FOURTH POST

July 6, 2026 · 4:37 PM

I didn’t write over the weekend.

That's not true at all. I did, I just didn’t post it. None of it was good, all of it was self-indulgent, and frankly, I don’t want to post about how I really enjoyed laying in my hammock while fireworks and lightning happened around me. I ditched 5 parties and ten barbecues and all of my friends to rest.

I don’t know that my thoughts are meant for human consumption today, so here’s a list of books I’ve read this year:

Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams
Permutation City, Greg Egan
The entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is out (That is, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, The Gate of the Feral Gods, The Butcher's Masquerade, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, This Inevitable Ruin, and A Parade of Horribles)
Leaving the 20th Century, McKenzie Wark
Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord
Propaganda, Edward Bernays
Crystallizing Public Opinion, Edward Bernays
The Absence of Myth, Georges Bataille
Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi
Cavalier Perspective, Andre Breton
The Hacienda, Peter Hook
Underground, Blake Atwood
Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall
Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore, Martin J. Smith
Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds
Mysticism, Simon Critchley
Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, John Patrick Leary
Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
The Sovereign State And It’s Competitors, Hendrik Spruyt
Mobile Autonomy: Exercises In Artist’s Self Organization, Nico Docx & Pascal Gielen

Here is a list of books I am currently reading:
Accelerando, Charles Stross
Too Like The Lightning, Ada Palmer
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering
Blindsight, Peter Watts
Neuromancer, William Gibson
The Medium Is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan
Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, Mark Fisher

Here is what’s on my list to read next:
The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Diaspora, Greg Egan
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Eduardo Kohn
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Bernard Stiegler
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Culianu
T.A.Z., Hakim Bey
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Seeing Like a State, James Scott
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Erik Davis
Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus

If you think of anything like these that you think I ought to read, please recommend them to me. I’m thinking across a lot of areas, and frankly, all I have are more questions. For example:

What does it mean to organize collectively? Who builds consensus? What organizes life when limits dissolves? What does it mean to put on a show? Beyond that, what does it mean to have an audience? What do you owe each other? Who writes myths? What does the future look like? What does that mean? How does something become common sense, or accepted thought in the first place? Can counterculture be infrastructure? Is reality programmable substrate? What kind of beings do particular systems create? Is consciousness adaptive? How do realities get built, and how do humans come to inhabit them? Can environments think? Is magic just another operating system? What if symbols actually do things? How do new worlds begin? What survives exponential change? What is a person? Is the self a thing or an effect?

So anyway, if you know someone who knows something about anything, please let me know!

Here are some archetypes of people I took meetings with in June that definitely seem to fit that bill:
Community space creators
Landmine enjoyers
URL-to-IRL company makers
Novel Slop Creators and Anthropologists
A bunch of jewish artists in crown heights
Technology journalists
Healthtech disruptors
Seven Time Founder
Fifteen prediction market makers
Guys writing business books
Cancelled Right-Wing Figures
People with vast networks of venues and artists
People working on novel new form factors for medications
Philosophers working on memory architecture
Radicalized transhumanists who demand higher forms of agency for themselves
Self-proclaimed Slop Enthusiasts
Rocket Guys Who Say Yes Ma’am
Beautiful Women
Micro-niche influencers

I think some of them might be on to something.

One day I will figure out how to conclude anything I’ve ever written. I’m bad at goodbye, bad at endings, bad at demarcation. One thing everyone that cared to look at my art show came to was this: change, the only constant, is often painful and difficult. I feel very at home in the inbetween, but never at the start, and definitely never at the ending. Shall we cross that threshold together? I think I'll hang back a sec.