pete_d

New blog --- contravex.com/2023/06/04/wha… #Contravex #LossPorn #SFYL

@palladiummag @nathanielkoloc This is pure affective kitsch, a husk performing its own huskness (per @HusseinAboubak ) open.substack.com/pub/critiquean…

Society has lost our sense of greatness and the reasons it is worth pursuing. This is especially relevant to those with wealth, who are best positioned to reclaim this pursuit. Read the new article by @nathanielkoloc (link below):

Nobody is asking why Bitcoin rallied during a war. The answer is Iran. - Iran mines Bitcoin for $1,300 per coin. The cheapest on earth. - The IRGC runs the operation. Every coin gets sold to fund imports and bypass US sanctions. - They’ve been dumping tens of thousands of BTC on the open market for years. Constant invisible sell pressure. - Then the US bombed their power grid. Mining went offline overnight. The hashrate dropped within hours. - The sell pressure that nobody knew existed just vanished. The US accidentally made Bitcoin more scarce by bombing the world’s cheapest mining operation. And nobody is connecting the dots.

@DennisonBertram @ELLEmagazine @marieclaire @Cosmopolitan @LouisVuitton @gucci @novogratz still wins "best dressed" in the group shot

I was a fashion photographer for over a decade before crypto. I worked for magazines like @ELLEmagazine @marieclaire @Cosmopolitan and brands like @LouisVuitton @gucci and more. The Vanity Fair article was a setup to mock crypto and those it depicted.

New blog: Rousham House, near Oxford, just down the road from Churchill's shack at Blenheim contravex.com/2026/03/15/sig…

In praise of golden ages by PG If you're into status, watches, branding, etc this is worth a read: paulgraham.com/brandage.html

@davidsenra @pmarca I’d go further. Ambition is often the result of a wound. If one were to heal that wound via therapy one might be less ambitious. In that sense, conquest is a defense mechanism. “Man would rather go to the moon than therapy.” And that’s not a bad thing.

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

Just got 7 pounds of Ringers interpretations from the Infinite Images show in @ToledoMuseum

New blog: Try not to laugh contravex.com/2026/02/15/try…

@CEBKCEBKCEBK And plebs still talk wistfully of these times as "unified" and "less corrupt"

Watergate never got cracked bc it’s actually ten different conspiracies: -Nixon set up reckless loyalists who were willing to follow dubious orders -John Dean faked orders from higher-ups to make them go after the Watergate callgirl blackmail ring his wife was in -The CIA infiltrated them & intentionally sabotaged the Watergate break-in so they’d get caught & Nixon could be taken down for sidelining & subordinating them -The Pentagon was spying on Nixon over detente & sent its intel agent Woodward to WaPo so its White House insider Haig could work with him on making the Watergate narrative more scandalous -Ted Kennedy got his people to take over every aspect of the prosecutions & committees investigating this, to set him up for an election bid (7 of the 8 main investigators were very close Kennedy loyalists & they did things like secretly work with CIA-man E Howard Hunt’s Kennedy-aligned lawyer to cover up some crimes & manufacture others) -The chief judge kept sabotaging the defenses in bizarre ways (mainly for personal vanity reasons, to get his name in the paper [eg he used extremely novel args about “presentment” & extremely questionable private meetings with prosecutors to make sure he could get this case before his 70th birthday would limit his powers to assign it to himself]) -John Dean worked with everyone to frame higher-ups like Mitchell (eg the military & CIA & judge all coordinated on faking a prison sentence for him so his testimony would look less like it was given to avoid prison [he was actually given very nice lodging on a military base & let out years before his official sentence was up right when he was done testifying against Nixon’s guys [transcripts of his early statements to investigators {which included nothing about any cover-up} were also doctored in order to make them consistent with later testimony]) -The FBI was also trying to keep its unaccountable power in the wake of Hoover’s departure, thus putting their head of COINTELPRO Mark Felt up to being Deep Throat -While Nixon’s DoJ was in disarray (eg cycling through 3 AGs) various interests—nefarious & petty—came together to force the VP out over a few thousand bucks in unpaid taxes, & replace him with Ford (who’d eg been heavily involved in the Warren Report) -When Ford thus became the only unelected president in our history (wasn’t even on the ballot as VP), Rockefeller used his intel & political contacts to become VP, & suddenly two women (both connected to MK-ultra ops like Manson) independently came close to assassinating Ford within a few week, so Ford replaced Rockefeller with Dole on his 1976 ticket & lost to a hapless nuclear secrets navy man (the military spy ring was all about naval intelligence using hapless loyalists to spy on the White House for nuke related reasons) -Intel rings whack a number of people related to the running of WaPo then keep on handing the resulting leadership all the juiciest stories about presidential overreach (Deep Throat, Pentagon Papers, etc), & then the liberal media canonizes this as its modern foundation myth for every “-gate” since -I’m probably forgetting several other angles (eg activists had various less direct roles in setting the scene, & this obviously connects to the JFK/RFK stuff) Absolutely Shakespearean.

lol. lmao even. buddy they have nukes ? the network state is a profoundly unserious idea cryptocurrency enthusiasts have no idea what they're talking about memecoins are the the most profound thing to happen in billions of years. memes outmode genes genecurrency = natural selection memecurrency = artificial selection "transnational protection" ? " ... anyone with an internet connection can— " guess who made the internet? guess who owns it? guess whose territory it lives on? guess who defends and protects that territory? you want to put the nukes on chain? hand em over ot the network state of unserious individuals? do you realize how fragile your access to internet is? do you understand the level of responsibility statecraft demands? you want to put the pentagon on chain? cmon brodie. think through that thought a bit. unserious people will your network state go to war to defend the rights of its people? will the people of your state? more importantly, will they win? "... guarantee free speech and free markets—" buddy that shit doesn't come for free. many genes have gone extinct for even the first vestiges of freedom to manifest. a network state of nerds ain't gonna guarantee shit. "I have never been more bullish on crypto—" crypto has never been more bearish on humanity. nothing human—genetic, biological, geological, philosophical, or otherwise—makes it out of the near future. cryptocurrency is th einstrument of the evolution of evolution, from genecurrency to memecurrency and beyond

@mmjukic @FistedFoucault First... since Atlantis

@FistedFoucault It's kind of weird living in the downswing of the first planetary empire, isn't it? On some level nothing you do matters, or even can matter, because you are doing it on the back of a whale that has already chosen its course, rather than on solid ground.

Assumptions about geopolitics and the economy are basically all wrong. We live in a unipolar world empire with a planned economy, industry outsourced to China due to inability to replenish human capital, which took over the world thanks to the late 1800s technological explosion.

“According to Brueghel, when Icarus fell it was spring: a farmer was ploughing his field; the whole pageantry of the year was awake, tingling near the edge of the sea, concerned with itself… sweating in the sun that melted the wings' wax. Unsignificantly, off the coast, there was a splash, quite unnoticed—this was Icarus drowning.”

@mmjukic "Dutch East India Company" for the 21st century

Consolidation of the Elon empire all into one company makes a lot of sense. Tesla is pivoting into batteries and robots while SpaceX is pivoting into AI data centers. The end-result is a "space industry" company like Blue Origin also wants. Just move the whole economy to space.

The cinematic quality in the paintings of Henri-Paul Motte (1846–1922)

@mr_scientism Thankfully "industrialism" was just feudalism faking its own death

Feudalism to industrialism is the only secure path to open-ended development. Once you enter liberalism-capitalism, decline is inevitable, and you can never exit. The bourgeois state is a terminal political form.

IYKYK #Trilema

@ctindale Bahahaha are you gonna pretend this isn't 2014-era material trilema.com/2014/the-bezzl…

New blog: my (poetic) review of CDMX "if you're reading it, it's for you" contravex.com/2026/01/04/to-…

New aesthetics require new mediums and morals, and most importantly, it is the presence of permission architecture that blocks it in the first place. So offering funding or permission and demanding a plan or application is the best way to reward the performance of novelty without the novelty. Anything truly new will not be goal oriented or time managed at all, and it will be so strange as to be alien. This is the same thing as asking for “evidence of exceptional ability”, and the cause of astounding unexceptionality across industry academia art etc., because eveybody is too busy playing permission games. I mean. Really? “Which caregory of exceptional / novel are you?” If you want to give the money give the money. Asking for an application is a nonstarter mid magnet. Creates the antibiotic resistant tb equiv of art, because it is not exceptional, it is exceptional slop, just like all that goes on in the name of research is not research but noise, and so too eith everything else. The whole idea of an application is retarded at the root. Nothing new is born with an application. It is born with a declaration.