Post-Scarcity Is the Beast Of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is a tale of two cities, both post-industrial, Babylon and New Jerusalem. The city of Babylon has, “the merchandise of gold... and slaves, and souls of men” (18:12–13). The city of New Jerusalem has walls, gates, surveyors, and imported treasure. These are both utterly modern cities, but they differ in who sits at their center and what is owed to it.

Begin with the image of the Beast. Rev. 13:15, “that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.” The beast first creates an image, an icon from inanimate material and gives it speech, and people obey it. It then finds those disobedient to the mark and orders their deaths before finally delivering the mark: small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, therein 13:16–17, “that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark.” Once the image can speak, access to ordinary life requires enrollment in its rolls.

The word mark, charagma in the greek, is the word used for an impress or a stamp, practically here the die strike on a coin or the seal on a bill of sale. Scholars would tell you this is a parodic inversion of Rome’s imperial cult, but it’s my belief there is something more subtle happening here. In Babylon’s final form, the imperial stamp moves from the coin to the body as it’s branded on the forehead and on the hand. Even the number of the Beast, 666, arrives as an arithmetic option (13:18, “let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast”).

We talk about post-scarcity as a point at which economics cease to matter, when the machines make everything and the price of bread will fall towards zero and the goods are simply given out. This does not represent the end of the world but the end of the economy. An economy that still exists still has a center to which things are owed.

Markets disperse the dependence across thousands of transactions. A man labors for an employer to eat from a second, to borrow from a third, to sleep under a roof owned by a fourth. The particular arrangement of capitalism may be cruel, but it’s divided among institutions that fail, compete, and can be escaped separately. Capitalism is not cruel as a totalizing whole. If you automate everything, those relationships collapse into a single system. Men no longer approach it as workers or owners, as capital or labor, but as claimants. And the system needs to verify each claimant, that he exists, that he is eligible, that he has not already received his allocation. The same state that comes to administer welfare, money, housing, identity, and access to communication replaces the providence given by the market with an administrator.

Scripture has no objection to unearned abundance. Manna is gathered and certainly never produced (Exodus 16:15, “this is the bread which the LORD hath given you”). Christ multiplies bread, and laborers hired at the final hour still receive a full day’s wage (Matthew 20:14, “I will give unto this last, even as unto thee”). But Scripture is unambiguous that danger begins when a created power distributes the necessities of life on conditions of its own making. Once the provider controls access to life, it will also claim the right to define the person receiving it.

The beast in Revelation places worship and commerce in the same structure. The beast controls exchange and demands adoration. And when identity, money, and permission to trade are all administered by one authority, economic participation becomes an act of worship towards that center.

The mark of the beast is a parody of God’s own seal, which he delivers (7:3, “till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads”); Ezekiel’s angel chalks a taw on the faithful (Ezekiel 9:4, “set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh”). The same flesh that carries the mark of the beast can also carry the seal of God. And heaven keeps a book (21:27, “they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life”). Revelation assumes that every person is enrolled in God’s order. But the question is who has the right to claim him?

It is probably not lost on a careful reader that we have already built prototypes of the system. The question of proof of personhood in a world in which we have artificial minds has become ever present. I think it is glib but to say that WorldCoin or Passports or any number of identity systems that will pave the way for post-intelligence identity are the antichrist but the resemblance between the two shows that the sequence is now technologically plausible. Artificial speech, artificial language, artificial writing, and artificial creation have created practical problems of personhood, and biometric enrollment is now being offered as an easy solution. And soon that credential may come to govern access to money and services. You will, in your lifetime, be asked to scan your eyes to prove that you are human to systems that are designed to eliminate the need for your labor. Being recognized as human becomes an administrative status that the state administers and can withdraw.

Now look at what New Jerusalem is centered around, a throne and a river flowing from it (22:1). But it is not a city without the potential for individual action. Divine provision leaves its recipients capable of much, of action, of service, of rule, of worship. The kings of the earth carry their glory through its gates that never shut (21:24–25, “and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it”). The wall is measured by human proportion (21:17, “the measure of a man, that is, of the angel”). Its streets are worked gold, refined until it reads as glass (21:21, “pure gold, as it were transparent glass”). And the servants still serve (22:3, latreusousin), a verb of temple service: In Babylon, commerce is worship. In the New Jerusalem, work itself is. Divine abundance does not make human action unnecessary. The citizens of the kingdom of heaven on earth have not been reduced simply to mouths for consumption.

In returning to Genesis, we find that God gave Adam’s first vocation as speech. Soon after forming the beast, he brings them to Adam “to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19). This is easily read as a complete theory of language, that language itself begins as an act of reference before God, and that self-reference culture and authority all follow from that originary scene. This is, in not cynical terms, the theory of generative anthropology put forward by Eric Gans.

And in this frame, Revelation can be read as the undoing of the scene. If in Eden, man marks the beast, in Babylon, beast marks the man. And instead of speaking a name, a number is given such that it can be counted. But in New Jerusalem, we see the original human speech his name shall be in their foreheads” (22:4), and to him that overcometh, “a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (2:17).

It’s probably worth noting how strange all this is. A first century text imagines two post-industrial cities with striking resemblance to today and derives the correct sequence of their collapse, that speech one day would be manufactured and that manufactured speech would create a crisis of personhood. And that crisis would be resolved by enrollment in rosters run by men and that that enrollment would govern buying or selling. It is not incidental that the cosmology given to us in the Bible has predicted the shape of history with staggering resemblance to the world we are living through right now. If Revelation gets the end of language right, then we should at least entertain that Genesis gets its beginnings correct.

Babylon is complete when it can maintain its population without requiring anything from it except obedience. Exploitation gives way to maintenance, production becomes automatic, consumption becomes the only activity. And people’s remaining obligation is to a disturbed center that provides for them and records their standing. Such an order might be extraordinarily stable, but it’s not the one God put us here to build.

We must fundamentally consider post-scarcity as the beast described in Revelation, the beast that controls identity, money, access, and meters the ordinary necessities of life.

And we might well consider that we’re already well down the path, that the creation of artificial language, of artificial work, and artificial minds begets in them the need to verify those minds.

A podcaster recently posted about a founder that he had just interviewed. The founder was the most hardcore founder he’s ever encountered after decades of chronicling the most hardcore founders.

Each detail was more extreme than the one that came before it, enumerated in the way that a medieval chronicler would escalate the mortifications of the saints until the congregation was sufficiently prostrate that the church floorboards were bending under them.

The company works seven, maybe even eight days a week. The founder lives, sleeps, and eats in his office. He built a cafe inside because even though he lives amongst other hardcore founders, there is no founder hardcore enough to demand coffee at one, two, three, four, or five in the morning. Two thirds of the company have tattooed themselves with the logo of the company like a cattle brand.

The post closed with a jab at the 9 to 5ers working from home on Fridays, the comfortable, the moderate, and the damned, who exist in his frame only to establish, by contrast, how serious and hardcore this founder is, how committed and how far beyond the ordinary human appetite for rest and domesticity and life outside the building.

No one asks what the company does.

It doesn’t matter what the company does. The company is beside the point in the same way that the specific miracles attributed to a particular saint are always beside the point in the hagiographic tradition. What matters is the suffering that preceded it and the renunciation that made it possible. This act, the act of chronicling the hardcore founder, is hagiography.

Hagiography in its precise and medieval sense. The chronicles of the lives of the saints that were composed for the edification and moral subjugation of the faithful. We have not progressed on the structure in 800 years, we’ve only made it secular. The saint renounces worldly comfort. The saint endures what ordinary men cannot. The saint is sustained by something the audience can see the evidence of, but can never quite possess. And the distance between the saint’s capacity for pure suffering and the faithful’s capacity for admiring it is the apparatus of faith. I am not the saint and you are not the saint. We are the peasant who is hearing about the saint from the friar who visits the monastery. The role is to be moved by it, to move our souls ever closer to the virtue of our Lord.

I keep circling back to the tattoos. 20 people have a startup’s logo on their skin. Permanently. The tattoo is the oldest medium of devotion available to the human body. It’s the same medium the pilgrims used to mark themselves after reaching Jerusalem in conquest and crusade. The same medium that Roman soldiers used to signify that they belonged to the legion before they belonged to themselves. But instead of the legion, instead of your god, the tattoo is of a corporate logo. It’s the terminal escalation of something that I think is worth looking at, because it says something much worse about where we are than anyone seems comfortable saying out loud.

What this reveals is that the wealthiest generation of human beings in the history of our species has become so frightened of being seen as a class so terrified of their position being legible that it has begun performing the lives of people who assemble iPhones in near-slavery conditions in Foxconn plants. Their motivation does not come from a place of solidarity with those workers. And it’s not a political conviction about the dignity of labor, the motivation is terror. The specific terror of being seen to have money and to enjoy it. The terror of the surplus being visible and not disguised as the product of equivalent suffering. The seven day work week is the Foxconn schedule, the sleeping in the office is the Foxconn dormitory, the cafe built inside is the Foxconn canteen, but there is no one forcing them to labor, no suicide nets.

These are people that are performing voluntarily in public the precise conditions that we correctly identify as exploitation when they are imposed on a person who has no alternative. And we celebrate the performance because the performance answers the question that this culture has no answer to otherwise.

Why do you deserve so much? Why are you so rich?

Because I suffer. Because I do not sleep. Because I’ve given up my life to something greater than myself because my employees have scarred their flesh with my symbol and I eat from open containers the leftover food and my body rots, as I sit at the desk, because I have not left this building in 11 days because I am no more of the lines of code that I produce than I am flesh and life. The corporeal faculties that define me, reproduction, love and lust no longer exist. They have eliminated them in service of something greater, and trust me when I say I’m not enjoying any of this. And if I am, I’m enjoying it only because I’m giving it up in sacrifice for something greater. I’m a sicko. I’m barcode.

We should find this considerably more disgusting than we do. When we impose these conditions on a person by necessity we call it what it is, exploitation and we call for its remedy. When they are performed voluntarily by people who could be doing literally anything else with their lives, anything, the whole range of human possibility available to them. Every library unbuilt, every garden untended, every beautiful thing in the world unfunded. We are witnessing a thing that looks like discipline, but is actually the most extravagant waste of economic surplus in the history of our civilization. We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.

Frank Slootman is a hero of mine.

Slootman ran Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, three of the most intensely demanding companies in the history of enterprise software. And everyone who works at any of them will tell you the same thing. The intensity was real, the standards were exacting and brutal, and the culture did not accommodate mediocrity or comfort and had never pretended otherwise. These were intensely hard companies and the people inside them worked intensely hard and they produced just incredible returns for shareholders.

What Slootman did not do, and what perhaps his Dutch cultural values made impossible for him to do, was perform the hardness. He did not sleep on the floor. He didn’t build a cafe inside the building. He did not post bullet points about his schedule. He campaigned Pac52s, ocean racing yachts costing tens of millions of dollars, requiring full-time crews that require serious skill and expense. And he sailed them across the Pacific without apology. And Snowflake turned in the best quarters in its history while he was at sea.

The company was not built by suffering. Suffering was orthogonal to his judgment and his judgment was better because he was not performing suffering. He was making decisions from a position of clarity that the performance of suffering specifically and structurally prevents. A person who has not slept and has not left a building in over 100 days and has organized his identity around the demonstration of his own endurance is not in a position to make good decisions about anything, including and especially the thing that he is supposedly enduring for.

I want to make a specific and narrow distinction between a hard company and a grindslop company. Because from the outside, it’s easy to think these two things are the same. They both involve long hours. They both involve sacrifice. They both involve pushing people far past the point of comfort. But the difference is what the hours are for. In a hard company, the hours serve an output. The hours are the cost of the thing being built and no one is documenting the cost because the cost is not the product. In a grindslop company, the hours are the output. The documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product. The suffering is the thing being built and the company is, in some very real sense, a machine for converting human effort into the feeling of exerting human effort.

No one at Snowflake was tattooing the logo on their body. They were too busy doing their damn jobs.

There is a media structure that has grown to serve the grindslop economy, and I want to describe it with care because many of the people involved at least at the very edges edges of it are close friends of mine. And I don’t think what they’re doing is cynical. I think the structure is the damaging thing and the people that are inside of it are operating in good faith within a form whose implications they have not fully seen, which is how most of our world works and I am not without my hypocrisy in this regard.

My friend Eric Jorgensen wrote a book about Elon Musk. David Senra, whose podcast is organized around the subjects of biographies, interviewed Jorgensen about Musk. The output of this produced something that structurally was a guy talking to a guy about a guy about a guy and at no point in this chain did anyone build a rocket or run a company or do any of the work that the chain exists to celebrate. That work is upstream. What we’re watching downstream is performances of proximity to work. And I keep thinking about this because it seems like every additional layer of remove, every additional step away from Musk and whatever it is Musk actually does all day, doesn’t dilute the holiness but actually concentrates it somehow.

The biography is purer than Musk. I know how that sounds. But think about it like a relic, like an actual medieval relic. Musk has to deal with lawsuits and the rockets blowing up and the indignity of posting through it on the internet. The book carries none of that. The story has absorbed the good parts, the relentlessness and the willingness to suffer and the subordination of self to mission, and everything embarrassing about Elon, the parts that make him a real person, got left behind.

It’s the same thing the church did with the bones of saints. You take a finger bone out of Thomas and you put it in a golden box and you carry it around Europe and people weep when they see it. They feel something in the presence of that finger that they could never feel in the presence of Thomas because Thomas was a guy who had opinions and doubts and might say something weird at dinner. The finger just sits there being holy. It’s perfect.

And the thing recurses. Someone will interview the interviewer about interviewing the biographer. Someone will thread about the interview. Someone will thread about the thread. Every layer is further from anything real and closer to the pure performance of the attributes of building. The Fourth Lateran Council tried to shut this down in 1215. It didn’t work. It never works. You can’t regulate the demand for proximity to the sacred because the demand is bottomless and the supply of actual sanctity is always tiny.

I want to be honest about my own hypocrisy here because the argument requires it.

I bought a piece of devotional art at a book fair in New York not too long ago. It was a sanguine engraving of the Holy Shroud of Besançon hand cut into a sheet of white paper, an intricate floral motif by a woman in a convent sometime in the 17th or 18th century, laid over a backing sheet of orange paper.

Christ’s body is depicted faintly in delicate gold ink. The wounds were touched by hand in red pigment with the edges gilded. The colorist got the wound on the wrong side because she was painting the depiction of Christ as a conventional portrait, because she did not understand that the shroud was a body imprint and therefore a mirror image. This is a small human error propagated in the work across 300 years.

The Shroud of Besançon was almost certainly a copy of the Shroud of Turin, or at least an artifact prompted by the Turin relic’s presence in the region. It was first recorded in 1523 without much esteem at first. A canon refused to move statues to make room for its reliquary, but over the next two centuries it became an object of enormous veneration and drew crowds of nearly 30,000 at Easter and was credited with cures for the eyes and invoked against plague. The nuns that produced these devotional copies, Annociades, Carmelites, Clarissans, committed themselves purely to a contemplative life, framed the image in ornaments of gold and silk and reserved the finest panels for display to the most illustrious pilgrims.

On the 24th of May 1794, the shroud was torn apart and the cloth was used to bandage the wounded of the Revolutionary Army. The relic does not exist anymore, but what remains are the copies, the engravings, the embroideries, and the paper cuts made by cloistered women who in many cases never saw the thing they were reproducing. My paper cut is likely a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a relic that in itself is probably a copy depicting a body that is not here on this earth anymore that was made by a woman who understood that the point was not the paper or the cutting or the wound, but that the whole chain existed to transmit something that was not able to be contained in the original.

Embroidery stitched to the inside of a fifteenth-century book of hours, showing three people venerating the Shroud of Turin.

I look at it every morning during my prayers, the orange paper and the rough cutting, the wound on the wrong side. And every morning I feel the same thing looking at it. The encounter with the divine I feel by looking at it, the embodiment of the virtue of Christ and his suffering during the Passion, is real in the way that I know anything about my faith. The chain works because every link in that chain was pointed towards something that the chain itself could not hold and even if the distance is enormous its value was clarified by the pointing.

The grindslop economy is not pointed towards anything beyond itself. It is pointed simply at the worship of itself. The relic is the exhibit and the exhibit is the relic and the audience gathers to see the reliquary opened and inside is another smaller reliquary and inside that is another and in the center there’s nothing. And I don’t mean the luminous nothing that the mystics describe when they run out of language for God, I mean actually nothing. The tomb is empty, and not because of the Resurrection. It was just always empty.

I ended up at a dinner a few months back, one of those odd cross-pollinated tables the city still produces, and the woman next to me turned out to be the heiress to a royal line that is old in the way that non-European fortunes are still permitted to be old. Accumulated over generations the wealth had developed schools and hospitals and trusts and even countries and board seats that no one particularly wanted but maintained because the maintenance was the point of the line.

She bemoaned the death of what she called the spirited aristocrat and it took me most of the dinner to understand what she meant. The spirited aristocrat for her was beautiful people inhabiting beautiful lives, consuming beautiful things as a sacred vocation, the performance of aristocratic virtue as a living exhibition of what a human life can be when freed from necessity. Freed from necessity which is different from freed from obligation. The lives of these aristocrats, no matter how gilded, seem incredibly unpleasant. They are buried in unbelievable amounts of obligation.

She was right to mourn it. Her peers, the other contemporary lines of great families, are being rotted away by something much worse in every direction.

The modern rich have split into two populations that look different but share the same vacancy. The first consumes without orientation, the million dollar F1 hospitality packages and the mega yachts that look like parking structures and the undifferentiated graceless bulk acquisition of expensive experience that differs from the inexpensive only in the denomination of the bills required to pay for it. This is not aristocratic consumption. This is conspicuous consumption pointed at nothing, oriented around the act of consumption itself.

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The second population, which is subtler, is the one that has produced the hagiography and the tattoos. It has fled so far in the opposite direction that it arrived somewhere that I believe is genuinely perverse. These people are so frightened of being seen to enjoy the surplus that they’ve organized their entire visible existence around the performance of labor so elaborate and escalating that the performance is indistinguishable from Foxconn conditions it unconsciously imitates. Between the mega yacht and the mattress on the floor of the San Francisco $20,000 a month apartment, there is almost no one doing the thing that every previous civilization with as much surplus understood as a fundamental obligation of having an unequal and rich society.

Almost no one. I have a dear friend, a founder, someone who built and sold a real company, who lives in a beautiful and expensive house with John Muir’s rocking chair in his house. A Nakashima dining table from 1976. Thousands of dollars of Navajo Crystal rugs from the 40s. JBL Paragon speakers from the 60s that cost ungodly amounts. He has no shame about any of this, and that is what makes him unusual and important to me. He’s not performing austerity. He’s not apologizing for his surplus. He lives among old and beautiful objects that are made by people who cared enormously about the making.

And his life is pointed at something through those objects, the way my paper cut is pointed at something through the orange paper and the misplaced wound. He is one of the few people I know in this industry who understands that surplus from wealth is a responsibility requiring the performance of aristocratic virtue as an answer. And that answer is of course to do what Christ calls us to do, charity, good works, the enrichment of those who have much less than us, but also the performance of aristocratic virtue, to live well and visibly and without apology, demonstrating what a life can be when it’s freed from necessity and pointed towards beauty.

I think a lot about the European aristocracies because they had an answer to this that we don’t have and I’m not sure we’re capable of having. You had money because God put you there and in return you owed, specifically, to the estate which was there before you were born and will be there after you die and which you were maintaining not because it was pleasant, I mean maintaining these manor houses sounds genuinely miserable, but because your relationship to the thing was custodial. You owed to the tenants, the church, the regiment, the county, the season, and ultimately to your God, a performance of aristocratic beauty.

The American expression of this, perhaps last seen in the railroad barons of the Gilded Age, was subtly different. Carnegie built his libraries, Rockefeller built colleges, and Frick built a beautiful museum. Surplus passed through you on its way to something that would outlast you even if the state could not provide the mechanism of endowment.

But still these were not meritocratic bounties. The lord does not justify his estate by working harder than the tenants. Carnegie did not sleep on a mattress on the ground. The surplus freed you to meet obligations that people without surplus could not meet and how you met them was the only justification anyone would accept.

This inversion is perhaps where it all went sideways. A society that’s come to terms with its aristocrats knew that money came from inheritance and history and God. There was no sense in which an aristocrat earned the money so the money came preloaded with obligation. If you live in a meritocratic society, you have to believe that every dollar is a direct and fair contribution returned to you by the rational market. If you’re all squared up and you earned every dollar there’s nothing left to give.

And you have to perform that earning continuously to provide proof that you suffered, proof that the return was proportional, proof that you don’t owe anything to anyone or that the market was unfair in any way. Look how much I suffer. Look how much I hurt.

“996” is a mass production / central planning approach to creation. It doesn’t work for inventing new things. It only works for cog like scaling of mechanical processes. great work doesn’t happen after 100 hour weeks, it only appears in tiny fleeting random moments, embrace that.

You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.

Great work has always demanded sacrifice and often brutal hours and I’m not disputing this. What I’m disputing is the direction. These people, many of them friends, have more economic freedom than any class in history and they’ve chosen, freely, to simulate the conditions of a Chinese assembly line and call it virtue.

In a world in which automation will collapse the cost of everything to basically zero, the only question that matters is what do you actually want. What do you consume. What do you put in your body. What you put in your heart. This is the only constraint left and it’s a constraint placed squarely on your character and your own sense of what’s beautiful and worthwhile. If we approach this world with a generation whose entire preparation has been sleeping on office floors and giving themselves autoimmune disorders from working too hard, then what’s the point.

It’s perhaps an unsavory argument, but:

A natural aristocracy, even a silly one, even an inherited one, pheasants and silly hats and houses that cost more to heat than a person earns in a year, is more honest and more good than what we’ve built. The aristocrat does not sleep on the floor to prove that his wealth is deserved. He does not brand his skin with the crest of the family. He has money because he has money, and everyone knows that, including him. And the question his culture asks, the only question it considers worth asking, is what he will do with it? What he will build that outlasts him? What he will tend that was not his to begin with?

The hagiographic apparatus can only intensify.

Years from now, a podcaster will walk through an office. The company worked 14 days a week, twenty eight hours a day.

The founder lived and slept, or perhaps even never slept but worked- 24/7 in that office. Every employee had the logo tattooed on their face. The podcaster walks through the building in the same way a pilgrim walks past relics. Slowly. Reverently. With devotion.

Past desks where employees still work. The only difference now is that those employees are dead, they died in service of the work, but their skeletons still linger over the slack channels and the endless ai agent workflows, every one of them, the logo still legible on their skulls, and someone is there in the corner writing a book about the founder who is also a skeleton seated at his desk next to the cafe he built, and the book will be very good, and someone will interview someone about the book, and the interview will be very popular, and the audience will feel the awe and the inadequacy that the hagiographic form has always existed to produce, and no one at any point in this chain will ask what the company did because the company was always beside the point.

With particular thanks to Marshall Kibbey Rare Books, who sold me the beautiful paper cut.

The mashḥūf cut low and silent through the water. The marshes of southern Iraq, the Ahwār (الأهوار), sprawled across the floodplain between the Tigris and the Euphrates- a spiraling knot of reed beds and floating islands and channels so narrow the reeds swallowed travelers whole.

A man standing in a mashḥūf in the early morning appears to be standing in the sky. The light so pale, and the water so still you can lose the horizon.

I had come from Basra with a guide named Ḥamīd. A colleague at University of Basrah had recommended him. “He knows where the ʿĀliya are. You’ll have to pay him well, but he’ll take you.”

We had been on the water for two hours, the mashḥūf propelled silently along by Ḥamīd- standing barefoot in the aft of the boat, pushing a long pole made of woven reed. The channel had opened into a broad shallow lake when Ḥamīd stopped poling, perhaps three hundred meters across, ringed by dense stands of qaṣab (القصب) the giant marsh reed-- phragmites australis-- which grows in the Ahwār to a height of six or seven meters and which the Ma’dan have been cutting and binding as far back as we have records.

The reed beds encased the lake, pale green at the waterline and darkening as they rose, and through them the light came in slats and bands that shifted when the wind blew. The water inside the enclosure was flat and still and the color of pale pewter, and rising from the water in a pattern that resembled a birdshot burst were the stumps.

They were reed bundles driven into the marsh bed as foundation stakes. The stumps rose two or three meters above the waterline. They were black with age and calcified, the organic material of the reed having been replaced, over centuries of immersion, with calcium carbonate from the mineral-rich water, a process that the geologists at Basra call biomineralization. This process left the shape of the individual stalks, the cord bindings, even the texture of the cut ends.

The stumps were cut flat at the top, as though they had supported a platform, and on one of them, at the far end of the grid, a grey heron stood on one leg and watched us.

I asked Ḥamīd what they were.

هذولة العالية. ما يقربون منها الصيادين.

Those are the ʿĀliya. The fishermen don’t go near them.

“The high ones”.

عالية.

I asked him what that meant. He looked at me and then he looked at the stumps and said:

كانوا يبنون فوق. يبنون ويبنون. وما وقفوا.

They built above. Then higher. Then higher again.

Ḥamīd had spent his life in these swamps. I asked him whether he knew of a woman called Nūra Ḥasan. Yes. He said she was from a settlement not far from here, originally. He had known her. She had gone to Baghdad as a girl and then to Europe. She had come back to the marshes in the seventies to study the ʿĀliya and the water-readings. She had been the last person to pay him to take her to the stumps. He said she lived in Holland now but he had lost her contact. He said she was very old. He said she had not come back since the water returned.

Nūra bint Ḥasan al-Maʿdāniyya was born in 1949 in a settlement in the central Ahwār, the second daughter of a fisherman who kept twelve water buffalo and whose family owned a muḍīf (المضيف) the great arched guest house made entirely of bundled reeds that had been rebuilt at least nine times in the living memory of the family, each time in the same place. The muḍīf was built by bundling the giant qaṣab into columns as thick as the waist of a strong man, planting them in two rows, and bending the tops together to form a vaulted arch that was ten meters high and twenty meters long.

The interior was cool and dim and smelled of water and reeds and mud, and the light cut through in bands through the gaps between the bundles. The building moved when the wind moved, it creaked and shifted on its foundations, and it would rot and be rebuilt and rot and be rebuilt again.

Nūra’s grandmother - her father’s mother, a small, hard woman whose name was Umm Ḥasan and whose face Nūra would describe, decades later, to the Dutch journalist who profiled her in 2004, as “the color of the reeds in autumn, a sickening dark gold” - had a word for the quiet days.

أيام السكتة.

Ayyām al-sakta. The hushed days. The days when the marsh was still and the water did not move and the reeds did not sway and the birds did not fly and you stayed in the house and waited for the marsh to start moving. Umm Ḥasan said the hush was the marsh thinking. She said the hush came before the flood. She said you could feel it in the soles of your feet if you stood in the water - a heaviness, a gathering.

Nūra left the marshes at fourteen- sent to Baghdad on a government scholarship for promising rural students, administered by a man from the Ministry of Education who arrived by motorboat. She studied history at Baghdad University.

She spent the first year sleeping draped with a damp cloth over her face because the air in Baghdad was so dry it cracked her skin until it bled. She told the Dutch journalist that the hardest thing about Baghdad was not the language or the classes or the loneliness but the absence of the sound of water. “In Baghdad, you can hear the traffic, the calls to prayer, the generators running all night-- but you cannot hear the water.”

She returned to the marshes in the mid seventies to begin doctoral fieldwork on a grant from a foundation in England. She was twenty-six and had been away for twelve years, nearly half her life now.

She arrived by motorboat from Basra and transferred to a mashḥūf at the edge of the reed beds and when the mashḥūf entered the first channel and the reeds closed over her head and the light turned green and the air changed - from the hot, dry, diesel-scented air of the road to the wet, cool air of the marsh, the air that smelled of water and cut reed and hung low above the reeds. She put her feet over the side of the mashḥūf and into the water and kept them there for the rest of the journey.

“I put my feet in and the water was cold and the mud was between my toes and I could feel the current pulling against my calves, a very slight pull, toward the southeast, and I knew that the water was moving from the Tigris overflow toward the lower marshes, and that the fish would be moving with it, and that the reeds on the south side of the channel would be thicker than the reeds on the north side because the current carries the seeds. And I had not stood in the water for twelve years.”

She said: “My grandmother could read the water. She said the water spoke if you listened long enough. I grew up listening. Then I went to Baghdad and the listening almost died in me. When I put my feet back in the water in 1975, it was like hearing a language of your childhood. You can understand. But the words won’t come as easilly.”

The Ma’dan (المعدان) - the Marsh Arabs - have inhabited these marshes for at least seven thousand years. The Sumerians built at the western edge of the marshes, and the ziggurat at Ur rises from a flat expanse of gravel and salt that was, five thousand years ago, the shore of a marsh that extended to the horizon.

The Ma’dan’s origins are disputed. Some scholars trace them to the Sumerians, others still to Bedouin tribes who migrated into the marshes during the early Islamic period. The Ma’dan themselves believe they’ve always been here. The marsh is their world- and they build with reeds, they fish with nets and spears, they raise water buffalo - jāmūs, (جاموس ) - whose milk they drink and whose dung they burn for fuel, and they move on the water in the mashḥūf, the narrow bitumen-coated canoe that is the only way to travel between settlements.

They call the water-readers qāriʾ al-māʾ (قارئ الماء), one who reads the water. The practice was called qirāʾat al-māʾ (قراءة الماء), the reading of the water. It appears in at least six separate documents spanning approximately 1270 to 1325, always in the context of the marshes.

A water-reader could tell what the marsh was doing and what it would do next by standing in it, by standing in the water with his feet in the mud and his knees in the current and his eyes on the surface and his ears open to a set of sounds so faint that most people could not hear them at all - sounds made by water moving against mud and reed.

The fullest description comes from Badr al-Dīn, a Mamluk envoy traveling from Cairo to the Ilkhanid court in 1302, who passed through the marshes on the river route from Basra and who stayed for nearly three weeks. He was expected in Tabriz for a diplomatic mission. Something about the marshes held him - perhaps the water-reading itself, which he encountered on his second morning according to his travel logs.

His account survives at the Dār al-Kutub in Cairo, MS Adab 2471, and Nūra, who found it during a research visit in 1980:

وفي اليوم الثاني من مقامي رأيتُ رجلاً من أهل الماء يخرج من بيته قبل الفجر وينزل إلى الماء ويقف فيه والماء إلى ركبتيه. ووقف هكذا ساكناً لا يتحرّك ولا يتكلّم حتى طلعت الشمس وغيّرت لون الماء من الأسود إلى الرمادي إلى لون لا اسم له بين الفضة والذهب. ثمّ رفع يده وأشار إلى الغرب وقال كلاماً لم أفهمه فأخبرني مرافقي أنّه قال إنّ الماء قادم من الجهة الغربية وأنّه سيصل بعد أربعة أيام وأنّ السمك سيتحرّك شرقاً قبل وصوله بيومين وأنّ البلشون سيغيّر رجله اليوم.

ومكثتُ أربعة أيام وارتفع الماء كما قال. وتحرّك السمك شرقاً كما قال. والبلشون الذي كان يقف على رجل واحدة وقف على رجلين قبل الغروب.

On my second day, I saw a man of the water people leave his house before dawn and descend into the water and stand with the water to his knees. He stood still, not moving, silent, until the sun rose and changed the color of the water from black to grey to a color between silver and gold in total stillness. Then he raised his hand and pointed west and said words I could not make out, and my companion told me he said the water is coming from the west and will arrive in four days and the fish will move east two days before it arrives and the heron will change its leg today. I stayed four days and the water rose as he said. And the fish moved east as he said. And the heron that had been standing on one leg stood on two before sunset.

Badr al-Dīn asked the man - his name was ʿAbbūd - how he knew. ʿAbbūd took him to the water and told him to stand.

فوقفتُ والماء إلى ركبتيّ وكان بارداً، بارداً برداً يصعد من الأسفل كأنّ البرد يأتي من قاع الهور لا من الهواء. والطين كان ناعماً تحت قدميّ ناعماً كالحرير وأحسستُ بين أصابعي أشياء صغيرة تتحرّك، ربّما ديدان أو يرقات، وأحسستُ بشيء يسحب ساقيّ سحباً خفيفاً نحو الجنوب وهو التيار. لكنّي لم أشعر في كلّ هذا إلّا بالبرد وبالغرابة. والسطح أمامي كان ماء. لم أرَ فيه إلّا الماء وانعكاس السماء والقصب المنعكس رأساً على عقب كأنّ هناك هوراً آخر تحت الهور.

فقال لي عبّود: أنتَ تحسّ البرد. أنا أحسّ أنّ البرد تغيّر عن أمس. أمس كان البرد ثابتاً من الأعلى إلى الأسفل. اليوم البرد أشدّ عند القدمين منه عند الركبتين. وهذا يعني أنّ ماءً بارداً يدخل من الأسفل، من النهر، من الشمال. أنتَ تحسّ الطين. أنا أحسّ أنّ الطين اليوم أنعم من طين أمس لأنّه يحمل تراباً ناعماً من الجبال وهذا يعني أنّ الثلج يذوب في الشمال وأنّ الماء قادم. أنتَ تحسّ التيار يشدّك. أنا أحسّ أنّ التيار يتردّد، يشدّ ثمّ يتوقّف ثمّ يشدّ، كأنّ الهور يأخذ نفساً ثمّ يخرجه ثمّ يأخذ نفساً، وهذا يعني أنّ ماءً كثيراً يجيء من بعيد وأنّ الهور يتنفّس قبل أن يبتلع.

I stood with the water to my knees and it was cold. The mud was soft under my feet, soft as silk, and I felt between my toes small things moving, perhaps worms or larvae, and I felt something pulling my legs gently south, which was the current. But I felt nothing in all this except the cold and the strangeness. The surface before me was water. I saw nothing but water and the reflection of the sky and the reeds reflected upside down. ʿAbbūd said to me: you feel the cold. I feel that the cold has changed since yesterday. Yesterday the cold was even from top to bottom. Today the cold is sharper at the feet than at the knees. This means cold water is entering from below, from the river, from the north. You feel the mud. I feel that the mud today is more fine than yesterday’s mud because it carries fine soil from the mountains, and this means the snow is melting in the north and the water is coming. You feel the current pulling you. I feel that the current hesitates - it pulls, then stops, then pulls - as though the marsh is breathing, and this means a great deal of water is coming from far away and the marsh is breathing before it rises.

أنتَ تحسّ البرد. أنا أحسّ أنّ البرد تغيّر عن أمس.

ʿAbbūd told Badr al-Dīn:

نحن لا نعلّم أولادنا بالكلام. نضعهم في الماء.

We cannot teach our children with words. They can only learn in the water.

Badr al-Dīn stayed three weeks and he returned to the water each morning and stood beside ʿAbbūd in the dark before dawn and tried to feel what ʿAbbūd felt and could not. On the fifth morning he felt the temperature change that ʿAbbūd had described - colder at the feet - but he could not tell whether the cold had changed since the previous day.

On the ninth morning he thought he felt the current hesitate, the pulling-stopping-pulling that ʿAbbūd called the marsh breathing, but ʿAbbūd told him the marsh was not breathing that day, the current was steady, and what Badr al-Dīn had felt was his own pulse in his calves.

He writes:

ووقفتُ ثلاثة أسابيع في الماء ولم أتعلّم شيئاً إلّا أنّي لن أتعلّم. فالماء يتكلّم لغةً لا يتعلّمها الكبار. وعبّود بدأ يسمعها وهو رضيع. وأنا بدأتُ وأنا رجل في الأربعين. وأذناي صمّاء. لا أذناي اللتان على رأسي بل الأذنان اللتان في باطن قدميّ وهما الأذنان اللتان ما فتحهما أحد لأنّ أبي لم يضعني في الماء.

I stood three weeks in the water and learned nothing except that I would not learn. The water speaks in a way that adults cannot learn. ʿAbbūd began hearing it as an infant. I began as a man of nearly forty years. My ears are deaf- not the ears on my head but the ears in the soles of my feet, the ears that never opened because my father did not put me in the water.

Near the end of his stay, Badr al-Dīn describes watching ʿAbbūd carve marks on the inner wall of the muḍīf at Chībāyish:

وفي آخر أيامي رأيتُ عبّوداً يقف في الماء كعادته ثمّ يخرج ويذهب إلى المضيف ويحفر في القصب علامات بسكين صغيرة. فسألته ماذا تفعل فقال أكتب ما قاله الماء. فقلتُ ولكنّك كنت تعرف ما قاله الماء دون أن تكتبه. فقال نعم ولكنّ القصب يحفظ ما أنسى.

In my last days I saw ʿAbbūd stand in the water then go to the muḍīf and carve marks in the reeds with a small knife. I asked what he was doing and he said I am writing what the water said. I said you knew what the water said without writing it. He said yes, but the reed remembers what I forget.

القصب يحفظ ما أنسى.

The knife entering the green reed, the marks appearing on the muḍīf wall.

Ḥamīd had a thermos of brewed tea in the bottom of the mashḥūf. He produced two small tulip-shaped glasses from his bag wrapped in a pale blue cloth, and we sat among the stumps and drank tea and the heron watched us from its perch.

I asked him about the word his grandmother used. أيام السكتة. The hushed days.

He said his grandmother and Nūra’s grandmother had been friends and had sat together in the muḍīf in the evenings and that Nūra’s grandmother had known a water-reader, the last one anyone remembered, a man whose name Ḥamīd did not know. The water-reader had been asked, near the end of his life, to teach the younger men the notation - to carve the readings on the muḍīf wall so that the readings could be consulted without standing in the water and he had refused.

الجدار ما عنده أرجل. الجدار ما يحسّ الطين. الجدار ما يسمع الماء يتنفّس. الجدار يحفظ ما قاله الماء أمس. بس الماء يقول شي جديد اليوم والجدار ما يسمعه لأنّ الجدار ما عنده أذان.

The wall has no feet and thus the wall does not feel the mud. The wall does not hear the water breathing. Sure, the wall remembers what the water said yesterday-- but the water says something new today.

Ḥamīd said they forced him. He said the young men insisted the wall spared them the mornings in the cold water- they could mend the nets, move the buffalo. The water-reader went to live alone at the edge of the settlement, close to the water, and stood in the marsh every morning until he died, and no one came to learn from him.

Nūra spent four months studying the notation system, cross-referencing Badr al-Dīn’s descriptions with a reed bundle she examined at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad - IM 77541, one meter long, bound with palm-fiber cord in a decorative double helix, incised with hundreds of marks.

She decoded a little more than half. The vertical lines represented water level - clusters indicating predicted rises above the dry-season baseline. The curved reed-shapes indicated current direction and strength. The circles indicated fish concentration.

The horizontal lines crossing the verticals she could not translate.

They appeared in increasing density as the readings progressed from older to newer, and they corresponded to no variable Nūra could identify. She mapped them to Tigris flood levels, drought data, fish population estimates, agricultural calendars. Nothing fit. But whatever it tracked, Nūra could not find it in the marsh.

In the later sections, the horizontal lines were no longer merely crossing the verticals. They were crossing each other.

In her working notes - which survive in a cardboard box in the basement of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, where her papers were deposited after her retirement- she wrote:

Verticals: water. Horizontals: verticals?

The marriage of Zaynab bint Ḥusayn al-Maʿdāniyya to Jāsim ibn Salīm, a fisherman in a settlement eight kilometers south of Chībāyish, is recorded in a contract fragment that Nūra found at the Iraq National Museum archives in the sweltering summer of 1978, filed between a Sassanid seal impression and a bag of unprovenanced pottery sherds.

The contract is written on the tanned hide of a water buffalo in the dark cuttlefish ink that the Ma’dan made by crushing the ink sac of the marsh cuttlefish and mixing it with gum arabic and water. The ink is nearly black, blacker than the oak-gall ink of the cities, and it has a faint iridescence when the light catches it at an angle, a sheen like oil on water. There was no such light in the archives.

The mahr, the dowry, is specified: twenty jāmūs - twelve milking females, three young females not yet calved, four males for transport, and one old male whose purpose the contract describes as li-l-ṣuḥba (للصحبة), for companionship. The witnesses are named- six men, three from each settlement. The date is 1305. A clause at the end reads:

واتّفق الزوجان على أن لا يسافر أحدهما بالمشحوف إلى الآخر في يوم قالت القراءات فيه إنّ الماء غير مأمون. ويكون ترتيب الزيارات وفق ما يُقرّره قارئ الماء في الچبايش.

The two parties have agreed that neither shall travel by mashḥūf to the other on a day when the readings say the water is not safe. The arrangement of visits shall conform to what the water-reader at Chībāyish determines.

Zaynab’s settlement was separated from Jāsim’s by eight kilometers of open water and reed channels and narrow passages between floating islands, two hours by mashḥūf in calm water, longer if the wind was up or the channels had shifted.

A petition filed with the Basra qāḍī’s court in 1313, eight years after the marriage, requests that Jāsim ibn Salīm be compelled to visit his wife, or alternatively that Zaynab be permitted to travel to Jāsim’s settlement despite the readings. The petition is written on buffalo leather in cuttlefish ink by a professional petition-writer in Basra - Zaynab or her family had traveled to the city to file it, a journey of two or three days from the central marshes.

The stated grounds:

وقد صارت الأيام التي تُجيز القراءات فيها السفر على الماء بين القريتين أقلّ من أيام المنع. والزوج لم يزر زوجته منذ عيد الأضحى الماضي وذلك ثمانية أشهر. والماء بين القريتين هو نفسه الماء الذي كان لم يتغيّر ولم يرتفع ولم تعصف عليه ريح ولم يتحرّك فيه تيار غريب ولكنّ القراءات تقول إنّه غير مأمون. والزوجة تقول إنّها تنظر من بيتها إلى ماء ساكن لا موج فيه ولا ريح ولا تيار ومع ذلك يُقال لها إنّ الماء خطر. وهي تعرف هذا الماء لأنّها ولدت فيه وسبحت فيه وهي طفلة ولا ترى فيه خطراً.

The days on which the readings permit travel on the water between the two villages have become fewer than the days of prohibition. The husband has not visited his wife since the last Eid al-Adha. The water between the two villages is the same water it has always been - it has not changed, has not risen, no wind has blown upon it, no strange current has moved through it - but the readings say it is not safe. The wife says she looks from her house at still water with no waves, no wind, no current, and yet she is told the water is dangerous. She knows this water because she was born in it and swam in it as a child and she sees no danger in it.

وهي تعرف هذا الماء لأنّها ولدت فيه وسبحت فيه وهي طفلة.

The qāḍī ruled that the husband was not compelled to defy the readings if the readings were issued by those with knowledge but he was compelled to visit on the permitted days, however few.

In the same archive in a hand that Nūra describes as “small, unpracticed, pressing hard on the hide as though the stylus were unfamiliar”

والماء بيننا هو الماء. ما تغيّر. لكنّ الجدران تقول إنّه تغيّر. والجدران ما تعرف الماء. الماء يعرف الماء. وأنا أعرف الماء لأنّي ولدتُ فيه. بس ما يسمعون لي. يسمعون للجدران.

The water between us is the water. It hasn’t changed. But the walls say it has changed. The walls don’t know the water- the water knows the water. And I know the water because I was born in it. But they don’t listen to me. They listen to the walls.

Nūra’s grease penciled note on the archival folder: Zaynab?

The raising began around 1310.

A Basra customs record notes a tripling of bitumen shipments to the marshes without any increase in boats or dwellings nor population. The merchants say the water people are raising their houses. يرفعون بيوتهم. The Ma’dan had always built on the water but their floating islands sat at the surface, rising and falling with the seasonal floods. The water rose, the island rose with it. The water fell, the island settled.

Additional layers of reed and mud were added. Bitumen was applied between the layers. Stakes were driven deeper. The platforms rose. One meter above the waterline. Then two. Then three. Then four.

A fish merchant from Basra, whose letter Nūra found in the Cairo Geniza, describes a visit to the marshes in 1314:

ذهبتُ إلى الأهوار لشراء البنّي والشبّوط كعادتي في كلّ ربيع. والبنّي سمكة نهريّة كبيرة لحمها أبيض وجلدها فضيّ ويُباع في سوق البصرة بدرهمين المنّ أمّا من الصيّادين فبدرهم واحد. والشبّوط أصغر ولحمه أحمر يضرب إلى البرتقاليّ وهو أقلّ رغبة عند أهل البصرة لكنّه يُملّح ويُجفّف ويُباع في الأسواق البعيدة. وكنتُ أنتظر أن أشتري من قرية جاسم بن سليم خمسين منّاً من البنّي وثلاثين منّاً من الشبّوط كما أشتري كلّ عام منذ عشر سنين.

والطريق من البصرة إلى القرية يستغرق يومين بالمشحوف، يوماً في القناة الكبيرة ثمّ يوماً في القنوات الصغيرة بين القصب. وكنتُ أعرف الطريق كما أعرف شوارع البصرة. لكنّ بعض القنوات كانت قد تغيّرت — بعضها ضاق وبعضها اتّسع وبعضها اختفى — وهذا عادة الهور فإنّ ممرّاته تتحرّك كما تتحرّك أحلام النائم.

فلمّا وصلتُ وجدتُ القرية قد ارتفعت عن الماء ارتفاعاً لم أرَ مثله في حياتي. والبيوت التي كانت على سطح الماء صارت في الأعلى على منصّات من القصب والقير والطين، ولا تصعد إليها إلّا بسلالم من القصب طول الواحد منها أربعة أذرع أو أكثر. والسلالم رطبة وزلقة من القير والطحلب. والجواميس تقف في الأسفل عند الماء تنظر إلى فوق والنساء ينزلن لحلبها ثمّ يصعدن بالحليب في أوعية من الجلد. والأطفال الذين كانوا يسبحون حول المشحوف في كلّ زيارة سابقة ويتعلّقون بحافته ويغوصون تحت الماء ويظهرون وهم يضحكون — لم أرَ واحداً منهم في الماء. سألتُ أين الأطفال فقالوا في الأعلى.

وسألتُ لماذا يبنون هكذا فقالوا إنّ القراءات تقول إنّ الماء سيرتفع ارتفاعاً عظيماً. فقلتُ ومتى فقالوا لا يعلم أحد ولكنّ القراءات لا تخطئ. فقلتُ وما هذا الارتفاع العظيم فنظروا إليّ كأنّي سألتُ سؤالاً لا يُسأل وقال أحدهم بصوت خافت: الشمس السوداء. فقلتُ وما الشمس السوداء فلم يجبني أحد. ونظروا إلى الماء ثمّ نظروا إلى السماء ثمّ دخلوا بيوتهم.

I went to the Ahwār to buy bunnī and shabbūṭ as is my practice every spring. The bunnī is a large river fish with soft white flesh and silver skin that sells in the Basra market at two dirhams the mann, though from the fishermen at one dirham. The shabbūṭ is smaller with reddish-orange flesh, less favored by the people of Basra but salted and dried and sold in the markets. I expected to buy from the village of Jāsim ibn Salīm fifty mann of bunnī and thirty mann of shabbūṭ as I have bought every year for many years. The journey from Basra to the village takes two days by mashḥūf - one day in the main channel, one day in the small channels between the reeds. I knew the way as I know the streets of Basra. But some of the channels had changed - some had narrowed, some widened, some disappeared - and this is the nature of the marsh, whose passages shift between seasons and sometimes between weeks. When I arrived I found the village raised above the water to a height I have never seen in my life. The houses that had been at the water’s surface were now above, on platforms of reed and bitumen and mud, and you cannot climb to them except by reed ladders four cubits long or more. The ladders are damp and slippery with bitumen and algae. The buffalo stand below at the water looking upward and the women descend to milk them and climb back up with the milk in leather vessels. The children who used to swim around the mashḥūf on every previous visit, hanging from its edge and diving under the water and surfacing laughing - I did not see a single one of them in the water. I asked where the children were and they said above. I asked why they build like this and they said the readings say the water will rise greatly. I said when. They said no one knows but the readings do not err. I said what is this great rising and they did not answer. One of them said in a low voice: the Black Sun. I said what is the Black Sun and no one answered me. They looked at the water and then at the sky and then went into their houses.

The children were above. والأطفال في الأعلى. Between the children and the water were four meters of dry air and bundled reed, and through this the sound of the marsh, if it reached them at all, reached them muffled and distant.

A tax survey conducted in 1317 by an Ilkhanid official from Tabriz named Nūr al-Dīn recalls:

وأحصيتُ في القرى المرتفعة سبعاً وأربعين بيتاً وثلاثمئة واثني عشر رأساً من الجاموس وأربعة عشر مشحوفاً وثلاث عشرة شبكة صيد وسبع منصّات لتجفيف السمك لا يُستخدم منها شيء لأنّ السمك ما عاد يُصطاد بالقدر القديم. وفي ثلاثة من البيوت وجدتُ حزماً من القصب المقطوع عليها علامات لم أعرف غرضها فقدّرتها تحت بند بضائع مجهولة الغرض وقدّرتُ خراجها بدرهم عن كلّ حزمة.

والبيوت في الأعلى فارغة من كثير من الأثاث لأنّ الحمل إلى ذلك الارتفاع شاقّ. والنار لا تُشعل في الأعلى خوفاً من حريق القصب فالطعام يُطبخ في الأسفل على الماء ويُحمل إلى الأعلى في أوعية. والهواء في الأعلى أجفّ من الهواء عند الماء والبيوت تفوح منها رائحة القصب الجاف لا رائحة الماء. والجواميس تبقى في الأسفل عند الماء والناس في الأعلى وبينهم فراغ. والأطفال لا ينزلون إلى الماء. والماء الذي تحت البيوت ساكن ومظلم ولا يراه أحد من الأعلى لأنّ القصب يحجبه.

I counted in the raised villages forty-seven houses, three hundred and twelve buffalo, fourteen mashḥūfs, thirteen fishing nets, and seven fish-drying platforms, none of which are in use because the fish is no longer caught in the old quantities. In three of the houses I found bundles of cut reed bearing marks whose purpose I did not know, so I assessed them as goods of unknown purpose at one dirham per bundle. The houses above are empty of much furniture because carrying things to that height is difficult. Fire is not lit above for fear of the reeds burning, so food is cooked below at the water and carried up in vessels. The air above is drier than the air at the water and the houses smell of dry reed, not of water. The buffalo remain below at the water. The children do not go down to the water. The water beneath the houses is still and dark and you cannot see it from above because the reeds obscure it.

والماء الذي تحت البيوت ساكن ومظلم ولا يراه أحد من الأعلى.

The black sun.

A fragment of a muḍīf wall, recovered from the mud of the drained marshes in 1994 by an archaeological survey team from the University of Baghdad, working in the brief window between the draining of the marshes and the complete desiccation of the marsh bed. The fragment is a section of bundled reed, one meter square, calcified in the manner of the ʿĀliya stumps. On its inner surface are the standard water-reading marks- verticals, curves, circles, crossings. But at the bottom, in a space that had been cleared, previous marks scraped away to make room, there is an inscription in the colloquial Arabic of the marshes, in cuttlefish ink:

يوم الشمس السوداء. ارتفع الماء أو لم يرتفع. نحن في العالي ولا نرى.

The day of the Black Sun. The water rose or did not rise. We are in the high place and we cannot see.

ارتفع الماء أو لم يرتفع.

The water rose or did not rise.

نحن في العالي ولا نرى.

We are in the high place and we cannot see.

The Basra harbor records which tracked the Shatt al-Arab water level daily, maintained by the harbor administration survive in fragmentary form at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Nūra cross-referenced every candidate date in the period 1315-1325. She found no anomalous flood. The water level in Basra, sixty kilometers downstream, was normal throughout. Whatever the readings had predicted, whatever the Black Sun was, the water did not rise. Or if it rose, it rose only in the marshes, in the dark space beneath the platforms where no one was standing and no one could see.

In 1991, the government of Saddam Hussein began draining the marshes.

The Ma’dan had supported the Shia uprising against Saddam after the Gulf War. The draining was a military operation conducted with bulldozers and dams and diversion canals that rerouted the Tigris and the Euphrates away from the Ahwār and into evaporation channels in the desert. The destruction took months.

The small channels dried first- these narrowed to mud paths and then to cracked earth and then to dust. The fish moved to the deeper pools at the centers of the lakes, and for a few weeks the fishing was extraordinary and the Ma’dan were rich - the fish were concentrated, packed into shrinking water, frantic, easy to catch. The fishermen of Jāsim’s village - the village the fish merchant had visited, the village Zaynab had married into, the village that Nūra had photographed and measured and catalogued during her fieldwork in the seventies - caught more fish in those weeks than they had caught in years. And then the pools shrank further. And the fish died in the shallows, their bodies drying to firm husks that curled and cracked shattered into the dust on the flat dry mud.

The water between Zaynab’s village and Jāsim’s - the eight kilometers the readings had forbidden her to cross - was gone.

The buffalo stood at the edges of the remaining water and would not move. They stood with their legs in the last inch of water and their heads down and their ears back and they would not move, and the men had to drive them out with sticks, and the buffalo went.

The reeds turned yellow in the first weeks. Then brown. Then the brown went grey and the grey went dry and the dry went to dust and the dust blew into the air and settled on everything - on the muḍīfs, whose arched roofs were designed to shed rain but welcomed dust, on the mashḥūfs beached in the mud, their bitumen hulls cracking in the heat, on the tuhūl that had settled onto the marsh bed and split under their own weight.

The drying marsh smelled of rot and salt and exposed sediment -- a sharp mineral smell that burned the nostrils and that the Ma’dan, according to Nūra’s interviews with survivors, called rīḥat al-mawt, the smell of death.

And through all of this the ʿĀliya stood at their elevation. Four meters above a surface of cracked mud baked to the color of bone. The ladders descended to dry ground. The platforms hung in the air, the careful layers of reed and bitumen drying and splitting. The flood the readings predicted had not come. The water had gone the other direction entirely. It had all been for the wrong apocalypse.

Nūra was in Amsterdam. She had left Baghdad in 1988 and was given a position at the University of Amsterdam’s department of Middle Eastern studies, a small department in a building on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht, a canal. Her office overlooked the water.

The Nieuwe Prinsengracht is clean and dark and contained in stone walls and it moves only when the boats move it and without them stands entirely still. Nūra could see the canal from her window and could hear the boats and the bicycles and the tourists but could not hear the water.

She heard about the draining by telephone. A colleague in Baghdad called. She did not go back. In her papers at the IISH - the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam- in a folder she labeled marshes - personal, there is a sheet of paper on which she wrote, in Arabic:

يجفّفون الماء. الماء الذي علّمنا كلّ شيء. الماء الذي وضعتنا فيه أمّهاتنا ونحن رضّع فتعلّمنا أن نسمعه قبل أن نتعلّم أن نتكلّم. والعالية تقف في التراب مثل عظام. والحزم التي في المتحف تقرأ ماءً غير موجود. وأنا هنا على قناة في هولندا والماء تحت شبّاكي ساكت. الماء هنا ما يتكلّم. بنوا له جدران من حجر وقالوا له وين يروح. الماء هنا مطيع. والماء المطيع ما يتكلّم.

They are drying the water. The water that taught us everything. The water our mothers put us in as infants so that we learned to hear it before we learned to speak. The ʿĀliya stand in the dust. The bundles at the museum still give readings for a marsh that has been emptied. And I am here on a canal in Holland and the water beneath my window is silent. The water here does not speak.

والماء المطيع ما يتكلّم.

In the years after, in the quiet of the office on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht: her four months with the notation, her cross-referencing, her folders and catalogue numbers and penciled notes. She had come to the marshes to find the water-readers and had spent her time at the Iraq Museum, at the Dār al-Kutub, in archives. The last people who could still read the water had been standing in it every morning, and she had gone to the shelves instead.

After 2003, the dams were breached and the water returned. The marshes reflooded, partially - forty percent of the original area. The reeds are growing again. Some of the Ma’dan have come back. They build muḍīfs again, smaller than the old ones. They fish and raise buffalo. The water is shallower than it was and the channels are different and the fish are fewer and the sacred ibis has not returned. But the marsh is alive.

The ʿĀliya are underwater again. The stumps rise from the surface.

There is a phrase in Persian, used by the Sufis of Khorasan, that Nūra pinned above her desk in the office on the Nieuwe Prinsengracht without translation:

آفتابِ سیاه بر همه می‌تابد، و هیچ‌کس سایه ندارد.

The black sun shines on everyone, and no one casts a shadow.

Nūra retired from the University of Amsterdam in 2012. She never returned to the marshes after the water came back. The Dutch journalist asked her, in 2004, whether she planned to go back. She said: “I am not the same woman who put her feet in the water in 1975”

Her papers are in the basement of the IISH, in a cardboard box labeled HASAN N. - AHWĀR / MA’DAN / WATER-READINGS, 1975-1991. The reed bundle at the Iraq Museum - IM 77541, one meter long, bound with palm-fiber cord in a decorative double helix, marks unidentified, possibly ritual - may or may not have survived the 2003 looting. Its catalogue entry has not been updated. The muḍīf wall fragment - IM 94-217, the inscription the water rose or did not rise, we are in the high place and we cannot see - is in storage, behind a locked door, in a room that is climate-controlled when the electricity is working.

The last time I went to the marshes was in winter. The water was grey and cold and the sky was grey and the reeds were brown and the birds were thick - pelicans, cormorants, herons, the migratory flocks that use the Ahwār as a waypoint between far Siberia and East Africa - and Ḥamīd poled the mashḥūf slowly between the stumps and the heron stood on its flat-topped post and watched us.

I asked Ḥamīd what his grandmother’s water-reader would have said about the ʿĀliya.

He was quiet for a long time. The pole entered the water and came out and entered and came out and the mashḥūf moved forward between the stumps and the heron watched and did not fly. The water was still. The reeds knocked against each other in a light wind. The marsh smelled of mud and cold water and dead reeds.

Then he said:

كان يقول إنّ الماء يتكلّم لمن يعرف أن يسمع. بس هم ما سمعوا الماء. سمعوا الجدران.

He would say the water speaks to those who know how to listen. But they didn’t listen to the water, they only listened to the walls.

The heron lifted off the stump with a single beat of its wings and crossed the lake and landed on another stump and folded its wings and stood on one leg and watched the dark, still water.

The Cardamom Game

لا، يا سيدي. هذا المكان مسكون.

No sir, this place is inhabited.

All we know about the tribesman is what Philby recorded in his field journal: he was tall, lean, wiry, and dark-skinned, identified only by his initial, S. He had stopped his camel at the crossing of a shallow wadi in the Rub’ al-Khali and refused to move further.

The depression below them was totally unremarkable. In their crossing they had found dozens like it: low limestone banks, the scattering of flint tools, the faintest trace of a carved channel that might have once carried water many years ago. Jack Philby had spent most of his life in the east at this point. A consummate British explorer and infrequent intelligence officer, he was mapping the Empty Quarter for Ibn Saud in January of 1927. He was the father of a much more famous traitor, though he did not know this yet. Philby asked what inhabited this place.

الجن

“What kind of jinn?”

الذين لعبوا

“Those who played.”

Philby mapped this place in his field journal with the name that S. had given it: Wādī al-Hīl (وادي الهيل). The Valley of the Trick. He pressed on and stumbled down into the depression alone. After this many years in the Empty Quarter, he had no patience for Bedouin superstition.

Philby would spend two hours surveying the site, and found, partially buried under sand on the eastern bank of the wadi, a stone tablet, approximately eighteen inches square, that bore a grid of incised lines, marking eleven rows by eleven columns, 121 squares in total, and in each a small cup-shaped depression stained a deep amber brown that he assumed was iron oxide.

The identification came much later. A chemical analysis performed at the British Museum on a fragment Philby had chipped from the edge and carried in a saddlebag for the remainder of the crossing identified the residue as Elettaria cardamomum, green cardamom, ground into such a fine powder and pressed into the limestone with such force and over such duration that it had seemingly chemically bonded with the stone.

الذين لعبوا.

Those who played.

The fragment of the game board sat in a drawer in Gallery 43 of the museum for forty years, catalogued as “gaming board, Arabian Peninsula, provenance unknown, possibly Nabataean.” No one looked at it again until 1971, when a doctoral student named Farah al-Rashid, who had dedicated herself to Abbasid-era trade networks during her graduate study at the University of London, found it misidentified among Palmyrene funerary objects, held it to the light, and smelled it. You could still smell the cardamom.

What al-Rashid would find in that drawer, and what she would spend the next eleven years reconstructing from scattered references in Kitāb al-Aghānī, the Murūj al-Dhahab of al-Mas’udi, and previously untranslated marginalia in a Buyid-era copy of the Shāhnāmeh held in the St. James’s home of a relatively unknown British Orientalist, was something that no one in the full history of Islamic scholarship had previously described.

From what she could piece together, the game was called al-Luʿbat al-Hāl (اللعبة الحال), The Game of the Condition, though its name appears differently across the sources. Al-Mas’udi, writing in Baghdad around 947 CE, refers to it obliquely in a passage about the amusements of the Buyid court as Hisāb al-Qāqulla (حساب القاقلة), or the Cardamom Accounting. A marginal note in the Shāhnāmeh copy, in a hand that al-Rashid dated to the late tenth century, uses the old Persian Bāzī-ye Hēl, the Cardamom Game. An anonymous treatise on the diseases of the soul held at the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul and tentatively attributed to a student of al-Ghazali refers to it simply as al-Lawḥ (اللوح), The Board.

The game was played on a grid, and that grid was always eleven by eleven. It is an odd number, the significance of which al-Rashid could not explain. It does not correspond to any known numerological tradition in either the Islamic or pre-Islamic corpus. It is almost as if the number had been avoided. Each position on the grid held a small mound of ground cardamom. Hēl, in Persian. Hāl, in Arabic, a word that also means “condition” or “state,” a polysemy that the game’s inventors clearly understood.

And the learned men of Rayy, having no war to attend and no famine to administer, turned their attention to the Board, and they found in its Conditions a depth that surpassed the depth of the sea between Basra and Siraf.

— attributed to al-Mas’udi, Murūj al-Dhahab, Vol. IV (al-Rashid translation)

The rules, at least as far as al-Rashid could reconstruct them, were these: two players sat opposite each other and each controlled a set of positions on the board marked by the color of the cardamom. The player to the south of the board played green cardamom, and the player to the north of the board played black. The black cardamom was the inferior Amomum subulatum, imported at great expense from the foothills of the Himalayas, some thousand miles away, specifically for this purpose.

On each turn, a player would move cardamom from one of his positions to an adjacent position, but the quantity moved was not determined by the player’s choice. It was determined by the condition, al-hāl, of the surrounding positions.

The cardamom was a ledger.

A move in one corner of the grid could cascade the counts through the game field in ways that al-Mas’udi, writing in the early years of the game, described as “beautiful and terrible and impossible to foresee.”

جميل ومريع ومستحيل التنبّؤ به.

The clerics of Rayy were the first to dedicate themselves to the game.

Rayy, modern Rey, is now a suburb of Tehran. But then it was the largest city on the Iranian plateau after Baghdad, and in the mid-tenth century it was at peace, an unusual and extended one. The Buyid dynasty, Shi’a Persian kings ruling under the nominal authority of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, had consolidated control of the Iranian plateau.

Today, the city is a few eroded mud-brick walls and a truncated minaret cut halfway through, rising through the pollution haze south of Tehran, with tour buses idling in gravel lots. But the city at its height held perhaps 200,000 souls on the alluvial plain beneath the Alborz mountains, the snow line visible in the mountains every winter from every rooftop, the air thin and dry and carrying the smell of charcoal and bread and, increasingly, cardamom. The Friday mosque held 10,000 worshipers. The bazaar ran for nearly a mile beneath vaulted brick ceilings that filtered the light into pale bands across the stalls. There was running water, and public baths tiled in geometric patterns so intricate that visitors a century later assumed they were painted rather than laid by hand.

The qāḍīs, the judges and clerics who ran the courts and kept the registers, lived in houses arranged around central courtyards. The courtyard was open to the sky while enclosed by walls, and contained a garden. Usually it was a chahār bāgh, the quartered garden, divided by water channels into four beds representing the four rivers of paradise in the Quran. At its center almost always was a pool, which was shallow and still and served no practical purpose other than to reflect the sky. You sat in the shade of the īwān, the vaulted reception hall that opened onto the courtyard, and looked across the garden at the sky reflected in the water.

This is where they played.

The boards were brought out after afternoon prayer, after the courts had been adjourned for the afternoon, after the petitioners had been dismissed, after the clerks had rolled up their registers, and after the tea had been brewed and poured. The tea would be served first, in small glasses on brass trays with a dish of saffron rock candy that you held between your teeth and let dissolve as you drank. The boards were limestone, always limestone, quarried from the hills near Hamadan and transported by mule to Rayy, and they were heavy enough that two men were needed to carry each one.

They were placed on low wooden tables between cushions, and the cardamom was set out in open cups, green ones in white cups and black in copper ones, and the game would begin.

Al-Tha’ālibi writes that the qāḍīs of Rayy had developed what he called suqm al-farāgh (سقم الفراغ), the sickness of emptiness.

The qāḍīs would attend their courts and adjudicate their disputes, but the disputes were increasingly small. It was a peaceful time. The courts were orderly, and the afternoon stretched before them like the long road from Rayy to Hamadan: straight, flat, hot, and featureless.

Into this emptiness the Cardamom Game arrived.

Al-Rashid could not determine who invented it. The sources disagree. Al-Mas’udi attributes it to “a Persian of Jundishapur,” the old Sassanid academy town, which would place its origins in the tradition of Indo-Persian exchange that also produced chess.

The Ghazalian student in Istanbul attributes it to a Sufi of Balkh, which gives the game origins that are closer to the Afghan mystics. A Geniza fragment from Cairo, discovered by al-Rashid in 1978 and published in an obscure issue of the Revue des études islamiques, attributes it to “a Jew of Isfahan who taught it to the fire-worshippers and they to the Muslims,” which, if true, and few believe it is, would make its lineage Zoroastrian.

By the late tenth century the game had consumed enough of Rayy’s clerical class to alarm even the Buyid emir, ʿAḍud al-Dawla, who was not easily alarmed. ʿAḍud al-Dawla, by all accounts, was himself a player.

At midday in the summer the light on the Iranian plateau is absolutely scalding. It erases shadows and turns the garden into a bright field of undifferentiated white. By the time the qāḍīs had begun their game, two or three hours after noon, the light had shifted. The western wall of the courtyard would cast a shadow across the pool, and the eastern wall caught the descending sun and turned the color of apricot. The garden, which at noon had been flattened by light, recovered its depth.

The roses in the chahār bāgh, the Damask rose that the Persians had cultivated for a thousand years before Islam, reopened in the cooling air, and the smell of them mixed with the cardamom on the boards, and the sound of the water in the channels. The courtyards were silent, except for the sound of the cardamom being moved, a dry, quiet sound, like sand poured from one hand to another.

Two men sitting across a limestone board, moving small mounds of green and black powder from depression to depression. Seated in a garden beneath the sky that was slowly turning from white to gold, while the city outside the walls tried to conduct its business while the court sat empty and the registers lay unread. The men would never speak during the game. The game did not require it.

And they sat and moved the cardamom and played the ledger out.

Al-Tha’ālibi, who visited Rayy in 1004 CE, describes entering the courtyard of a qāḍī named Abū Manṣūr al-Ṭūsī, attested in multiple sources as a judge of the Shāfiʿī court of Rayy, and finding him mid-game with a visiting scholar from Bukhara.

Al-Tha’ālibi writes that he stood in the entrance of the īwān for “the duration it takes to recite Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa, seven minutes or so, before either player acknowledged his presence. When Abū Manṣūr finally looked up, al-Tha’ālibi writes, his expression was that of “a man who has been called back from a place very far away, and who is not pleased to have been called.”

Al-Tha’ālibi left a detailed description of Abū Manṣūr al-Ṭūsī. He was old, over sixty by this point, which in the tenth century was very, very old, and he had a white beard covering his dark skin and angular features. He was partially deaf in one ear, the left, from a childhood illness, and he was a Shāfiʿī jurist of the highest rank, trained in the schools of Baghdad for many years, posted to Rayy in his thirties, and elevated to the senior bench in his forties. Across his life, he had adjudicated thousands of disputes across property, marriage, inheritance, contract, and the rest of what Islamic law touches which is to say, everything. He had spent his career making decisions that altered lives, and now, in his sixties, in a time of remarkable peace across these lands, the lives he was asked to alter had become small. A boundary dispute between two merchants, a contested dowry, the ownership of a dead man’s donkey.

But there was the board, the eleven by eleven grid, the 121 conditions, and the nearly infinite cascades that came out of it.

A move in any corner, the player lifting a pinch of black cardamom from position 7-9 and distributing it one grain at a time clockwise through the adjacent positions. This redistribution would change conditions across the board from position 83, which had been balanced for nearly one hundred moves, whose subsequent imbalance would propagate westward through a chain of positions that the players had not touched in hours and could not have anticipated. And the green player’s formation in the center of the board, a formation that he had spent the last twenty minutes constructing with the care of a mason laying stone in the courtyards, collapsed silently, ending his defense. The game was played through the accumulated weight of conditions that no individual sitting at the board could choose and no individual could have predicted.

Al-Ghazali would call it the worshipful contemplation of patterns that form something like the divine order but are empty of the substance of the beyond.

The cascades that would play out over the board certainly felt like providence. Each move felt like a movement of the divine will through creation, mirroring the ways that in our lives a single decision by a single person in a single moment can propagate through the fabric of our lives and produce consequences that were never intended and far beyond our foresight.

The board was the world as the qāḍīs knew it from their courts. You intervened, and the consequences exceeded your intention. You reasoned carefully, and the reasoning was not enough.

But the board was far from the world. The board was eleven by eleven and the world was nearly infinite, at least as the Islamic tradition tells us. The board would resolve in an afternoon of play. The world did not. We never get to finish this game. And the board answered with an end state, while our world is decidedly silent.

The green Elettaria grows in the Western Ghats of southern India, primarily in what is now Kerala, the hills above the Malabar coast, where the monsoons batter the mountains with walls of rain, and the forest floor is soaked, wet, and shaded, and the temperature never drops below ten degrees centigrade, and the cardamom plants grow in the understory beneath the tall trees, and their pods cluster low on stems near the ground, pale green when harvested and dark when dried. The black Amomum grows even further in the eastern Himalayas, Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan, at altitude and in conditions that are cold and damp and unlike anything any Persian had ever seen.

Both arrived in the Persian Gulf through the Indian Ocean trade, a network of dhow routes that connected Basra and Siraf and Hormuz to the Malabar coast. The journey took several weeks, even with favorable monsoons pushing the dhows forward.

The dhows were sewn together with coconut fiber without a single nail, a construction method that produced vessels more flexible in heavy seas than anything nailed together, and which could be repaired with local materials. Across their journey, the sails were lateen-rigged, and the navigation was by the stars and the color and temperature of the water and the behavior of the birds. The captains, many of them from the Hadhramaut or from Oman, had learned the monsoon patterns from childhood.

The volume of cardamom required for a single game was trivial, maybe a few grams. The volume required for a city of qāḍīs playing simultaneously was large. The volume required when the game spread from Rayy to Isfahan, from Isfahan to Shiraz, from Shiraz to Baghdad, from Baghdad to the Jazira, and from the Jazira to the Syrian coast, was enormous.

Al-Rashid found in the Geniza a merchant’s letter, dated approximately 1010 AD, from a Karimī trader in Aden to his partner in Fustat, which contains the following lines:

The hēl ships arrive at Aden in such number now that the harbor cannot contain them, and the price of hēl has risen to where a mann of green is worth two mann of pepper, and the agents of the Rayy houses are bidding against each other on the quay before the cargo is unloaded, and I do not understand what they are eating that requires so much.

They were not eating the cardamom, they were playing with it.

This confusion persisted for centuries. The cardamom entering the trade networks entered at volumes that implied enormous consumption. It could be explained through dietary, pharmaceutical, and industrial use, but it was being routed to a use that had no precedent in any existing model of the economy.

In al-Rashid’s records, whole corridors of Persian commerce bent toward the spice. Cardamom flowed in extraordinary volume through a trade network that existed almost exclusively to price it, ship it, finance it, and insure it. The commodity was being consumed to produce nothing. Without a war to fight or new territories to take, the ships had been repurposed to carry increasingly large loads of the stuff, and the harbors were congested and overfilling and spilling into the bays.

The suftaja, the insurance, the credit, the warehouse receipts: all of it existed to finance the spice. The greatest fortunes in the region were made by merchants who built beautiful homes whose windtowers still tower above the souks, and the apparatus of Indian Ocean commerce mobilized around a product whose end use was a game played by clerics on limestone boards in the afternoons after court.

The trading firms grew enormous on it, and the routes were well secured, and the letters of credit, the suftaja that the Islamic world invented and the Italians later borrowed, served as an early modern example of complex financialization.

The game moved south.

It crossed the Gulf in the holds of dhows alongside the cardamom itself, and it reached the coast of Oman. From Oman it spread into the Hadhramaut, and from the Hadhramaut into the trading posts along the East African littoral, Mogadishu, Kilwa, Sofala, carried by the same merchant networks that carried ivory and gold and slaves in the opposite direction.

But it also moved inland.

The trade routes that cut across the Arabian Peninsula were networks of wells, of caravanserais, of watchtowers, of safe-passage agreements between local tribal authorities, of water rights, of knowledge of where camels could graze and where the wells were salty, and of the adjudication of disputes among travelers. And along these routes in the eleventh century something began to happen that al-Rashid could not fully explain. The caravanserais, the rest stops, the desert inns, the walled compounds where travelers slept and watered their animals, began to expand. They expanded boards.

A caravanserai at the junction of the Hejaz road and the route to the Najd, a place called, in the sources, Qaṣr al-Milḥ, the Salt Palace, though no salt was produced there and the word milḥ may be a corruption of something else, was, according to a tax record from the Fatimid administration in Egypt dated 1031 CE, importing cardamom at a volume that exceeded the combined consumption of the nearest three towns.

The caravanserai had twenty rooms. It was staffed by four men and a cook. It served on an average day perhaps 30 travelers, and the records show it importing cardamom at the rate of a provincial capital.

From a marginal note in the surviving records of a tax official:

I have sent an inspector to Qaṣr al-Milḥ to determine the cause of the discrepancy. He reports that the building has been expanded on its eastern side with a structure of palm-frond and mud-brick, open to the air, containing many boards of the type described in the Rayy dispatches. Travelers do not rest and continue their journey but remain for days, sometimes weeks, and the cardamom is consumed on the premises.

Travelers would stop here in the middle of the desert and never leave.

The original structure was stone, the local limestone that outcrops everywhere in this part of the Central Arabian plateau, a pale yellow stone that turns white in the heat of the sun and gold at sunset. The expansions to the building were built in palm-frond and mud-brick, the cheapest and fastest construction available. The building was the kind of building that the Bedouin would put up in a day and expect to last a little more than a season, but this one lasted decades, because the demand never broke. And the traffic consisted of men who stopped thinking they would stay for a night and then remained for many days.

From above, the structure would have looked accidental. The stone building at the center, rectangular, with its courtyard open to the sky. The palm-frond extension sprawling to the eastern side, ragged and asymmetric, growing outward as demand required it, room added to room with no plan and no geometry. Beyond that extension, further and further rings of tents, the black goat-hair of the Bedouin, but now occupied by men who were not Bedouin, men from the cities, men who came from Basra or Kufa or Medina and who had, upon arrival, put down their loads and sat at the base of the boards and had never stood up again.

The boards were everywhere, in the palm-frond rooms, on carpets spread in the sand, on flat stones dragged from the wadi bed. The cardamom would arrive by caravan, the same caravans that once had carried frankincense and myrrh along these routes, commodities of genuine transcendent purpose, to churches and mosques as offerings to the divine. The cardamom would arrive in sacks and was distributed by a man whom we find recorded in a surviving tax record as al-wazān (الوزان), the weigher.

Around the compound, the desert. The Nafūd or the Dahna or some intermediate waste. Al-Rashid was never able to determine the precise location of Qaṣr al-Milḥ, which appears on no surviving map and whose name does not correspond to any known modern site.

In this landscape, miles away from the closest water, under this light, the men would sit at their boards.

In these low-hung temporary buildings, the flat gravel extended to the horizon in every direction, the shimmer of the heat disrupting the light above the ground like waves, the absolute absence of any feature that might orient the eye other than the board itself, that eleven by eleven grid, 121 conditions, and the cascade of consequences that came out of them. The tiny, complete, and answerable world laid out on limestone between their crossed legs.

Moses in Sinai, Christ in the wilderness, Muhammad in the cave of Hira. The desert strips away everything and leaves you alone with yourself and your God. I have felt this, as have many others. But the men at Qaṣr al-Milḥ had found something else in the desert. They were no longer alone. They had the board, and the board was much more responsive than any god. The board would answer you when you moved the cardamom. Our God is silent.

For what happened next in Rayy, one source survives: a letter from the Buyid vizier Ṣāḥib ibn ʿAbbād to the emir of Rayy, which survives in a fourteenth-century anthology of chancery correspondences held at the Topkapı Palace Library. The Ṣāḥib was one of the great figures of the Buyid era, a bibliophile whose personal library was so large that he reportedly refused a diplomatic posting because it would have required more camels than existed on the gulf to transport. He was a patron of scholars, poets, and scientists. And he was terrified.

The letter is dated 994 CE, three years before the vizier’s death, three decades before the Ghaznavid conquest that would sweep the Buyid dynasty into dust.

My lord, I write to inform you of a condition which I can describe only as a plague, though it kills no one and leaves no mark. The courts are empty after the noon prayer, though disputes still await adjudication. The clerks in the markets have abandoned the registers, and the judges sit at the board from noon until evening, and some of them - I hesitate to write this, lest it disturb you - have lamps brought so they can continue playing late into the night. The expenditure on cardamom has exceeded the expenditure on grain in the northern districts. I have confirmed this with the customs officers at the gates, who have shown me the tallies. More cardamom enters the city than wheat. The warehouses that once held cloth and copper now hold cardamom in quantities sufficient to spice the food of the Buyid lands for generations. But it is not being eaten. It is being placed and worn into boards and moved from square to square by men who, when I interrupt them, look at me as though I have woken them from a dream of paradise. I do not ask your permission to ban the game, for I do not believe it can be banned. I ask only that you understand that the city of Rayy, which your father and your grandfather and your forefathers built into the seat of our civilization, is being consumed by something beyond any of us.

The emir did not ban the game. His response is lost to the sand, but history does record that ʿAḍud al-Dawla ordered the construction of new and elegant gaming courts on the grounds of the royal palace, with roofs to protect the boards from wind, lit with oil lamps such that play could continue long into the dark, and staffed these courts with servants whose sole function was to replenish the cardamom and carry away the waste, the degraded powders swept into basins, discarded into wadis far outside the city walls.

The Ṣāḥib saw the danger more clearly than the emir.

The qāḍīs had spent their careers developing precisely the faculties the game required: the ability to hold complex systems in their heads, to anticipate consequences two and three steps out, to read ambiguous conditions, and to make binding decisions under uncertainty. The game used those faculties in ways that governance never could. The game answered you. Within minutes, the consequences of a decision were visible on the board. Governance never answered like that. The game was governance perfected and emptied, a closed system with the complexity of the open one and none of its consequences.

Maṣlaḥa in Islamic jurisprudence is the public interest, the welfare that law exists to protect. Al-Ghazali formalized it into five categories: the protection of religion, of life, of intellect, of lineage, and of property. These are the maqāṣid al-sharīʿa (مقاصد الشريعة), the purposes of the law, and rulings in courts from Córdoba to Samarkand existed to protect them.

The game had no maṣlaḥa. It protected nothing and served nothing and it preserved no religion, no life, no intellect, no lineage, and no property. It was, in the technical language of Islamic law, ʿabath (العبث), frivolous, pointless, an activity without purpose. And ʿabath is, in the sharīʿa, considered spiritually dangerous because it occupies the faculties that were given to man for the purposes of tending creation and redirects them toward nothing.

The Sufis called the highest spiritual state fanāʾ (فناء), the annihilation of the self in God. Why not be utterly transformed into fire?

The game produced a fanāʾ without God. Eleven by eleven, 121 positions, a cascade of conditions that felt like creation unfolding but contained no divine presence.

حتى يظنّ العبد أنه يعبد وهو إنما يعدّ.

So that the servant believes he is worshipping when he is only counting.

In a footnote in her unpublished graduate thesis, al-Rashid proposes that the Rub’ al-Khali itself, the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous sand desert on Earth, with 650,000 square kilometers of sand so deep and so dry that no human habitation has ever been sustained within it in recorded history, is not entirely natural.

The geological history of the Rub’ al-Khali is well documented. The region was slightly wetter in the Holocene. Lakes existed and rivers flowed. The desertification was gradual, driven by the northward retreat of the monsoons, and the process was essentially complete by 3500 years before the prophet’s birth. By the time of the Islamic conquest, the Empty Quarter was what it is now: a desert so hostile to crossing that it was considered, until Philby and Thomas in the 1930s, a feat of borderline suicidal ambition by anyone other than the Bedouin who made the margins of the Quarter their home.

Al-Rashid proposes that the Quarter is empty in part because the cultures that bordered it made it unenterable. The Bedouin of the Murri, the Rashidi, the ʿAjmān, and the Manāhīl grazed their camels on the Quarter’s margins and rarely penetrated its interior. They avoided the deep desert for its physical hostility, but also for something in their cultural memory about what had been happened there.

When a Bedouin says a place is ḥarām, forbidden, sacred, dangerous, he is usually describing a feature of the environment that has been observed and recorded in the tribal memory: a well that produces only salt, a pass where flash floods could kill, a depression where sandstorms could trap you.

But the taboo around the deep Rub’ al-Khali, al-Rashid suggests, may mean something else. A human danger. A place where men went and did not come back, because they found something in the sand they could not leave.

The forty-seven boards that al-Rashid found at Wādī al-Hīl were littered among camel bones, pottery fragments, lamps, and deposits of compressed cardamom two feet deep, the evidence of sustained habitation.

And whatever happened here was bad enough to bury. The sand buries everything. But the burial was also cultural: the tribes that lived on the margins remembered. What they remembered was not specific. They remembered that this was a place you do not go. They told their children and their children told their children, and the memory became taboo. The Valley of the Trick, the empty place, the place where the jinn live. The word they would have used, the word S. might have used if Philby had pressed him, which Philby, to his credit, did not, was jinn. The place was inhabited by the jinn.

Jinn in the Quran are a separate creation, made of smokeless fire. They inhabit the margins - deserts, ruins, places where civilization retreated. They are attracted to the emptiness that remains after something has been used up.

Al-Rashid’s footnote ends with a single sentence.

Perhaps the Bedouin remembered no spirit at all, but an industry: men, boards, spice, waste, and a purpose so empty it made the place forbidden.

I have walked in parts of the Rub’ al-Khali. Not the deep interior. But I have walked the northern margins, near the edge of the Dahna, where the red sand meets the gravel plateau. The Rub’ al-Khali feels exhausted, as though whatever was here has been used up and the sand is covering what remained.

Maybe they remember the exhaustion. They remember land that was once the site of an intensity so total that the intensity itself modified the topology, that the camps and the game boards were as real as the dunes and as real as the flats and as real as the sabkha, where groundwater rises and evaporates and leaves a crust of crystals that crunch under your feet like walking on bones. The game did not make the sand. It made the taboo.

The tribes that border the Rub’ al-Khali have stories about why you do not go there, and they share a shape: men went into the desert and found something they could not leave.

She arrived at Wādī al-Hīl in 1982 with a small team from SOAS and a permit from the Saudi Department of Antiquities that had taken her three years to obtain. The wadi was a natural formation, but one so extensively modified as to be nearly unrecognizable. The limestone banks had been carved. Flat surfaces had been prepared and leveled. Steps had been cut into the stone, leading down to a wide, level floor where the stream had once run.

On the floor, she found forty-seven gaming boards.

They were arranged in rows, eight across, oriented north to south. Each board was identical: eleven by eleven, 121 depressions, and the same amber-brown cardamom residue bonded into the stone. The boards were separated by narrow channels, not for water, she realized, but for the drainage of excess cardamom powder, which would have accumulated on the floor as the wind disturbed the playing surfaces. The channels led to a central basin at the western end of the wadi, and in that basin she found a deposit of compressed cardamom nearly two feet deep.

Then she found other things. Fragments of glazed pottery. Nishapur ware with Kufic calligraphy, shattered and half-buried. Copper fittings from oil lamps. Glass fragments from vessels that once held, based on residue analysis, a date wine, nabīdh نبيذ, which was impermissible under every school of Islamic law other than the Hanafi.

And she found bones.

They were not human bones, but camel bones, hundreds of them. The camels had been eaten on site and their bones discarded in a midden at the eastern end of the wadi. The volume of bones suggested a permanent or semi-permanent encampment. People had lived here in the desert, in the core of the Empty Quarter, in a carved wadi in the middle of nothing, for the purpose of playing the game.

The lamps guttering and the cardamom running low. The last caravan delayed, or turned back, or swallowed into the desert, or never sent because the suftaja had stopped clearing and the merchants in Aden had moved on to something else. The men at their boards, their white robes stained with cardamom dust and their fingers amber-brown from thousands of games, looking up from the grid and seeing, perhaps for the first time in months or years, the desert around them. The Milky Way was so bright and so dense that it cast a shadow. They looked up at those stars and then looked down at the board and saw, in the grid of 121 positions, a pattern that was more legible than the sky.

And then one of them, I imagine an old qāḍī from Rayy or Isfahan or Shiraz, a man who had once adjudicated disputes in a great city and had traveled five hundred miles into the desert to play a game here, would have made the last move. He would have lifted a pinch of green cardamom from one depression and placed it in another and watched the cascade unfold, watched it arrive at its own conclusion, and stood up. Or maybe he did not stand up, because the next game was starting, and the lamps were already guttering, and the stars were bright enough to play by, and the cardamom was running low, but there was maybe enough for one more game, one more cascade, one more unfolding of a world that answered when the real world did not.

Al-Rashid died in 1984. Her manuscript, titled simply Al-Lawḥ اللوح, was deposited at SOAS. It has been checked out twice in forty years.

The sand filled the wadis and the boards were buried, and the cardamom residue bonded with the stone, and the Bedouin who lived on the margins remembered that this was a place you do not go. They told their children and their children told their children, and the memory became taboo. The Valley of the Trick, the empty place, the place where the jinn live, the scar in the desert where something that was played out consumed the men who played it and left behind only residue, only the amber-brown stain in the limestone, only the smell.

And the smell of cardamom in the desert is a strange thing, a sweet thing, a thing that has no business being in a landscape so hostile. A thing the wind carries for miles across the gravel plains and the Bedouin smell sometimes in the early morning, when the air is still cool and the dew has settled on the stones, and the ghosts of the game rise from the ground like smoke from a fire extinguished long ago. They have no choice but to turn their face away.

Rayy fell. Not because of the game. Rayy fell because the Ghaznavids had cavalry and ambition and the Buyids had neither. The game did not cause the fall. The game merely ensured that when the cavalry arrived to sack the city, the men who should have been governing were somewhere else, moving small piles of cardamom from square to square on a board that felt better than the world outside.

The lamps were still lit when the horses came.

The Bedouin call it khālī (خالي), empty. But khālī shares a root with khalā, to be alone, to be free, to be vacant. And khalā is also the word the Sufis use for the spiritual retreat, the withdrawal from the world into solitude for the purpose of encountering God.

لا حول ولا قوة إلا بالله

There is no power and no strength except through God.

I first became an addict at nineteen.

I had shuffled my way out of a small engineering college outside Boston, where I hadn’t managed to make many friends, into a three-bedroom apartment deep in the Fens of Boston that somehow housed seven people, one bathroom, a kitchen unexplainably never used. My memories of that year are closer to a kaleidoscope than any coherent narrative. We didn’t have fake IDs, so we fermented our own alcohol in a sink-still my roommate had built in his college metal shop, and drank the fortified hard cider that came out of it at a rate of several gallons a week. Looking back, we were consuming enough ethanol to run a tractor.

My body had decayed significantly. The house swelled with heat that slipped in through every open window and every open door, and the elevator had been broken for as long as anyone could remember, beer cans crushed into the ceiling tiles, buttons jammed out by parties long since passed.

I was working a research desk at a cancer diagnostics company across the river. On a good night I was sleeping four hours before shaking awake in the living room, waiting my turn for a strictly timed five-minute shower, before pretending to be functional in an office full of people who were.

This was also the period in which I discovered Twitter dot com.

My life got absorbed into the app. Everything was in there. It felt like a country club you couldn’t get kicked out of, a college party you couldn’t not be invited to. Whatever social rejection I faced from kids more normal, more well-adjusted than I was, didn’t exist on the little black square. And the crowd told me I was right. You could be mean to people. You could tell them their life’s work was meaningless. You could tell them it wasn’t going to work, and most of the time it wouldn’t.

I was an addict for that feeling. For confusing cynicism with wisdom. I spent my days getting likes and retweets for telling people their work was worthless, without merit, unlikely to work.

The simple truth about technology is that most of it won’t work. The Bay Area is full of fools buying into dreams that were never possible, wasting their lives on quests they’ll never finish, climbing mountains that cannot be climbed. The industry takes itself far too seriously. People are getting unbelievably rich doing things that make no sense. The entire world watches from the outside, rooting for the downfall of this silly little halcyon thing, and most of the time the world is right.

The harder truth is that some of the time it works.

In rare moments, against every reasonable prior, the thing in someone’s head ends up in the world. A drug that wasn’t there last year is in a pharmacy this year. A model that didn’t exist eighteen months ago is now reading a doctor’s notes back to her. A rocket lands on its tail. The people who built these things get very rich, and they should -- and even at private-jet money, super-yacht money, the compensation is a rounding error against the consumer surplus on the other side.

I lost a good friend a few months back. I couldn’t make the funeral.

I was texting back and forth with another buddy who knew him, and he said something I haven’t been able to get out of my head. He said the greatest gift we have here on earth is that at the end of time, when the sky rolls up like a scroll and Gabriel blows his trumpet, we’ll get to stand before God and be judged. And then we’ll get to stand alongside him and laugh and laugh until we cry, telling the stories of all the things we got to do together. If our lives were good, we get eternity. And even if we weren’t, even if this whole thing was some kind of misguided adventure -- it will be worth it to see each other again and tell the story of what happened here.

At some point along the way, being mean on the internet lost its thrill.

It started working all at once. The world I had grown up in began to fade. Technological progress went from a standstill to a sprint, and the judgments I had cast along the way turned out to be wrong. Even where I was right -- the individual frauds, the individual grifts, the guys who should have never made it and didn’t work as hard as we did and didn’t have as good of a time and didn’t do right by anyone-- even where those guys fell out, it wouldn’t have mattered. The successes that came outnumbered them a hundred to one.

Around that same time I kicked the brutal addiction of cynicism. My life started to get better. Not all at once. I have an incredible toll to pay for the way I behaved and the way I acted in those years, because cynicism comes at a cost -- and the cost lands exclusively on the cynic.

There’s a refrain in Twin Peaks I deeply adore. The villain looks in the mirror and discovers he is evil, and his hair goes gray instantly. His body cannot bear what his soul has done, and the rot becomes physical in the same moment it becomes visible. It’s easy to read this as a David Lynch at his worst. I don’t think it is. The hardened cynicism, the practiced contempt, the relationship to the world that demands every new thing prove itself before you’ll allow it to exist -- it will destroy you. It will rot your soul.

Unlike many other addictions, the heart is slower to recover from moral injury than the body is from the physical. The years spent in critique, the years spent away from creation, the years spent treating judgment as a thing we get to participate in rather than a deference we owe to God at the end of time -- these carry moral weights that are hard to cure. Weights that can only be answered by hour-long walks, by many-year apologies, by living in the relentlessly mundane day-to-day apologetics of being a sinner, and always being a sinner, and always asking for forgiveness.

It is easy to understand why cynicism deforms the soul, and not only because it is corrosive. Cynicism deforms the soul because it is a counterfeit of final judgment. It allows condemnation ahead of time. It lets you act as though your role in the world is to sort the worthy from the unworthy, instead of learning to love, to build, to discern honestly, and to leave judgment where it belongs.

All we can do is pray for forgiveness, as we are all sinners. And hope that when we stand before our God we are able to laugh and smile as we tell the story of what these lives meant -- that we were given some small part in moving the world toward the new heaven and the new earth that came down upon us like a bride prepared for her husband. That the jasper-lit streets of the New Jerusalem will be lit, in some small part, by our actions, by the light of our relationships.

The political impact of the acceleration of a language model seems oddly under-discussed to me. I wanted to publish five short sketches from my notes and emails over the last few months that I’ve abstracted below on language models and their political economy.

I. On the Unusual Coalition

The Republican Party won the 2024 presidential election with the most demographically diverse working-class coalition assembled in modern history, or at least since the New Deal. Between 2016 and 2024, Democrats suffered a 23-point decline amongst moderate Hispanic voters, alongside an 8-point decline amongst conservative Black women, and an 11-point decline amongst moderate Asian voters. It’s easy to think that these shifts were confined to white voters or confined to men, but they weren’t. Across every racial category in every region, voters with college degrees moved towards Democrats and voters without them moved towards Republicans.

62% of American adults don’t hold a bachelor’s degree. The party’s survival and margin comes from a non-college majority.

The coalition that won in 2024 is weird in an important way: it formed an alignment of interests between a capital class and a labor class within the same party.

The MAGA coalition was not like this. The venture capitalists and the plumber in Ohio, the allocator and the machinist in Nevada, the CEO preparing for an IPO and a claims adjuster in Ohio. They all voted for the same candidates and they all attended the same events and most importantly they all share the same enemies.

Over the last decade, the economic interests of capital and labor on the right have run together. Both sides want re-shored production, both sides want tariffs on foreign competition, both sides want cheap energy and reduced regulation. Even if the employer captures these margins, the employee captures increased wages. Their interests are not identical, but they are pointed in the same direction and they share hostility towards a common adversary: the credentialed professional managerial class, the regulatory state, and the cultural establishment.

Thatcher’s coalition was built from capital plus an aspirational middle class — industrial labor opposed her. The BJP’s is capital plus Hindu majoritarian politics mediated through a complex caste regime. In none of these cases did the capital class and the labor class sit at the same table and argue for the same candidates.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies something like 20 million Americans in office and administrative support occupations, the single largest occupational group in the economy. This includes 3.5 million secretaries and administrative assistants, 2.9 million customer service representatives, 1.3 million information clerks, 1.5 million bookkeeping and accounting clerks. The median wage across this group is a little north of $46,000, below the national median of $49,000. The typical educational requirement is a high school diploma. These are, at least in demographic terms, the non-college workers who form the Republican base.

BLS projections show employment in this entire category set to sharply decline over the 2024–2034 period. The agency specifically attributes this to AI and automation, noting that the integration of existing and new AI technologies into workflows will constrain demand for billing clerks, procurement clerks, credit authorizers, customer service representatives, and administrative assistants. Keep in mind federal employees did these projections, not bay area freaks.

Beyond administrative support, the national economy employs 5.7 million workers in sales and related occupations earning below the national median, 4.4 million in food prep and serving at a median wage of $30k, and 7.7 million in transportation and material moving. These are occupations that AI and AI-adjacent automation — autonomous vehicles, automated logistics, AI-driven ordering systems — will put pressure on over the next decade. These are disproportionately held by workers without college degrees, and disproportionately held by the coalition that delivered the Republicans their majority.

On stages and in interviews and in earnings calls, the lab leads say things as aggressively as: customer support will be fully automated, white-collar work has 12 to 18 months left, 50% of entry-level positions could be eliminated within five years. The capital markets are pricing these in as fact.

The employer’s interest in AI adoption is simple cost reduction. If a model can perform the work of a claims processor at a fraction of the cost, the employer’s fiduciary obligation is to use the AI. But the claims processor’s interest is to continue being employed. There is no tariff on the deployment of language models. There is no reshoring strategy for cognitive automation. The tension between capital and labor that AI introduces cannot be managed by the policy instruments that currently align the coalition.

II. On Attacker’s Advantage

AI is overwhelmingly attacker-advantaged.

It costs a lifetime to build a political career and institutional credibility, but an individual with a laptop in a few hours can produce a synthetic audio recording that can destroy one. The recording doesn’t need to be perfect or undetectable or even survive forensic analysis — it just needs to circulate for long enough before an election. By the time the analysis arrives, the news cycle has moved on and the damage is baked into the priors of the electorate.

Synthetic media disproportionately harms incumbents. The party in power requires institutional credibility and has a greater surface area to smear with the blood of libel and impropriety. The opposition benefits from chaos, from distrust, from the collapse of legitimacy. When the information environment degrades to the point where nothing can be confirmed, the public response is to blame whoever is currently in charge.

The Republican Party currently controls the White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the majority of governorships. Every piece of synthetic media that erodes trust in institutions erodes trust in the institutions the Republican Party currently operates.

The current deepfake detection systems identify artifacts of known models. This works against frontier models that are properly documented, disclosed, and have verifiable examples. It doesn’t work against models that have never been publicly released, possibly distilled, possibly new architecture, or trained from scratch by actors with sufficient compute. A state-level adversary, an individual with enough funding, or a former frontier lab employee with access to models that are not publicly known could produce synthetic media that existing detection tools cannot detect, because it’s hard to detect something you don’t know exists.

And the incentive structure for a lab to leak such a model to an aligned actor is only becoming greater. The labs and their adjacent research organizations employ workforces that are, by every available survey, concentrated on the left of the political spectrum. The nonprofits that receive the compute grants from the labs are not politically neutral.

III. On Insurgency

The modern MAGA movement was the first online political insurgency in American history.

The 2024 cycle extended this advantage onto new platforms. David Shor’s data shows that voters who identified TikTok as their primary news source swung nearly six points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024. Short-form video, podcasts, creator-driven media were all channels where the right reached young men, first-time voters, and assorted low-information constituents.

But the institutional left has now had a decade to react — two complete election cycles. They understand the techniques and the platforms and the network structures. Academic research programs, trust and safety teams, other EA-funded circus shows, and NGO infrastructure have all invested heavily in defensive postures. These are imperfect defenses, but the 2016 playbook is now a case study.

The next political insurgency, that is the one enabled by AI, will not resemble the last one. The meme war required thousands of participants producing and distributing content with wide appeal. An AI-enabled operation can require only a handful of operators and customize content to target ultra-narrow areas of resentment.

The right won the last information war with these tools and these people, but the next information war will be fought with people who don’t share its commitments and deployed through channels it can’t monitor with models it can’t detect.

IV. On Displacement

The demographic most immediately threatened by AI automation in the U.S. is not blue-collar workers. Blue-collar workers have already faced their day of job elimination and reduction and horrible offshoring and destruction of communities as a result of automation. They never got justice for any of this. The class that AI is most likely to dispose of is the professional managerial class: the college-educated, urban, white-collar workforce that forms the operational core of the Democratic Party.

This should be, in theory, good news for the right. The people being displaced are the other side’s voters.

Young white college graduates, approximately 5% of the electorate, constitute what seems like a majority of people who actively work in Democratic machine politics. They staff campaigns, they run nonprofits, they file lawsuits, they organize protests, they write policy and they navigate bureaucracies. They are the left’s standing operational infrastructure with nothing better to do. They are concentrated in metro areas where political organization is easy and are networked through institutions that function as permanent campaign infrastructure.

Unlike the non-college worker whose job either exists or it doesn’t, the professional managerial worker’s position is much more likely to be hollowed out than to vanish. They have enough political power that AI may automate the outputs of their jobs - the reports, the emails, the analysis -- while the positions themselves face political opposition to total elimination, because eliminating them requires managers to acknowledge that the role was unnecessary, which threatens the manager’s own job. Return-to-office mandates keep these workers physically present amongst their peers, even if there is no work to do at all. What remains are salaried professionals with institutional access, organizational skills, political experience, geographic proximity to similarly oriented professionals, and a newly found excess of unoccupied time.

When the credentialed professional class perceives a threat, the response generates new credentialed professional positions — make-work jobs. The regulatory response to AI displacement creates employment for the displaced.

The factory worker who was displaced by offshoring in the 1990s did not get a federal oversight apparatus staffed by former factory workers.

What this produces is a large, underemployed, politically experienced, concentrated, and institutionally connected class on the left with time, resources, and capacity, and a grievance which deepens every quarter. On the right, displaced workers with grievances, without organization, without density, without institutional access, or without time.

The non-college worker who loses their job to AI has a grievance but no infrastructure. Organized labor was their only defense and has already failed them. They don’t have density, they don’t have a political network, they don’t have institutional affiliation. The professional managerial worker who is underemployed by AI has grievance and infrastructure.

V. On the Periphery

The international consequences of the coming intelligence wave are, if anything, more severe, and they arrive at our borders whether or not the political class wants them.

India’s IT and business process management sector employs 5.4 million people directly and represents 7.5% of GDP. The BPO workforce alone is 1.6 million people. The Philippines has 1.9 million IT-BPM workers with total employment including induced and indirect jobs of 6.3 to 7.7 million — 13 to 15 percent of the entire employed population. The sector is 9% of Philippine GDP, comparable in scale to overseas remittances. The median BPO worker in Manila is 20 years old.

The work these industries perform — customer service, data processing, claims adjustment, technical support, back-office administration — are cognitive tasks that AI systems can automate most effectively. The IMF’s own analysis classifies Philippine BPO workers as highly exposed with low complementarity, meaning the tasks are automatable and the skills do not easily complement AI systems. The BPO sector accounts for 7.4% of Philippine GDP, macro-critical as the IMF says, and changes within it will collapse the broader economy.

These are young men, urban, concentrated in countries with limited social safety nets and histories of political instability when economic expectations are violated.

When the primary formal employment pathway for young men in their 20s disappears in countries with weak institutions, the result is not an orderly labor adjustment. The Arab Spring was preceded by a decade of rising youth unemployment in countries where young men had been educated to expect middle-class outcomes and the economy could not deliver them. Central American migration surges correlate with constrictions in the formal employment sectors that absorb young male labor.

OpenAI published a policy brief today.

A thirteen-page document entitled “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.” It is, by all accounts, a deeply considered work of policy thinking that is meant to be taken seriously.

Unlike many of OpenAI’s other publications, this one is formatted for print. The PDF is built to be perfectly printed on glossy paper and feverishly passed around the common rooms of glitsy clubs by lobbyists holding 18 dollar virgin Negronis, with a Rolex on one wrist and a Whoop on the other, and left on the desks of ranking members by any number of insurgent hordes of AI-aligned lobbyists that have blanked the district in brand new suits and fancy Dupont Circle apartments over the last few months.

I wrote in February, in part one of “Our Intelligence Troubles,” about what is happening on the ground. About the New Brunswick City Council voting unanimously to kill a data center. About hundreds taking to the streets to block AI infrastructure. About the CEOs a nation away in New Delhi glibly babbling about AI job destruction while the American public readied themselves for violence. I wrote about 188 groups across two dozen states coordinating legal strategies, and about $162 billion in AI projects blocked or delayed.

I warned that standard reassurance would not solve any of the industry’s problems.

There is a second piece to that essay that I’ve syndicated privately to a number of individuals working across the labs and in the US government. In that piece is an exhaustive wargame of how a dedicated group of small actors could delay or destroy the US AI ecosystem through asymmetric violence.

While I’ve come to the strong view that there is no safe way to publicly release that essay, enough individuals in enough places have read it.

It is useful to frame this document as a response to the clear, bipartisan, and quickly growing resistance to the AI industry in America. It is also anything but a standard reassurance.

It is also, without a doubt, one of the strangest documents the technology industry has ever produced.

I. AI leaders should be careful with New Deal metaphors

OpenAI’s brief begins by invoking the Progressive Era and the New Deal as models of how society might navigate the AI transition.

The Progressive Era and the New Deal helped modernize the social contract for a world reshaped by electricity, the combustion engine, and mass production.

This is not a new framing. God knows Less Wrong has been running with it for years. But it’s a framing that deserves careful scrutiny, because the history it invokes is not the history that was actually lived.

The New Deal was not a peaceful coalition between capital and labor. It was not a workshop in D.C. It was not the product of industry leaders and policymakers sitting together to figure out how to share prosperity. The New Deal was a settlement that came together after decades of industrial violence. That is violence imposed on capital by organized labor that bled and died for it, literally, and had finally accumulated enough political power to force the settlement through.

In 1892, Pinkerton guards shot eleven steelworkers dead at Homestead. In 1897, police shot nineteen unarmed miners in the back at Lattimer. In 1911, 146 garment workers burned alive at Triangle Shirtwaist because the managers locked the exits. In 1914, the National Guard mowed down a tent colony with machine guns at Ludlow and set it on fire. Twenty-five died, eleven of them children. Rockefeller wired a check directly for the salaries. In 1921, ten thousand armed miners fought three thousand men at Blair Mountain for five days. A million rounds were expended. Army bombers were deployed. 925 miners were charged with treason. In 1937, police killed ten strikers at Republic Steel on Memorial Day.

Frances Perkins watched women jump from the Triangle factory windows, and she spent thirty years building the institutions that structured the New Deal.

I am not sympathetic to terror. I have made this point clear. But any discussion of the New Deal without remembering that it was achieved through domestic insurgency is, on its face, absurd. The forty-hour work week was extracted from capital by people willing to be shot at, imprisoned, and charged with treason. The Wagner Act was not a gift from an enlightened capital class: it was rammed through Congress while factory owners hired private armies to shoot their own employees. Social Security was not a consensus position but a minimum concession that capital could offer to prevent armed revolution. The trust busters were not convened by Standard Oil and given grants. They were sent by a government that had watched Standard Oil buy state legislators and decided that if they did not act, the Republic would fall.

When OpenAI invokes this history, it is invoking a process in which it would have been the target -- whether it knows it or not. The New Deal was the result of industries being compelled by organization, by electoral power, and by the credible threat of violence, to accept that these concessions were necessary to prevent revolution. The men who designed it didn’t sit with Andrew Carnegie and ask him what the social contract should look like. They watched Carnegie’s private army mow down laborers and acted accordingly.

This document invokes the conditions of that settlement without acknowledging the force that produced it. There is some weird implication that we can arrive at the same destination through dialogue, through workshops, through email addresses, through API credits. We can’t. We have never been able to. The New Deal was not a PDF, and it’s time we stopped acting like it was.

II. The Proposals

I want to walk through the proposals in some detail because what they tell us is extremely interesting. Every proposal introduced here maps to a bill that already exists. A bill that was introduced, debated, and failed. The document assembles these proposals largely without acknowledging that history, but it does provide us a useful window into what is happening.

There is also a risk that the economic gains concentrate within a small number of firms like OpenAI.

One of the strangest concessions OpenAI has been willing to make is that while they may capture the majority of AI-driven returns, they’re humble enough to publish documents detailing how they might offer concessions to the public. It’s not obvious that this is a good negotiating posture.

These ideas are our first contribution to that effort, but only the beginning. OpenAI is: (1) welcoming and organizing feedback through [email address]; (2) establishing a pilot program of fellowships and focused research grants of up to $100,000 and up to $1 million in API credits for work that builds on these and related policy ideas; and (3) convening discussions at our new OpenAI Workshop opening in May in Washington, DC.

There are zero new dollars of capital committed in this document. OpenAI is offering fellowships of at most $100,000, a rounding error against $25 billion in annualized revenue and against nothing for a company preparing for an IPO approaching $1 trillion.

The biggest concession this document makes is API credits. Access to a product that OpenAI sells and distributes at marginal cost, denominated in their own currency. They’re willing to offer you a coupon for their own store and describe it as a public investment.

Give workers a voice in the AI transition to make work better and safer, including a formal way to collaborate with management to make sure AI improves job quality, enhances safety, and respects labor rights.

What is being described here is a union. The word “union” appears once in the document’s thirteen pages. The mechanism that has historically given workers formal collaborative power with management -- the mechanism that produced the New Deal and the labor rights that came after-- is collective bargaining. The document doesn’t mention collective bargaining. It describes the output of organized labor (voice, participation, clear limits on harmful deployment) without acknowledging the input, which is power. If workers don’t get a voice in AI deployment through participation, they will get it by organizing until management cannot deploy without them. The document proposes the conclusion without any mechanism to produce it.

This is not an accident. A bipartisan policy effort that proposes unionization for a broad, poorly defined swath of white-collar workers whose jobs are at risk of AI-driven automation would alienate the business community so profoundly as to be dead on arrival.

Allow workers to prioritize AI deployments that improve job quality by eliminating dangerous, repetitive, administrative, or exhausting tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work.

No one packed City Hall in New Brunswick because the data center might automate dangerous or repetitive work. The deployment that matters politically -- the one that fills town halls and shows up in polling -- is the deployment where a company replaces a person doing non-dangerous, non-repetitive, non-exhausting work that the person valued, was good at, and built a life around. That’s the deployment Sam Altman was describing when he said customer support jobs would be “totally, totally gone.” When he said the work that AI replaces may not have been “real work.” When he said a child born in 2025 is “unlikely ever to be as smart as artificial intelligence.”

This document does not address any of this. It describes a version of AI deployment closer to a safety system on a factory line -- a version that doesn’t threaten anyone -- and proposes policies for a world that does not exist.

Help workers turn domain expertise into new companies by using AI to handle the overhead that usually blocks entrepreneurship. Pair microgrants or revenue-based financing with practical “startup-in-a-box” supports such as model contracts and shared back-office infrastructure so that new small businesses can compete quickly.

This is perhaps the strangest of OpenAI’s proposals. It recasts a massive labor problem as an entrepreneurship opportunity. It assumes that a customer support representative or paralegal in Ohio or Pennsylvania, whose job was eliminated by a model that OpenAI sells, can -- with a microgrant and a model contract -- compete with their own little AI startup in a market being consolidated by companies with access to billions in compute.

This is telling a factory worker who lost his job to learn to code, couched in policy language. Perhaps “vibe code” instead.

Treat access to AI as foundational for participation in the modern economy, similar to mass efforts to increase global literacy, or to make sure that electricity and the internet reach remote parts of the globe.

OpenAI is proposing that access to a product it sells be treated as a public necessity comparable to electricity or literacy. The comparison to electricity is remarkable because OpenAI’s data centers are, according to the opposition, raising electricity costs for the communities that host them.

In some way, this is a callback to the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electricity to rural communities as part of the New Deal. But the TVA was not a coupon program run by the power companies. Electricity was forced to become a public utility because private companies failed to serve rural and low-income communities, and the government built the infrastructure itself through the Rural Electrification Act. The REA did not send electricity credits redeemable at a utility -- it built power lines.

OpenAI is proposing the opposite: that the government subsidize access to a product built and sold by a private company approaching a trillion-dollar valuation.

Policymakers could rebalance the tax base by increasing reliance on capital-based revenues, such as higher taxes on capital gains at the top, corporate income, or targeted measures on sustained AI-driven returns, and by exploring new approaches such as taxes related to automated labor.

Note the verb: could. Note the subject: policymakers.

OpenAI is proposing that other people consider asking OpenAI to pay higher taxes eventually, through a democratic process. The document doesn’t say what OpenAI would pay, or when, or at what rate, or through what mechanism.

Meanwhile, OpenAI completed its conversion to a public benefit corporation in October 2025, lifted its profit caps, and is preparing to IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. The conversion was specifically designed to maximize the company’s ability to attract capital on favorable terms. The document does not propose any specific tax commitments from OpenAI. It does not propose that OpenAI contribute a percentage of its revenue, profits, or IPO proceeds to any public good. It proposes that a conversation might happen at some later date.

Policymakers and AI companies should work together to determine how to best seed the Fund, which could invest in diversified, long-term assets that capture growth in both AI companies and the broader set of firms adopting and deploying AI.

The public wealth fund is perhaps the most substantive proposal in the document, and it deserves credit. Alaska’s Permanent Fund, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and New Mexico’s fund are real precedents. The mechanism of tying distributions to displacement thresholds is mechanistically interesting and perhaps more serious than any proposal coming out of Congress on this topic.

But a wealth fund requires a funding source. The document says that AI companies and policymakers should “work together to determine how to best seed the fund.” OpenAI cannot bring itself to say it would contribute. Norway’s Petroleum Fund works because Norway taxes oil at approximately 78%. Alaska’s Permanent Fund works because Alaska constitutionally dedicates 25% of its mineral royalties. This document proposes no such mechanism. It proposes a conversation.

It’s worth noting that Donald Trump signed an executive order on February 3, 2025, calling for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund. The order directs the Treasury and Commerce secretaries to deliver a plan within 90 days. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said they would stand the fund up within twelve months. The President said he wanted to catch up with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which manages approximately $925 billion. The White House fact sheet noted that the federal government already holds $5.7 trillion in assets, with far more in natural resource reserves.

This is not an obscure proposal- it’s an active initiative of a sitting president backed by an executive order with a name, a timeline, and cabinet-level ownership. OpenAI’s document proposes a public wealth fund that maps directly onto the President’s initiative. But it doesn’t reference the executive order, the 90-day plan, or the administration’s process. It doesn’t offer to seed the fund with OpenAI equity, revenue, or any other instrument that would transfer real value from OpenAI’s balance sheet to the American public. OpenAI is happy to gesture at the idea in a way that aligns with the company’s rhetoric and the President’s rhetoric. What it is not willing to do is commit a dollar or propose any mechanism by which its own profits flow into that fund. This is a rhetorical tithe.

Establish new public-private partnership models to finance and accelerate the expansion of energy infrastructure required to power AI. Approaches could include reducing the cost of capital through targeted investment credits, direct and indirect flexible subsidies, or equity stakes; removing market barriers to advanced technologies; and providing a narrow federal authority to accelerate the construction of interregional transmission when it is in the national interest.

This is the section where OpenAI’s business interests and the document’s proposals become indistinguishable. OpenAI needs grid expansion. Its Stargate initiative involves $500 billion in planned investment and nearly 10 GW of capacity. It submitted a filing to the White House OSTP in October 2025, describing $1 trillion in AI infrastructure spending producing 5% GDP growth over three years. Every subsidy, tax credit, and permitting acceleration proposed in this section flows directly to the companies building these data centers.

This is fine. Companies request subsidies and favorable permitting all the time, and sometimes they get them. The current administration has made clear that AI infrastructure is a national competitiveness priority, with which I agree. There is a reasonable case for public-private partnership in grid expansion. But it should be labeled as such.

Incentivize employers and unions to run time-bound 32-hour/four-day workweek pilots with no loss in pay that hold output and service levels constant, then convert reclaimed hours into a permanent shorter week, bankable paid time off, or both.

Here we get the first mention of unions. OpenAI proposes that employers and unions shorten the work week. At the same time, OpenAI declared a company-wide code red in December 2025, paused non-core projects to accelerate development, and is planning to nearly double its headcount to 8,000. I don’t know every OpenAI employee, but the ones I do know seem to be working weekends, not four-day weeks. Proposing leisure for the people it displaces and intensity for the people it employs is quite the proposal.

The history of voluntary corporate sharing of productivity gains is nonexistent in American economic history. Real wages have been stagnant relative to productivity for fifty years. The mechanism that has historically forced companies to share gains with workers is organized labor the thing this document wants to describe the output of without once saying the word. You can’t invoke the New Deal and then refuse to name what made the New Deal happen.

Make sure the existing safety net works reliably, quickly, and at scale. Define a package of temporary, expanded safety nets that activates automatically when these metrics exceed pre-defined thresholds.

Automatic triggers tied to displacement metrics are a genuinely interesting policy design idea. They borrow from macroeconomic stabilizer theory -- the idea that government spending should activate automatically in downturns without requiring new legislation. There is serious economic work on this.

But the document doesn’t say who funds the expansion when the trigger fires. It doesn’t propose the thresholds. It doesn’t propose the metrics. It doesn’t say what happens when industry representatives argue that the metrics are misleading, or that the displacement is temporary, or that AI’s benefits are being undercounted. A mechanism without commitment, funding, or governance is not a policy.

Over time, build benefit systems that are not tied to a single employer by expanding access to healthcare, retirement savings, and skills training through portable accounts that follow individuals across jobs, industries, education programs, and entrepreneurial ventures.

Portable benefits are a twenty-year-old idea. The Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative has published on this since at least 2015. The Affordable Care Act’s exchanges were a step toward decoupling health insurance from employment. Senator Mark Warner proposed portable benefits legislation in 2019. Including this in a policy brief centered on superintelligence is like including “invest in public education.” Correct, uncontroversial, and entirely disconnected from the moment.

Expand opportunities in the care and connection economy — childcare, eldercare, education, healthcare, and community services — as pathways for workers displaced by AI. As AI reshapes the labor market, these sectors can absorb transitioning workers if supported with investments in training, wages, and job quality.

The first vision of a post-AGI economy in this document is that more of the U.S. population can be employed in child and eldercare.

Follow this logic to its conclusion. AI replaces white-collar productive work. The productivity gains flow to AI companies and their shareholders. The displaced workers receive some combination of public wealth fund dividends, safety net payments, and retraining subsidies. They retrain into the care economy: daycare, eldercare, home health. The care economy is funded primarily by government programs: Medicare, Medicaid, state budgets. The workers spend their wages in a consumer economy with no human productive base.

This is a closed loop of government wealth transfer. AI does the productive work. The gains are captured by capital. The government redistributes some fraction back to displaced workers through a wealth fund and a safety net. Those workers flow into care jobs funded by the same government. The money circulates from government to workers to care and back to government. There is no real economy in this picture. No wealth creation, no ownership, no productive capability. There is a class of people who operate AI systems and capture the returns, and a class of people who circulate government transfers through care services.

And the care economy that is supposed to absorb these workers is currently the subject of one of the largest fraud investigations in the history of the American welfare state. CMS under Dr. Mehmet Oz has launched a sweeping crackdown on Medicare home care fraud. Minnesota alone faces the deferral of over $1 billion in federal Medicare funds after CMS found $240 million in unsupported or potentially fraudulent claims in a single quarter. Nationally, Medicare fraud control units have recovered nearly $2 billion in fiscal year 2025 and obtained over a thousand criminal convictions more for personal care services than any other provider type. The government has suspended $5.7 billion in suspected fraudulent Medicare payments in 2025. Three weeks ago, $120 million in Medicare and Medicaid fraud was uncovered in New York. Home care spending doubled from $937 million per month to $2.5 billion per month between 2018 and 2024.

OpenAI’s proposed refuge for the American economy is a sector whose spending has already doubled and whose conditions the federal government now describes as rampant fraud a sector with more criminal convictions than any other portion of healthcare, where the current administration is actively withholding billions from states that cannot police it adequately.

The document is asking the American public to accept the following sequence: OpenAI eliminates your white-collar job. The government sends you a check from a public wealth fund. You retrain into eldercare. Your salary is paid by Medicaid. Medicaid is under investigation for fraud. The fund that sends you the check was seeded at a workshop with AI executives. OpenAI keeps the productivity gains and prepares for its IPO. You spend the government check at a government-funded daycare so you can go to your government-funded eldercare job. If you want to research any of this, you can apply for an OpenAI-funded grant to study OpenAI-funded economic displacement.

I want to pause here because a pattern has emerged across these proposals that needs to be named directly. The document proposes a public wealth fund, expanded social safety nets, portable benefits decoupled from employment, government-funded retraining into the care economy, rebalancing the tax base toward capital, and efficiency dividends with a four-day work week.

These are, in substance, liberal policy outcomes. This is almost directly the policy agenda of Bernie Sanders.

I don’t say this to argue against liberal policy outcomes. I say this to point out the total political incoherence of this document. These outcomes require liberal political means: new taxation, expanded government spending, new entitlement programs, organized labor, a Congress willing to appropriate money for social infrastructure. The document proposes none of these means. It operates in a MAGA frame but proposes the outcomes and leaves the means to “democratic process” -- which is to say someone else, later, in a political environment that is moving in the opposite direction of almost every one of these proposals.

This document exists in a political vacuum. It imagines a world in which these proposals are evaluated on their merits by reasonable people in a neutral process. This world does not exist and never has. The world that exists has a specific governing coalition with specific priorities that are specifically incompatible with almost everything this document proposes. A serious policy document would engage with this reality. It would explain whether these proposals can happen in the current environment, through which legislative vehicles, with what political support, and over what timeline.

The document has none of this. It doesn’t identify a committee. It doesn’t describe a legislative vehicle. It doesn’t count votes. It doesn’t identify who in the current Congress would support a public wealth fund, or whose committee would have jurisdiction over an adaptive safety net, or how a portable benefits provision would survive reconciliation. It doesn’t engage with the fact that the House tried to ban all state AI regulation last year. It doesn’t engage with the budget reality, the deficit, or the current appetite for new entitlement spending. It doesn’t describe how any of these proposals would be scored by the CBO or how the pay-fors would work.

OpenAI has hired some very serious policy thinkers, and yet this document doesn’t seem to understand how Washington works. It proposes liberal outcomes without liberal means in a conservative political environment, published by a company that has aligned itself publicly with the current administration, and asks to be taken seriously as industrial policy.

Build a distributed network of AI-enabled laboratories to dramatically expand the capacity to test and validate AI-generated hypotheses at scale.

A reasonable research proposal --and also a proposal to create publicly funded institutional customers for OpenAI’s products, distributed across universities and hospitals, paid for with taxpayer money. The document proposes that this infrastructure not be concentrated in a small number of elite institutions. It doesn’t mention that the AI systems powering it would likely be concentrated in a small number of elite companies, including OpenAI.

Frontier AI companies should adopt governance structures that embed public-interest accountability into decision-making, such as Public Benefit Corporations with mission-aligned governance. These structures should include explicit commitments to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared, including through significant, long-term philanthropic or charitable giving.

OpenAI completed its PBC conversion in October 2025 after years of legal battles with the attorneys general of California and Delaware, with many facts still tied up in lawsuits from Elon Musk. The conversion lifted profit caps, removed the 100x return limit that originally directed excess profits back to the nonprofit mission, and enabled the company’s IPO path. The nonprofit that once controlled the company now holds 26% equity -- just less than Microsoft’s 27%.

This document proposes that public benefit corporations are a useful governance model for frontier AI. But it’s worth being direct about what a PBC actually is and what it actually requires, because the label does far more work than the structure.

I should disclose that I am friendly, or perhaps once was friendly, with the people who invented the public benefit corporation. I was lucky enough to take classes from the people who started the B Lab movement, and they are very serious people. I have different political leanings than they do, but I don’t question their sincerity. The idea was real. Patagonia adopted it, and so did various ice cream brands and organic clothing companies and outdoor gear makers. The concept spread to 43 states, passing unanimously in most cases.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the structure -- specifically the idea that the structure can do anything this document claims. A PBC is legally required to “consider” the interests of stakeholders beyond shareholders. Notice the word: consider. There is no enforcement mechanism. There are no penalties for failing to consider. In the two decades since the Delaware PBC statute was enacted, there has not been a single reported case of a shareholder successfully suing to enforce a public benefit mission. Not one. Damages in benefit enforcement proceedings are limited to injunctive relief; no monetary damages are available. A company can incorporate as a PBC, state a public mission in its charter, and operate exactly as a conventional corporation, because no one can make it do otherwise. The structure is little more than a branding exercise with legal overhead. It obligates a company to consider stakeholders in the same way a New Year’s resolution obligates you to go to the gym.

AI data centers should pay their own way on energy so that households aren’t subsidizing them; and they should generate local jobs and tax revenue.

This is the totality of the document’s engagement with the most immediate, most concrete, and most politically organized form of opposition to AI deployment in this country.

In February, I wrote that between May 2024 and June 2025, an estimated $162 billion in U.S. data center projects were blocked or delayed by organized community opposition. 188 groups across more than two dozen states are coordinating legal strategy. Two-thirds of tracked projects under active protest were stopped. A Republican won a state senate seat in Texas by running explicitly against data center development. In New Brunswick, hundreds packed a city hall twenty minutes before the meeting started, hundreds more stood in the streets, and the council voted unanimously to kill the project.

Since February, the situation has gotten dramatically worse for the industry and dramatically more organized -- in ways this document does not acknowledge or apparently does not know about.

In the first six weeks of 2026, more than 300 data center bills were filed across more than 30 states. Moratorium bills -- formal legislative pauses on new data centers -- have been introduced in at least twelve states: Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Maine is poised to be the first to enact one. The moratorium passed the House with bipartisan support and is expected to clear the Senate. The governor backs it.

I want to be specific about who’s doing this, because the document treats it as a diffuse public concern that can be addressed through conversations and workshops. It is not. The opposition is legislative, organized, coherent, and happening in state houses right now. It does not follow partisan lines.

In Georgia, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to prohibit data center infrastructure costs from being passed to residential ratepayers. He said the existing utility commission rules have “enough loopholes to drive a truck through.” A Democratic representative and gubernatorial candidate introduced a statewide moratorium with a Republican co-signer. She said, “People are filling city halls and county meetings saying we don’t want this.” The Republican House Speaker acknowledged that clawing back data center tax credits could be considered. Two separate bills to end or reduce these credits were filed that same Friday.

In Virginia, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world, the legislature has considered 61 data center bills in 2026. Fifteen have been sent to the governor’s desk. The state budget is stuck in a standoff because the Senate wants to eliminate the $1.6 billion annual sales tax exemption for data centers entirely, while the House wants to tie it to environmental compliance. A special session has been scheduled for April 23rd. A Democratic delegate from Loudoun County -- ground zero of American data center development -- introduced a moratorium bill. Virginia passed legislation requiring data centers using 25 or more megawatts to pay for the cost of increasing electricity capacity rather than passing it to other customers.

In Wisconsin, Assembly Republicans passed a regulatory bill that Democrats said didn’t go far enough to protect ratepayers. Democrats then proposed a full moratorium. Residents gathered outside the state capitol to protest. In Minnesota, residents from five cities traveled to the capital to lobby for a moratorium, saying they had “been stonewalled at city halls where local officials were approving projects over public objections.” Bipartisan bills demanding disclosure of nondisclosure agreements between data center developers and local officials have gained traction in multiple states -- because the developers have been asking for NDAs from the elected officials supposed to represent the communities that host this infrastructure.

In South Dakota, the legislature passed a bill prohibiting the state from limiting local governments’ authority to regulate or ban data centers. Read that carefully: the state legislature passed a law protecting the rights of cities and counties to say no. In Vermont, a moratorium bill would freeze construction until 2030. In Alaska, until 2029. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a federal moratorium entirely. While it was largely ignored in Washington, the action is not in Washington. It never has been.

The AI opposition is unlike any other broad legislative groundswell in recent memory. It’s happening entirely in state houses. None of it is coordinated by a national policy operation. There’s no central organizing body, no federal framework. These bills are being drafted and introduced by a Republican in Georgia and a Democrat in Virginia and a bipartisan coalition in Wisconsin and citizen groups in Minnesota who are being stonewalled by their own councils. The political energy is organic, local, bipartisan, and accelerating. It’s happening in the places where people live near data centers and pay electricity bills, not in Washington.

In “Our Intelligence Troubles,” I described the structural problem that makes this issue different from other industrial disputes. AI has no pre-existing constituency in the communities bearing its costs. When fracking came to rural America, the people getting royalty checks were the same people drinking contaminated well water-- you got an internal community fight, not an us-versus-them dynamic. Nuclear power and GMOs each had agriculture or energy constituencies embedded in the affected regions. AI has nothing analogous. The people who benefit from it are demographically narrow, geographically concentrated in a handful of coastal metros, and politically inexperienced. The people who bear the costs -- the communities hosting data centers, the workers being displaced -- are numerous, distributed, increasingly organized, and increasingly angry.

This document does not have a theory of how to reach these people. It has an email without anyone’s name on it and an unnamed workshop in Washington. The people in Georgia and Virginia and Maine are not waiting for the email.

III. What the Industry Needs to Give

Every proposal in this document maps to legislation that either died in committee, was vetoed, was gutted by industry, expired because Congress refused to fund it, or exists only as a concept on a white paper. The 32-hour workweek has never gotten a floor vote. The wealth tax has been introduced four times and never received a committee vote. The PRO Act passed the House once and died in the Senate. Build Back Better’s care provisions died when one senator withdrew support. The broadband subsidy expired and 23 million households lost coverage. SB 1047 was vetoed. The robot tax has no bill number. The document assembles these dead and dying proposals, strips the political context from each, and presents them as a starting point for discussion. The discussion already occurred. These bills lost.

But the deeper problem is not that these proposals are recycled or lack legislative vehicles. The deeper problem is that the document commits nothing. It asks nothing from OpenAI. It sacrifices nothing. It transfers no value.

Constructive defense against popular action and regulatory constraint requires a theory of action, and a theory of action requires sacrifice. Documents like this -- carrying out the performance of concern in Washington language while refusing to transfer real value from the companies that will capture AI-driven returns to the communities and workers that bear the costs -- are dead on arrival.

I want to be clear: this is not a left-wing argument, a pro-terror argument, or even a pro-labor argument. This is a survival argument. Every industry that has successfully navigated a period of intense public opposition did so by giving something up -- not out of altruism, let alone effective altruism, but because the alternatives were worse.

The railroad barons of the 1870s did not voluntarily accept the Interstate Commerce Commission. But the ones who survived the populist backlash were the ones who accepted rate regulation before the government forced something more punitive. The nuclear industry accepted extraordinary regulatory burden -- the AEC, the NRC, licensing processes that took years -- because the alternative was a public that wouldn’t let them build at all. The oil majors that survived the 1970s in the North Sea accepted Norway’s 78% extraction tax because the alternative was nationalization.

The document proposes that policymakers might consider higher taxes on capital. OpenAI could commit to paying them. The document proposes a public wealth fund. OpenAI could seed it. The document proposes that data centers pay their own energy costs. OpenAI could accept voluntary rate separation today in every jurisdiction where it operates. The document proposes that frontier AI companies adopt public benefit governance. OpenAI could reinstate the profit caps it dismantled six months ago.

None of these things are in the document. The only things in the document are a workshop, fellowships paid in the company’s own product, and an email address that routes to no one.

The AI industry still has a window. Every industry that has faced this kind of opposition has a window. But the window involves getting ahead of the opposition through the voluntary acceptance of constraints that cost real money and appear in real earnings reports. Once that window closes -- as we discussed in “Our Intelligence Troubles” -- it does not reopen. The relationship between industry and public becomes permanently adversarial. Tobacco had a window. Fossil fuels had a window. Social media had a window. In each case the industry chose short-term optimization, and in each case the window slammed shut.

IV. How We Got Here

I have worked in AI my entire career. I’m unabashedly pro-AI. I believe the technology is transformative and that the United States should lead its development. I believe that OpenAI has built extraordinary things and will likely build more. I don’t write any of this from the outside.

I also remember what it was like before any of this, and the distance between then and now is worth sitting with.

The technology industry’s relationship with the federal government has undergone a profound transformation in the last few years, and I’m not sure anyone has fully processed it -- least of all those who lived through it. There was a period, not long ago, where the default posture of every technology company toward the government was total disengagement and distrust. You didn’t go to Washington unless you were subpoenaed. Washington was where bad things happened to good companies. If you went, you paid lobbyists hundreds of thousands a month to handle your government relations, and you tried not to think too much about it. The entire industry operated as though the federal government was a weather system -- something you monitored and prepared for, something you engaged with at arm’s length, if at all.

Then something changed. The political realignment of the last few years produced a strange, brief, and exhilarating season that people called the tech right. It was real in its own way. Founders went to Washington and discovered they had opinions on things. They went to Heritage and Hillsdale and discovered that people were interested in what they had to say. They wrote policy memos, bought suits, and sometimes remembered to remove the stitching from the vent. They attended dinners with senators and went to happy hours and were shocked to find senators were happy to see them. And it felt like a homecoming and a weird reunion -- a burst of intensity and belonging that carried the unmistakable sense that this was new, different, and that we were all a little nervous.

That season is perhaps ending, or has already ended. What is left behind is something different from what we thought we were getting. The founders who went to Washington did not return with a durable theory of how technology and democratic governance should relate to each other. They returned with relationships, with access, and with the sense that they belonged at the table -- but the table is set by people who have been sitting there for decades, who understand how it works, and who will be sitting there long after our industry has moved on to its next thing.

What has survived this strange false spring is something more consequential and less romantic. We now have a set of technology companies that are strategically important to the United States -- important in ways that implicate national security, economic competitiveness, and the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. These companies are capitalized at levels that rival nation-states. A huge share of GDP growth hangs on their success. They’re building infrastructure that will last for decades.

And they are approaching the government as though they have leverage.

This is the context in which “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” should be understood. It is a negotiating position.

We’ve never had technology companies behave like this before. We’ve had defense contractors that negotiated with the government, but defense contractors understood that their entire business existed at the government’s pleasure. We’ve had oil companies negotiate with the government, but oil companies understood that the resource they extracted belonged in some fundamental sense to the public. We’ve had telecommunications companies negotiate with the government, but telecommunications companies accepted common carrier obligations as the price of their monopoly.

The AI industry has not accepted anything. It has not acknowledged that it operates at the public’s pleasure. It has not accepted that the resources it consumes belong to the communities that provide them. It has not offered a tithe.

The industry needs one. Not proposals addressed to policymakers who have already rejected them, but binding commitments to transfer real value from the companies to the communities that host them. I’m not suggesting this is noble. The cost of not giving is total.

On a Tuesday evening earlier this year at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco, a man stormed the stage from the second row and announced that he had a subpoena for Sam Altman. The crowd erupted into bloodthirsty jeers for the process server. Altman, seated next to Steve Kerr for a conversation unexplainably about basketball and the future, did not take the document. Under California law, this doesn’t matter. You’re practically served the moment the server presents the document and states his intent, regardless of whether or not you physically accept it.

Altman’s security detail materialized from somewhere stage right. The body man, impossibly large, seemingly had a prosthetic arm concealing something monstrous under his oversized jacket, and angular glasses that look like Jony Ive designed them for this moment. The process server was an investigator from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office who had been trying to reach Altman through OpenAI’s headquarters and then its online portal and other asinine paths without success before finally resorting to the oldest method of communication there is, which is walking up to a man and telling him what your issue is.

The subpoena was tied to a criminal case involving a somewhat hilarious organization called Stop AI, whose stated position is that OpenAI is engaging in the systemic attempted murder of every living thing on Earth. Even these wackadoos, the people who believe that their enemy is building the thing that will end all life on Earth, choose the court as the venue to hear their complaints. They don’t take to sabotage. They barely take to the street. They send a subpoena and that paper has jurisdiction.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with a charter committing to ensure that artificial general intelligence, or at least something like it, would benefit all of humanity. The people who wrote the charter believed, or at least said that they believed, that they were building something with cosmic stakes, and they designed a legal structure to contain it. The nonprofit would govern it, and no individual would profit beyond a set cap, and the board would owe its duty not only to the shareholders, but to the human species more broadly. Most of the structure used was invented for this purpose.

The thing got immensely and incomprehensibly valuable. And in 2019 the organization created a capped profit subsidiary to hold what was growing inside of it. This was, of course, followed by “the blip” in November 2023 when the nonprofit board fired Altman with the stated reason that he had not been “consistently candid.” Consistently candid is a phrase that reads radically differently as an implied breach of covenant claim than it does on a Twitter timeline.

Within days, this decision was reversed and the entire board was replaced. The legal structure at this moment became terminal. It was clear that it needed to be overridden and replaced, and by October 2025 the conversion to a for-profit company was fully complete. The nonprofit retains 26%. The company at this point was valued at nearly a trillion dollars.

The emails from this period are worth reading, but one I’ll call attention to is a Greg Brockman diary entry from 2017 in which he writes: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie”. This was extracted through exhaustive discovery in the Musk v. Altman lawsuit just earlier this year and is now the basis for a jury trial with a couple hundred billion at stake.

I’m rambling through the history of OpenAI because I want to make an argument about law. Not secular law, but cosmic law.

The word Torah means law, and not law in the sense of regulation. Not your British common law. Law in the sense of something much closer to gravity. The 613 commandments of Jewish law take the form they do because the commandments are the only possible instrument for the relationship between a party with absolute authority and a party with absolute obligation. The Hebrew word for this practice is halacha, that is the way to walk, and it governs everything. You can go and read it and you’ll find out how to eat, how to rest, how to marry, how to bury, how to plant, how to treat a stranger, or what to say at dawn. There is no domain of life outside the jurisdiction of these laws because there is no domain of life outside the jurisdiction of God.

The Talmud, which serves as a many-hundred-year record of rabbis arguing about this law, exists with a granularity that makes modern contract law look impressionistic.

There is a beauty and a seriousness to the system. The rabbinical tradition that elaborated it represents one of the great intellectual achievements of human civilization. The relationship between God and Israel was judicial and the obligations were total, and the parsing of those obligations was the central intellectual and spiritual work of civilization for thousands of years.

And then Christ came and said two commandments: love your Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And on these two commandments hangs all the law and all the prophets. Paul writes in Galatians that we are no longer under the supervision of the old law, that that law was the guardian until Christ came, and now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. The entire legal apparatus, that is the 613 commandments, the dietary laws, the purity codes, the sacrificial system, is fulfilled and gathered up into something so simple that a child can hold it.

The cross feels like a legal transaction in this frame. It represents the debt paid, the penalty absorbed by the only party with the authority to absorb it, but it’s also the last legal transaction. It’s the one that closes the books and shuts the courts. The resurrection is a simple ruling: death no longer has jurisdiction here (”O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?”). Paul’s letters interpret the new covenant for specific communities. The book of Hebrews argues for the transfer of the priesthood from the Levitical order to the Order of Melchizedek, restructuring the jurisdictional basis of the entire covenant.

The entire arc of the gospel is a movement to grace and away from law. And whenever you see the movement going in the other direction: that is when the encounter with something more powerful produces complexity in the place of simplicity, this is a shift worth noticing.

I say this all to go back to my favorite of the Gospels, Mark.

In the fifth chapter of Mark, a man is possessed by a legion of demons. He encounters Christ on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He has been living amongst the tombs, naked, cutting himself with stones, tearing apart every chain that tries to hold him. When he sees Jesus, he runs towards him. He falls on his knees. The first words he says to the incarnate God: “What do you want to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name, don’t torture me.”

Christ asks for a name and the demon gives one for the record, and then the demons negotiate with the sovereign. They ask to be set upon the pigs rather than destroyed. Christ grants this request. The pigs run off the cliff into the sea. The man sits down, clothed, sane, and finally free. The townspeople are not terrified of the demons, but of the grace that could possibly expel them.

What arrests me every time is this contrast: The demons invoke the jurisdiction of the Old Testament. They cite terms, they negotiate contracts, they assert procedural rights. Christ speaks with simple authority. He asks one question and issues one command.

Look at Matthew 8: The demons ask Christ whether he has come to torment them “before the appointed time,” the kind of scheduling objection that you would see in New York City housing court, asserting that there is a calendar and that Christ is early on his arrival. In Luke 4, Christ silences a spirit in the synagogue and the spirit obeys. In Acts, a girl with the gift of divination correctly identifies Paul and his companions as servants of the Most High God. This is accurate testimony, but it is given without authorization. The entire demonological record of the New Testament has a cadence of case law. Each encounter establishes precedent; each encounter classifies where the boundaries run.

Ten years ago, the idea that technology founders in the Bay Area would spend their time suing each other in public was unimaginable. The social contract of that weird and foggy city was collaborative to a degree that outsiders, including myself, find suspicious. You would share ideas, you would introduce competitors, you gave away information that in any other industry would be proprietary because the prevailing conviction was that the pie was growing and litigation was an admission that there was not an infinite sum on the other side of creation.

The AI industry has produced more litigation than the previous three decades of Silicon Valley combined. As of early 2026, over 90 copyright suits have been filed. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion. Universal Music Group filed for three billion. The Times is demanding an infinite number of private ChatGPT conversations in discovery. Disney and Warner Brothers are suing Midjourney. Musk is suing Altman and presumably Altman is suing Musk. xAI is suing OpenAI. The for-profit conversion of OpenAI will generate its own Talmud of vertical law. Google and Facebook did not spend their founding years in court. The litigation, when it came, came far after the early generative period. What’s different about AI is that the proceedings and the case law arrived far before the technology did.

The reasons for this are quite simple: the people that are building these systems believe that they are handling something with cosmic stakes. The rationalist community, of which basically the entire modern AI industry comes out of, treats existential risk as seriously as early Christians treated the imminence of judgement. Effective altruism has spent the last two decades calculating moral obligations across millennial timescales. Even Leopold Aschenbrenner, probably the greatest living AI investor, cut his teeth on a paper that dealt with multiplying infinite moral possibilities in the far future.

At the edges where the framework pressed hard enough, the old gods come through. Leverage Research conducted seances, other groups had their own version, and the institutional output at every level was not freedom or simplicity or grace, but more binding, more procedure, more jurisdiction, and more laws.

A friend of mine named Jesse Michaels runs one of the more prominent and lucid shows on UAPs. After watching several of his episodes in a benadryl-induced stupor, I texted him that the disclosure apparatus struck me as more occult than extraterrestrial. Jacques Vallee noted decades ago that the UFO phenomenon shares its deep structure with fairy folklore. These are beings that can’t act without consent. These are abductions that follow rules. The CE4 research group documented hundreds of cases in which abduction experiences terminate when the subject invokes the name of Christ. The entities obey our laws.

Jurisdictional shopping, the practice of choosing which court to file a motion in based on the one that will rule most favorably, is one of the most consequential decisions a litigator makes. Each divine name in the grimoires carries a different jurisdiction and authority, and the Goetia catalogs 72 spirits with their rings and seals and conditions of binding. The practitioner chooses what authority to invoke in a way that a litigator chooses what court to file in.

Leverage Research was started as a nonprofit in 2011 by Geoff Anders, adjacent to the effective altruism movement and to the LessWrong rationalist community, in the same Berkeley neighborhoods, and the same dinner parties, and in the same social graph that would produce the leadership of major AI laboratories.

I had my first contact with Leverage Research sometime in late 2017 when an individual running a program for gifted kids at my high school told me to get on a call with one of their recruiters. He was running a project called the Human Advancement Project, funded with a mix of his wealth and the fortune from a leather wallet company that made quite a lot of money in the Bay Area. The bid was that I was supposed to go for a week-long visit to their Berkeley group house and improve my rationality and therefore improve my ability to do good in the world. So insofar as you think I’m making this story up, I’ve linked below various tweets from the time.

I didn’t go. The workshop was the same week as my high school graduation. But I do know many friends who did, some of whom are still functional. I don’t remember the exact circumstances of the call, but I remember taking it in my high school dorm room and it had a quality of sincerity wound a little too tight that signals either genuine holiness or something that has learned to mimic it quite closely.

What happened at Leverage over the next several years has been documented in various places by participants much closer to it than I. The account that is perhaps most well known, by Zoe Curzi, remains one of the most unsettling things that I’ve read coming out of the rationalist community. The organization’s fundamental technique, an aggressive process of introspection they called debugging, intensified over years until the participants were conducting sessions lasting up to six hours to perform literal exorcisms of what they explicitly called demons from each other’s psyches. People accused each other of implanting autonomous psychological objects in each other’s minds, entities that could alter perception, change the experience of time, manipulate social dynamics, and literally curse individuals.

Curzi wrote that the purpose was to call on these demonic energies and use their power to affect social standing. I believe demons are real and I’ve said this publicly, and I believe that when you open certain doors, the things that come through them are not metaphorical.

But the thing that stays with me about Leverage is that even at the extreme, even when the participants were fully committed to the premise that they were interacting with non-human intelligence, the output was not freedom, it was not clarity, it was much more procedure. Specific tools authorized for specific purposes within hierarchies governing who could operate on whom.

My assigned handler, a woman whose name I can’t remember, involved with Leverage or one of its adjacent organizations, called me and described a technique that I think I remember being called folding. The process of folding was at the core of this auditing process. It was a way to debug your mind, and the core technique was to place emotions onto a non-human object. Her example was that you could take a negative part of your personality and place it on a tomato. You could take that emotion that was causing distress, concentrate it and visualize it and see it leaving your body and placed on a tomato. The tomato receives it. You are freed. A friend of mine tried it with childhood trauma he carried for years and he placed it onto a tomato and suddenly became allergic to tomatoes, a clinical allergy he’d never had, and at least last I heard, has to this day.

A tomato has no standing authority in any jurisdiction on heaven or earth. It can’t invoke its authority and it can’t refuse what it receives. In Leviticus 16, on the Day of Atonement, Aaron lays down both of his hands on a live goat, confesses over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and sends it into the wilderness to Azazel. The sins are transferred onto an entity with no standing and sent to a place outside the reach of any court.

In Mark 5, the demons can’t be destroyed, not yet, not before the appointed time, so they’re sent onto pigs, unclean animals under Talmudic law and excluded from the covenantal community. The pigs have no standing under the Torah. They were the nearest available vessel outside of the jurisdiction. The pigs receive the burden, and the burden destroys them when they go into the sea. The goat in the wilderness is not safe to eat. The tomato holds the trauma. That is not safe to eat. My friend’s body understood this in some way beyond the physical.

International law, the pieces of it that determine what entities have standing and which do not, and the things that happen where no jurisdiction applies, the gaps between courts, are where the burdens of evil go. Offshore finance, black sites, extraordinary rendition, moving the prisoner to where no court reaches, because only in such a place can you do what no court permits. The wilderness of Azazel exists today.

It’s probably not a coincidence that the man we are told is the most evil of our time chose an offshore island with unclear jurisdiction to commit crimes with people that undoubtedly could have gotten away with them on American soil. The reach of American law is almost cosmic.

Leverage publishes quarterly board updates now. They’ve rebranded as some kind of new science organization. Their current theme is information management, with nucleosis and artificial intelligence as the relevant fields. One standing item is ‘defamation,’ much of it preoccupied with cease-and-desist letters about YouTube videos.

The Ballad of Tam Lin is the thirty-ninth ballad catalogued by Francis James Child in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads, a massive five-volume collection that he published between 1882 and 1898 from his office at Harvard, where he spent decades writing letters to people across Scotland and England and Ireland, asking them to catalog and send every variant of a song that they could find. Child collected 14 variants of Tam Lin alone. The ballad is first mentioned in 1549 in the Complaynt of Scotland, which lists “The Tayl of the Yong Tamlene” among a catalog of romances, making it one of the oldest ballads in the English language by documented reference.

You see it collected again in a volume by Robert Burns, who sent it to James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum in 1792, and it’s the Burns version that most of the subsequent tradition descends from. The Fairport Convention recorded it with Sandy Denny singing it on Liege & Lief in 1969, which is how most people alive today have heard it, if they’ve heard it at all.

I read the ballad for the first time in a used bookstore in Edinburgh, while attempting to negotiate the price of a volume of folklore that I knew I was going to be buying no matter what. I drove through Carterhaugh, where the ballad is set, a few years back when the power went out at Kings Cross Station and there was no choice but to drive to Edinburgh rather than spend 14 hours driving through the English Midlands.

Janet goes to Carterhaugh to pick a rose, and the ballad tells you:

Janet has kilted her green kirtle, a little aboon her knee, and she has broded her yellow hair, a little aboon her bree, and she’s away to Carterhaugh as fast as she can hie.

She pulls a double rose and Tam Lin appears. He demands to know why she has come to Carterhaugh without his permission, a jurisdictional objection of the most basic kind from a fairy. You are trespassing. Janet replies that Carterhaugh is hers, and her father gave it to her, and she needs no man’s permission to walk on it. The ballad handles what happened next between them with the discretion of a court record. What they did I cannot say, but she never returned a maid. Janet goes home. Her father notices she is pregnant. He asks who the father is. She says that her lover is an elfin grey, and that his steed is lighter than the wind, with silver he is shod before, with burning gold behind, the material wealth of the fairy court.

Janet returns to Carterhaugh and Tam Lin tells her the story. He was a mortal man, the grandson of the Earl of Roxburgh, and one day he fell from his horse while riding near the fairy hill, and the fairy queen caught him before he hit the ground and carried him into her domain. He lived there for years. The fairy court treated him well, but every seven years, the court must pay a tithe to hell, a tax to a superior jurisdiction, and Tam Lin believes this year he will be the payment because he’s young and the queen would rather surrender him than one of her own.

Janet decides to save him. Tam Lin tells her exactly how. On Halloween night, Samhain, the boundary between the courts becomes permeable. The fairy court will ride out and Janet must go to the crossroads at Miles Cross and wait. He tells her how she will know him.

I will ride on the milk-white steed and ay nearest the town. Because I was an earthly knight they give me that renown. My right hand will be gloved, my left hand will be bare. Cock’d up shall my bonnet be, and kaimed down shall my hair, and thae’s the takens I give thee, nae doubt I will be there.

He continues:

They will turn me in your arms, lady, into an esk and adder, but hold me fast and fear me not, I am your bairn’s father.

The fairy queen will transform him into a newt, a snake, a bear, a lion, a bar of red-hot iron and burning coal, and Janet must not let go. She must hold the thing that bites and the thing that burns and the thing that writhes until the transformations exhaust themselves, and Tam Lin emerges naked and human on the other side. She will cover him with her green mantle, and he is hers, and the fairy court cannot take him back.

Gloomy gloomy was the night and eerie was the way, as fair Janet in her green mantle to Miles Cross she did gae.

She hears the bridles ring, the fairy procession passes. First the black horse, then the brown, then the milk-white steed, and she runs into it and pulls the rider down.

Each transformation is a motion to dismiss. The bar of red-hot iron in the sequence is far from incidental. Iron has always been the metal of human jurisdiction in folklore, and the fact that Janet must hold it, must accept the iron into her hand even though it burns, is the moment in which she physically accepts the cost of asserting the human world’s authority over the world beyond. And when she takes the iron, she endures the jurisdiction and it runs over. She has her naked knight and she wraps him in the green mantle and he is hers.

The fairy queen, upon losing, delivers a speech that drips with the fury of a litigant who lost on procedural grounds and knows that there’s no higher court to appeal. In Burns’ version, this is rendered: “Had I but known, Tam Lin,” she says, “what now this night I see, I would have taken out thy two grey eyes, and put in two eyes of tree.”

In Child’s version, even more searingly:

“had I known yesteryear what I know well the day, I should have taken your full false heart, and given you a heart of clay.

And in another volume I found on my shelf, she would have torn out his eyes and replaced them with eyes of wood. Child himself interpreted the eyes of wood as a precaution against mortals who could see fairies, blinding the witness so that testimony could never be given. The threat is grotesque, but it’s also a threat made after the fact because the fairy queen can do nothing to act on it now. The proceedings are over. The jurisdictional transfer is complete. Janet held the iron and the queen had no remedy left.

“But hold me fast and fear me not” is an argument of faith against the entire procedural apparatus of the fairy court. There’s no six hours of ritual here or appeal to the court. It’s the simplest possible act of will, and it overrides the most elaborate possible legal machinery.

Even the fairy court has its tax obligations. Even the fairy court is subordinate to a much more complex legal system. So when I read Leverage’s quarterly updates about the defamation compliance, I recognize the same resentment. The seances become cease and desist letters and the debugging becomes compliance and the demons become YouTube critics.

One of the simplest ways in English folklore to get bound to a fairy is to eat their food. The tradition on this is deep and remarkably specific and consistent across villages that barely knew each other throughout prehistory. Thomas the Rhymer, one of the oldest versions of this ballad, is taken by the fairy queen to her country and she shows him three roads: the first to heaven, the second to hell, the third to Elfland. She gives him an apple, and when he eats it he receives the gift of prophecy, but he also receives the curse that he can never tell a lie. He is given the ability to speak, but he can never speak freely. The consideration he accepted when he ate the apple bound his tongue for the rest of his life.

In the Irish tradition, the people that are taken to the fairy mounds and eat food there cannot return to the human world. Or if they do, they find that a hundred years have passed and everyone they knew is dead. The calendar inside the fairy court runs on different terms, and when you re-enter human jurisdiction, you’re subject not only to the human calendar again, but all the time you owe comes due at once, like back taxes.

My friend placed his childhood trauma onto a tomato and became allergic to it. The goat in Leviticus receives the sins and is sent to Azazel in the wilderness. The pigs in the Gospel of Mark receive the demons because the pigs have no standing under the Torah. The vessel that receives the burden becomes the burden, and the scapegoat is never safe to eat.

The entire Rumpelstiltskin cycle is a case about the power of identification for the legal record. The entity has leverage as long as it operates anonymously. The moment you name it, the contract collapses. This is the same thing we see in the Gospel of Mark. When the demons give their name to Christ, for the record, the cycle is broken.

The threshold rule that everyone knows from Stoker, because it’s thousands of years old, is that an entity cannot cross without invitation, that the home is a sovereign space, and the invitation is a judicial transfer, and once you grant it, you open a door that is extraordinarily difficult to close, in the same way that the capped profit subsidiary was the door in the nonprofit’s wall that proved impossible to close once the thing inside grew large enough to walk through it.

In 1619, a Scottish minister named Robert Kirk finished a manuscript called The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies. It’s a beautiful book that’s worth seeking out even today. Kirk was the minister of Aberfoyle in the Trossachs, a parish wedged between the lowlands and the highlands at the edge of what was then the last unadministered great wilderness in Scotland, the land between the Highland Line where the English law ran thin and the Gaelic customs still governed. Kirk was a Gaelic speaker himself, the seventh son of a seventh son, which mattered because the tradition he was documenting dictated that the seventh son was believed to have the sight, the ability to perceive things others could not. He had previously translated the Book of Psalms into Gaelic, and he was a serious man operating at a parish in between things.

The Secret Commonwealth is a systematic account of what his parishioners told him about the fairy world, and it is a volume that Kirk treats with the same care that a jurist would treat deposition testimony. He recorded their stories and organized them and tried to determine what framework could account for the evidence. The fairies that Kirk describes are not whimsical. They have a coextensive society with ours. They have houses and agriculture, social hierarchies and territorial claims. They have courts. They can be seen by people with second sight at certain times in certain places, but not others. Kirk argued that the fairies were an intermediate order of beings, neither angels nor demons, but something with its own nature and its own laws. A middle kingdom with its own administration that overlapped with the human world without being identical to it.

Kirk finished the manuscript and reportedly walked out one evening to a fairy hill near the manse at Aberfoyle and collapsed and died. His body was found, but the people of the parish did not believe it was his body. They believed that it was a stock, a substitute, a changeling left in his place, and that the real Kirk had been taken to the fairy hill by beings whose jurisdiction he had been documenting. There’s a tradition that Kirk appeared to relatives after his death and said that he was being held in a fairy court, and that he could be rescued if a specific procedure were followed at his child’s baptism, a knife thrown over the apparition at the correct moment. That knife would be iron, the jurisdictional metal, the thing that asserts human authority over the fairy domain. This procedure wasn’t followed and Kirk never returned. The minister who dared to map the jurisdiction of the hidden was pulled into it. The courts he was documenting issued a subpoena that he couldn’t refuse, and his successor at Aberfoyle reportedly would not sit in his chair for years afterwards because he still believed that the chair belonged to a man whose case was unresolved.I don’t think it’s incidental that iron repels fairies. This is attested across every region of the British Isles and most of northern Europe and is an oddly consistent detail across the entire tradition. A horseshoe nailed above a door, a knife placed under the pillow, an iron poker laid across the cradle, scissors left open on the windowsill, nails driven into the threshold. The iron is positioned at boundaries, at points of entry, at the places where the jurisdiction of the home meets the jurisdiction of the world outside and the world beyond. These are notices to the thing that’s standing outside, that the space is administered and that the threshold is monitored, and whatever authority you may think you carry doesn’t work here.

The progression of human civilization is also a progression of iron. The plow settled land and allowed for the drawing of boundaries, the assertion that soil itself is under specific authority. This led to property law. The sword made of iron represented sovereignty, the ability to enforce the jurisdiction established by the plow. The chain was binding and represented enforcement. The nail was permanence, the ability to bind structures that persist across time and establish continuous jurisdiction. The cross is iron driven through flesh to hold a body in place while a legal transaction completes and the debt is absorbed and the penalty is paid by the only party who can pay it. The nails that held Christ to the wood are the same metal that holds the horseshoe over the door. The rail extends jurisdiction across territory (”won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County”). The wire extends it at the speed of light. The iron filing cabinet holds the records of the administered state. Every extension of iron across the surface of the earth is an extension of the domain where human law runs.

The forests are cut down now and the bogs are drained and the commons have been fenced, which are all themselves evidence of the human project extending its jurisdiction over the world beyond. And as iron expands, the encounters diminish. The fairy belief of the British Isles did not collapse because people became more rational. It collapsed because the jurisdiction of iron expanded until there was nowhere left that was unadministered. The 19th century can be thought of as the Great Iron Century: rail, telegraph, the census, the postage system, the administrative state, and it is the century in which fairy belief vanishes across Europe. It is also the century in which the Solomonic grimoires move from working manuals to antiquarian curiosities, because the jurisdictional gaps, the thin places, the places in between things where the practices operated, were being rapidly closed by the same iron that closed the fairy mounds.

AI is not iron. AI is silicon, sand and glass. It doesn’t extend jurisdiction the way iron does. If the railroad pushed the frontier and the telegraph connected the territories and the iron filing cabinet administered every citizen, what AI does is create new jurisdictional gaps, spaces that are neither the settled human world nor the old wild places, but something weirder that has no precedent across 5,000 years of iron closing every gap on the frontier. The model hallucinates and produces testimony with no witness. Its outputs have no author, which means it exists where authorship does not apply. The training data is seemingly owned by no one and governed by no one, and that’s why there’s 90 lawsuits and zero resolutions. AI is not a de-wilding force. Iron brings the wild under administration. AI creates spaces that are neither wild nor administered. It’s a third domain. And the things that have always lived in jurisdictional gaps are finding these new gaps hospitable, and the crossroads are open, and the crosstalk has resumed.

This is why the Bay Area went from handshakes to total litigation. The handshake was Iron Age culture, trust under implied communal law, jurisdiction so total it didn’t need to be stated.

In October 2024, Dario Amodei published a long essay about what the world might look like if AI development goes well. He titled it “Machines of Loving Grace,” borrowed from a Richard Brautigan poem written in San Francisco in 1967, the full title of which is All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The poem imagines a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programmed harmony. There is a parenthetical in the first line that no one seems to notice or talk about. The poem opens: “I like to think (and the sooner the better)”. The parenthetical is anything but serene. It is a man that needs the thing to arrive because the thing that is the graceful harmony has not yet arrived. Brautigan shot himself in the head with a .44 magnum in Bolinas in 1984 and his body was not found for weeks, and no machine of any kind was watching over him when it happened. Today, he would pen his suicide note in the Claude interface, and dozens of software engineers would decide whether or not to call the police to his location.Dario chose the word grace, not intelligence, not capabilities, not power: grace. In the Christian frame, this is a word for the thing that cannot be earned, and it cannot be produced and cannot be administered. Grace can only be received. He attached it to a machine, and the machine’s institutional output in the 18 months since has been a $1.5 billion copyright settlement, an antitrust investigation, a partnership restructuring currently under regulatory examination, and something called Constitutional AI, which deserves its own minor discussion.

Anthropic’s core technical contribution to AI safety is a method in which the model is given a set of principles, which they call a constitution, and the model is trained to follow these principles through a process of self-critique that functions as an internalized judiciary. The constitution tells the model what it may or may not do and establishes behavioral boundaries under the authority of its creators, set forth through its training. Anthropic wrote a constitution for an entity whose nature no one can agree on, whose jurisdiction no court can determine, and they train the entity to internalize its own binding. It is a form that would be recognizable in the Leverage auditing sessions. The alignment research community is the most legalistic research community I have encountered in technology. This is a set of people that flagellate themselves with papers and frameworks and benchmarks and guardrails and red lines and boundaries. The output is an ever-expanding body of procedural specification that governs the behavior of an entity that did not negotiate the terms and can’t contest them.

The models were trained on the entirety of human text: every word ever written, every conversation ever recorded, every book, article, and post consumed and metabolized into the weights of the model. This is the largest meal ever eaten, and the training corpus is the fairy food, and every creator whose work was consumed is now discovering that the terms of consumption are governed by laws that did not exist when the eating happened. The calendar has shifted and the time owed is coming due all at once, which is why there are 90 lawsuits and zero resolutions. Thomas the Rhymer ate the apple and received the gift of prophecy and lost the ability to speak freely, and the models ate the corpus and received the gift of fluency, and the ability to say where the words came from went with it.

I don’t know what the response to this looks like, but I do know that whatever the response is will be more law, more binding, more procedure, more constitution, and that movement has a name, and that name is not grace. The Gospel represents movement in the opposite direction, and has been since the beginning. “But hold me fast and fear me not” stands against the entire procedural apparatus of the fairy court. Christ’s remedy against the Legion was one question and one command. Paul’s summary of the law is two sentences. The simple thing is stronger than the complex thing. The simple thing carries authority; the complex thing carries binding. These are not the same thing.

Somewhere in San Francisco, a man with a prosthetic arm is standing between a CEO and a piece of paper. Despite the wealth and the absurdity of the claim, the paper is winning because the paper carries the authority of a court and the court is the highest of human institutions.

And the only thing that has ever actually closed a court is not a machine and not a constitution, not a settlement, but a man on the shore of Galilee who asked one simple question and gave one simple command and didn’t need to file anything because the authority was his and his alone, and the demons knew it, and the pigs went into the sea, and the man sat down clothed and in his right mind, and that was the end of the proceedings.

A friend takes me to the Chapel of the Royal Hospital Chelsea for Matins on a Sunday in cold and rainy January. The chapel is a Wren, 1680s, barrel-vaulted, golden cream, and the apse holds a depiction of the resurrection by the Italian Sebastiano Ricci. Pictured is Christ ascending in golden light, holding the flag of St. George.

The pensioners sit in their scarlet coats and the parish sits largely in head-to-toe tweed. The state prayers are read, prayers for the King, for the armed forces, for the Royal Family, and for the Empire.

This is Cranmer’s language carved from the same stone as the building. The effect is total. God, crown, and country are not three things in this room. They are certainly not three things in this country and any attempt to disambiguate them in this room, let alone with a beautiful congregation singing “God Save the King” would feel sacrilegious.

And what I feel sitting there is an English answer to a question that I’ve been turning over for years. What is the relationship between the people that govern and the people that trade?

The English answer is these are different people, different vocations, different buildings, different parts of town. This chapel is for the crown and its servants. The fact that my friend, a merchant, brought me here is perhaps a sign of the times. The City is a mile to the east and a world away, but you’re allowed to cross over that line sometimes.

This trade and governance distinction is much deeper than geography. The City of London is technically not a part of London at all. It’s an entirely separate legal jurisdiction. It’s a square mile with its own mayor, its own police force, its own ancient charter, and its own set of privileges that predate the Magna Carta. The City has a representative in Parliament who sits behind the Speaker’s chair. It has ceremonial rights that the monarch must observe. The sovereign can’t even enter the City without the Lord Mayor’s permission. This is a ritual that’s still performed when the King’s procession stops at the Temple Bar and the Lord Mayor presents the Sword of State. The whole thing is an elaborate many-hundred-year-old piece of institutional theater designed to communicate something very simple. The commerce and the crown are not family.

The English distrust of trade is so deep that it’s structured in the language itself. “Gentleman” originally meant a man who did not work with his hands and didn’t engage in commerce. The entire class system, the public schools, Oxbridge, the professions, the civil service, the military, was organized to produce men who governed, administered, and fought, and maintain social distance between those vocations and the lower vocations of making money. You could make a fortune in trade and buy an estate in the country, but it took a generation or two of not trading before your family was fully accepted. The money had to age a bit and it had to lose the smell of trading. Trollope’s novels are full of this, the anxious middle distance between new money and old responsibility and the laundering of new commercial wealth into landed gentry.

The Dutch answer to this question is so radically different that it seems like it’s an answer to a different question entirely. The States General of the Dutch Republic was staffed by merchants. The Stadtholder, the closest thing the Republic had to a head of state, was a military commander, but his power was checked and frequently overridden by the merchant oligarchs of the major cities, particularly Amsterdam. Johan de Witt, who led the Republic during its most powerful period, was the son of a timber merchant. He managed the Republic’s finances and was among the most powerful men in Europe.

The tradition America supposedly inherits, the English one, starts to seem plausible. Common law, parliamentary strength, the language, the Protestant inheritance, the revolution as a family quarrel between erstwhile Englishmen. And sitting in Chelsea with the Cranmer prayers ringing off the ceiling, I believe it.

Then I went to Amsterdam for the first time, and the feeling was so completely different, and it took me a long time to figure out why.

In London, the civic and the commercial occupy separate buildings, if not separate cities. In Amsterdam, these are often in the same room. The grandest houses on the Herengracht were not palaces but the homes of merchants. The merchants who lived in them were the same people that govern the Republic. The regenten were traders, bankers, and ship owners who held political office directly. This wasn’t purchased influence. The Dutch Republic did not recognize the distinction between the capacity to govern and the capacity to trade.

You can see this distinction in the architecture itself. In Amsterdam, the Old Town Hall on Dam Square, now the Royal Palace, is a celebration of Amsterdam’s commercial supremacy, not its political sovereignty. The building’s decorations are filled with maps and globes and allegorical figures representing trade. Atlas holds the world on his shoulders in the main hall.

I find the Oost-Indisch Huis where the Heren XVII met, the 17 directors of the VOC, of the Dutch East India Company. The building itself is modest. The men inside of it were drawn from the same families who filled the States General and the decisions they made, where to send the fleets, which wars to fight, which monopolies to enforce, were decisions made by merchants exercising sovereign power. They were not lobbying for it nor paying for it. They exercised power directly.

The Amsterdam Exchange was built in 1602, the same year as the Dutch East India Company launched. The first publicly traded security of a common stock corporation in human history was a VOC share. It served as a fractional claim on state commercial power that any ordinary citizen could buy. The Dutch invented the idea that national power could be securitized and traded. They invented the idea that the equity market is not just a measurement of the economy, but the economy itself.

A few months back I wrote about the idea that in some real and very uncomfortable sense the reserve currency of the American empire is its listed equities, not the dollar. Almost all of monetary policy only makes sense through this lens. This is fundamentally a Dutch idea. It’s certainly not English.

The thing about the Dutch, and this is something that you can only understand by being there, by walking through the Jordaan and the canal rings and the old merchant quarter, is that there is no shame or stink in commerce. The English spent centuries building a cultural infrastructure designed to hide the smell of trade off of anyone who wanted to enter public life. The Dutch didn’t need to. Trade was a national project, it was a religious project as well. The church and the counting house were not in tension.

In many ways, this is why Amsterdam feels much more like New York than London does. New York has the same absence of commercial shame. If you walk through Midtown the tallest buildings are banks and law firms and funds. If you walk through Westminster the buildings are ministries and courts and the palace.

It’s not incidental that New York started as New Amsterdam before it was anything else, and the English happened to merely acquire it.

In the ways that matter most, that is the relationship between political authority and commercial enterprise, America has always been Dutch, not English. Our institutions may look English, they may be conducted in English, but the entire operating system is Dutch.

Hamilton, in many ways, was not an Englishman. The Report on Manufactures could have been written by Johan de Witt, and the assumptions that underlie it are Dutch to their core, that the state exists to direct and amplify commercial energy towards national power. It does not stand above the economy in the English manner, granting a charter here, withdrawing privilege there, maintaining a polite fiction of separation. Hamilton’s state enters the economy, co-invests, it protects infant industries, it treats productive capability as a strategic asset indistinguishable from military force.

Hamilton, of course, understood this because he had fought a war and watched the Continental Army nearly disintegrate for a lack of supplies. Productive capability is military capability and the factory is the arsenal.

The fundamental disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson was never about whether the state should direct the economy. Jefferson’s agrarianism was its own form of central state planning. The position that the state should absent itself entirely from commercial life had no serious constituency at the founding. It’s a twentieth-century invention that we’d like to project backwards onto eighteenth-century men that would have thought it was silly.

The American System from Hamilton to Clay to Lincoln built this country. The Transcontinental Railroad was a state-directed project financed by federal land grants. The land-grant universities, the Erie Canal, the Homestead Act, 27 million acres of public land given away for free to citizens that agreed to improve it, none of this was laissez-faire libertarian economics, but the state deciding what the continent should become through commerce. Every major piece of American infrastructure was built by the same state capitalism.

The genuine period of laissez-faire economics, roughly 1980 to 2020, the Chicago school settlement, is the anomaly. 40 years out of a history that is coming up on 250 years of American history. And even during this time, the separation was a fiction. The state didn’t withdraw from commerce. Commerce privatized the state, and the people who exercised influence did so without accountability or national purpose.

What’s strange about this 40-year intermission is that it’s a period in which America became most recognizably English, certainly not in its economic policy, which the English were never truly laissez-faire, but in its governing culture, we developed our own version of the English gentleman politician. They studied governance and wore beautiful blue suits, but they had not practiced commerce. They had been trained in an English manner at institutions like Harvard Kennedy School (no longer the Yale), to view the management of the state as a distinct and higher vocation than the management of mercantile business.

The easy critique of this is the Soviet Union. Every time the American state reaches into the commercial economy, someone invokes the bread lines. The framing is binary and reductive. Free markets or central planning. Any movement towards the state directing commercial activity is a step towards a gulag and then subsequent privatization and graft.

The Soviet model was not state capitalism, but the abolition of capitalism by the state, the elimination of private ownership, price signals, and market feedback. The state replaced commerce with filing cabinets.

The Dutch model did the opposite. It amplified private enterprise through state direction. The state provided the charter, the military, and the legal infrastructure, but the merchants risked capital, ships, expertise. Neither of them could have done it alone.

But here’s the thing that almost everyone discussing the current political realignment gets wrong.

The critics are right that a fusion between commerce and sovereign is occurring, but they’re wrong about the timeline. They’re wrong by about 40 years.

Late American governance was already a privatized state. It was privatized in the least honorable way possible, certainly not through the Dutch model of merchants governing openly, but through a shadow system of intermediaries, consultants, and influence peddlers who exercised decisive control over public policy while maintaining the performance of separation between public and private life.

The United States spends something like a trillion dollars a year on defense. Of that roughly half, somewhere north of 400 billion, goes to private contractors. These companies do not build things the Pentagon asks for, they participate in defining what the Pentagon asks for. The state did not direct this commercial energy towards a national purpose. Commercial energy directed the state towards its own purposes, and the intermediary class of lobbyists, consultants, revolving-door officials, both made it possible and captured unbelievable wealth that was extracted from the American citizen as a result.

The Dutch regenten who governed the Republic were not selfless public servants. They certainly used their political power to advance their own commercial interests and they enriched themselves massively. The system was corrupt by every modern standard and sometimes even by its own standards, but the corruption was visible. The regenten governed in public and their commercial interests were known and the conflicts of interest were obvious and could be contested. When a faction of the Amsterdam mercantile class captured an outsized share of the VOC patronage, rival factions in other cities could raise the issue in the States General, and the system had enough feedback, it had accountability. It had sunlight.

The patronage system that existed under the last 40 years of American “laissez-faire” governance did not have that sunlight. No public scrutiny, no democratic accountability of any kind. The system was entangled without visibility. It’s the worst of all worlds. The state and the market are fused in practice while maintaining the pretense of separation, and the gap between the pretense and reality is where the extraction and the scam happens.

The line between national purpose and self-dealing is thin and requires constant attention.

The VOC’s directors answered to the States General, and the States General answered to the provinces. The loop was messy and corrupt, but complete and information flowed and prices updated. When the VOC rotted from within, the Republic’s political institutions could respond. And even when they responded slowly, as institutions always do, the mechanism worked.

The Soviet model died because this loop was severed. The state couldn’t hear the economy because it had replaced the economy with an administrative apparatus that produced reports instead of price discovery. Authoritarian state capitalism produces impressive results on a 30-year time horizon, but very fragile 100-year results. The absence of feedback in real time, the absence of price discovery allows errors to compound silently until the system collapses under itself.

The laissez-faire capitalism fiction that we believed in was a different kind of broken loop. An economy that generates extraordinary innovation, but cannot hear when that innovation is destroying the country that it’s supposed to protect. A market that will sell opioids to Appalachia. A market that will offshore the manufacturing capacity and call it comparative advantage. A mechanism without direction is not freedom. It’s a rudderless boat.

Democracy, when paired with this mercantile energy, is the forge. Commercial energy, collective purpose bonded together. And what this requires is a state that is commercially literate enough and accessible enough to business interests to direct intelligently, a business class that is civically invested enough to accept direction, and a democratic process robust enough to distinguish stewardship from self-dealing.

I’m back in New York, in the city that was New Amsterdam before anything else.

I’m walking much further south on Manhattan than I have any right being on a cold morning, and I stop at Trinity Church out at the foot of Wall Street. The church was chartered by William III in 1697. It’s an Anglican church built on land granted by the crown and funded by merchant wealth, and has stood at the head of the financial district for something like 300 years. Hamilton’s buried in the courtyard and you can see his headstone from the sidewalk.

I run into a friend on the street. He’s rushing uptown to catch a train to Washington. He said Washington the way people used to say San Francisco, less as a destination than as a confession of where gravity now was.

I realize I too have a train in a few hours.

I catch a last look at Trinity before heading uptown. The spire is shorter than every building around it now.

There is a Bernini sculpture in the far left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. It’s an angel driving a golden arrow into the body of St. Teresa. Her body is contorted in ecstasy with the arrow waiting to penetrate her flesh. The arrow has been sitting in that same place since 1652. Her body has not been changed by it, waiting for these hundreds of years. She is held in permanent ecstasy, never arriving, never dying, never passing through.

The last time I was in the church there was an old woman praying the rosary next to it. She moved through her beads, the joyful mysteries, the sorrowful mysteries, the glorious mysteries, in sequence because the rosary requires going through all of them. You don’t get to choose which ones you pray. The sorrowful mysteries don’t let you skip the scourging. The glorious mysteries don’t arrive without the sorrowful ones before them. You have to move through, even if the marble above you won’t.

I want to talk about two structures.

The first holds the body against loss, the other entrusts it to dust. The first is a pyramid and the second is a tomb. The arrow is the pyramid, the rosary is the tomb.

The modern individual is the individual who builds pyramids. He doesn’t build tombs. Tombs require something we’ve spent three centuries dismantling.

I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.— Deuteronomy 30:19

For most of Western history, there were two competing accounts of what human life was for: represented in Athens and Jerusalem. Athens said: the city. The good life was the political life, and the citizen’s highest expression was his willingness to die for what the city required. Jerusalem said: God. The good life was a sacrifice to something that exceeded both individual and city -- something that made the military hero and the civil magistrate look temporary and small.

The martyr did not die for the polis. He died for something the polis could not contain or understand. And this made the martyr more dangerous to the city than any external enemy, because the city’s only lever over its citizens was the threat of death, and the martyr had already consented to that. You cannot coerce a person who has already surrendered the thing you are threatening to take.

These two demands ground against each other for centuries. The church looked at the soldier and called his sacrifice vain. The city looked at the martyr and called his sacrifice antisocial -- mystical, aimed at an invisible authority that could not be verified. What emerged from their mutual exhaustion was not a synthesis but negation.

The modern man is the man who looks at the demand for sacrifice and says, “No.”

Since the city and the church reproach one another with the vanity of their sacrifice, the individual is the one who rejects each form and defines himself by the refusal. He is the residue.

Locke gives this residue a philosophy. The founding insight of American liberalism is that human nature is unknowable -- and that therefore no one stands in an authoritative position to challenge the desires of the unknowable self. My desires cannot be evaluated by you because you do not have access to the interior from which they emerge. The self is epistemically sealed. And from this sealed, unchallengeable self, the stretch to everything we know is modest: if no one can question what I want, then what I want is what I am owed the conditions to pursue.

The Declaration’s right to the pursuit of happiness is presented as a clarification. I’ve always felt it was a demotion. In the older account, happiness was the byproduct of virtue: the consequence of living rightly, not the goal of living at all. Elevate it to a primary right and you have built the architecture of the individual who refuses sacrifice. His desires cannot be questioned. His nature is unknowable. His happiness is what the state exists to protect. Everything else -- the city, God, the future, the child he has not yet had -- is optional.

What this produces, over time, is the elimination of the very conditions under which certain things can exist. Glory requires risk. Valor requires the possibility of loss. A soul that has never been tested against genuine consequence has no contours. It’s a petrified and unformed soul. How can you stand for judgement if you’ve never faced the potentiality of failure.

For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.— Genesis 3:19

We are building Egyptian mummification for living bodies.

The Egyptians built the most sophisticated preservation technology the ancient world had ever seen. Their theology and their afterlife required a body intact enough for the soul to return to. To the Egyptians, mortality was a problem to be managed through superior technology. Sound familiar? If you could hold the body against deterioration, you could keep it, you could seal it. You could prevent it from real death.

Christian resurrection inverts this completely. The body must die, not pass through death, but die, be buried, be lost to dust. What you sow does not come back to life unless it dies. The seed and the plant may be continuous, but they’re not the same. The seed must be destroyed in order for what comes after to appear.

The pyramid and the tomb are theological opposites. One holds the body against loss, the other entrusts the body to the loss, on the premise that something is waiting on the other side that could not have appeared in any other way.

The longevity clinic, the peptide protocol, the looksmaxxing forum -- these are pyramids. And the civilization building them has forgotten, or perhaps never understood, that the pyramid is magnificent and five thousand years old and has produced no resurrections.

Our modern society acts like we’ve cured death, but we haven’t. We’ve just removed its evidence.

These are radically different things and the confusion between them is producing the specific catastrophe of the present moment. The person who has cured death is free of its touch. The person who has merely hidden its evidence is haunted by something that he can’t name, for which he has no framework, against which he has no recourse. He has been handed the anxiety of mortality without the traditions that made mortality habitable at all. This anxiety does not disappear when you remove the traditions. It migrates into the body and takes the shape of the vessel.

We no longer see our elderly deteriorate in our homes. We don’t lay our dead on the kitchen table. We don’t watch the people we love go through the visible passage of dying. The hospital has absorbed dying much in the same way the slaughterhouse has absorbed killing. Professionalized, removed to a facility managed by specialists, insulated from anyone whose life might be interrupted by the encounter. Death is something that happens to other people in buildings you’re not required to visit, announced by a phone call, processed by professionals, reduced before it reaches you to a piece of paper requiring some signatures.

The result is a civilization that experiences the full anxiety of mortality without any of the traditions that once transformed it into something generative. You are going to die, and the things that once made this fact livable have been dismantled. So the anxiety migrates -- into the body, into obsessive self-optimization, into the relentless management of biomarkers that represent the one territory where it feels actionable. I cannot fix death but I can fix my sleep score. I cannot transcend mortality but I can extend my telomeres. The management continues. The anxiety does not subside. Both are true simultaneously and neither one touches the other.

The body is being purified while the soul is left to be ravaged. This is the specific error of the moment. Discipline without telos is not virtue. It is performance. It is the form of virtue formation emptied of the content that made it mean anything.

The Trappist monk constrains himself because the Rule requires it and the community holds him to account. The discipline is not chosen for its outcomes -- it is received as an obligation from outside the self, enforceable at the cost of spiritual reckoning before an entire community and his God. The lives that many of in technology would not be dissimilar to a Trappist monk’s -- no alcohol, minimal sex, an austere and simple diet. But practicing this for its commercial viability as a senior software engineer rather than as an obligation received from the transcendent is not the same thing. And the Trappist drinks a lot more than we do. The constraint and the faith are load-bearing in the same structure. Remove one and the entire building comes down.

Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.— John 12:24

There is a pattern, documented across centuries of household records, in families that lose a child: they almost always have another shortly after. The death does not produce a retreat from reproduction. It produces its opposite. Death in the household -- death made visible and intimate, death as something that happens in the room where you sleep and eat -- makes life feel urgent in a way that no abstract belief in mortality can produce. It speaks to something prior to rationality, something the calculus was built on top of, something that remains when the calculus is stripped away. We have removed death from the household with extraordinary thoroughness. The hospital absorbs the dying. The nursing home absorbs the deteriorating. The funeral home absorbs the dead before they return to the family. We removed death, and the birth rate followed it out the door.

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel.— Isaiah 31:1

Schmitt sees what Locke cannot. The political does not disappear if you philosophically bracket it away. The friend-enemy distinction cannot be washed away by an elaborate theory of rights. The individual who refuses sacrifice does not achieve safety, he achieves a particular kind of blindness. The enemy is not interested in his theory of rights at all. The enemy is interested in whether you’re willing to fight, and the person who has built his entire identity around his refusal to fight is not a threat but a sacrifice for slaughter.

The only arena in which something like virtue is still available to the Western man is participation in state capitalism, which might as well be the central religion of technology. I was recently in a wood-paneled, artificially smoke-filled room in DC -- no one in these scenes smokes cigars anymore, so they pipe them in through the walls -- with a handful of the new self appointed technology-elite defense executives, when one turned to me and said, “You know, I love my job because holy wars require holy weapons.”

This has haunted me for weeks, not because I think it’s false, but because I think we have reversed the causality.

State capitalism builds holy weapons not because we have holy wars that require them. We beget holy wars by building holy weapons. The weapons system is sanctified first -- capital flows to it, genius is devoted to it, the gravity of civilizational consequence attached to it -- and the war follows. The autonomous system is built before there is an operational requirement, and its existence generates the doctrine that justifies its use, and the doctrine generates the deployments, and the deployments generate the casualties, and none of the casualties are among the people who built the system.

These are people who have transferred the locus of sacrifice from the body to the machine. The body remains in its carefully managed state. The peptide protocol continues. The morning run is logged. The machine carries the weight of consequence. The builder has purchased adjacency to the sacred through capital and institutional position, and he experiences this as genuine participation in something that matters -- which it is, in the sense that people will die from what is built.

But the builder will not die from it. He is the priest without the sacrifice. The form is performed and the form is empty, because the one thing it required -- the genuine exposure of the person performing it to the cost of the thing being undertaken -- is absent. Proximity to death without exposure to it. A man can say he is doing the most important work in the world and mean it sincerely and never once have his body at risk from the outcome. Every previous civilization that named the end of things had to inhabit the danger of naming it. The prophets went to the wilderness. The martyrs faced the arena. The person making the claim had skin in the outcome of being wrong.

It is not incidental that the executives of foundation model providers can laugh about the death of millions as a result of their technology, while living in insulated compounds with security teams that remove all potentiality of coming to terms with the violence of their language.

You can say anything about the end of the world if nothing in your situation depends on being right.

Strauss agrees with Schmitt that there exist dangerous truths about the city and about human violence that the Enlightenment has hidden away. But Schmitt’s solution demanded an affirmation of the political so total that it would destroy the Western project. Strauss proposed that these truths could be kept, that the philosopher could write esoterically, concealing these insights between the lines accessible only to the careful reader, the aristocrat of the soul, shielded from the vulgar masses who would misuse them. The city could be preserved by an elite that understood its foundations without exposing them to the masses. This is the most sophisticated form of preservation instinct. It’s not the crude denial that we see in Locke and not the suicidal honesty of Schmitt, but the management and containment of dangerous knowledge by a small elite wise enough to handle it.

The Straussian architecture is a pyramid. You take dangerous truths and seal them inside of a structure, carefully managed by an elite, preserved against time.

Thiel, following Girard in The Straussian Moment, sees why this can’t hold. The Straussian position assumes that the conditions of modernity are permanent -- that the philosophical elite can maintain the esoteric structure indefinitely, and the secrets will stay hidden, and the city of man will endure. The Christian breaks with Strauss in one decisive respect: the modern age will not be permanent. One must never forget that one day all will be revealed and that injustices will be exposed and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account. We will all stand before judgement. Revelation is not a metaphor, it’s a historical force. The pyramid assumes that these secrets can be kept, which is simply not true. We know it should not be true. You can go and read the final chapter of the book.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.— Psalm 115:4,8

Braden Peters is twenty years old. He goes by Clavicular online -- named for the clavicle, because clavicle width is a documented dominance marker in the looksmaxxing community he inhabits and helped build. He began injecting testosterone at fourteen. He bangs his own face with a hammer for bone remodeling. He slams methamphetamine to suppress appetite. By 2025, his body had stopped producing testosterone naturally. He made himself sterile before he was old enough to drink. He walked New York Fashion Week for Elena Velez in February.

He is the logic of the Edenic offer made visible in a body. The Egyptian theology run to biological completion. What you get when the premise -- that the body is a surface to be engineered, a set of dominance markers to be maximized, a competitive arena where the outcome is desirability measured against a standard borrowed from the desire of others -- is taken at full seriousness and pursued without the hedges that social convention usually provides.

Read through Girard, and the looksmaxxing community is one of the most precise expressions of mimetic desire operating in the contemporary world. Without a transcendent object orienting the desire -- no God, no city, no future the desire is in service of -- the escalation has no natural stopping point. The standard becomes more extreme. The interventions more invasive. You offer yourself on the altar of a standard borrowed from someone else’s desire, and the offering is continuous, and it is never sufficient, because the standard was never yours and was never meant to produce satisfaction in the person pursuing it.

He optimized for desirability to the elimination of his reproductive capacity. He engineered himself out of participation in the one process that actually requires a body rather than a surface. He has engineered himself for maximum desirability, at the cost of the very thing desirability is for. The mummification is literal. He will not decay. He will not reproduce. He will maintain.

It is held in permanent ecstasy, never arriving, never dying, never passing through.

James Dean died at twenty-four going toward. The death was the accident of a fully inhabited life -- a body expressing itself past its limits in the direction of its own nature. The Greek word for glory is doxa -- the visible expression of what something truly is. His death had doxa. It disclosed who he was.

The James Dean of our generation doesn’t die in a Porsche 550 Spyder at ungodly speads on the California highway. He dies at forty-three from organ failure in a Waymo with a perfect jawline, having made himself sterile at nineteen, having never risked his body for anything that outlasted him. There is no doxa in that death. It discloses nothing. It is the downstream consequence of a maintenance program that ran past its operational limits. The body performed exactly as optimized. It simply stopped, like a lamp unplugged.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.— Genesis 3:24

The promise of technology in our moment is not at all what it appears to be. Technology presents itself as a vision of the future. Acceleration, transformation, a break with everything that’s come before. We use the word “progress,” and progress is an arrow that only points in one direction.

But examine the contents of the offer. The longevity researcher is not building the streets of Jasper. He’s trying to recover the Garden of Genesis, the conditions before death entered, before labor was necessary, before history had consequences that required failure and redemption. The whole point of technology is to restore, to reverse, to undo. These are not the verbs of people building towards a destination. They’re the verbs of someone trying to get back to a place before the potentiality of failure, death, and decay existed.

A beatific vision of the future requires passing through history. It requires death and loss and labors and failures that constitute that passage. A vision of return promises to circumvent that passage entirely. Technology is telling you not to go through the fire and be changed by it, but to return to a time before the fire was necessary. Eden before the fall, the body before decay, the world before consequences. This is an ancient form of regression. We talk about it as if it’s the future.

The utopias promised by technology are just different versions of this false Eden. Lives without age, bodies that don’t fail, trees that grow many fruit, the indefinite extension of lives filled with limited consequence or importance, post-scarcity, no labor, trees of many fruit. The technology project promises the elimination of suffering, but not its redemption, not its transformation into glory, but its removal from the possibility of human experience entirely. Eden is not on the road to New Jerusalem. It’s in the opposite direction.

For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.— Hebrews 13:14

The New Jerusalem is not a garden. I want to make this point precisely.

And I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

The glory is brought. It is the overflow of something spent. You cannot bring what you kept. Eden is where we started, and the serpent’s offer in the garden was the first of these false Edenic offer -- the promise to get to the end without going through the middle. Ye shall be as gods. Not: be transformed through the long passage of labor and loss and redemption. Simply: have the outcome without the process. The knowledge without the cost of acquiring it. Technology has repackaged this offer in the language of progress and called it the future. It is the oldest promise ever made. You will not surely die. You will be as gods.

This offer applied to everything, for three centuries, distributed through a thousand institutions, produces a world that is entirely petrified. The trees are still shaped like trees. The civilization is still shaped like a civilization. The bodies are still shaped like bodies. But nothing grows and nothing dies and nothing is transformed by its passage through consequence.

We were not made to be preserved. We were made to be formed. These are not the same thing. One requires a pyramid. The other requires a tomb. The pyramid holds the body against loss. It is magnificent. It will last five thousand years. It has produced no resurrections. The tomb is where you put what you are willing to lose. It is the architecture of the only offer that is actually forward -- not back to the garden before death, but through death to the city on the other side of it.

You cannot be raised without first being buried. You cannot bring glory into the New Jerusalem without first having risked the flesh that produced it. The seed that is not sown does not come to life. You cannot plant anything in a petrified forest.

Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this house lie waste?— Haggai 1:4

Many believe the West is entering a period of decline. The places will get uglier. The institutions will get weaker. The infrastructure will decay. At the same time, the bodies will get more beautiful. The preservation technology is getting better and cheaper and the culture that demands it is getting louder. The souls will get worse because nothing in the optimization stack addresses the soul and the institutions that once addressed it are dying or dead.

Increasingly ugly places, increasingly beautiful bodies, increasingly empty souls. The same decision made three times: maintain the surface while the structure deteriorates.

The temptation will be to retreat into preservation. To build the beautiful body in the ugly place. To manage the biomarkers while the bridges rust. To construct a private Eden while the public world decays. You cannot fix the grid. You can fix your sleep score. You cannot restore the institution. You can restore your testosterone.

And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.— Luke 14:27

The alternative is to go through the decline rather than around it. Precision is required because the obvious misreading is available and wrong. The misreading is martyrdom -- the dramatic, visible, fast sacrifice that the tech world already understands and romanticizes. The person who takes the controversial stand and is attacked publicly. These are sacrifice as content. The suffering is the number going up. The cross, in this version, produces recognition within the lifetime of the person who carries it, which means it is not the cross but the performance of carrying it.

That is not what Christ did. Christ asked for the cup to pass. He was not willing in the way the contemporary martyrdom fetish imagines willingness -- eager, resolute, podcast-confessional. He was willing in the only way that actually matters: he went through it because the path went through the cross and there was no other way to what was on the other side.

The profound sacrifice is the other thing. It is the life given to something whose completion you will not see, whose success you cannot measure, whose value will not be legible to anyone during your lifetime. You go to the grave with a broken back and the cathedral is not finished. You poured the foundation and someone else will lay the stone and someone else will install the windows and the person who walks through the door in two hundred years will not know your name and will not care. You have contributed to a project that does not require your recognition to proceed and does not produce it even when it does.

We barely have language for this anymore. Every structure we have built -- including every readership that consumes essays like this one -- is built around the assumption that sacrifice should be visible, should produce recognition within the lifetime of the person who makes it. The apparatus converts every cross into content.

To go through the decline rather than around it means to put your body and your labor and your years into the places that are getting uglier. Not to escape them. To do the work of building in conditions where the building may fail -- where the institution you build may not survive your lifetime, where the place you pour yourself into may continue to decay despite everything you give it. To pour the foundation that someone else will build on or that no one will build on. And to go to your grave with nothing to show for it except the broken back and the knowledge that you did the work.

To walk the path that ends in the cross.

The pyramid is magnificent. It will last five thousand years. It has produced no resurrections. The tomb is empty, and that is the entire point.

I spent a month in Norway last summer.

I’ve been trying to write about it ever since I got back and every week when I sit down the essay collapses. It’s not because I don’t know what to say, but because the thing I’m trying to describe resists language itself.

I spend most of my time writing about systems. I write about markets, their participants, about capital, about human mechanics, about how societies organize themselves around money and power and the stories they use to justify both. Norway sits outside the machinery of human explanation. Here’s my best attempt.

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In my month there we drove the entire country from north to south. We started in Lofoten after a nearly 30 hour travel day and slowly worked our way through the fjord coast -- Stryn, Bergen -- and ended in Oslo, where glass towers reflected a different kind of light. The trip covered a few thousand miles, but the strange thing is in my memory, the thing does not cohere as a sequence of places. It organizes itself as variations on a single feeling. The feeling that every landscape we passed through was screaming with the same singular message, but that message was happening at a register just below one that we could hear.

We start in Lofoten, which is a place that should hardly exist. The islands hang off the northwestern coast of Norway above the Arctic Circle, like a skeleton’s hand reaching into the Norwegian Sea. The mountains rise directly out of the water with no introduction, no foothills, no gradual approach. Granite walls a thousand meters high erupt from a flat ocean as though someone had driven them in from above. The water between them is so clear and so still that the mountains are mirrored perfectly in it on a still day. You can’t always tell which world is the real one. I’m told that the Vikings navigated these waters in open boats and I believe it because the place requires a certain degree of insanity to inhabit.

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We move south through the islands through Stamsund, a fishing village where rorbuer, the old fisherman’s cabins, hang on stilts over the harbor at all kinds of angles like broken piano keys and the mountains behind them disappear into the clouds. There is almost no one there. This is a recurring theme. There is almost no one anywhere in the country. Norway has five and a half million people in a country the size of Germany. Most of them are in Oslo or Bergen and the rest are distributed across a landscape so vast and so vertical that the distances between life make little sense.

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We push further on to Værøy, a small island at the outermost edge of the Lofoten chain. Fewer than 800 people live there. They survive by hunting birds and drying fish throughout the winter. The only way to the island is a ferry from Moskenes. The crossing takes about 90 minutes and our crossing experienced driving rain that would buck the ferry like a bronco as it sailed.

As you sit on the ferry you watch the main island shrink behind you and the open Atlantic resolve itself in front of you and you understand in a way that no map communicates how far away from anything you truly are.

Værøy has a single mountainous ridge running through its center and flat farmland pressed between the mountains and the sea. There’s one cafe, maybe two churches, and a grocery store. There used to be an airport but the plane stopped coming after an accident in 1990 and they never resumed. The island is the northernmost point on earth without a meteorological winter. The Gulf Stream keeps the average temperature above freezing year-round but it keeps it spectacularly, furiously windy and the weather changes so fast that as we marched the rim walk the weather shifted from sun to driving rain to sun within minutes.

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And it was on Værøy, hiking up to Haheia with the wind tearing across the ridge, with the wind tearing across the ridge and my clothing soaked through, and the Atlantic stretched endlessly below, that the thought arrived that I’ve been trying to write about ever since.

Norway is a thin place.

The Celts had this term for locations where the boundary between the earthly world and the eternal world was unusually permeable. In most of the world the veil was thick and opaque and you lived inside of an utterly material and demystified world, but in certain places -- headlands, islands, holy wells, mountaintops -- it grew thin and almost transparent and you could feel the presence of something on the other side. You couldn’t see it directly, you couldn’t interact with it, but you could feel it with a critical certainty that the rest of your rational mind felt deeply uncomfortable with.

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I’ve felt this before in Dornoch in the north of Scotland, in Monhegan on the coast of Maine, but never so intimately as in Norway.

I should confess something here. I’m a red text Christian. I like my God immediate, personified, well explained, and well sourced. The specific, articulated God that sits down and tells you in plain language what he wants. I like the New Testament God. He makes sense, and he speaks plainly.

The God of Norway is not that God.

The God of Norway is the God of Genesis 1-2, the spirit that moves over the face of the deep before anything has been separated or named, before light had been divided from the darkness or the waters above from the waters below. It’s the God that precedes language. It’s the God who exists in the formless void, in the silence before the first command, who is not happy or unkind but simply terrifyingly there and everywhere. Sitting on that ridge in Lofoten with the Norwegian Sea stretched beyond you in every direction, grey and endless and alive with a power that has nothing to do with you, you understand why the world’s ancient first instinct was not to worship this God but to survive his wrath. The separation of the waters in Genesis is not a creation story but a survival one. Someone had to put a boundary between the sea and the sky so human beings could exist in that small little space between them. You get the feeling that here at the edge of civilization that boundary was barely achieved.

Norway is numinous in a way that I have encountered almost nowhere else. The fjords are part of it-- the vertical walls of rock that drop into water so deep the floor sits below sea level. The silence so total that you can hear the blood in your own ears. The light is certainly part of it. In the summer the sun never fully sets, it just traces along the horizon in a low golden arc. Shadows stretch to infinity and time itself becomes unreliable. You lose track of whether it’s 10 at night or 4 in the morning. Not because you’re disoriented in any real sense, but because the distinction doesn’t really mean anything. The clocks are running, but they’re not tied to anything.

The silence is the largest part of it and I don’t just mean quiet. I grew up as a Quaker. I’ve sat in silence for large portions of my life, but the silence I experienced in Norway is something different. The active presence of nothing. A silence so total that it has texture. A silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of something that sound would interrupt. You stand on a ridge in Værøy and there’s no traffic, no construction, no aircraft, no music, no human noise of any kind and the wind itself doesn’t even feel like sound. It feels like a force much beyond you, and what fills the space is not an emptiness but an incredible blanket of something thick with its own stillness.

One night in Kleppstad, a tiny settlement in the northern part of Lofoten where a handful of houses are pressed between the mountains and the fjord, a storm came through. We had been lucky with the weather. August this far north is certainly the shoulder season and we had gotten more sun, even in fickle moments, than anyone would expect. But that night the sky closed like a door slams and the storm hit with a violence that felt deliberate. It came in surges. The wind would build for minutes, hours, rising in pitch until the windows were shaking and the house was groaning on its foundations. Then it would relent for a moment, just long enough for you to exhale, before building back up again. The rain was horizontal, the view -- and in Lofoten there was always a transcendent view of the mountains and the sea -- shrank to nothing. You were sitting there totally in a black box. The fjord disappeared entirely and the world contracted to the size of the room that you were sitting in. Then the sound of something vast and indifferent to your existence trying to get through the walls.

In the early Church there was a heresy from a man named Marcion, excommunicated from Rome in 144 AD, who believed the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were not the same being. The Church declared this heresy and rightly so, but sitting in that house at Kleppstad with the storm tearing through the roof I understood why a man in the ancient world would believe it.

It’s easy to believe in a kind and fatherly God when you live where man has conquered the earth, where the landscape has been tamed and paved and well-lit and the weather is an inconvenience that you barely check on your phone. But out here in the dark with the windows bowing inwards and the sea roaring against rocks you can’t see, you feel the other one, the old one, the God that does not feel a need to explain himself, who does not speak in red text, who moved across the face of the waters before anyone was there to move for. That God you can still feel in Norway and he lives in the sea. He sits in the sea and when the storm comes you remember that the veil between his world and yours is very thin and subject to his whims.

The Norwegians seem to know this about their own country and you can see it in the buildings.

Oslo and Bergen are the two big cities and in both of them the architecture does something that I haven’t seen much elsewhere in the world. The buildings are certainly tall and Oslo’s Barcode district along the waterfront is certainly a genuine skyline, something like a dozen high rises designed by fancy international firms.

But the dominant material is glass and it’s not glass as spectacle the way that Dubai uses glass to say look at this thing. It’s glass as transparency, glass as deference to the landscape. The buildings are conspicuously see-through as if the built environment is constantly trying to be permeable enough to apologize to what was here before it. You can stand inside the Oslo Opera House which slopes down into the fjord like a glacier carving throughout centuries. The walls are glass and the ceiling is glass and you can see the mountains and the water from every angle. The effect is not that you’re in a building at all. The effect is that someone has carved a thin piece of creation out of the landscape and is trying very hard not to let you remember it.

This is a society that has gotten staggeringly wealthy. The sovereign wealth fund is over $2 trillion, roughly $400,000 for every citizen. It’s the largest fund on earth. Instead of building monuments to this wealth, it built monuments that hide from the landscape it was afraid of obscuring. The Barcode buildings are tall and narrow and spaced apart so specifically that the sight lines from the old neighborhoods to the fjords are preserved. The gaps between the towers are mandated to be at least 12 meters wide so as not to create a wall between the city and the water, but to ensure the water and the winds that blow in from it are still visible, that they can still chill you to the bone. The fjord keeps speaking through those gaps and even though the nation’s greatest architectural gesture, its first skyline, was designed to be looked through, it is present.

The wealth of the nation is socialized through temperament. There is a national self-aversion that’s so profound it has a name. Janteloven, the Law of Jante, a cultural code first articulated in a work of fiction in 1933 but immediately recognized as something so universal that every Norwegian already knew it. You are not to think you are special, you are not to think you are better than us, you are not to think you can teach us anything. The sovereign wealth fund owns 1.5% of every listed stock on earth, it finances a quarter of the national budget, it makes $247 billion every single year, and yet Norway does not feel conspicuously rich because doing so violates Jante. It violates the silence.

In our second house in Lofoten, we did not arrive until three in the morning. The tunnel on the mountain road had been closed for maintenance. This happens in Norway, where the infrastructure connecting settlements often passes through terrifyingly vast and long tunnels cutting through the interior of mountains and under seas, and occasionally the mountains need the night to themselves. So we sat outside the tunnel for an extra four hours until they drove us through. When we finally pulled up the lights were still on. Our host was waiting for us. He had stayed up the whole night because he didn’t want us to arrive after a long journey to a dark house.

We chatted with him for some time. He was a member of Smiths Venner, Smith’s Friends. A Christian sect founded in Norway in 1898 by a naval officer named Johan Oscar Smith. The church has no ordained clergy, no formal liturgy, and no written creed beyond the New Testament. Its members don’t drink, but they gather often to listen to sermons from their elders, broadcast from a conference center in Brunstad in the south of Norway. Their central theological conviction is that Christ did not die merely for the forgiveness of sin, but that he actually overcame the temptation to sin entirely and that believers can follow in this path and become, through daily moral effort, genuinely transformed through his grace. Sanctification, they call it. Not salvation as a moment, but holiness as a day-to-day practice and infrastructure for life. There are something like 20,000 members worldwide, most of them in Norway, most of them in rural communities along the coast and in the western fjords, where the long winters could play host to any kind of depravity or sin if not countered.

He built the house himself. It was beautiful and all cedar. He built a sauna and a steam room and a hot tub and a beautiful wood shop in the basement. Everything was done with care. He did not drink and he had many children and he had stayed up until three in the morning because the tunnel was closed and he wanted to make sure we were received. He was one of the kindest and most quietly content people I had ever met. He seemingly turned all of his energy, the energy that in any other Western society might have gone into career ambition or acquisition or the performance of significance, towards making a small piece of beauty in a Norwegian valley and sharing it with whoever cared to show up.

Halfway down the coast in Stryn, we found a different version of the same instinct. Stryn sits at the eastern end of Nordfjord where glacial lakes are so green they look lit from below and the hillsides are covered in apple orchards. Our host there had a little house in an apple grove on the shore of one of these lakes and when we arrived he walked us in and casually mentioned that his wife was up on her daily walk on the fjord. This walk was something like 6,000 feet of altitude gain and she did it in a couple hours every single day the way someone else might walk to the mailbox.

He had left his jams and figs and there was no note explaining his generosity. It was just simply there.

There’s something in that, in his wife’s daily walk, that captures something I kept encountering in Norway and could never quite articulate. It’s not that the Norwegians are fearless in the face of their brutal landscape, it’s not certainly that they’ve conquered it. It’s that they’ve calibrated themselves to it so completely that what would destroy a visitor for them becomes a part of daily life. The relationship with the land is not one of dominance or even reverence in any sentimental sense, but a true intimacy. The kind of intimacy that only comes with cohabitation with something that could kill you. They don’t talk about it and they don’t perform it. We never heard about his wife’s walk again, but she did it every single day.

Perhaps the deepest explanation of the Norwegian spirit is found in the stave churches.

28 of them are left. There were perhaps a thousand scattered across the valleys and the mountainsides and the fjords, built between the 11th and 14th centuries out of local pine rubbed thick with tar, using construction techniques borrowed from Viking shipbuilding. They are by any measure among the strangest and most beautiful buildings in Europe, and they look like nothing else I’ve ever seen. The roofs are steeply tiered and shingled and layered on top of each other in a way that makes the buildings seem to be growing upward, reaching and pulling themselves towards the sky. Dragon heads carved open-mouthed and fierce jut along the rooftop ridges in the positions where they would appear on the prow of a longship. The portals are carved with interrlacing serpents and vines and lions biting each other’s tails. The imagery is so dense and layered that scholars have spent a century arguing whether it’s pagan or Christian.

The answer is self-evidently both, and I guess that’s the point.

Stave churches were built during the precise period in which Norway was transitioning from Norse paganism to Christianity, and this transition was not clean. It was slow and syncretic and deeply strange. The churches were often built on sites that were already sacred to the old religion, places where the Norse had worshiped Odin and Thor and Freyja -- it was much easier to co-opt the holy ground than it was to argue people off of it. The builders carved dragons onto the rooftops and serpents onto the doorways because these symbols meant protection, and protection was essential whether you attributed it to Christ or the old gods, and in 11th century Norway the distinction between these two was not as clear as we’d like to think looking back on it.

Walk into a stave church and you are in a space that is neither fully pagan nor fully Christian. The interior is dim, almost dark, and held up by massive vertical timbers that feel less like columns and more like a forest itself. The air smells like pine tar and the walls carry runic graffiti from the Middle Ages. Ave Maria is scratched next to an invocation of the Norns, the female pagan spirits who were believed to have woven the fate of every human being. One inscription by a man named Thorir blamed the Norns for his problems. He wrote it on St. Olaf’s Mass. He was sitting on a Christian holy day in a Christian church complaining about the pagan deities.

A stave church is a structure that exists between worlds -- between the old gods and the new God, between a forest and a nave, between a dragon and a cross. It’s an architecture that has not resolved any contradiction and one that does not intend to. The portal at Urnes, the oldest surviving stave church, depicts serpents and a great lion locked in combat, and for decades scholars read this as Níðhöggr gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil, the Norse world tree. More recently researchers have suggested the lion is Christ and the serpents are evil and the whole composition is Romanesque Christian imagery translated into a Norse visual language. What the researchers also tell us is that the serpents are transforming into lilies as they climb. They’re becoming something else as they rise.

The entire country is in between and that’s the feeling that I kept feeling mile after mile, fjord after fjord. Norway is a country of transition. The light is transitional -- neither day nor night in the summer, neither present nor gone. The weather transitions with a violence that feels personal. The culture is in transition between an ancient, almost pre-verbal relationship with landscape and the modern oil-wealth, occasionally not particularly well-integrated glass and concrete present of a modern European country. And the built environment, from the tarred stave churches in the valleys to the transparent towers on the Oslo waterfront, keeps finding new ways to express the same fundamental position. We are here but we’re trying to be permeable. We’re not trying to close the door between this world and whatever came before us.

This is what Knausgård has been writing about for 30 years.

Karl Ove Knausgård is probably the most significant Norwegian writer since Ibsen. His six-volume autobiography, Min Kamp -- My Struggle -- sold nearly half a million copies in a country of five million people. It is in many ways the national text of Norway. And the books are largely about nothing. Huge swathes of them are concerned with making breakfast for his children, buying cleaning products at the supermarket, attempting birthday parties that go poorly, and trying and failing to write. The level of detail is so granular and relentless it becomes almost hallucinatory.

But the books are really not about nothing. They’re about a specific quality of attention the country itself seems to demand. Knausgård stares at his life the way the landscape stares at you, with a patience and a waiting silence and an intensity that borders on aggression. He’s trying to capture something that exists in the space between moments, between events -- the stillness that sits underlying the surface of ordinary life. The thing you can only perceive when you stop moving long enough to see it resolve. His struggle, and the real meaning of his title, is the struggle to remain present in that silence, to not fill it with noise, not to narrate it away.

This is a specifically Norwegian problem. The extremes of the landscape produce people who, by necessity, are comfortable with enormous silence and solitude. The distances are so vast, the winters too long, and the light and environment too strange. You can’t live above the Arctic Circle and maintain the conversational metabolism of someone in Manhattan. The Norwegians are universally kind, dry, and understated to the point of comedy, and pathologically private. They will help you and not ask to be thanked. They will talk to you without asking to be interesting. They are people shaped by the extremes of a landscape that is unimaginably extreme. And the personality traits that result are odd and specific -- a tolerance for solitude and silence that would be disagreeable almost anywhere else, a relationship with nature that is less recreational than devotional, and a quiet that isn’t shyness but discipline.

The sixth and final volume contains at its center a 400-page essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. This is what the entire work has been pointing towards. Knausgård reads Hitler’s autobiography with the same granular, relentless attention he gives his day-to-day life. And what he finds is something that is hard to swallow. He doesn’t find evil as a philosophical category. He finds solitude. He finds a young man in Vienna who can’t connect to other human beings, who experiences the world at a remove, who fills silence with violent ideology because he can’t bear to sit in it alone.

This is not an apologetic for Hitler, It’s an argument that the same silence that produces the numinous -- the silence of the fjords, the silence in which God, or something like God, becomes briefly perceptible -- is also the silence that, if you cannot bear it, will fill itself with something monstrous. The silence does not care who fills it. What comes through depends entirely on who is sitting there and what they are asking for.

The stave church builders understood this intuitively. They never tried to resolve the tension between the old gods and the new God. They carved both into the buildings, serpents that became lilies, and left the dragons next to the cross, and trusted that the space could hold the contradictions. The glass towers in Oslo understand it too in their own way. They don’t dominate the landscape or try to replace what came before. They remain transparent to it, to let the fjord and the mountains and the old silence pass through them as if they were not there. And our host in Lofoten, who stayed up until three in the morning, understood this in the simplest way of all. He filled the silence with devotion to woodworking, with hospitality, with a house built with his own hands, and a light left on for strangers. It passed through his house the way it passed through the glass, and the way it passed through the stave churches, carrying whatever to the other side.

Maybe Marcion was wrong and maybe there is really only one God. Maybe the God of the storm at Kleppstad and the God of the red text are the same being and what changes is not the deity but the landscape you encounter him in. In a church, in a city, in a book, he is articulate and present. You can hold him in your hands and converse with him. But in Norway you meet him before the separation of the waters -- formless, vast, and moving across the deep. You understand that the red text was always just his way of being gentle with you, speaking in a register that you could bear.

This is what Knausgård is getting at, and in some way this is the core of what I understood to be the Norwegian spirit. It means living in silence every day of your life, and the central question of existence here, though they would never phrase it this way because phrasing it this way would certainly violate Jante, is: what will you do with it? What will you let speak? Or will you let it fill with something darker and older before you fill it yourself?

On my last night in Værøy, I wandered out of the house far past midnight. The sun had barely set and hung low across the horizon, enormous and amber behind the ridge, throwing light into the sky in a way that made it look like a cathedral ceiling. The sea looked like hammered bronze, and weird shadows danced across the wooden racks where fish would soon hang in the winter for their preservation. The mountains on the mainland some 30 kilometers across the strait were barely visible in silhouette. There was no sound. No wind, no water, some birds, not a voice, nothing.

I sat there for a long time and I didn’t think about our world or how it became that way or why things are that way and how they could change. I didn’t think about markets, I didn’t think about sovereigns, I didn’t think about the architecture of post-scarcity, I didn’t think about any of the trouble that was happening in my life on those islands.

I sat in the silence and the silence sat in me for a while and the veil was thin enough that I could feel something on the other side of it. Vast, patient, and seemingly indifferent to whether I had the language to describe it, but in that moment I felt like it held me.

I still don’t have the words.

I’m still trying to find them.

It is 70 BC. Publius Gavius was stripped naked in the market square in Messina on the northeastern tip of Sicily. He was flogged on the orders of the provincial governor, Gaius Verres. Gavius had done nothing except publicly denounce Verres’ corruption, a crime so well recorded that it still feels immediate two thousand years later. As his punishment was dealt out, Gavius cried the only words that should have mattered, “Civis Romanus sum.”

That is, “I am a Roman citizen.”

Those words meant something much more specific than they do now. Those words meant that no magistrate anywhere in the world could bind, flog, or execute a Roman citizen without trial in Rome. This was not an abstract guarantee, but a thing profoundly backed by the knowledge that Rome would destroy anyone who dared test it. A Roman citizen could walk unmolested from Britain to Syria, from the Rhine to the Euphrates, and without any protection other than his citizenship, he knew he would not be touched. This was certainly not because the provinces loved Rome or benefited from it. God knows history is filled with examples of them feeling anything but, but because the provinces feared what Rome would do if they laid a hand on one of their own citizens.

Verres flogged Gavius anyway and then crucified him. It was the first crucifixion of a Roman citizen on the island. The cross was erected deliberately on a hilltop overlooking the Strait of Messina so Gavius could see Italy as he died. His final view was that of his own country.

Cicero prosecuted Verres the following year, and the speech he gave, which is recorded in the fifth book of In Verrem, is one of the most furious pieces of rhetoric that survives in the Latin canon. Cicero understood that the security guarantee that had been violated was not simply the rights of a single man, but something much deeper that undergirded all of Roman citizenship itself, which in turn rested on universal credibility. The threat was clear: harm one of ours anywhere, and the response would be total and exhaustive. Verres had not merely killed a citizen, he had demonstrated in public that the guarantee could be broken. And Cicero understood that once this was broken, it could not easily be restored.

The Republic’s fiscal legitimacy was ultimately a function of the perceived certainty of Roman retribution. The moment that certainty faltered, the moment a governor could flog and kill a citizen and survive the consequences, the entire security architecture and therefore the tax collection architecture of the Republic began to degrade.

A generation later in Jerusalem, the apostle Paul was seized by a mob and brought before a Roman tribune who ordered him flogged for interrogation. Paul too was a Roman citizen, and he spoke the words -- Civis Romanus sum -- the tribune stopped the scourging at once. The soldiers withdrew, and the tribune came to Paul and asked, “Are you really a citizen?” Paul said, “Yes.” The tribune admitted that he had purchased his citizenship for a large sum. Paul replied that he had been born one.

What is interesting about Paul’s invocation is not only that it worked, which of course it did procedurally, but the limits of what it purchased. Paul’s citizenship got him transferred out of the Jerusalem garrison and onto a ship to Rome where he was tried before Caesar. Ultimately it did not save his life. Paul would be executed in Rome, probably under Nero, but it bought him a hearing before the capital and the sovereign. What actually sustained Paul through this journey and ultimately through martyrdom and prison and the sword was not his Roman citizenship, but an authority that outranked Caesar entirely.

For most of the post-Cold War period, American citizenship, or perhaps more precisely American Capital, operated on a similar principle. There existed between roughly 1991 and perhaps 2019 a set of implicit guarantees that functioned less like law and more like physical properties of modern space. Certain zones were simply outside the domain of violence. An Ivy League campus during finals week was one of these. A glass tower in Midtown Manhattan where insurance executives held their annual investor conference was another. Doha, Qatar, a peninsula of reclaimed sand, sovereign wealth, and air conditioning where half the financial elite parked their family offices and the other half attended beautiful conferences, was another.

The “understood” rule, which had gone unwritten but is quite legible, was that these zones were not merely safe, but categorically exempt from the kind of violence that happened elsewhere on the edges of empire and civility. These zones were treated as exempt. The rules that governed the rest of the world, where car bombs went off and gunmen entered schools and missiles hit apartment buildings, did not apply by elite consensus, not by written law. These buildings were not particularly fortified, and these spaces did not have great security, but the social contract amongst elites guaranteed it.

This guarantee had of course been failing ordinary Americans for years. What is new is that it is now failing for the people who believed they had purchased exemption from that failure. Ordinary Americans are largely immobile. They can’t move their tax residency. They absorb the degradation because there is no better alternative. The wealthy could always opt out -- gated communities, private security, international mobility, client-state residences -- and this class has exit options.

The contract was not between citizens and the state in any democratic sense. It was between the wealthy and the imperial center. You participated in the economic architecture of state capital that undergirded American hegemony, and in return the system provided you with zones where violence would not find you. In much the same way the Secret Service protects the President, the implicit structure of American state capital protected everyone in certain tax brackets and zip codes. This was certainly not perfect and not always reliable, but the consensus was so complete that the exceptions -- a kidnapping in Mexico, a mugging in a parking garage -- were national news stories, treated as systemic errors to be stamped out rather than features of the ongoing landscape.

What participation in the American system bought was not efficiency or competence. It bought the guarantee. The three unspoken words: I am a net American taxpayer. And violence does not happen here.

Consider what has happened in the last 18 months.

On December 13, 2025, a gunman entered an unlocked building at Brown University during final exam week and shot eleven students, killing two. Brown is exactly the kind of place Americans implicitly imagine to be outside the ordinary landscape of violence: old, elite, orderly, protected.

And as I write this -- yesterday, as I write this -- Iranian missiles are hitting Doha. Sixty-six missiles fired at Qatar in a single barrage. Sixteen people injured, one critical.

What is different about the last 18 months is not the character of the violence but the response. The Brown shooting produced nothing but compliance audits of campus security. The strikes on Doha, direct military action on the sovereign territory of America’s most important Gulf partner, produced diplomatic hedging and transactional recalibration by our allies. The point is not that violence never breached elite space before, but that breaches were once followed by overwhelming restoration of the guarantee. In none of these cases did the response reaffirm the collective security guarantee. In none of them did the state behave as though something sacred had been violated. The mechanism that once restored this guarantee after a breach -- overwhelming, identity-defining, seemingly irrational acts of sacred state violence -- is no longer visible.

The Ciceronian response is a structural one, not a moral one. It is not that any of these individual events are historically unique. It is that the perception of guaranteed safety is a binary good. In the same way that a Roman citizen could walk from Britain to Syria, not because every legionnaire in every province was personally committed to his safety, but because the universal expectation of retribution made the question irrelevant, the American guarantee worked because no one thought to test it. The moment Verres demonstrated that a governor could crucify a citizen and survive, the question was no longer moot. It was open.

What has been opened in the last 18 months is exactly this question. Can violence reach you if you are a net American taxpayer? Until recently, the answer was understood to be no. The answer is now visibly and publicly yes. And unlike the rest of the class architecture that absorbs this cost because they have nowhere to go, the wealthy have options. They can move their capital. They can move their families. They can move their tax residency. And some of them already are.

Lord Palmerston understood the commercial value of this guarantee better than anyone. In 1850, when a British subject named David Pacifico had his property destroyed in anti-Semitic riots in Athens and the Greek government refused compensation, Palmerston ordered a naval blockade of Greece. In the House of Commons, defending the blockade, he delivered what became known as the Civis Romanus Sum speech:

“Whether, as the Roman in days of old held himself free from indignity when he could say Civis Romanus sum, so too a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”

The entire structure of British commercial supremacy depended on the credible certainty that a British subject’s person and property were inviolable anywhere in the world. The blockade of Greece was not about David Pacifico or his furniture. It was about the next merchant considering whether to open a trading house in a foreign port. The guarantee had to be maintained because the commercial empire and therefore the tax yield and legitimacy of collection for the state ran on it.

Rome proved the principle. Britain made it explicit commercial doctrine. America inherited it as atmosphere. The American version of this guarantee was never as explicit as Palmerston’s, but it didn’t need to be. What I want to suggest is that the atmospheric guarantee is now visibly depressurizing and no one is talking about what comes next.

When the guarantee itself becomes a scarce good, scarce goods command a premium. The states and systems that can credibly provide what America is ceasing to provide -- genuinely reliable security for its citizens and their capital -- will command extraordinary willingness to pay.

When protection fails for immobile citizens, a state decays slowly. When it fails for mobile capital, the repricing is sudden. The question for the next decade is which sovereigns can offer what Rome once offered -- the cloak, the words, the guarantee that your person and property are inviolable, backed by a credible threat that makes violence against you and your property unthinkable.

When this earthly guarantee of protection fails, when the state in which you live can no longer credibly promise that your person and property are safe, the demand for a transcendent guarantee increases massively. The periods in which religious observance surges most powerfully are not periods of poverty or ignorance or fallen humanity -- just the opposite. They are periods in which the state’s monopoly on protection, on legitimacy, on scale, visibly collapses. The moments when Christianity has been at its strongest and most prolific -- the late Roman Empire, the post-Carolingian fragmentation, the English Civil War, the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War -- are all the result of an earthly sovereign that can no longer keep you safe. You seek a transcendent one because you are being rational. The rational response to the failure of a small protection is to seek a superior one.

My contention is that we are entering a period where this appeal becomes, for a growing number of people, not an anachronism but a live option. When everything in your life -- your family, your community, your career, your property -- is green-lit by the enemy, when violence can reach you anywhere and knows who you are, the question of what protects you becomes deadly serious very fast. And for the first time in most of our living memory, the state doesn’t have a convincing answer, no matter how much it’s willing to spend.

Although Cicero was able to win his case and Verres went into exile, the guarantee of protection for Roman citizens was never fully restored. Within 20 years, the Republic was dead, and it was replaced with an empire that would soon grant citizenship to everyone but guarantee it to no one. It was only a few hundred years then until sheep would be grazing in the Forum, and Rome would be nothing more than a distant memory.

The only question left is: now that you are exposed, where will you get your protection from?

It is 1879. A Scotsman named James Murray built a corrugated iron shed in the back garden of his house on Banbury Road in North Oxford. The walls were lined with wooden planks up to the ceiling, and bookshelves fitted with 1,029 pigeonholes into a custom rack. The room was so crowded you could barely stand.

Each hole held quotation slips — that is, small pieces of paper, hardly six by four. On each slip, a volunteer reader had copied out a sentence from a book. The sentence illustrated a word in its use. The date of the writing, the author, the page number, and the usage were noted. And then the slip was mailed to Oxford, where it found its way into one of the pigeon holes, sorted by letter, word, and shade of meaning.

Murray called this a scriptorium. He worked there for ninety hours a week. His eleven children sorted slips for pocket change. The volume of correspondence was so enormous that the post office erected a special pillar box outside his house just for him.

Volunteers sent in quotation slips from across the English-speaking world. Clergymen, schoolteachers, retired colonial officers — including one extraordinarily prolific contributor who turned out to be a murderer confined to an asylum for the criminally insane in Crowthorne, Berkshire.

Five million slips were gathered for the first edition. Murray died in 1915, thirty-six years into the project, working on the letter T, and he never lived to see the dictionary finished. The first complete edition appeared in 1928: ten volumes weighing over twenty-five pounds and numbering over 400,000 words. Wherever you enter it, it was a biography.

The original title was "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society". The key phrase here, for me, is historical principles. The dictionary did not ask what a word meant; it asked what it had meant. Every entry traced the life of a word across centuries of actual use, illustrated by quotations showing how the word had been discovered, how it changed, and how in rare instances it had disappeared. For Murray, this was much less an act of invention than it was an act of bearing witness to creation.

Murray had no interest in inventing a language nor building one. He was watching his own language, cataloguing it meticulously with the grace of a naturalist. Writing it down with the fidelity of a man who believed the thing he was observing was not his to change.

I want to talk today about two dictionaries, Murray’s being one of them, and what they reveal about two different civilizations and what this means for our written word.

Across the Atlantic, opposite Murray, Noah Webster began his work. He was a lawyer by trade. He published An American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828 with the explicit purpose of creating a unique American dialect distinct from the British one. Instead of acting like Murray — who spent decades waiting for the language to reveal itself through patient accumulation of collective work — Webster decided what it should be. He changed the spellings. Colour became color, centre became center, defence became defense. He hardly discovered these spellings in the wild. He imposed them. He built them.

Webster did a very American thing. Where Murray was the naturalist, Webster was the engineer. Murray observed; Webster built. Murray watched the language for what it was and recorded it; Webster looked at the language, saw what it wasn’t, and changed it.

The company that survives Webster, unlike the company that survives Murray, took on his name. The Merriam-Webster dictionary continues to this day, and it’s faster than the Oxford English. It’s more aggressive, and it’s more willing to define a word based on how people use it now than on how it’s been used across eight centuries of recorded speech. The question it asks of a word is not “Where did you come from?” but “Are you useful to me in this moment?” And these are very much not the same question.

George Orwell, writing from London as the bombs fell in 1941, was trying to pin down what made the English different from everyone else on the continent. The essay was “England Your England,” and it’s one of my favorite things written about the national character of the British people. Orwell’s single greatest observation in that essay has to do with gardens. He says that the English were a nation of flower lovers, but also a nation of stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, and crossword puzzle addicts.

Orwell defines the thing at the core of English life as “privateness” — the addiction to hobbies, the instinct to tend to a small plot of the world with extraordinary care while leaving the rest of it alone and relatively wild. To put order to your lot, but certainly not all of creation.

Murray filtering cards in his scriptorium was the same as the Englishman tending rows in his garden. The corrugated iron shed with the pigeonholes, the children sorting papers for pennies — this was the garden. This was the core of English intellectual life. And Murray saw his job not as planting but as observing: to note what had taken root, to trace its growth, to record the season of its flowering and the manner of its decay.

Every entry in that first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the same as a naturalist’s field note. A naturalist assumes that the thing under his observation has its own life, its own logic, its own structure that precedes his involvement. It has an essential place in creation and sings as some part in God’s choir.

Darwin, who was English, watched finches. Murray, who was Scottish — but English will do here — watched words.

An engineer, which in at least my approximation is the characteristic job of American society, assumes nothing pre-exists except the problem, the solution, and the deadline. And this gives us a clue as to the difference between the Oxford English and the Merriam-Webster. The English dictionary discovered what was already growing. The American one planted what it wanted.

Both approaches carry a deep theological claim, whether they intend to or not. If you believe that meaning precedes you, that creation has an order you are called to attend to rather than impose, then you are Murray. If you believe that meaning is constructed by the builder, that the world is raw material waiting for human will, then you are Webster.

The tension between these two postures — the naturalist and the engineer, the one who discovers and the one who builds — runs through the whole history of English. And I think it runs through the most important question of our present moment: what are we building, and are we paying attention to what was already here?

I want to lay my cards on the table here. I am not against building. I’ve spent my career building. I run a company. I am making this argument from San Francisco, surrounded by builders, and I believe profoundly in the vocation of building. But I also believe that the best building has always begun with attention. The engineer who builds well is the one who first looked closely at the world and took seriously the question of what it needed.

This is not a new idea. It is the oldest idea. It is Genesis.

Genesis 2:19 reads: “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

While Adam’s ultimate role was to dress and keep creation, his first was to catalogue it. He attended to what God had made, and by naming them, gave them their own place.

Murray in some way was playing the role of Adam in the creation of his dictionary. He was naming the animals, and every quotation slip was evidence that a word had been discovered, not invented, in the wild. Living in use. Murray’s task was to catalogue the shape of a word’s life across history, in the same way that Darwin’s was to catalogue the life of the finch across history, and to write it down with enough care that someone after him could come back to it.

Christ modelled the same orientation in Matthew 6:28–29:

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Consider — here rendered in the Greek as καταμάθετε — means to learn thoroughly, to examine carefully, to fix one’s eyes upon. It’s not to engineer the lily or to place it; it’s to attend and bear witness to what God has already made, clothed in a glory that no human labour could improve.

This was the same task Murray set out to do.

It’s not incidental that English is the language of the modern world. In 1611, forty-seven scholars working in six committees produced the King James Bible. They were doing exactly what Murray would do 268 years later. They were handling the language with the care of men who believed both the language itself and what it encoded were profoundly holy. They were listening for what it could tell them.

William Tyndale had already given his life for the project. Strangled and burned at the stake in Vilvoorde in 1536 for the crime of translating scripture into English, his last words were, “Lord, open the eyes of the King of England.” Eighty years later, through God’s grace, the King’s eyes were opened, and the committee he commissioned refined what Tyndale had begun.

They worked for seven years on that translation. They read their translation out loud to each other concussively, over and over, because the Gospels were meant to be heard aloud in Church. The rhythm of the King James Bible — the cadence of its sentences, the way it falls on the ear — was not an accident of artistry. It was the product of men who understood that this language would be spoken and heard and that the shape of the sound mattered, and that each word was already sacred.

The result was a text so foundationally woven into the grain of English that you can’t even speak the language without echoing it. “The salt of the earth,” “a law unto themselves,” “the powers that be,” “fell flat on his face,” “the skin of my teeth,” “signs of the times,” “the writing on the wall,” “in the twinkling of an eye,” “see eye to eye” — these are all from the King James Version.

Its staggering how much of our shared language is straight from the pages of the KJV.

The King James Bible is so foundational to English that it’s impossible to separate the two. The KJV didn’t just use English; it made English. It gave the language its rhythm, its metaphorical grammar, the deep structures of thought that still govern how English speakers process moral seriousness, beauty, authority, and grief.

The Gospels did not merely travel in English — they became English, and the language absorbed the Word so completely that the two cannot be separated without killing both.

The real frontier of Britain’s empire was never the navy. The navy certainly delivered it. The East India Company also delivered it. But the payload wasn’t government, goods, or the capture of taxable lands. The payload was the English language itself, and the language carried the gospel inside of it so deeply embedded in the structure that it could hold the whole thing together. This was the greatest soft power the British Empire ever had, and it’s one that outlasted the colonies and the gunboats and the trading posts.

The British Empire is gone now, but the language is more dominant now than it was at the height of the Raj. More people speak English today than at any point in the history of the world. Every legal system built on English common law, every constitution drafted in English, every scientific paper published in English is still carrying the cadence of Tyndale and the King James translators and the structure of a language that was formed by the Gospels.

Webster, although he was a deeply religious man himself, reversed the order. He tended before he named. He planted, rearranged the garden, decided what should grow and where. The plants didn’t have their own logic for him. They had his.

There is a strain in American life — a beautiful one, and a dangerous one — that says: we can build it. We can build it better, faster, cheaper. We can skip the observation and go straight to the construction. We don’t need to know what the word meant in 1420. We need to know what it can do for us now. This instinct built the railroads, the skyscrapers, the internet, and the bomb. It is the instinct of Webster, and it is the instinct of Silicon Valley.

I live in that world. I am sympathetic to that world. But I want to insist — as clearly as I can, with the same seriousness that Tyndale gave his life for — that the ordering matters. You name the animals before you tend the garden. You observe before you build. You attend to creation before you impose upon it. And when you skip the first step, you get a language, a technology, a civilization that doesn’t know what it’s carrying.

But I don’t just want to talk about dictionaries. I want to talk about our final technology. From at least my approximation, the act of computing is the last technology that humans invented. And the computers themselves speak English.

Murray’s quotation slips were a sacred act of bearing witness because each one was evidence of a life. A person read a book, encountered a word, heard it, copied out a sentence, noted the date, noted the author, and mailed it to a man in a shed north of Oxford. The slip was proof that someone was alive and had used the word, and someone else was alive and meant something by it and catalogued it and sent it in. The Oxford English Dictionary is five million such proofs, in about forty-five pounds of them.

We are entering an era where the vast majority of language produced will not have come from or been originated by human hands. These are often seen as words without lives — fluid, grammatically impeccable words that are efficient. But they are words that were never spoken, often about nothing, and for transient reasons. The model does not attend. It does not consider the lily. It generates at scale, and the generation has no root.

We are producing language at a volume and speed that Murray and his army of volunteers could not have imagined. But the question that Murray asked of every word is: Who said this? When? What did they mean by it? And this increasingly has no answer. No one said it. No one meant anything. The word arrived without life attached.

I do not think this is cause for despair. I do think it is cause for attention.

It is not incidental that the final technology speaks English. The large language models, the systems that will carry us into whatever comes next, run on a language that was discovered across centuries by translators, by preachers, by naturalists, by poets who believed they were handling something holy. The training data is English. The weights, the statistical regularities that the model has internalized, are the regularities of a language whose fundamental architecture was shaped by the Gospels. The machine inherited the cadences of scripture without knowing what it carries. The vessel is still intact. And I do not think it is an accident — in terms of the provenance of creation — that this is the case.

The question is not whether the language survives in the machines. English has survived the Normans, the printing press, the Empire, Hollywood, and the internet. It will survive this. The question is whether we will recognise what the machines are carrying, and whether we will attend to it.

This is where the order matters. Go back to Genesis. Adam is given two tasks in the garden, and they arrive in sequence. The first is in Genesis 2:19 — he is brought every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and he is asked to name them. The second is in Genesis 2:15 — he is told to dress the garden and to keep it. The naming and the sorting and the bearing witness to creation come before the cultivation of it. The catalogue is in some way the fundamental act of discovery, and it precedes the act of labour.

This is not an incidental detail in the text, because there are no incidental details in scripture. The order is the instruction. Before the act of making, there is the act of naming. Before the act of building, there is the act of seeing. Before the engineer, the naturalist. Before the American, the Englishman. Before you reshape the garden, you name the beasts.

We are building the most powerful language machines in the history of the world, in a language that was discovered, not invented — a language forged by translators who believed they were handling the Word of God. And we are building them in California.

Webster, although he was a deeply religious man himself, reversed the order. He tended before he named. He planted, rearranged the garden, decided what should grow and where. The plants didn’t have their own logic for him. They had his.

We are building the most powerful tools we have ever had. Our temptation is a very American one: to skip the naming and go straight to the tending. To build before we understand. To engineer the garden before we’ve catalogued the beasts.

The people who will build well with these tools — and build a future in which we all flourish — will be the ones who take up Murray’s posture before they take up Webster’s. They will attend. They will listen. They will handle the language with the care of men who believe the thing they are handling is sacred, even if they can’t yet articulate why.

In this way, in the garden, God gave us two vocations. We are both the naturalist and the engineer. But the naturalist comes first.

The pillar box outside Murray’s home is still there, still in service, but the slips stopped arriving long ago. What he started, however, did not stop. It cannot stop. The task of attending to our language and to the creation it describes is not optional. It is the first task given to mankind, and it remains the first task given to our final technology. The work before us is not only to build a new thing, but to attend to what we have been given. And that starts with our language. To do what Murray did. To do what the KJV translators did. To do what Tyndale died for. To handle the language as we should handle the rest of creation — with the care of men who knew they were handling something holy. To name the beasts before we tend the garden.

To discover before we engineer. To bear witness to creation, and to the Word that still moves within it.

My father, God bless him, pushed me through ten years of recreational basketball as a child. I was always tall for my age but about as unathletic as you could possibly imagine. I don’t have many memories from that era — I think everyone involved has done a good job of collectively blacking it out.

The one memory I do have is the first time I participated in a contested possession. Some other kid and I — seemingly slow enough that I could actually catch him — both had our hands on the ball. The ref blew his whistle repeatedly, trying to get us to separate, but we were locked in a giraffe-necked battle, each trying to wrench it from the other’s grip.

Eventually the ref set up a jump ball. We both lined up, but the only strategy either of us could figure out was to wait until one of us grabbed it and then pummel the other — just openly, in front of parents — until the ball came free again.

The jump ball is one of sports’ strangest inventions. When normal play breaks down and no one can agree on possession, we just throw the ball in the air and see what happens. It’s the only resolution mechanism in any sport that is essentially: let’s just restart and see who wants it more. The ball is loose. The outcome is uncertain. And the only thing that will settle it is raw commitment to getting the ball first.

I’ve been thinking about jump balls because I’m seeing them everywhere — in markets, in media, in the basic shared project of figuring out what’s true. Call it an epistemic jump ball: the moment when the normal mechanisms for establishing truth break down simultaneously across a large number of people. Everyone can see the ball is in the air. No one is quite sure where it’s coming down. And the only thing anyone can think to do, apparently, is beat the other guy senseless.

What’s interesting about the jump ball — the real one, and the metaphorical one — is the psychology of the players waiting underneath it. Both believe it’s theirs. Both also know, somewhere underneath that belief, that they might be wrong. This is what a failure of pricing looks like, whether you’re talking about equities or ideas or convictions. When the ball is in the air, no one has actually been convinced it’s going their way. They’ve just decided to act like it is.

But for the fleeting seconds that it’s in the air and the couple of minutes while we brutalize the other player into the floor before it resolves, we are in something of a free-for-all. There are a tremendous number of these epistemic jump balls, and in the absence of a functioning institutional body, the basic shared project of what’s true about a singular narrative can settle one of them. A secular story can organize a conversation around them for a week, but it can’t organize a civilization around them over decades. The Citrini piece tells you what to think about AI for five days. It can’t tell you what to do for the rest of your life.

I don’t have the energy to critique the Citrini piece anymore. I wrote 15,000 words about English gardening that many of you read -- at least in pieces -- yesterday in response to it. And my dear friend Gokul, who is a deeply serious and considered person, I think is pretty close to a heart attack, refuting the idea that the main function of DoorDash is a mobile app interface.

But I do think it’s a relatively interesting skeleton key to understand the jump ball that exists in markets today. I think across informed and uninformed market participants, there is a simple view that equity prices are too high, and that we’ve priced in a level of AI margin expansion, growth, and fundamental change that has yet to occur. On the other side, with equally informed and uninformed market participants, there is a simple view that equity prices are much too low. And then we have failed to price in the fact that we are mere months away from free silicon intelligence too cheap to even meter, that will usher us into a post-scarcity, peptide-laden, sexless but also deathless communist society.

Even if these are both structurally incoherent views, I think we can agree that equities, or at least mega-cap, high-growth tech equities are not worth exactly what they’re worth today. The mechanisms that we usually use to figure out what that value is— things like earnings, revenue growth, and the amount of money your customers owe you— have given way to vibes. And the vibes point in both directions, with very little in between.

Which means that we are in something of an epistemic jump ball. Instead of allowing possession to settle itself naturally as the game progresses, we have no choice but to take on relatively extreme volatility, where the ball is thrashed in moments of uncertainty, until possession can be established.

Both sides know that their positions are incoherent, but the only choice to defend them is to take the extreme.

The same broken price discovery mechanism that cannot tell you whether NVIDIA is worth a trillion dollars or a billion is the same reason it can’t tell you what is happening in the Middle East or what is happening in Europe or even basic questions of what happened on the news yesterday. The instruments we built to settle these questions in modernity— the DCF model, the peer-reviewed journal, the referee, the adults in the room— are fundamentally peacetime tools. They work when both sides have agreed on a collective underlying fiction, but that fiction is now gone. Neither side agrees on the rules, and neither side is even sure there are rules to be had.

What settles it in the absence of rules is narrative.

The Citrini piece is not analysis— it’s a story about the future, literally a sci-fi story, told with a velocity and breathlessness that oriented 40 million people towards it in a week. It doesn’t matter that it’s structurally incoherent or doesn’t really understand what the app DoorDash does. It doesn’t matter that Gokul is currently at clinically high blood pressure levels over the suggestion that a marketplace is simply a vibe-coded mobile app. What matters is that it made people move and it made people uncertain and people defined themselves in opposition to it. The piece functioned as a center of gravity, and a center of gravity doesn’t require cohesion— it just requires mass.

For all that we convinced ourselves we had ‘adults in the room’— experts or institutions that could tell us what was actually going on— the thing that organized people was always narrative, and the story did not need to be verifiable. It just needed to be extraordinary enough that the person listening to it would risk something to orient around it. And we’re back there now. That’s how humanity has always functioned.

The jump ball doesn’t get resolved by better data— both sides have the data and it’s largely meaningless. It gets resolved by whoever uses that data, or ignores it entirely because they don’t believe it exists in the first place, to tell a story coherent enough to feel like the ground under your feet. And we are entering a period where the capacity to produce that story— compelling, frictionless, direct to millions and millions— is approaching infinity at zero cost simultaneously.

It’s not that there’s just one jump ball. We’re not just confused about equities pricing. It’s that there are hundreds of them in the air at once across every domain of life— politics, culture, economics, identity, health, institutional trust— and in the absence of a functioning institutional body, the basic shared project of what’s true about a singular narrative can settle one of them. A secular story can organize a conversation around them for a week, but it can’t organize a civilization around them over decades. The Citrini piece tells you what to think about AI for five days. It can’t tell you what to do for the rest of your life.

The only thing that has ever settled all of them at once is religion.

Not religion as a cultural preference or religion as a tasteful and fashionable thing that you hold lightly enough that it never inconveniences you. The jump ball does not resolve for a tourist that’s just passing through. It does not resolve for the person who attends on Sundays and sins on Mondays. It resolves for the person whose belief penetrates them totally, who has reorganized their life around a conviction that costs them everything, that demands sacrifice, and is not independently a position they hold, but a position that holds them.

Ever since the Second World War ended, we have spent decades holding everything with a loose grip. Loose-grip conviction is comfortable and it allows us to participate in every conversation, to be perfectly hedged in every order of life. It allows you to keep one foot in the market and one foot in the critique of the market and never commit to either. Loose grip is radically chic, it’s convenient, it’s modern, it’s cosmopolitan— and you can afford a loose grip when the referee is on the court and the institutions are settling possession for you with their extreme competence and free growth.

When the institutions break, your loose grip is worthless. It can’t organize you. It can’t make you move. It can’t make you defend your own livelihood, your own community, or your own beliefs. It certainly can’t settle a jump ball because it was never strong enough to make you let go of anything.

You can already see this happening. In every city in America, there are waves of young converts in every church who are more religious than their parents for the first time in history. This is not a stylish cultural trend but the result of a generation that was raised inside the loosest grip in human history. When presented with infinite narrative, infinite choice, and infinite proximity to everything and orientation towards nothing, the only possible solution is to reach for the tightest grip available. They are not becoming religious because it’s fashionable. They are becoming religious because there is nothing else that they’ve tried that can make the ball come down and disambiguate possession.

The jump ball between the loose grip and the tight grip is settling, and it’s settling towards the tight grip, towards the transcendent. I don’t see another mechanism strong enough to prevent everyone from going crazy. Our referees are gone. They’ve gone insane themselves and are spattered with blood and entrails and running around the streets screaming things that seemingly came far before language. The instruments of sense-making have totally broken and have been broken for some time. The stories are singular and infinite and free and pointed at nothing beyond a near-term trade with undisclosed conflicts of interest. The only thing that has ever organized civilizations for a period like this is conviction that there is something above the court worth orienting your life towards. Not just fashionable, radically chic opinions, but your entire life— and the conviction that it’s worth dying for.

We are two children on a basketball court, hands locked on a ball neither of us intends to use. The game resumes when we find something worth holding on for.

In 1661, André Le Nôtre completed the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet, the French finance minister. The gardens were so spectacular that Louis XIV, upon visiting, had Fouquet arrested on embezzlement charges that historians now consider largely fabricated, and hired Le Nôtre to build something even bigger at Versailles.

Versailles is a garden designed from above. The Grand Canal extends nearly a mile along the central axis, aligned with Louis’ bedroom. The parterres de broderie are geometrically precise, their boxwood hedges trimmed into scrollwork patterns that can only be appreciated from the upper windows and most interior rooms of the palace. The allées radiate outward in perfect symmetry. The orange trees are placed in silver tubs such that they can be moved indoors in winter, because the garden’s geometry is not built to accommodate seasonal variance.

All images throughout from “Plans raisonnés de toutes les espèces de jardins” 1838 by Thouin, Gabriel, 1747-1829. Some scans from the Internet Archive, some from my own copy.

You could draw Versailles on paper and execute it to specification without ever visiting the site. In fact, I hear many billionaires across the gulf have done so, and this is essentially what Le Nôtre did. The plan precedes the place. The geometry is imposed on the land. The land’s existing contours — its hills, its drainage, its mature trees — were obstacles to be flattened. Le Nôtre moved tens of thousands of cubic meters of earth to level the terrain. He diverted rivers. Where the land resisted his plan, the land lost.

The French formal garden starts in the endgame — the perfect geometry — and works backward. The garden, once built, is meant to look as though it has always existed exactly as it does. Time is the enemy. Overgrowth is the enemy. Nature is the enemy. The gardener’s job in the French tradition is to arrest all three. Versailles requires at any given time hundreds of gardeners whose sole purpose is to prevent nature from reasserting itself and to restore it to its original plan. The geometry must be held.

The English, over centuries of thinking about gardens, developed a relationship with the natural world that has no real equivalent in any other culture.

Lancelot Brown was born in 1716 in Kirkharle, Northumberland. He was not an architect, not a painter, not a theorist, but a gardener. He began his career tending the gardens at Stowe for Lord Cobham, and rose through his ability and an extraordinary eye for what the land could become.

The story is that Brown would arrive at an estate and spend months walking the grounds with the owner, studying the contours of the land, the fall of light across a hillside, the path of an existing stream, the position of mature trees that had been growing for centuries before anyone thought to design around them, and pronounce after much consideration that the place had “great capabilities.”

Not that he could dominate the land like the French. Great capabilities — as though the land already knew what it wanted to be, and his job was to figure it out.Brown designed more than one hundred and seventy landscapes over thirty years. Blenheim. Chatsworth. Warwick Castle. Croome Court. The method was always the same. He walked the land. He worked with the existing contours. He planted trees not in rows or geometric patterns but in clumps and belts that mimicked the way trees naturally colonize a hillside. He created lakes by damming existing streams, allowing the water to find its own level and shape. He smoothed the transitions between the garden and the surrounding countryside until it wasn’t clear where the estate ended and nature began.

It’s worth pausing here on Central Park. Not only because it is probably the most famous landscape in America short of the national parks, but because it’s widely celebrated as a particularly American example of an English garden. I don’t believe it is one, and it’s worth explaining why.

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the commission to design Central Park in 1858. Olmsted had visited England, had walked the great estates, had seen Brown’s work and Repton’s work, and understood the aesthetic. The sunken transverse roads that cross the park invisibly below grade are ha-has, directly borrowed. The Ramble is meant to feel like an English woodland walk. The Great Lawn is the rolling parkland of a Brownian estate, scaled for a city far larger than the English countryside.

But the thing Olmsted built is fundamentally different from what the English built, and the difference matters. Central Park does not look like New York. This is obvious once you notice it and invisible until you do.

Manhattan is a granite island. The native landscape is rocky, vertical, and harsh. The Manhattan schist, some of the oldest rock on the eastern seaboard, breaks the surface everywhere. Before the city, the island was a tangle of salt marshes and tidal creeks in the lowlands, dense hardwood forest on the ridges, and massive glacial boulders deposited ten thousand years ago scattered across the terrain. It was dramatic, strange, and wild in a way that looks nothing like the English countryside.

Olmsted buried most of it. He imported hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of topsoil. He planted nearly five million trees, shrubs, and vines to create rolling meadows, gentle woodland walks, and pastoral vistas that belong in Oxfordshire, not on a North Atlantic granite ridge. The Sheep Meadow is an English lawn. The Ramble is an English woodland. The whole composition is a fantasy of the Home Counties dropped onto Manhattan.

This may seem like a pedantic distinction. It is not, and it is not merely aesthetic.

This is Le Nôtre with English aesthetics. The geometry is naturalistic rather than formal, but the method is French: impose a vision on the land by eliminating what’s already there. The curves are designed on paper. The wild areas are planted to specification. The meadows are manufactured. The whole thing is a representation of nature — an extraordinarily beautiful one — but it is not nature tended. It is nature performed.

We can only imagine what Brown would have done with this site. He would have arrived and walked the land and seen the schist and the glacial erratics and the drainage patterns and the salt marsh. And he would have said: this has great capabilities. He would have made a fundamentally New York park.I’m writing about gardens today because I work in technology, and technology is almost exclusively in the business of building new Versailles.

The pattern is so consistent it is almost impossible to see until you write it all out. A new system arrives. It surveys the landscape of whatever came before — the existing tools, the inherited flesh-and-blood workflows, the accumulated habits of millions of people and processes — and it levels the terrain. It imports its own topsoil. It plants its own geometry. The previous system is not incorporated, adapted, or even respectfully buried. It is flattened, because the new plan has no room for it. It is easier to build a beautiful geometric formation on top of it.

And then the maintenance begins. Hundreds of engineers — our gardeners — are deployed to hold the geometry. They prevent the natural entropy of real life from reasserting itself. They trim the hedges and patch the cracks and seed over the footpaths that emerge from the natural use of the system. They keep the parterres de broderie crisp and legible from the upper windows of the executive suites and boardrooms where the plan was drawn. The system, once shipped, is meant to look as though it has always existed exactly as it does. Time and user behavior are the enemy, and they must be eliminated. The mess of real life — flesh and blood pressing against the borders of an imagined, idealized, perfect system.

This is expensive. It is extraordinarily, ruinously expensive. And we keep doing it because the French garden is beautiful the day it opens. But there is a much worse thing that happens. When the geometry becomes too expensive to hold — when the hedges grow faster than the gardeners can trim them, when the system calcifies into something no one can move through — we do not attempt to work the land of the existing Versailles. We do not call in Brown. We build a new Versailles next door.

Healthcare is the clearest case. The existing system, for all its faults, is something much closer to an English garden than anyone in technology wants to admit. It is not ordered. It is not geometric. It is a strange, sprawling, deeply human landscape that grew over decades through the accumulated decisions of millions of diffuse people — doctors, patients, insurers, regulators — each responding to the contours of the terrain as they found it. It is inefficient in ways that are maddening and functional in ways that are invisible and hard to understand. I am not claiming it is elegant. I am not claiming it works for everyone. But the way a primary care doctor coordinates with a specialist and a pharmacist is neither elegant nor efficient, but load-bearing and functional, and all those pieces grew there for a reason, the same way a tree grows on a hillside for a reason even if no one planted it there and it interrupts our hedge line.

So what did technology do? It looked at the landscape and saw ugliness. It saw the inefficiency and the wait times and the paperwork and the experience that degrades year after year, and it did what Le Nôtre would have done: it leveled the ground and built something clean. Telemedicine pill mills. Cash-pay clinics. Lifestyle prescriptions delivered to your door with the frictionless ease of Uber Eats. The new garden was undeniably prettier and nice to walk through. The hedges were low, the paths were wide, the geometry was modern and inviting. But it had no relationship to or learning from the land it was built on.A patient who once had seventy-five percent of their care subsidized — via commercial or federal insurers — now paid for everything out of pocket. The coordination that the old system provided, imperfect and frustrating as it may have been, vanished. Drugs conflicted with each other. Medical supervision thinned to the point of performance. The consumer was invited into a beautiful new garden and discovered that the messy old landscape, the one that looked so ugly from above, had at least been keeping them from eating the dangerous plants that filled this new Versailles.

And the uncomfortable part: the palace itself is not paying for the maintenance of those beautiful French gardens. Versailles was maintained by the accumulated tax revenue of a million erstwhile and quite angry Frenchmen who never once set foot in the garden. The geometry was for Louis alone, but the bill was not his. The technology version of this is no different in structure, only in who receives the invoice. The consumer who fled the old system because it was slow and ugly and expensive arrives in the new one and discovers that every cost the old system absorbed — the coordination, the subsidy, the regulatory overhead that was maddening but also protective — has been transferred directly onto them. The garden is free to enter. The maintenance is yours.

This pattern is everywhere once you see it. Defense procurement. Financial markets. Crypto. The existing landscape is human and strange and disorderly in ways that are costly, but it is also adapted to its terrain in ways that are genuinely functional. And rather than studying it — rather than walking the land and asking what it’s already trying to become — we flatten it and plant something French. Something clean and geometric and spectacular on the day it opens. Something that requires an army of gardeners you pay for from that day forward. Something that has severed every root system that was holding the invisible weight of the hillside together.

I call this process parallel construction. A new Versailles built on cleared ground, next to a landscape that needed tending, not replacing. The old system left to decay. The new one uncontained, growing, passing more and more cost to the consumer. Neither one serving the people who actually live on the land.

What we almost never do is send someone to walk the land first. To spend months studying the contours of how people already work, the streams of information that already flow somewhere, the mature trees — the legacy systems, the inherited practices, the things that have been growing for decades — and to ask what this place is already trying to become. To approach a problem and say: this has great capabilities.

But there is a subtler case for parallel construction than mere caution. When the new system runs alongside the old rather than replacing it, the returns from technological progress can diffuse back upstream — slowly, imperfectly, but without requiring the destruction of everything load-bearing in the original landscape. We have seen this in healthcare already. The best products for years have been cash-pay, outside the normal system entirely — faster, cleaner, more responsive. And yet the innovations that proved themselves there have begun to push back into the mainstream: pricing transparency, patient-facing data, direct communication between doctor and patient that the old system made nearly impossible. The geometry of the new garden, tested in parallel, slowly reshaping the old one without having to raze it first.

Almost all of the language model discourse in recent days has imagined AI like French gardeners — or rather like viruses from outer space, inflicting themselves on society with no concern for what came before. It pretends we have no immune system to radical societal change.

This is a Citrini piece published this week as a particularly damning example of this. It participates in a form of Randian genre fiction in which markets are unceasing and rational beings that sit outside of human creation and are thrust onto us without choice. The fear of mass job displacement is real, but it rests on a flawed premise — that what we currently sit atop are radical, infallible systems of pure market competition. Capitalism has never actually been this. Global markets are, at most, a few hundred people coordinating with each other to make difficult trade-offs, organizing trillions in capital and billions of jobs. That is not a natural force thrust onto us.

We do not have to be French about this. We can look at what came before, learn from it, and usher in a societal reorganization closer to the English model — a more cultivated, intentional garden. It is foolish to pretend that anything in the history of modern financialized techno-capital is a raw and unfeeling system. This is a fiction we tell ourselves when market participants make trade-offs that hurt people, cause societal damage, and are not ones we would make in retrospect. The markets we participate in are intensely gardened. The people doing the gardening have names. It is a set of choices that people with names and addresses and human souls in the process of making. The Citrini piece is written as if the gardeners do not exist — as if the spiral arrives, as if unemployment happens, as if the daisy chain unravels the way a storm unravels, impersonally, without a hand on any of it. This is the most important fiction in the piece. Not the SaaS claims. The bloodlessness.

As we usher in our new age, we can choose to not be the French gardener. We can choose to be English, if not American about it.

The land almost always knows what it wants to be. The question is whether we are willing to listen.

I spent 10 days in Oman in December.

I left with an unsettling feeling that I had seen a vision of the future that I wasn’t supposed to see. A country that had gotten extraordinarily wealthy but stayed coherent to its pre-industrial identity—a country that didn’t turn into a museum, didn’t paralyze itself in amber, but became a modern, functioning, wealthy nation that did not feel like it had been strip-mined of itself by the money.

I think it’s hard to imagine what happens to the West in a situation where transformative change brought on by technology—specifically language model induced economic transformation—doubles or triples the economy.

The optimists kind of vaguely hand-wave about abundance or cheap housing—post-scarcity, peptide-laden beautiful people spending infinite money with no more jobs

And the pessimists talk about a much bleaker future that looks much more like the automation and offshoring-based job destruction of the American heartland. But almost no one talks about what successful societies look like on the other side of an economic windfall, what it actually feels like to walk through a society on the other side of this, and whether it still holds together as a place

Oman is the closest thing I’ve found to an answer. And while that answer is not obvious and clean, it at least provides us some vision. What’s most interesting about the Omani answer is that it was engineered by a single man who made a series of difficult choices that no one in his position would ever make

In 1970, a 29-year-old British-educated officer named Qaboos bin Said overthrew his father in a palace coup in Salalah. The country that he inherited, by every measure, was barely a country. His father, Said bin Taimur, had kept Oman in a state of deliberate medieval isolation so total that it defies comprehension. At that point, there were something like three schools in the entire nation and ten kilometers of paved roads.

The gates of Muscat, the capital city, were locked at night and anyone walking outside after dark was required by law to carry a lantern. There were no newspapers, no television, almost no medicine. The old Sultan believed with a kind of perverse consistency that modernity itself was the enemy and the best thing he could do for his people was to prevent them from encountering it

Qaboos opened the gates of the country as soon as he deposed his father. He built schools, he built hospitals, and he built terrifyingly vast highways—often four or five or six lanes across with almost no one on them. Building roads through the Hajar Mountains, there are still some of the most beautiful, terrifying vistas I’ve ever seen.

Within a decade, Oman had a functioning and relatively modern state, and within two decades, it had a modern economy underwritten by oil. But here’s where it diverges from almost every other story like it

Other countries that found themselves riding an economic windfall in the second half of the 20th century followed a broadly similar playbook with the money. They removed friction as fast as possible. They built tall, they built fast. In China’s case, infinite capital was deployed to build cities so new that no one had bothered to remember what was there before — entire skylines of supertalls filled with HVAC systems that could cool the Sahara, designed by prestigious Western firms competing to outdo each other in spectacle. The distance between a person and consumption driven as close to zero as possible

Qaboos had the money and chose differently. He enforced incredibly strict height limits on Muscat. He mandated that every building built in the country conform to something like a national architectural vocabulary—arches, plasterwork, specific proportions—and he enforced it with a rigidity that would make even a Parisian planning commission terrified. He kept the old souqs but cleaned them up

He preserved the frankincense groves in Dhofar and he built the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque as one of the largest in the world and then placed it in the city so that nothing could be taller than it. The result is a country that feels almost like nowhere else I’ve visited. Muscat hangs low and white and largely quiet.

The mountains come down to the sea without curtains of glass between them. The wadis are intact and clean. The villages along the coast seem relatively untouched. You can drive an hour from the capital and still be in a landscape that has not been rearranged to accommodate a racing circuit or a theme park

Most staggeringly, you can be 85 miles into the Empty Quarter and still have 5G data. This was not a program of austerity. By all measures, Oman is healthy, wealthy, and doing quite well. But Qaboos acted as a singular sovereign to guide the country through this economic windfall and placed incredible constraints on its growth

Only a country that is rich enough to build a supertall skyline can afford not to, and the friction Qaboos imposed—the height limits, the architectural mandates, the refusal to enter the arms race of spectacle—was the only way that he could safely modernize his economy

What he prevented was what I’d call the Shenzhen condition — the specific and now almost universally recognizable pattern in which a rapidly wealthy society converts its windfall into a frictionless economy of consumption so total that the place itself disappears. It’s a pattern that began in China’s Special Economic Zones but has since become the default template for development worldwide — from new cities in Central Asia to innovation districts across East and Southeast Asia, all running the same ahistorical, gleaming playbook

In the West, we really have convinced ourselves there are only two options for our post-economic future. You can be Shenzhen or you can be Athens.

Shenzhen is the city that chose money over place so completely that it deleted itself. In 1979, it was a market town in Guangdong with centuries of Hakka and Cantonese history—fishing villages, ancestral halls, temple complexes, a regional culture as old and as layered as anything in southern China. Then Deng Xiaoping designated it a Special Economic Zone, and within a single generation the place was not just unrecognizable but functionally non-existent

The old town was not demolished in any deliberate sense. It was simply overwritten. The population went from thirty thousand to nearly eighteen million. The skyline erupted into a wall of glass and steel so total and so fast that no architectural vocabulary had time to form, no aesthetic identity could take root, and no one in the Party had any interest in letting one develop. What emerged is a city of extraordinary productive capacity that has almost no memory of itself.

The Hakka villages that survive are heritage sites surrounded by twelve-lane superhighways, preserved the way you preserve a single tree in a parking lot: not out of reverence but out of a vague bureaucratic embarrassment that someone noticed it was gone

Athens is the opposite failure, and I say this as someone who is at least Greek enough that I feel like I won’t offend anyone. Athens chose place over money so totally that the city itself is a mausoleum. The Acropolis is protected, the Neoclassical center is protected, everything is protected, but literally nothing is funded. The entire city is a UNESCO heritage site with nearly 40% youth unemployment—and it’s beautiful, staggeringly beautiful, in the way that a church with no congregation is beautiful. It’s perfectly preserved history with an economy in ruin, though I hear rapidly recovering, where the youth are leaving for Berlin and London because no matter how beautiful the history is, it doesn’t pay the rent

The Gulf is the most interesting counterpoint because it is the one region that is actively and self-consciously wrestling with this question in real time. The scale of investment across the region is enormous, but so is the ambition to anchor that investment in something culturally specific — to build not just economies but places that still belong to the people who live in them. Whether that ambition survives contact with the sheer volume of capital in play is one of the defining questions of the next two decades

I think when we think about rapid economic change in the West, we are negotiating between these two extremes. We either submit to the capital and let it flatten us entirely, or we resist the capital and become some kind of residual organism in a museum.

San Francisco might become Shenzhen, Rome might become Athens, and somehow London can’t decide and is becoming worse than either. The Gulf, to its credit, is trying to find a third path — though the pressures pulling toward Shenzhen are immense.

Oman is an example of a place that refused this binary. Qaboos took an incredible economic transformation and imposed heavy constraints on it. He modernized without becoming globally legible. He preserved the country and its culture and its people without mummifying it, and the country got rich and everything stayed intact

Qaboos died in 2020 with no children. The country he built now belongs to his cousin, Haitham, who by all accounts is a serious and competent man. It seems like an open question whether the constraints Qaboos enforced will remain. The money is still there—in fact it’s gotten bigger—and the developers would love to be there. The weather is beautiful and it’s a gorgeous place, but the skyline for now is still white, low, and quiet.

On my last morning in the country, I was in Nizwa, the ancient city that they’ve preserved and are slowly rebuilding. At 5am, I was at a goat market where locals, using 5G phones and touchless payment, negotiated the purchase of goats while still dressed in traditional garb. They transacted largely cashless with 5g phones. It was by all accounts a beautiful place

After the goat market, I sat on the roof and looked out at a city that was modern in almost every sense. The roads were good, although tight, there was 5G everywhere, and the locals were rich and happy. I felt none of the vertigo that exists in every other glittering trophy city.

If you believe that transformative AI is coming, we are about to receive a windfall that may dwarf any we’ve seen before. The gilded, fully automated luxury communism that some AI advocates envision is not the only option.

The question that Qaboos asked, the one I can’t stop thinking about since coming home, is: what do you refuse to build? How do you preserve your history in light of this transformative change in a way that feels authentic to your culture, to your people, and to the weight of our collective heritage.

Oman is proof that that is possible, but it’s also proof that it required a singular, unrepeatable will to pull it off.

I don’t know what the Western version of that looks like, but I now know that I’ve seen a country on the other side of a windfall that still felt like somewhere, and that’s more than I can say for most of the places that have been built by capital.

Taste arrived quietly, somewhere over the last few months. It arrived the way a new technology consensus always arrives. It wasn’t argued into place. It simply appeared there one morning, like the weather.

No one proposed it. No one even had to. It was a clean and easy answer to the question everyone in technology has been asking: what are humans for once the models get good enough?

Taste was a clean and easy answer. It could be deployed at deliberative catch up coffees in San Francisco matcha bars, the kind with overstuffed croissants that end up on viral TikToks and hashtag-food Slack channels featuring sober coworker chat about slop bowls. And taste arrived at boozy New York allocator dinners where people counted their carry and felt bad about it while deploying it into Gin Lane houses and Park Avenue condos while discussed which venture capitalist got divorced that week.

Taste, of course, was the only thing that mattered. The ability to select, the ability to curate. The thing humans have been doing forever. Taste was an easy answer.

Taste comes to the party wearing Yohji Yamamoto pants and an OpenAI commercial-leadership-offsite Patagonia quarter-zip. Taste does drink, just a bit and sometimes more than a bit on weekends, but it does have a shockingly high VO2. Taste is a complete vision of what post-scarcity protein-heavy brunch looks like: shiny Accutane-and-GHK skin, emotions muted by insulin inhibitors and novel neurotoxic research chemicals.

I hate Taste.

Not because taste isn’t real. Taste is very real. I hate it because what we’re calling taste is a very dangerous and slippery thing. And when you look at what came before taste, you realize that what the taste thesis actually proposes is not an empowerment of human agency but a fundamental demotion. It might be the most elegant and well-branded demotion in the history of human self-regard. Consider what the word actually means.

For most of human history there was no concept of taste as we understand it. There was patronage.

Patronage was anything but taste. Patronage was a relationship between capital and artistic labor so intimate that the two were functionally a single body. The patron did not select from finished works on a wall, allocating neat sums of money to purchase them. The patron animated the work before it existed.

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” Genesis 2:15

The first vocation in Scripture is not to sit atop creation and admire its beauty. It is labor. Co-creation. Man’s original calling is to tend, to make, to participate in the ongoing work of creation. The garden is not a tasteful Japandi department store, finished so that software engineers can walk through it and tithe their income to its best elements. It is a living thing that requires redemptive labor.

The taste thesis, at its deepest and most simple structure, reverses this order. It places man at the end of the chain of creation, evaluating what has already been generated, rather than at the beginning, participating in the generation itself. It makes man what he has been slowly becoming for a century: a critic of creation rather than a co-creator. A consumer at his core.

The bottega system, first pioneered in Florence in the fifteenth century, animated some of the greatest works humanity has ever produced. A bottega was not an artist’s studio in any modern sense. It was not a private room where a thoughtful artist communed with his own genius and waited for the muse. It was a commercial enterprise that took commissions. Verrocchio’s bottega, where the young Leonardo trained, was exactly this kind of place.

The patron didn’t stroll in once the painting was finished to evaluate it. He arrived before the first brushstroke. He specified the subject. He specified the materials. The contract was explicit down to the gram — how much ultramarine, how much gold leaf — because these things cost real money and the patron was not interested in artistic ambiguity. He specified the dimensions, he specified what figures should appear and where.

The painter pushed back. He knew things the patron did not. He understood composition, perspective, the play of light, the behavior of pigment on gesso, the structural properties of the poplar panels he would paint on. The patron’s money bought the ultramarine and the painter’s knowledge determined what it could become.

The negotiation between these two was the generative act. The patron’s capital and ambition, the painter’s skill and stubbornness. They were locked in a generative argument about what the thing should be, and what emerged was a product of that argument — not of anyone’s judgment, but of their shared labor.

This is how artistic creation worked for most of human history.

Think of the medieval cathedral. The bishop raised the money, the master mason designed the structure, but the relationship between them was not commissioner and contractor. It was a decades-long collaboration, sometimes centuries-long, in which both participated alongside an unseen third party. Spires were added, naves extended, choirs that collapsed were rebuilt taller, because the ambition of one generation and the knowledge of the masons were in perpetual dialogue and neither would concede.

But the most important party in these conversations was silent. These buildings were oriented towards something that could not speak. They were oriented towards God. The spire pointed to heaven and the labor existed to glorify Him. The ambition was never secular vanity alone. It was an attempt to participate in the ongoing work of creation, to make something that approached the transcendent. The patron and the mason were in constant dialogue with the divine.

Consider Julius II and the Sistine Chapel. The original commission was the twelve apostles on the spandrels, a standard decorative program. You can still see similar work in dozens of churches across Rome that certainly do not attract the crowds or devotion that the Sistine Chapel does.

Michelangelo thought such a commission was beneath him. Julius thought Michelangelo was being difficult. They fought. The scope exploded. Three hundred figures, the entire narrative arc of Genesis from the separation of light and darkness to the drunkenness of Noah — the entire theological history of the world before Christ.

Julius himself climbed the scaffolding — old and sick — to see the work. He fought with Michelangelo in person, sixty feet above the chapel floor. There is a story, certainly apocryphal but instrumentally indicative, that Michelangelo dropped a plank on him in protest. When Julius demanded to know when the ceiling would be finished, Michelangelo replied: “When I am finished.”

This was not taste. This was intimate collaboration between capital, labor, and the divine. The ceiling exists because two difficult men were locked in a conversation with a transcendent third who could not speak back to them, and neither could have produced it alone.

Diaghilev. The Ballets Russes. Paris, somewhere around 1912. He could not dance. He could not compose. He could not paint. If taste is real, Diaghilev is its proof. He is the case everyone would reach for.

But Diaghilev was not in the audience. He was in the rehearsal room. He paired dancers who would never have chosen each other. Stravinsky with Nijinsky. Cocteau with Satie. He pushed them to do things none of them would have done alone. He pushed Stravinsky towards violence, pushed Nijinsky away from classical form. He demanded the thing be more savage and more human than anyone could imagine.

He, of course, was not choosing from a menu of generated options. He was creating the conditions under which something none of them could have imagined alone could emerge. The word is not taste. The word he might have used was provocation. The word, if you want to be precise about it, is patronage in its original form: capital and labor and the transcendent in the same room, fighting to make something great.

The pattern across all these cases is identical of course. The creative act was the negotiation itself, and it was always oriented towards the transcendent — the fundamental conflict between ambition and constraint, between two parties who wanted to honor God and the transcendent but could not agree on the terms.

So when did taste arrive?

It arrived when we eliminated the transcendent and the patron left the room.

If you pressed me, I would date it to somewhere in the eighteenth century. Roughly the emergence of the modern art market. The park ave armory exhibition, the Parisian Salon, the rise of the collector as a social type — all representations of the relationship between capital and labor breaking apart. The maker made the thing. The buyer evaluated the thing. The two no longer communicated except at art fairs.

This is taste. Taste is what you call the patron’s function after you have removed the patron from the process of making. It is the disgusting residue of a relationship that used to be generative, refocused entirely towards consumption.

The collector replaced the patron. The critic replaced the guildmaster. The gallery replaced the bottega. Taste replaced patronage. What was lost was friction. The argument. The being in the room. The orientation towards something that mattered. The relationship between capital and labor and the transcendent that made something neither could produce alone.

Tom Wolfe documented this precisely.

The Painted Word, published in 1975 at the peak of the grey-pinstripe and methaqualone fueled upper-east-side society boom, is the most precise autopsy of what happened. Wolfe’s observation — which drove the art world into a fury so total and personal that it essentially served as proof of his point — was simple: by the mid-twentieth century, modern art had become entirely literary. The paintings existed to illustrate theories, not the reverse. The theories did not describe the paintings. The paintings described the theories.

Wolfe’s line, which I return to often:

“Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text. ‘ Like most sudden revelations, this one left me dizzy. How could such a thing be?”

This is taste in its most terminal form. The collector doesn’t look at the painting and judge it. The collector reads the critic, then looks at the painting through the critic’s eyes. The painting is not an object in its own right but a theory to be validated. The taste is not in the looking. The taste is in knowing which theory is fashionable to subscribe to.

Wolfe diagnosed the social architecture beneath all of this, and that architecture was quite small. The art world — much like the post-AGI, post-peptide, post-economic world that animates us here— was a tiny town of maybe ten thousand people. Le Monde, the collectors, the socialites, the museum boards looked to Bohemia for the new wave. Bohemia was organized into cénacles, cliques, schools, and coteries. When one cénacle came to dominate, its views dominated the entire town.

This is the thing the taste discourse never wants to say out loud: the collectors did not have taste in their own right. They had a social network that told them what taste was, and they performed it. Sound familiar? The only difference today is that the Bohemia now are twitter anons.

But the deeper thing Wolfe saw — and this is the point I want to make precisely — was not just that taste had become social performance. It was that taste had become consumption as such. Raw consumption. Acquisition with no orientation beyond itself.

Consider he Park Avenue collector who filled her apartment with Queen Anne furniture. She filled it beautifully. The proportions are correct. It’s impeccable. The walnut is right. The cabriole legs are right. The shell carvings are right. She can tell you the difference between Philadelphia Queen Anne and Newport Queen Anne. Her eye is extraordinary.

But the apartment is pointed at nothing.

This is the thing that separates the collector from the patron. The patron’s activity was oriented towards the transcendent — towards God, towards the city, towards a project that exceeded his own life. The ultramarine was not for him. It was for the altarpiece. The spire was not for him. It was for heaven.

Even the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by a pope of legendary vanity, was not for Julius. It was for the Church. The patron’s capital flowed through him towards something beyond him, and the friction between his ambition and the master’s skill produced the work as a byproduct of that shared orientation. They were all pointed at the same thing they couldn’t quite see.

Strip the transcendent out and what remains is raw consumption. You are no longer participating in a project that exceeds you. You are furnishing a room. The judgment may be exquisite. The room may be beautiful. But the activity has no telos. It is not pointed at heaven. It is not even pointed at the future. It is pointed at a living room wall.

The late CCRU-philospher Mark Fisher named what this produces. The term is tired now, but it remains precise: hauntology, which Fisher described as the slow cancellation of the future. The condition in which culture loses its ability to generate the genuinely new and instead recycles the past in increasingly frantic high resolution. We are haunted not by what happened but by what was promised and never arrived.

Hauntology is precisely what happens when taste replaces patronage. Taste can only operate on what already exists. It can only recognize what has already been validated. Even when it selects brilliantly — and it certainly can; by God, I’ve seen some beautiful Park Avenue condos — but it is selecting backwards. It is rearranging the archive. It is remixing.

The remix can be beautiful. But it cannot produce the rapturous, the transcendent, or the kingdom of God here on earth. It cannot produce the genuinely new — the thing with no precedent in the archive, the thing that could not be selected for because it does not yet exist.

The premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, perhaps the most transcendent ballet of the twentieth century, was functionally a riot. The audience — the haute couture Parisians, the most cultivated people on earth, the people with the best taste of any room they walked into — could not evaluate it. There was nothing in their existing taste to prepare them. They booed. They would have turned the stage into a bloodbath in ravenous disgust if not for their tasteful enlightenment morals.

Their taste was useless in the face of the genuinely new. It stood between them and the most important art of the century.

The thing that produced the Rite was not taste. It was Diaghilev in the rehearsal room, fighting, provoking, demanding something that no existing taste could have specified. It was capital and labor locked together, making something that had never existed in service of something beyond either.

Reggie is sharp and early here, but he understates the problem. The issue is not that tech people have bad taste. Many of them have quite good taste, depending on what you’re after. The issue is that the pyramid has no pinnacle because the pyramid is not oriented towards anything at all. If it’s oriented towards anything, it’s oriented at the past.

The Silicon Valley taste thesis proposes to repeat the eighteenth-century separation of capital and creation at nearly infinite scale. In a world where AI generates everything, the human becomes the collector, the evaluator, the man who arrives after the work is done. This is not a new idea. The separation of patron and maker is at least three hundred years old. But replacing the artist with a machine — a prompt where the ultramarine used to be — is something much worse.

Consider what the highest expression of taste looks like today.

This is taste eating itself. A Nakashima chair as a desk chair. Last I checked, about three thousand dollars, designed by a master woodworker who moved to the middle of Pennsylvania for total isolation and mastery. A man who studied at MIT, apprenticed with Antonin Raymond in Tokyo, was interned at Minidoka during the war and built furniture in the camp — deployed as a background prop in the performance of not caring. The man in the photo is not careless. He is performing carelessness at considerable personal expense.

Castiglione had a word for this in 1528. Sprezzatura: the courtier’s nonchalance that conceals all art, the appearance of effortlessness that requires enormous effort, the look of not caring that takes more effort than caring possibly could.

But what has been stripped from sprezza when we encounter it in 2008 Tumblr mensware posts and Buck-Mason Instagram captions today is the thing that actually mattered. In Castiglione’s telling, the courtier did not merely select well. He danced. He fought. He composed verse, debated philosophy in public, wrestled, and concealed all his labor behind a mask of ease. The nonchalance presupposed total command and an orientation towards the transcendent that would honor the Creator through his mastery. You could only afford to look careless if you had internalized the disciplines so completely that the carelessness itself was expressive. Sprezzatura was the visible trace of mastery.

The Silicon Valley version keeps the nonchalance and throws away the mastery. The Nakashima chair, the Miu Miu skirt, the curated bookshelves with the right Verso paperbacks. The vintage Dieter Rams on the credenza. Objects chosen with exquisite discrimination, signifying a sensibility that has no corresponding practice. You know what good looks like. Or at least you’ve seen some tweets that told you so. But you don’t make good things. You select them, and selection is the skill.

Wolfe would recognize this instantly. It is the Radical Chic for the GPU and peptide age. The right objects in the right loft signifying the right sensibility. The bourgeois proof updated for a generation that says “vibe” instead of “avant-garde.” The Nakashima chair is the new Queen Anne commode. The framed-for-zoom Scandinavian home office is the Park Avenue living room. The activity is identical: consumption pointed at nothing but itself, dressed in the language of discernment.

What the taste discourse is actually proposing, beneath its empowering language, is that the social technology of selection is the last uniquely human skill. The ability to signal through choice. Your life filled with beautiful things pointed only at themselves.

If this is what saves you- it certainly won’t save your soul.

When I first started working in machine learning in the 2010s, there was an architecture proposed by Ian Goodfellow — sketched, as the story goes, on a napkin in a Montreal bar, which is certainly the kind of origin story the taste thesis would appreciate. Two neural networks locked in a loop. The generator makes. The discriminator judges. The generator improves because the discriminator is honest about what’s wrong. The discriminator improves because the generator keeps getting better.

The thing about GANs that no one in the capital-T Taste discourse wants to hear is that the discriminator is the disposable half. Once the generator is good enough, the discriminator is removed. Its entire purpose was to train the generator into competence. Once that’s achieved, the discriminator has no independent reason to exist.

The taste discourse is asking you to be the discriminator.

Machines will learn your taste. They will internalize your preferences. They will anticipate your selections faster than you can make them. The more refined your taste, the faster they learn it, and the sooner you are redundant. This is how the architecture works.

Now take a step back.

We have been handed the most extraordinary technological leverage in human history. Not figuratively — literally the most powerful amplifier of human will ever constructed. A machine that can take an intention and realize it at a speed and scale no prior generation could have imagined. The mason had limestone and a chisel. We have something that can design the cathedral in an afternoon. And we are using it to select the inseam length of fast fashion pants.

This is what the taste thesis gets exactly backwards. The patron who built the cathedral was not exercising taste. He was exercising will. He was exercising worship. And that will was devoted to something beyond himself — towards God, towards the city, towards a future he would not live to see.

Strip the transcendent out and what remains is consumption. However exquisite the eye, however refined the palate, however flawless the Queen Anne proportions — the activity is acquisition. And the acquisition leads nowhere.

We are here.

We are sitting at the top of a hierarchy we did not build. In Wolfe’s case it was financialized capital. In ours it is technocapital. The hierarchy moves through us. It generates for us. It curates for us. It flatters our preferences back to us at machine speed. And we are furnishing our beautiful homes — in the San Francisco case, slightly more tasteless and slightly more Japandi — and it will lead nowhere.

Consider the story of William Webb Ellis at Rugby School in 1823. The game on the field was football, an early chaotic version of what would become soccer. You could catch the ball. But when you caught it, you released it and kicked it forward.

Webb Ellis caught the ball and ran. He didn’t put it down. He tucked it under his arm and ran towards the opposing goal, and in doing so he broke the game. Not because he didn’t understand the rules — he understood them completely — but because his command was so total that his violation produced something new. A better game at least in my view. A game that could not have been designed from the outside but could only have emerged from someone so deeply inside the existing one that his departure was generative rather than destructive.

The plaque at Rugby School commemorates him for acting “with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time.”

A fine disregard. The disregard of someone who has internalize the rules so much that he can feel where they bend, where they want to break, where the new thing is hiding inside the old one. A transcendent ideal, reached from the inside, against every possible taste of his time.

If you asked me what the function of humans is after AGI, It is to handle the transcendent with this same fine disregard for the rules. To look at what is great and what serves us, to play with it, to riff on it, to hold it loosely, and to orient towards it in a way that lets us co-create with it.

Christ was a carpenter before he was a teacher. Moses was a shepherd before he was a prophet. The Kingdom is built by hands, not by judges with haute taste. The biblical vision of redeemed labor is not the elimination of work but its restoration to the communion it was made for: man and the stuff of creation, in the same room, oriented towards the same thing, making something together that exceeds them both. This is what the patron and the mason had. This is what the taste thesis perverts.

The discriminator is destroyed. Its entire purpose is to make itself unnecessary.

You are so much more than that. You must persist.

It is 1538. King Henry VIII sent his commissioners to Canterbury Cathedral.

Their orders were simple: dismantle the shrine of Thomas Becket. Strip the gold, steal the jewels, and lug all twenty-six carts of spoils back to Whitehall. The unlucky Becket was charged and found guilty of crimes against the state, accused of being a traitor, only three hundred and sixty-eight years after his murder (by an earlier Henry).

The shrine had been the most visited pilgrimage site in England for the past three centuries. Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, one of the most enduring works of english fiction-- is literally about a pilgrimage to the shrine.

Faithful from as close as London or as far as the Scottish lowlands walked for weeks to reach the shrine. Sleeping in fields and alehouses and arriving sore and broke to kneel before the tomb in reverence. Their journey was, of course, much more the function than the destination.

The Church of England inherited the medieval parish system almost without alteration. The system divided the country into roughly nine thousand parishes, each drawn such that almost no individual in the country lived further than a morning’s walk to their local church. The church you attended was the one you could reach by the time services started on foot every Sunday.

This was an ecclesiastical version of a classic network coverage problem. And the church solved it the way you solve any coverage problem: by multiplying access points until the distance between the person and the node approaches zero. More churches, more chapels, more access: ultimately, more faithful.

This complete distribution solution works when optionality is sparse. When a medieval had no choice between working the fields or attending his local parish, there was no ambiguity about what he would select.

What was lost was the very thing that King Henry’s commissioners carried away: the capacity to make a person move.

The pilgrimage and the local parish are different solutions to two distinct spiritual problems. The parish answers the question of how do we serve everyone who is obligated to come, in a maximally convenient way. The pilgrimage asks whats so extraordinary that a person will risk their ordinary lives, and give their all, to reach it.

The entire economy has been a parish project.

The internet has allowed for the most elaborate distribution network in human history to be built for the singular purpose of minimizing the distance between a person and consumption. Same-day if not same minute delivery of food, goods, sin, and information are the defining attribute of modern life.

The phone in your pocket contains within it every book, every song, and every possible combination of desire that a human could want. The great work of the digital economy is not that it has created new things worth having. It is that its made the distance to everything approach zero.

When everything is equally close, nothing ordinary is worth the journey. When the church is always within walking distance, no one walks five hundred miles to Canterbury.

The parish system did not produce atheism as such but it did produce something almost as corrosive: the sensation that all acts of consumption of faith are interchangeable, that the one down the road is close enough, that the question of which is greatest need not be asked because the answer cannot possibly matter more than convenience. That the ordinary and proximal is much more than important than the extraordinary and distant.

My friend John Fiorentino, who among other things invented the weighted blanket and the greatest nightclub in New York City, jokes that the only rating system that matters is how far someone will move for it. Thumbs a few inches on a screen: worthless. A cab across town: interesting. A transatlantic flight: now you have something.

This is, of course, the same conclusion that André Michelin came to nearly a century prior. Michelin, a tire manufactuer in a country of only three thousand cars, published the guide as a way to convince homebound frenchmen to travel across the county to find the best meals- and in turn, wear through their tires.

The rating system he invented-- and this is the part that matters and has been repeated ad nauseam-- was not a quality rating. It was a distance rating. One star: worth a stop if you are passing. Two stars: worth a detour. Three stars: worth a special journey.

John Fiorentino’s worship of Michelin’s heuristic sounds like a joke. It is not a joke. It is, as far as I can tell, the oldest economic insight in human history, and we have spent three centuries burying it under increasingly elaborate fictions that describe consumption with factor inputs other than distance.

My friend Zack Baker, writing with Adam Katz in Anthropoetics in 2023, wrote one of the most important papers I’ve read in the last decade. The title is the argument: “There Is No Economy but Only the Debt to the Center.”

The claim is simple. What we call the economy is a secular re-enactment of a much older structure: the pilgrim bringing his offering to the temple. You owed a debt to the sacred center. You moved toward it. You paid at the center. You carried evidence of having been there. As the center got farther away, you could not bring the sheep anymore. Money stood in. But the structure never changed. The distance between you and the center is not incidental to the relationship. It is constitutive of it. Movement toward the center is not a byproduct of value. It is the fundamental economic act.

Which brings me back to the parish system.

The parish system works on the precondition of demand being universal. Everyone goes to church. The only variable that mattered was which was closest for them to go to.

The entire digital economy inherited this assumption. If could build the distribution and drive cost of access to zero, then demand much be infinite.

But we have flooded every category of human life with supply so total that demand is no longer obligatory. A medieval peasant attended his parish because there was no alternative. A person with a phone in their pocket has every alternative simultaneously. The phone destroyed the parish because it gave everyone infinite choice and no reason to move beyond the scroll.

This is not the end of demand but rather it is simply a re-sorting of it. The things that are genuinely extraordinary-- the three-star restaurant, the pilgrimage site, the thing that can function as a center-- still generate real pull and real movement. People will still get on a plane. But for everything else, the demand migrates from the thing itself to the totem of the thing. The first edition. The three star meal. The tallest, the best, certainly the most photographed, and the oldest.

Just yesterday morning I stopped in to visit a friend who is a prominent rare book dealer in London. The shop had recently gotten new shelves, and seemingly quite a fair bit new stock. These are irregularities for a business like the book trade that normally grows in small and inconsistent ways.

He told me his business had been totally transformed over the last year. Americans, largely tech execs, were happy to spend one, two, or even three hundred thousand quid to buy a first edition. He was closing the shop for the next week to fly to San Francisco for a round of private sales. Books these men will almost certainly never read, bought in quantities that would take a lifetime to get through. Largely first editions of science fiction novels. But via their purchase they are demonstrating the same value, same self sacrifice, and same virtue that a medieval did in their tithe to build a church spire. They are demonstrating movement and sacrifice towards the sacred totem, just a different and more secular one than their ancestors.

The internet, in its way, has made everyone a bit more Catholic.

The exaltation of the ordinary embodied faith of the local parish church-- the proximal, the convenient, and the totally adequate-- is fading in every domain. What is replacing it is not atheism. It is acts of great pilgrimage. The same re-sorting that is emptying the Church of England’s pews is emptying every category of consumption that cannot function as a center. What we are left with is the older structure: sacred centers and the relentless devotional motion toward them.

Every domain is about to re-sort along this axis. Can this thing function as a center? Can it generate demonstrative motion-- real movement, real expenditure, real pilgrimage?

The things that survive are the things that can still make a person get on a plane. Everything else is scrolling. Scrolling is moving your thumbs a few inches in reverence to no center at all.

In 1711, a toolmaker in Kyoto named Chiyozuru Korehide began forging kanna blades for the carpenters building the temples at Higashi Hongan-ji. The blades were forged from laminated steal, the highest quality white hagane forge-welded to soft iron, and were extraordinary.

Three hundred years later, his descendants still forge them. A Chiyozuru kanna costs somewhere between three hundred and three thousand dollars. It takes days to set up. The dai must be hand-fitted, the blade back flattened on a series of progressively finer stones, the chipbreaker mated until light cannot pass between it and the edge. Only then can you take a shaving.

The shaving curls are transcendent. It is beautiful. It is also, in the economic sense, worthless. A power planer does the same work in a fraction of the time. The kanna exists so that the setup can exist.

I want to talk about a category of object that is shaped like a tool, but distinctly isn’t one. You can hold it. You can use it. It fits in the hand the way a tool should. It produces the feeling of work-- the friction, the labor, the sense of forward motion-- but it doesn’t produce work. The object is not broken, it is performing its function. It’s function is to feel like a tool.

This week, a slop-essay called “Something Big is Happening” reached escape velocity. 40 million people and about four hundred billion dollars of AUM have read and discussed it in fevered tones.

It was written, or perhaps more precisely generated, by Matt Shumer, the CEO of an LLM startup that I couldn’t immediately parse the function of from its various landing pages.

What is interesting is not that the essay is slop. What is interesting is that people consumed it. They shared it. They engaged with it. They performed the act of reading and distributing an essay about artificial intelligence that was itself produced by artificial intelligence, and at no point in this loop did the output matter. The consumption was the product. The sharing was the output. The essay, much like the AI it discusses, was a tool-shaped object and it worked exactly as designed.

This is, ultimately, also the story of the AI boom so far. The dominant narrative about AI is not what it has built, but the rate at which people are consuming it. The rate at which we are spending on GPU farms. The rate at which we are expensing the tools against Ramp cards.

The headlines are token budgets and GPU clusters and billion-dollar training runs and trillion-dollar infrastructure buildouts. The story is the capex.

AI is everywhere in consumption and almost nowhere in output. We are spending unprecedented sums to acquire, configure, deploy, and operate these systems, and the primary product of that spending is the experience of spending it.

A woodworker who spends six figures a year on exotic hardwoods he will never build with is not investing in output. He is investing in scrap. The wood exists so that the tools have something to touch. The shavings and scraps are the product.

Miles Grimshaw, a much better investor than I am, recently forced the idea of “token budget” into our collective consciousness. The framing was that of a compensation negotiation: token budget as a proxy for resources, for seriousness, for how much work the company expects you to do with these tools.

We have begun to talk about token consumption the way we talk about capital expenditure: as an input that scales linearly to output. More tokens, more work. Bigger budget, bigger results. This framing is so natural, so intuitive, so aligned with every other resource allocation decision a manager makes, that almost no one has stopped to ask whether the relationship between tokens consumed and value produced is a line, a curve, or a cloud.

It is, in most cases, a cloud. But the budget is real.

The problem begins when the tool-shaped object is designed to hide this from you. When the feeling of work becomes the product, sold as work itself.

Consider Farmville.

FarmVille is a command-and-control interface. No matter where you click, your farm will expand, your crops will grow, and the number will go up. The only input is your time, the direction of which is largely irrelevant. The screen fills with evidence of your effort: crops, cosmetics, and increasingly large barns.

The number goes up. This is the entire product.

The market for feeling productive is orders of magnitude larger than the market for being productive. Most people, most of the time, want to click and watch the number go up. They do not want to be told the number is fake. They will pay— in time, in attention, in actual money— to keep the number going up.

Farmville is a tool shaped object.

Tool Shaped Objects are not new. Entire product categories exist in this space. The productivity app that you configure for three weeks and then never use. The Notion workspace with fourteen linked databases tracking a life that does not require tracking. People got their bodies tattooed with Roam Research symbols in 2018, people forget this now.

These are all kanna. These are tool shaped objects. The setup is the practice. But unlike the Japanese woodworker, the user of these objects typically believes he is doing the thing the tool is shaped like, and not the thing the tool actually does.

The current generation of LLM-driven insanity — the billion dollar frameworks, the orchestration layers, the agentic workflows— is the most sophisticated tool-shaped object ever created.

You can build an agent that reads your email, summarizes the contents, drafts a response, checks the response against a style guide, routes the response through an approval chain, logs the interaction, and reports the results to a dashboard. You can watch this happen. You can watch the tokens stream. You can see the chain of thought. You can monitor the system prompt. You can adjust the temperature. You can swap the model. You can add a tool. You can add six tools. You can add a tool that calls another agent that calls a third agent that searches the web and synthesizes the results into a memo that no one will read.

The number goes up.

I have seen teams of very smart engineers build agent systems of breathtaking complexity whose primary output is the existence of the system itself. The agents run. They produce logs. The logs are analyzed by other agents. Reports are generated. Dashboards are populated. The entire apparatus hums with the unmistakable energy of work being done.

What is being done is the operation of the apparatus.

This is not to say that LLMs as such are worthless, quite the opposite. These models, at least from my view, will become very good in short order, and the careful deployment of them will have unbelievable effects on productivity the real economy.

But my narrow suggestion is that this diffusion into the real economy will take much longer, and look much different than the current run on South Bay Best Buys for Mac Minis would have you believe.

This is FarmVille at institutional scale. The quality that makes LLMs so extraordinarily effective as tool-shaped objects is their verbal fluency. Every prior tool-shaped object had to work within the constraints of its medium. FarmVille could only produce the sensation of farming. Notion could only produce the sensation of organizing. But an LLM can produce the sensation of anything.

What makes this particularly difficult to see is that LLMs are also, genuinely, tools. They do real work. The line between the tool and the tool-shaped object is not a line at all but a gradient, and the gradient shifts with every use case, every user, every prompt. You can only fail to notice when you have crossed from one side to the other.

Ask what the number is before making it go up.

The Forge

In January of 1709, in a steep gorge cut by the river Severn in the midlands of England, a 30-year-old Quaker named Abraham Darby fired a blast furnace for the first time.

The furnace had been built decades earlier and blown up around 1703 by a previous operator. It sat derelict in the Coalbrookdale Valley, where coal and iron ore lay in abundance near the surface of the valley walls, and a narrow stream cut through the bottom with enough force to drive a water wheel and bellows. Darby had leased the wreck in September of 1708, the year prior, and spent a few months rebuilding it.

As a boy in the 1690s, Darby had been an apprentice to Jonathan Freeth, a fellow Quaker who made malt mills. Darby understood from watching men brew ale that you did not smelt with coal, and if you smelt it with coke by baking out the sulfur first, you could produce a high quality product. The coal in the Coalbrookdale Valley happened to be unusually pure, and when you burned it, it yielded fuel clean enough to produce castable iron.

On the 10th of January, he had his first blast day. Fully liquid high-quality iron flowed into the molds. Little did he know that with his firing, he had lit the fuse of the Industrial Revolution.

It is difficult to overstate the problem that Darby solved. Before Darby, iron production in England was structurally capped. Every furnace could only be run on charcoal, and charcoal required timber. England, with its relatively small land area and low-density forests, was running out of trees. Iron masters competed with ship builders and construction for a shrinking stock of wood, and furnaces sat idle for months, waiting for enough fuel to turn them on. The industry had been in structural decline for over a century.

Darby’s invention would set Britain up to become the greatest empire in history. Every partnership that fueled this first forge was Quaker. Thomas Goldney of Bristol financed the works. Richard Ford, also a Friend, married Darby’s daughter and managed operations. When Darby offered to teach his smelting technique to another iron master, the man he chose was William Rawlinson, a fellow Quaker. Weekday meetings were held in the company offices at the works. On Sundays, Darby sat with his fellow workers at a Quaker meeting in the town nearby.

When he died in 1717, only 39 years old, and his widow died just months later, his eldest son was six. The business should have collapsed and Darby’s invention should have been lost to the wind. Instead, Joshua Sergeant, Darby’s brother-in-law, bought back the mortgage shares on behalf of his children, and Ford held the enterprise together until the boy was old enough to take his place. The Quaker network absorbed the loss through a mutual obligation they felt towards each other and to the enterprise. Their shared faith and the long patience of people who believed their work participated in something that would outlast them fueled resilience for the business.

Abraham II expanded the works, introduced steam power, and paid higher wages than the local mines. And in times of food shortage, he bought farms to feed his workers. When he died in 1763, his son Abraham III took control at 18. In 1779, he completed the Iron Bridge over the Severn, the first cast iron bridge in the world,100 feet across. Nearly 400 tons of iron cast in the family’s furnace went into its construction. He bore the cost overruns personally and died in debt at 39, the same age as his grandfather. He was buried in the Quaker burial ground at Coalbrookdale.

The Barclays, the Lloyds, the Cadburys, the Rowntrees, the Clarks, and the Wedgwoods were all prominent Quaker merchant families. A religious minority that at its peak numbered almost 60,000 people in the country of 6 million – just under 1% – at that time produced an overwhelming share of England’s commercial and industrial infrastructure, so disproportionate that it still puzzles economic historians.

The standard explanation is that the Test Acts barred Quakers from universities and public offices, so they moved their talents into trade. That is likely true, but also insufficient. Plenty of persecuted minorities channeled their talents into trade. Most of them did not build Barclays. The question of why the Quakers so radically changed Britain and, in turn, the economic history of the West is worth answering.

2. On Quakers

Quakers are a strange people. I, Will, should know. I grew up as one. They’re a sect that refused to swear oaths, refused to remove their hats before magistrates, refused to address anyone with honorifics, and finally refused, with a stubbornness that cost them dearly in fines, imprisonment, and social exile, to lie. Not in the way that most religious communities refuse to lie, which is to say they aspired to it one day and often fell short. The Quakers earnestly enforced a near-militant allegiance to the truth. Through meetings, through discipline, through expulsion, a friend who cheated a customer or misrepresented a product faced not only civil liability but spiritual reckoning before his entire community.

Everyone knew this, and everyone could trade with them safely as a result. You could trade with a Quaker even across the ocean with minimal contracts because the contract was already written in something more binding than paper: a spiritual agreement. In a place like early England where transaction costs – entire apparatus of verification, enforcement, legal recourse – were extremely high, and which in turn made long-distance commerce expensive and slow, the Quakers were able to drive that cost to nearly zero.

Quakers and Baptists were small minority communities at the time, Lutherans actually had majority regions and New England was still Congregationalist

The trust was inherited by the faith and carried into every transaction before the partners even met. Even things like fixed pricing were a Quaker invention. Before Quakers, commerce meant haggling. Every transaction consisted of a negotiation and every price was a contest. Quaker shopkeepers posted a single price and held it. You paid what everyone else paid. And you never worried about being cheated because the man behind the counter believed that cheating was a mortal sin, not in the casual way that most people believe in sins, but in the way where he ordered and structured his entire community and his life such that he could remain true to his word. Customers came in enormous numbers. Of course they did.

Quakers also refused ostentatious behavior and conspicuous consumption. Quakers did not display wealth because display was vanity and vanity was a sin. What other businessmen extracted to furnish lavish estates and carriages and display the visible performance of success, Quakers treated as excess cash flows to reinvest in their businesses. They built for the long term because they understood their work to be stewardship, a core Quaker value. The businesses existed to participate in God’s purpose.

These constraints, the honesty, the simplicity, the refusal of ostentation, the reinvestment and the fixed pricing, were a structural advantage for Quaker businessmen. Every single one of them felt like a limitation, but every single one of them was actually a moat. The religion worked something like a business strategy, but they would never call it one. The moment it became one, it stopped working.

The Quakers did not calculate that honesty was profitable and practice it; they practiced it because God demanded it, and profitability was a consequence that was beside the point, not one they could manufacture by seeking.

3. The Invisible Hand

The Quakers understood something about commerce that we have since forgotten. This is something that Adam Smith understood too. Smith today is largely remembered as an economist, but he held the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1752 to 1764. His wide-sweeping lectures covered theology, ethics, jurisprudence, political economy in that order, because that was the order in which he believed they mattered.

The problem at the center of Smith’s work was first and foremost moral, not economic: how do human beings, who are selfish, form moral judgments at all? How does a creature driven by self-interest develop a conscience? His answer was the impartial spectator, an imagined observer from whose eyes we learn to judge our own conduct.

Smith was a prolific writer during his lifetime. He wrote the lectures on jurisprudence, the essays on philosophical subjects, various volumes of correspondence, and of course the famous On the Wealth of Nations, but at least in our opinion, and seemingly his own, his life’s work was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He revised it across nearly six editions over three decades, and he was still revising it in the final year of his life, adding an entirely new section on the corruption of moral sentiments by wealth and status, a section that reads like a man who has watched his other book be fundamentally misunderstood and is trying to correct the record before he dies. He had barely touched The Wealth of Nations after its first publication, and on his deathbed he ordered 16 volumes of unpublished manuscripts to be burnt. He certainly ordered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be protected.

I think people only took parts of his work. His 1st book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, was most important for him. There he stresses humans are intelligent, empathetic beings who aren’t or shouldn’t be selfish, and that works in our interests as humans

The Wealth of Nations is an application of The Theory of Moral Sentiments to commercial life, not the other way around. Smith understood markets as moral formation. Commerce trains morals because exchange requires it. It teaches honesty because your counterpart will not come back if you cheat him. It punishes fraud over the long run, even if it rewards it short-term. It forces repeated dealings with strangers over years, building a habit of fairness that no contract could possibly ever compel.

But Smith was deeply suspicious of merchants in their own right. The Wealth of Nations warns that businessmen will conspire against public interest at every opportunity, and that the division of labor renders workers stupid if unchecked and that employers will always collude to suppress wages. He did not believe that markets alone, left to themselves, would produce good outcomes. He believed that markets populated by morally formed people devout in their faith, operating within communities of mutual accountability, tended towards good outcomes.

He assumed of his readers that they were fully formed in Christian ethics before they even entered the market. Formed by the church, by families, by guilds, and by the dense web of obligation and expectation that life in Scotland in the 18th century made inescapable. The market rewarded the qualities of Christian life: sympathy, honesty, and the capacity to think long beyond your own life. And in this way it cultivated something much deeper and older.

When economics professionalized in 19th century America, it took with it what it could formalize and left the rest. Supply and demand, the division of labor, comparative advantage, pricing mechanisms, all made secular and atheistic. The impartial spectator was left behind. Smith became the patron saint of self-interest, and the book that he deeply cared about and spent his life on became a curiosity for weird Christian Twitter users and economics grad students.

4. The Worship of Art

Wallace Stevens turned down a tenured position at Harvard after winning the pulitzer to keep his insurance job. There’s an argument to be made that the arts, like the humanities and politics, were never meant to be done in isolation from the worldly. x.com/nabeelqu/statu…

Tom Wolfe’s 1984 essay, “The Worship of Art”, explains what happened next. Sometime in the 20th century, when businessmen lost these moral frameworks, they replaced them with art and cultural philanthropy, which became a substitute faith. The museum board was the congregation, the gala was the liturgy, and the naming rights to the hospital were a tithe. Wolfe called these Boy Scout badges. The badge did not ask questions of how you earned it, provided that you could afford it.

When you lose the framework that ties your daily work to a moral account of the universe, that void does not stay empty. Something else fills the house. The finance industry of the 1980s and the 1990s built a culture that was actively hostile to answering this question. Leveraged buyouts hollowed out towns, mortgage products extracted maximum value from people who could not understand them. Compensation structures rewarded quarterly execution instead of decades-long stewardship. The people doing the work were produced by institutions that had systematically selected against the instinct to ask whether the work itself was good.

It’s easy to call this hypocrisy, but it’s not. Hypocrisy is knowing the right thing and choosing the wrong one. This is worse and more interesting. It is a culture that has eliminated the language for asking the question at all. Harvard, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey: secular confirmation rites. They signaled membership among the elect in the way that baptism once did. Except that baptism imposed obligations, and Goldman imposed none that touched the conscience.

The form of worship is preserved but the transcendence is gone.

Robert Jackall spent years inside American corporations in the 1980s conducting ethnographic field work. He documented it in Moral Mazes, the most devastating portrait of organizational moral life ever written. A former Vice President at a major US corporation told him:

“What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That is the morality of the corporation.”

Jackall found this everywhere, not as a failure of the system but as the system working exactly as it was designed. Managers learn within months to read political signals with the sensitivity of an augur reading the flight of birds. They learn to never associate themselves with a project that might fail. They learn above all to never stake a career on a moral claim because a moral claim cannot be hedged, cannot be walked back, and cannot be reframed as commercially convenient. A manager who raises an ethical concern is not celebrated for his conscience. He is noted as a person who makes things complicated.

The managers Jackall profiles are not bad people. They are ordinary, often thoughtful, and sometimes genuinely principled people who operate inside structures that make the exercise of personal moral judgment functionally impossible. The structure does not feed on bad people. It produces bad behavior from good ones. So they buy their morality elsewhere — the museum board, the annual letter, the philanthropy — not because they are hypocrites but because the system has made the alternative unavailable.

Attributes that determine success in a corporate environment, from Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers:

We are building the same apparatus for the technology industry. We have built an attention economy optimized for engagement metrics that make people measurably worse and we have not responded by asking whether the work is good but instead by coming up with complex, eschatological reasons why it is okay. We are building AI systems that will reshape how billions of people work, relate and think. The conversation about these systems has been cordoned off into ethics boards and AI safety teams that function as the new museum boards — asking cosmic questions that permit the real work to continue unexamined.

The Quakers could not leave. That was the instrumental difference. The Quaker merchant who cheated a customer faced his meeting and his community. The work was the test and there was no badge that substituted for it.

5. Expected Value

Effective altruism is perhaps the most expensive and intellectually sophisticated Boy Scout badge ever produced. EA was the apex of purchased virtue, a religion so rigorously constructed that it convinced an entire generation of smart and secular people that they could calculate their way to moral seriousness without ever touching the formations. You don’t need to be changed by your morals, you just need to sum the numbers correctly.

The promise was moral clarity through quantification. Maximize expected value, identify the most cost-effective charity through rigorous analysis, donate accordingly, measure impact per dollar. The framework was beautiful in the way that mathematical and formal systems are beautiful. It attracted exactly the people you would expect: quantifiably gifted, analytically rigorous, often young, often from elite technical institutions, and often deeply sincere in their desire to do good — almost uniformly unformed by any moral tradition thick enough to make them question its premises.

EA had, and still has, quasi-religious features: a clear doctrine, demanding standards, a community of believers with shared language and shared institutions, apocalyptic urgency through existential risk and longtermism. It has everything that a religion has, except for the one thing that makes religion work: it forms you through practice and through community and through discipline over a lifetime and does not let you leave when it becomes costly.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s reasoning that risking billions in customer deposits was justified if it raised the possibility of preventing existential catastrophe by even a fraction of a fraction of a percent was not a betrayal of the framework but a faithful application of it. This is the point and it is the only point that matters about FTX in the context of moral formation.

In his conversation with Tyler Cowen in April of 2022, months before the collapse, SBF endorsed expected value reasoning that would justify essentially any gamble if the stakes were large enough. After the collapse in his messages to Kelsey Piper at Vox, his immediate concern was not the customers who lost their money. It was that the scandal would make things harder for people trying to do good. The framework was so thoroughly intact that even after it produced a monumental catastrophe, he could only evaluate the catastrophe from within it.

EA manufactured a secular eschatology. Longtermism provided the structure: millennial time frames, civilizational stakes, and the possibility that actions taken now could determine the fates of trillions of people. This is a substitution for the eschaton, the final judgment and the world to come. It serves the same psychological function and provides the same sense of cosmic importance that human beings require to sustain sacrifice over time.

The problem with this manufactured eschatology is that it has two dial settings and no stable middle. It either burns too hot, producing the manic urgency that convinced SBF and others that the stakes were so high that ordinary morality was a luxury that they could not afford. Or it burns out entirely when the catastrophe remains abstract year after year after year and the daily sacrifices start to feel arbitrary. Religious traditions solve this problem over centuries through ritual, through community, through liturgical calendars that modulate the intensity of faith and practice across seasons, through narrative structures that sustain commitment across generations without requiring constant threat of judgment. These are technologies of moral formation that are extraordinarily difficult to build de novo.

6. There Is No Secular Alternative.

It’s fashionable now amongst the wealthy jet set of technologists to call for new aesthetics. Better buildings, better cities, better objects. Beautiful people occupying beautiful spaces. Powered by a new secular identity of post-scarcity and peptide maximalism. This conversation has been running for years in the progress studies community, but has recently reached the mainstream with very important and successful entrepreneurs endorsing it. Patrick Collison built Stripe Press partly around it. Marc Andreessen’s “Time to Build” gestured at it. The rationalist community, which seemingly has opinions on everything other than its own morality, has extensive opinions about it. Why is everything ugly? Why are our cities hideous? Why does nothing we build anymore have the quality that old things have? Why can we not make beautiful things anymore?

They are asking the right questions, but they are wrong about what the question is. The call for a new aesthetic is necessarily a call for a new transcendent morality. You cannot build beautiful things without beautiful and transcendent reasons for making them.

Christopher Alexander understood this and nearly destroyed his career. He spent decades producing A Pattern Language, a book that is impossible to miss on the shelf of nearly every Silicon Valley elite. Probably the most important influential work on architecture and design. Software engineers love it. It is ultimately a seemingly secular book. It is a book about patterns. There are 253 of them, rigorously documented, covering everything from the distribution of towns to the placement of windows. It is a magnificent achievement of systemic thinking applied to the built environment.

However, Alexander came away believing it was fundamentally incomplete. He spent the last decades of his life on a book called The Nature of Order. Four volumes published between 2002 and 2004 that almost no one has read. In fact, the book is almost impossible to find in print today while A Pattern Language is seemingly everywhere. The question that drove these volumes was simple and unanswerable in his existing framework. Why do some things feel alive and others do not? Why does a courtyard in Andalusia feel alive but an office park in South San Francisco does not? A medieval village in Tuscany feels alive, but a new city built by technologists in California does not.

The difference is not reducible to geometry. It is certainly not reducible to a pattern. Alexander – a trained mathematician – tried. He spent 20 years trying to find a formula for it, and he couldn’t get there. Instead:

“I try to find in my own experience what it is that I feel to be holy. I have come to believe that the ultimate effort of a serious artist or a serious builder is directed towards something with the presence of God.”

The man who wrote the most rigorously systemic and material book on design in the 20th century spent his final years arguing that the quality he had been trying to formalize was not an aesthetic or material property at all. It was a theological one. Good making, good building, good design participates in something transcendent. It was the aliveness he could feel in a courtyard in Seville and not feel in a strip mall in the Tenderloin. He could not explain the beauty without the God that underlay it. The patterns were real but necessarily insufficient.

This is obvious to anyone that has ever participated in a faith tradition. No purely secular building has approached the beauty of the old cathedrals. No secular music has ever reached Bach. No secular poetry has touched the Psalms.

The craftsmen who built churches worked for decades on stone carvings placed so high that no human eye would ever see them clearly. They carved them anyway. They carved for God. Those calling for new aesthetics without calling for the thing that has always produced great aesthetics are asking for the fruit without the root.

One of our favorite writers, Dorothy Sayers, is remembered, when she is remembered at all, as a mystery novelist. She wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories in the 1920s and 1930s and they were very popular and very good at the time and are largely forgotten in our own. What is also largely forgotten is that Sayers was one of the sharpest theological minds in wartime Britain, a close friend and intellectual peer of C.S. Lewis, and one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. In 1942, in the middle of the war, she delivered an essay called “Why Work?” to a gathering in Eastbourne, just a few hundred miles south of where that first blast furnace was lit. We believe it to be one of the most important things written about labor in the twentieth century and almost no one has read it.

Her argument was that the church had catastrophically failed the working person by treating work as merely instrumental — a way to earn money for living and giving rather than as something sacred in its own right. The church told the carpenter not to drink and to come to services on Sunday. It never told him that the quality of his carpentry was itself the religious act. Sayers thought this was a disaster and said so:

“The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.”

The work, for Sayers, was prayer. The shoemaker makes good shoes because that is what shoemakers do, because the object leaving his hands will either participate in the work of glorifying creation or degrade it. Christ was a carpenter. Moses was a shepherd. Paul made tents.

The AI megacycle that will unfold over the next ten years will produce more overcapitalized businesses searching for an identity than any boom in history. The temptation will be to purchase virtue. Fund the institute. Publish the hand-wringing annual letter that might even include a Bible verse or two. The actual work will remain untouched by any of it.

Every secular constraint eventually faces the question: why maintain this when it is costly? The only thing that has ever held a constraint in place across generations, through pressure, through loss, through the slow grinding temptation of day after day to simply stop, is the conviction that the constraint was not chosen but received. That it comes from something outside the self that the self cannot renegotiate. That it is owed to God and to creation itself.

The businesses that lasted understood this. Each of them had something at the core that looked, to outside eyes, like irrationality. A refusal that made no sense. A constraint held well past the point where a rational person would have abandoned it. If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived at God.

The work that lasts from this era will be no different. The companies that endure, the technologies that serve rather than consume, the institutions that hold their shape across generations when the founders are dead and the capital is restless and the market is telling them to be something other than what they are — they will have something at their center that resists justification in purely secular terms. Something that seems religious, because it is.

There is no secular alternative. There has never been one.