The only valid first reaction to something that makes you angry as soon as you see it should be a desire to verify that it is true. If you don't focus that initial fury into getting the context behind what gets your blood to boil and making sure that it's not hype, you're giving away your power and control to someone else. If you confirm that it is verified information, with an understanding of the full context and background, then you can plan actions to make changes in a direction that you would prefer things go. But please, don't just react blindly. It's a good way to slam face first into a wall.

Reflecting on the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The Principle of Jurisdictional Continuity Historical records, charters, laws, and constitutions may persist indefinitely, but the authority they confer does not endure automatically. Legitimate authority exists only while living participants continue to recognize, enact, and uphold the purposes those records express. Each generation inherits the record of prior commitments, not the authority itself. Authority is sustained through ongoing affirmation—by interpretation, consent, compliance, and enforcement—adapted to present conditions. Where such affirmation continues, long-standing institutions may gain strength through stability, predictability, and shared understanding. Where it lapses, authority weakens even if formal documents remain unchanged. Customs and traditions can preserve authority by reducing the effort required to coordinate behavior, but when they are followed without reflection, validation, or accountability, they may lose legitimacy and impose increasing costs on the system they govern. Enduring governance therefore depends not on the age of its founding documents, but on the continuous willingness of each generation to examine inherited commitments, apply them conscientiously, and renew them in light of current knowledge and future responsibility.

Building a resilient global civilization requires less brilliance than restraint, less unity than permeability, and less certainty than courage.

When Failure Becomes Ordinary

When Failure Becomes Ordinary

There's a particular kind of exhaustion settling into the bones of our civilization right now. Not the exhaustion of working too hard, but ...

Money is important, but it's just one type of information with special properties. Content - ideas, discoveries, creative works, evidence, records - is the substrate of everything else: Money flows from proven value creation Laws depend on verified facts Science builds on verified observations Justice requires verified evidence Reputation reflects verified behavior If Bitcoin at 0.4% causes this much disruption to ONE domain (finance), what happens when verification infrastructure exists for ALL domains? I've spec'd out SatSwap - a modification of IPFS BitSwap that trades file fragments for Bitcoin/Lightning payment invoices instead of favor-tracking. The specification is documented, the economic model is strong, and this could do for content verification what Bitcoin did for money. I need someone who can build a proof-of-concept that proves the core idea works. In exchange: co-founder equity in whatever emerges from this, your name on foundational infrastructure, and the satisfaction of building verification infrastructure for the future of human civilization. Interested?

When a civilization’s primary representation of capital loses value over time, it forces all coordination into the present; reversing that reopens the future as a place where structure, trust, and resilience can exist.