Books / Archive

Archive

402 essays, lectures, and interviews

2025

The Supreme Court Should Be an Ensemble of LLMs

LLMs can process human language with formal rigor—the function of Supreme Court justices.
The Bari Weiss Strategy

Notes on a $150M playbook that's never been written down
In Domestic War, Beware the Rabble

Notes on an "unfortunate season" of civil conflict
Alexander Karp's Iron Cage: A Review of The Technological Republic

I wanted to love it, but Alexander Karp's new book is a mess of contradictions and a bloody revenge by the Frankfurt School against the school of American Optimism.
Plato's Playbook

Influence and Intellect in the Ancient World
Deregulation and the State Arms-Race Each Other Into Cyberspace

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.
Plato: The First Indie Scholar (Plus a NorCal Meetup in 3 Weeks)

A preview from my forthcoming book and an upcoming weekend in the woods.
The Body Count Climbs Through a Series of Globewars

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.
Ecstatic Swoons

Stendhal, Lacan, Gutenberg, Nick Land and more
Markets Manufacture Intelligence, Politics Upgrades Paranoia, and Tries to Get a Grip

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.
A Blow to the Head

On Alex Karp, Hélène Cixous, Gorgias, Sarah McNally, and More
Catastrophe and Child's Play

Notes for the week
Homo Sacer and the Invention of Reading

The final installment of our 2024 annual letter.
The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 3)

An annual review in 3 parts.
The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 2)

An annual review in 3 parts.
The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 1)

An annual review in 3 parts (with a shipping update on The Independent Scholar).

2024

Nietzsche's Big Mistake: Three Ideas on Christianity

A close reading of St. John blows Nietzsche out of the water.
Manny Farber's Rhizome

An exploration of Manny Farber's aesthetic philosophy of 'Termite Art vs. White Elephant Art' and its connection to rhizomatic thinking.
On IVF and Embryo Selection

Why genetic manipulation of babies leads to market slavery and embryonic holocaust, even by secular utilitarian standards
Libidinal Economies

And how masterpieces are made.
Dostoevsky vs. Nietzsche

And the second most fateful bookstore encounter in history...
Deadline Tonight

On Nietzsche's fatal mistake
You Can Probably Just Have It

The right attitude and body language can obtain almost anything through confidence and presence.
Walls as a Service

The removal of walls decreases the fraction of relevant space under your control.
Logistically Accelerating Techno-Economic Interactivity

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.
How Renaissance Rationalization and Oceanic Navigation Locked Into Commodotization Takeoff

On the first sentence of Nick Land's Meltdown.
The Life of Spinoza as an Independent Scholar

How did a lens-grinder who published only two failed books during his lifetime become one of the most influential philosophers in history? The keys to Spinoza's success as an independent scholar.
No Doesn’t Always Mean No

Nietzsche, Marinetti, Ecuador, and my new print book coming soon
On Angelicism and Post-Academic Futures

Become imperceptible, not illegible.
Angels and Communication

How the visible world hangs together.
The Divorce Revolution: How a Social Tragedy Became a Personal Triumph

Divorce rates increased from 1960 to 1980, partially thanks to an academic trend led by divorced women. Upper-class divorce rates have stabilized, but working-class divorce rates continue to rise. Divorce harms children in most cases, contrary to earlier claims.
Video Game Syndrome

In the 21st century, it's easy to forget you are not Super Mario.
Deadline tonight

Aristotle and the Secret of Esoteric Boomerism
Seminars, Meetups, and Dinners in NYC, Philly, Austin

And online, too.
Wittgenstein's Religion

"The facts of the world are not the end of the matter." —Wittgenstein
Heraclitus, Nietzsche, John the Apostle, and a Wyoming Trip Report

On speech, truth, and the printed word
The Social Mobility Illusion

On Gregory Clark's 2014 book The Son Also Rises, one of the most remarkable economics book I've read this year.
Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy

A long-running historical gradient suggests that individuals will enjoy full control over the creation, distribution, and monetization of their work, eventually evading all centralized platforms and arbitrary constraints.
What to Do After the Orgy

Baudrillard famously asked, "What are you doing after the orgy?" Our answer: Take a leap of faith about the ultimate truth, then harness the chaos of modernity to bring that truth into being.
Ask for the Truth: Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism

"Wham! I became Catholic the next day."
Society Is a Corpse That Purges at the Mouth

On Mary Moody Emerson.
The Montaigne Paradox

The greatest social power is achieved by withdrawing from society.
Write to Yourself and Yourself Alone

Sibi scribere.
Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio: Detailed Summary

Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.
Time Capsules and Air Lifts

News and updates, the essays of Samuel Johnson, and more...
Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier: Detailed Summary

Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: Detailed Summary

A detailed summary of René Girard's account of mimetic desire, scapegoating, violence, and Christianity.
Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest by Nick Land: A Detailed Guide

The high-water mark of revolutionary Deleuzian Feminism.
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre: A Detailed Guide

A critique of modern moral discourse and a proposal to revive the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics.
The Rising Returns to Focus

And the accelerating rate of paradigm turnover
On the Unleavened (A Thought for Easter)

"Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." —Corinthians 5:8
North by Northwest 2024: The Annual Other Life Meetup

Registration now open.
The Height From Which No One Is Cast Down

Seneca on philosophy as immortality
There Is a Time to Polish Your Rifle and a Time to Fire

Stendhal, Sex, Classics, Jews
A Simple View of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective

What could enjoy the Mandate of Heaven more than an autopoietic truth system offensive to all prestigious consensus and immune to human manipulation?
The Auteur and the Ghetto

Multipolar aesthetic warfare, cruelty, marriage, and Charlotte Perriand
Nietzsche on the Pride of the Philosopher in Contrast to the Slave

Slavery gets a bad rap, but it had one silver lining.
On the Miracle and Scandal of Education

You are allowed to go straight to true knowledge of the highest things.
The Magic, the Money, and the Madness

"The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions." —Samuel Butler
Introducing the New Monthly Print Issue

And the most important event we've ever hosted.
On Suburban Kings and Academic Revolutions

"If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago." —Hazlitt
Diogenes on Excellence and How to Be Unstoppably Happy

“Many men compete in digging and kicking, but no one at all in the pursuit of human excellence.” —Diogenes
On Idea Hoarding

Stop saving your best ideas for later because later never comes.
St. Francis and the Obscure Logic of Cultural Influence

Do you have what it takes to leave behind a long-lasting institution?
Unpopular Truths About Mate Selection

A man should not seek intellectual satisfaction from his wife, but from the only place men have ever found it.
And We're Back... Welcome to Other Life 2024

A return to the masters, a republic of letters.

2023

Nick Land on AI Acceleration

"The world is becoming hypersensitive to signs."
Lacan, Leibniz, and English as a Programming Language

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” —Lacan
There is No Winning the Culture War

To win the culture war, leave the culture war.
The Independent Scholar's Guide to Twitter/X

On Algorithmic Publishing with Dignity
Virilio, Parenting, and the Network State

"There is something in the synchronization of emotion that surpasses the power of standardization of opinion that was typical of the mass media in the second half of the 20th century."
On Form, Israel, and the Death Athletic

Why Writing on the Internet Still Hasn't Been Tried
Emerson's 21 Principles of Self-Reliance

Why intelligence and knowledge are overrated, while honesty and courage are underrated.
On Shakespeare, Wyoming, and Merely Staying Afloat

“You are hanging on by a very fine thread, and I dig that about you.”
Return to the Future of Classical Education

Three reflections toward the acceleration of traditional knowledge.
The Billionaire Gentleman Scholar

Why the future belongs to the wordcel tinkerer.
Generate Subtle Tweets From an Essay in the Style of the Author

This script will take your essay text, extract key points, and use function-calling to create a subtle thread composed of your ideas. It works and it’s damn better than any tweet generator I’ve ever...
How to Build Software With Natural Language

I’ve built two fully-functioning web apps so far. One is deployed to the web, the other will be soon. They both do things, and they both can take payments that go into my bank account. Each one took...
Recursively Self-Improving Writers

Then, about two weeks ago, I had a real idea...
Plato, Prose, and "Selective Breeding"

On reading Plato's Republic, writing better, and another nail in the coffin of institutional publishing.
The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Borges, Heisenberg

"Humanity forgets... that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels." —Borges
The Delirium of Reason: On William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984)

"Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names."
Montaigne, Mary Emerson, and the Race to Own Yourself

"Always do what you are afraid to do." —Mary Moody Emerson
Intent on Truth: St. Augustine's Philosophy of History in The City of God

"Life eternal is the supreme good, death eternal the supreme evil, and that to obtain the one and escape the other we must live rightly."
If You Can Articulate, You’re All Set: Russell, Yeats, Gaddis

"The things I want are not in any country, nor in any job." —William Gaddis
Everything You Know About Audience-Building is Wrong

And what you should do instead.
War as the Truest Form of Divination: On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Meet the 7-foot albino who says you should petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute.
"Ask for the Truth:" The Medium and the Light by Marshall McLuhan

What the media won't tell you about the famous media theorist.
The Solitary Volcano: Four Lessons from the Life of Ezra Pound

"If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good." —Ezra Pound
Cybergothic: From John Milton to Nick Land

"It all starts for you with a casual channel-hopper question: What's happening on the other side?"
Ezra Pound and the Aristocratic Spirit

On the Pursuit of Artistic Excellence
Signaling Through the Flames: Artaud's Inquisition

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.”
Catholic Instead of What? By Alasdair MacIntyre

Transcript of a public lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre.
René Girard's Anthropology of the Cross

Can social science vindicate religion, or should we respect the Cartesian Bargain instituted 400 years ago?
On Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927)

"The most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing."
The Industrialization of the Mind

Reflections on the judicious use of social media.
Excess Vitality and Reversible Modernity: Wyndham Lewis, Leo Strauss, and the Art of Reading

"Intelligence would be electrified by naïveté and humor."
Literary Outlaw: Three Lessons from William S. Burroughs

Never seek to impress, having kids is no excuse, and the absolute necessity of a high-intensity, private friend group.
The Weight of Glory

And how to find secret weapons.
From Self-Pity to Pulitzer: Lessons from the Life of John Kennedy Toole

Why you should never count yourself out as a writer, especially in the internet era.
Harold Bloom's 4 Rules for Reading

"A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light."
Reading is Selfish, Elitist, and Anti-Social

Reflections on Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000)
Welcome to the new Other Life

I am asking you to quit all of your passive media consumption to read great books and write the truth every single day. Or unsubscribe now!
ȘȈǤƝȘ 63: Reality Splitters

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 64: Only Physicists and Dancers Escape

Master Baby by William Quiller Orchardson (1886)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 65: No Other But This Eternal Life

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 66: Variant Judgment

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 67: The Naming Power

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 68: Urbit Apocalypse

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 70: Small Games

A Scene in Leigh Woods, Francis Danby (1822)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 69: Texan Cybergothic

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 71: Imperceptible War

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 72: Nomads Never Travel

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, it must be pretty cool. Subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 74: Cold Winds

Welcome to Signs of Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. It's about philosophy and science on the frontiers of internet culture. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 75: The secret of victory

The Artist in His Studio by Henry Alexander (1860-1894)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 73: The Greatest Hazard of All

The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window by James McIntosh Patrick, 1948
ȘȈǤƝȘ 77: Water in the Desert

Illustrated depiction of North Africa by British Orientalist artist Augustus Osborne Lamplough
ȘȈǤƝȘ 78: Abysmal Knowledge

In the Middle of the Valley by Ivan Shishkin (1883)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 76: Power Whispers

Welcome to Signs of Life, a periodic roundup letter from Other Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 79: Rite Makes Might

The Baptism by Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1892)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 80: Flatline

Black Lake Technical Institute in Northern Ontario, ancestral home of the Tzikvik
ȘȈǤƝȘ 81: Grace and Gaucherie

L 450 flat loudspeaker, TG 60 reel-to-reel tape recorder and TS 45 control unit by Dieter Rams for Braun
ȘȈǤƝȘ 82: Fear in the Clever

Landscape With a Clump of Trees by Théodore Rousseau (1844)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 83: The Imperceptible House

You're invited here for the weekend of November 4-6
ȘȈǤƝȘ 84: Secret Agents

Hegel, Napoleon, and the World Spirit on Horseback
ȘȈǤƝȘ 85: There Is No Regime

Welcome to Signs of Life, a periodic roundup letter from Other Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 86: Enlightenment How?

Brutalist Silence, interior by Annabell Kutucu
ȘȈǤƝȘ 87: Self-Reliance

Welcome to Signs of Life, a periodic roundup letter from Other Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 88: Subdued to Fate

Renzo Piano Building Workshop offices in Genoa via Benjamin Schneider
ȘȈǤƝȘ 90: Kings of the Realm

Welcome to Signs of Life, a periodic roundup letter from Other Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 91: The Smoking Room

The Smoking Room with Monkeys by Abraham Teniers (1629-1670)
ȘȈǤƝȘ 92: The Duel After the Masquerade

The Duel After the Masquerade by Jean-Léon Gérôme
ȘȈǤƝȘ 93: Well Directed Attention

Welcome to Signs of Life, our periodic roundup edition sharing the best ideas, art, code, and events from the Other Life community on Urbit and beyond. If someone sent you this, subscribe for...
ȘȈǤƝȘ 94: Kindness Is Not Fondness

City of London (1951), Robert Frank. "London was black, white, and gray, the elegance, the style, all present in front of always changing fog…”
ȘȈǤƝȘ 95: An Edifying Death

The Funeral of Shelley (1889) by Louis Edouard Fournier. In 1822, the poet died in a shipwreck. From left to right, that's Trelawney, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron.
ȘȈǤƝȘ 96: The Unbearable Repartee

Villa by the Sea (1865) by Arnold Böcklin
A Child is Not the Most Important Thing

Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956) by Charles and Ray Eames
A machine superintelligence might never display itself

This seems to me a crucial point not often discussed by the AI Risk folks such as Bostrom and Yudkowsky. Whether it’s a bug or a feature of the AI Risk industry is harder to know, a thorn in the side...
A Realm of One's Own: Urbit and the Next Creator Economy

Holium's new desktop app for Urbit communities
A Theory of Verbal Inflation

“All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not from want of honor or virtue, but from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.” —John Adams in a...
Abjection

To be a philosopher one must be abject, and the reason a lot of people don't understand anything about this concept is because most contemporary philosophers want to be respected; they want to be in...
AcademiaLeaks, University of Chicago Edition

I was just sent this by an anonymous reader. It's not private but it's not in the news. The reader says "Haha imminent collapse. For real though, mostly suggestions for more committees..." They went...
Advancing to Level 2

I’ve now been on Patreon for one year. It's been good, but I think I need to level up. Would you like to help? If so, I have a new flashy object with your name on it. Read on.
Algorithms and prayers

The mild-mannered socialist humanist says it's evil to use algorithms to exploit humans for profit, but the articulation of this objection is an algorithm to exploit humans for profit. Self-awareness...
Against the Epistemic Status

I've been considering the idea of assigning an "epistemic status" to each of my blog posts, in the fashion of Scott Alexander. Basically: adding an addendum at the top of each blog post indicating...
All men by nature desire to know

“All men by nature desire to know.” — Aristotle, Metaphysics
An automated system for delivering high volumes of exclusive content to patrons

This took a lot of tinkering, but I think I've finally figured out the best currently available way to manage and deliver a wide variety of exclusive items to patrons.
American Cities are Vastly Superior to European Cities

Somehow, Americans have gotten the impression that European cities are paragons of intelligent urbanism.
An Effort Allocator for Content Creators

If you're trying to build a long-term intellectual life on the internet, one of the biggest problems you'll face is figuring out how to allocate your effort. There is no template for doing this...
Are Politically Correct Students Better or Worse Students?

In my current book project, one of my goals is to provide the fullest possible empirical accounting of the strange new persona sometimes derisively called the "social justice warrior."
Are the greatest beneficiaries of Effective Altruism its proponents?

[I’m not sure how much I believe this, this just barely passed my threshold of post-worthiness.]
Aristocracy and Communism

Communism remains the best conceivable form of human organization, and it can work, but the major catch is that it requires something that smells intolerably fishy to those who are most likely to...
Audience structure on the Left and Right of new indy media

It looks to me like the audience structure of public intellectuals and/or "content creators" differs across the Right and Left. Right-leaning writers/creators in contemporary culture seem to enjoy a...
Barbarians Past the Gate

2 million full-time “content creators,” outside any professional sanction; the election of Donald Trump against an airtight media consensus certain of its impossibility; mass, hysterical preference...
Bear Traps

It is very clever how Moldbug chooses extra-provocative phrases and examples—for instance, extended reflections on the successful infrastructure projects of the Third Reich. He likes to purposefully...
Becoming Imperceptible (1)

Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly stress the importance of becoming imperceptible, but the idea remains poorly understood.
Beware, rationalism!

A fatal flaw of rationalism is that the spread of rational thinking often causes a net-decrease of rationality across the population. For every type of logical fallacy, for instance, there is a...
Bioweapon

A few months ago, Martin Shkreli wrote a blog post from prison entitled, "Love is a Battlefield." It was about the stock market. The post never mentions love or battlefields. I've been wondering what...
Calling all indie thinkers (literally)

Over the past week, I’ve conducted more than ten private Skype interviews with a diverse group of internet intellectuals, “content creators” of the higher-brow variety, cancellation-vulnerable...
Camping in Bear Country

Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)
Can you do a PhD if you have ADHD?

I received this question recently from a reader. Here is how I replied. I also made this video if you’d prefer to hear my thoughts that way. This post and the video are not exactly the same.
Catholicism as Nomad War Machine (Deleuze and Chesterton)

Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life. Imagination does not breed insanity....
Caviar Cope

I watched The White Lotus because my wife told me about it, and I saw people talking about it. I didn't really enjoy the first episode, and I didn't learn anything, but I figured it would get better,...
Communism Is Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Nothing Else

Money is a trap, but how? For many years I believed that radical intellectuals and political revolutionaries (interchangeable terms, I thought) should simply eschew instrumental calculations...
Cyber-Hype Techonomics: The CCRU and Crypto

The endpoint of the digital revolution is cyber-hype techonomics, the confluence of cyber-hype (the digital coordination of collective desire around the promise of a future outcome) and techonomics...
Database Animals, Financialized

Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942) by Piet Mondrian
Decouple intellectualism and intelligence

Speak of the intellectual life and a lot of people will think you’re pretentious; they think you’re calling yourself intelligent.
Deleuze’s Troublesome Inheritance (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)

Now that the book is a little more than 75% done, I figure I should start posting some excerpts. Did you know Deleuze’s parents were both fascists? Good son that he was, though, he never disavowed...
Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned #9)

This is the ninth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear...
Deleuze, Cybernetics, Evolution, Academics

Alexander Galloway thinks that Deleuze sees cybernetics as an enemy, or even the enemy:
Democrats wanted strongman rule way more than Republicans — until Trump arrived

That graph is from the new book by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (2019), Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism.
Depressive capitalist realism

I recently received an email challenging some of my past comments on depression and public political theorizing. Here is the main gist of the email and beneath it is my response.
Disconnected

Once again, I'm absolutely plagued with a desire to quit everything normal, to mentally and socially withdraw from everything one is supposed to know...
Disrobed Academics, Crimethinc Anarchism, and the Resurrection

Thanks to some good questions in last night's livestream, I managed to give a relatively concentrated hour of talking, with a surprisingly high signal/noise ratio (relative to my average, which isn't...
Dr. Samuel Johnson: Hustler, Savage, Grifter, Great

Samuel Johnson's Club. From the left: Boswell, Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, Paoli, Burney, Wharton, Goldsmith
Does a country's separation of powers affect its status culture?

I was recently wondering whether countries with more centralized executive and legislative powers (less checks and balances) might have more status-intensive cultures — or in some way a qualitatively...
Durkheim Meltdown

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim believed that one defining feature of a profession is that the attitudes and behaviors that count as "professional" within it are of no interest to the general...
Early Days of Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 10)

This is the tenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear...
Educated Errors? On Perceptions of Trump's Ideology

More educated individuals generally know more than less educated individuals. If you test what they know about any random political issue, for instance, uneducated individuals are more likely to give...
Eichmann in Oxford

I have recently been assigned to an Ethics Reviewer position, and I just had my first training. One of the lecture slides for this training was quite audacious: It placed the UK's current academic...
Emerson on the American Scholar

I've recently taken to the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson because he was arguably the first world-class public intellectual of a distinctly American type. Of course there were great thinkers...
Empty Pockets

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) by Nam June Paik
Evaluating Exit Modes: Resign or Be Fired? (How Academia Got Pwned 11)

This is the eleventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.
Every Angel is Terrifying by Riva Tez and Praxis Society

Riva Tez and Praxis Society just published a really lovely video, which I think deserves to be read as text. I transcribed it for my own archive, so I figured I might as well post some of my favorite...
Eric Weinstein's Error

Eric Weinstein has released his highly self-aggrandized anticipated research paper on geometric unity.
Explaining Who Gets to Speak at Universities

I recently received the following question from a journalist (paraphrased): "Universities host many Islamist extremists as speakers, but they order comedians performing on campus to not offend...
Exponential Satanism: Girard and Digital Technology

Christianity invented the concept of defending the victim. In pre-Christian societies, collective violence against innocent scapegoats was commonplace. With the revelation that humans would kill God...
Ezra Pound and the Curse of Genius

I mentioned last week I've been reading about the life of Ezra Pound, which is somehow both inspiring and sobering.
Fear and Dissembling

Philosophically, it is impossible to ground claims about the ultimate value or quality of living entities, e.g. genetic quality.
Fascism over yourself is called autonomy

When I recently sketched out a system for bootstrapping a libertarian communist society from a combination of AI and blockchain, I was genuinely surprised to receive so many indignant accusations to...
Flannery O'Connor and the Mysterious Secrets of Writing

In 1955, Harvey Breit asked the great Irish-American writer Flannery O'Connor, "What is the secret of writing?" She said:
Free Hierarchy

Libertatem hierarchia. What we call European feudalism was the becoming–patchwork of the Roman Empire. As the control structures of the Roman Empire atrophied, and the de facto liberty of its...
From the Imperceptible Country

The Other Life community is also known as the Imperceptible Country. Think of it as a Web2.5 community.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism as Rousseauean Techno-Commercial Cyber-Manorialism

My take on Fully Automated Luxury Communism is that — if it is anything — it should probably look something like a Rousseauean techno-commercial cyber-manorialism. In short, think The Four Hour Work...
Garden State Cybergothic

I grew up in New Jersey, but I got out as soon as I graduated high school. Never really did much site-seeing or interesting travel within NJ, I mostly just skateboarded in the Asbury Park area and...
Fully automated personal brands

Right now, it’s still seen as bad taste to overly automate your personal social media — and for good reason. But taste changes, and it always follows the money.
Genetic research disrupts racist views of welfare

Following on my post from yesterday, I've been thinking about how the widespread and often racist views of "welfare" in the United States — especially among poor whites — fester on top of the...
Getting High on Easter Sunday

I got high in the morning, for the first time since I can remember. There exists a defensible Christian opposition to drugs, no doubt, but it's poorly calibrated to the Information Age.
Gunslingers and Iconoclasts

More shootouts have occurred in Texas than any other state in the US.
Hallow be thy name

To say that one believes in God is to be stupid and wrong by the definition of these words in modern secular culture. And yet I believe that I believe, so how? The word “God” does not mean what...
Hard Forking Reality (Part 1)

TLDR: Environmental complexity increases the cost of adjudicating interpersonal disagreements about the true model of reality, while information-processing power increases the payoffs (and decreases...
Hard Forking Reality (Part 2): Communication and Complexity

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 3.
Hard Forking Reality (Part 3): Apocalypse, Evil, and Intelligence

This post is the third in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 2.
Hateful Silence

What's great about modern tolerance is that we're rarely confronted with negative judgments about our personal choices (notwithstanding the resultingly elevated sensitivity to negative judgments,...
Heard Mentality

The trial of Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard is like a magical keyhole into the hidden realities of Hollywood power politics and modern gender relations. It’s like a little wormhole in the Hollywood...
How Academia Got Pwned (1)

This is the first post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.
How accurate social valuation of individual characters generates true communism

But how would this create communism, you ask? Well, first of all, the small number of highly productive people would want to pay for a comfortable and dignified subsistence for everybody else! Why...
How I'm Successfully Digitizing Another Professorial Function: Consulting

[Update: Much of this turned out to be prescient, in fact so prescient that a lot below has been transcended by the creation of IndieThinkers.org. So I'm not really helping many people personally and...
How many readers do you need? Kierkegaard only hoped for one

From Copenhagen on his 30th birthday (May 5, 1843), Kierkegaard wrote the following in the Preface for his first book, Two Upbuilding Discourses:
How to Deal With Punishment According to Nietzsche and Spinoza

I was just reviewing my copy of Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, before I send it off to someone through Version 2 of my book recommendation experiment. The person said they wanted something I...
How to kill the grump in your head (Deleuzean #NiceRx?)

I can sometimes sense inside of myself, already, the early stirrings of elderly grumpiness. Needless to say, I do not like this, and so at this relatively early stage in my life, I must do everything...
How Urbit Wins

Philip Monk co-authored the Urbit whitepaper with Curtis Yarvin in 2016. He's now one of the top engineers working on Urbit.
Hunger Games But Really Slow

Une Passion Dans Le Désert (2017) by Antonio Recalcati
Hyperstition Americana

I like Lana Del Rey. She’s not super hot, and she's not a great singer — but she’s become an entity that is “super hot” and “great singer.” That’s true art.
I Have a Dream (How Academia Got Pwned 6)

This is the sixth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this...
I think I built a Liberal Arts college on the internet

I've spent the past 2 years building a business.
If education is signaling, does moral signaling become a viable major?

In a recent post, I encountered an interesting empirical fact about the college wage premium accruing to low-ability college grads over the period 1979-1994. Looking at a 2003 article by Tobias, I...
Inscrutably Obvious: A Paradox of Technological Change

In 1997, everyone thought the cable industry was dead.
Intelligence as a political cleavage

Intelligence is increasingly a political cleavage, thanks to the phenomenon of skill-biased technological change.
Introducing Deleuze vs. Heidegger on Technology, Enslavement,  and Escape

That’s the title of an online course I’m developing with Johannes Niederhauser. You may remember Johannes from his widely admired appearance on Other Life: “Heidegger, Ecstatic Time, and the...
Introducing monthly seminars

For the past two months, I've been hosting private online seminars for patrons supporting me at $25/month or more. The first one was good, but the second session really took off. Participants became...
Introducing Statistical On-Chain Analysis

Impulse Response Functions exemplify the insightfulness of proper time-series analysis, showing the expected effect of X on Y over time. Graph by Kevin Kotzé.
IRLmaxxing Against the Soydevs, Indie Magazines, Filmmaking, Urbit

Today I want to share some highlights from the last few episodes of the Other Life podcast.
Is Facebook the Largest Corporate Fraud Ever?

Jaw-dropping new post up today on Naked Capitalism, “Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fake Accounts Ponzi Scheme,” by Aaron Greenspan.
Is it racist to use the Kekistani flag?

I was recently queried by a reporter in Arizona covering a story about some conservative university students who caused a scandal by displaying a Kekistani flag. It turns out that I am now the...
Is parental social status a mixed blessing? On toleration for occupational drudgery

Many people assume that coming from parents with high social status is an advantage, because it would appear to increase the probability of gaining high social status for oneself. But what if...
It's rational to move somewhere beautiful to write

Having unique and true ideas is, pound for pound, the most valuable human resource in the world. If you are blessed with periodically arriving flashes of insight, in the long-run it is economically...
How to know if you’re talking to a wokescold: A scientific method for preventing IRL flame wars

[FYI: If you’re interested in data-blogging like this, I’m offering a little free course on it.]
Left Singularity

…modern political history has a characteristic shape, which combines a duration of escalating ‘progress’ with a terminal, quasi-punctual interruption, or catastrophe – a restoration or ‘reboot’. Like...
Lessons from Nietzsche’s Awful Publishing Results

Independent intellectuals today should study closely one of the most profound and impactful thinkers in all of modern philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche. I’m not referring to his ideas (although one...
Let’s make personal computers rugged, dignified, and enduring

A Sol LeWitt wall drawing in construction
The Other Life Gift Guide

I've never done a gift guide before! Probably because the Other Life remit has been so wide over the years, it was never clear to me what types of things it would make sense to recommend.
Other Life News and Links (February 6, 2019)

Other Life started as a “side project,” but it seems now to have escaped its cage, destroying my normal life, and growing itself into the project, which is now my life itself (at least until I go...
Life update from the Sunshine State

It's been about three months since I set sail from all currently existing institutions. After finalizing our business in the UK, saying goodbyes, and flying back to the United States, it's now been a...
Make Communism Elite Again (Corralling Desperate Hordes Is Not a Blueprint)

Any serious theory of communism needs to have not only an account of how and why communism has always failed, but also an account of how and why it could work differently now. Ideally, a parsimonious...
The Meaning of Clubhouse vs. Taylor Lorenz

This is not just another Twitter beef, but a bellwether for the changing structure of intellectual influence.
Modern Liberalism Is Not Peace, It's Pacification

Readers of my work over the past few years will know that I have long been interested in how natural human rebelliousness gets pacified (1, 2, 3).
Millennials, Migrate to Mountain Mansions

[In less than 30 days my wife and I are packing up our few belongings and driving up into Colorado, Utah, and/or Montana. We haven’t decided where yet, but we’re going to be renting somewhere,...
Multiple heuristic equilibria (cognitive patchwork)

If we are living through a “semantic apocalypse,” a likely implication is that the signal-to-noise ratio in most explicit political debates is not only lower than it might seem, but asymptotically...
Mushrooms, Modafinil, and Mass Shooters (How Academia Got Pwned 2)

This is the second post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. Tell me: Would you like to read the whole story, edited, in...
Mussolini: A Wormhole in the Fabric of History?

Hyperrealistic fashion photograph Benito Mussolini in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome natural outdoor lighting --ar 16:9 --v 5
The New Frontier of Personal Computing

Ever since I articulated my first thesis about Urbit two years ago, I’ve never felt more confident that Urbit is the future of personal computing.
Not everyone needs to be heard

One of the worst mistakes I made as a younger man was believing that everyone just “needs to be heard.” Some do. I don't relinquish at all my conviction that exhaustive, collective, emotional...
Not making progress or losing motivation?

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I was recently hired on a monthly retainer to do some intellectual consulting. Basically, a very smart person just needed to some help getting a project off the ground —...
Now, wars start themselves

Major wars have become less frequent, but a curious feature of the wars we still observe is that almost nobody starts them. When wars occur today, they appear to start themselves, or are started by...
NXIVM was a rationality cult

From 1998 to 2018, Keith Raniere built one of the most rationally optimized private enterprises in recorded history. NXIVM was a private company that synthesized all of the most powerful and...
Occupations and Their Ideologies

Occupations are strongly sorted by ideology. Political scientist Adam Bonica has produced reliable and consistent estimates of ideological placement for a huge number of individuals, politicians, and...
On Agnes Callard

Greek Girls Playing Ball (1889) by Frederic Leighton
On British Reservedness and American Boisterousness

The British are known be to reserved, and Americans boisterous, but I don’t think Americans communicate more in their higher volume of noises and gesticulations. If one could somehow measure the...
On Intellectual Twitter Beefs

Smart and capable people spend vast amounts of time engaged in useless, circular debates on a platform that is arguably designed to thwart intellectual illumination. Why? No sane person would ever...
On Not Being Fired (How Academia Got Pwned 12)

This is the twelfth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear...
On the business model of the private intellectual

I built my business in order to run a successful research program, including for the analysts that work at Bismarck. The priority often there is intellectual growth, accumulation of this type of...
On Writing in the Age of Machine Intelligence

On taste and brand in the face of AI acceleration.
On Those Who Worship the Big Other

Nina Power just lost her gig at The Wire because of her appearance on my measly haphazard experimental one-man Youtube channel with no particular identity and a whopping ~2k followers. (Feel free to...
Open Letter Concerning Luke Turner

In a paranoiac and libelous screed written recently against Nina Power, yours truly is mentioned several times. The so-called "open letter" calls me a neo-reactionary, among other things I am not....
The Optimal Podcasting Process for Indie Thinkers: Automate and Proliferate

Here is the podcasting process I’ve developed over nearly 2 years of iteration. It’s not perfect, and it’s not for everyone, but for many indie thinkers I think this is the best system. Certainly...
Other implications and observations

Now, for all the anti-communist right-wingers out there, you might still strongly doubt all of this. And indeed, you have some good reasons to fear that in such a situation the Masses would...
Paid Vacation Begins (How Academia Got Pwned 3)

This is the third post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.
Personal Computer or Personal Enemy?

The personal computer has become a personal enemy.
Paul Skallas Is a Scammer and I Called It in 2020

I just have to take a little victory lap on this one…
Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit

And what to do instead.
Peter Thiel's Theory of California

I'm constantly hearing about California’s acute mismanagement problems, but I haven't heard any good, general theories of what's going on. Until recently.
Planning a tour, would you like me to visit you?

I have received just enough speaking invitations to announce that I'm pretty much embarking on a DIY book tour. Basically how punk bands do it: no agents, no rules, no frills. Would you like my wife...
Post-Structuralism and False Authority

A major epistemological foul in Continental Philosophy is that it often treats concepts as if they were tested and validated empirical models, when they are not. People routinely speak as if X’s...
Progress report for first book project

I launched a pre-order form for Based Deleuze a little more than a month ago (June 20, 2019). I committed to publishing a short book of about 20k words by September 20 at the latest.
Quick note on a site change

For those of you who've subscribed to receive my blog posts via email, you'll notice my posts are now coming from a different email address. This is just a quick note to let you know, in case you're...
Radical Europeans of the Twentieth Century — In Color

Machine-learning techniques for automated colorization are increasingly effective and accessible. I came across a Python library by Algorithmia that makes colorization very easy. If you have a...
Rap is not art but it’s cool

Rap is not art, it’s stylized abjection. Same with punk. Indeed, this is one reason why it has been possible for rap and punk to merge today, musically and sociologically. Who ever would have...
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, and Intellectual Strategy

In 1836, when his Twitter profile still showed nothing but some obscure username and the face of a Roman statue, Ralph Waldo Emerson published a badass blog post called Nature. The day before he...
Reasons why the IHME model might be under-predicting coronavirus deaths in the USA

Most political elites in the United States right now seem to be invoking one epidemiological model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.
Reasons not to start an online magazine

TLDR: The magazine model is not the best choice for indie intellectuals trying to start something. Two reasons: (1) Accelerating digital culture requires you to move fast and group projects move...
Religion, guilt, and creativity

One feature of religion a lot of secular people do not understand is that, although religion can make one feel guilty at times, it also prevents one from feeling guilty about trivial matters. Secular...
Religion is an extra-rational condition for the possibility of rationality

G.K. Chesterton happily understood in advance what the Frankfurt School theorists only observed with great horror after the fact. Namely, that without an authority such as the Catholic Church, placed...
Remodeling the Units and Flows of Intellectual Production (How Academia Got Pwned 8)

This is the eighth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear...
How Renaissance Rationalization and Oceanic Navigation Lock Into Commodotization Takeoff

Regatta on the Canale Grande (1740) by Canaletto
Reputation (How Academia Got Pwned 5)

This is the fifth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. At some point, I will very likely edit and compose this...
Results from Based Deleuze

The Based Deleuze project is now officially complete, so it’s time to do some final accounting. Here I will review the financials, the labor/time costs, and the main lessons learned.
Respectability Is Not Worth It (Reply to SlateStarCodex)

I've had some vague notion of trying to contribute more to other intellectual communities, but whenever I start to write a quick reply, I end up hunched over in a room gone dark from nightfall with a...
Review of Based Mansion LA: Observations, Finances, and Bibliography

On the weekend of February 28, I rented a mansion in Los Angeles for two nights and stayed there with about 15 people from the internet. I facilitated a mini-conference; everyone there presented some...
Rethinking intellectual production models (How Academia Got Pwned 7)

This is the seventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. This will probably become a book. If you'd like to hear...
Riva Tez on Epistemological Freedom

I recently sat down with Riva to talk about the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, why the brain might be an antenna, why she moved away from Transhumanism, why Rationalism is cringe, how she...
Samo Burja and the New Private Intellectual

I just published a new episode of the podcast. Here I collect some of its best insights, in text for your convenience. From Other Life Episode #129, Samo Burja on Intellectual Legitimacy and His...
Satisfice Money, Maximize Freedom

Welcome to today's issue of Other Life. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here. Instead of paywalling posts, we offer a unique community membership.
Scientific introspection and the analytical advantage of average people

When you have thoughts and feelings and drives, note them and try to understand which variables about yourself cause them. The best way to do this is to compare yourself to others, and the best way...
Segmentation and personalization for philosophers and scientists

The techniques used by today's marketing professionals, such as "customer segmentation" and "web-page personalization," would appear to be emblems of instrumental, exploitative communication. Today,...
The Seldom Frequented Path

Welcome to Signs of Life, a periodic roundup letter from Other Life, the coolest newsletter in the world. If someone sent you this, subscribe for yourself here.
Sell Outs and Sell Ins

It's interesting to note that, since I've shifted a lot of my intellectual energy to autonomous work on the internet, I've received a fair number of accusations about "selling out" or "pandering."
Shared roots versus hard forks

I’m reading with interest the recent comeback post by Curtis Yarvin. I might have some longer thoughts later, but for the moment I just wanted to quibble with part of his empirical model.
The Shock is Almost Lethal

Dear reader, I write you today with two interesting notes and one last-minute opportunity.
Show Me

Leptis Magna, a prominent city of the Carthaginian Empire (Libya).
Signs 89: Exiles in This World

The California coast in Pescadero (Imperceptible Mansion, November 4-6 2022)
Signs of Life, May 2021: Truth is a Schelling Point

“When someone reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, 'And I sentenced them to stay at home.’” —Diogenes
So what if I’m afraid of death

I must admit to feeling afraid of death. I am drawn to religious belief, in part, because I think I do want help with my fear of death. I don’t see why it would be an intellectual violation to want...
Social AI is Coming

It's never been possible for an arbitrary number of average people to combine Turing-complete computation and financial liquidity within one seamless, integrated operating system and graphical user...
Some news and updates resettling

I'm now back in the United States, for the foreseeable future. My last two weeks in the UK were possibly my favorite two weeks in my 5.5 years there. On February 28, we went up to London with only...
Some personal reflections on Jordan Peterson

If you've been following me for some time, you'll know that current affairs commentary is not exactly my strong suit. I don't really keep up on the news and my own thoughts and ideas are quite...
St. Augustine, the Kernel, and the Long Run

In The City of God, St. Augustine points out that philosophers can very well establish a rational system of ethics, but we humans suffer from infirmities that prohibit us from consistently executing...
Should you start a Substack?

TLDR: For most of you, no, starting a Substack is not the best way to build a financially sustainable long-term writing project. You should definitely build an email list, but you should do it with a...
Stream Theory

As a livestreamer, you ignore the entire world to focus your attention on a subset of people who are genuinely interested in you. Entrance into the practice of livestreaming immediately leads you to...
Student debt is worse than a bubble

I've often thought about higher education today as a kind of economic bubble, though I've always wondered if that's quite right. It seems to have the traits of a bubble: It seems overpriced, herd...
Study finds the relationship between genes and earnings increased after 1980

Someone sent me a recent NBER working paper by Nicholas W. Papageorge and Kevin Thom on polygenic scores and educational attainment/earnings. Most pertinent to my theoretical interests is that the...
Suicide should be slightly stigmatized

For people on the brink of suicide, struggling with excruciating suffering, no good would ever come — and wanton cruelty would certainly result — from stigmatizing their difficult situation. I wish...
Technocommunist Vectors: Radar Edition

When I first laid out my idea for a neo-feudal technocommunist patch, I only waved my hand at the coming technological pathways to my proposed polity. In that first talk, I just hypothesized that...
Technology, Class, and Ideological Realignment

I appreciate Michael Lind's model of the contemporary American class structure. He asks us to visualize two horseshoe structures:
Terre Thaemlitz on why you should just stop

Woker Nexus in my Discord server recently introduced me to the work of Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles. (If Woker Nexus sounds familiar, Woker is one of the more active participants in my Youtube...
Testosterone is declining because it's illegal

A lot of people wonder why testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades.
The Billion Dollar Personal Server

The City Rises (1910) by Umberto Boccioni
The Categorical Dual of the Blockchain

Ted Blackman is a senior engineer at Tlon and one of the most advanced Urbit engineers in the world.
The Case for Annexing Mexico and Canada

My first argument is Manifest Destiny—the most Alpha political theory doctrine ever conceived.
The Catholic Coordination Game

[Disclosure: I don't actually know that much about European feudalism. Most of my posts contain a fair bit of speculative guesswork and imagination, but after finishing this I felt compelled to make...
The Crypto Reformation

In my latest podcast with former historian Joshua Rosenthal—The Crypto Reformation—there were some gems I want to share with you.
The Cybernetic Trinity

The Trinity is one of the more vexing doctrines in all of the Catholic tradition. God is one, and yet God is three: the father, the son Christ who walked on earth, and the Holy Spirit. To make...
The Cyberpositive AI-aligned Communism (CAIC) Protocol

In Atomization and Liberation, I began to outline a vision of small-c communism divorced from the corruption of modern Communism as most people know it. As I've explored many times before, the entire...
The Devil Is in the Denial

The religious, who possess only tacit knowledge of the pragmatic truths inhering in religion, should be forgiven their occasional intellectual backwardness, for the same reason we forgive the idiocy...
The Facts of the World Are Not the End of the Matter: On Wittgenstein's Religion

Wittgenstein’s hut (restored) in Skjolden, Norway. All photos courtesy Jon Bolstad and © Wittgenstein Initiative.
The First Problem of Being Perceptible Is Being Manipulated (Becoming Imperceptible 2)

This is the second post in a series, on the concept of "becoming imperceptible" in Deleuze and Guattari. The first one is here.
The Freedom-Specificity Tradeoff

When it comes to internet writing, a highly specific brand will grow faster than a vague or mysterious brand.
The Great Flaw in West Coast Thought

Welcome to today's issue of Other Life. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here. Instead of paywalling posts, we'll give you a new sovereign computer.
The Highest Human Activity

Welcome to today's issue of Other Life. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here. Instead of paywalling posts, we'll give you a new sovereign computer.
The Highest Ranking Non-Player Characters (How Academia Got Pwned 4)

This is the fourth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. I'm curious: Would you like to read the whole story,...
The Highest Reason is Always the Truest: Emerson's Method

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson in his first book Nature, everyone enjoys equal access to a kingdom as great as Adam’s or Caesar’s.
The Human Cartel, Part 1: The Working-Ruling Class

Why do so many people in large bureaucratic organizations spend so much time doing meaningless paperwork that has no effect on anything? One possible answer, suggested by David Graeber, is that the...
The Imperceptible Country

How I Gained Creative and Financial Independence. "The Paul Millerd episode and subsequent discussion has prompted me to share my experience & perspective in hopes that some will find it helpful and...
The Imperceptible Mechanisms of Deep Community

I started noticing this about three years ago.
The Improvement Illusion

Have you ever had a great idea and thought to yourself, "I need to write an essay about this," but then you never wrote a single word about it?
The interaction of education and race on Trump approval

The correlation between education and support for Trump is very different across the black-white divide. The graphs below I have taken from Civiqs.
The Key Ideas of Leo Strauss

Below is the text of an interview I conducted with political theorist Michael Millerman, PhD. Listen to this interview on the Other Life podcast or watch it on Youtube. We cover all the key ideas of...
The Long Run is Getting Shorter

St. Augustine says there are two cities: The City of God and the City of Man.
The net-negative utility of Utilitarianism in the long term

Utilitarianism, taken as a world-historical arrival at the level of civilization itself, might very well have a net-negative utility. It is perfectly plausible that an overly refined awareness of,...
The New Cyberpunk

Original photographs by the author. Urbit Assembly 2022 in Miami.
The Non-Fungible Aristocracy

Fidenza #531 by generative artist Tyler Hobbs. At time of writing, $11,362,995.
The Next Men of Letters

"Fine minds are seldom fine souls." —Richter
The non-linear effect of ability on earnings in the computer age

A reader/watcher/listener has brought to my attention another paper, which shows that, for college-educated individuals, earnings are a non-linear function of cognitive ability or g — at least in...
The Other Deplatforming

There is increasing awareness that social media can be bad for the mind—we use words like "addiction" and "distraction"—but we rarely discuss how social media can reshape the contents of the mind.
The Patchwork Intellectual

Patchwork intellectuals do not protest or endorse technological acceleration; they ride the waves of destruction wrought by disintermediation. They fall forward, sacrificing the twin pillars of...
The Psychology of Prohibiting Outside Thinkers

This post was first published on May 15, 2017 on my old personal site. I'm republishing it here because it will be new for a majority of Other Life readers; it was widely shared in 2017; it remains...
The Psychology of Supporting Open Borders

Angela Nagle makes the case that open borders are not consistent with leftist politics. The wonderful thing about the intensity of the culture wars right now is that, with a little bit of courage,...
The rich are more communist than they're allowed to be

When I talk about aristocratic communism — the idea that a functional communism might be achieved by organizing and enforcing respect for the rich, on condition they distribute wealth — many...
The Second Problem of Being Perceptible Is Motivational Highjacking (Becoming Imperceptible III)

Another problem with being perceptible is easy to understand in our current digital context. It is a problem we might summarize as the motivational problem. Being perceived triggers dopamine, and...
The Second Golden Age of Blogging

Many people say that “blogging is dead,” but dead for whom? Blogging remains powerful, just not for the same type of person who found it powerful in the “golden age of blogging” (roughly 2003-2009)....
The Singular Importance of Being Correct

Technocapitalism increases returns to judgment relative to labor.
The Struggle of the Independent Scholar

Welcome to today's issue of Other Life. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here. Instead of paywalling posts, we'll give you a new sovereign computer.
The Sweet Smell of Success

I'm the first to admit I usually don't love movies from before the 1970s.
The time to withdraw

"Being, as the most unique and most rare, in opposition to nothingness, will have withdrawn itself from the massiveness of beings, and all history—where it reaches down to its proper essence—will...
The Two Meanings of Reaction (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)

The following is an excerpt from my short book Based Deleuze, which will be published on September 20th. Pre-order here and you’ll receive it by email as soon as it’s released.
The Two Paths to Power

There are two paths to power: top-down and bottom-up.
The Univocity Debate in a Nutshell

From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze:
The Unreasonably Negative Effects of Podcast Listening

The feeling of listening to podcasts approximates the feeling of having original thoughts.
The Violent Focus of Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews in London. 13x20 feet. Bacon probably designed the large mirror himself in the 1930s when he worked as a furniture designer. Image scanned from Margarita...
The Vortex of Tiny Effects

This is a story about eggplants, do you have the courage to read it? 🍆
The worst that can happen is nothing

If you’re genuinely seeking the truth and you put something crappy into the world, nothing happens. There is no punishment for crappy content. It’s one of the simplest and most profound facts of...
The Young Balzac: Disordered Knowledge, Strange Student

I'd like to share with you some biographies of great writers, artists, maybe some inventors—people who represent the other life ethos—people who have produced great work from the fringes, or in weird...
Theology and experimental method

I think tomorrow morning I will take the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession). It will be the first time for more than 15 years. Why not? I will do it with absolute sincerity, but also reflect on...
There are no humans on the internet

The best way to build community and make friends on the internet is to treat all internet interlocutors as if they are real humans in a real-life, local village. If you do this, over time many people...
Thousands of Lovers Executed for AI Safety

Death of Chatterton (1856) by Henry Wallis
To Become Rich and Famous, Take a Vow of Poverty and Anonymity

When the famous documentarian Ken Burns first started doing his long, historical documentaries, he thought he was taking "a vow of anonymity and poverty,” he recalls.
Tools, sequences, and workflows

Automatic editing and uploading with Auphonic
Tour stop in Raleigh, North Carolina this Thursday May 16

Currently in the mountains of western North Carolina, I’m looking to buy an old broken down house somewhere for like $50k but I need to test Wifi quality first...
Truth = Joy = Power: Spinoza's Galaxy Brain

We live in a bourgeois culture where people hate intellectuals, the truth is. So, yes, of course there are stupid people on the internet who are really pretentious and think they're really smart....
Two kinds of hustle

To get the kind of life I want, or anywhere close to it, I realize I'm going to have to hustle like crazy. But one thing that's become immediately clear to me is that working hard has profoundly...
Unfair Competition (How Academia Got Pwned 13)

This is the thirteenth post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life. It's going to become a book, so for updates be sure to...
Utilitarianism incentivizes suffering, or victim culture as a child of rationalism

Insofar as people live according to its suggestions, Utilitarianism strangely incentivizes suffering. In a society where utilitarianism operates as the governing philosophy, the accommodation you...
Virtues of the Desert

Here is Joseph Ratzinger, formerly Pope Benedict, on St. John the Baptist.
Wang Yi's Other Life

A listener of the podcast writes me about a Christian pastor in China who was recently detained. The pastor Wang Yi has released a personal and theoretical statement that followers of my work (and...
WASP Microaggressions (MY #METOO MOMENT)

I've noticed I strongly favor words beginning with intense, brash sounds. Words which invite you to say them quickly and loudly. The paradigmatic example might be the greeting: "WHAaat's up, DUuude?"...
We Are All Conspiracy Theorists Now

The collapse of trust in mainstream authorities is discussed as if it is only one of many troubling data points. It's not. People are still underestimating the gravity of the interlocking trends that...
We Still Don’t Understand the Attention Economy

Simone Weil's ID card working for the French resistance
What Happened to National Geographic?

For today's issue we have a rare guest post, actually our first ever guest post—by the doctor and soldier Cornelius Stahlblau, author of The Outpost on Substack.
What am I doing?

Many different people are asking me what's going on with me. In different languages, sometimes gleefully and sometimes worriedly, I have been asked some variant of "what are you doing?" so many times...
What I'm reading: Ernst Jünger

I've been exploring the work of Ernst Jünger, which I've never really read until now. The most cursory searching confirms a high likelihood of this man entering the Other Life pantheon. Consider the...
What Would I Do Without This World

faceless incuriouswhere to be lasts but an instant where every instantspills in the void the ignorance of having beenwithout this wave where in the endbody and shadow together are engulfedwhat would...
What is an "image of thought" for Deleuze?

From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze:
When does blogging become worth it?

A misconception about blogging is that one needs X number of readers before it's worthwhile, where X is some dauntingly high number. But actually, you only need Y readers, such that when you write...
When Kipling Met Twain

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in his writing cabin at Quarry Farm in Elmira, NY. 1903. Photograph by Thomas E. Marr.
When not to go with the flow

The task of identifying the line between good and evil is like infinitesimal calculus. Mere intuitions are insufficient, which is why "going with the flow" so easily ends in evil. Many marriages fail...
Why I’m interested in blockchain tech for creators

I’m becoming more bullish on crypto, in particular the long-term value of Bitcoin and the shorter-term value of blockchain infrastructure for content creators.
Why no depiction of Hitler is evil enough

Robin Hanson thinks it the result of a signaling spiral, "wherein people strive to show how moral they are by thinking... even more lowly of standard exemplars of bad..." Certainly possible, and...
Why Do Muslim Immigrants and Western Leftists Like Each Other?

It's fairly well known that Muslim immigrants in Europe tend to support left-wing political parties, but it's not obvious why, given that Muslims tend to oppose key planks of Western social...
Why Virtue Ethics is Probably Correct

Die Römische Ruine in Schönbrunn (1832) by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
Why Write One Book When You Can Speak 18 Volumes?

Have you ever wondered how and why The Life of Samuel Johnson is so damn long (and influential), even though he's just rambling like a livestreamer on adderall? Some thoughts on the current frontiers...
Will the University of Austin Succeed?

I’ve been asked a few times now what I think about the new University of Austin.
Will the pandemic have partisan effects on voter turnout?

Election forecasts will probably err systematically in some way, given the unique shock of the pandemic. But in which direction might the forecasts err?
Writers are Losers

We live in a strange era where words and dreams and realities constantly crisscross in befuddling ways.
WYRD PATCHWORKSHOP

I was recently approached by Diffractions Collective in Prague, who are working with a group called Sdbs, about hosting a discussion event on my livestream. The topic is patchwork. I don't know...
Writing is a Single-Player Game

If you can figure out the truth, you should share it. You might help someone.
You can be neutral on a moving train

There's a popular idea that one can't avoid taking some political position because having no position is to support the status quo. In the words of Howard Zinn, "You can't be neutral on a moving...
You can’t be smarter than you are

This might sound obvious, but it’s not: You are only as smart as you are. People get stuck because they aspire to be smarter than they are. People refuse to produce until they are as smart as they...
You don’t have writer’s block, you’re just being evil

If you are unable to think and express words, something is certainly wrong, but you are not “blocked.” Your brain is a ceaseless machine. It identifies and creates connections. When it gets blocked,...
If you're a content creator, you're a tiny startup (you just don’t know it yet)

All of the following terms from Silicon Valley startup culture have direct analogues in the content-creation game. In the examples below, I’ll discuss a blogger or video producer who earns income via...
Reality Patchwork and Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism (Transcript)

[This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Diffractions/Sbds event, "Wyrd Patchwork," in Prague on September 22, 2018. The video can be found here. My talk begins at around the 2-hour and 6-minute...
CS Lewis, Edith Stein, and How to Make It as an Indie Writer

Hey gang, hope you're well—today I'm sending you some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast, Be Not Afraid with James Ellis.
Girard and Baudrillard on Pandemics and Plagues

Dear readers, I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast, The Hyperreal Plague: How Girard & Baudrillard Explain the Pandemic with Geoffrey Shullenberger.
Housewives on LSD and other secrets about the psychedelic revolution

"My impression of ketamine was... It's like a brand new skyscraper, all the walls, all the floors are carpeted in white, all the drinking fountains work, the elevators run smoothly, the fluorescent...
How Chris Williamson Grew Modern Wisdom From Zero to 450k Subscribers

Today I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast (#200): How Chris Williamson Grew Modern Wisdom From Zero to 450k Subscribers.
How Plato Made Himself the Most Influential Thinker Ever

Today, I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast, Plato Uncovered: Building Influence in the Ancient and Modern World with Alex Petkas.
How to Dominate Substack with Genetic Blackpills

I just published a new episode of the podcast. Highlights below for your reading convenience. Highly recommend this one, some true galaxy brain content here.
If You Build It Correctly, God Will Come To Dwell

The Other Life podcast had its biggest month in May. We're still pretty underground—growing the podcast has never been a focus—but we're seeing a little liftoff with 18k downloads in May. Thanks for...
"Insanely Bullish" on Urbit with Uqbar Founder ~timluc-miptev

Today I want to share some highlights from a recent episode of the Other Life podcast, "Insanely Bullish" on Urbit With Uqbar Founder ~timluc-miptev.
On Virtue Ethics and Why Effective Altruism is Wrong

Today, I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the podcast, Virtue and Excellence: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with Colin Redemer.
On Zero-Knowledge Crypto-Anarchy

Today, I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the podcast, Zero-Knowledge Crypto-Anarchy with Rachel-Rose O'Leary from DarkFi.
Should Bitcoin Have a King? Curtis Yarvin on Crypto

Today I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast (#199): Curtis Yarvin on Crypto: Bitcoin, DAOs, Inflation, and Government Crackdowns.
The Harvard Finance Bro Building an Urbit Network State From El Salvador

Today I want to share some highlights from the latest episode of the Other Life podcast, The Harvard Finance Bro Building an Urbit Network State from El Salvador.

© 2026 • Justin Murphy

Press Esc or click anywhere to close