On a day in which #nostr seems to be trending and getting (very deservedly) more attention, I think it’s worth thinking about some of the ways in which traditional social media has rapidly diminished our capacity for citizenship. The very deliberately addictive design of big social media is and has been a nuclear assault on the collective attention span of the populace. Combine this with all the other millions of available distractions on the devices we all walk around with and you basically have a ubiquitous ocean of noise, of pings and dopamine hits, of quick answers and short form content . We live in inside this. And in here it’s very hard, and very time-consuming, to constantly parse what is real or not, what’s signal and what’s not, what’s manipulated and what’s not, what has a factual basis and what does not. Bad policies and malevolent actors thrive in this environment. Nuanced policies struggle to find air, to find space on the blanketed jungle floor to grow. It’s gets hard to pursue things that require sustained attention span, which is most things worth doing. It’s hard to be perform the basic responsibilities/diligence of citizenship well in an environment like this. And by responsibilities of citizenship I mean being informed, seeing through BS, developing thoughtful views, standing on your values, distinguishing sincerity from charlatanism, between propaganda and information, etc. Which probably plays some role in the diminishing quality of our political candidates. A clouded citizenry doesn’t deliberate and decide - it lurches violently and unpredictably. I fear this will only get worse with AI and augmented realities.

For any fellow cinephiles and film people out there, this list (and site) is a pretty incredible resource #filmstr

TSPDT

TSPDT - The 1,000 Greatest Films (by Ranking 1-1000)

They Shoot Pictures, Don

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.” -Albert Maysles

Been spending lots more time on #nostr the last two weeks (shout out @Trey Walsh for the push), and have been trying to share more about the stuff I care deeply about beyond just #bitcoin (though I of course talk Bitcoin too). But for me those things are literature, art, poetry, and ideas. Before I eventually became a lawyer I went to grad school for lit and film, and that remains an integral part of my life and the way I think about things. It’s my intellectual anchor. I’ve been blown away honestly at the quality of convos I’ve had on here the last week or so. Even the last few days I’ve been discussing Infinite Jest, Shakespeare, postmodernism, DeLillo, etc, and the discussions have been very cool. I feel I can kinda open up and express more of my total self, beyond Bitcoin bull-posting (which to be fair I still enjoy and support). It’s refreshing. Hoping to continue to find and engage with more Bitcoin/nostr folks who are into literature and mining great artistic achievements for lessons and constructive discourse on the present. Gm

Letter from Zuck to Congressman Jordan yesterday:

Gonna be an awesome convo. One angle I think about a lot: Don DeLillo described the Kennedy assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” And he did so because after that Americans lost conviction in capital-T Truth, in a fundamental coherence of the universe. After all if we can’t even determine who committed the most famous murder since Franz Ferdinand, if we have to fall back on “magic bullet” theories, does anything mean anything? Is there something behind the curtain? This, coupled with Vietnam, creates the perfect backdrop for the intellectual revolution that is postmodernism and all its tributaries and outgrowths. Postmodernism takes over college campuses. Critical theorists like Derrida and Foucault and de Man become rockstars. Academia becomes almost a competitive game to see who can formulate the most radical understanding of the world. We go off gold in 1971, and inflation ensues. For the next 50 years everything gets more expensive, especially higher education. So at the same time post-structuralists and post-colonialists et al are saturating the academy, the number of folks who can actually afford to go to the academy is decreasing. So now we have elite schools increasingly captured by what is essentially an evolved viral (almost Darwinian) Marxism, teaching increasingly wealthy and well-connected kids. This is where we are now. With the country’s most affluent, privileged, educated kids becoming the most politically radical, and it’s all occurring in a way and in places more and more detached from the lived reality of normal people. And these kids of course grow up to take powerful positions in society (because they’re wealthy and well connected). So a schism between “the Left” and the constituents it purports to care most about, “the working class,” emerges and grows. Most regular people are basically just like what the actual fuck are you guys talking about. And so the Left becomes utterly detached from its target demographic and becomes instead like an eternal regress of theoretical nonsense. Like the bird in an early David Foster Wallace story (the title escapes me at the moment) that flies in increasingly narrower circles until it actually flies up its own ass. Voila here we are. View quoted note →

I’m not sure what incendiary (and surveilled) nonsense people are talking about on Twitter tonight, but on Nostr we’re chopping it up about Infinite Jest and Shakespeare book clubs. Different vibes over here and I fucking love it. View quoted note →

Couldn’t possibly agree with this more. Anybody who thinks ayn Rand is an elite novelist has simply not read enough (or widely enough) to know what an insane opinion that is. Infinite Jest, for example, is a far more interesting rumination on freedom in America than anything by Rothbard, Rand, etc etc. You will learn more about humanity from Shakespeare than from the Mises (all due respect to Mises). So many incredible conversations about big ideas live in works of fiction or poetry, where people tend not to look. 100% endorse not just reading more but reading outside of your comfort zone. Read poetry, read more fiction, read something you think you might disagree with, read something long. Imagine how absolutely miserable hyperbjtcoinization will be if everyone just reads and talks about the same five books. View quoted note →

“The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.” -Thomas Merton

Gm, still thinking about RFK’s speech on Friday. When you store your wealth in S&P 500 index funds, among the things you are “investing” in and funding are censorship, surveillance, big pharma, the sickness industrial complex, and war. And so many people do this. They blindly, price-insensitively store their wealth, the result of their life energy on earth, in companies who participate in the aforementioned societally harmful things. It’s a reflexive, inculcated behavior. It’s what the financial advisor class tells you is “prudent and smart.” It’s what Warren Buffett will tell you is “investing in America.” It may be prudent and smart, in a dark, cynical way. But I reject the idea that investing in our own gradual spiritual and physical death as a populace is investing in America. I tend to agree with RFK that the most important issues of our time are fixing our utterly toxic food system, fixing the perverse incentives of our broken healthcare system, dis-empowering the censorship and propaganda machines of mainstream media and tech conglomerates, and defunding war. One way you vote for THAT is with your money, by saving in #bitcoin. Another is with your eyeballs and your attention, by using #nostr. So yes, we talk about our bitcoin price, and maybe we do it too much. But it’s because #bitcoin is a vote. It’s a tool. It’s a protest. It’s being the change you want to see in the world. Gm #nostr

When your nightstand has lost all sense of direction:

My 2.5 year-old. This is the way.

David Foster Wallace on the purpose of good fiction. So good.

Despite RFK ending his campaign, I’m hopeful that there’s an emergent groundswell of independent political voices in the U.S. Voices that are heterodox, non-monolithic, beholden to neither of the two ossified existing parties. And I hope this leads to a politics with less theater and more real human interaction; less doctrine and more ideas. Americans are a deeply innovative people. Our country’s founding itself was a tectonic innovation in governance. Back then it was the tyranny of a distant monarch. Today we live under the tyranny of the two-party system and the ubiquitous media machine that supports it. There’s a frontier beyond this paradigm, though, and I hope we can find a new frontier in our politics, too. Something more than merely recycled Reagan or FDR. It’s why I feel so strongly about #bitcoin. Because it aids in the subversion of this paradigm. Same with #nostr. Other than education, I’m not sure there’s anything in America more in need of innovation than our politics. I see glimpses of something new, whether it’s Vivek walking around talking to everyone, even passionate detractors, impromptu and unscripted, without handlers or teleprompters. Or RFK, taking on big pharma, crusading for clean food, healthier lifestyles, and a detoxified world for our children, and doing it all while a massive, coordinated censorship campaign sought to banish and discredit him into obscurity. I occasionally even see some of it in a guy like John Fetterman who, after his hospitalization, has made the radical decision to just say what he thinks, haters be damned, party marching orders be damned. I don’t agree with any of these people on everything. But that’s perfectly okay. And that’s the point. What I want to see is a politics of PEOPLE, warts and all, debating ideas; not of vast machineries producing newer vessels for the same shit. We are a nation capable of generative, even revolutionary heterodoxy. We awesomely, transcendently weird. But we’ve allowed our political imaginations to atrophy on a 24/7 diet of mainstream media, algorithms, and the virtue-signaling regime that makes us all self-censor. Polarization went from being a temporary bug to being fundamental. Grievance is now both a business and an infinite regress. Activism is a profession. If you listen closely you can hear the song of the trapped who has grown to love its cage. But I’m hopeful there’s a rumbling of something new on the horizon.

The RFK speech today was better, more urgent and more authentic, than any speech from the two major candidates at their respective conventions.

On Tim Walz and his repeated digs at J.D. Vance for getting an education and making some money: I was born and raised in a small rural town near the Appalachian Mountains, 2 hrs from the nearest major city. Still work in this town today. My father was born and raised in an even smaller town, even more rural town with a population under 2,000. I have three degrees from three elite institutions because my folks believed in aspiring to education, that it opened doors, created opportunities, and allowed you to experience more of the world. They instilled that in me. I am a cocktail of my upbringing and my education. I shoot guns, and I quote Shakespeare. I eat venison, and I think about Dostoyevsky. I am comfortable in both Waylon Jennings and Mozart, Steve Earle and Alice Coltrane. I can cite Luke Combs and Lou Reed, wax poetic about Top Gun and Le Mepris. I buy food (and milk) from farmers. I am an attorney, yes, and my J.D. is from an elite institution. I represent the blue-collar folks of my hometown. I am neither a supremacist, nor a relativist. I am a dad and a husband. I am a #bitcoin er All my life I have had one foot in the ethos and spirit of my rural hometown and the other in the rarefied echelons of the elitely educated, the financially successful, and the well-connected. It's not always comfortable. All my life I have climbed, my folks sacrificed and pushed me to climb and to aspire. "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," to quote Tennyson (see, I told you I can do that). And all my life I have kept my upbringing close to me, because it is a part of me. I don't shed my lived experience, nor do I forfeit its imprint, its impact, simply because I pursued the best education and got a professional job. The validity of my experience does not expire upon achievement. So when Tim Walz repeatedly attempts to invalidate J.D. Vance’s upbringing, to cast him as some inherently callous, rich interloper, out of touch with the "heartland" simply because he pursued the best education he could and made some money, it bothers me on a deep, personal level. In the Walz taxonomy, which is binary, but only binary for non-Democrats apparently, financial success or an Ivy-League education, automatically and irrevocably renders one out of touch with "regular" people. Further, aspirations to these things are no longer to be applauded; they're punchlines in campaign speeches. Never mind the financial success and education of the Obamas, the Clintons, Kamala Harris, Oprah, etc. This does not invalidate their respective experiences, the journeys they each took to get there. Only if you're J.D. Vance does success actually make you a charlatan to yourself, an interloper in your own life, an enemy to your past. It's not right. We should be applauding folks, no matter their race or political affiliation, for aspiring, for traversing the brutal terrain of class, region and familial afflictions and making it. You may agree or disagree with J.D. on the issues, of course. That's perfectly fine. But dismissing him simply because he managed to go to Yale (like so many Dems, by the way, who readily purport to be regular, working class heroes), or because he majored in philosophy, or because he eventually worked in finance and made some money, is craven, disingenuous, breathtakingly lacking in self-awareness, and offensive to anyone who has actually grown up in the "heartland," myself included. Like so many other Americans, I contain multitudes, Tim Walz, but your taxonomy apparently doesn't allow that.

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” Winston S. Churchill

Excellent