Welcome to Dark Markets, a newsletter about technology fraud. It is also an occasional platform for my self-indulgent meditations on mental fitness, reading practice, career paths, and excercise. Today’s post builds on some recent thoughts about ”slow but mighty” career strategies, after finding out this week that I’ve qualified for a major grant for my work on Roman Storm and Tornado Cash.

One Programming note: I have a new interview about “Stealing the Future” out with Sunil Kavuri, one of FTX’s victims, who’s launching a podcast of his own. Have a listen, then be sure to pre-order the book.

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Let me reveal something uncomfortable: Over the past couple of months, I came very close to slipping off the ledge.

Not psychologically, to be clear, but practically, with dropped clients and late checks and the kind of existential moments that are inherent to existence as an independent writer/communication consultant. I wouldn’t have guessed or hoped that I’d be in mid-life facing the same kind of uncertainty I did as a struggling freelancer at the start of my journalism career, but the context is much different now: rather than trying to simply get a toehold and a scrap of recognition, I’m leveraging a strong track record and shouldering risk on the way to building a robust independent foundation for my work.

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But that doesn’t always work out! For a minute there I was looking at the prospect of having to get a job, which I know is hardly the worst thing in the world, but is incompatible with pursuing my biggest creative and intellectual ambitions. That would have been all the more crushing because at the same time that I was wondering whether I could make rent, I was hitting thrilling highs in terms of output and impact, both with my coverage of the Roman Storm trial and the increasingly exciting impending release of my new book (join us at Powerhouse Books on November 11).

By hook and by crook (and with many, many thanks to my subscribers here), I made it through my mini-financial crisis, and my next four to six months are beginning to take clearer shape. That’s largely thanks to learning I’ve been accepted into the round of 30 finalists in the ninth “epoch” of grants from Octant. Octant is run by the Golem Foundation to support the Ethereum ecosystem, and the current group is focused on culture and education.

My supporters here at Dark Markets have been absolutely crucial to getting me to this point. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to gain access to more than two years worth of paywalled insights on AI, crypto, and investing.

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My project, currently titled “TORNADO: The War on Code” and in partnership with The Rage, will turn the prosecutions of Roman Storm and Alexei Pertsev, and in-depth discussions of the legal and social issues at stake, into a narrative documentary podcast. It will be similar in format and style to Crypto Crooks, which I created and wrote for CoinDesk in 2023 (and may those spineless grifters choke on their ownership of one of the best things I’ve ever done). TORNADO will hopefully bring together the same team of producers.

David Z. Morris

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Aug 31

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The precise amount of the grant will be determined by a ranking process starting in October, and depends on a lot of variables, but seems very likely to support ongoing work on series development for several months. Alongside other projects in the queue (and finally maybe getting some revenue from the book, which was written without an advance) should hold me together for the next six months and, potentially, beyond.

This feels to me like an inflection point, not just for my survival and sustainability, but for my ambition and energy. After my layoff from CoinDesk, I very consciously took a step back and rested my brain for a while, including by working primarily for private clients - work I strongly believe in, but that doesn’t require the same unrelenting focus as journalism or other more creative efforts.

With the podcast and another unannounced major project poised to kick off in full in October, I’ll be fully out of that (relative) hibernation and back to work. In sort, the cluster of things I’m spending my time doing is beginning to fully align and self-reinforce.

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There will be other hiccups, no doubt, but it all feels, simply put, like truly hitting my stride as an independent operator. The ideal model for professional life varies across fields and times, but for me in the present day as a veteran thinker and reporter committed to the truth rather than propaganda, doing my own thing is pretty much the only option that really feels like ‘winning.’ Which to a degree actually kind of sucks, because I’d love to have a big fat salaried job with benefits, but people like me don’t really get those much anymore.

But barring the real stability that has been robbed from an entire socially crucial profession by the thoughtless destructive impulses of the technology elite, where I’m at right now feels like the best of all possible worlds. It feels like the first burst of sustainable, independent success on my own terms.

But crucially, it’s happening for me in my mid-40s - and that’s really why I’m writing this post. As I also tried to convey in my post on imagining slow careers, succeeding later in life is a healthy, realistic norm.

Our news and social media are obsessed with the idea of youthful success, for reasons at the nexus of consumer culture and hypercapitalist numbers-obsession. But one of the core themes of my book on FTX is that this impatience is a repeated and often destructive gamble that we take, both with our capital, and with the lives of the supposed paragons we hold up as totems of genius and ambition. Early success in intellectual and creative pursuits is common and worth celebrating - but early success in finance and business is, too often, a kind of leveraged bet hard to distinguish from a mirage.

You can probably name many of the supposedly precocious geniuses who simply turned out to be frauds - Elizabeth Holmes, Do Kwon, Sam Bankman-Fried. Or take Charlie Javice, who will be sentenced Monday for defrauding investors in her ed-tech startup. These bright-eyed idiots are in fact pressured into fake-it-til-you-make it performativity and outright fraud by the shibboleths of youth and genius constantly bandied about by low-grade journalism and self-dealing hype machines.

The truth is that being your own person and succeeding on your own terms takes a lot of time and work - especially under a ruthless capitalist system that gives you no guarantee of a minimal safety net. It sucks that it requires so much nerve and resourcefulness to remain steadily fixated on a goal that can take decades, particularly for Americans*.

But the shortcuts involve far worse sacrifices than a little bit of patience and grit. As we’ve learned even of “real” youthful megasuccesses like Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, relentless climbing for its own sake often involves sacrificing your own humanity.

No matter how desperate you might feel, it’s not worth it. Yes, as I was forcefully reminded this summer, it’s always darkest before dawn. But more importantly, it will always get dark again - and when that happens, all you’ll have is your name, your ideals, and your clarity of purpose.

Without those, you barely exist at all.

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*In fact, my own experience has further convinced me that a truly vibrant, innovative economy is supported by more social programs and resources, in contrast to the absurd right-wing canard that making it harder to survive somehow fuels innovation.