The Shock is Almost Lethal

Dear reader, I write you today with two interesting notes and one last-minute opportunity.

You'll learn about:

• Nietzsche, Bataille, and Nick Land

• A crisis too large to be spoken

• How to triple your writing output starting this week

• The Day of Judgment

The Administrative Crisis

All large institutions today are dying under the weight of bureaucratic gridlock, which requires increasing degrees of dissemblance and double-speak because almost nothing works as it's supposed to.

The problem of political correctness or "wokeness" is really only a symptom of a much larger and more mundane problem so bad it's almost unspeakable.

The problem is largely technology-driven. The real economy of human activity changes too fast, nothing made out of bureaucracy can handle it. But the problem is so big and so bad, that most people feel like it's useless to critique—talking about it is just bad for the morale of millions of people, so just get on with it...

Even within the most flexible and fast-moving domains—e.g. startups—you see the same problem. Software-as-a-Service at first seemed like a clever solution: Let a million micro-services bloom, so organizations can plug into whatever specialized and automated apps they need to do their work efficiently. But over time, SaaS increasingly feels like a Byzantine prison with Manhattan rents:

As Luttig points out:

While companies like Rippling may succeed in tackling this problem, ultimately blockchains and integrated execution layers like Urbit really should solve this.

Blockchains aren't just "over-engineered databases," as one common quip goes. They're databases with incentive engines. You can solve the SaaS problem within a company using... one big enterprise SaaS database. But there's no way that a whole civilization could plug itself entirely into one big enterprise SaaS database (and if there was, we'd hate it). Only something like Bitcoin can provide a civilization-scale incentive logic that we can imagine inducing everyone into its "database."

The Shock is Almost Lethal: Nietzsche, Bataille, Land

I've been reading Nick Land's Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism and man—it goes hard.

This was Land's first academic book, mind you, published by an academic press while he was still a professor.

Land reads Bataille as a successor of Nietzsche—not controversial at all—but read how Land situates Bataille in the academic literature on Nietzsche.

Nietzsche, Bataille, and Land all represent a distinctly ungovernable lineage in late modern thought. Whereas many authors write books to establish a tidy and respectable claim to knowledge within an institutional order, a small number of authors decide to attack the foundational lies hiding beneath the institutional orders of their time.

All three had at least one foot within modern institutions of learning—at least early on—and all three eventually go off the reservation completely. What Land says of Bataille's book on Nietzsche could also be said of Land's book on Bataille:

Triple your writing output starting this week

The third cohort of indiethinkers starts this Monday.

It's a 6-week group program for writers, philosophers, scientists, artists, and engineers building independent intellectual lives on the internet. It's a mix of education, strategy, networking, and a ton of group co-working sessions (4-hour blocks, 3x/week) to make you move faster (or get started) on that book, or blog, or whatever.

You'll create or optimize your platform, design a research agenda, connect with peers, and—most importantly—get to work.

We officially closed enrollment Friday, but we still have one seat left.

So if any of you want to take the last seat, you can just enroll directly.

I'm biased but if I must say so, the program really works. Many programs like this one go for several thousands of dollars. If writing is important to you, and you'd like to do it more, and you'd like to update your approach for the internet era, I am certain you'll find this program worth much more than the price.

A Summary Court in Perpetual Session