa,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and papyrus expert at the University of Bristol in England, told The New York Times. “Recovering such a library would transform our knowledge of the ancient world in ways we can hardly imagine. The impact could be as great as the rediscovery of manuscripts during the Renaissance.”

So what’s in the box? An epicurean philosopher and pleasure enjoyer bagging on stoicism. Perhaps you share this reaction. “It’s astounding to feel this kind of redemptive power that we may hold now because of AI and tomography and computation,” said one of the guys behind the challenge prize that motivated the winning decoder. “We have probably less than 1% of … all the literature that was written. Any gain in our knowledge is important.”

What script might one day change his heart on that idea?

He might even start with the first decoded word, the delightfully loaded word PORPHYRAS.

DOES BUKELE SCALE?

Many bro rhapsodes over El Presidente’s thumping win at the polls in El Salvador, and there’s no turning up one’s nose at the mercies experienced these days by the long-suffering Salvadoran people. It ought still to be expected that a turnabout of this magnitude moves the man in charge to give thanks and credit to God, and in his victory speech Bukele did just that. This is a man willing to go beyond praise for a generic God and publicly utter the words Christ is King.

From what I gather, El Salvador is largely Catholic and Pentecostal, with a sort of blurring going on between them, which seems as fertile soil as any for the kind of nominally Christian syncretist civil religion that used to be associated with, well, the United States of America. But the tremendous weakness of that kind of religion, which has led the US to its present spiritually fractured and degenerated state, raises difficult questions. Can it really serve El Salvador? Does it really serve The Savior?

And what about Latin America as a whole? Many seem so hard up for Ws, and for a feeling that momentum has shifted for real this time, that they speak of Bukele and Milei in the same breath, avatars of a “right-wing” realignment. Personally, I can’t look at Milei’s theatrical countenances without feeling an unwelcome and unreliable presence. No question, getting away from generations-old collectivist cronyism is a reasonable and serious goal, especially considering the way modern state socialism, communism, corporatism, etc., have proven themselves so characteristically at odds with the Christian life stably and richly lived.

But the time has come—it’s long past time—to recognize that “right-wing” is not a stable foundation for anything, not sufficient authority for a regime, not even really an ontology. It is hard not to see in the political situation today, from the smallest-scale local level to the largest worldwide, a collapse of meaning among the last grand ideological categories of political life, the ones our regime has fallen back on with such an automated affect: “our democracy” versus “their authoritarianism”. We all have a clear enough idea of what sensible realities underlie the caricatured contrast. Yet, we also recognize that even on their own terms, these labels often apply equally or interchangeably to the same regime. Authority as such is not a bad thing, just as democracy as such is not a good thing. Marc Andreessen’s recent provocation that “love doesn’t scale” led a colleague of mine to remark, with the Holy Spirit in mind, that love is the only thing that scales.

MANIC PIXIE QUEEN BORG

Apropos of a lot of AI art making the rounds, so so much of which has this kind of relentless aesthetic uniformity to it, some of us are old enough yet lucid enough to remember the turn-of-the-millennium character dubbed the “manic pixie dream girl”, a creature of fiction, nonfiction, and lived experience with a remarkable staying power seemingly only the woke effort at transvaluing all values was capable of relegating to the sea of recent cultural artifacts forgotten as if they were millennia old.

All this AI art suggests that the MPDG has returned, on the back of tech worship, by merging with the latter-day archetype of the Borg Queen familiar from Star Trek and popularized somewhat as the devouring cyborg mother by Mary Harrington in her Feminism Against Progress. Not sure what better underscores that the digitization of our media environment has hybridized the imagination-driven world of television into a world driven by memory, the memory of machines. Try as people might, the myth of love that merely human or cosmic love is the be-all-and-end-all has been worn out by digital technology's cold, hard dominance. In this age, it’s ever more clear that the only love that saves is that of The Savior, all and in all.

I’m not going to link to the posts. But roughly one second after the Apple Vision Pro hit shelves, the cyborg fatalism has been pouring into my, and quite possibly your, “feeds”. 

Complain as we might, the fatalists say—sharing the fast-multiplying videos of wearers in the wild gesticulating their way through the receding real world—but soon we’ll all be…

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Hello, hardy readers, and a belated Happy New Year. On January 3, I was received into the Orthodox Church in America. The time was right for a slight inhale before diving into a fresh year of poasting. An admonition from Bishop Gerasim of Fort Worth (whom I might see at Divine Liturgy in Dallas this Sunday) is making the online rounds, and it reflects and animates all I hope is to follow here at THE BUILD:

The message of the Kingdom has nothing to do with ideology… The culture wars distract and consume the neophyte who is only beginning to learn how to walk the royal path. And what happens is, this young soul abandons the prayer book for a laptop. He pursues blogging in place of prayer, thereby placing himself in great peril. And there is no substitute for what Father Seraphim [Rose] called ‘quiet and humble labors’.

The laptop has been my weapon of choice, and not always choice, lo these many years of our running war of words. Of course, more than a mere culture war, it is a spiritual war being waged today, as in all days. With painful awareness of the foolishness I share with all men, I pray what I do here offer you a taste of the holy wisdom of others you might not come across elsewhere, and a glimpse at how that wisdom shines forth today in all the strangeness and temptation of our online and offline world.

It isn’t easy to “keep being right” about what’s happening around us at its accelerating pace, not for an off-the-shelf pundit or one focused particularly on technology. That’s especially so because the value of continuing to be right in the sense of the word-warring world continues to trend downward. What has “destroying someone with facts and logic” done for you lately?

What is most valuable today is to cling to what has always been correct, spiritually correct, and I hope it is at least some benefit to help track for you the most significant developments in the realm of tech and public life in a way that assists in maintaining or even sharpening that spiritual focus. These powerful tools are built to dominate our lives and to reassert a dominion over them healthy for our souls and bodies. At least some of us might help show a path to recovering and wielding the spiritual authority and discipline needed to do so—beginning within our own hearts.

To that end, I’ll provide a brief commentary every week of each month on notable developments “in the space”. On with the first.

—

BITCOIN MAXXING

Perhaps you’ve heard that “Bitcoin ETFs” have (at last) broken out across the financial industry. The normie-media reaction is predictably iffy:

The launch of U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking bitcoin deepens ties between the volatile world of cryptocurrencies and the traditional financial system, potentially creating unforeseen new risks, some experts say.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month approved 11 spot bitcoin ETFs from issuers including BlackRock (BLK.N), opens new tab and Invesco/Galaxy Digital, in a watershed moment for a crypto industry dogged by bankruptcies and crime.

Some say! Almost a motto of the United States of America. Those who see Wall Street as a criminal enterprise may laugh at the fearmongering invocation of bankruptcy and law-breaking. The real point, which is no laughing matter, is that Bitcoin is not going away, because its technological fundamentals, workability, and scalability make it the leading nascent world computer.

Every major digital player, foreign and domestic, wants to master, or at least get a pie slice of, this “one feed to rule them all.” Sam Bankman-Fried tried to do it with FTX; Elon Musk wants to do it with X; Wall Street, Washington, the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, the list goes on and on. Someone will “get there first,” and the urgent question facing us today is where that will leave the American people if they are denied their implicit constitutional rights to “keep and bear” foundational computational technology like Bitcoin.

Isn’t it insane, some say, to trust the American people with such power? Politically, the alternative is to destroy what’s left of our founding constitutional regime and replace it with an anti-America, one where America stops at tech’s edge the better for tech’s worshippers to eat the world. But spiritually, yes, it would be insane (or worse) to trust any people with such technological power outside proper and orderly spiritual care. I have suggested before in a few places that the “swarm” body of our incorporeal digital entities can only be ruled in spiritual authority by a “governing” body that incorporates the visible and invisible worlds, the human and the divine. The Body of Christ, as the Church is called, faces a rendezvous with destiny.

But don’t think it’s as easy as “legislating morality”. Trying to do an end run around the slow and painstaking purification of the heart by speedrunning some ostensible purification of the law of the state will only end in tears. We can expect that the tech worshippers, the money worshippers, and the “woke” idolaters of justice will all ratchet up their plans to attempt exactly that. Now is the time to be ready for that—to protect one another and offer the true alternative.

ELON EARTHBOUND

Speaking of Elon:

A court in Delaware has ruled to rescind Elon Musk’s $55 BILLION pay package that was approved by shareholders in 2018. As of 2024, Elon Musk has reached the necessary goals to be awarded the amount by hitting numerous targets laid out by the plan. As of this date, a very large majority of the package has yet to be paid out…

The man himself has ruefully suggested no one incorporate in Delaware. One might think the reaction on X would center around the impact of this ruling on Musk’s ambitions to create one app for all things on Earth. But at least so far, it seems to center on that other, off-planet ambition of his:

If there were any singular event that could start a cascade of events that keeps humanity locked on planet Earth, it’d probably be something like this with the potential to cause a slow death.

Locked? We’re sold Mars as a new absolute in amaaaaazing destinies, but beneath the showmanship is a fearful hatred of having to reckon fully with our lot on Earth. When every distraction and strategem of hiding from God has proven barren and fruitless, Mars looms in the passions and dreams as a “saving” escape—into a new world, a new paradise, a new “project”, busy work at the scale of the pagan gods. If anyone has made Earth a prison, it is ourselves. Our time in the flesh on Earth is short; our time thereafter immeasurably long, beginning at a moment always sooner than we think. Mars is no escape for we creatures decidedly not locked on Earth.

MOON BRAH TO ZERO

The sad man who hopes to resolve his midlife crisis by becoming undead has (inevitably) tried to “spiritualize” his biohacking efforts at eternal youth—which, as it so often does in America, means marketing, and lots of it:

Bryan Johnson proposes Gen Zero: a post-human, blank-state belief and value system [video]

One can’t substitute “to the moon!” for “to Mars!” and expect a different result. So far, the reactions on X have been broadly negative. But you can be assured it will take more than dismissive remarks to stop Johnson’s delusional quest from finding more, and still more deadly, recruits. I can’t help but think of ancient Egypt, with its state death cult of pseudoscientific priests worshipping false gods. For a few years, I’ve aired the question of whether that Egypt counts, too, as “the West”…

SPIRITUAL FRONTIERSMEN

I’ll have more, much more, on this theme this year. As Texas and its border heat up, let’s flag the question of where to find our spiritual frontiersmen with two X posts. First from Mr. “Bitcoin Monasteries” himself:

Governance is the administration of Power. Power is not derived from the seat of the philosopher but from the crucible of the frontier. Government is always adjudicated by competition on the frontier.

Second, your humble correspondent:

Don’t allow yourself to be deceived. Is your frontier just a simulation?

Stay watchful, friends!

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