Archive

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

Notes on a $150M playbook that's never been written down

Notes on an "unfortunate season" of civil conflict

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.

Influence and Intellect in the Ancient World

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.

A preview from my forthcoming book and an upcoming weekend in the woods.

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.

Stendhal, Lacan, Gutenberg, Nick Land and more

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.

On Alex Karp, Hélène Cixous, Gorgias, Sarah McNally, and More

Notes for the week

The final installment of our 2024 annual letter.

An annual review in 3 parts.

An annual review in 3 parts.

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

A close reading of St. John blows Nietzsche out of the water.

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

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

And how masterpieces are made.

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

On Nietzsche's fatal mistake

The right attitude and body language can obtain almost anything through confidence and presence.

The removal of walls decreases the fraction of relevant space under your control.

Reading Nick Land's Meltdown sentence by sentence.

On the first sentence of Nick Land's Meltdown.

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.

Nietzsche, Marinetti, Ecuador, and my new print book coming soon

Become imperceptible, not illegible.

How the visible world hangs together.

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.

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

Aristotle and the Secret of Esoteric Boomerism

And online, too.

"The facts of the world are not the end of the matter." —Wittgenstein

On speech, truth, and the printed word

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

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.

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.

"Wham! I became Catholic the next day."

On Mary Moody Emerson.

The greatest social power is achieved by withdrawing from society.

Sibi scribere.

Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.

News and updates, the essays of Samuel Johnson, and more...

Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

A detailed summary of René Girard's account of mimetic desire, scapegoating, violence, and Christianity.

The high-water mark of revolutionary Deleuzian Feminism.

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

And the accelerating rate of paradigm turnover

"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

Registration now open.

Seneca on philosophy as immortality

Stendhal, Sex, Classics, Jews

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

Multipolar aesthetic warfare, cruelty, marriage, and Charlotte Perriand

Slavery gets a bad rap, but it had one silver lining.

You are allowed to go straight to true knowledge of the highest things.

"The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions." —Samuel Butler

And the most important event we've ever hosted.

"If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago." —Hazlitt

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

Stop saving your best ideas for later because later never comes.

Do you have what it takes to leave behind a long-lasting institution?

A man should not seek intellectual satisfaction from his wife, but from the only place men have ever found it.

A return to the masters, a republic of letters.

"The world is becoming hypersensitive to signs."

“All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.” —Lacan

To win the culture war, leave the culture war.

On Algorithmic Publishing with Dignity

"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."

Why Writing on the Internet Still Hasn't Been Tried

Why intelligence and knowledge are overrated, while honesty and courage are underrated.

“You are hanging on by a very fine thread, and I dig that about you.”

Three reflections toward the acceleration of traditional knowledge.

Why the future belongs to the wordcel tinkerer.

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...

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...

Then, about two weeks ago, I had a real idea...

On reading Plato's Republic, writing better, and another nail in the coffin of institutional publishing.

"Humanity forgets... that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels." —Borges

"Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names."

"Always do what you are afraid to do." —Mary Moody Emerson

"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."

"The things I want are not in any country, nor in any job." —William Gaddis

And what you should do instead.

Meet the 7-foot albino who says you should petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute.

What the media won't tell you about the famous media theorist.

"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

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

On the Pursuit of Artistic Excellence

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.”

Transcript of a public lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre.

Can social science vindicate religion, or should we respect the Cartesian Bargain instituted 400 years ago?

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

Reflections on the judicious use of social media.

"Intelligence would be electrified by naïveté and humor."

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

And how to find secret weapons.

Why you should never count yourself out as a writer, especially in the internet era.

"A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light."

Reflections on Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000)

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!

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...

Master Baby by William Quiller Orchardson (1886)

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A Scene in Leigh Woods, Francis Danby (1822)

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...

The Tay Bridge from My Studio Window by James McIntosh Patrick, 1948

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.

The Artist in His Studio by Henry Alexander (1860-1894)

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.

Illustrated depiction of North Africa by British Orientalist artist Augustus Osborne Lamplough

In the Middle of the Valley by Ivan Shishkin (1883)

The Baptism by Julius LeBlanc Stewart (1892)

Black Lake Technical Institute in Northern Ontario, ancestral home of the Tzikvik

L 450 flat loudspeaker, TG 60 reel-to-reel tape recorder and TS 45 control unit by Dieter Rams for Braun

Landscape With a Clump of Trees by Théodore Rousseau (1844)

You're invited here for the weekend of November 4-6

Hegel, Napoleon, and the World Spirit on Horseback

Brutalist Silence, interior by Annabell Kutucu

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.

Renzo Piano Building Workshop offices in Genoa via Benjamin Schneider

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.

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.

The Smoking Room with Monkeys by Abraham Teniers (1629-1670)

The Duel After the Masquerade by Jean-Léon Gérôme

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...

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

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.

Villa by the Sea (1865) by Arnold Böcklin

Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman (1956) by Charles and Ray Eames

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...

Holium's new desktop app for Urbit communities

“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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.” — Aristotle, Metaphysics

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.

Somehow, Americans have gotten the impression that European cities are paragons of intelligent urbanism.

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...

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

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."

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

Timothy Treadwell in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man (2005)

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.

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....

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,...

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...

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...

Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942) by Piet Mondrian

Speak of the intellectual life and a lot of people will think you’re pretentious; they think you’re calling yourself intelligent.

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...

Alexander Galloway thinks that Deleuze sees cybernetics as an enemy, or even the enemy:

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...

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.

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Samuel Johnson's Club. From the left: Boswell, Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, Paoli, Burney, Wharton, Goldsmith

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...

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...

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...

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...

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995) by Nam June Paik

Eric Weinstein has released his highly self-aggrandized anticipated research paper on geometric unity.

This is the eleventh post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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

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...

The Other Life community is also known as the Imperceptible Country. Think of it as a Web2.5 community.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

More shootouts have occurred in Texas than any other state in the US.

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...

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can also read Part 1 and Part 3.

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

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,...

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...

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...

This is the first post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.

[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...

From Copenhagen on his 30th birthday (May 5, 1843), Kierkegaard wrote the following in the Preface for his first book, Two Upbuilding Discourses:

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...

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...

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

Une Passion Dans Le Désert (2017) by Antonio Recalcati

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've spent the past 2 years building a business.

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...

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...

In 1997, everyone thought the cable industry was dead.

Intelligence is increasingly a political cleavage, thanks to the phenomenon of skill-biased technological change.

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...

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...

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.

Today I want to share some highlights from the last few episodes of the Other Life podcast.

Jaw-dropping new post up today on Naked Capitalism, “Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg’s Fake Accounts Ponzi Scheme,” by Aaron Greenspan.

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...

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...

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...

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

…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...

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...

A Sol LeWitt wall drawing in construction

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 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...

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...

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...

This is not just another Twitter beef, but a bellwether for the changing structure of intellectual influence.

[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,...

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).

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...

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...

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.

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

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...

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 —...

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...

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 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...

Greek Girls Playing Ball (1889) by Frederic Leighton

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

On taste and brand in the face of AI acceleration.

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....

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...

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...

I just have to take a little victory lap on this one…

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

The personal computer has become a personal enemy.

And what to do instead.

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.

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Regatta on the Canale Grande (1740) by Canaletto

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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,...

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."

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.

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

Leptis Magna, a prominent city of the Carthaginian Empire (Libya).

The California coast in Pescadero (Imperceptible Mansion, November 4-6 2022)

“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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I appreciate Michael Lind's model of the contemporary American class structure. He asks us to visualize two horseshoe structures:

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...

A lot of people wonder why testosterone levels have been decreasing for decades.

The City Rises (1910) by Umberto Boccioni

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

Ted Blackman is a senior engineer at Tlon and one of the most advanced Urbit engineers in the world.

[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...

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

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...

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 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...

Wittgenstein’s hut (restored) in Skjolden, Norway. All photos courtesy Jon Bolstad and © Wittgenstein Initiative.

When it comes to internet writing, a highly specific brand will grow faster than a vague or mysterious brand.

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

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.

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.

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,...

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.

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...

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...

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?

I started noticing this about three years ago.

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

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...

St. Augustine says there are two cities: The City of God and the City of Man.

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,...

Original photographs by the author. Urbit Assembly 2022 in Miami.

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

"Fine minds are seldom fine souls." —Richter

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...

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.

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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)....

Technocapitalism increases returns to judgment relative to labor.

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.

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

"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...

There are two paths to power: top-down and bottom-up.

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.

From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze:

The feeling of listening to podcasts approximates the feeling of having original thoughts.

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...

This is a story about eggplants, do you have the courage to read it? 🍆

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...

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...

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...

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...

Death of Chatterton (1856) by Henry Wallis

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.

Automatic editing and uploading with Auphonic

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Here is Joseph Ratzinger, formerly Pope Benedict, on St. John the Baptist.

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...

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?"...

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...

Simone Weil's ID card working for the French resistance

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...

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.

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...

From Lecture #3 in my video course for Based Deleuze:

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...

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...

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in his writing cabin at Quarry Farm in Elmira, NY. 1903. Photograph by Thomas E. Marr.

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...

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...

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.

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...

Die Römische Ruine in Schönbrunn (1832) by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

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...

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

I’ve been asked a few times now what I think about the new University of Austin.

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

If you can figure out the truth, you should share it. You might help someone.

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

[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...

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.

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.

"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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.