Now swap "Austin comedy scene" for "Silicon Valley VC/billionaire class": They think threatening to leave California over the 5% tax (or regs, or "woke") is building leverage—"We'll take our money, talent, and innovation to Texas/Florida/Miami. California will beg us to stay." But California's broader economy (and the global tech/investment machine) treats geography functionally: Talent is in the Bay because of universities/networks, not because of all in podcast. Capital is global. Startups will still cluster where the engineers are. No one's coming begging. The state will consume the innovation at arm's length (remote founders, satellite offices, global LPs) without granting the old deference.
And the cruelest parallel: Many of these "disruptors" are nostalgic for the old California system—low friction, massive public subsidies, minimal accountability, automatic cultural goodwill. They want the state to resume the 90s–2010s deal: let us extract unchecked, give us hero status, don't ask questions.
The Austin comedy collapse is funny because it exposed a fundamental misread: they thought they were building leverage when they were actually burning it. Hollywood treats geography purely functionally — Canada is cheap labor, New York is a writer farm, Atlanta is a tax haven. None demand ideological buy-in.
Austin tried to be a *branded alternative* with political identity. But Hollywood doesn’t need validation of your reasons for leaving. It needs interchangeable talent that slots in without baggage. The comedians assumed the move itself was the value — that Hollywood would come begging. Instead, it kept hiring people who never left in the first place even if they were in NY, Atlanta or Toronto. Now they’re stuck: can’t leverage Austin (collapsed), can’t easily return (without admitting failure), can’t get validation. The punchline: they wanted to be a power center while operating like refugees. Hollywood called the bluff by not caring.
The documentary skirts the real event: the moment the music industry stopped pretending it was about music. The old system was vicious and racist, but it still required songs, scenes, friction. Even its predators needed talent to misbehave. By the late ’90s that requirement vanished. Music was replaced by brand-safe success theater. Sean Combs wasn’t a musician so much as a protocol: vibes instead of songs, access instead of craft, visibility instead of risk, sponsorship instead of patronage. A licensing stack wearing sunglasses. He is the proto–tech founder: not building tools, but owning pipelines. He doesn’t make the thing; he controls the access to attention. He’s not creative capital—he’s attention arbitrage. What matters isn’t the song, it’s the throughput.
This was sold as democratization. Anyone can make it. Anyone can be a mogul. Both are downward-shifted lies. When the system fails, it’s your fault for not branding harder and real power is proximity, not creation
Just for finished the Sean Combs documentary. It’s nauseating how a generation of politicians and influencers gave cover to this demon as viable empowerment example for back people. Dems and less nativist reps loved it and flaunting their playlists. He was “proof” that the system worked. Not because the harm wasn’t visible, but because it was useful story where extreme wealth, ruthless behavior, and proximity to power could be reframed as liberation. What makes it doubly 🤢 is the double betrayal. First, the victims—silenced, paid off, or ridiculed. Second, an entire generation of Black kids told: this is what power looks like. Not collective strength, not dignity, not refusal—but domination, excess, and proximity to capital. A plantation logic with better lighting and a Beats sponsorship. Aspiration without responsibility. Corpos loved it because it turned structural injustice into a branding problem with a luxury solution. The way abuse gets canonized as “grind.”
The code is portable because the incentives are identical. Tobacco wrote the original script: the science is uncertain, regulation is premature, we’re being unfairly targeted, consumers choose this, and anyway the product is safer than it used to be. Oil adopted it almost verbatim for climate—uncertain models, transition fuel, market distortion, consumer demand, carbon capture just around the corner. Now tech runs the same play on algorithmic harm and AI safety: early research, innovation at risk, users have agency, improved models prove progress. The through-line is constant: don’t regulate the business model, trust us to optimize the implementation. What changes is the polish. Tobacco was crude and got caught lying. Oil got smoother—acknowledge the problem in theory while blocking action in practice. Tech is slickest of all, wrapping extraction in libertarian philosophy, effective altruism, and progress studies, until latent violence learns how to sound like virtue
AT&T used to tell us the Bell System was a single vast cybernetic organism, too complex to dissect without plunging America into communicative darkness—a humming national nervous system held together by priests in white shirts and actuarial tables. Break it up, they said, and the phones would stop ringing, the switches would melt, and the future would cancel itself. This was nonsense, but it was high-status nonsense, the kind that passes for realism when uttered by people who own the infrastructure. When the breakup finally happened, the sky didn’t fall; instead, innovation escaped from the basement. Modems screamed, prices collapsed, weird devices proliferated, and the network turned out to be not a sacred organism but a stack of solvable engineering problems wearing a monopoly like a lab coat. “Too complex to unwind” turned out not to be an empirical claim at all—it was territorial pissings, a way of saying the system worked fine for them
Tech’s sudden sympathy for oil makes sense because they recognize each other as structurally similar industries: both extract abstract value (data or hydrocarbons), externalize real-world costs, and rely on scale, infrastructure lock-in, and regulatory complexity to stay dominant. So the climate-“realist” argument isn’t denial—it’s managerialism: trade economics reframed to make producer profits sound like national benefit, methodological quibbles over methane used to preserve LNG expansion, utilities treated as neutral arbiters rather than incumbents protecting sunk assets, “cleaner US oil” invoked to justify more supply rather than less demand, and the Big Tobacco analogy rejected because it implies moral clarity and an endgame. Tech sees itself in oil—capital-intensive, system-critical, too complex to unwind—so “game recognizes game,” and what gets sold as pragmatism is really a mutual defense pact against being told the party has to end.
I think Farcaster will be back when a16z’s tax burden rises 1%. It didn’t grow because users demanded decentralized social, because its UX beat Web2, or because its network effects were organic; it grew because a16z’s legitimacy pulled founders, funds, and media attention, because being there signaled alignment with the right capital cohort, and because activity clustered where optionality clustered—usage was financially reflexive, not socially reflexive. That doesn’t mean decentralization has no real uses; it means those uses weren’t the driver but for large funds, marginal tax changes matter more than marginal product improvements, especially after ZIRP collapsed time horizons and normalized speculation. Moving activity on-chain recharacterized income, deferred realization, and justified new structures; so you’ll see when off-chain carry worsens or regulatory pressure rises, web3 becomes interesting again—not because it’s good social tech, but because it’s a flexible wrapper.
What’s actually advancing isn’t the technology in a user-benefiting sense — it’s financialization. The “tech” layer mainly exists to package, disguise, and legitimize that financialization.
New tokens, L2s, bridges, restaking, points, yields, RWAs, etc. aren’t primarily solving user problems. They are creating more surfaces for speculation, leverage, fees, and rent extraction. Each layer introduces new instruments, not new capabilities ordinary users asked for.
Tech as obfuscation. Complexity isn’t accidental — it: Keeps insiders employed and relevant. Creates information asymmetry (edge = profit). Discourages casual users from fully understanding risks
Wallets can get cleaner, but they can’t hide: why you need ETH to move USDC why assets exist on 6 chains, why bridging is existentially risky. These aren’t UX problems — they’re economic design choices.
I really hope Farcaster doesn’t collapse. I just bundled all my followers into a Collateralized Disciples Obligation, tokenized it, fractionalized the tokens, and staked the fractions in a yield farm backed entirely by their future engagement. If the platform goes under, I’m going to have to explain to my LPs why my community defaulted. It’s hard telling pensioners their retirement evaporated because my memes failed as an asset class
People who dislike people shouldn’t build social networks. You can’t design a public square if you resent the public. It’s not ideology; it’s temperament. When builders treat their own aversions as irrelevant, the product ends up haunted: features lean toward control, moderation toward sterilization, and the whole thing reflects the founder’s conflict more than user needs.
Seeing what’s wrong isn’t the same as being suited to fix it. Fixing problems usually means doing more of the thing you already can’t stand.
Move fast and break things wasn’t a strategy; it was a personality tic. Zuckerberg liked the technical puzzle, not the humans using it and it created tye current hellscape. Web3 is this problem distilled. Its builders hate platform power but avoid anything that accounts for normal users. They distrust institutions, resent hand-holding, scorn existing habits, and idolize complexity. Then they’re baffled that only people like them—or grifters—join.
Marc Andreessen arrived in Hell with the same expression he wore in board meetings: a serene, self-satisfied glow, like a man who had just discovered the concept of fire without noticing it was already burning him alive.
A demon with a clipboard—formerly middle management at a failed fintech startup—checked him in.
“Reason for arrival?” the demon asked.
Marc smiled. “Thought leadership.”
They walked through a canyon of tormented souls, all screaming in a way that suggested they’d been asked to navigate a crypto wallet with a broken CAPTCHA. Marc inhaled deeply.
“Lucifer has agreed to see you”, said the demon.
They passed a river of lamentation clogged with souls who’d been sentenced to set up smart home devices with no Wi-Fi. Every few seconds, one shrieked, “WHY DOES IT NEED MY LOCATION?”
Marc inhaled the sulfurous air like it was fresh VC capital. He strolled into the throne room as if he owned Series A in damnation.
Doing this now. Moorcock’s multiverse is the first one that isn’t built like a strip mall of IP franchises. The real difference is this: in almost every modern multiverse, from Marvel to whatever franchise bolts on quantum hand-waving next, the rules stay the same. The physics is the same. The morality is the same. The narrative grammar is the same. The characters may wear different hats or have goatees, but the operating system never changes. It’s one universe duplicated endlessly, like photocopies made on cheaper paper.
Moorcock is the opposite. In his multiverse, the rules don’t stay the same. That’s the entire point. Each world feels like it’s running on a different metaphysical engine. One universe is governed by tyrannical Law; another by anarchic Chaos; another by a precarious Balance that barely remembers you exist. Time flows differently. Meaning flows differently. Identity isn’t stable—sometimes it’s barely a suggestion.
Update from Europe: I, Brayden ‘Sovereign-Individual’ Multisig, have discovered something deeply uncomfortable. After a decade of screaming that taxes are theft, safety nets are socialism for ugly people, and that society should run on 100× leverage and raw founder energy, I have to report the following treasonous facts: My blood pressure is down. I sleep through the night without checking if my bags are -90 % I haven’t tried to onboard a single barista to copy-trade me. I just… feel good? Like, suspiciously good?
Apparently the same policies I diagnosed as ‘serotonin-deficient serfware’ function differently when you’re not personally exposed to the downside. Who knew? I spent years telling founders that universal healthcare would turn us into docile NPCs and it turns out it mostly turns you into someone who doesn’t have to pretend ‘hustle culture’ is a personality because of golden-handcuffs perk for making partner at a16z or grinding LeetCode for ten years.
Deeply grateful to Gavin Newsom for personally ordering the premium, top-shelf Thanksgiving weather package. Really inspirational to see the #ThanksGav stepping up their customer service this year.
#BetterWithElites, #TaxMeDaddy, #LibertarianTearsAreSolarPowered, #DontTreadOnMeButMaybeTuckMeIn
