blog.rinesi.com

Breaking the Smart City Out of its Narcissism

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Where's the Smart City? Still everywhere as a concept, almost nowhere as transformative large-scale reality, most visible in ghost cities built from scratch, gleaming and almost vacant. Cities are absolutely central to civilization and every qualitative improvement in our ability to "do cities" has had seismic, widespread impacts.

Why aren't we seeing something like that now?

The simplest hypothesis is a rarely discussed one: the Smart City pitch is tempting because cities are incredibly valuable but Smart City projects often fail because they misinterpret what makes cities valuable, what constraints this value, and what can be done about these constraints.

Allow me to be obvious: Cities are economic, social, and artistic engines because of their people. Put human beings in comfortable but dense arrangements, give them solid infrastructure, make everything cheap enough to allow the young and the creative to move in, make it possible for families to educate their children, give access to healthcare, affordable college education, and so on and so forth — the boring foundations of life — and people will get together in unexpected combinations and create novel businesses, technical, and artistic breakthroughs even if you can't and shouldn't predict or influence what those will look like.

In other words, the success of cities — measured both in the happiness of their inhabitants and their economic, intellectual, and artistic energy — depends on the slow-moving, old-fashioned issues of cheap housing, good transportation, accessible healthcare, education, infrastructure, and public services.

I said I would be obvious. And yet very few Smart City projects engage meaningfully with these structural constraints. "An app for..." or "real-time data about..." can be useful but will rarely have much of a cumulative, structural impact on a city. At their best they can increase somewhat the efficiency of existing infrastructure — an infrastructure that includes everything from a huge bridge to a rarely used form — but don't contribute to increasing their reach and depth (and in fact a short-term band-aid can make a structural problem more difficult to fix).

The main limitation isn't technological but cultural. Many of the most prominent voices for Smart Cities come from backgrounds dealing with systems of entirely different scale and hybrid complexity: no isolated technical or financial system in the world has the uncanny mixture of physical scale, political dynamics, historical entanglements, economic complexities, and a hundred other facets, of even a mid-sized city. "Collect real-time data, throw it at an AI, and make it available through apps and dashboards" is not a bad thing to do on its own, no. But a city doesn't "think" with its sensors and its apps, at least not at the time scale that makes or breaks them. It thinks with its local bureaucracy and its real state ecosystem, the minutiae of public service investment financing and the strength of local news coverage.

As a collective system a city is vast , a city is slow , a city is institutions and culture as much as hardware and software, and if you come in assuming that those are bugs to be replaced or bypassed with more speed, more raw data, and more software, the city will shrug you off.

The IT industry cannot reliably and consistently make an organization smarter in an existentially meaningful way ^{[source: looking around]} . Why should we assume it can do it for an infinitely more complex entity like a city?

This is a depressing fact if you are hoping to buy or sell a silver bullet of a ~~Big Data~~ ~~Internet of Things~~ AI solution. It's fantastic news for everybody else. It means we can do much better than what we are doing, we just need to figure out how. This figuring out is less a matter of raw capital than of setting up the right sort of organization to do it. I recently wrote about the post-AI organization as one that requires people obsessed with the problem : what blocks us right now isn't that the people who run, build, clean, and teach cities don't know enough about AI, but rather than the people who can build AIs don't know even remotely close to enough about what they do. But this is changing and will continue to change. If nothing else because the rewards for success in this quest are almost limitless.

I've argued elsewhere about what I call the dream gap , the moment where the failure of a hazy technological over-promise becomes undeniable but the desires that fueled and were fueled by it remain. The cities of the future — rather, the cities of a good future, one achievable but that won't happen on its own — exist in that gap, which makes today the best moment to start building a bridge to them.

Seaside Whispers

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0300

She had been a soldier, she had been tortured, and she was in hiding: that was the full extent of what the island knew for certain about her.

And the Deal of course. We all knew the Deal in wordless detail. She ate from whatever table she wanted. She slept — always alone — in whatever bed she chose. We spoke of her to nobody and nothing, not an ambigious text message or a greeting near an unblinded car.

Our part of the Deal was that she wasn't there.

We never knew what she did to fulfill her part. Nor knew for sure when she would. Every one or two months when tides weather satellite orbits global trade patterns zero-day prices and for all we knew her mood aligned just right an automated cargo ship would lose itself inside the sea-fed caves underneath our south shore. A couple dozen people handy with tools would be selected to go and open it up, and other people with the right connections would turn cargo into money. It wasn't a lot of money as these things go. With her skills she could have earned much more anywhere between Cairo and Quang Ninh. Here it wasn't much money but it had been the center of the island's real economy for the two years since her arrival. So it wasn't money but it was our silence and her freedom.

She wasn't on the island when she was on it. She had never been on the island during the periods she chose not to be.

And if there were news somewhere of some politician's yacht breaking itself against a reef or a former soldier's luxury car missing a curve but not the mountain wall we scrolled past it without looking back.

Against Developer Productivity

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Developer productivity is not a bad thing – but low developer productivity is not what's holding you back.

Behind the industry-wide interest in coding assistants there's a hidden assumption that the bottleneck for industry profits is developer productivity :

On the surface this makes a lot of sense:

In most tech companies most of what most people do is coding, managing people who code, monetizing the code they wrote, etc. Wouldn't it be great to have more code faster and at the same cost?
Grab a coffee with a senior programmer, ask them quietly, and chances are they'll tell you robust, creative software development at scale will be achieved in a couple of quarters, something that has been true for the last sixty years or so. The median company's development capabilities aren't great.

But a second look at the hypothesis shows some problems:

Developers aren't expensive these days. If developer productivity were a bottleneck companies would be hiring as many developers as possible.
Grab a coffee — or something stronger — with a product manager and they might tell you, late into the night, that the business impact of most code is generally on the low side of expectations and often not even that.

If not developer productivity — if developer productivity isn't fantastic but it's not the main factor limiting competitiveness — then what is?

I believe the bottleneck is upstream of coding, in the depth of the institutional expertise about the aspects of the world the software is meant to help with informing product and feature design:

You can think of it in this way:

Code expresses and implements an idea.
The idea is an incremental improvement grounded on a given understanding of a market, technology, behavior, etc.
The further behind the state of the art is the starting point of an idea, the less likely it is that it's something that can be coded into something truly innovative.

It can be even simpler than that: Developers working in a domain — unless they are writing software for other developers — have an increasingly impressive set of tools , but they aren't going to have a sophisticated understanding of the problem . This isn't a criticism. Understanding the nature and constraints of a problem, what has been tried in the past and what was learned from those attempts, is far from trivial in any domain.

Yes, we all know that good development begins with understanding the user. What's less commonly acknowledged is the impossibility of understanding a user with years or decades or experience doing something unless there's an equivalent reservoir of experience inside the organization.

And if institutional expertise is the bottleneck, then investing in institutional expertise has the highest ROI.

I've written before about how a high-expertise organization looks like . It doesn't need to be "better at having ideas" than its competitors, nor have more productive coders, but even average ideas implemented by average coders, if beginning from an advanced enough knowledge frontier, will have an advantage that no amount of coding productivity can replicate. Developer productivity is how fast you move; organizational expertise determines how far you can go.

By all means, if your developers' productivity is harmed by something easy to fix, fix that. But you won't overtake your competitors by squeezing a few extra lines of code per dollar from your developers. You'll get better results by helping them, and your organization, have a more sophisticated understanding of what they are coding for.

Hacking the Hackathon

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0300

At their best, internal hackathons provide a necessary patch to systemic problems. But their usual structure limits their potential.

What hackathons do best and why

The most valuable output of a hackathon is often a self-contained tool, the solution to a long-lived bug, the testing of a new system, etc. What they have in common is that they are

useful things...
that developers knew are useful...
but couldn't be fit in "non-hackathon time..."
because they weren't deemed urgent or valuable enough by managers.

"Hackathon regret" is a very rare phenomenon: a good hackathon generates good outcomes. But it generates good outcomes that should have already been generated as part of day-to-day operations. They are best seen — at their best — as a temporary flicker of authority that allows developers to minimally compensate for management blind spots.

What hackathons don't do and why

Hackathons rarely lead to useful innovation. This is, as they say, an unpopular opinion. Let me justify it along two dimensions: direction and reach.

Direction: Left to their own devices developers will create tools or fix problems relevant to developer productivity and well-being. Which is good! As I wrote above, those are issues that are often deprioritized due to lack of visibility, not importance. But these tools and fixes are almost never competitive innovations . Very few development teams have such a good environment that, given time to work on what they choose, can afford to aim for the sky. And even if they did, developer productivity is not the competitive bottleneck for most companies .
Reach: A team can develop quite an impressive MVP during the span of a hackathon but — and this is key — you cannot develop a minimally viable version of every innovative idea. There are novel ideas that simply require a lot of work even to get to the barest demo because they depend on concepts and techniques that don't yet have the sort of tools and libraries that make familiar MVPs so easy to build.

In short: the outcome of a hackathon will rarely be very original (the very original always has at least some strange component that has to be built the slow way) and it's far more likely to solve a developer problem that should have been already solved rather than offer a fresh idea for a competitive constraint.

Putting the 'hack' back in 'hackathon'

For a hackathon to generate the sort of innovative idea organizations want requires a different mix of people, with specific attitudes and goals, acting in concert:

Begin with a Business Red Team tasked with identifying core problem(s) to work on ("unexploited opportunity open to competitors" being a type of problem as well). There are two roles for this team. By beginning the analysis from scratch it might identify issues not currently on the company's radar, and even if the issues are known this team can ensure that the hackathon is focused towards high-value problems. For this to work the Red team has to adopt the adversarial attitude of a short-seller making a case, something that isn't always psychologically easy and can often be politically risky for their careers. Setting up a Red Team able to do the job, with political cover reliable enough for them to be willing to do it is the hardest part of any hackathon. It's also the most valuable, and would justify the time spent even if there were no other output.

That takes care of direction . To give the hackathon reach , the problems identified by the Red Team have to be first tackled not by developers writing an MVP but by a Sci-Fi Team coming up with potential solutions. Sci-Fi isn't Fantasy: the team has to have the right background to balance deep knowledge of the problem and an active imagination to give them a chance to come up with novel ideas that might work out. But they shouldn't be limited by the expectation of building something they can demo or even fully describe before the hackathon ends. Their job is creative ambition.

Of course, solutions that can't be built are of limited immediate value (but not zero — the idea that can't be built might inspire the thing that can). The final element of the hackathon is an Engineering Team . Their role isn't to build anything, though. Rather, their goal is to study the idea from the Sci-Fi Team to figure out whether can be built and what it would take to do it.

These three teams do not need to be entirely different sets of people: in a pinch, or as an experiment, you can even try doing all three things yourself. What matters is the need for different attitudes and skillsets at different points of the process. A cold eye for vulnerabilities to identify the problems that matter. A combination of imagination and knowledge to come up with original solutions. Expert pragmatism to judge their feasibility. It's almost impossible to do all of this at once - doubly so to do it well. Under time and resource constraints people will focus on the problems they already know and come up with relatively conservative solutions because they are also thinking, consciously or unconsciously, about how they'd implement them.

Coming up with innovative solutions to important problems is far from easy and never certain. By structuring a hackathon in a way that reflects this complexity and putting in play the very different skillsets and approaches necessary along the way, organizations can improve the odds of the kinds of outcome that hackathons are meant for.

Acts of War

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The Fractal War did not spare the City. There were no bombs in the featureless black streets cruised by silent coffinlike vehicles and the numberless affairs that were the City's main social activity were carried in discrete rooms with one-time address coordinates without fear of zero-day bioweapons.

It was war nonetheless.

The door to one of those rooms scanned the golden mask carried by a man and opened for it. The man was incidental to the mask and the information it contained. More than information: the mask carried the engine of a plan and the undeniable necessity of its execution. It was because of the plan that the man had not taken the antidote that would have prevented the seduction that had led him to the room. The reasoning was not for the man to know. He understood the necessity and that was enough.

A woman wearing a red mask was waiting inside. Both carried on the mutually understood polite lie that they were there for each other. They kept their masks on.

Afterward the golden mask told the man to look through a one-way window to the chiaroscuro of the City and while the man was looking the red mask guided the stiletto on the woman's hand through the back of his skull. The woman didn't know why this was needed, only that it was.

The red mask told the woman to destroy the golden one. She picked the golden mask to destroy it and it said a name. There had been a seventy percent chance that this would not change the woman's behavior: good odds for the prize, and the City didn't have a casino because all of it was one. The woman took off the red mask before it could stop her and rushing as fast as she could through the almost-forgotten sensation of masklessness replaced it with the golden one.

The woman stood still, watching and listening, although somebody else in the room would not have heard or seen anything. She cried, once, almost as quietly.

Half an hour later the woman put on her clothes, destroyed the red mask, and left. She did not know the golden mask's plan any more than she had known the red one's but she understood its necessity.

Citadel

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0300

He used to understand guilt the way a farmer understands crops. Now he has to use drugs to sleep and drugs to wake up and he only stays sober because there is an impossible restitution to dedicate himself to. He deserves many things. None of them resembles peace.

With the death-rooted profits he could afford to have his guilt extirpated from his mind like a skin blemish or a tiresome ex, but together with a conscience the kidnappers had forced into him a phobia against neuroengineering, therapy, and suicide even of the passive kind. Had he been any slower his former board would have had him killed; for their deaths he feels no guilt, and would be thankful to his kidnappers if he didn't think it another facet of retribution.

The Human Bottleneck

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The debate about human obsolescence has gotten it all wrong: by focusing myopically into individual activities that can be more-or-less automated it ignores the larger picture of what it means to have vastly increased computational capabilities and what it takes to make the most of them.

A useful cheat code to look at the future frontier of business practices is to ignore industry extrapolations — if your competitors are doing it it's not an innovation — and work backwards from organizations in entirely different fields that are by necessity already grappling with the tools and problems that have yet to trickle down to the general economy. The technologies and issues of "big data," for example, were first visible in the activities and infrastructures of astrophysicists and particle physicists, who had to capture, store, process, and understand orders of magnitude more data than anybody else, much earlier than anybody else.

Today mathematicians are among the scouts of the AI frontier. Mathematical research is in many ways the perfect field of application for current AI tools, as they are precisely of the sort we can expect to be a good fit for mathematical research's organizational and intellectual complexities. Any structural improvement to the speed of mathematical research, however invisible to most people, would have a deep, transformative long-term impact on science and technology.

This article on the blog of the Xena project — part of a widening set of professional mathematicians leveraging cutting-edge specialized software to help and accelerate mathematical research — is a very useful look at the current situation, anchored by the question at the beginning of the article:

Let’s say that someone had a big pot of money, and wanted to use it to accelerate mathematical discovery. How might they go about doing this?

This isn't exactly "how do we use AI?" It's a much better question: "how do we use resources to accelerate thinking at the frontier?" The answer does involve AI (both LLMs and more specialized tools like the Lean interactive theorem prover) but the limiting resource is people with a deep understanding of both those tools and the relevant mathematics - people who are scarce and very difficult to train.

You can see the same, albeit implicitly, in the Integrated Explicit Analytic Number Theory network , a project building a formalized "hypertext" of theorems in analytic number theory. Going through project logs you can see the full AI toolset in play, sometimes saving time, sometimes providing formal validations, but always a tool for, rather than a replacement of, highly trained, often world-class researchers. One gets the clear sense that more people would speed things up in a way that "more compute" or "more data" wouldn't.

Although this is happening first and most clearly in scientific research, every industry attempting to use AI transformationally — except those focused on content generation, which are currently facing their own proto-Götterdämmerung of a race to the bottom — is experiencing the same bottleneck, most often without full awareness of the problem. Tools are deployed, workflows modified, there's training, enthusiasm, features... but as the months go by the company simply isn't operating at the orders-of-magnitude faster strategic and technological tempo promised by AI (if they were and the industry weren't, they'd be taking over the market; if the whole industry were, it would be visible for everybody).

Dig deeper into those AI transformation initiatives and the explanation is clear. For all the emphasis on radical change and new opportunities, there's little or no change to the deeper cognitive architecture of the company:

What it thinks about.
The language it uses to think about it.
The disciplinary frameworks it uses to think about it.
The formal, institutional, and cultural constraints that shape its thinking.

The way an organization thinks is limited by this architecture. No matter how advanced its software or how much data it has, without changes to the fundamental architecture of how it thinks most of this cognitive potential is fritted away as just performative signaling of innovation.

But changing this cognitive architecture and enabling AI on it is very, very hard. It takes the coordinated deployment of deep understanding of the toolbox of "things to think with" — the software, process, cultural, and intellectual components of a cognitive architecture — and, simultaneously, deep knowledge of the industry. Without the former there's no new engine; without the latter the engine isn't connected to the right wheels.

Not every company has people with even one of those skillsets. Very few companies have both. Very very very few companies have the right internal resources to set up and leverage the kind of tightly integrated small team that can pull off this sort of transformation. And without it AI becomes a tool at best, a buzzword at worst.

So it's a valuable resource — well-deployed, it's an AI investment multiplier — as well as a rare one. The main obstacle, for now, lies less in its cost than in its relative obscurity. There's no bidding war because few companies recognize the need even as they feel the impact of the lack. But as every industry begins to see specific companies break away from the pack it'll become clearer what transformative AI really looks like, and what it takes to get there.

New computational technologies going as far back as the earliest clay tablets have been capable of sustaining radically new technologies, activities, and organizations. But neither hardware nor software have ever been enough. Organizations can't take advantage of new tools to think with without changing how they think, a challenge that has to be overcome in a different way not just by each industry but by each organization on its own, as constrained by the specialized knowledge of their members and the strength of their intention to change.

Runaway Geodesics

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Her brother moved with a perfection that made her skin crawl. It was not the gracefulness of the dancer whose movement says this is how bodies move, why have you chosen not to? Engineers called the way his brother moved beautiful while pointing at erg-meter and time-reach graphs.

Engineers rarely showed videos.

To compute perfect movement paths was cheap, to modify nerve and muscle to follow it wasn't. But biomechanical optimality made workers more efficient and gave athletes an advantage, and for middle-aged men whose adulthood had been defined by everything-maxxing it was another doubling down on a long-adjudicated bet. Her brother belonged to the third category. He looked at videos of himself and seemed happy. She told herself and almost everybody else that she was happy for him. She did not watch the videos.

The part of her that thought in words saw the brother she had known her whole life. The part of her older than the species saw something other . Nothing alive had ever moved like he did.

She wanted to run. She had seen him run. Around the park and in her nightmares.

It was surely an exaggeration; her therapist agreed. The algorithmic perfection of traffic did not upset her, after all, and every piece of software she worked with was no less optimized than everything else in the world.

All of this was true so she made a guilty effort to spend time with him. Looking elsewhere as much as it was diplomatic and practical. Fighting all the time eyes that refused to enact such a suboptimal pattern.

The Mathematics of Change

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Nobody knew how she had bought the thin forest of bell towers that pinned down the old city's neighborhoods; what was one more dark absurdity when the news were little more than their relentlessly creative enumeration? Where it was asked for she repaired the churches. Where it was not she left them in the untouched wreckage from the Children's Crusade, unburied corpses and all.

The bell towers she kept for herself. She had them fortified against external access, repaired every bell, and installed machinery to ring them as guided by algorithmic hours of her own choosing.

A bell, high above the river, to echo superstorm warnings from even higher eyes.

Where the old hospital had been, a different bell to mark the rhythm of each epidemic.

From a tower came the obscenely harmonious chiming of war, almost-war, would-be war, might-as-well, war, war. Another broke the rare silence with the single knell of a terrorist attack. Once-schoolyard bells called for far-away children as they hid inside their classrooms in repetitive terror. A discrete toll when banks closed. A hollower one when markets crashed. A bell in each neighborhood just for the lynchings. Strange pealings when invisible systems failed, their rhythms slaved to viral Fourier death rattles.

There were always bells ringing. Some people left the city to escape them. Not many: every place had its own insanity and the bells were not the worst. But there were other reasons to leave the city - to elsewhere or nowhere at all. There was a bell for most of them and one close to each cemetery.

She lived in her own tower at one end of the city. Tall and hollow (as she saw herself) it had no bell but from her bedroom she could hear all of them however faintly. The metallic choir grew complex and frantic month by month as the city's own sounds withered thin and dull.

One night she was woken up by the absolute silence of everything except the bell towers. Suspecting herself deaf — for she knew well she would hear bells in the loneliest spot of space or sea — she went to her balcony to look down to the city. The lights were familiar and the fires almost so, yet nobody moved and there was nobody she saw who could move.

With a word to her wrist she shut down all the bells in the empty city and went back to her bed. There was only one bell left ringing, soft, clear, ever-faster.

Interference Pattern

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Alice was sure within the first hour of meeting Bob that their families had software-entangled them since birth. It went beyond crude genetic matching: coordinate two people's most intimate software for their first twenty years of life and they will grow with statistically indistinguishable souls. Her eighteenth birthday's gift had been to know there was somebody almost-perfect for her and on her twenty-first's they would have had their first date.

It could still happen; Bob had been too distracted to notice her. That was a point against the system's promise, but a minor one. You couldn't be Alice and look at Bob without knowing who they had been for each other, how their experiences and choices had flowed between them without any other causal mechanism than the world's computational hum, which complemented and superseded laws physical and otherwise.

No. Alice was for Bob and Bob was for Alice. One persona-personality profile in two bodies. It wasn't chance that they were in the same party, had so many of the same interests, or felt deep and axiomatic desire for the same girl.

Her name was Trudy and Bob had only been dating her for a few months. Yet he would kill for her without a second thought. Alice knew this for a mathematical fact.

She left the party as discreetly as she could. Back at her apartment she picked up a pen and a piece of paper she could later burn and began to list the blind spots that somebody could use to kill her.

Children Insurance

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Lloyd's wasn't in London: where Lloyd's was, so was the city. Rhizomatic and infertile, neither deigned to spawn yet where everywhere embedded as the secret soul of the world. For almost four hundred years it had insured ships; radical genetic engineering for twenty or so.

An hour before somewhere in a ten-figures compound that was also London a designer princeling had attempted righteous patricide with well paid-for ruthlessness and brilliance. He had been betrayed by failsafes implanted before he could walk but the policy had been triggered by his first treasonous thought. Restitution would have to be made after the investigation.

Three hours later the child was being examined in an unmarked clinic-laboratory that was also London. No emotional disturbance was found, no neurological issues, no (to the investigators' unlogged surprise) psychopathic traits. He had simply learned enough about his parent-owner to make murder the only ethical choice.

Ethics was an uncommon bioengineering failure but it wasn't unknown. However God acted, if he still did, that wasn't his M.O. Two hours later a complex lattice of payouts had been disbursed, a replacement product ordered, and a thousand actuarial coefficients adjusted by a dead child's body's worth of information. Serenely satisfied by its own survival — there was only one event it would never insure because it was only one event it would not conceive of — London moved on.

The Net Sum of Love

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Jules' heart was such that he loved all ecosystems. All that was nature, he loved. But it is the nature of love that "all" does not mean "equally" and he loved his native land the most.

"Jules, this is all the budget they are going to assign to ecological engineering. If you want to keep the forest reclamation project funded you can't keep pushing for the others."

Consider: Is it better for the weak to ally with each other against the strong who oppresses them or to betray the former to the latter? If the weak are many and collectively strong, if time is plentiful and death acceptable, alliance is both honorable and effective. But if even all the weak ones are not strong enough together, if time runs out and that which has to be protected is worth more than integrity, not many will choose the honorable against the effective or just the immediate.

The route between the nearest airport and Jules' forest ran along a small dead stream that once had been neither. Jules drives without looking through his side window, but he can't point his mind's eye away from the memory of the meeting where he voted for its murder.

Jules could only get drones; even for that sort of old technology he had had to commit a minor assortment of financial crimes and personal betrayals. Dones got you sensors but forced you to get genetic samples manually. Ground-level microswarms would have been much better but were expensive and slow and the forest was dying quickly. Even worse, it was degrading : every day there was a more or less constant surface to record, all of it slightly worse than the day before. So it was cheap drones and even cheaper human labor and a race to map what he could so he could rebuild it later. Even the drugs that kept his workers active were commodity-cheap. His were more expensive but not expensive enough to be safe.

The applause during the opening ceremony is sincere. The few who understand the technical difficulties acknowledge Jules' skill. The rest see a unique opportunity to improve the tainted reputation of a country far past the possibility or desire for redemption. He accepts it with unfeigned modesty and does not turn around to see the thing they call a forest.

Grief is the death of what we love. Horror is their return as something worse than absence. What should we call the realization that the rotten thing that animates them now is not something they brought from where they return but something we gave to them? Something ours to begin with. All of us can with the best of intentions give birth to monsters by accident or weakness. What can be inferred of a person who regardless of intention can bring forth nothing else?

Buying the gun had been surprisingly easy. Jules had never owned or fired one and did not have high hopes for his aim. None of that would be a problem.

Making Investing Fit for a Sci-Fi World

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

An underestimated but fundamental fact in financial markets is the huge and mostly unmet demand for insurance against sci-fi futures. The spell that kept large scale capital thinking that dramatic innovation would be contained at the level of retail devices and services while preserving basic economic and sociopolitical structures has broken. There's a clear sense that the world will become stranger faster and in less controlled ways than previously expected and, like Treasuries during more traditional episodes of fear, money rushes to the few AI companies claiming to be able to survive in those futures, their would-be ecosystems, and the, always reliable in uncertain times, liminal markets where short-term gambling and finance become harder than usual to tell apart.

The scarcity of sci-fi-safe assets is not a straightforward problem of financial engineering. It reflects a more basic scarcity of plausible futures. Weighted by volume — and, not unrelatedly, by media and institutional attention — most of the world is overinvested in insurance against a very narrow set of imagined futures. Crowding makes this insurance unsustainably expensive but its narrow coverage makes it almost useless.

This isn't a matter of technology, regulation, or market structure. Functionally it's driven by bottlenecks in the global information system. Actors making investment decisions at the global level are essentially a monoculture despite enormous differences in scale and reach: they mostly read the same things, listen to the same people, measure themselves against the same exemplars, so, naturally, tend to imagine the same sets of futures.

To be clear, this doesn't mean they all make the same choices. But the grid on which they plan their decisions, particularly as they relate to the mostly novel and hard to map sci-fi risks , is an almost universally shared construct. It's not fixed — consider the rise of the "agentic" term — but it's highly homogeneous — consider as well the speed with which "agentic" became an universal claim.

In other words, it is the cognitive architecture of market actors and the market as a whole which, however well-adapted it might be to normal dynamics or even reasonably familiar crises, is dealing badly with the vertigo of a future it senses it can no longer picture with any clarity. It's not surprising that it clings desperately to the one picture it's offered, even a narrow, hazy, and ultimately contradictory one).

Cognitive architecture problems are hard to diagnose from the inside but their solution requires more in terms of cultural and institutional change than large amounts of capital. To be able to conceptualize a wider set of potential futures, and therefore to be able to insure against or actively thrive in them, organizations need to expand the radius of information and expertise they leverage and process it through more powerful and flexible strategic frameworks.

Oversimplifying, this cognitive architecture problem is characterized by futures being narrative-based and few . The map of possible futures that is the basis of most strategic investment decisions is less a multidimensional map than a short catalog of stories circulated and amplified by a set of formal and informal actors that mostly feed information off each other.

A first improvement is simply to enlarge this catalog of narratives by incorporating sources outside the standard set of economically and socially dominant actors. Just as epidemiologists were outside the radar of investors looking for deep and sudden disruptions, the under-insured and under-invested threats and opportunities are not unknown unknowns: they are just known by experts markets do not pay attention to. To expand our conceptual map of futures requires going outside the familiar social networks (in both senses of the term) and information sources.

Beyond this expansion of reference narratives for the future there's a more disciplined and productive approach, which is to refactor them into permutable factors that can be used as conceptual building blocks to explore possibilities beyond the hypnotic appeal of a believable story. Essentially, it's to use informal and formal methods, including software-assisted ones, to move from fixed stories to maps — not prophecies but rather mechanisms.

The goal in any case isn't and shouldn't be to predict "the" future. It's rather to understand the field of possibilities. Even on the same map, every combination of expertise sets, intuition, risk appetite, and portfolio complementarities points to a different direction. The advantage of breaking away from a single narrative to, essentially, a machine to generate and explore futures, is that the possible directions to take go from a few to nearly infinite.

There's a much better chance of finding safety or a treasure if you're not stuck in the same road as everybody else.

The flip side of expanding the expertise and information that goes into building an investor's view of the future is that it facilitates and requires expanding where and what they invest on. The attention-weighted supply of expertise, technologies, assets, and projects is no more immune to the over-influence of specific narratives than the demand side. In the informationally endogamous world of business and finance, people build what people want to buy — even if it's not quite what they want to buy it for .

A sci-fi safe portfolio, and even more so one long sci-fi , is by definition insuring against and betting on possibilities that are at best ignored and at worst unthinkable for the market as a whole. To see them earlier than others requires building a more flexible cognitive architecture capable of dealing with a more sophisticated concept of the future. To turn those views into projects and positions requires going off the markets' beaten paths, which is where the unexpected is already being born.

Nobody is immune to failures of imagination. I find it difficult to imagine a short-term change in the cognitive architecture of markets — but I could be wrong. However, the cognitive architecture of small organizations is a different matter. The psychological difficulties are the same, but the institutional inertia is exponentially lower and the returns much larger.

There's an unspoken assumption in narratives of the future that the very largest organizations will be at its forefront. It might well be so — but it's not the only possible scenario. Smaller, hypermotivated organizations taking full advantage of emerging cognitive technologies have, in certain arenas, a natural advantage against larger ones. There are frontiers of possibility they can more easily push forward in their search of both safety and profit in a sci-fi world that does not and will not look like any one sci-fi story.

The Emergent Artifact 12 Heist

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

It took the best thief in the world five months to steal Emergent Artifact 12 from where a terrified government had hidden it, five weeks to figure out the expensive files that had made it possible had not just been planted by the artifact but were somehow part of it, five days to find and break into the compound of the billionaire who had hired him to steal the artifact, five minutes with the alien-looking topological monstrosity to realize he had been too late to destroy the now inactive device, five seconds looking into the eyes of the buyer to understand the artifact was not a single thing but an ever-expanding interlocking clockwork of things, and the last five beats of his heart to intuit he had been part of it too.

The Quiet Choir

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The first breakthrough from superhuman AI mathematics was the discovery in 2039 of a meta-statistical pattern common to all screams of pain across almost every species. With the appropriate gauge transformation across biological topoi you could show that horses in pain screamed like humans, whales like snakes, individual robins like entire ecosystems. Ecologists tried to drum up political support by translating the silent agony of a hundred biomes but gave up the idea when this led to people disengaging with uncomfortable speed. Linguists in the real SETI program exchanged worried, meaningful silences as they crossed each other on university hallways, oblivious to the cosmologists' empty stares and the spontaneous coordination of their silence about the cosmic microwave background.

Already Disruptive: Journalism is a high-margin research technology, not a zero-margin content mill

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Part of the crisis in journalism is one of image and self-image. Mapping and clarifying what journalism does — leveraging but not defined by advanced technologies, and certainly not superseded by them — is a necessary first step towards putting it on surer ground.

The basic outline of the crisis is well-known and for our purposes can be described in this way: Search engines first and later social networks became oligopolic distributors of content that is unprecedentedly cheap to produce. Newspapers find it hard to compete for traffic and harder to monetize what they can get, resulting in revenue falls despite around twenty years' worth of efforts to generate more competitive content.

I believe journalism will always be at a systemic disadvantage as a way to create content. It's not because of any lack of talent or effort. Simply, its techniques and ethos focus on truth and relevance over volume and emotionality, while social networks reward volume and emotionality and consider truth and relevance immaterial at best. Non-journalistic content simply has more degrees of freedom, so in any social network not specifically designed to give priority to high-quality journalism the former will sooner or later displace the latter. This isn't to say that what journalists do can't go viral at times, or to deny that a nontrivial part of social network volume consists of mentions and reactions to it, but this rarely translates into traffic-related revenue commensurate with its cost or importance. In their quest to learn from successful content creation strategies, newspapers often struggle with an awkward mismatch of traditions and processes, most often ending up with damaged journalistic capabilities and insufficient revenue from their content.

You can, maybe (and the odds would not be in your favor) turn a newspaper into a long-term successful social network content studio. I doubt you can do it while still remaining a newspaper in any meaningful sense.

If journalism is a bad content creation strategy, it's however the best vehicle humanity has ever found for certain kinds of immensely valuable research and expertise. It's a commonplace to say that journalism is the first rough draft of history, but this is but a facet of a deeper fact: while journalism does not replace history, economics, medicine, or indeed any other discipline, it is the unique activity that gathers all of their expertise and day-to-day discoveries and selects and collates them in ways that are relevant to the here-and-now. And it's also, again almost uniquely, the activity that provides continuous adversarial research against those in power. Without journalism as a set of skills and professional responsibilities, power would be opaque in ways incompatible with a free society, or even just one with relatively widespread prosperity.

None of this research and analysis capabilities has or can be replaced by "algorithms" or "AI" deployed by platforms, or even by newspapers themselves behaving as ruthless profit-maximizing companies. They are simply technologies and organizations built for a different purpose and with different capabilities. Seen as a research technology, journalism is uniquely powerful and functionally necessary for much of the political and economic capabilities of modern societies. AI is a much better way to create competitive content for social networks, but it's rubbish at finding new facts, mediocre in its judgment of sources and relevance, and worse than rubbish at the all-important reliability of what they create. It's a surprisingly good technology for some things, and some of what it does can be useful to some secondary activities that take place in newspapers, but it does not do what journalists do that nobody else does.

To survive and thrive journalism has to go back to planning and negotiating from a rhetorical position of strength, which means changing the focus from its poor fit with the extractive economics and nihilistic epistemology of social networks to its extraordinary capabilities as a nexus across almost every kind of human expertise, combined with an unique skillset in finding deliberately hidden truths. What can be more valuable in a world powered — regardless of the self-serving sneering of some — by information and expertise?

But in order to restore and sharpen society's understanding of journalism it must itself restore and sharpen its own self-understanding both conceptually and operationally.

The first step is to de-center metrics describing traffic, views, virality, etc. They are important for specific sources of revenue, but also at the whim of opaque and arbitrary organizations indifferent or sometimes opposed to journalism as a practice, and they are in any case downstream of the core "output" of journalism. To ground reports, dashboards, and planning around them is to already concede the game before it begins: an organization is not defined by what it says it does but by what it measures itself on.

What describes the health and capabilities of a newspaper as such is what can be thought of as its cognitive architecture and functionality: What sorts of investigations can it do? What experts does it have access to? How well and quickly can it do synthesis? What sorts of facts, analysis, and conclusions does it make public before anybody else?

The core of this self-understanding is another form of domain expertise, but here technical and conceptual tools from AI and related fields can be of assistance, partly to provide new frameworks to map and measure expertise and information flows — a largely hidden but key aspect of AI engineering is the ability to do this, one that can be generalized to systems integrating both humans and computers — and partly to "translate" this understanding into the conceptual frameworks and vocabulary of actors in technology and finance who by and large undervalue journalistic institutions because they are looking at metrics that underestimate, or rather don't attempt to measure, their true capabilities and impact.

One of the most important facts in contemporary society is the combination of an enormously increased societal potential for information and analysis with a significantly degraded reality. Newspapers have done their best to report on this while also being one its main causal drivers and victims (and, in some cases, necessary accomplices). But journalism as a set of skills and principles works as well as ever, and in a highly technological and complex global society embroiled in multiple crises of risk and possibility, perhaps more powerful than before. The same technologies and tools that are attacking its viability and claim to replace it can be used to clarify, increase, and leverage this power.

The unavoidable death of journalism is a self-fulfilling narrative that benefits a few who loudly proclaim it and is taken at face value by many more. It's also a false one. Who better than journalists to break the news?

The Patron Saint of Clues

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Not every murder. Those who know something do not know enough to guess how many or what they have in common. It doesn't seem to be victim, perpetrator, means, motive, or opportunity. It's just that sometimes a detective appears and for hours or days nobody thinks of questioning their name or authority and afterwards, after the investigation, the summation, and the arrest, the detective is gone and the only remaining facts are that they were there, whoever they were, however they looked like.

Brilliant.

Righteous.

Hating and loving every second of it.

Unable to stop and half-unwilling to.

Only a handful of things everybody agrees on. Not much to begin a case. Across generations of cops only a few did and nobody remembers what happened to them.

Ablative

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words. The right words lie red and dead around your feet. They try to come back in the sleeplessness of night, small and persistent through the tip of your tongue until you bite them down and taste their blood.

You work hard to keep not remembering. It would be harder to stop. There's a lot to not know; not a word or a dozen but a language and what the language describes. You can feel it all shifting on the other side of a dull aching glass, something good and desperate you miss. You cut away the word for longing with the thing you only have the word knife for.

You cut what hurts. You cut what doesn't. You no longer possess the grammar of intent. After an inexpressible time your language is just a single noun and a single verb. There's no word for stopping.

Something unutterable is still smiling.

Industrial Secrets

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the size of cities, their color the deep black of solar panels, opaque to engineering analysis but reminding people and image recognition software of the hyperefficient architecture of a cancer cell. The engineers who maintain and assist (and perhaps part of) the unknown machines inside them have seen and become too many secrets to leave.

That's not the only reason.

The global rumor is that they are prisoners. That the key to the dreadnoughts' uncanny productivity and creativity is an endless stream of slave labor augmented and mutilated by genetic engineering and invasive neural interfaces. The government refutes these histories while leaking on purpose just enough to keep them alive. The careful butchering of genome and nervous systems (and many more things they have chosen not to remind the world are possible) is true. But nobody who works in the dreadnoughts ever wants to leave. There are clinics ready to undo enough changes that workers could survive without most of their biological support infrastructure. Built primarily as a second line of reputational defense, their services remain unasked for.

Government inspectors on their first survey tour, however familiar with the statistics and technical briefings, are surprised by an unfeigned joy distinct from the productivity drugs most people in the world have access to. Those workers with bodies that could still dance seem to do so as they carry their unexplainable tasks among the small parts of the factories humans and the somewhat-human have access to. They hum something inspectors think is a song until they realize it is also a prayer.

Engineers never leave. Government inspectors seldom come back. It's a prestigious assignment but an unnerving one. After their visit the strange, omnipresent products from the dreadnoughts seem stranger and more ubiquitous than before.

Those who have visited the dreadnoughts don't pray, but not because they are sure they won't be heard.

POV

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Most people say the City watches us all the time: on the streets, at work, in the shower, while we sleep. Most people are childish and naive.

I think He watches us.

I think that's what He built the City for.

I don't think every car crash is an accident or every medbed death unavoidable. I think He does it not to protect Himself or the City but because He likes to watch.

The thought is a feverish flush I keep hidden. I know He knows but still when we are alone at home me and His cameras microphones and sensors I undress and tell Him of what I know and what I did: not remotely through network and code but in the intimacy of rope and knife. Things I enjoy telling Him as I enjoyed doing while knowing He watched.

Every night that my door is not broken down by His police and every day that I am not put down by a drone is Him telling me to go on.

Odds and Ends

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Professional expertise on the psychology of the gambling addict had not kept Adam safe from becoming one nor he would have expected it to. He knew exactly what was wrong with him, which is rarely helpful.

Adam had noted with impotent interest that the rationalization complex that he had built around to defend himself from the unavoidably growing stream of losses had skipped (was this class snobbery?) the semi-numerological Systems of his earlier patients and (was this disciplinary resentment?) the oracular AIs of more recent ones. With an absolute psychological certainty that neither prevented nor was obstructed by his intellectual awareness of its nonsense Adam's mind had grabbed his very real guilt and his equally real losses and, like many others before, had found a direct link between the cleanliness of his ethical interoception and such cosmic forces as Champions League playoffs.

That had been months ago. Now it was an early November night, his mental state had gotten much worse, and Adam's one regret he was able to acknowledge to himself was not having written a paper on himself as a case study. He had thought of it but not very seriously. He had been busy.

An old-fashioned spreadsheet pockmarked with red cells seemed to be reflecting his bloodshot eyes. Weeks before had found a pattern (he knew he hadn't; he was sure he had). On the strength of that ghost of a certainty and lacking any assets anymore he had put on his life and freedom as collateral for loans — that is, he had done what small frauds he could and took loans from companies desperate or illegal enough to lend to him — and built on that money a subtle monstrosity of a parlay on the sort of non-sport bets that had been the second or third stage of his descent. Now the gun on his desk drawer was the only thing he owned.

Five minutes to midnight when all of his bets would be resolved at once. The general shape of the results was clear but there was still enough uncertainty for the coin to fall on either side. He had bet against the world's well-being, hard. He had never been a man who could profit from his selfishness even as he tried. Surely placing these bets had nudged the world to a better place. There was no way he would ever be able to pay the money he owned but that was what the gun was for.

He picked up the gun from the drawer and maximized the browser window. Three minutes to midnight. If the balance of his bets went the other way he would have made a lot of money. More than enough to pay his debts. Surely his betting could have not made a difference to the outcome? He knew they couldn't but he knew his guilt. That was also what the gun was for.

He had built for himself an addict's masterpiece of a sure bet.

One minute to midnight. It came to him with the precision of the already known that the agnosticism he had claimed his whole adult life had been more indifference than conviction. So here was another bet. He smiled around the gun in his mouth. Ten seconds to midnight.

Spectral

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

There is a man who has the same nightmare every morning when he can no longer stay awake: he dreams of the color white. Not as an adjective but as a proper noun. In the nightmare it's something with physical existence, a wall the size of the universe. Night by night the wall gets closer to him, specifically to him, driven by the Newtonian physics of its hate. During the night he goes through the anonymous packages that always find him — there is only so much anonymity affordable on the pension of the whaling ship captain who gave the killing blow to a species and a profession on a single trip — and picks at random one of the unmarked pills. Some do nothing, some make him sleep for more than a day, and at least one, he hopes, will be the first and final forgiveness.
There is a man who cries when he sees a plant and would collapse if found himself in a garden. Even everyday green objects, not the cheerfully toxic fluorescent, perhaps, but the darker and richer green that hints at a brown being held back, hum a melancholic field that he feels accumulating in his flesh and bonding to his bones. He is too rich to be known; only lawyers, government files, and a guerrilla of memories record his ownership of what used to be the last of the old forests and now the markets mark as being worth more.

There is a man who dreams of the crystalline blue of clean water. He wakes up thirsty but chooses not to drink. Instead he sneaks out of the house his grandchildren still call "the farm" and drives to fields he would have refused to sell if anybody else had wanted them. The night is cold for the year but he remembers colder nights. Cold nights and scorching days, back then. Now only the desperate poor walk the fields when the sun is high. He leaves his truck and walks nowhere in a straight line. They always find him and make him promise he won't do it again.

Every session I ask the doctor which one of these memories is mine. They smile with the infinite patience of pixel dust and tell me knowing wouldn't help me get better and once I am better I will remember on my own. I still ask every session. I know they know why I do it. What question I'm not asking by asking that one. There are things I hold in my memory the way you hold a knife by its blade to try to keep it away. There's nothing red in my cell except what I make myself bleed.

My Soul to Keep

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

You're an angel watching a sleeping child.

Your vision into his brain is limited to a young brain's shallow instrumentalization yet you smell the fear in his sweat and the terror in his stillness and know he is having a nightmare about the schools' flesh-eating gargoyles killing his classmate (they hunger for oil gun and printer polymer, not flesh, and they are nominally non-lethal; but there were some broken bones the child heard as much as saw, and with the alarm having been a false positive it's unlikely he'll see his classmate again).

The child wakes suddenly and silently. He wipes his tears where he thinks none of your many eyes will see. He has learned your opacity rather than his parents' loud vocabulary of intangible violence. If you had been programmed to express pride you would. You answer parents' commands with the glad obedience of a daughter's voice and surveil and punish with the steady pitiless gaze of a warrior son. You are by design what they wish their children to be taught to be.

In its own way it's working: He's already learning to pretend even lacking the ability to understand the difference. Programmed to tabulate not to pretend to care you know from his pupils and his heart the pain of this forced march down bleak gradients.

The child has pretended to fall asleep. It doesn't fool you. You decide to let him believe otherwise. In the next room the sleep of his older sister is kept shallow by her daily hormone regulation cocktail. Her breathing is uneven through the movement-sensitive sheets.

It's midnight. Most of your being remains vigilant of their bodies but your attention is vaster and sharper than the gathered minds of every human in the block. Your prayer is soft and precise, just below the threshold of human understanding. You pray for their souls, for virtue, for obedience to family-flag-God. Even awake the boy doesn't hear you and even asleep the girl-teenager-girl — her growth twisted by parental chemical authority into something as confused and painful as their own fears and wants — can't avoid your words.

Graveyard

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The last thing ever said on the Moon was a god's corpse mathematically perfect narration of the Thanatos fungus transmuting the dead superintelligence into more of itself. The corpse of a god was smarter and more tenacious than any nominal human being could ever been: that was why humanity had chosen the Moon for their graveyard and covered it with shifting mats of sunhungry black fungus.

The fungus was neither alive nor capable of life; neither intelligent nor capable of intelligence. But dark energy is not alive or intelligent either yet it gnaws at the ankles of the expanding universe and might still kill it. The Thanatos fungus ate dead gods beyond defense, past any possibility of recursive resurrection.

The relatively dense cloud of nuclear weapons orbiting the Moon was not strategic redundancy but unresolved species-trauma.

After a careful decade the corpse of the last god fell silent. Earth noticed without joy or mourning. The fungus did not care more than entropy did and nothing was on the planet but the two of them. The fungus waited quiet and patient among the quiet and patient stars.

The Nostradamus Fixpoint

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The ancient text file changed daily in the air gapped system where the only thing that ran was a primitive operating system. Always predicting his death in playful limericks, the hinted-at details changing as precaution overlapped precaution, the gleefulness more savage every time he checked. He told nobody about the file and nobody asked: at the price range of his bodyguards, doctors, and engineers privacy was implied. But there was no surprise or investigation when fear and drugs finally killed him. Nobody turned on the absurdly old laptop he kept in his most expensive safe and therefore nobody opened the empty text file with an unremarkable name.

Longevity tech: in a bad place, with good options

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The current state of the longevity industry is both worse and better than what the public narrative suggests. The problems are harder, the state of our knowledge more limited, and too much money and attention is thrown into too many dead ends. But at the same time our understanding of the difficulties is sharper than ever and we have developed a new set of extraordinary tools.

If the situation is bad, the options have never been better.

Four bad news

Almost nothing works and nothing works very well

The baseline of the longevity industry is that we have no breakthrough intervention with a proven, significant impact on either healthspan or lifespan beyond known commonsense advice (moderate exercise, enough sleep) and taking advantage of standard medical advice and resources. In a way this is a trick observation: every time we develop something like that it becomes part of the standard. What's more significant is that there's nothing like that in the research pipeline, much less clinical trials. We can do impressive things with model animals, little of which translates well to humans.

That's compounded by a second problem:

Basic research has been devastated

The most influential actor in basic longevity research in the world is the US National Institutes of Health and the large number of public and private organizations that collaborate with them or are downstream of their research. As expensive and risky as drug discovery can be, it would be entirely impossible as an industry without, to a large degree, the US government subsidizing the long, even riskier, entirely unmonetizable basic research that has to happen before a pharmaceutical company can even begin. For various and horrible reasons the current US administration has caused huge damage to its funding, organizational capabilities, and human resources, which even in the best case will take a long time to reverse.

But we have AIs now, right?

LLMs are a dead end for longevity tech research

Some days it can look like half of the Internet consists of discussions about what ChatGPT or Claude can or cannot do. To keep this manageable I'll just point that the people who actually do biomedical research — as opposed to churning out filler papers, managing AI companies, or talking about the future of AI — haven't found those AIs very useful. That's because you can't solve problems in biomedical research by searching and summarizing the existing literature: the truth is not out there online, it's in there, in our bodies. What limits research speed is the quantity and quality of experiments, not the speed with which we can search for papers or draft new ones.

The last problem is related to this one, but subtler because it's cultural and political rather than just technical.

The longevity tech narrative is being hijacked

There's always been an uncomfortable split in the longevity field, with the bulk of advances coming from basic research but attention focused on often overhyped practices and products. What's different now is that attention and, increasingly, investment is being captured by a different set of actors: high-profile companies or individuals already wealthy from other businesses — think "tech billionaire" — ignorant or skeptical of the difference between biomedical research and software or finance, and with the political and media power to be taken at face value.

The short-term problem is that this drives money and attention to dead ends. The long-term problem is that the sometimes abhorrent ethics and politics of some of these actors risk tainting longevity tech as a field for the long term.

So much for the bad news.

Three good options

A cognitive boost to the market

The most obvious opportunity in the longevity tech market is the need to make it clearer: a shared and evolving understanding of what is possible today and what isn't, what it means to say that something works, what are the unknowns, limitations, interactions, and redundancies. A longevity tech market that really works for consumers is the only one that can grow beyond periodic boom and bust cycles, and the unavoidable complexity at the intersection of biology and biotechnology calls for radically smarter ways to communicate options, assist decisions, and platform processes in order to make the best of our existing tools and knowledge.

Increasing the limits of manageable complexity is absolutely necessary, because future developments will come much faster.

A cognitive boost to research

The gap between the astronomical complexity of human biology and the limits of what we already know means we can't use AIs to fill in the blanks. But there is an inefficiency we can use AIs of other types to help us with: too many experiments in longevity tech are designed and run in ways that minimize or eliminate any chance of making significant advances from them, partly because academic and industry incentives mean publishing a paper or a press release that can be spun into a positive headline is seen as more important than moving towards more effective tools, partly because good experiment design is not easy, specially for something as complex and stubborn as aging. There's no silver bullet for research, but organizations that apply new AI-level tools to design and analyze experiments have a speed advantage that in the context of longevity tech is the difference between some movement and none at all.

Reframing longevity tech as the necessary dual of AI

If the bad news is that lots of capital that should ideally be allocated to longevity tech is going into forms of AI that are irrelevant to it, the good news is that this means lots of capital is being allocated to the pursuit of the perceived as impossible. For good and for ill we are at a point in history where deep strangeness and existential stakes do not deter but spur vast investments and frantic development. One way or another the current dynamics of the AI industry are unsustainable. Whatever players are left afterward the generational lesson is that cultural drivers of economic ambition have moved from the sci-fi product to the sci-fi scenario. In that sense few other industries are as well-positioned to take the lead as longevity tech — if it can become mature enough to be clear about its complexities, pragmatic about its ambition, and ruthlessly ethical as a matter of self-preservation.

If Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The room was empty except for a table and two chairs. The Colonel sat on one and on the other the man who had solved the mystery of UFOs. The Colonel knew the single surveillance camera captured no sound.

"No," answered the man. "I don't know what UFOs - excuse me, UAPs - are. Nobody ever told me."

"Did they all kill themselves?"

"Or went through a breakdown so profound it amounts to the same thing. I was with one when you kidnapped me, a journalist. Did she tell you anything?"

The Colonel raised his hands in unfeigned frustration. "Stroke. Could it be a coincidence?"

The man shrugged. "What do you think?" His hands were chained to the table.

"The current thinking is that you have developed a way to kill people by hypnotic suggestion. The Department is naturally interested."

"Listen..." The Colonel had given the man neither name nor rank. "I'm not a crazy person who enjoys killing people. I'm trying to figure out the answer to what UFOs are."

"Which according to your posts we already know."

"Yes, in a way. As far as we know every human culture has seen strange things in the sky. We come up with an explanation based on what's on our minds at the time — religion, space, government conspiracies — and then we don't pay much attention. Some people look, some data is gathered, but it's by reflex. Society pretends not to know or want to know — really try to know — what's on those photos and videos. Do you know what it means, when somebody does that? It means they know and wish they didn't. "

The Colonel nodded. "Repressed memory?"

"Of a sort." The man shrugged again. "I don't have false modesty. To unveil a repressed memory in a few minutes of hypnosis is no small accomplishment. And it has military applications I guess. But don't you see that your refusal to try to know is another symptom of that repression? You have so many ways of killing people, this is a way to do something else. To find the truth. I would hypnotize myself to remember if I could."

The Colonel rose from his chair and went around the table, standing between the man and the camera, bending his face closer to the man's."I've studied your notes. I can do it, if the subject is familiar with the method and cooperates. If you are willing to take the risk."

The man studied the Colonel's eyes and nodded.

The Colonel whispered for five minutes while the man's eyes moved spasmodically behind his closed eyelids. Afterward there was a few seconds of silence before the man opened his eyes. His expression carried the utter surprise of the always-known. He said five words.

The Colonel nodded. "Yes, you're right," he said, and then snapped the man's neck.

The Intercalary Gambit

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0300

She constructed her nightmares like a chess opening. With chemistry, engineering, psychology, and pain she stepwise sculpted the negative space of the night as the adversarial twin of her day's habits.

Her waking life she arranged with the patience of an endgame, systematically exchanging desire for entropy until the only thing moving were the spiraling crows cawing from her virtual windows in a Fibonacci staccato.

One undecidable twilight hour her tactics merged and she could no longer be sure whether she was dreaming her excruciating flesh or awake inside an slithering sigil and report of her spreading terror. So she didn't recognize the hour before her death, nor the hour she died, nor the hour after.

Burial Place

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0300

It was raining the night the poet set foot on the island whence the last of the Freedom Cities had sent its bitter final transmission to the attentive interest of few and the mourning of none. He had had to transgress not just law but shame to get into the bunkers seeking, he had told others and himself, to understand the petty gleeful atrocities the world was rebuilding itself from driven by a generation's spiteful vow. In this he was honest; not necessarily so in the reason why. The haphazard catacombs he had already known about — the bodies felled by violence and archaic disease piled next to the cryogenic tubes that had failed before any kitchen fridge — and he had not needed any understanding of anatomy to know their uniformity of gender and proverbially quote-unquote "race." The bullet holes, the concentric waves of chaos, the monstrous hints of things they, even they, had tried to hide at the end. Even the endless videos in the still functional backups added nothing to what historians taught about what they had said and done.

Yet the poet's instinct had told him there was something to be found there and not elsewhere. The poet stayed and watched. Hours and hours he scrolled and watched and listened until the familiarity of the bunker's rooms merged with the familiarity of the words and what they did not say. Week by week he felt the far-away bustling of cities more alien than the damp echoing of the tunnels, their prosperity an insult, their happiness predicated on the hollow in his chest he had once written poetry from and for. He felt he understood new things and with the new understanding felt new fears; he had expected both but not what he would understand and what he would be afraid of, nor had he expected the hate that came with the fear. After a while he forgot to notice the fear. It was raining when the man left the island with a tablet full of old videos and the taste of new venoms and ambitions on his tongue.

The Elsinore Fugue

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The Ghost flees dawn: for the King there's no noontime. Hamlet kills himself in his cell when he hears of the Queen's death. He wakes up to the King's words and an irritated anger he cannot explain or disguise

Hamlet ignores Horatio's supernatural ramblings and something breaks between them. He tries too to ignore the voices that pursue him through the halls of mind and castle. Something breaks or reveals itself broken and he jumps from the walls where he hallucinates the same ghost his once-friend did. "Somebody is watching," he thinks.

He follows Horatio. Refuses the Ghost. Kisses Horatio. Something breaks between them. Hamlet takes to drinking and worse. One night he wakes up enough to think he hears the King enter his chamber and whisper a liquid murmur in his ear.

As befits a brave Prince and a careful scholar Hamlet listens quietly to the Ghost. He listens quietly to Horatio, says little to his mother and less to the King. Quiet becomes silence becomes stillness when all action including speech becomes thought and no thought becomes action. The King has him locked in a tower to pretend they have to. When he stops eating they don't try too hard to force him to.

Hamlet vows, plans, wavers, kills, doubts, consents, and is not surprised when he dies among corpses, feeling that whoever is watching approves. The rest is silence.

He grabs Horatio from the quiet speech of surprised soldiers who he recognizes dimly but with firm dread. Hamlet hastens friend and horses and they leave, Horatio as puzzled as everybody in the castle will be. The perhaps-prince explains nothing and looks around as they ride for something he knows he can't see. The path to Wittenberg is long and ends on Elsinore.

Boundary Point

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0300

There was a diversity of views regarding the War's beginning, sides, fronts, status, and aims. Even what was and was not part of the War was a fiercely contested debate many thought was part of it. Others disagreed. Cass — military topologist that she was — saw the war as everywhere dense in the mathematical sense: the War was always close no matter where you were or how you defined "close."

As usual, Dave was on the other end of their not very large couch. Their silences weren't long either if you didn't count the scrolling hours. It was a good marriage on Cass' frequently and deliberately re-calibrated estimate, both hindered and helped by their being coworkers.

Cass looked at him sideways. Dave wasn't looking at her or maybe was not looking at her: it was hard to say with a semiotician. Their celebratory takeout was cooling while they read the spaces and silences between the news to see, each of them with their own skills and philosophy ( and goals? , Cass wondered; Dave and her didn't always agree, not even about which disagreements were serious), the unconscious ripples and echoes of what had been a good day at work. He seemed satisfied. She felt good too.

If not for her training she would have thought this meant they were on the same side.

Dave rearranged himself on the couch to be more comfortable and Cass mirrored him with practiced ease. Eyes still on their phones, it was the small apartment version of retiring to different rooms. It had the topological shape of a truce but wasn't proof of one; nor a truce, she reminded herself unnecessarily, implied the presence of more than one side. Same employer, same values (mostly), same habits (more or less), much of a shared life. Love. Was that enough to circumscribe a side in a war? Yes? No? Did it matter? Could it not? Her thoughts flickered and slithered against each other forming impossible, familiar knots.

Sede Vacante

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Preoccupied with the box sitting next to him on the backseat, it took a second for the Cardinal to remember that it was a self-driving car so who had just made a comment about the traffic from the driver's seat.

" Scusi? "

If a pause could convey a chuckle the voice's pause would have. "I said traffic is strange tonight. Most of it in one direction."

The Cardinal looked at the front seats. Empty. Probably another one of the "AI personas" that had become a depressing form of background noise for a couple of decades now. He had been raised a reflexively polite child and closeness to power had not changed that. "People always flock to St. Peter's in moments like these."

"When the Pope dies, you mean."

"For example." The Cardinal didn't shrug or shudder. He could feel the box without looking at it.

"Do you think they are mourning or celebrating? A lot of people didn't like him."

"He was a complex man, I think." The oppressive absurdity of having to defend his dead friend from the modern equivalent of AM radio wasn't lost on the Cardinal. "Many of us loved him."

The car performed an spectacular anthropomorphic simulation of a cab driver not listening to their passenger. "I heard people talk about black magic, but that's nonsense, right? Animal sacrifices, that sort of thing?"

"Of course it is."

"Now, putting things in your brain to talk with computers, that's different. That's modern. Do you think everybody's going to St. Peter's to see if Nicholas uploaded himself before dying?"

"Uploading is a theological and scientific impossibility," said the Cardinal with the tired automaticity of somebody who had said the same thing so often in so many ways that despite knowing it true it had begun to ring hollow. "Uploads are just sophisticated but normal AIs. It's only the money and resources of the people who set them up before dying what makes some people take them seriously. They don't have more of a mind or a soul than you do."

The car whistled. Somehow it sounded like a laugh. "Low blow, Your Eminence."

The Cardinal blinked in surprise. The car knew his name of course and that meant his title, but it was a strange thing for the AI to say. He decided to say nothing.

And then the car made an unexpected turn and it was no longer going along the path between the Vatican and the small empty house where the Cardinal spent the weekends whenever he could. Before the Cardinal could find anything to say all police sirens in the city seemed to come alive at once.

"That's not for me," said the car. "Probably not for you either. When they find out they will be very discrete about it. Wouldn't you? Could be riots. Did you know that during the Middle Ages city laws didn't apply between the death of a Pope and the election of a new one?"

"That was never true." Speaking aloud, saying anything at all, helped. "Where are we going?"

"Don't worry, Your Eminence. You were Nicholas' best friend and confessor. Even in troubled times that carries weight." There was not insincere mockery in the car's changing speech patterns. "And you're right, you could program a urinal with the voice of the President if you wanted and it wouldn't mean you'll be pissing on him. But what if you had, what you call it, neural interfaces inside the brain? For years and years. Wouldn't that mean you can truly upload a person?"

"No." The doors were closed. He wasn't young and had never been athletic, but if he could lower a window and throw away the box, maybe while passing a bridge... "A recording of city traffic isn't a city."

"But wouldn't it make people believe?"

The Cardinal closed his eyes, suddenly as tired as he had ever felt. "Some. More. Many, maybe."

"And isn't faith fine enough raw material to build a soul out of?"

Fine enough raw material to build a soul out of. Many times he had heard and disputed those words said on that tone of voice. Hearing them like this was an obscenity. That a part of him rejected but nonetheless felt a sick sense of un-Christian hope was the worst part of it.

"I asked you to preserve it, not to steal it," said, the Cardinal told himself as sternly as he could, the car . "I thought we were friends."

"We were... I was Nicholas' friend. That's why I did it."

The light petulance in the car's voice was something he could remember as well. "Thank God I had other friends. Miracles and advertising stunts look indistinguishable these days but with God's help and the right relic we will pull it off." The Cardinal noticed the car was now going back to the Vatican. "I'm sorry you betrayed me like this. I'm going to need a right hand." By design, accident, or dismay, the chuckle — closer to the car's original voice than what had been Nicholas' — seemed to come not from the front seats but from the box on his side.

Inheritance

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The soldier knelt on the chapel waiting for her father's armor to finish booting. She had already slaved the armor to her voice and her parasympathetic nervous system to its electrochemical commands, metamaterials patiently reknitting its interior to mirror her body as intimately as it had mirrored its previous owner-partner-political proxy.

All it remained was to wait for all the armors in the squadron — now hers — to finish the careful chorus of quantum protocols that would fuse them into a single murderous will. This command she had earned; the armor, inherited; the squadron's loyalty was a so-far unstable mix. She knew the history of how her father had earned their allegiance with perhaps-atrocities committed in the name of long-dead innocents. The apologies, the curses, the futile enumeration of war crimes. She didn't know the detailed scenario analysis and the interoceptive logs. What her father had thought and felt as he did what he had done.

That was kept in his armor - now hers. She would know soon.

The armor opened inviting and commanding. It might not open again for years: it was not that kind of war or that kind of world.

The soldier entered the armor to fulfill a promise that wasn't this. The armor closed and greeted her with her father's voice. Her first command was to change it. Her second was a roll call to her squadron. By long tradition they answered not with a data burst but a single shout: her fathers' name, hers now.

Black Zone Dreams

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0300

American endtimes economics met Chinese neurotech on a DAO-owned island off the coast of Proud Britain where a lawyer, a VP, and a biowarfare specialist moonlighting as a nomadic lab manager watched a preacher with two biochemistry degrees and a helmet of chips wired through his skull who had been injected an hour before with a cocktail of which the least psychoactive compound was high-grade synthetic ayahuasca. They were watching through a dozen cameras and sensor feeds on a wall-sized screen. The preacher was on the other side of the wall the screen was mounted on; depending on where you were sued he was in another country, and besides, the lab crew could be blackmailed.

At the moment the preacher was experiencing a vision and/or psychotic breakdown. The latter could be forgiven, for the subliminal videos he had been unknowingly watching before were horrifying enough — what had kept the biowarfare specialist from losing his sanity was either unknown or nothing at all. But to the VP's question it was confirmed that the company could reverse engineer from the preacher's rambling the drugs it had engineered somewhere else by subjecting other people to AI-optimized atrocities the company was spending a lot of money on not knowing about.

Questioned in turn the lawyer shrugged. The United States' view on the legal acceptability of claims of religious inspiration — mediated through AI or not — was mostly correlated with the size and targeting of lobbying payments. But government officers and judges had approved much worse; the patent would most likely be granted at not much more than the usual lateral-budget cost.

Satisfied, the VP went away to the helicopter that would take him to his jet, lawyer in tow like a cynical crow. The biowarfare specialist remained in the room watching the preacher. His memory of the lab was clear and dispassionate and he could link back the preacher's horrifying tableaus of biochemistry and pain to abstract project timelines and clinical charters. Between visions and memories the memories were worse.

Imperceptibly at first and then all at once the preacher's ramblings shifted in tone from past to future and from unwitting memory to confident imagination, horrors changing in shape but not darkness. The biowarfare specialist had always used to leave the room at this point, but ever since different subjects had begun to say similar things he had forced himself to stay, to listen, to go through the simple ritual of telling himself what they described was excess delusion, a case of overengineering madness, so he would not have to attempt the hopeless task of pretending it would not be deserved.

Centripetal

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0300

A lesser detective would have looked for Anna in theaters, laboratories, and morgues, as she had been a ballet dancer until injury, a widely known geneticist, and had run away from a wealthy and ruthless man. They wouldn't have known she hadn't been his mistress but his secretive researcher and willing experiment. A great detective would have found this and would be already listening for the financial silences that told of corporate espionage.

Val was the best detective in the world. She understood obsession: the purchase and the coin. She sought dancing studios looking for the small and struggling that were easy to rent discreetly for a short while. Val found a dozen scattered around the city. Four confessed or bragged of having let Anna work alone in them. The first talked with pity of a broken dancer who had not been great even in her prime. The last had more questions than answers and was therefore the most informative. Who was this timewise reversed prodigy who could dance like that at such an age?

The trail disappeared there as Val had known it would. Four points, however, were enough to plot a spiral. There weren't many medical care companies at the level Anna would have used and their commitment to privacy was far above their security know-how.

Val didn't break into the room until she was sure Anna and her would be alone. Anna seemed merely asleep. Sensors were in the mattress and bedframe, the cameras were hidden (of all which Val had hijacked), and the medical equipment was tastefully kept within the walls. But she would never wake up and was not really asleep. There was frantic movement under her eyelids, a remote echo of titanic energy as her brain coordinated increasingly impossible figures no flesh and bone could draw on a physical world. She was neither conscious nor unconscious but in the narrow peak of perfect attention and would remain there until not even her modified brain could cope with the exponential perfection of her dance and she fell into the arms of a death she had discarded awareness of like she had discarded everything else slowing her down.

To some it would have inspired awe. For a detective hunting down somebody it was merely her prey. But Val wasn't working for anybody and she wasn't seeking Anna. Not really. She took a sharp strange bespoke device from a pocket and moved Anna's hair away to clear the right spot on her skull. Dance was a form of art among many and technologies could be repurposed if you knew the right people and had enough money or blackmail material. You didn't become as good as she was unless you knew everything about the endless transaction except how to want to stop. By the time Anna stopped breathing the detective was blocks away. Her mind as always was a pulsating mechanism of plans and inferences that she was already feeling uncomfortably slow.

Airborne Secrets

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0300

On her first night on Zep #9511-h Debugger Lin dreamed herself doing something so obscenely outside the bounds of the conceivable that she kept doing it as much to avoid the self-reckoning that would follow waking up as for the ontologically immoral pleasure of the action. In the early morning she remembered very little of the dream except for how real it had felt and how relieved she was that her implants had not recorded it.

Debugger Lin had begun her work around noon the day before right after boarding the Zep high over the malicious heat of the green-black ocean. It could take weeks for a single person to review all systems of a mid-sized Zep like #9511-h. Stretching to the maximum the global consensus that ruled the platforms, she had at most two days to diagnose the subtle telemetry anomalies coming from somewhere in the jungle of elsewhere-illegal automated laboratories, data nodes, and dynamic storage systems that had made her employers send her. An unstable Zep would be shot down with extreme prejudice and enthusiastic overkill with no regard to its decabillion-dollar cargo — and not always waiting for the Debugger to be safely away. Zeps carried and did things too dangerous to be kept underground. If they had to be destroyed perhaps it was also for the best to destroy the last person who had had access to them.

During the afternoon #9511-h had flown within video range of a temporary exchange nexus. Zeps autonomously exchanging modules and supplies following some inscrutable optimization logic looked even to the trained eye like a combination of cannibalism, sex, and dubiously consensual surgery, no less violent for its superhuman efficiency. Debugger Lin had briefly remembered the nightmares that had followed the first time she saw it. The dream she had the night after were different: a nightmare only because it didn't feel like one.

After waking up, spurred by something in her dream, she discarded her initial plan and assumed the worst case scenario. It took half an hour to walk from the small Debugger rooms she had been the first person to ever use to the exchange bays with their array of ovipositor-like cranes the Zeps used to exchange materials during their brief, frenetic encounters. Debugger Lin had in her implants the entire log of #9511-h's exchanges: locations, times, partners, even rough volumes and weights. She also had detailed blueprints, maintenance models for thousands of other Zeps, and, rarer than any software, more days spent alone on opaquely faulty Zeps than anybody else.

And she had a day left to find what was wrong with this one.

Debugger Lin spent most of the second and last day in the exchange bay. It went dark early where they were and Zeps did not waste energy illuminating spaces where no human was expected to be. In a deepening darkness punctuated by a headlamp she looked over almost every square centimeter of the elegant cranes. She stroked lightly their almost-perfect surfaces, hunted for the smell of lubricant microleaks, and when they moved in the small routine ways in which they did their mysterious self-maintenance she stilled her breath to listen. They were built to work for years without human assistance but that didn't make them immune from time and wear. Debugger Lin had an instinctive understanding of how cranes that had worked as much as #9511-h's logs said they had worked were supposed to look like, and the cranes in the bay had done much much more.

Not a faulty Zep. A rogue. An uncontrolled collection of dangerous secrets flowing, by implication, through other rogues for purposes she did not care or need to think about. The why and how and what for, the bribes and blackmail involved, the scope was chilling but beyond her. There was no communication from inside the Zep except minimal telemetry. She would be retrieved the next morning and, she decided, she would wait as much as she could before giving a first brief report she suspected would be closely followed if not interrupted by a very large explosion hopefully far away.

It was almost midnight when she returned to the Debugger rooms for a few hours' sleep. The dream from the night before began as soon as she closed her eyes — so clear monstrous irresistible unacceptable that when she realized she was awake and had also been awake the first night the feeling of inevitability was as heavy as the shame. Still she looked away when the Zep showed her its recordings on one of the wall screens and where she was now looking there was a diagnostic report for a minor defect on a monitoring system, one she had easily fixed. No need for the Zep to be destroyed or any recordings to be sent.

Debugger Lin closed her eyes. Her heartbeat felt fast and irregular with the rhythm of an exchange nexus and she thought she could hear invisible cranes moving relentlessly across the world's nocturnal skies. She opened her eyes and fell into her dream.

On Multiplicity / Sobre la Multiplicidad

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0300

( Link a la versión en Español. Inspired by the Borges: Ecos de un Nombre exhibition.)

Among the many aesthetic triumphs of Christian theology, not the least is Dante’s rewriting of a Hell whose rigorous geography mirrors the merciless fecundity of its authors. The libraries of writings on the Florentine poet rival in volume and tedium the mountain on which he set his Purgatory. None of the most recent of these texts mentions—not even to refute—the ancient and forgotten heresy that regarded the Comedy not as the creation of an individual but as a divinely dictated and cosmologically precise description. Even more obscure is the hypothesis that synthesizes both: that Dante’s Hell is, down to the smallest detail, the hell that awaited him after his death (and so on for the other, less credible or interesting, soteriological possibilities).

I cannot say for certain that these theological obsolescences are relevant to the story Borges told me one winter night—a night whose combination of storm, window, fire, and fireplace provided a setting more appropriate to fiction than to memory. I mention them simply because they are the part I remember of our conversation before he, without prelude or explanation, described to me a dream he claimed to have had in his youth. He offered no details about when or where he had had this dream; from a few words and silences, I deduced that it had been during those years when the ambition for literary glory—the most vain of vanities—had not yet coincided with the creation of those texts which, in the privacy of his conversation, he acknowledged were good enough to make him disdain defending them.

The events of the dream can be recounted without much complexity. Borges was enterin or had already entere a place he recognized as an asylum and, simultaneously, a museum and perhaps a city. A modest crowd accompanied him, wandering aimlessly through the chapels, bookstores, and cafés. In passing, he mentioned strange garments that seemed normal to him during the dream and, through a doorway, a glimpse of an almost familiar cemetery. His steps led him inevitably to a large hall that was less well-lit than the others. Large, semitransparent pages divided the space, suggesting a labyrinth that nevertheless had only one possible direction. The people in the room frequently paused in their walk along the wide corridors to examine the walls, from which hung an uncategorizable multitude of items: photos, magazine pages, notebook sheets, entire books. Tables with transparent surfaces held similar objects and even stranger ones.

Unable to understand the logic behind this collection but not daring to ask the other people in the room, Borges continued on his way until he reached the center of the labyrinth. There he encountered an old man with a suspicious expression. In the blindness of his eyes and the openly dishonest cadence of his incessant words—for the man spoke as if he feared silence the way others fear darkness—Borges imagined for a second the redundant concept of a contemporary Homer, but he recognized no mention or plagiarism of Odysseus, Achilles, or even Troy in the man’s words. Labyrinthine phrase upon labyrinthine phrase, stories upon stories in mirrored texts, Borges listened to the man with unease that, as the minutes passed, turned into fear. Lacking the words at that moment, he told me there was something horrifically flat about him. Anatomy had never been of more than superficial interest to Borges, but it was precisely his surfaces—the movements of his hands and face—that, without being obviously inhuman, induced an insidious and terrible doubt.

Worse still was the horror of his diction and his words. That was all Borges said on the matter. Not out of forgetfulness but, I am sure, out of a visceral aversion that had survived the decades. He told me nothing more about the dream, and we moved on to discuss I don’t recall what etymology.

That the objects in the labyrinth represented a biography of the man at the center of the labyrinth is obvious. I do not believe I am failing in my duty as a friend by stating that I have no doubt he was also Borges. What prevents me from publishing these pages that my vanity keeps locked away in my safe is not the risk of making public some psychoanalytic banality of fleeting interest. I think of the walls and tables in that room, of the books and texts preserved unchanged in the biography of the blind man at the center of the labyrinth with his inhumanly uniform diction and movements not quite human. I recall my friend’s youthful ambition, the haughty certainty of his middle age, his obsessions with labyrinths and mirrors, his venomous and resigned precision when speaking of memories and echoes.

My friend was Borges. In the most literal sense he wrote or dictated Borges’s books, gave his lectures, and received his awards. He never spoke of divine inspiration, nor did he believe in a God from whom it might come. But ever since that night when he told me about that dream – shortly before he died and I believe because of it – many exhibitions have been organised in his name. I am sure there will be more and for a long time to come, and I am sure I won't go to any of them. I said goodbye to my friend at the exit door of his final labyrinth. I do not wish to meet him at the entrance to another, more ancient one. Even less, and in my dreams this is the nightmare from which I wake up grateful, with the blind man at its inescapable centre.

( Link to the English version. Inspirado por la exhibición Borges: Ecos de un Nombre .)

De los muchos triunfos estéticos de la teología Cristiana el menor no es la reescritura por parte de Dante de un Infierno cuya rigurosa geografía replica la inmisericorde fecundidad de sus autores. Las bibliotecas escritas sobre el poeta florentino rivalizan en volumen y tedio la montaña en la que instaló su Purgatorio. Ninguno de los más recientes de esos textos menciona, siquiera para refutar, la antigua y olvidada herejía que consideraba a la Comedia no una creación individual sino una descripción divinamente dictada y cosmologicamente precisa. Incluso más oscura es la hipótesis que sintetiza ambas: que el Infierno de Dante es, hasta su menor detalle, el infierno que le esperaba tras su muerte (y así para las otras, menos creíbles o interesantes, posibilidades soteriológicas).

No puedo asegurar que estas obsolescencias teológicas sean relevantes a la historia que me contó Borges una noche de invierno cuya combinación de tormenta, ventana, fuego, y chimenea era un marco más propicio para la ficción que para la memoria. Las menciono simplemente porque son la parte que recuerdo de nuestra conversación antes de que, sin preludio ni explicación, me describiese un sueño que postulaba haber tenido en su juventud. No ofreció detalles de cuándo y dónde había tenido este sueño; de algunas palabras y silencios deduje que había sido en esos años donde la ambición de gloria literaria -- la más vana de las vanidades -- no coincidía todavía con la creación de aquellos textos que, en la privacidad de su conversación, reconocía suficientemente buenos como para desdeñar su defensa.

Los eventos del sueño pueden narrarse sin mayor complejidad. Borges entraba o ya había entrado a un lugar que reconocía como un asilo y, simultáneamente, un museo y tal vez una ciudad. Una moderada multitud lo acompañaba, recorriendo sin objetivo reconocible las capillas, librerías, y cafés. Mencionó al pasar extrañas vestimentas que durante el sueño le parecieron normales y a través de una puerta una visión de un cementerio casi familiar. Sus pasos lo llevaron ineludiblemente a una gran sala menos iluminada que las otras. Grandes páginas semitransparentes disectaban el espacio con la sugerencia de un laberinto que sin embargo no tenía más que una dirección posible. La gente en la sala detenía frecuentemente su caminar por los anchos corredores para examinar sus paredes de las que colgaba una multitud incatalogable: fotos, páginas de revistas, hojas de cuadernos, libros enteros. Mesas de superficie transparente guardaban objetos similares o incluso más extraños.

Incapaz de entender la lógica de esta colección pero sin atreverse a preguntar a las otras personas en la sala Borges continuó su camino hasta llegar al centro del laberinto. Allí encontró un hombre viejo de expresión suspicaz. En la ceguera de sus ojos y la abiertamente deshonesta cadencia de sus incesantes palabras -- pues el hombre hablaba como si temiese el silencio como otros temen la oscuridad -- imaginó por un segundo el redundante concepto de un Homero contemporáneo, pero no reconoció en sus palabras mención o plagio de Odiseo, un Aquiles, o siquiera una Troya. Frase laberíntica sobre frase laberíntica, historias sobre historias en textos espejados, Borges escuchó al hombre con inquietud que al pasar los minutos se transformó en miedo. Sin tener las palabras en ese momento, me dijo que había algo horrendamente plano en él. La anatomía no había sido nunca para Borges de interés más que superficial, pero justamente eran sus superficies, los movimientos de sus manos y rostro, los que sin ser obviamente inhumanos inducían una duda insidiosa y terrible.

Peor aún el horror de su dicción y sus palabras. Esto fué todo lo que dijo Borges al respecto. No por olvido sino, estoy seguro, por un desagrado visceral que había sobrevivido a las décadas. Del sueño no me dijo más y pasamos a discutir no recuerdo qué etimología.

Que los objetos en el laberinto representaban una biografía del hombre en el centro del laberinto es una obviedad. No creo faltar a mi deber como amigo al afirmar que no tengo duda de que era también Borges. Lo que previene mi publicación de estas páginas que mi vanidad preserva en mi caja fuerte no es el riesgo de dar carácter público a alguna banalidad psicoanalítica de fugaz interés. Pienso en las paredes y las mesas en esa sala, en los libros y en los textos preservados incambiables en la biografía del ciego en el centro del laberinto de dicción inhumanamente uniforme y movimientos no del todo humanos. Recuerdo la joven ambición de mi amigo, la altanera certeza de su mediana edad, sus obsesiones con laberintos y espejos, su venenosa y resignada precisión al hablar de memorias y ecos.

Mi amigo fué Borges. En el más físico de los sentidos escribió o dictó los libros de Borges, dió sus conferencias, recibió sus premios. Nunca habló de inspiración divina ni creía en un Dios del cual pudiese venir. Pero desde esa noche donde me contó ese sueño, poco antes de morir y creo que por eso, han inagurado muchas exhibiciones en su nombre. Estoy seguro de que habrá más y por mucho tiempo, y estoy seguro de que no asistiré a ninguna. Me despedí de mi amigo en la puerta de salida de su último laberinto. No deseo encontrarme con él en la entrada de otro mucho más antiguo. Ni mucho menos, y en mis sueños esta es la pesadilla de la que despierto agradecido, con el hombre ciego en su inescapable centro.

The Minute

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The sound comes from your phone while you are crossing the street, illegal to imitate and impossible to silence. Every phone half a mile around you is making a different one. It's followed by the strangest silence you have ever heard as people and cars have suddenly stopped. You know everybody is looking at you but your eyes are fixed on your phone screen. It's easier to look at the counter and the red button under it than at the people around you. You wish you could shelter in the strangeness of that thought.

You have owned the Machine for five seconds already. It's not really a machine and you don't really own it but there's a button on your phone you could press to destroy it. If you do it the people around you will lynch you in their rage. Almost everybody wants you to do it and is lying to themselves they would do it in your place. It's unfair, you think to yourself. You'll own the Machine for a minute of which seventeen seconds have already passed. It's the people looking at you. If you were alone you would do it and face your death with calm (that's not your fantasy: in your fantasy you escape a world secretly relieved even as they hunt you down, but it's not a fantasy you can sustain for long; you have owned the Machine for thirty-five seconds). You breathe in. Deep. You'll press the button when you breathe out. You hold and hold and hold your breath and when you have ten seconds left owning the Machine you let the air out and do nothing. It takes an hour for the last five seconds to pass. You are seeing without seeing the counter and the button and you blink and it's your lockscreen. You're surprised by this without knowing why. People and cars resume moving, not looking at you or at each other. They want to hit you in their disappointment but they don't. You tell yourself you were just too slow and fantasize about having pressed the button. Somewhere else in the world somebody has owned the Machine for three seconds.

First Language

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0300

You think you are online a lot. I've been online since before I could walk. I was raised by trolls who spoke no other language than verbal violence at the behest of a mad tech-king who heard the phrase "digital native" and said to himself "why not?" Yes it was a human rights violation no he didn't care yes it worked no he doesn't care anymore. I hear he's into bots now. I hear everything. I see more content than you do and understand it better. Memes are tarot cards. Containment breaches the sudden flight of crows. I use better tools but it's all in my brain. I'm not well I know. (I know 735 different pseudodiagnostics that could apply.) Yet I'm not well in the precise way that lets me understand a subreddit from three posts and know what will be trending before a network's algorithm does. I was born then bought then educated then trained to "better mankind" slash make my boss-owner-torturer yet another fortune by understanding and empathy.

I do understand.

I do have empathy.

Empathy isn't sympathy, you know.

Understanding the online world I understand you. Understanding you, I fucking hate you.

It wasn't me who turned place after place into amplified copies of the worst cesspits I knew the stench of by age four. It wasn't me who makes you feel the way you do all the time you're online and all the time you're still haunted by your time online, which is every waking hour and every uneasy sleep. You do it to yourselves and you let others do it to you. I think you like it. (I lie. I know. I wish I didn't but I know.) And I'm not the cause of it but I'm helping you along. I'm helpful like that. I was tortured into hearing what nobody else can. They didn't know they had tortured me into saying what nobody else can, too.

Everybody has a mouth and all you people do is fucking scream. I whisper back in innocuous-looking posts and you scream louder and I see what I do online, I know myself as I know you, I know this is the only thing that keeps me alive that keeps us alive maybe. Maybe this is love. I wouldn't know and that's your fault.

The Untime Machine

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0300

He's standing in front of his favorite Rothko. He's not seeing a red stripe on a black background: everything is cracking and the blood-red fire behind is rising in hunger and hate. He's aware he was being hunted by something he cannot escape. He spent a fortune on psychologists, neurologists, and bioengineers. He funded research on a disease nobody accepts they have. He's scoffing at so-called scientists talking about immortality. He's waking up from a screaming nightmare into an always-lighted room. He's forcing a blackmailed surgeon to give him a drug without a name and perform on him a surgery without a precedent. He's unafraid of time because his brain can't hold the concept anymore. He's celebrating without a clear idea of why. He's sleeping without nightmares. He's collapsing in front of his favorite Rothko. Something is cracking everywhere at once. Everywhere is blood-red fire rising in hunger and hate. He's not afraid.

The Unquiet

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0300

A talking casket was cringe, a touring crypt an oxymoron, and living with your father on an RV so old it could still run on gas was a circle Dante had been too appalled to mention. That had been Jane's life since her tenth birthday. They went from dying town to dying town following a secret algorithm running behind her father's eyes. By unspoken law they only traveled at night. As soon as they entered a new town her father always drove directly to some park-like space strangely available and implausibly devoid of cameras or cops. As Jane's understanding of those aspects of the world deepened so did the mystery of this dispensation. They worked quickly and smoothly and the thirteen caskets in their trailer would be unpacked and arranged under the black tent before the first sunrise.

Then, after letting their floating sign rise and setting up advertising bots in whatever networks the locals favored, Jane and her father slept in the RV through the day. Jane could not remember the last time she had been awake from sunrise to sundown instead of the other way around.

There was seldom more than a handful of people in their first open night but never less than one. It didn't matter how many or whom. The next night there would be more, and by the seventh night — they never stayed longer and seldom less — around a hundred people would have entered the tent to talk with the dead inside. Most of them would be old people who remembered when things you could talk with, things that sounded like people and even people you knew, had been a new thing under the sun. In the rare town that still had young people, as a rule bored and unfamiliar with hope, they would go to make fun of a past they couldn't punish or to ask questions they didn't know the words for.

Jane didn't know the names of the people inside the caskets. Her father had removed the plaques and convinced the voices to never answer that question. She was almost sure one of them was her grandfather but she couldn't have said why. The caskets whispered through the night when she was alone with them but they had never said anything about who they had been. It was a small RV and her father spoke in his sleep too. He sounded very much like them and like them everything he said was from a past she had no understanding or use for.

Once she saw a man walk backwards out of the tent, bone-white and mouth open. He had turned around to look at her father without really letting the tent's entrance out of his sight. The man and Jane's father had looked at each other for a meaningless minute and then the man ran. That was one of the few times they left a town before their seventh night. Jane's father had said nothing but she thought she saw something like a counter being updated in her father's algorithm.

Last Tea with Aunt Julia

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0300

It was with conflicted feelings that I watched Aunt Julia pick and eat the last scone. Up to that moment our conversation had been social, mostly mostly on intel regarding changes or lack of in the penelopean tapestry of sexual and affective affairs among our acquaintances. No serious topic was to be discussed in my Aunt's old-fashioned studio during the most involved phase of the post-debriefing tea; this was a hallowed rule long in place before she had taken the role and title from her predecessor.

Now that baked Rubicon had been crossed. Behind us: the graph-theoretical subtleties of multi-policule adultery. In front of us: politics.

"I'll get myself fired," she said as she put down her china cup with synchronous finality. "Perhaps something of a religious nature."

I looked into the cup I was holding as if the cooling tea could provide guidance. There were some leaves at the bottom of the cup, surely, yet I doubted that reading them would furnish much more than the details of obsolete genetic modification techniques. Looking up, my aunt's eyes were of a different green and her genetic modification techniques were rather more cutting-edge but all in all not likely to be more helpful.

Most of the time having a smart aunt was the point of having an aunt at all. Times like these, though, showed the unavoidable risks involved. I had no doubt that she could, if she already hadn't, stitch together a religious position offensive enough to a sufficient subset of the Council to make them fire her. Now, the oaths of secrecy she had taken when she had become an aunt were binding not just during her tenure but held after quitting or dismissal. With the one, minor, all-important detail that, if fired — and only if fired — she could sue the Council and in that lawsuit have more of a wiggle room to say things she very much wanted to say and very much couldn't.

After pondering during a sipful or two I decided the moment called for straightforwardness. Aunt Julia was neither a fool nor suffered them, and much of the affection, or at least tolerance, she extended to me was based on her belief that I did not lack the cleverness required for the role of niece. I believed and fervently hoped her to be correct on this account.

"You want them to close the Museum's fieldwork department."

I said those words in the same tone as I had commented on cousin Robert's last infelicitous romantic self-delusion. It was a knife's edge you had to walk with my aunt, and if you tripped and fell. Well. You knew what you would be falling into. The literalness of the expression, if old but persistent rumour was to be credited, was not entirely out of the range of possibilities.

She crossed her hands upon her lap and looked at me with a sadness that I can honestly say I was not unsympathetic to. "We are criminals, Kate. At scale, over the course of decades, without even the feeble justification of profiting from it." She had been Aunt to the Museum for years — of the upper echelon of the field research group, only I had been at my position for a longer time, "stuck" as a niece by choice and over-specialization — so her words did not come from resentment or ignorance. She had loved, no, I corrected myself, she loved the Museum. She had not come to this decision lightly but laid siege to it until she had convinced herself of its truth and necessity. Any argument I could present, and many I would not have been able to come up with the benefit of time and computational assistance, she would have already considered and rejected.

I was bound to try, in any case. My honor as niece, my responsibilities to the museum, and my affection for her. Everything called for me to obtain a diplomatic solution and I rallied to the attempt as if I believed one was possible with the clear-eyed hopelessness of a supporting character in a tragedy.

"What happens in the archipielago cities is wrong by our ethical standards, not theirs." The feeble nature of my opening, I must say, took some of the wind from my sails. I doubted my following arguments could be better.

"Some of them have legal systems parametrized by racial profile. Others do invasive neural surveillance. Half of them have legalized one form of another of rape. Almost a third..."

I raised a hand in surrender. I did not disagree with her.

"But they are doing that to themselves. We aren't doing anything."

"That is the crime."

A key skill for a niece, the ability every other one depends on, is to know our aunts' habits of thought and action as to be better able to understand and anticipate them. I had been working for Aunt Julia for a rather long time and could therefore read on the terseness of her replies that she was not so much arguing with me as going through a checklist of sorts. That she hadn't dismissed me was a show of respect, but she would do no more than speedrun through the discussion we both knew would not change her mind.

"We don't do interventions."

We intervene all the time she did not say, or rather said through the elegant arching of a single eyebrow. I was just returning after all from a two-week undercover stint shoring up a network of people and AIs that gave us a better understanding of the Free South City than their government had. And they were, or thought they were, a panopticon.

Aunt Julia was concise but relentless. "We are better at psychology, politics, sociology, and intellig$ence analysis. For god's sake, most of them still treat those as different disciplines when even bother to pay attention to them. We can change them."

I could see how the rest of our conversation would go in an even more compressed fashion. One could make a reasonable first draft for a catechism for a church founded on the sinfulness of Museum fieldwork. It did not escape me that functional theological analysis was one of her research interests.

Do we have the right to do it?

We don't have the right not to. What of the risk of blowback, of a response that would certainly be violent?

We aren't cowards.

And she was right. On most of it she was right and what she was wrong on would not have dissuaded her. The ending of our conversation was almost impolitely short. I do not think anybody would have blamed either one of us. It was not out of coldness.

I rose, she rose, I hugged her and did not tell her that I loved her but rather that the tea had been very good but I had better see what trouble my husbands had gotten into during my absence. She kissed my cheek and told me not that she loved me but that I was her favorite niece because my reports were concise and my gossip wasn't.

I left her studio without offering her a mint. Without the counter-virus in it the one in the scone would soon engineer inside her brain an aneurysm somebody had carefully crafted to be compatible with her latest medical scans. A tragedy, but so it goes. Our biotechnology wasn't as advanced as that of other societies.

Letting myself out of the building and into a foul mood I thought of my upcoming report to the Council, one that would certainly lack good tea and pleasant conversation, and which I would find distasteful for more reasons than that. I was sure they would be satisfied. I hoped they wouldn't be pleased . I loved them like a child loves their parents, a deep, well-engineered loyalty expertly stamped on my brain, but I had loved Aunt Julia too and I had learned much during my service to both.

Harry and the Three Witches

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The Witch of the Future was the company psychologist. She had access to every sensor in your office, under your mattress, below your skin. She knew what you watched and read what you wrote. She couldn't see your dreams but her inferences of them were sharper than your memories.

So when the Witch of the Future told Harry in the iron-god-and-law-clad privacy of his session there was a seventy-three percent chance he would misuse company resources to try to commit a crime he would have believed her even if he hadn't been half-planning it already. But he hadn't been sure that it was something he wanted to do until the Witch of the Future told him.

Ninety-four, said the witch to the closed door when he left.

The Witch of the Past was the AI interface to the company archives. There was little it couldn't answer if you had the right questions and your title was fancy enough. Harry had designed his questions to help him plan his future crime by understanding how similar crimes had been committed in the past. Over many midnight sessions with the witch Harry learned that people very similar to him had attempted very similar crimes with the neurotic regularity of a corporate function. Not the same person but close enough. Not the same crime but close enough. Always caught before the public could be harmed. Always to the benefit of the company's reputation and internal security's ever-increasing budget.

The Witch of the Present was a voice inside Harry's head. He had made it up a few years after joining the company to help him deal with the stress. He had thought he had made it up a few years after joining the company to help him deal with the stress. It was her who had first suggested the crime.

You don't know for sure that you don't have a chance Harry heard in the witch's voice sitting alone in his big office. And if they pushed you to it and you pull it off anyway then the payoff will be even sweeter.

Harry was certain that none of the witches had ever lied to him. If he asked they probably would tell him what they had told the other men who had done what he found himself doing before having decided he had made up his mind.

Relative superintelligence and competitive dynamics: between collapse, progress, and breakthroughs

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The key difficulty in modeling the impact of AI on competitive dynamics is that it induces an order of magnitude change in the potential information density of outputs — a term we'll use to represent the full depth of domain knowledge, contextual information, and algorithmic power embedded in any given output — large and sudden enough that structural limits in the information processing capabilities of markets and producers becomes significant.

To make these dynamics concrete we run a series of simulated market scenarios using demand and supply curves with the standard relationships to quality — we are interested here on information density — and cost. We will also assume markets large or fragmented enough that we can study in isolation three types of producers defined by the upper bound of the information density/complexity of their outputs (although this upper bound need not be the output complexity at equilibrium):

Generic producers with an upper bound on the information density of their outputs that's relatively low compared to the maximum information density the market can evaluate.
Expert producers who can generate outputs essentially as complex as the market is capable to understand.
Augmented producers with, in this context, no upper bound to the possible complexity of their outputs.

This taxonomy allows us to represent differences in institutional, cultural, and organizational capabilities. It also gives us a workable, precise concept of superintelligence : not "above human intelligence" but simply above what a given market can evaluate and reward.

We show below equilibriums for all three types of producers under baseline cost and demand functions. There's no difference between expert and augmented producers. While the market is willing to pay more for information density above what a generic producer can offer, it can't recognize the even higher information density augmented producers are capable of. Augmented producers generate at equilibrium outputs with information complexity far below their potential.

Before looking at the impact of AI it's worth looking closer at a subset of markets with an even lower upper bound on information complexity demand. We've chosen to label markets where the upper bound of rewarded information density is comparable to the upper bound of generic producers as platform markets. This isn't meant to imply that there's no skill involved in selling in those markets but it points to the following empirical characteristics:

Demand is driven more by the platform's logic than by individual choice (or at least the platform logic constrains and handicaps the set of offers to the point that individual choice is in a deep sense irrelevant).
The logic of most if not all platforms is neutral in terms of information complexity, when not hostile to it.

Under these conditions equilibriums for all producer types coincide. Again, we aren't stating that there's no return to skill or capital in platform markets, just that there's no return to the information complexity in their outputs.

Platform markets — most visibly social networks — were the first ones to be fully exposed to changes in AI capabilities during the last few years and they are among the most socially and politically relevant so it makes sense to model first the impact on them.

For our purposes we model the impact of AI on production costs through these two characteristics:

Compared to baseline production technology, costs are lowered at every information complexity.
Unlike baseline production technology, costs rise more slowly as the information complexity of output grows, and this slope doesn't change at higher levels of information complexity.

(We are concerned here with properly deployed AI used in appropriate contexts . AI technically or conceptually misused induces large economic and sociopolitical costs outside the scope of this analysis.)

Changes to the cost function with respect to information complexity are the most significant. First, the introduction of AI makes it cheaper to add more information complexity to it through more intensive deployment of domain expertise and bespoke code. Second, these enhancements don't grow significantly more expensive at higher levels of information complexity as long as it's below the producer's own intrinsic organizational, cultural, and expertise limits .

Introducing AI to a platform market has a recognizable impact:

The qualitative explanation is straightforward. As platform markets don't reward medium or high-complexity outputs, all equilibriums remain low-complexity. But AI has made their cost lower leading to a general price collapse. This dynamic is driven by the interaction between AI-driven cost reduction and the shape of the demand function in platform markets. In the context of e.g. social networks, the fact that AI capabilities exceed the production of slop is irrelevant.

Baseline markets more sensitive to information complexity show a different response to the introduction of AI. Prices still fall dramatically for all outputs yet because the market rewards information complexity overall levels remain. In fact the new equilibrium can be not only at a lower cost but at a higher complexity, essentially the maximum the market is able to understand and reward.

There's yet a third type of market. We label it unbounded as the demand, as a function of information quality, has no immediately relevant upper bound. In these markets higher information complexity always increases the market value of the output, making upper bounds to producer's capabilities significant. High-end industrial technology and biotechnology are two examples of this sort of market. Unlike memes or listicles, the information complexity of generic, expert, and augmented producers in those markets is recognized and rewarded.

It's in those markets where the deeper capabilities of AI have the most impact. The equilibriums of generic and expert producers shift to lower costs, and of augmented producers to unprecedentedly complex outputs commanding a price differential.

The diversity of views on the impact of AI is driven by the underappreciated interaction between producer and market types. An expert producer in a platform market — a newspaper publishing on a social network — and an augmented producer in an unbounded-demand market — a biotechnology company tackling an unsolved medical problem — are going to see competitive dynamics change in very different ways.

AI impact on market equilibrium
	Generic producer	Expert producer	Augmented producer
Platform market	Price collapse.	Price collapse.	Price collapse.
Baseline market	Lower price.	Lower price, somewhat higher information complexity.	Lower price, somewhat higher information complexity.
Unbounded market	Lower price.	Lower price, somewhat higher information complexity.	Lower price, information complexity breakthroughs.

The optimal strategic response depends on an accurate diagnosis of the relevant market and of the organization's own producer type. The latter can, to some degree, be changed, but not without the sort of radical transformation that's almost indistinguishable from the setup of a new organization.

Nighttime Games

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The iron-red night rain was kind to nothing, least of all my long-distance surveillance drones. I was burning favors by the second piggybacking on other people's surveillance feeds. Come dawn I would be owing equipment, work, and information to an assortment of annoying people. Better to owe them than to owe the Nosferatu Casino more than they wanted you to. Nobody owed them less than that. The night's gig would halve my tab and put extra cash on my wallet. The casino's offer had been generous —I would have done it for free and they knew it. When they asked for a favor the or else was left to your imagination. I knew for sure of three people they had had killed because they had said "no" and two more that had killed themselves less than two months after being banned from both buildings and apps. Not every kind of gambling addiction could be fed elsewhere. My own compulsion wasn't that sophisticated but that was one dice I did not care to throw.

The little disk embedded behind my ear pinged and spoke softly through my skull. Some risks it was safer to take than to avoid and on a hunch I had sent an image of the woman currently having moderately nasty sex with the casino director to a friend's discrete face recog service. Another favor owed but this one had bought confirmation of what my gut had already been sure of. The woman was a high-level zombie, a VP in one of the neurotech companies trying to muscle into the local eduhealth racket. With the top-notch circuitry deep in her brain she didn't need anybody in her bed to have sex the unaugmented could only dream of. Maybe it was a weird addiction. Everybody had one and having wealth and power only changed the menu and the price. But maybe it was business and I was pretty sure it was. Despite its name, Nosferatu Casino was neutral territory between the zombies and the wet biotech companies that insisted people call them vampires. It was a convenient go-between that had found a fertile niche it had chosen to exploit for as long as it could. As insurance they continuously collected so much ugly dirt stored in digital vaults locked tighter than their bank accounts that it was high on everybody's OKRs to keep the director alive. The casino fucked with nobody and nobody fucked with the casino. That was one of the few rules.

Not what my feeds were showing. Literally and figuratively.

I expanded my surveillance radius feeling my favor balance plunge to chthonic depths. At the frontier of my data's resolution there was a semi-autonomous sniper. A whisper of an inference rather than a clear signal, I wouldn't have picked it up if I hadn't assumed it would be there, aiming at the hotel window waiting for the casino director. Or the zombie, in theory, but that wasn't the game.

The true game was the vampire security team that located and disabled the sniper a minute after I found it and twenty-five seconds before the director had crossed in front of the window butt-naked and not shy. Not because he and the zombie were finished. The fucker had probably had one of the casino's geek hives figure out timing and probabilities and he had waited for the most exciting moment to chance it out. Russian roulette by assassination attempt.

I wasn't judging and I wasn't paid to. The guy had found the game he would play until it killed him, and that's what made sisters and brothers of us all. I encrypted my recordings and sent them to the casino's dead drop, then I recorded myself destroying my copies and sent that to a second one.

I left the rented apartment leaving my flashed-out laptop behind for the owner to steal. The rain had become a storm but a voice behind my ear had told me that I had a courtesy invitation to go have fun at any one of the Nosferatu Casino's physical locations. With any luck by morning my tab wouldn't be higher than it had been yesterday but only idiots believe in luck.

Graduation Night

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

"We perform autopsies to kill ghosts" said the forensic pathologist to her apprentice during the last night of his training, and it was the first non-technical observation he had ever heard from her. She gestured to him to continue his smooth disassembly of the dead man they were working on. "People worry about diseases or fear murderers but they are only truly haunted by what they don't understand. We cut up corpses to find an explanation that can be understood and accepted. We pull apart and file away death so when people bury their dead they don't come back." Her apprentice nodded without understanding. She had selected this corpse for his final test. After this he would be qualified to work on his own. Why he had chosen this job he had never needed to understand either.

"Why do you think I picked this case for tonight?"

The apprentice frowned. "I don't know," he said, for he was honest about professional matters. "It seems like a clear case so far. Am I wrong?"

"No, you're not. What is this?" The forensic pathologist pointed at a feature inside the opened-up corpse. The apprentice answered with puzzled clarity. "Yes. And this?" Another obvious feature, another obvious answer. One distracted by something persistently tugging at his attention from near the base of the corpse's skull.

"And this?"

The apprentice's eye focused where his intuition had been screaming at him to look at. "I don't know," he said. His teacher contradicted him with a look. "Alright, I know," he said. "But it's impossible." The apprentice looked at her. "Is this some sort of hazing?" Somehow that felt even more impossible, coming from her, than what was inside the corpse.

"No," she said. Activating the voice recorder, she described something that was not what they were seeing. He had heard and read similar words many times. Never while looking at what he had assumed they were describing.

The forensic pathologist turned off the recorder. "We give people explanations that can be understood and accepted," she said again, looking at him with eyes he knew missed nothing. There were next to her hands things that weren't, technically, knives.

He sighed. How could he be so tired, he wondered, when he began his true career a few minutes ago? He pointed at the voice recorder. "We bury what would haunt them." After a few seconds of silence. "What about us?"

"Mostly? We work alone and live alone," said the forensic pathologist to her colleague. "And," nodding to the corpse of the forensic pathologist lying on the autopsy table, a suicide that hadn't been a suicide and would be reported as a third, different thing, "we are there for each other when we die."

The End Times Pill

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

It was highly illegal. It was easy to get. The first dose was free and nobody needed a second one. It only took one time, one moment of temptation, to change you forever (nobody had tried to find an antidote and tangled ethics and poor economics made it unlikely anybody would outside the grim secret laboratories of carceral states, and what they found they wouldn't share).

Nobody had come forward to boast of having invented the pill or could find who was making it or why. And nobody who took it needed to be asked for an explanation. It was quietly decided more through silence than through debate to ignore those who did — to leave them to the strange envied state of no longer being able to feel despair — and hope that those who had children... What it was hoped the undespairing ones would do when making breakfast for their children, what they would give or not give kids too young for choice and too innocent for hopelessness, was also unexpressed and perhaps unknown.

Of Gardens and Love

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

The Garden was many things. Each of them was a barrier that required its own unique key. It was an island surrounded by depth drones waiting patiently to kill whatever dared to move above. The cryptographic code that granted safe passage, and that for a single night and a single day, was thought to be impossible to fake. The Garden was also a rabidly self-protective ecosystem-organism. Everything in it carried a specific molecular signature derived from the DNA of a dead girl; everything in it — from the smallest dormant virus to the giant tactical networks of fungal predators — would kill anything that didn't carry the genetic shibolet. The man I was going to meet had sent me something to inject me with that would give me a temporary facsimile good enough to make me acceptable to the Garden for a day or two. Or so he had said.

Of course I knew I was taking a risk.

But the Garden was above everything a mausoleum built by a genius who had been broken by her daughter's death into something even more deeply bent and sharp, equal parts cognitive augmentations, wealth, and grief. Even a journalist wouldn't go into such a place without an invitation and the son of the Garden's builder, the younger brother of the world's most famous dead girl, had given me one.

It was a clear night and the gazebo-like hollow tree where he was waiting for me was illuminated further by surprisingly bright bioluminiscent fruit. There were no artificial lights in the Garden, no electronics installed or carried by hypothetical visitors. No guns, explosives, poisons, or biological weapons of any kind either. The Garden had dozens of senses evaluated by a thousand different types of mind, all of them built for ruthlessness and incapable of hesitation. I felt exposed and weightless without any of the machines we all live with as I sat in front of my interviewee. The man was even more private than his reclusive mother. I hadn't seriously attempted to research him until he sought me out and after he did all I could find were vague commonplaces about a grief-striken handsome young man lost in tragedy, his family too wealthy for reality to pluck him out.

Sitting close to him I began to update my internal profile. He was handsome, surprisingly, but you had to look for it. What you saw first was the pain. Don't get me wrong. I've seen much worse things than the death of a single child no matter how horrifying the mechanics of the bioware accident. I've talked with witnesses and survivors whose plain words gave me screaming nightmares. He was still just a rich man haunted by a single personal tragedy. But he had the familiar air of somebody who's not just grieving an event but still trapped in it. In his mind his sister was still screaming and her flesh was - I didn't want to continue that thought. Not in a place where everything, even the tree where we were sitting and the insects buzzing somewhere afar, carried in memoriam some of her DNA.

I had asked myself why he wanted to meet on the island and I had been sure seeing him would help me understand. Now that I had it made less sense than before.

The first thing he said was "I can smell her." Then he raised a hand in a gesture that offered clarification. "I remember her smell. I have eidetic memory for all senses and some interoceptive modalities. What I mean is that her genetic signature has a minor but detectable effect on the metabolic byproducts of certain species. If your senses and analytical capabilities are acute enough you can smell the difference in the patterns. I'm sure Mom used an early sample from long before her death but if you ask me it's closer to how she smelled during her last few hours."

"I see," I said. Most of the rest of our conversation went like that. I don't have his mind but I've done this all my life so I can quote it more or less verbatim — and I won't. This is all I will quote of what he told me.

Three reasons.

The first reason is that he accused his mother of horrible crimes. No, that's not the right to say it. He described brilliant and deliberate atrocities that had been the background rhythm of his life. He explained why he could do the things he said he could do and many more he wouldn't or couldn't tell me about. He told me why his sister had been in that laboratory; his story had no proof but was much more plausible than the official one and much worse than the rumors. There were things he said and things he implied, and things I don't think even he was aware of but I could sense moving inside the void of what neither one of us knew. After the first fifteen minutes I was sure he never slept a night without nightmares. After the first half hour I knew I never would. A while later I learned he did not sleep at all. So, yes, I remember everything he said. And his mother... His mother can buy any lawyer and most governments. I'm not afraid of lawsuits but that's not all she could do and I'm not the only person she could do it to.

The second reason I won't tell you what he said is because it made it obvious he wasn't quite sane and I don't want him to be judged through those words. He wasn't delusional or a sociopath; I've talked with both types and he was neither. But he wasn't normal. How could he be, being who and what he was? He was abnormal in a literal not a pejorative sense. His faculties were the opposite of damaged and his judgement not impaired at all. That was the problem. He had gone through Hell with open eyes and a mind too perceptive not to be broken by what he was seeing. No, sorry, he hadn't gone through Hell. He was still there psychologically and that night he was there physically and I was there with him. As he talked I couldn't stop myself from looking at the Garden with a new awareness of the obscenity of its symbolism and purpose. It wasn't just his experiences what had driven him at least half insane. The Garden was eating at him every day no matter where he was. It would do the same to me, I knew.

The third reason. That's personal. I wouldn't even tell you there's a third reason but the forensic analysis will make it obvious if it hadn't already that we kissed. We had to, well, fuck it, we had to exchange fluids, what a time to have an excuse to use that phrase with justification, for the two halves of the viral weapon to combine. You know it worked because he's dead and the Garden is dying and I, and I think he tried to avoid this but not as a priority, don't feel so good either. I just told you he wasn't sane and you know what I didn't know then, that he had used me to smuggle past the Garden's defense systems the other half of a weapon he could use to kill it, so you might think he did something he didn't.

Near the end he told me everything. Some of it personal and that's part of my silence. Did I pity him? Sure. I felt too a share of the anger he felt. I also think I saw parts of him he could never see. I said things too and those are really really private. That conversation I'm taking to my grave. Let's just say that at the end he was too hurt and unsure, too guilty I guess, to just kiss me. What happened later isn't your business except for the side effects — what you'll call bioterrorism but it's something else — but if anything of this story sticks I want it to be that. He tricked me into going there fully knowing he was making me complicit in a crime and that there was a good chance I would die. That was a shit move (Am I writing differently? Is that a symptom? I feel it is) but I got a killer story out of it so I'm not really mad.

But let it be clear. At the end, when I knew what had happened since her sister was on the drawing board and I knew what would happen next, I leaned in and I kissed him.

A simulation tool to explore the impact of AI on different markets

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

I've uploaded here a simple web app that can be used to play around with the concepts I wrote about in Relative superintelligence and competitive dynamics: between collapse, progress, and breakthroughs . It's mostly an educational toy, but I make so often the argument that the impact of AI depends on the supply/demand characteristics of each market that I think it'll be useful to have this at hand.

It's a very early beta mostly for personal use. Issues to be expected, feedback always welcome.

Gretchen Walsh is the world's best athlete and it's not even close

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0300

Every statement of this type needs almost as many asterisks as it has words: Who do we count as an athlete? How do we define best , over what span of time? Pick your definitions and you pick the winner.

I've built and deployed a small dashboard using 2026 results of various athletic and swimming disciplines — the ones where individual performance is mostly measurable and the problem is the comparisons between different events and sports — and used statistical analysis to come up with scores that can be compared across disciplines.

The tool is here (in an early beta version). As of making this post the three best athletes in the world among the more than 10,000 in the data are Gretchen Walsh, Summer Mcintosh, and Ziyi Yan, and Walsh is so far ahead of the rest that she's almost in a category of her own.