This Machine Kills

(Sorry for the delay!) We comb through Andreessen Horowitz’s inaugural 2022 State of Crypto Report, devoting more time and attention to discussing its claims and framing than it should warrant. But co...

24 Mai 20228min

We check in on our old friend / enemy / mentor, Masayoshi Son, and see how the SoftBank Vision Fund has been faring over the last year. The Masa multiplier effect is his ability to amplify the state o...

20 Mai 20221h 16min

We dive into chapter 8 – Imaginary Cities – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. We talk about the origins of cities and contradict the commonly held belief that proto-state governance—e....

16 Mai 20229min

We review China’s hard, fast, and big regulatory responses to big tech’s rising power over the last year, discuss the vastly different political theories motivating tech policy in the US, Europe, and ...

13 Mai 20221h 24min

We continue our discussion of Hilary Allen’s paper on DeFi and shadow banking and dive into her comparative analysis between Wall Street and Silicon Valley. We see how there are direct analogues betwe...

8 Mai 20229min

We discuss an extremely good paper by law professor Hilary J. Allen – DeFI: Shadow Banking 2.0 – which lays out a very clear, critical, and comparative analysis of the unregulated financial instrument...

5 Mai 20221h 4min

We dive into chapter 7 – Ecology of Freedom – of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow. In which we discuss the tragedy of the commons, ecological imperialism, flirtations with farming, domest...

1 Mai 202210min

We take a walk on the weird side as a brief reference to the novel Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove—a graphomaniac author of alternative histories and all around beautiful mind—leads us down a ra...

28 Apr 20221h 11min