With cognitive disintegration prolonging itself deeply into the month, this is a scrappy sketch of the space across which I’m strewn. I have three pieces of writing on the go, under deadlines of varying severity, along with a tangled bundle of other stuff.

The first thing — kind of almost finished now — is the latest in a string of Accelerationism papers and posts. (The previous one, entitled Teleoplexy and devoted primarily to twisted historical entelechy, is coming out in this.) The new piece is structured as a contribution to security analysis, or preemptive, cryptographic, Butlerian Jihad. If acceleration to hard singularity were directed as a Terminator-style resistance drama, how would a strategically-rational Human Security System be depicted? Fuse MIRI with the CSER in a virtual / clandestine species-defense apparatus (Anthropol), then ask how it would operate to prevent the emergence of the ultimate enemy. It’s not at all easy. One almost begins to sympathize with the wretched creatures.

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The second essay is the second-installment of a two-part Bitcoin series, for a Dutch online magazine (I’ll link the first part when it’s published). It aims to situate the digital monetary revolution within a global economic and geopolitical context. In a nutshell, the argument runs: The Triffin Dilemma explains why international reserve currency status is a poisoned chalice, and since everyone now understands this, it is unlikely that USD financial hegemony will be supplanted by an alternative national currency (meaning the Chinese Yuan). Given the unsustainable status quo, and the implausibility of a global SDR-based regime, a virtual chasm yawns in the world economic order. Blockchain cryptocurrency is emerging at exactly the point in history when the road is wide open to it.

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The third piece attempts to rigorize a philosophical idea of the occult, or integral obscurity (for these guys). I’m aiming to assemble some working (semiotic) machinery for it.

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The Better Half is putting together the syllabus for a Chinese Cyberculture course, which provides the opportunity to discuss the foundations of a yet-unformulated discipline. One clear lineage is based upon the centrality of Chinese digitization problems on the country’s tormented path to modernity. This paper is quite a nice introduction. Theories of the Great Divergence tend to under-stress this side of things.

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Doom Machines — the long-impending Outside in Trike-trek through neoreaction (oriented by the skein of time-structured issues around freedom and fate)  keeps getting pushed down the road by the triple-accursed perfectionist-procrastination complex. I’m determined to break through, by the end of the month at the latest, and get started. Some kind of fragmentary prelude material might be a good way in. I started delving into the Anaximander fragment with this in mind, but got lost in the abyss.

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My @dblbd qabbalo-horror twitter ID is appropriately corpse-like at the moment. It was set up under the numerical inspiration 222 as a deposit for experiments in micro-memetic horrorism. This weekend, I had two family restaurant receipts in succession each amounting to exactly RMB 222. Something is trying to infiltrate some extra darkness into my life … (I obviously need to get Out more).

ADDED: Part-1 of the Bitcoin argument is now up at WdW Review.