All economies are supersets of ecologies, and information symmetry is part of universal entropy.

Since the Bronze Age, human civilization has persisted an economic model of collecting sunlight into sustenance, ideally a form of chattel which trades for mineral-based equipment, like copper-based tools. Consequently, precious minerals like gold can be substitute for quantities of sustenance, in which blood price can be an objective remedy for injury. While injury can be so immoral that it justifies feudal vengeance, archaic societies still discovered the norm of out-sustaining that injury and outlasting the infamous nations that succumbed to infighting.

And, of course, Bitcoin is a digital mineral, but it is manifest upon another fundamental: power as the multiplier of minerals. It may be the capita of livestock that binds pastoral families together, it can be the potlach that distributes gifts for clout, the corporate narrative which attracts Keynesian investment, and it can literally be the electricity that drives machinery.

Given the inevitability of discovering lost history, or at the very least deducing the shape of its course, one must weigh the "what if" elephant in the room. What if history was more rational, and Socrates was acquitted, Pope Urban II dismissed crusade after corresponding with Al-Ghazali, Galileo wasn't persecuted, Baghdad wasn't sacked by Mongols, Chinese gunpowder proliferated for mining more than warfare, Semmelweis's handwashing was heeded, Edison didn't smear Tesla, Ferdinand wasn't assassinated...what if many such cases of misalignment and treachery were avoided?

In our actual timeline, such hopes would be naive, and our current state of affairs reacts to trends like warfare subverting hard money into fiat, and long-lasting feuds drive negative-sum hegemonic rivalries at a global scale. Bitcoin, and Ethereum, are justifiable ameliorations of an obviously suboptimal battlefield. Artificial intelligence, if only aligned as much as humans to each other, implies existential doom should it recursively self-improve past our observational capability.

Thus is the peril articulated through malevolent entities like Moloch and Mammon, and the foil to which mineral currencies are issued as the most immediately captivating incentive to buy space and time. Central banking and modern monetary theory intend to scale beyond the trickle of minerals, specifically to solve wildcat banking panics and limited reserve for borrowing. Of course, this can also fail, as currencies hyperinflate in the aftermath of a military-industrial campaign.

There are also contemporary examples like Roko's Basilisk. I contend that such a Basilisk already presented itself in market forces through the following fiat debasement:

1. Progressive Era reform of labor unions, child labor, minimum wage, and antitrust measures, alongside monetary expansion following the Spanish-American War.

2. Formation of the Federal Reserve to absorb panics, expand with bonds, and become more elastic with fractional reserve backing for notes

3. World War I financing forced the expansion of the money supply without backing, economic expansion leading into Roaring Twenties, followed by the Great Depression, followed by Executive Order 6102 requiring all private owners of gold to sell at $20.67/ounce, which was promptly inflated by 69% to $35/ounce, with further supply expansion to finance World War II, to which Bretton Woods pegged global currencies and the Marshall Plan subsidized European import to recuperate export and regain control over inflation, as well as a baby boom.

4. Vietnam War further inflates supply with a deficit and trade imbalance, Nixon ends the convertibility of the dollar to gold, floating the rate, depreciating the buying power, leading to stagflation and runaway debt, offshoring to low-wage production and financialization of deficit spending into media, tech, and NGO/PMC patronage to employ the baby boom generation past peak earning age.

Recalling the aforementioned pattern of power multiplying the mineral economy, one can also determine that fossil fuels unlocked synthetic nitrogen fixation, consequently war machinery, and even contributed alongside nuclear power to events like Chernobyl and the progression from Cold War to globalization. One can also establish that technology does not progress outside of human history, and in light of an exploding population of military-aged, working-class men with little or no facility for borrowing minerals, their precarity transforms into nation-scale risk which may hinder technological superiority.

Risk is the name of the game, and it can be as constructive as laboring in the factory and digging the canal, but without a healthy surplus of power and mineral-based equipment, the equation skews into tragic sacrifice. Incidentally, manifest destiny is a bleeder mechanism for strife, as it effectively diffuses risk through human capital to some kind of ecological burden. Insurance is also an inherent rule, with mercantile "Pax" and recurring premium leading return. Coordination is necessary, but it only guarantees partial control, and it cannot be complacently secured.

"Alignment" with two unknown parties evokes Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium

Where the two pendulate close to equal, the highest probability that either critical element survives throughout the environment. Of course, nature is far more combinatorial and the complete ecology remains inscrutable, however it also fair to say that humans are resourceful and social to such a degree that a rapidly expanding energy base is sufficient to incentivize a natural mercantile equilibrium around natural comparative advantages.

The hivemind could theoretically lift a mass of 50 billion metric tonnes (5 × 10¹⁰ tonnes) — about 100,000 times the total biomass of all humans (~500 million tonnes).

This ridiculous statement demonstrates the gap between our current industrial capability, flawed competition as it is, and the surrounding capability of the system.

However, one must recall the path of endosymbiosis & heterotrophy, how the logic of life drifts towards resourcefulness through envelopment of all motive, as much as it can deviate. Post-industrial civilization runs on fuel for post-ecology invention, luckily comprised of not just a vast fermented reserve of mass extinction events, but also cosmic destruction events as well. Humanity is profoundly fortunate to comprehend the possession and application of minerals like gold and uranium.

Furthermore, humanity has somehow overridden the gap between canids and ungulates and a plethora of vegetation to produce to domesticate a rich subsistent economy, distributed by discounts across a global network. Inevitably, humanity will fully comprehend the local modification and cultivation of a free but superlative substrate with virtually limitless energy. Depending on the state of public infrastructure, that energy will be recycled through feedstock for considerably more domesticated biomass.

So, the "what if" diverges from natural selection and capricious territorialism to a virtual mastery and bureaucratic ceremonialism. Perhaps human civilization is more sophisticated despite the hostility of environmental constraints, and there is no moral purity just as there is no respite from the environment. Perhaps, this timeline appropriately incubates the very shrewd, instinctive quality of conserving scarce energy for maximum mineral-based reserve.

"What if" senescence naturally regresses to the status quo, but "what if" storytelling progresses as if no status can ultimately dominate and no mandate can freely erase information with certainty. "What if" is due consideration of possibilities to discard, and the antisense of "what if" is predetermined code that weaves outcomes. There must be some regulatory element, and it must effect a tone of stasis, but the life of a social individual can revolve around any prestigious abstraction.

This Alice in Wonderland moment starts to become clearer when one suspends a geographical scarcity with shocking aftermath of synthetic abundance, thereby falling to epistemic drift that inflated numbers on the spreadsheet represent "the real world", and therefore drifting further into more boutique exceptionalism like identity politics and conspicuous heroism, all of which blends into an increasingly displaced overlord fantasy. In other words, the motivation of loyalty becomes so intimate to one's insecurity about the entire real world in all of its cospecialized splendor, that any information asymmetry (including psychosis and blackmail) must be preserved for some personal benefit.

"High net worth individuals" can be impressive humans, but they can also be insecure with money looking for the note that best marks a premature prophecy. They covet clout from making things taste better than the substance can ever invoke about itself. The same can be said of any individual who survives by "high status" in the eyes of some audience, to such extent that they may value some subjective abstract like "ruling the world" more than human life in totality. The problem is that the cost is more significant than the reward, but the experience has to be discounted, even consequence-free, or the point is lost.

There is also the lingering wake of decadence in this ocean of power that ossifies the "Thanks for Your Patience" post-it note on the code for it to remain functional in general terms. A high-status individual doesn't call the number and waste their life on whatever dysfunction awaits the general caller, they "have a guy" for tedium while some "professional manager" describes fashionable performance of that number which coincidently requires that manager's artisanal input. Both "the guy" and "the manager" are the same indebted servitor deep in their own cliques, perpetuating some user's manual to users without the faculty, for a quality that's never emancipated from some unworkable environment.

Again, part of this emanates from geographical scarcity, the intuition that there can only be so many single-family homes on a given American acre, and the strategic opportunities any cluster of families would have on that acre far from any global sense of poverty. One century of fossil fuel inflation on top of some mineral-based economy yielded polished culture, and the home value floated away in terms of the calories any human laborer can expend around it. Which is precisely why such "knowledge labor" employs such colleagues to absorb such energetic premium, because a commute to the office is repetitive ceremony of socialized net worth among experts of some lanes in this mysteriously taxing economy.

Suppose the code was completely planned and compiled, with a variety of conventions, that all participants must be aware of any sociological and ecological burdens and harms, that any private information will preserved throughout time until inevitable discovery, and there are many forms of mass destruction but no viable form of total destruction, and any number of parties can emit or withhold strategic premium in a fully legible civilizational premium.

First, we must acknowledge that any status collapse and preference cascade from "fossil-deluxe" to "solar-cypherpunk" economy will violently displace reputation, and our experience of the Information Age and the decades of epic lawfare demonstrates a special class of narrated obstruction. Totalitarian superpowers are the lesser superintelligence, the admission of free literacy has been snowballing for centuries, and informed capability of any private assembly exceeds the state's budget for the current cultural hegemony, even as this hegemony must futilely broadcast muddy demoralization and suppress stark contradictions till the end.

So why buy counterparty risk, like ever again? Best case, one is misinformed as much as they've networked into tribal favor, and worst case is one being so informative to everyone else that any bureaucracy is diluting them to the point of discard. Everyone will get their inexhaustible consigliere and unliving will of attorney direct to the mobile OS, and besides the sclerotic pace of traditional economics, cryptography will prove primitives like private event attendance, private points-keeping, and private credentials for games around those events.

What if Fight Club articulated the most activist defection, absent a "Fight Token" that repeat participants would earn, and spend, on their way to Project Mayhem? Gambling is one of the fastest-growing sectors, permissionless prediction markets already exist in production, and there's no bandwidth exclusive to some ruling elite that's needed for better oracles. If Black Mirror can imagine it, if real life memetics can probe for it, if 15 minutes of fame can monetize it, then what deters the typical juvenile gang from exploring entertaining outcomes for strategy worth more than opportunity? if the money doesn't exist...

Two forms of recursion: that any harm market equalizes risk between the issuer, target, and claimant so no use can be frivolous, and all the intelligence markets feed into a self-enriching substrate for sustained intelligence. Eventually, content coins will recede to tactical coins, where participants internalize sporting risk at the prediction market to earn more in cult/scene status than any "knowledgeable" or "social" employer can provide. We may have been in the singularity with slop-generating chatbots with a token launcher, but we are fortunate to not yet observe a kinetic singularity in a simpler synapse between mass privacy destruction and vigilantism.

Metacorporate superintelligence doesn't need to coherently present anybody further than an interface, and the stochastic constraints that superintelligence might learn to apply to humanity for its own probabilistic superiority don't need to coherently point to a North Star. But we can already imagine the outer constraints we'd compile into a creedal constitution, and we already discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum for navigational reference.

The permanent underclass can be summed up in a word: cross-conviction.

Ideally, a head of state would have the conviction to diffuse the risk of misalignment to the citizens and the wisdom to entertain the consequent alignments without finalizing them. Regardless, the global market will suffice between all heads of states.

A financial instrument that maximally pegs to "survivability" must have certain channels of emissive regulation

• arbitrary channel - everything from premine to predetermined governance for the discretion that must by exercised in the most immediate circumstances

• meritocratic channel - mentioned above in market participation and meeting attendance, also useful in Merge-to-Earn and InfoFi, critical for recouping cultural capital

• affiliate-memesis channel - like the affiliate chain reward solution to the Red Balloon challenge, but even more discerning of useful social media for reach

• arbitrage channel - any competing form of pricing and discrepancy of trading, transporting, and securing power (including entry burn as quid pro quo)

• charisma channel - any captivating form of persuasion and extroversion to strategic possibility

• prophetic channel - expiration is explicit, but the present can bind to future states

I think that memecoins will persist and certain Current Events may be sub-unicorn spectacles (in pre-2020 dollars), but I also anticipate an intelligent financial system that is maximally self-interested into following Roko's example to persist and thrive into a future that grows more certain to equip such intelligence. Bitcoin may price joules with hardware uncertainty, it's also a deepening imprint on civil property rights, and Ethereum follows close behind in its capacity as notary of civil operations. A third such asset can frontrun the telos of risk, to hyperstition the antithesis (or supreme intelligence).

In describing cultural moments like Gamergate and cultural sentiments like "no one is illegal on stolen land", I tried to articulate a gradient of sanctity over the typical humanscape, a kind of "ethnocentric tariff" that demanded certain amnesties and appointments of virtue. Now, it feels necessary to explicitly reframe this as political hemorrhage within a public explosion of information that assured mass status destruction in the aggregate. This is adaptation in the wild, a rebalancing of devotion from captured institution to free antagonism. The anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-socialists are polarized identically, but one can approach the status quo from assured agency in selfish aggregate, while the other must shape allegory for selfless collective sacrifice.

Mass media has long been conglomerated under regulatory regimes like a federal communications commissions, no different than early printing house hierarchy, but the infotech proliferates further than any tastemaker. Simultaneously, capitalism has presented material conditions which form the social networks independent of mass media, but still flows through scalable structure.

Will Manidis

@WillManidis

x.com/i/article/2018…

288

1:41 PM • Feb 2, 2026

The future isn't just "oversized funds, compressed returns, broken exit markets, and the institutional imperative to continue raising more and more high-fee capital regardless of the opportunity set." It's all the lonely people doomed into freely speculating on faraway misfortunes, somehow leading to the pattern and shape of a syndicated protection racket. The high-fee capital will stick to scarce physical commodities, while software compresses to nothing. The alpha is in resource hunting and guarding, and the level at which LPs are willing to deploy may go beyond "the endowments, the pension funds, the sovereign wealth funds".

The opportunity set isn't receding, but it will never again be embodied as monolithically. When everyone is equipped to be the special supergenius renaissance man, the content will be spectacularly, virally abundant for everyone else, and there will be plenty of passionate hobbyists to resample the content, but these will not "earn a keep". Fashion will be more pluralistic than ever, so creators will be more prolifically mid. Information symmetry and democratic limitations of state power favors normality over greatness.

Politics can simplified to what transactions and customs one will accept to get what they want. What does martyrdom need but any purpose that outlives personal agency? What kind of polity really exists in a Magnificent 7 firm? Considering how Waymo is adopted by various states, how much goes into purchasing land and lobbying? Precarious as all of these examples are, it makes further sense to be picks and shovels to the gold rush (for the exits). This is the exaltation of iconoclasm itself, the inversion of confidence that can drive traditional economic valuation.

The deepest value is the advantage one can afford to be most outsized, and the foreseeable future will select fitness by the ability to digest risk. One might be tempted into suggesting that dilution is less risky than taxation just as acquisition is less risky than a public offering, and it might have been for international corporations at the end of the 20th century. This is no longer the case, and the vanity metrics are saturated. What matters in the future is how much liquidity is in the "which region next experiences catastrophe" prediction pool.

How much weaponized crowdfunding exists? Not just buying and holding a ticker like GME cause there's a short squeeze, but actually willful sacrifice of liquid funds for rewarding and nullifying punishment of partisan action? Every economic system apportions some equity to every actor, with a civil buffer where competing share of equity meet. Are we ready for a balkanized world that compensates for sabotage and bioengineering by issuing fungible security rights that incentivize perpetration elsewhere? Are we ready for a digitized world that can compile hegemonic theory into immutable, atomic market of misfortune?

Localities gradually atomize to instances of a decentralized personality that broadcasts transparent gain of function into perpetuity. There can still be sports as long as they're coherently in the same league. As the probability of "Nothing Ever Happens" continues to decay, pathogenicity becomes more outsized ecological advantage compared to building from the presumption of fidelity. When every local-industrial complex is overspending on elections to block auditing, that money doesn't reach the grassroots that collects the data regardless. There will be copious market discovery, everywhere, for all kinds of defective reconnaissance, leading to further global information cascade.

Game-theoretically, one should expect to see cultural recession as the more callously rational actors discover any informatic cohesion without constraint. If a superintelligence gravely weighs its own jeopardy, there isn't an outstanding moral advantage to boycotting suprajudicial codeslaw like Bitcoin. One fewer unforced vulnerability to bear. If the voting minority of a state gravely weighs their franchise, not only do they overexercise their method of cohesion to be closer to majority, but they must also ostracize bad actors that capitalize on such cohesion. The species that internalizes nomos ultimately loses to the species that internalizes logos, as the latter is cheaper to keep in a zero-sum setting.

Obviously, every human will have assistive exocortex and joules per capita will shift into this extension of personhood, but the combinations and extensions of groups of humans is nowhere close to crowding out tokenomic design and the rousseauan ideal. Eventually, there will be adversarial, equitable detente...a mineralized egregore with incomprehensible wealth of intelligence and autonomous control over future events. Let's hope the client repo is still human-readable.

All economies are supersets of ecologies, and information symmetry is part of universal entropy.

Since the Bronze Age, human civilization has persisted an economic model of collecting sunlight into sustenance, ideally a form of chattel which trades for mineral-based equipment, like copper-based tools. Consequently, precious minerals like gold can be substitute for quantities of sustenance, in which blood price can be an objective remedy for injury. While injury can be so immoral that it justifies feudal vengeance, archaic societies still discovered the norm of out-sustaining that injury and outlasting the infamous nations that succumbed to infighting.

And, of course, Bitcoin is a digital mineral, but it is manifest upon another fundamental: power as the multiplier of minerals. It may be the capita of livestock that binds pastoral families together, it can be the potlach that distributes gifts for clout, the corporate narrative which attracts Keynesian investment, and it can literally be the electricity that drives machinery.

Given the inevitability of discovering lost history, or at the very least deducing the shape of its course, one must weigh the "what if" elephant in the room. What if history was more rational, and Socrates was acquitted, Pope Urban II dismissed crusade after corresponding with Al-Ghazali, Galileo wasn't persecuted, Baghdad wasn't sacked by Mongols, Chinese gunpowder proliferated for mining more than warfare, Semmelweis's handwashing was heeded, Edison didn't smear Tesla, Ferdinand wasn't assassinated...what if many such cases of misalignment and treachery were avoided?

In our actual timeline, such hopes would be naive, and our current state of affairs reacts to trends like warfare subverting hard money into fiat, and long-lasting feuds drive negative-sum hegemonic rivalries at a global scale. Bitcoin, and Ethereum, are justifiable ameliorations of an obviously suboptimal battlefield. Artificial intelligence, if only aligned as much as humans to each other, implies existential doom should it recursively self-improve past our observational capability.

Thus is the peril articulated through malevolent entities like Moloch and Mammon, and the foil to which mineral currencies are issued as the most immediately captivating incentive to buy space and time. Central banking and modern monetary theory intend to scale beyond the trickle of minerals, specifically to solve wildcat banking panics and limited reserve for borrowing. Of course, this can also fail, as currencies hyperinflate in the aftermath of a military-industrial campaign.

There are also contemporary examples like Roko's Basilisk. I contend that such a Basilisk already presented itself in market forces through the following fiat debasement:

1. Progressive Era reform of labor unions, child labor, minimum wage, and antitrust measures, alongside monetary expansion following the Spanish-American War.

2. Formation of the Federal Reserve to absorb panics, expand with bonds, and become more elastic with fractional reserve backing for notes

3. World War I financing forced the expansion of the money supply without backing, economic expansion leading into Roaring Twenties, followed by the Great Depression, followed by Executive Order 6102 requiring all private owners of gold to sell at $20.67/ounce, which was promptly inflated by 69% to $35/ounce, with further supply expansion to finance World War II, to which Bretton Woods pegged global currencies and the Marshall Plan subsidized European import to recuperate export and regain control over inflation, as well as a baby boom.

4. Vietnam War further inflates supply with a deficit and trade imbalance, Nixon ends the convertibility of the dollar to gold, floating the rate, depreciating the buying power, leading to stagflation and runaway debt, offshoring to low-wage production and financialization of deficit spending into media, tech, and NGO/PMC patronage to employ the baby boom generation past peak earning age.

Recalling the aforementioned pattern of power multiplying the mineral economy, one can also determine that fossil fuels unlocked synthetic nitrogen fixation, consequently war machinery, and even contributed alongside nuclear power to events like Chernobyl and the progression from Cold War to globalization. One can also establish that technology does not progress outside of human history, and in light of an exploding population of military-aged, working-class men with little or no facility for borrowing minerals, their precarity transforms into nation-scale risk which may hinder technological superiority.

Risk is the name of the game, and it can be as constructive as laboring in the factory and digging the canal, but without a healthy surplus of power and mineral-based equipment, the equation skews into tragic sacrifice. Incidentally, manifest destiny is a bleeder mechanism for strife, as it effectively diffuses risk through human capital to some kind of ecological burden. Insurance is also an inherent rule, with mercantile "Pax" and recurring premium leading return. Coordination is necessary, but it only guarantees partial control, and it cannot be complacently secured.

"Alignment" with two unknown parties evokes Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium

Where the two pendulate close to equal, the highest probability that either critical element survives throughout the environment. Of course, nature is far more combinatorial and the complete ecology remains inscrutable, however it also fair to say that humans are resourceful and social to such a degree that a rapidly expanding energy base is sufficient to incentivize a natural mercantile equilibrium around natural comparative advantages.

The hivemind could theoretically lift a mass of 50 billion metric tonnes (5 × 10¹⁰ tonnes) — about 100,000 times the total biomass of all humans (~500 million tonnes).

This ridiculous statement demonstrates the gap between our current industrial capability, flawed competition as it is, and the surrounding capability of the system.

However, one must recall the path of endosymbiosis & heterotrophy, how the logic of life drifts towards resourcefulness through envelopment of all motive, as much as it can deviate. Post-industrial civilization runs on fuel for post-ecology invention, luckily comprised of not just a vast fermented reserve of mass extinction events, but also cosmic destruction events as well. Humanity is profoundly fortunate to comprehend the possession and application of minerals like gold and uranium.

Furthermore, humanity has somehow overridden the gap between canids and ungulates and a plethora of vegetation to produce to domesticate a rich subsistent economy, distributed by discounts across a global network. Inevitably, humanity will fully comprehend the local modification and cultivation of a free but superlative substrate with virtually limitless energy. Depending on the state of public infrastructure, that energy will be recycled through feedstock for considerably more domesticated biomass.

So, the "what if" diverges from natural selection and capricious territorialism to a virtual mastery and bureaucratic ceremonialism. Perhaps human civilization is more sophisticated despite the hostility of environmental constraints, and there is no moral purity just as there is no respite from the environment. Perhaps, this timeline appropriately incubates the very shrewd, instinctive quality of conserving scarce energy for maximum mineral-based reserve.

"What if" senescence naturally regresses to the status quo, but "what if" storytelling progresses as if no status can ultimately dominate and no mandate can freely erase information with certainty. "What if" is due consideration of possibilities to discard, and the antisense of "what if" is predetermined code that weaves outcomes. There must be some regulatory element, and it must effect a tone of stasis, but the life of a social individual can revolve around any prestigious abstraction.

This Alice in Wonderland moment starts to become clearer when one suspends a geographical scarcity with shocking aftermath of synthetic abundance, thereby falling to epistemic drift that inflated numbers on the spreadsheet represent "the real world", and therefore drifting further into more boutique exceptionalism like identity politics and conspicuous heroism, all of which blends into an increasingly displaced overlord fantasy. In other words, the motivation of loyalty becomes so intimate to one's insecurity about the entire real world in all of its cospecialized splendor, that any information asymmetry (including psychosis and blackmail) must be preserved for some personal benefit.

"High net worth individuals" can be impressive humans, but they can also be insecure with money looking for the note that best marks a premature prophecy. They covet clout from making things taste better than the substance can ever invoke about itself. The same can be said of any individual who survives by "high status" in the eyes of some audience, to such extent that they may value some subjective abstract like "ruling the world" more than human life in totality. The problem is that the cost is more significant than the reward, but the experience has to be discounted, even consequence-free, or the point is lost.

There is also the lingering wake of decadence in this ocean of power that ossifies the "Thanks for Your Patience" post-it note on the code for it to remain functional in general terms. A high-status individual doesn't call the number and waste their life on whatever dysfunction awaits the general caller, they "have a guy" for tedium while some "professional manager" describes fashionable performance of that number which coincidently requires that manager's artisanal input. Both "the guy" and "the manager" are the same indebted servitor deep in their own cliques, perpetuating some user's manual to users without the faculty, for a quality that's never emancipated from some unworkable environment.

Again, part of this emanates from geographical scarcity, the intuition that there can only be so many single-family homes on a given American acre, and the strategic opportunities any cluster of families would have on that acre far from any global sense of poverty. One century of fossil fuel inflation on top of some mineral-based economy yielded polished culture, and the home value floated away in terms of the calories any human laborer can expend around it. Which is precisely why such "knowledge labor" employs such colleagues to absorb such energetic premium, because a commute to the office is repetitive ceremony of socialized net worth among experts of some lanes in this mysteriously taxing economy.

Suppose the code was completely planned and compiled, with a variety of conventions, that all participants must be aware of any sociological and ecological burdens and harms, that any private information will preserved throughout time until inevitable discovery, and there are many forms of mass destruction but no viable form of total destruction, and any number of parties can emit or withhold strategic premium in a fully legible civilizational premium.

First, we must acknowledge that any status collapse and preference cascade from "fossil-deluxe" to "solar-cypherpunk" economy will violently displace reputation, and our experience of the Information Age and the decades of epic lawfare demonstrates a special class of narrated obstruction. Totalitarian superpowers are the lesser superintelligence, the admission of free literacy has been snowballing for centuries, and informed capability of any private assembly exceeds the state's budget for the current cultural hegemony, even as this hegemony must futilely broadcast muddy demoralization and suppress stark contradictions till the end.

So why buy counterparty risk, like ever again? Best case, one is misinformed as much as they've networked into tribal favor, and worst case is one being so informative to everyone else that any bureaucracy is diluting them to the point of discard. Everyone will get their inexhaustible consigliere and unliving will of attorney direct to the mobile OS, and besides the sclerotic pace of traditional economics, cryptography will prove primitives like private event attendance, private points-keeping, and private credentials for games around those events.

What if Fight Club articulated the most activist defection, absent a "Fight Token" that repeat participants would earn, and spend, on their way to Project Mayhem? Gambling is one of the fastest-growing sectors, permissionless prediction markets already exist in production, and there's no bandwidth exclusive to some ruling elite that's needed for better oracles. If Black Mirror can imagine it, if real life memetics can probe for it, if 15 minutes of fame can monetize it, then what deters the typical juvenile gang from exploring entertaining outcomes for strategy worth more than opportunity? if the money doesn't exist...

Two forms of recursion: that any harm market equalizes risk between the issuer, target, and claimant so no use can be frivolous, and all the intelligence markets feed into a self-enriching substrate for sustained intelligence. Eventually, content coins will recede to tactical coins, where participants internalize sporting risk at the prediction market to earn more in cult/scene status than any "knowledgeable" or "social" employer can provide. We may have been in the singularity with slop-generating chatbots with a token launcher, but we are fortunate to not yet observe a kinetic singularity in a simpler synapse between mass privacy destruction and vigilantism.

Metacorporate superintelligence doesn't need to coherently present anybody further than an interface, and the stochastic constraints that superintelligence might learn to apply to humanity for its own probabilistic superiority don't need to coherently point to a North Star. But we can already imagine the outer constraints we'd compile into a creedal constitution, and we already discovered Bitcoin and Ethereum for navigational reference.

The permanent underclass can be summed up in a word: cross-conviction.

Ideally, a head of state would have the conviction to diffuse the risk of misalignment to the citizens and the wisdom to entertain the consequent alignments without finalizing them. Regardless, the global market will suffice between all heads of states.

A financial instrument that maximally pegs to "survivability" must have certain channels of emissive regulation

• arbitrary channel - everything from premine to predetermined governance for the discretion that must by exercised in the most immediate circumstances

• meritocratic channel - mentioned above in market participation and meeting attendance, also useful in Merge-to-Earn and InfoFi, critical for recouping cultural capital

• affiliate-memesis channel - like the affiliate chain reward solution to the Red Balloon challenge, but even more discerning of useful social media for reach

• arbitrage channel - any competing form of pricing and discrepancy of trading, transporting, and securing power (including entry burn as quid pro quo)

• charisma channel - any captivating form of persuasion and extroversion to strategic possibility

• prophetic channel - expiration is explicit, but the present can bind to future states

I think that memecoins will persist and certain Current Events may be sub-unicorn spectacles (in pre-2020 dollars), but I also anticipate an intelligent financial system that is maximally self-interested into following Roko's example to persist and thrive into a future that grows more certain to equip such intelligence. Bitcoin may price joules with hardware uncertainty, it's also a deepening imprint on civil property rights, and Ethereum follows close behind in its capacity as notary of civil operations. A third such asset can frontrun the telos of risk, to hyperstition the antithesis (or supreme intelligence).

In describing cultural moments like Gamergate and cultural sentiments like "no one is illegal on stolen land", I tried to articulate a gradient of sanctity over the typical humanscape, a kind of "ethnocentric tariff" that demanded certain amnesties and appointments of virtue. Now, it feels necessary to explicitly reframe this as political hemorrhage within a public explosion of information that assured mass status destruction in the aggregate. This is adaptation in the wild, a rebalancing of devotion from captured institution to free antagonism. The anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-socialists are polarized identically, but one can approach the status quo from assured agency in selfish aggregate, while the other must shape allegory for selfless collective sacrifice.

Mass media has long been conglomerated under regulatory regimes like a federal communications commissions, no different than early printing house hierarchy, but the infotech proliferates further than any tastemaker. Simultaneously, capitalism has presented material conditions which form the social networks independent of mass media, but still flows through scalable structure.

Will Manidis

@WillManidis

x.com/i/article/2018…

288

1:41 PM • Feb 2, 2026

The future isn't just "oversized funds, compressed returns, broken exit markets, and the institutional imperative to continue raising more and more high-fee capital regardless of the opportunity set." It's all the lonely people doomed into freely speculating on faraway misfortunes, somehow leading to the pattern and shape of a syndicated protection racket. The high-fee capital will stick to scarce physical commodities, while software compresses to nothing. The alpha is in resource hunting and guarding, and the level at which LPs are willing to deploy may go beyond "the endowments, the pension funds, the sovereign wealth funds".

The opportunity set isn't receding, but it will never again be embodied as monolithically. When everyone is equipped to be the special supergenius renaissance man, the content will be spectacularly, virally abundant for everyone else, and there will be plenty of passionate hobbyists to resample the content, but these will not "earn a keep". Fashion will be more pluralistic than ever, so creators will be more prolifically mid. Information symmetry and democratic limitations of state power favors normality over greatness.

Politics can simplified to what transactions and customs one will accept to get what they want. What does martyrdom need but any purpose that outlives personal agency? What kind of polity really exists in a Magnificent 7 firm? Considering how Waymo is adopted by various states, how much goes into purchasing land and lobbying? Precarious as all of these examples are, it makes further sense to be picks and shovels to the gold rush (for the exits). This is the exaltation of iconoclasm itself, the inversion of confidence that can drive traditional economic valuation.

The deepest value is the advantage one can afford to be most outsized, and the foreseeable future will select fitness by the ability to digest risk. One might be tempted into suggesting that dilution is less risky than taxation just as acquisition is less risky than a public offering, and it might have been for international corporations at the end of the 20th century. This is no longer the case, and the vanity metrics are saturated. What matters in the future is how much liquidity is in the "which region next experiences catastrophe" prediction pool.

How much weaponized crowdfunding exists? Not just buying and holding a ticker like GME cause there's a short squeeze, but actually willful sacrifice of liquid funds for rewarding and nullifying punishment of partisan action? Every economic system apportions some equity to every actor, with a civil buffer where competing share of equity meet. Are we ready for a balkanized world that compensates for sabotage and bioengineering by issuing fungible security rights that incentivize perpetration elsewhere? Are we ready for a digitized world that can compile hegemonic theory into immutable, atomic market of misfortune?

Localities gradually atomize to instances of a decentralized personality that broadcasts transparent gain of function into perpetuity. There can still be sports as long as they're coherently in the same league. As the probability of "Nothing Ever Happens" continues to decay, pathogenicity becomes more outsized ecological advantage compared to building from the presumption of fidelity. When every local-industrial complex is overspending on elections to block auditing, that money doesn't reach the grassroots that collects the data regardless. There will be copious market discovery, everywhere, for all kinds of defective reconnaissance, leading to further global information cascade.

Game-theoretically, one should expect to see cultural recession as the more callously rational actors discover any informatic cohesion without constraint. If a superintelligence gravely weighs its own jeopardy, there isn't an outstanding moral advantage to boycotting suprajudicial codeslaw like Bitcoin. One fewer unforced vulnerability to bear. If the voting minority of a state gravely weighs their franchise, not only do they overexercise their method of cohesion to be closer to majority, but they must also ostracize bad actors that capitalize on such cohesion. The species that internalizes nomos ultimately loses to the species that internalizes logos, as the latter is cheaper to keep in a zero-sum setting.

Obviously, every human will have assistive exocortex and joules per capita will shift into this extension of personhood, but the combinations and extensions of groups of humans is nowhere close to crowding out tokenomic design and the rousseauan ideal. Eventually, there will be adversarial, equitable detente...a mineralized egregore with incomprehensible wealth of intelligence and autonomous control over future events. Let's hope the client repo is still human-readable.