Money is a fundamentally political institution.
What do you do when people who don’t think you have a soul use your currency to terraform your life?
In a digital age Americans need to ground their systems of exchange in bots that respect their souls.

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More from @jamespoulos

7 Jun
“One technology created within the digital medium has arisen with a clear and already well-functioning capability to move us past the passive faith in algorithmic fiat that today characterizes the approaching singularity of weaponized information...”
“back into the position of human beings extending rather than eliminating our senses and faculties to conduct arms-length but trustably face-to-face collaborative work in culture creation and valuation. This is bitcoin...”
Read 5 tweets
26 Mar
I think a lot about Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and Nikephoras II Phokas, Eastern Roman Emperor.
While I can’t substantiate it, the story about Nikephoras is that he wanted to canonize fallen soldiers himself and the Patriarch said no. Henry, as is known, wanted to invest bishops with sacred authority himself and was also negged, ultimately renouncing claim to select popes.
The question of whether holy emperors could take secular control of religious appointments appears likely to have come to a general head around the turn of the millennium. In Christendom the outcome expressed for the answer a powerful no.
Read 4 tweets
26 Mar
Anyone hoping to function in a digital age elite must grapple with issues like those raised here. Many pitfalls and ancient snares, devilish problems for people losing ancient wisdom. So, a few pointers:
The emergent ontology of social injustice responds to the problem of how to assign blame and take responsibility for the behavior of machines religiously, by spiritualizing transgression. People/machines “are” racist/sexist/whatever, but what’s more, the -ism is a -ness, spirit
The insight or instinct that only religion can be authoritative enough for digital cybernetics—for the re-establishment of control over both humans and machines—is crucial. But the execution immediately raises terrifying paradoxes...
Read 15 tweets
16 Mar
A certain strain of intelligent tech criticism warns that passive acceptance of data determinism kills human creativity and leads to civilization necrosis. But...
this insight is unfortunately highly susceptible to being absorbed into the idea that only our divine-like powers of boundless imagination differentiate us from the bots and therefore are the only things that can save us...
the difficult reality is that our faculties of imagination are not magical or godlike in the sense of infinite or salvific power; in fact it is this reality above all that our bots ram home every instant with accumulating inescapable force...
Read 7 tweets
15 Feb
Hasn’t been easy to grasp China—on one hand, a masculine, vein-popping national communist regime against American interest; on another, something softer, deeper, wiser than what’s sensed and portrayed in the West. But this seeming contradiction is key to understanding China...
What is native—original—to the Chinese civilization-state?
How does China see the logic of its imports and the trajectory of their harmonization with what is native to the civilization-state?
Read 12 tweets
2 Nov 20
A type of liberalism is independent of and prior to the abstract apparatus of liberal experts trying to make the world conform to their perfection of it in speech...

That of meeting your neighbors as you find them in the unending labor of building and tending our shared environs
This liberalism, premodern in its origins, is inimical to the discourse-ruling class—which sees it as flatly unethical and an existential threat to “the world” as they would construct and dominate it
Liberals—regardless of what happens this election season—need to rise up against the “managed democracy” imposed by the decadent and failing discourse-ruling class. To retvrn to a liberalism global but not globalist—real and imperfect, not a pure fantasy. Door wide open.
Read 13 tweets

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