The most remarkable thing about the blockchain/crypto space isn’t the blockchain. Nor is it necessarily the profundity of its innumerable applications. Nor even how it may, in the most utopian case, fundamentally reorganise the very structure of the world. As interesting as all that is, how seriously fun it is…

Money gets lots of credit (LOL) as a concept. People within the crypto space especially tend to appreciate just how profound a concept it is, just how integral it is to this whole show we’ve got going. A concept that gets less credit, but that is equally if not more…

One of the more philosophically interesting aspects of the present moment, and the crypto space in particular, is the conversation around identity — specifically, how identity should work in a digital context, the cool-sounding-but-ultimately-nebulous “metaverse”. For the longest time, we’ve existed in one world only: the “real world” (RW). In…

A plea for peace. — There’s a dark irony that casts a shadow over the current cryptosphere. While the blockchain was supposed to be the thing that finally united us, that brought us all together, at the moment, the environment is proving to be just another cesspit of greed, malice and tribalism — another vehicle…

Spoiler alert: because it’s pernicious. — The problem with “The News”, as a window onto Reality, is that it isn’t a window at all — it’s an interpretation. And as with all interpretations of Reality, The News is filtered through something of a “fundamental worldview,” an implicit — if not explicit — metaphysic. The facts, it’s…

But why people think it does anyway, but also why it does suck a little bit and how it might one day suck less. — There’s a general suspicion towards philosophy that pervades the present moment. A sense that there’s really nothing there, that the whole philosophical enterprise is but a raft of smoke and mirrors. A rort. As someone who, on certain occasions, identifies as a philosopher — indeed as someone who views philosophy…

Or swimming against the current while having coral lobbed at you. — Ideals are great. Until you have them. Without ideals, you are swimming with the current along with the rest of them — being swept along by the caprices of the ocean to nowhere in particular. You will have friends, comrades, fellow fish in the sea. You won’t have a sense…

In search of a positive conception. — It’s a curious fact of our existence that even the most conspicuous of concepts are, at bottom, utter mysteries. Space. Time. Life. Reality. Matter. Mind. Meaning. Truth. These things we take for granted — as brute facts of existence — are windows onto the Mystery. That’s why they’re mysterious —…

In praise of not working like a fool. — Of all the ideologies that pervade the present moment, the ideology of “hard work” — the “grind” — is among the most pathological. Not because it’s the most perverse, on its face, but because it’s so pernicious. It takes what is, on some level, a bona fide virtue — that…