Excerpted from Second Power Last month I attended the Nowhere Summit in Ecuador with several friends, old and new. Alex Petkas provides a good description of the event here: Technological, political, and societal change are happening at an alarming rate. There are huge, asymmetric opportunities for network-institution builders that simply did not exist 5 years…
Tag: books
ẅ̴͍é̷̞̲͐e̵̺̊͜ķ̷̥́̃e̸͎̣̼͂n̴̬̄d̸̡̈́ ̴̯̲̠̈́̾ĺ̸̯͎̯̈́i̷̻̼̚n̸̰̲̽̈̍k̴̖͆̊s̴̤̓̄: How to Stop Worrying; Rebellions Against God; Machines to Replace God
Atheists in Space: “[Oswald] Spengler believed that even as the 20th century began, all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in…
weekend links: the bone orchard, war as divination, punishing wickedness
Don’t Waste a Good Crisis: “If you want to know what might come next, read the memoir of ‘White’ Russian general Pyotr Wrangel, Always with Honor, about the Russian Civil War. I’m not joking.” Godzilla: “A highlight of Heisei period Godzilla movies is Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. It’s mostly a highlight for being completely bonkers Japanese nationalism. The…
w҇e҇e҇k҇e҇n҇d҇ ҇l҇i҇n҇k҇s҇: the violence of heaven, history’s new surprises, the chthonic swamp
Jupiter Rising: “It is not that the public is in some deep slumber or guided hypnosis, but that they are so deeply humiliated and abused that they don’t even know who they are anymore. Many Americans don’t even know their own fathers, let alone contemplate or internalize the triumphs of their ancestors.” The Cionci Thesis:…
Terra Damnata
What follows is a list of stray words and quotes that I highlighted for my own reasons while reading Blood Meridian a couple years ago. I’m sharing them because their aesthetic value is inherently high but also because, in aggregate their strangeness and desolate aesthetics are enhanced. They also act like luminol on my brain…
Weekend Links: the Age of Disenchanment, Digital Ghosts, Faraway Friends, and Magisterial Relics of the Ancient World
Anons at the Gate: “The nature of the shadow is equated with the unknown, and with chaos itself. A chaos that is always on the brink of returning once more. Only now we live in an even more precarious position, because as [Jordan] Peterson correctly asserts, in the age of disenchantment, after the ‘Death of…
Q&A with @L0m3z: Wages of Fear, the Rejection of Falseness, and Navigating Hell
I first came across the @L0m3z Twitter account circa 2016 or 2017 and I was struck by how the things this person wrote in 140 characters were not simply tweets — they were great pieces of standalone writing. Fast forward to the current year and @L0m3z is one of the kings of anonymous Twitter. He…
#WEEKENDLINKS
Culinary Mysticism — review of “Pig,” starring Nicolas Cage (IM1776) Rob does not hate Portland; like Socrates, who dismisses outright the idea of fleeing Athens for Thessaly, he sees it from the standpoint of eternity, and so both loves it and knows it to be deeply broken: Amir: “If the city floods we can always…
Lost and Found in the Cartographical Matrix
I’ve been thinking about “place” a lot lately. Thinking about “place” led to me write this blog post, which got me digging through the great book Applied Ballardianism again, and a chapter called “Cartographies of the Infinite,” where author Simon Sellars contemplates whether future cities can be “tuned to produce a kind of stereoscopic urbanism.”…
Blood Meridian
I haven’t had the pleasure of reading Blood Meridian yet, but every single Blood Meridian quote I’ve mined from the internet is extraordinary. To wit: They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise…
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Cities and the Balance of Power: “Cities are like massive information-processing units, with real-estate markets revealing the value of being able to access the networks involved. People put a dollar value on physical colocation and proximity to others who have similarly paid a high price to access density. This implicit sorting lies at the heart of…