PB: Oh, what fun! We’ve been pulled out of deep freeze to help cover the narrator’s ass by giving readers, new and old, some sort of trite summation of the plot. Not that I’m complaining, exactly… I really thought he was going to keep us mothballed for another four or five hundred pages. Nice to…

“I think, increasingly, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.“ – John Le Carré “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” – Bill Shakspere, Twelfth Night “If you can’t get away with it,…

All this isn’t to say that the situation can’t get quite grim for certain localities, and for not-insignificant lengths of time. When whole generations dwell within periods of easy cruelty and mass death, so too would it be cruel to dismiss their plight and resulting perspective. The cynicism of men like Petrarch, which can be…

Our first solid reference to a conceptual European dark age emerges from 14th century Italy, or what was left of it, some three hundred years after Rome was finally dislodged from the throne of the western world. There, a polymath named Francesco Petrarca saw fit to cast aspersions on the recent history of his own…

There is a simple and well-understood explanation for the coin slot’s apparent conceptual disintegration back into the world’s collective consciousness just after its initial debut, the very idea of mechanized coin operation apparently having slipped headlong into the epochal void of malicious ignorance, even while perched for victory on the razor’s edge of early modernity…

Like the coin, the partner technology it is inexorably bound to within the annals of human capital, the coin slot’s underpinning technology was present in our corpus of knowledge well before anyone could conceive of a reason to create one. It is easy to forget, in a world of constant bold creation, that every instance…

The tokenized utility marker has been a tool of local trade for nearly as long as transactions have been formally ritualized by the human animal, although its role as an arbitrating appendage of the state would come tens of thousands of years after its initial pre-historic introduction. As state powers centralized, they were slow to…

By the dawn of the tenth century BC, global trade was already a profoundly interwoven endeavor. The world of peoples was no longer an incoherent assemblage of distant insular islands, but a roiling sea of social cross-contamination, amalgamating culturally-disparate thought and technique in the dialectical thresher of aggregate technology, which rapidly harvested and further disseminated…

To suggest that capital is an inherent component of humanity’s cybernetic impulse is no mere hyperbole; the further away a civilization crawls from a hierarchy of implied abstraction and into the codified regulation of the commercial market, the more the machinery of finance will demand the kind of efficiencies that only a breach into the…

Our relationship with material reality is defined, in large part, by the tension between our known and unknown fears. It is this polarizing, universal trepidation which contaminates all aspects of individuality, and provokes segregated strands of origination to eventually struggle toward the same false light. The perception of the singular self is ultimately a collective…