Back in the nineties, a teenage supergenius joined a mailing list. That odd seed led, via Harry Potter, to today's Effective Altruism and AI Risk movements; bizarre cults; and the birth of Bitcoin. This is the surreal saga of Extropia's Children.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 3: Extropicoin Extrapolated
Many of the 90s cypherpunks were also 90s extropians. That's why the person most closely connected with Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto is ... while certainly no longer alive ... also, some would argue, still not actually dead.
《X+Y: A Brilliant Young Mind》 Review
A story about self-discovery and the wider world.
Extropia's Children, Chapter 2: This Demon-Haunted World
The rise of the rationalist movement has led to multiple strange and dark offshoots - demons, cults, hells, suicides. How and why could dedication to rational thought result in such fantastically weird and grim outcomes?
Extropia's Children, Chapter 4: What You Owe The Future
Is the increasingly controversial "effective altruism" movement about helping the most people in the most efficient ways, or about saving trillions of future humans from the dread threat of an AI apocalypse? Or, as some adherents argue ... both?
We Can't Fix The Internet - Kotaku
As a teenager in the early 2000s, I was a member of a large, passionate, and loosely affiliated community of Harry Potter lovers (known, like other,
Vampire Capital
The highly lucrative trade in children in care reveals another level of cynicism altogether.
In Depth: Miscellaneous
*this is a giant, everchanging collection of micellaneous tidbits about my life and career.* On The Moniker I had a habit as a kid of creating fictional enti...
The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIb: Children and Childrearing
This is the back half of the third part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the patterns of life for the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of hu…
Grandpa Had a Pension. This Generation Has Cryptocurrency. (Published 2017)
After years as a niche market for technologically sophisticated anarchists and libertarians, digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream.
Child Liberation | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology