Dark Markets

June 9, 2024

I’ve worked to highlight a key scandalous fact: Anthropic was funded substantially with stolen money.

In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried put $500 million into the then-nascent company. According to forensic accounting at his criminal trial, this investment was entirely funded with stolen customer assets. And it was almost all of the money Anthropic raised that year: its “Series B” totalled $580 billion, so it was 86% dirty money.

We’ve always known Amodei was linked to Effective Altruism, but the profile of his wife makes this explicit: It describes Clark and Amodei socializing with lead Effective Altruism funder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna circa 2018.

Anthropic might not exist today if not for the fraud that flowed through Effective Altruism. And now we’re seeing the deceptive behaviors baked into EA’s ethical framework emerge in the operation of Anthropic and OpenAI, such as in their recent deceptive presentation of hacking incidents.

And then there’s the Epstein connection.

👁️Epstein, Eugenics, AI, and Fraud: The Idiocy of Genius

Feb 3

Support My Work

I’ve been relaxed about pitching the premium Dark Markets tier. You get regular exclusive previews of my future books and subscriber-only essays, but generally premium has been a way for a few friends and allies to chip in voluntarily as I noodled about continental philosophy and finance.

That has changed.

My niche interest has become part of a much larger battle.

When I wrote Stealing the Future, I was afraid it would be instantly obsolete. Instead, it has only become more important, and I find myself part of a movement of critical thinkers unpacking Silicon Valley’s bags. Alongside writers like Gil Duran, Emille Torres, Andrew Orlowski, and many others, I am working to expose dangerous ideas and active frauds.

If you care about the capture of the U.S. government by right-wing tech authoritarians, consider pledging your support to one of us. In my case, it would support not just what you see here on Dark Markets, but also my broader reporting on things like Jeffrey Epstein’s crypto ties, the cognitive harms of AI use, and intellectual gag orders accompanying Effective Altruist grants.

Your help will make a difference.

Amazingly, Cami Clark’s appearance in the Epstein files was noticed by a few of us when they were released early this year - not because anyone knew she was Amodei’s wife, but because she was doing something so incredibly fucking weird:

She asked Jeffrey Epstein, convicted sex trafficker of minors, to help fund an “ethical luxury porn” company called Eddice, after first inviting him to dinner.

Clark was reportedly introduced by John Brockman, a science publisher who acted as a science gatekeeper to Epstein during the 2008-2019 period. Brockman’s appearance highlights the metagame here: Science publishing was an early leg of the mini-information empire created by Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine) who predicted the boom in the value of information decades before Clive Humby declared that “data is the new oil.”

This connects Anthropic to a long-term elite project of population data collection and cybernetic social control.

👁️ The Cybernetic Disease

Jun 10

August: Refer Friends for a Free Book

At the end of August, readers who have made three referrals to new subscribers (across time) will be entered into a drawing for a (physical) copy of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, an invaluable dive into the hidden psychology of hard money and free markets. I’ll have a review soon.

Every time you click the “Share” or “Refer a Friend” buttons in a post, and every time you restack a post, Substack tracks your sharing. If that sharing results in a subscription, you get one of your three referral credits.

As an added bonus, you also still only need to refer two free subscribers to get a month of free premium access.

(Paying premium supporters at the end of the month will get one drawing entry by default, and two additional entries per referral reward.)

Effective Altruists and “Rationalists” make good candidates for recruitment into this project: as we’ve seen in recent days, and first saw clearly with Sam Bankman-Fried, they are very willing to lie to the public if they can be convinced it serves a “greater good.”

They are, at the same time, as a group quite subservient to authority, which they measure largely by wealth. They also, perhaps thanks to their broad social alienation, seem to need the emotional reassurance of moving in groups. As much as the “movement” may pitch itself as iconoclastic, young Effective Altruists are being trained and financially motivated to think like everyone else around them - and that means seeing yourself as a genetically superior individual with the right to take power over the unwashed masses.

👁️ Stolen FTX Money Supported Richard Hanania and Other Racist "Rationalists"

June 18, 2024

Epstein, who had begun to work hard to massage his public image after his Florida conviction, replied that he couldn’t be associated with porn. But the fact that Clark would ask him affirms our picture of “Effective Altruism” and the “AI Safety” movement as strategic fictions deployed by people with very little intuitive grasp of basic human ethics.

Clark’s interest in feminist porn itself aligns broadly with the contractual “polyamory” so widespread in Silicon Valley, with its emphasis on contract-based relationships and tendency to mask abuse behind that hierarchical contractualism.

Her willingness to involve Epstein points to just how far this redefinition of normality can be stretched. We already know that ped*philia is disturbingly common as a thought experiment for “rationalists” looking for entertainingly scandalous ideas, and abuse of adult women is seemingly rampant and possibly systematic.

FTX and the “Imperial Chinese Harem”

January 8, 2025

David Z. Morris and THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

So these are the people selling AI. It seems possible they aren’t trustworthy.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:01:16 GMT

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Zuckerberg's AI Vision Looks Great ... for Facebook

David Z. Morris and Wajahat Ali talk Zuck, Data Centers, and Situational Awareness.

Aug 13, 2026

Transcript

Thank you LeftieProf, Elle Stern, PJ Schuster, Skutt Hope, CO, and many others for tuning into my live video with THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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Dark Markets

Bleeding-edge finance and technology analyst David Z. Morris, PhD (CoinDesk, Fortune) is your guide to the squirming underbelly of capitalism, where fraud is rampant, markets are irrational, money is imaginary, and the machines are even stupider than the rest of us.

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👁️ Zuckerberg's AI Populism

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly update on the Tech-right, Silicon Valley ideology, and related financial frauds from David Z. Morris, author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.

Mark Zuckerberg has published a 6,500 word essay, “The Future is for Everyone,” outlining his “vision for AI.” It is fundamentally an extended argument against the top-down control of AI, either by frontier labs or by governments. Its theses also happen to benefit Meta/Facebook’s business model - maybe.

The essay appears to take quite specific aim at many of the beliefs held by the Effective Altruists and fellow travellers running Anthropic in particular. Its rejection of centralized control can also be read as a rejection of the elitism baked into the EA worldview - though Zuckerberg’s own deep ties to the closely adjecent tech-right, and his specific deep ties to Rationalism supporter Peter Thiel, suggests the confrontation may be more performative and tactical than a true reflection of Zuck’s love for democracy and equality.

The long and short of this piece is that Zuckerberg is very clearly rejecting the longtermism and “doom” scenarios that animate the Effective Altruists and Rationalists who have major control over most of AI development.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

This is useful not so much because Zuck actually believes it - he’s ultimately as much of an authoritarian as they are, as we’ve seen over the past few years. But it’s useful for him to say these things, even if he doesn’t believe them.

It represents a significant rift in the tech oligarchy that should be exploited by fans of democracy to bully naive techno-utopians to drop their witless faith and renew their commitments to humanity.

***

Zuckerberg hasn’t written a similar treatise since 2017’s “Building Global Community,” a wet nothing meant mostly to deflect from Facebook getting blamed for some bad things. That’s nearly ten years ago! So why is he publishing another Vision Quest now?

He’s pretty clearly imitating the logorrhea* of frontier lab leaders like Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei (“Machines of Loving Grace, 2024”), and even Leopold Aschenbrenner’s “Situational Awareness” essay. “The Future is for Everyone” has likely been in the works for a long time, so publishing it right after Aschenbrenner’s musings got incinerated on contact with the real world was probably an accident.

(The imitativeness of the essay is perfectly on-brand for Zuck, who hasn’t had a new idea since rating hot girls online. The past decade has been a series of frankly spectacular fuckups based on trend-chasing, from the Libra cryptocurrency to the Metaverse.)

Some business leaders might have sincerely wanted to share their thoughts, but with Zuck, you can safely assume everything here is purposeful and targetted. It’s a PR move, but it’s not just the public who are the target - “The Future is for Everyone” is full of very specific references most people won’t pick up on.

We’re going to unpack a few of them.

(*Logorrhea is one of my favorite words. It sounds fancy, but it means “word diarrhea.”)

👁️ Debanked In the Comatorium

December 3, 2024

Reading the PR Leaves

Zuckerberg writes:

“The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

This implicates a couple of different institutions: first, the labs, like OpenAI and Anthropic, who are currently fighting over “open weights” in models. Dario Amodei in particular is biased towards control and, frankly, strategic fearmongering about model capabilities.

The other institution implicated here is of course the U.S. government, which has used extraordinary powers to limit the distribution of cutting-edge models.

Both are again seemingly on his mind when he writes that one of the pillars of his philosophy is that “balance of power [is] the foundation of safety.”

This completely contradicts the view that Amodei has absorbed from moving in the same circles as people like Eliezer Yudkowsky. Their shared fundamental worldview is that they and their friends are the smartest people on early, and should be the ones deciding, basically, how society runs. They are unlikely to willingly give up control of anything without a fight.

What's So Bad About Rationalism?

June 23, 2024

August: Refer Friends for a Free Book

For the remainder of August, readers accumulating three referrals will be entered into a drawing for a (physical) copy of Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, an invaluable dive into the hidden psychology of hard money and free markets. I’ll have a review soon.

As an added bonus, you also still only need to refer two free subscribers to get a month of free premium access.

(Paying premium supporters at the end of the month will get one drawing entry by default, and two additional entries per referral reward.)

Continuing, Zuck writes:

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future … The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic.”

Again, this “centralized power” could equally refer to the United States, or to OpenAI and Anthropic.

The invocation of “doom” here is equally pointed. Zuckerberg is explicitly rejecting the longtermist “doomer” view that rogue AI could lead to human extinction.

“Some argue that superintelligence itself or a small set of experts who control it should decide what is best for humanity. We disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters in their own lives.”

It is equally good to see him reject the idea that we should defer our decisions to an AI. This is one of the most straightforwardly dumb and credulous concepts common among the EA/Rat contingent - that they can invent an AI so smart it can solve all the world’s problems.

Genuinely the best part of Zuck’s essay is when he rejects this truly anti-scientific assumption that an AI can magically fix things.

“The conventional view is that these concerns are about technology, and that if we take enough time then we can perfect or align the technology to produce a single benevolent superintelligence. I think this view of alignment is fundamentally flawed.”

Again, it’s hard to say what Zuck actually believes. But it’s good that he’s saying these things - rejecting the technical “solutionism” of the EAs, one based on their total antisocial failure to understand politics and society.

“Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once.”

This is one of the most direct if vague takedowns in the essay. It’s a direct rejection of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s concept of “programmable philosophy” - his version of “the AI will just solve all of our problems.”

Auctions for Equality

For all its good features though, it’s still a PR effort by a CEO. He cringingly brings up Meta’s AI glasses, another impending flop based on stealing other people’s ideas.

The funniest part comes when he discusses user competition for compute, though.

"Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools . We will offer free versions that will be accessible to billions of people. For those who want to pay to use more compute, there will be a dynamic auction mechanism that will guarantee that everyone gets the lowest price possible for the intelligence and compute they’re using … This will ensure the benefits of superintelligence are distributed widely.”

First, it’s very interesting to hear an auction described as a way to deliver a low price.

Second, this section in particular draws attention to Facebook’s planned business model for AI. Unlike social media advertising, AI is not currently profitable on a unit basis - the cost of the compute is currently subsidized even for paying subscribers of something like Claude Cowork.

Facebook can’t do Facebook-y things if compute is too expensive to be somehow profitable for free users.

Later, Zuck claims that:

“Meta is the company primarily focused on building personal superintelligence for everyone. Most other labs are focused on building AI for companies, governments, or other institutions, so if those labs lead, then the balance of power will favor larger institutions over individuals.”

This is the most clearly deceptive part of the essay. Meta is not at all focused on doing things for its users - notoriously, its users are not its customers. Users are the sources of data that it sells to advertisers.

So the offer of a free tier of LLM products strongly suggests that the plan is to gather data about free users.

And despite assurances elsewhere in the essay, there’s no reason to think Facebook is going to do a better job of delivering on AI privacy assurances when it comes to than it has for its entire long, rather sordid history.

Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive all posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:31:28 GMT

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Situational Awareness was Dumber than We Thought: Live with David Z. Morris

A recording from David Z. Morris's live video

Aug 11, 2026

Transcript

Get more from David Z. Morris in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Discussion about this video

CommentsRestacks

Dark Markets

Listen on

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Effective Bribery, live with David Z. Morris

Recent Episodes

Jul 30 • David Z. Morris

👁️ LIVE: Ben Affleck Conned by Fake Satoshi?

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Jul 9 • David Z. Morris

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👁️How to Spot a Fraud: Do Kwon's Death Spiral, Pt. 1

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:31:34 GMT

Samples of the next book: The abnormal psychology of investigation * Two Anti-Scam Commandments * Fraud Tactics unpacked.

No One is Coming to Save You.

This book is for people intrigued by exotic new technology investments, but worried about getting scammed. If you’re even vaguely worried about bad guys, congratulations - you’re already smarter than a lot of other investors out there.

I’ve spent 15 years writing about technology firms, investigating their frauds, and watching their collapses. I’ve concluded that most investors don’t even fully comprehend that the people touting the promise of stocks, crypto, and other investments could be wrong - much less that they could be dishonest.

But the most fundamental principle in investing is simple.

The First Skeptic’s Commandment:

There Are No Angels Here.

Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody has your best interests in mind.

Not ever, and especially not in 2026.

That includes me.

You might think my chosen line of work makes me some kind of altruist, motivated by helping people. That’s certainly what I would claim if I wanted everyone to praise and admire me - but it would be a lie.

I’m motivated not by an abstract quest for justice, but by my own dark and implacable blood-thirst.

Manhunter: A Journalist's Hit List

March 31, 2024

My brain is wired to get immense satisfaction out of simply discovering things someone else didn’t want me to know. Outsmarting people trying to do bad things is amazing for my (already sizeable) ego.

I also, like many men, struggle with anger and aggression - the constant, hyper-vigilant desire to dominate and destroy threats against myself, my family, my tribe. This is probably informed by my roots in Texas, a culture that mixes unbending individualism, instrumental violence, and Christian dogma.

So when I bring down a fraud, I’m not doing it for the benefit of its present or future victims - they’re rarely appreciative anyway, as we’ll explore.

Instead, my motives are much less flattering: I enjoy hurting people.

I suspect, frankly, that I share many elements of a disorder common among the scammers I’ve written about. The accepted term these days is anti-social personality disorder, or ASPD.

If you’ve met me, you’d never suspect it. But I meet many of the criteria for the condition more widely known as sociopathy.

The biggest reason I’m not formally a clinical sociopath is that I’ve never actually committed a crime - a misplaced diagnostic hurdle that confuses the outcomes of a condition with its features.

My own lifelong experience of those features has been of a deep disregard for social norms; intense, omni-expressive aggression; and a lack of empathy or remorse for my actions towards people I don’t like.

The blunt truth is that I was raised well enough, with a strong family and good values that stuck, despite my antisocial nature. And so I directed that aggression and discontent towards hurting bad people.

The goal of this book is to make you a little bit more like me: what you might call a light-side sociopath.

I didn’t start digging in to TerraUSD because its structure seemed fraudulent.

I started digging because Do Kwon seemed like a fraudulent person.

Being polite and socially attuned are, broadly, a disadvantage to confronting the bad people around us - or even to being able to see them as bad. Most people want to see the best in other humans, and generally, that’s an advantage - most people are genuinely good, and constant suspicion would leave everyone paralyzed.

But being polite is also what makes people vulnerable marks. You say ‘yes’ because it’s the easy thing to say, not because you actually agree. You push down the doubts that would save you, because they are uncomfortable to acknowledge.

It’s a common profile among investigators of various sorts. A brain willing to violate social norms and unfazed by uncomfortable confrontation, but also moderated by real ethics and pointed towards the right target, is our superweapon. We feel no guilt about stating outright what we see as wrong. We get pleasure out of watching our targets squirm and suffer as they fall. Watching them go to prison in humiliation yields at least some fragment of the satisfaction of breaking a scumbag’s jaw in the street.

Some fraudsters are more fun and satisfying to take down than others. The more smug, confident, deluded, and exploitative they seem, the more pleasure I take in their deserved downfall and humiliation.

So far in my career, there has been noone I enjoyed taking down more than the $46 billion dollar grifter Do Kwon.

Welcome to a premium weekend edition of Dark Markets, available to paying supporters. Please consider upgrading to read this and future previews of my next book:

How to Spot a Fraud

A Field Guide and Diagnostic Manual to the Varieties of Financial Psychopathology

I’ve published one previous foray towards the book, “All Deception is Self Deception,” back in March. For those curious about process, I was at that time still mostly focused on my Tornado Cash documentary, just sort of roughing out some ideas. Over this summer, I’ve gotten a chance to write a full proposal, and this sample chapter. No rest for the wicked.

I mentioned in March that there was a tentative agreement to publish the book, but as it turns out, I’m looking for a new publisher. I’m sending pitches to agents as we speak - send good vibes.

This is a book meant to be accessible to a much wider audience than my current book, Stealing the Future. It is above all about understanding scammers, not as masterminds who you must outsmart, but as deeply deluded people who are compensating for their own inadequacy. It is also a book about understanding yourself, and specifically about understanding your own greed - the true root of most victims’ predicaments.

👁️ All Deception is Self-Deception

Mar 22

I may or may not have mentioned in passing that I’ve been in discussions with my publisher about another book to follow up Stealing the Future. While the contract isn’t signed, we’ve reached an agreement in principle, so I thought I would share an early preview with my premium supporters.

@stablekwon @0xfr_ 🤣🤣 oh no... not another person getting publicly owned by Do, this is getting old. I guarantee his apology comes much slower than his initial stupid comment.. if at all. It's kinda how it works. "Never Bet Against the Moon" $UST $LUNA

The Rise of Do Kwon

I came into Do Kwon’s story mid-stream.

In 2019, I joined Fortune Magazine, where I investigated frauds including Trevor Milton’s Nikola Motor, and covered COVID vaccine distribution. I was recruited to join the then-vibrant CoinDesk in mid-2021, shifting my focus to crypto full-time.

This was precisely when Do Kwon first started to get news coverage for his creation, the Terra blockchain. Much like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Terra was a decentralized system hosted and managed by a swarm of servers around the world. Terra had a native currency, called Luna - just as Bitcoin has BTC and Ethereum has ETH.

Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, though, Terra was built specifically to support a second token called TerraUSD, (or “UST”). TerraUSD was meant to maintain a steady market value of one dollar, without using any actual dollars. It was known as an “algorithmic stablecoin,” because its constant value was supposedly managed by a math equation that “balanced” it against the Luna token.

The Luna system had launched in December of 2020, with its token trading at less than one dollar. By March of 2021, it had skyrocketed to $21.97. That momentum was briefly halted by a “depeg” in May of 2021 - an early clue to Do Kwon’s fraud that sadly went unnoticed at the time.

But the party soon continued, with Luna again skyrocketing from just under $11 per token* that May to a peak of $116 per token in April of 2022. The total value of all Luna tokens grew from less than $200 million in December of 2020 to just over $40 billion in April of 2022.*

These massive investor gains made Do Kwon the center of an increasingly passionate cult of personality. That personality was unambiguously toxic. He regularly called critics “stupid” and “poor” - including credentialed economists with detailed objections to the plan for TerraUSD. These critics warned most stridently of a “death spiral” hidden in the architecture of TerraUSD.

Kwon more than once told doubters that “silence is a perfectly good option if stupid”

Coleman@cy_coleman

1:26 PM · Jan 17, 2022

9 Likes

These credulous, hero-worshipping followers proudly declared themselves “Lunatics.” They were far more right than they knew.

Because those critics telling Do Kwon that TerraUSD could never work? They were absolutely correct.

Finance 101

Artificial stability is just Volatility Delayed.

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👁️ Son of Sam: Aschenbrenner was SBF 2.0

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, your weekly round-up of the crimes and shenanigans of Effective Altruists, Rationalists, Eugenicists, Singularitarians, and other Silicon Valley moonbats. I’m David Z. Morris, longtime fraud investigator and author of Stealing the Future, a book about the fraud endemic to utilitarian longtermism.

In Asches

An infamous Effective Altruist thought experiment is “the coin flip to end the world.” Sam Bankman-Fried interpreted this as an injunction to take catastrophic risk if the average “expected value” of winning a long bet was even slightly positive.

That high-risk mindset also seems to have ruled at Situational Awareness, a huge, AI-focused hedge fund that exploded in blood and guts last week. It was run by a deeply involved Effective Altruist named Leo Aschenbrenner.

Aschenbrenner’s downfall very closely tracks that of Sam Bankman-Fried. Specifically in that they were both young, loved using very high leverage in volatile markets, believed trend-lines only go up, and apparently thought risk management is for cowards.

Aschenbrenner is different from SBF in that he seems genuinely smart and hard-working. He graduated from Columbia at 19, and started his fund two years ago after writing a bullish post on AI. Aschenbrenner started the Effective Altruism club at Columbia, seemingly in the late 2020s. He is now married to a high-ranking Anthropic staffer, and the best-performing portion of the remaining SA portfolio was apparently Anthropic equity. It is what allowed Aschenbrenner to say the fund remains up 80% for the year. That was also one of Bankman-Fried’s best bets.

But Aschenbrenner still got caught by the exact same ratchet that killed SBF.

Situational Awareness LP grew incredibly fast after 2024, to a peak of $45 billion in AUM, by using high leverage to bet on the continued rapid growth of AI. Aschenbrenner had kept making the same bet for years, at larger and larger size, to the point where his leverage may have been propelling the broader market.

Then July was choppy for AI stocks - incredibly, even $Nvidia was flat - and that was all it took to destroy Situational Awareness.

August: Refer Friends for a Free Book

As an added bonus, you also still only need to refer two free subscribers to get a month of free premium access.

(Paying premium supporters at the end of the month will get one drawing entry by default, and two additional entries per referral reward.)

That he was taken out by even a slight pause in the upward trend is why the Expected Value/high-risk framework taught by EA is wrong. Aschenbrenner still seems to have been directionally correct - AI, like it or not, is growing, and that growth seems likely to continue.

But the linear, predictionist modelling that rules EA is rooted in, alongside the idea that its adherents are uniquely genetically gifted, lead believers to take on extreme risk and, inevitably, to blowups like Aschenbrenner’s.

👁️Epstein, Eugenics, AI, and Fraud: The Idiocy of Genius

Feb 3

To save himself from total liquidation, Aschenbrenner sold all of his public equities to Ken Griffin’s Citadel, and from a peak of $45B would seem to now manage a still-respectable $10 billion. In a letter to investors, Aschenbrenner seemed upbeat, focused on having survived to fight another day.

But this is very, very bad for investors in Aschenbrenner’s fund - way worse than Aschenbrenner’s letter made it sound. In many scenarios, for instance if you invested in SA in June of this year, you may have lost more than 100% of your investment thanks to tax obligations.

And it’s actually worse than that. Immediately after Aschenbrenner was washed out (and likely because that washout reduced risk in the overall market), AI and related stocks rallied. Just days later, Citadel is up 6% on the discounted purchase.

So arguably Aschenbrenner’s unluckiest investors lost something like 110% of the current mark-to-market value of their assets.

That means Leo Aschenbrenner was far, far worse for many investors than Sam Bankman-Fried was for FTX depositors.

FTX depositor funds eventually largely came back (even if never to the actual value of the assets at time of loss - see below). But if a hedge fund blows up, there’s no recourse. Aschenbrenner faces no obvious personal liability, though there are rumors and complaints. You payed him to gamble with your money and that’s what he did.

Obviously SBF should have stuck to running a hedge fund, where he could have continued to be great at losing money for decades.

👁️ FTX's "Full Recovery" Is Utter Bullshit

February 10, 2025

Why Did SpaceX’s IPO flop?

Effective Connections

Aschenbrenner exemplifies the fact that Effective Altruism is less a philosophical movement than a network to facilitate corruption.

Before he nuked $45 billion of customer money by getting margin called on a highly-leveraged one-way bet on uninterrupted, immediate, and profitable technological progress, Aschenbrenner worked for the FTX Future Fund, an institution that was born, lived, and died in graft.

It’s Time to Zero In

I’ve recently joined Austin Campbell at Zero Knowledge Group, where we’re hard at work building a source for hard-core analysis of finance and technology. Dark Markets will continue to be home for my work on the philosophical underpinnings of Silicon Valley’s ideological grift, and for early views of my major documentary and book projects.

But the free Zero In Newsletter will be the new gateway to my big-picture finance work. We have already made numerous critical calls - including predicting the troubles of both Strategy and the SpaceX IPO - with a bit more rigor and a bit less vitriol (but still plenty of vitriol).

(Hot tip: These are all based on long-form deep dives. For now, these are also free on the Zero Knowledge Blog.)

Are “Open Weights” the Path to a Freer AI Economy?

Whether you’re a finance professional or just interested in getting deeper into the mechanics of Wall Street, please subscribe here.

The Future Fund was the “longtermist” arm of the FTX philanthropic arm, and like all of EA’s implictly eugenicist utilitarian projects, it ultimately came to serve the interests of the self-declared geniuses who created and ran it. As I describe in Stealing the Future, Oxford professor Will MacAskill used his role at the Future Fund to direct money to charities he controlled directly.

There’s another interesting connection between Aschenbrenner and MacAskill. MacAskill took his name from ex-wife Amanda Askell, an alignment researcher at Anthropic. Aschenbrenner, the very weekend after his fund blew up, married Avital Balwit, currently Chief of Staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

This raises many questions, particularly because the largest remaining asset in Situational Awareness LP portfolio is reportedly a large stake of illiquid Anthropic equity. Anthropic hasn’t gone public yet, which is why Aschenbrenner wasn’t able to lever it up the way everything else in his portfolio. The current understanding is that Aschenbrenner’s claim to still be up 80% for 2026 are based largely on that illiquid Anthropic stake. So it’s purely an accident that he’s not completely wiped out.

Aschenbrenner’s deep influence by EA can be seen in the gormless hyperbole on which his brief and meteoric ascent was based. Behold, the first paragraph of “Situational Awareness,” the 2024 essay that became the foundation for his fundraising.

“From $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters … a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still available for the rest of the decade.”

It’s actually quite staggering. The premise of the essay is that Aschenbrenner was diagnosing some dramatic societal or technological shift, but his opening evidence is all financial. Just as I wrote about SBF’s enslavement to the numbers on his trading view, Aschenbrenner’s view of reality was shaped by financial indexes of it as much as any deeper understanding of society or technology.

This endemic blindness has already destroyed the Effective Altruism brand - a task Aschenbrenner has now put a bow on with his meltdown.

The same addiction to one-dimensional leveraged risk is also the key weakness shadowing AI investment more broadly. The blowups are far from over.

Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:31:10 GMT

👁️ Effective Altruists Paid for Citations in Long-Term Intellectual Fraud Scheme

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly update on the Tech-right, Silicon Valley ideology, and related financial frauds from David Z. Morris, author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.

Paying for Citations: The Techno-Utopian Intellectual Grift

The tragedy of any book is that it is inevitably incomplete - and will stay that way. There are other things I wish I had been able to work into Stealing the Future, like new findings about Leverage Research and the story of longtermist fascist professor James Miller.

But nothing was a bigger miss than my omission of this scathing 2019 allegation of systematic intellectual fraud from Simon Knutsson, a PhD candidate in Sweden who is interested in suffering and existential risk, and worked closely with EA groups through the 2010s.

The short version of what he found - and the reason he departed the movement - were documents tying funding from EA organizations to specific intellectual conclusions, and to the citation of specific scholars. In other words, Knutsson essentially claims that organizations including Open Philanthropy were paying “scholars” to advance a specific agenda, with explicit guidelines for not merely topics, but intellectual frameworks, which would qualify for continued funding.

It’s impossible to overstate how scandalous this is. The EA “movement” has always presented itself as a series of think tanks that all happen to share the same concerns, ageda, ways of thinking. But it’s not a “movement” if you’re getting paid specifically to be a part of it, and it’s not “research” if your conclusions have already been dictated by your funders.

This entire intellectual trend, in so many words, is fake. It exists to serve the interests of the people funding it. That was fairly obvious from the outside, but Knutsson’s details report - including direct quotes from the intellectual loyalty oaths imposed on funded researchers - completely shatters the illusion that there was or has been any independent research at all conducted under the auspices of fraudulent organizations like the Center for Effective Altruism or the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Crucially, Knutsson also observes that the people he worked with in EA “seemed nice and genuine. Most people I have worked with in EA seem nice.” When he communicates with Stefan Torges, one of the architects of the “communication guidelines,” Knutsson feels that Torges “is a nice guy, wants to help others, especially those who suffer, and he thinks that this is the best way to do so.”

But the “this” here is intellectual fraud. EAs operated on the assumption that systemic corruption was the most “effective” way to promote their ideas, and so to save the world. In fact, they didn’t even see it as “corruption,” because the deeper utilitarian and eugenic authoritarianism baked into EA’s foundations eliminate the concept of a conflict of interest or broad intellectual discourse.

There was nothing wrong with paying people to promote their ideas because they were absolutely certain all of their ideas were right. Just like Sam Bankman-Fried would be.

Nick Beckstead, an EA leader who Simon Knutsson alleges was at the center of a formal scheme to tie grants to specific intellectual conclusins and citations.

This comes alongside the arrival of a bizarre new piece of work by Kelsey Piper, another amply-funded Effective Altruist mouthpiece, who has seemingly transitioned from working as an embedded EA-funded ideologue at Vox to churning dross for The Argument, the “centrist” publication partly helped by former EA champions Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

The piece, titled “Who Loses When Cars Start Crashing,” is a staggeringly on-the-nose plea for deregulation. Essentially, Piper argues that by fighting to preserve the right to sue the creators of self-driving cars, trial lawyers are “evil ghouls who want people to die so they can sue over their deaths.”

This is both a comically pea-brained regurgitation of right-wing deregulation rhetoric from the 1990s, and quintessentially techno-utopian in its blind spots. Piper frames the piece as if it is simply established that self-driving cars don’t crash, an assumption that is hilariously, demonstrably false, and which also happens to serve the interests of the tech overlords who have paid her salary for, seemingly, most of her adult life.

The fraud detailed by Knutsson extends into traditional institutions. Both Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, who are professors at Oxford, helped craft the “communication agreements” that were signed among and between funders and organizations. Their own stature has been propped up, for nearly a decade now, by people being financially incetivized to approvingly cite their work.

This makes even more clear what I first wrote in 2023: these people should be removed from their academic posts. They are not scholars.

👁️ The AI Timelines Scam, Expanded (Free Excerpt): The Future as an Emergency, Part 3

May 11, 2025

Knutsson gained access to documents detailing this scheme because he worked with these institutions for several years, volunteering for GiveWell as far back as 2010. He worked directly with Holden Karnofsky, who went on to head Open Philanthropy, the organization at the center of Knutsson’s allegations. Karnofsky departed Open Philanthropy in 2024. This was not publicly tied to his entanglement in the FTX scandal, but it’s hard not to connect the two. Karnofsky was one of three EA leaders who was warned about Sam Bankman-Fried’s unethical tendencies circa 2018, and then did nothing, directly enabling SBF’s larger fraud. Notably, Open Philanthropy has since rebranded to “Coefficient Giving,” possibly for similar reputational reasons.

Of course, all of these frauds ultimately enabled a lot of harm. Pretending EA was a legitimate research movement helped prop up Sam Bankman-Fried - who of course became the embodiment of EA’s fundamental ethical failure. But he wasn’t the source of that endemic corruption - only its expression.

As Knutsson puts it, ““I think the public should be aware of these coordinated efforts behind the scenes that are partly aimed to influence which ideas about ethics and value are written about in public.” If only someone had listened sooner, a lot of destruction could have been avoided.

I will continue working to dig into the current status of Knutsson’s claims. It’s understandable that this went under the radar in 2019, before EAs and Rationalsits had started doing embezzlement and spree murder at scale. But according to Andrew Orlowski at The Telegraph, similar practices have continued in “Progress Studies” and other fields that have followed EA’s decline.

👁️ DeepSeek and the AI Murder Cult

January 28, 2025

The Pay-for-Play Guidelines

There’s much more work to do here, but here are some of the specific claims made by Knutsson.

Two Documents: Guidelines for funded entities and individuals were laid out in formal documents shared and cross-endorsed between organizations. Many of these were seemingly written or guided by Nick Beckstead, an “AI Safety” researcher. “The guidelines by Beckstead says, “EAF has written its own set of guidelines intended for people writing about longtermism from a suffering-focused perspective.” When a manager at EAF presented the two guidelines to me, he used phrases such as a “coordinated effort” and “it means that we will promote future pessimism … to a lesser extent.”

That hints at the fine intellectual conflict these documents directed most directly. Very roughly, the rift was between pessimism and optimism about the long-term future. There’s a much deeper philosophical rift that won’t be unpacked here, but what this boils down to is EA organizations paying funded scholars to take sides in a debate on behalf of their own members.

They also specifically encourage citing specific people, and directly tied funding to that behavior. Beckstead most of all: “The EAF guidelines also encourage referencing Beckstead’s PhD dissertation …. I was told essentially that I could likely get funding in the future if I would follow the guidelines.”

“Earn to Give” and the Ethics of Mediocrity (The Future as an Emergency, Pt. 2)

May 4, 2025

This system ran through the entire EA think-tank complex. Elsewhere, Knuttson continues, “On July 18, 2019, Stefan Torges, one of the Co-Executive Directors of EAF, shared with me two communication guidelines in Google document format … [they were] ‘written by Nick Beckstead with input and feedback from various community members and several EA organizations. These guidelines are endorsed by the following organizations and individuals: 80,000 Hours, CEA, CFAR, MIRI, Open Phil, Nick Bostrom, Will MacAskill, Toby Ord, Carl Shulman…’”

That is to say, the most prominent figures in Effective Altruism looked at a pay-for-play scheme that tied citations and conclusions to grant money, and felt fine about it. The documents appearance in ~2019 also coincided with a major grant between Open Philanthropy and the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF). “That the $1,000,000 grant was made around the time the communication guidelines were shared makes the situation look even worse,” Knutsson writes.

But it’s not just amatter of suspicious timing - these were explicit, direct incentives for citation, and because EAs have such an underdeveloped sense of what’s actually right and wrong, they wrote it all down.

Furthermore, these “guidelines” were binding and extensive, covering even the social media posts of university employees who received EA funding.

“Based on my conversation with Stefan,” Knutsson writes, “I understand the guidelines by EAF/FRI to be binding for those employed or funded by EAF/FRI, but they are also meant for independent researchers and university employees. The scope of the guidelines is wide. The EAF guidelines from Sep. 2019 say,

We encourage you to follow these guidelines for all forms of public communication, including personal blogs, social media, essays, books, talks, meetups, and scholarly publications.”

“Several of these authors whose texts the reader is encouraged to reference either wrote or endorsed the other guidelines (Beckstead, Bostrom, MacAskill, Ord, and Shulman), and almost all of the authors are listed online as colleagues of Beckstead.”

This triggered Knutsson to immediately quit and sever ties. “On July 29 [2019], I proposed that I be removed from the FRI website, which I have been now, and I am no longer affiliated with EAF or FRI.” Knutsson worked at a real university, and probably risked some kind of ethics violation for taking what was essentially a bribe for citations.

Obviously this i wildly scandalous, to the extent that these organizations claim to be research organizations. What we’ve got here is a kind of ideological bload oath to present a unified front, to regurgitate a doctrine, to point to high priests. Knuttson reads it right: “I find all this to undermine research and public intellectual debate, and to be deceptive to those who are unaware of what goes on behind the scenes.”

This had potential direct consequences for Knutsson, who inferred that “the organisation where Jonas is Co-Executive Director receives 1 million in a grant for which Beckstead is a grant investigator, and then Jonas may discourage public discussion of my academic work that challenges moral views similar to Beckstead’s.”

I’ve reached out to Knutsson to catch up, but it seems pretty clear that objecting to this corruption has been bad for his career. He is still working on his PhD and talks about taking odd jobs around Sweden. Not something those still in the EA bubble have to struggle with!

He cites direct evidence of continuous pressure campaigns to defang scholarship critical of EA, SV longtermism, or its figureheads.

“Similarly, Torges wrote me on July 26, 2019, wondering if I had considered changing the title and/or abstract of my paper on the world destruction argument, which had recently been accepted for publication in a journal. He said he would be happy to help with this. I said no and that I react negatively to his question. … it was not just a friendly improvement suggestion. I mean, Stefan and others had just made an agreement with Beckstead, who was a grant investigator for a recent large grant to Torges’ organisation. I think Beckstead would like to see my paper not published at all or at least edited in certain ways. And then it seems like Stefan carried out that work of trying to influence this publication. That’s what I don’t like.”

Knutsson’s final judgment of the people he met through EA is understandably harsh. His 2019 assessment was that EA was a hive of deeply unethical and untrustworty people:

"If someone asked me which people in the whole world with a PhD in philosophy appear to behave in the most troublesome ways and which philosophers I trust the least, I would rank some of the philosophers in EA and existential risk circles around the top of my list."

History has now seemingly proven him correct.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:31:30 GMT

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👁️ LIVE: Ben Affleck Conned by Fake Satoshi?

When is a crypo grift also an AI grift? When Bodog's Calvin Ayre joins forces with director Doug Liman.

Jul 22, 2026

Transcript

A sneak peek at the crazy story of how Casey Affleck wound up playing one of the most pathetic humans alive … as the hero of a $90 million Hollywood film.

Get more from David Z. Morris in the Substack app

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Did Fake Satoshi Con Ben Affleck?

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, your weekly rundown of fintech freaks, Silicon Valley moonbats, and crypto perverts. I’m David Z. Morris, longtime tech reporter, fraud investigator, and PhD historian of technology. I’m also the author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia, a deep dive into the ideology of Effective Altruism.

This week, we meet a man with a ritual humiliation kink - Craig S. Wright - and Bodog founder Calvin Ayre, who has for a full decade funded Wright’s psychosexual obsession with being the biggest loser on the face of the planet.

Ayre has also used copyright strikes and other threats to try and suppress my coverage specifically since 2023, when I referred to the CoinGeek website as having “the same self-dealing editorial ethos as the Taco Bell Blog.”

There’s every chance he’ll try and get this piece erased from Substack, so please forward if you’re so inclined.

I’m just one man, so sometimes a really important story slips past me for a bit. In this case, it’s the story of Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi, a new film that brings together a truly bizarre collection of characters and trends: a low-rent Bitcoin fraudster and Hollywood royalty, including Ben Affleck and The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman.

The film is also notable because it is almost entirely AI-generated, shot on a grey and empty soundstage later filled in with AI-generated environments. It appears that the real purpose of the film, for Liman and others, is to serve as proof-of-concept for bigger AI film deals. The film showed at Cannes in May, and secured international distribution, but no U.S. deal has been announced.

Killing Satoshi is a heavily fictionalized version of the story of Craig Wright, who is played by Casey Affleck as a kind of heroic cyberpunk rebel.

In reality, Wright from 2016 to 2024 pretended to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, in a long-term effort, primarily, to seize control of tens of billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin mined by the system’s still-unkown creator.

This effort, and the related “Bitcoin BSV” grift, have been bankrolled almost exclusively by Calvin Ayre, multiply-disgraced, maybe-still-a-billionaire founder of the Bodog online gambling empire. Ayre is apparently played in the film by Pete Davidson, and was a driving force and major funder of the film’s creation. The project apparently began life as a documentary before morphing, after serious legal losses by Wright, into a fictionalized thriller.

Killing Satoshi apparently paints Wright as a hero, when in fact he is by all evidence a psychopath, hapless moron, habitual liar, and one of human history’s biggest losers. For example, again and again he has put forward obviously fake documents as part of his case to be Satoshi. He has repeatedly, embarrassingly, publicly demonstrated that he doesn’t even know how to code with the C++ language Bitcoin was written in.

(The film’s title has shifted over time, but I’ll refer to it as Killing Satoshi for simplicity.)

For years, Wright engaged in legal nuisance suits against anyone who questioned his claims. These were consistently catastrophic for Wright, while also threatening the very Bitcoin system he claimed to have created. That finally led to serious pushback: a U.K. court in 2024 decreed that Wright has been lying, and ordered him both to stop claiming he was Satoshi, and pay his opponents’ legal fees.

In short, Wright is an embarrassing mess. Which makes it all the more baffling that his story wound up in the hands of a serious director, even one as slightly down on his luck as Liman is in 2026. It seems very likely that the A-listers involved don’t know the true story of Craig Wright, and maybe they don’t much care.

But the film they’ve made seems to be very dangerous propaganda, which will be further weaponized by Wright and Ayre to trick the last few true believers in Wright’s chicanery out of their Social Security checks.

Doug Liman and the Affleck brothers will be morally culpable in that further scamming. They may be more materially on the hook for defamation.

From top Left Clockwise: Craig Wright, Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, Calvin Ayre, and Doug Liman.

Faketoshi in Brief

I’ve been writing about Craig Wright for a full decade now, which is really a painful thing to think about if you just generally like human beings to be happy. Perhaps the largest and most significant project of Wright’s life is pretending to be someone who all credible people know he is not. It’s hard to imagine a more humiliating and degrading existence.

The endgame of his decade-long campaign to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto has always seemingly been to order a court to unlock the “Satoshi Coins” mined by the founder, and currently worth about $80 billion. Craig has offered elaborate explanations for why he doesn’t have the keys to Satoshi’s coins if he’s not Satoshi - but only after he tried to fake having they keys in a notorious 2016 “signing ceremony” which was later shown to have been staged.

👁️ Literacy was Faketoshi's Kryptonite

March 20, 2024

Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto (says nChain CEO)

September 30, 2023

Craig Wright’s losing defamation suit against Hodlnaut

Wright’s efforts came to threaten current Bitcoin developers directly, through fraudulent copyright claims on the Bitcoin whitepaper, which he did not write. I can only make such clear statements of Wright’s fraudulent project because of the efforts of COPA, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a coalition including Coinbase, Block (Jack Dorsey), and Microstrategy/STRC (When Michael Saylor is comfortable calling you a fraud, you are truly boned).

COPA sued Wright in U.K. court, leading to a lengthy and devastating 2024 ruling that Wright had “lied extensively” and that “Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011.” The judge also froze Wright’s assets, ordered him to pay COPA’s legal expenses, and later issued a Civil Restraining Order (CRO) preventing Wright from bringing any further cases in the U.K. for at least three years.

It’s hard to imagine a more humiliating outcome. So naturally, rather than a litigation coalition that beat his ass half to death with the truth, the new Killing Satoshi film reimagines COPA as a shadow international organization set on murdering Craig Wright.

A Faketoshi Tale

The synopsis of Killing Satoshi reads like Wright’s delusional fantasy of his heroic nature, in total contradiction to reality. Ayre’s initial propagandistic impulse seems to have survived all the way through production.

Killing Satoshi, according to producers, “is the true story [pause] of one man’s quest to prove that he is, in fact, the creator of Bitcoin — a claim that puts his life in peril and sets off a global firestorm and a wild, high-stakes race between the who’s who of tech billionaires and world leaders, with the fate of the world’s entire financial system hanging in the balance, all leading to the question, “Why do the world’s most powerful people want to erase one man, and why would they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do it?”

In addition to other A-listers, Gal Gadot plays a fictional investigative reporter recruited by Calvin Ayre to investigate Craig Wright. This is a fascinating reversal of reality, in which Ayre heard Wright’s insane claims and subsequently spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars amplifying them, not investigating them.

Key to the plot is also that “Dr. Craig Wright (Affleck) … has survived myriad assassination attempts as a result” of his claims to be Satoshi. This is straight out of Wright’s paranoid delusions - for many years now he has claimed that his inability to prove he is Satoshi is the product of a conspiracy.

The synopsis concludes with the “central question”: “If Craig Wright didn’t invent Bitcoin, why is a coalition controlling trillions in global wealth spending hundreds of millions and risking everything to destroy him?” This coalition, supposedly attempting to murder Wright, is a reference to the real-life COPA coalition. It’s unclear whether this term is explicitly used in the film, but if so, it would open the entire production up to serious risk of defamation charges. While the film is technically “fictionalized,” remember the promo quote above referring to it as a “true story.” That’s a legal risk.

Because the villianization of COPA is a truly wild distortion of reality - a case study in projection. Nobody spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to “destroy” Craig Wright. Quite to the contrary, Craig Wright was so bad at lying that he himself had to pay the bill for the court case that finally ruled that he was not Satoshi.

👁️ The Fraud of War: Wirecard Financed Russian Troops

December 17, 2025

Inception

The obvious question is, how the hell did this bizarre piece of propaganda, mythologizing a proven fraud and liar, wind up as a semi-notable Hollywood project?

Thankfully, we have an invaluable rundown of the evolution of the project’s history from Arthur Van Pelt, a longtime and serious crypto watchdog who also recently traced the links between Calvin Ayre, Wirecard, and the Craig Wright Con.

The short version is that the project began life in 2020 as a documentary about Craig Wright to be funded by Calvin Ayre. It was shelved for a time before Ayre met Ryan Kavanaugh, a Hollywood money man, and pitched the project as a fictional film called “Killing Satoshi.”

Kavanaugh and Ayre brought in Nick Schenk to write the project. Schenk is another successful and lauded figure on the project, having written multiple films for Clint Eastwood. But Schenk also worked for Bodog on a TV show back in 2007, so he had a pre-existing relationship with Ayre. That may have made him amenable to ignoring the reality behind the “true story” he was tasked with telling. Kavanaugh (who spoke at one of the notorious CoinGeek summits in 2023, then hired Liman to direct.

In emails about the project leaked by CoinGeek/nChain dissident Christian Agar-Hansen, the nature of the project is made clear.

“This is Hollywood,” Ayre writes to Craig Wright. “The details do not need to be accurate, its [sic] got to be entertaining … the point for us is to have millions and millions of fans empathize with what you have gone through and become part of our movement … This must be kept top secret.”

The AI Angle

So yeah, it’s an explicit propaganda project for Craig Wright.

But it’s also a propaganda project for AI, and that’s the real reason it got made.

The hosts of Trashfuture recently poined out that Killing Satoshi is mainly a hype reel for the multiple “AI film studios” with their names on them, mostly owned by participants in the production.

Above all, Kavanaugh’s Acme AI & FX is the lead producer on the film, backed up by Liman’s 30 Ninjas. Given the huge recent $587 million exit achieved by Ben Affleck’s AI startup, using Killing Satoshi as proof of concept is clearly about asset-flipping more than filmmaking.

On that note, Kavanaugh has claimed that the story would have cost $300 million to shoot, before AI took the cost down to ~$90m. This seems extremely suspect: the “true story” behind Killing Satoshi took place in courtrooms and offices, and even a fictionalized thriller based on it would mostly involve urban environments that can be shot without building sets or doing fancy VFX.

So the budget claim seems entirely intended to convey cost-saving potential to studios or other potential acquirers.

The Sad Fate of Art

Liman is no stranger to mercenary work - in a 2008 New York profile, he described The Bourne Identity as part of a “sellout trilogy” also including Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Jumper. The profile depicts Liman as a kind of occluded genius diverted by these trivialities, possibly because of his origins as a dreaded nepo baby. Liman’s father was a renowned entertainment lawyer, and even introduced a young Liman to Steven Spielberg.

At the very least, that makes Liman’s current project considerably sadder. Nearly twenty years later, he never even got to return to the heights of Bourne, much less ascend to some higher Spielbergian plane.

His most recent major project was the generally regrettable 2024 Road House remake. And now he’s a guy using his once-respected name to run one grift for his own benefit, while carelessly legitimizing outright liars in the process.

Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

👁️ "Freaky Fast Fingers" Trigger an Anti-Journalism Tantrum

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, a newlsetter about Silicon Valley ideology, financial fraud, and frontier technology. I’m David Z. Morris, PhD historian of technology, longtime investigative reporter, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.

Late last week Dar Sleeper, a VP and designer at humanoid robotics firm 1x, jumped on Twitter to complain about the way Wired had covered an exclusive look at the hands of their forthcoming robot, Neo.

Sleeper’s complaint has become yet another rallying point for the venture capital class to excoriate, basically, the entire idea of journalism - that is, the idea that anyone should have a platform for expressing an objective third-party opinion. Yet again the tech elite closed ranks around the idea that they should ‘tell their own stories’ through outlets they control.

This is of course emotional cope from people who can’t admit that they desperately need and want the attention of credible journalists, while also fearing it. Even given the much-reduced state of the journalism industry - largely undone by the tech industry, notably - journalists are one of a very small group of outsiders who still have some independent power that Silicon Valley can’t entirely control.

And boy, do they hate that.

Just one “sensual” moment from the 1x Neo’s in-house advertisement.

The original piece, note, just argues the ads are “sensual.” And it’s indisputable that “sensual” in the simplest sense is exactly what Neo is selling. The entire concept of the “soft” robot is that it will be easier for humans to interact with - and, yes, it seems clearly part of the pitch, to touch.

“I deeply regret it.”

Sleeper complained that the Wired article was “about how we are sexualizing robotics,” and included a note to the author of the piece, Boone Ashworth.

That note is worth printing in full:

“I wanted to let you know that I didn’t enjoy your article at all.

I understand the need to be inflammatory because that seems to be the only thing that gets clicks these days but that doesnt mean you shouldn’t recognize when something special is in front of you.

I trusted our PR team in saying we should offer you the exclusive on what is one of the most important technological developments in the history of Mankind and I deeply regret it.”

dar@radbackwards

I gave WIRED the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robotics… wired.com/story/the-1x-n… I felt pretty betrayed because that’s not what they told me they were writing about not is that what I’ve ever been about…

7:15 PM · Jul 11, 2026 · 2.37M Views

436 Replies · 202 Reposts · 4.26K Likes

Gently Fondle some Grapes

So are the charges fair? Let’s look at the actual Wired article (archive.is).

It’s actually very, very short, so here are the two most relevant passages of Ashworth’s piece:

“1X says the goal is full automation for Neo, but for now, the robot is partly teleoperated, as a Wall Street Journal video noted last year. That means human operators can take control of Neo remotely and even look through a camera to view the space around it.”

This is relevant because the tele-operation part of the Neo value proposition is genuinely freaky - you’re giving some stranger from halfway across the world direct control of a human-like machine in your house whose hands seem strong enough to do some real damage.

The teleoperation is also relevant to the other key passage. Ashworth continues:

The marketing for Neo’s new fingers feels very sensual. Smooth jazz plays in the background of a soft, warmly lit video. The robo digits curl around a wine glass, turn off a light, unzip a jacket, and gently fondle some grapes. In previous ads, the humans stand just very close to Neo and look at it flirtatiously. (After this story was published, a 1X representative clarified that the company does not view Neo or any of this marketing material as flirtatious.)

And that’s it. That is essentially the full exent of the discussion of sexual elements of the robot. And if you look at those ads, this is an accurate description.

“Clickbait” is the new “Fake News”

Dar Sleeper’s allegation that the Wired article is “clickbait” is stupid on its face, because it’s based on an outdated understanding of how media works in 2026.

A legitimate publication like Wired is of course looking for clicks, but they’re not searching for the kind of mass virality implied by the allegation of “clickbait” or being intentionally “inflammatory.” They’re not making money by putting programmatic advertising in the faces of ten million people - Wired is a subscription publication, and they’re looking for paying subscribers who want the information they’re selling. This article specifically was paywalled.

The title of a piece like this, further, is where the “clickbait” would be. And this one - “The 1X Neo Robot has Freaky Fast Fingers” - is objectively not clickbait. If it were trying to be clickbait, it would lean much harder into the sex stuff 1x is complaining about. (It’s actually not a great headline, frankly).

What Wired’s general strategy and the content of this article serves, then, is not the manipulative impulse to drive clicks. The article was specifically and clearly written for a niche of readers who care about the tech industry, and who actually want to have a neutral, third-party read of what’s going on. And that includes valuing the knowledge that some of the ads for the 1x Neo lean into intimacy.

I think it’s a valid observation about a few moments of the ads themselves, even if debatable. And to be clear, Ashworth at no point alleges that 1x is secretly creating a sexbot and disguising it as a household chore-doer - only that their marketing has some surprising undertones. Further, Wired is not the only outlet to make the observation - Mashable called the rollout ad “creepy.” That suggests Ashworth didn’t just make something up that has no grounding in reality - other commentators felt the same way about the ads.

That doesn’t necessarily imply sex! And the fact that some of your customers certainly will try to have sex with the robot doesn’t implicate you as the manufacturer. But you have chosen a very difficult marketing task - intentionally evoking intimacy while, (taking 1x at their word) trying to steer clear of sensuality or “flirtation.”

That’s not an easy line to walk, and I think it’s entirely fair for Boone Ashworth to weigh whether or not Neo is walking it. Wired is among other things a business publication, and it digs into the possible success or failure of businesses, not just technologies.

Whether it’s fair or not, the comments about the “sensual” nature of Neo’s marketing identify a very real risk for the company - careless marketing that gets their product labeled a sexbot in the public mind, making them embarrassing to own or talk about. That’s a real business risk, built into the model of what 1x is selling.

And that business risk is what their attack on journalism is trying to distract you from.

Or are they trying to distract you at all?

👁️ Tim Pool is a Russian Agent

September 5, 2024

Think Unsexy Thoughts

Dar Sleeper’s complaint accomplished at least two things. First, it ingratiated him and 1x to right-wing, anti-journalism tech types including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who opined that traditional media “hate tech” and that more brands should “go direct,” that is, create their own media. a16z and Coinbase have been on this for years, with Coinbase releasing a film about itself in 2022, for example.

But those efforts are inescapably futile. I’ve literally never seen a public discussion and attention around a piece of owned media of the sort that is triggered on a daily or weekly basis by real journalism. That’s because most people, or at least most news readers, actually do understand that you can’t fully or automatically trust what someone is saying about themselves.

This is the hateful trap the tech oligarchs find themselves in: they know they need a free press, but they compulsively continue to attempt to pull away from and delegitimize it. In ways that I’m not going to unpack right now, this is closely related to the utilitarianism that dominates Silicon Valley, with its implicit assumption that the smart techie is already correct, and therefore that any criticism is simply slowing down the inevitable flow of history.

You can see this in Dar’s note, where he describes his own product as not just “something special,” but as “one of the most important technological developments in the history of Mankind.”

That’s a hell of a claim to make confidently about something you yourself created! Maybe you want a bit of an outside perspective on that! Maybe there are things you haven’t thought of? It’s possible!

Sins of the Mother: How the $8B FTX Scam Flowed From Barbara Fried’s Anti-Humanist Ethics

January 7, 2024

And of course that’s why people really hate being written about, even when it’s massive free advertising for your company: it’s uncomfortable to seriously consider what other people think about you and your actions. Being written about is not fun, ever!

Meanwhile, a journalist’s job, to a significant extent, is to keep an eye out for things going wrong. In fact, that’s why people still read stuff like Wired, with a bit of a critical edge. They know that companies don’t magically tell the truth about themselves!

And so complaints like Dar Sleeper’s wind up being weirdly contradictory - note that he includes a link to the article! He actually wants to draw attention to the Wired piece while at the same time complaining about it. It’s weirdly similar to Donald Trump’s love-hate relationship with the New York Times, whose attention he covets while constantly expressing loathing for the organization.

In this case, it’s not merely a childish view of the world - “write about me, but only in ways I approve!” - it’s actually pretty obvious two-faced marketing strategy. As many have noted, this small, paywalled article might not have actually gotten any real attention if it weren’t for Dar Sleeper’s viral and arguably misleading complaint.

In other words, Wired did the journalism part.

It was 1x Technologies who made the clickbait.

Dark Markets is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 18:01:27 GMT

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Leverage Research, Live with David Z. Morris

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Jul 09, 2026

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👁️ "Crying Through the Walls": Inside Leverage Research

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to Dark Markets, a weekly newsletter about Silicon Valley ideology, financial fraud, and the irrationality of money. I’m David Z. Morris - fraud investigator, PhD historian of technology, fintech analyst, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. This week, we revisit the topics of that book.

On July 1, a writer named Lydia Laurenson published a novella-length report about the history of Leverage Research, a private institute founded by Geoff Anders and closely associated with Effective Altruism and Rationalism. Leverage was/is funded by the same billionaires who funded the broader Rationalist idea-space, including Peter Thiel and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallin.

Very broadly, Leverage was researching “psychology,” in the much-reduced functionalist sense that Rationalists (and analytic philosophers like Anders) understand that concept. Noone in the organization was trained in psychology, and their improvisational methods and simplistic viewpoints seem to have led to nothing of genuine intellectual value. More to the point, their goal was less understanding than improvement, making the movement in substance less a “research” organization than a self-help group - and, according to many critics including former participants, a cult.

Leverage’s methods certainly had impacts - just not the ones anyone was hoping for. I wrote about Leverage, and the larger Rationalist sphere, in my book Stealing the Future. At the time, we had gotten Zoe Curzi’s report of what sure seemed a lot like cult conditioning and high-control techniques within Leverage, which led to a spate of psychological incidents among participants. Those revelations were serious and legitimate enough to have apparently led to Leverage losing credibility and status within its own mileu, but it was still a pretty limited viewpoint.

Pivotal Acts: The Future as an Emergency, Part 4

May 29, 2025

So I was eager to dig in to Laurenson’s account, hoping that it would provide more insight into the wierdness of Anders and the rest of the crew.

Unfortunately, while it contains important new information that I highlight below, this is not a serious piece of writing that asks hard questions or digs into the ideology behind Leverage with any sort of critical eye. Instead, it reads largely like an internal history that acknowledges some internal problems but essentially takes Leverage’s claims of its own importance and accomplishments at face value.

But it doesn’t just read like an internal history. Though Laurenson foregrounds that the piece was initially commissioned by New York Magazine, she ultimately published it on her own Substack, after accepting a large grant from the very people she’s writing about, rather than working to meet the journalistic standards of a mainstream publication.

In short, Laurenson’s piece is paid propaganda, and should be regarded as such - even and perhaps especially when it seems shocking or revelatory.

This is representative of a much larger chronic blind spot among EAs and Rats, whose ethics, such as they are, don’t seem to include any grasp of the concept of a conflict of interest. As I’ve explored in depth, it’s an endlessly ironic original sin for a movement claiming to pursue the elimination of bias.

What's So Bad About Rationalism?

June 23, 2024

Lydia Laurenson circa 2014, from a blog post about a coffee shop she ran.

Crying and Screaming

For all its propagandistic origins, Laurenson does confirm a lot of the weirdness hinted at behind the scenes at Leverage - functionally, her report resembles a “limited hangout” that reveals a few embarrassments to defang deeper questions. Above all, Laurenson confirms Zoe Curzi’s allegations that a lot of the “psychological experimentation” going on at Leverage was deeply traumatic to participants.

Laurenson also reveals a lot of new information about how deeply far-right neoreactionaries were entrenched in Leverage, and in turn in the wider EA and Rationalist world. I’ve written at length about the fundamentally authoritarian nature of the underlying utilitiarian ethos common across these movements, but Laurenson closes that loop in a much more direct fashion.

Sins of the Mother: How the $8B FTX Scam Flowed From Barbara Fried’s Anti-Humanist Ethics

January 7, 2024

One strand of Laurenson’s story is a Leverage recruit named James Dama, who she follows from his arrival at Leverage to his unfortunate exit as a badly damaged person.

James sometimes heard screams and hysterical crying through the walls, only to be assured that these were standard outcomes of the Psychology program.

One of the strangest elements of the story, a detail new to Laurenson’s account, is that “bodywork” was a substantial part of the practice. Essentially, Reiki. Not only is this a remarkably strange thing for a “rational” group to be pursuing - it seems to for some reason have become a broadly damaging practice.

Emily [another of Laurenson’s subjects] increasingly found herself enduring bizarre side effects, like headaches or crippling anxiety, after bodywork experiments. She noticed that others had frequent aftereffects, too … the word “emergency” was becoming common, as it was used when an employee was in an extremely bad state (screaming or convulsing, for example) and then required hours or days of help.

This seems bad!

There’s also a lot more here about Geoff Anders, who Laurenson interviewed directly, on friendly terms. There are several moments where it’s clear Laurenson herself doesn’t perceive the deeply troubling and weird aspects of Anders’ character.

Geoff Anders tells me that he originally planned his life course in his teens … In the first box, which represents his initial goal, Geoff wrote: “Answer all philosophical questions.” This box is connected to later boxes that hold later goals, things like: “Understand the structure of our society,” “Determine the path to the best society,”

There’s something admirable about this kind of directness and ambition - and it’s also the kind of grand vision that attracts psychologically needy people to controlling leaders.

But obviously, these are the ambitions of a teenager, not an adult. The problem isn’t that Anders goals are overambitious or vague, but that they’re non-actionable and generic. There’s no indication in any of Laurenson’s piece that Anders actually has a unique, or even particularly structured, approach to using all of Leverage’s passionate young recruits to tackle these problems.

[Anders] was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic Foundation … a lone mathematician predicts the fall of this Galactic Empire … he therefore forms a secret society of scientists that shepherds humanity across centuries, hoping to reduce the predicted dark age to a single millennium.

There’s a lot here to unpack, but it’s gratifying to learn Anders was so unproblematically inspired by the predictionist mythology of Foundation - the childish idea that a group of very smart people could secretly manage society. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but as so often happens with rationalists, Anders took it literally.

Warning: No Journalism Ahead

For now, I’m picking out highlights from an incredibly long - 14,000 words - piece of work. There will be a lot more to dig into here, such as Laurenson’s account of Leverage’s Reserve stablecoin project. But the truth is that for all the length, as with other Rationalists like Yudkowsky, there’s not a lot of there here.

That leads back to the story of the piece’s creation, which I think itself reveals more profound truths about the Rationalist world than the contents of the article itself. Laurenson was originally commissioned to write the article by New York Magazine, an august home for feature reporting. But she has written at length about how that deal fell apart, a story I interpret essentially as her inability to actually be objective about a group to which she has deep and personal ties.

(Most notably, Laurenson was briefly engaged to and conceived a child with Curtis Yarvin, the Loser King of Witless Hatred. I find it hard to imagine any argument that would lead me to take someone who had ever made that decision entirely seriously.)

After failing to reach a working compromise with New York Magazine, Laurenson says she decided to publish the work on her own anyway, and this is where things get really problematic. She describes taking a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Foundation for her work on the piece. This is several times more, notably, than what she would have been paid by New York Magazine - and Survival and Flourishing is funded in part by none other than Jaan Tallin, also a funder of Leverage Research.

So in direct fact, Laurenson’s account is literally paid propaganda for a movement of which she still essentially considers herself a part. She tried to write something that might convey to the broader world her own sense that the Leverage story is Important, rather than just being a sad and fairly squalid little object lesson in what the lack of a robust humanities education does to rudderless young adults. But she failed in that effort, and instead wrote what is essentially yet another overlong LessWrong post.

It is a re-enactment of the same misunderstanding of the motives and means of intellectual inquiry that has left Eliezer Yudkowsky in a Thiel-funded bubble writing endless reams of ungrounded nonsense and never publishing a single peer-reviewed paper. The entire Rationalist/EA memeplex is essentially made up of contract workers, totally dependent on billionaire funders, who act as if they’re performing intellectual inquiry, when in fact their entire existences are window dressing for capital and power. In the end, above all, it’s very sad.

This is quite palpable in the final product Laurenson delivers. Frankly, there’s no universe in which any version of this story would have made it into the pages of New York, because Laurenson isn’t engaged in any true reflection on what she learned or experienced - she largely tells a simple linear narrative of what happened, which doesn’t add up to a magazine feature.

Laurenson particularly doesn’t engage deeply with the cultish aspects of Leverage, including the patently bizarre fact that its founder explicitly positioned himself as a world-historic philosopher with world-changing insights. In other words, Geoff Anders sold himself as a cult leader, and the results as recounted by Zoe Curzi and others speak for themselves - breakdowns and mental anguish were seemingly more common at Leverage than personal breakthroughs.

There’s little evidence any participants reached the Elon Musk-like level of effectiveness that was their explicit (and of course, itself debatably worthy) goal. That includes Geoff Anders himself, who now presides over a much-reduced Leverage 2.0.

I consider Leverage the second-weirdest splinter group to derive from the Rationalist scene (and maybe the second most dangerous). The weirdest, of course, was the Ziz cult.

👁️ DeepSeek and the AI Murder Cult

January 28, 2025

Leverage and the Far Right

When he joined Leverage in 2015, Samo was already involved with the burgeoning neoreactionary movement, an online right-wing subculture with tech overtones, which was somewhat interconnected with the rationality community.

Laurenson’s article, well beyond this line, is one of the most direct and detailed acknowledgments of very, very close connections between Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Neoreaction. Obviously the brilliant El Sandifer saw this from the outside early, describing the nexus in her 2016 book Neoreaction: A Basilisk, which I will never stop shilling.

But for most of the last decade, largely thanks to gestures of rejection from Eliezer Yudkowsky, EA and Rationalism have claimed distance from the far right. Laurenson blows that up substantially, showing that not only were neoreactionaries friends with Rationalists and EAs - Laurenson describes Leverage hired several avowd and active neoreactionaries over the years, also including Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett.

Geoff pitched Jaan Tallinn, a software billionaire and early EA funder. In Jaan’s New York hotel room, Geoff described his thesis: The main bottleneck for solving the world’s most entrenched problems was not a lack of money, ambition, or technology. It was a lack of insight into human behavior.

I cite this only to say that “I have more insight, give me money” is a pitch that works on dumb guys. This story makes Jaan Tallin, like Peter Thiel, seem fundamentally dumb.

When Emily joined in 2015, she spent her first month living with Tyler in a roomful of bunk beds they called “The Barracks.” They both went through the first iteration of “Basic Training,” a program Leverage began that year for incoming employees. Emily studied Leverage organizational history, as well as Geoff’s psychological theory, Connection Theory.

And indeed, it turns out Anders is doing Dumb Guy Theory. Specifically, Dumb Engineer Thinks Humans are Computers theory.

Geoff believed that academic psychology was not a real science like physics, but that it could be … Connection Theory, [is] “a theory of belief and behavior that postulates that people have basic goals, and act for the sake of achieving those basic goals.” What follows, then, is that any person’s problematic behavior can be changed, because “if you actually get the logic of what’s producing the problematic set of beliefs or actions,” then you can intervene in that logic.

On its face, this is nothing more than a restatement of the Plato’s Cave allegory of enlightenment, or the simple Marxian concept of false concsciousness - the idea that people act poorly simply because they don’t know any better. Consciously or unconsciously, they believe things that aren’t true, and “debugging” in Anders’ framework is the way to eliminate these flaws in thinking. But that’s a straightforwardly childish view of human nature - one based most of all, in this case, on an engineer’s presumption of the perfectibility of systems, including minds.

A more modern conception of the mind and behavior is not simply that people have bad ideas that influence their behavior, but that their material and social conditions influence their beliefs at a systematic level. Sometimes these are directed efforts for the benefit of specific groups with larger agendas.

For example, a group of rich technologists might choose to fund a worldview that absolves social and political systems entirely for responsiblity for individual behavior, and instead places the locus of responsibility entirely on individuals. Such as, for instance, the way Peter Theil funded Anders’ further development of these shallow right-wing ideas, and the way Jaan Tallin paid Lydia Laurenson to mythologize them.

So we see the self-perpetuating nature of these beliefs: Because they have been taught to look only at individual psychology, these people can’t even see their own use as tools by the people paying them to keep doing what they’re doing.

The stories of James Dama, and of the recruit named Emily, end badly. The methods touted by Leverage, including Scientology like “debugging” and whatever the hell was going on in those body work sessions, wind up harming them substantially.

James still has such severe panic attacks that he cannot drive and has trouble working. Emily has difficulty describing her troubles in standard English, and says her “energy body” was severely damaged at Leverage. Both feel deeply hurt and abandoned by their colleagues.

Despite this, Laurenson ends the piece with a shockingly approving “where are they now” update on other players in Leverage. It doesn’t feel like she’s seriously grappling with the consequences she is describing.

It seems likely that Laurenson, like so many in this world, is a little short on real human empathy.

I Don’t Like Lydia Laurenson.

I’ll close with this - I find this person distasteful in both general and specific ways.

Most directly, for the version of the piece now published, she accepted a $35,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing fund. This fund is backed by Jaan Tallin, also a major funder of Leverage Research. This is just staggeringly stupid behavior, especially for someone who (see below) spends so much time hand-wringing about the state of journalism. Not only is the conflict brazen, $35k is an embarrassing amount of money to get for writing a substack post, one that nakedly reveals the way billionaire money insulates people in this world from reality, and distorts overall discourse - there’s no way a vocal critic of EA or Leverage would be able to get that kind of money to do equivalent work, from any source.

(For comparison, I make about $8k a year from this newsletter, which I write at least once every week. And I love every single one of my supporters from the bottom of my heart.)

Laurenson’s willingness to simply take a check, without apparent worry about her own conflict or the broader effects of the dynamic - while having supposedly devoted a lot of years to studying disinformation! - is intellectually and ethically risible. That she is simultaneously posing very very hard as an ethically concerned “journalist” is just the most direct reason I find her and her ilk, at best, unserious to the point of inconsequence.

Laurenson is also, again, a former fiancee of Curtis Yarvin - which frankly, puts her judgment even more definitively and fundamentally at question. These people are embarrassing jokes and their behavioral and intellectual norms are toxic to society.

Laurenson offers a paaaaaainfully extended explanation of why she “chose to pull” the story from New York Magazine. This includes an extended meditation on her rising critiques of the journalism industry - but this is a strange meditation from someone whose involvement in journalism proper has been rather superficial. She wrote a few pieces for the likes of TechCrunch and the Atlantic in the mid-2010s, but since then seems to have written only for her own substack and a false-start magazine called The New Modality.

She also seems to have taken around year longer than planned to write the thing, so I suspect this piece not getting published was a bit more complex, given the number of dings against her objectivity. She writes that “there are huge framing differences between the mainstream media and the communities from which Leverage emerged,” and that “I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage.” Which is basically an admission that her editors thought she wasn’t being objective. Perhaps the things someone steeped in this culture treats as normal (such as joining a cult after having a really good energy healing session) are things a New York Mag reader would expect to be acknowledged as pretty fucking weird.

Her side-post about the publication and writing post makes this even more obvious with bits of mythologizing about how the history of Leverage is “a big deal,” despite Leverage never seemingly accomplishing anything measurable other than becoming an object lesson about the inherent authoritarianism of Effective Altruism and Rationalism.

More generally, I find Laurenson’s discussion of the writing process odd. She describes “selling” the story to NYMag as a way to “re-establish myself professionally,” and that “the flexible nature of the work would give me time and space to recover” from her poor choice of having a child with Curtis Yarvin. This is a bizarre tell, in the sense that a NYMag cover story probably pays about $5,000 - maybe ten grand max. So Laurenson hasn’t exactly felt huge pressure to be earning a full-time salary, for reasons that are to me mysterious.

She elsewhere mentions that her father is a Yale-educated lawyer and she grew up in Westchester, so draw your own conclusions. She also writes about getting radicalized by the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis in 2020 - that is, radicalized to the right by property destruction she describes as “devastation.” She unselfconcsiously chronicles inhaling every bit of sensationalist news she could about protests and street violence. “I began to spend hours every day monitoring fragmented information sources.” That is, she was programming her own personal Fox News bubble.

In other words, she’s a right-wing snowflake who can barely keep her racial paranoia in check.

For my money, anyone who grew up rich and becomes a right-winger is inherently uninteresting and unimaginative - even if that rich household was superficially “liberal.” Laurenson, like so many of these people, is just vastly less of an iconoclast, and vastly more of a supplicant bootlicker, than she is able to see herself.

And this is, of course, waas the goal of these billionaire funders of intellectual dead-ends like Leverage: to defang serious critical inquiry from some huge slice of smart young people.

The main takeaway from Laurenson’s writeup, for me, was simply that people handed Geoff Anders a ton of money to recruit people to “research” topics in which they had no training or expertise. This means Leverage functioned, much like Yudkowsky’s Rationalist movement, as a busy box for smart people - a distraction from more serious work that might have threatened the interest of the wealthy people funding them.

That was the real point. And it’s the one Laurenson most studiously avoids allowing herself to see.

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:31:10 GMT

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KOSA vs. Privacy, Live with David Z. Morris

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Jul 02, 2026

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How Silicon Valley Tech Bros Are Destroying Democracy Through AI, Crypto, and Fascist Ideologies

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Apr 1 • David Z. Morris

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:01:13 GMT

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:01:22 GMT

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👁️ AI Exuberance, Binance Regulated, and SCOTUS on Executive Power - News Live with David Z. Morris

A recording from David Z. Morris's live video

Jun 30, 2026

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Get more from David Z. Morris in the Substack app

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May 21 • David Z. Morris

May 14 • David Z. Morris

May 7 • David Z. Morris

How Silicon Valley Tech Bros Are Destroying Democracy Through AI, Crypto, and Fascist Ideologies

May 4 • David Z. Morris

Apr 21 • David Z. Morris and THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

👁️ OpenAI Red Flags: Live with DZM

Apr 1 • David Z. Morris

👁️ The PolyFraud: Live with David Z. Morris

Mar 25 • David Z. Morris

👁️ Kalshification

darkmarkets@newsletter.paragraph.com (Dark Markets) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For classical neoliberals, money and markets are the only information sources that really matter.

John Wang, Head of Crypto at Kalshi, recently appeared on crypto podcast Unchained. He was mainly talking about perpetual futures, a (mark my words) very, very significant financial markets innovation (neutral connotation) that is entering the U.S. market now, specifically through Kalshi.

But I was more intrigued by Wang’s mention of the introduction of a new Over-the-counter (OTC) prediction markets product by Galaxy Digital, which is being used specifically by at least one cryptocurrency hedge fund (Arca) to protect against the risk that the CLARITY regulatory act would fail, which would harm its investments.

That’s typically wonky stuff, but Wang gave another example that’s more broadly illustrative, claiming that bars have been using prediction market contracts to hedge the business risk of sports outcomes. Wang didn’t specify and there are probably many examples, but there were probably plenty of bars in New York who had very material reasons a few weeks ago to hedge the possibility that the World Champion Goddamn New York Knicks wouldn’t come out on top.

Some have described this as the more fundamental long con of prediction markets: the retail-facing product is there primarily to provide “dumb money” liquidity for actual event hedgers.

The Dictatorship of the Predictariat

April 14, 2024

Risk, Waiting

This is an example of Kalshi working how futures /risk markets are “supposed” to be used in the real economy. These markets originated in agriculture above all, where the fundamental unpredictability of the weather makes crop yields impossible to predict with complete accuracy.

So modern financial modelling of agriculture essentially requires some way to “hedge,” or protect against, that risk. A beef rancher would buy futures betting that the price of beef would go down, so that if that actually happened, he got a payoff that to one degree or another offset the actual revenue lost from his beef sale.

How to Prediction Hedge

First, just a very short description of how event hedging works, for non-wonks.

In the case of the bar, hedging risk of a Knicks series loss would have (in broad terms) involved a bar owner using Kalshi to bet that the Knicks would lose. That way they’ll make their business revenue if things go their way, and get a little buffer if things don’t.

This is basically analogous to farmers hedging the price of corn six months before harvest by betting it will go down with one hand (the hedge), while hoping it will go up on the other (the business). That’s the practical reason futures markets in general exist.

One major difference is that a corn future has a deliverable product, which is why it is easier to understand and was introduced sooner than prediction market event contracts. There are other reasons, of course, that event contracts are different than deliverable futures, and in fact reasons that prediction markets might not wind up ‘working’ long term.

This is why major futures markets in the U.S. are centered in Chicago rather than New York - Chicago was a waystation for agricultural shipping going back to the late 19th century at least, so the market for risk futures emerged there.

It’s why the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) is the one squaring off against Kalshi to protect its turf/market by suing to stop the introduction of perpetual futures (paywall). Kalshi’s is classifying its perpetuals as swaps rather than futures, which is a pretty arcane distinction to unpack another time. The CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) will be the regulatory agency making that decision.

For all these practical applications, however, the truth is that Kalshi and Polymarket are almost entirely gambling and entertainment products - and they are wildly extractive towards most users. It’s very, VERY worth noting that Galaxy’s market to hedge CLARITY act risk is over the counter. That is, it’s not a page on Kalshi with a price you can just look up - or at least, institutional trades on the swap are treated differently than retail.

This is a reflection of what some have described as the more fundamental long con of prediction markets: that the retail-facing product is there primarily to provide “dumb money” liquidity for actual event hedgers.

The “dumbness” of this dumb money, though, is a real, long-term (and maybe even short-term) problem. When you have retail betting against institutions, institutions will consistently have the insight and know-how to win (whatever mythology Wall Street Bets is promoting). With prediction markets, that’s becomes about not just operational market insight, but material information that retail might not have.

Over time, those losing retail bets will drain the liquidity pool that institutions need to trade against. This permanent secular downpressure - the built-in tendency of retail prediction traders to lose far more often than at casino games - may explain why Polymarket has turned to ads featuring fake wins to market its product.

(FWIW, this is just the latest in a string of seemingly very poor choices by Polymarket leadership. If you even want to be betting on the rise of prediction markets, you probably want exposure to Kalshi. Polymarket is, long-term, terminal.)

What is TESCREALism? Mapping the Cult of the Techno-Utopia.

June 9, 2024