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#5 [2025-05-28] StJohn Piano: Tela Network Forum: Self-Introduction | Hi, I'm StJohn Piano. Positions: - CTO @ Solidi Cryptocurrency Exchange - Blockchain Advisor @ Tela Network I'm English / American, living in Valencia, Spain since 2021. I began working in blockchain technology in 2014. I've built storage tools, publishing systems, tradebots, smart contracts, and payment processors. I also developed a blog platform that used blockchain to timestamp every article, making it unalterable. I wrote there extensively about blockchain and its consequences. Link: http://edgecase.net Previously, I worked in speech recognition, robotics, and engineering simulations. I read a lot of history and appear regularly on the Tela Network Podcast. LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/stjohnpiano Substack: https://networktheory.substack.com Github: https://github.com/sj-piano Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@TelaNetworkPodcast
#6 [2025-05-29] Guillermo Pablos Murphy: Tela Network Forum: Self-Introduction | Hi, I'm Guillermo Pablos Murphy. I'm English / Spanish. I move frequently between Madrid and Valencia, in Spain. I'm a market research and project management consultant with a MA in International Relations and I'm expanding my skillset to include UI/UX and data analysis (Python, R) skills. My primary interests are artistic. I'm an award winning photographer, I write poetry, and I paint. My current project is called CATALYST - a magazine answering the question: "What is to be done?". We're currently publishing its digital print run at readcatalyst.org. I think a lot about stories and politics. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermo-pablos-murphy/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@gpm1507
#7 [2025-05-30] StJohn Piano: Roundup | New Post: Presidential Tweet Mode https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stjohnpiano_at-solidi-in-preparation-for-international-activity-7334138828607139840-WdYX Mood music: Just Like You Imagined, by Nine Inch Nails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6P_YISMJ4sQ Excerpt from Housing Is Both a Product and an Investment, by Michael Magoon https://substack.com/home/post/p-136980783 Housing is unusual because it is both a consumer product and an investment. Most products that you buy on the market depreciate rapidly after the initial purchase. This makes them extremely poor investments. When a person buys a home, however, they are not only purchasing a place to live. They are also purchasing an investment that can potentially accrue more value over time. For many homeowners, their house is their most substantial investment. ... This places the financial interests of homeowners in direct conflict with those who do not own homes.
#8 [2025-05-31] Guillermo Pablos Murphy: Late-stage Capitalism & Techno-feudalism | I see the term "late-stage capitalism" everywhere online. Its persistence is proof of Marxism's staying-power as a tool of critique, but I question its usefulness beyond that. Because of its symbolic implications. Words shape and reveal our beliefs. And each belief allows us _not to think about something_. "Late-stage capitalism" is fatalistic. The system is spent but can’t die. It lets us avoid alternatives. It aestheticizes collapse. It turns politics into content. Absurdities into punchlines. Organizers into grifters. "Welcome to late-stage capitalism. What did you expect?" Full ironic detachment. It dissuades _action_. I’m searching for other terms - ones that accurately frame what is happening but also ask "What is to be done?". "Techno-feudalism" does both. It breaks the liberal frame of profit through commodity exchange for one of rent extraction. It implies that we rank somewhere in a feudal hierarchy. It also suggests change: feudalism has come and gone before.
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StJohn Piano
Agree. Speaking of where things are going, I was reading Peter Turchin today. Excerpt from: …
#9 [2025-06-01] StJohn Piano: Agree. Speaking of where things are going, I was reading Peter Turchin today. Excerpt from: No Revolution without Counter-Revolution, by Peter Turchin https://substack.com/home/post/p-162797899 Any revolution is a struggle between the ruling elites and counter-elites. Once counter-elites gain power and attempt to build a new social order, the ci-devant (meaning former, or “have-been”) elites face a stark choice. They can accept defeat and acquiesce to downward social mobility, or they can turn into a sort of “counter-counter-elites” or, in more common terminology, counter-revolutionaries. Historical experience shows that there are always substantial segments of such erstwhile elites who chose to plot and fight.
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Duncan Tertius-Froude
Good article. Thanks for sharing. The author quotes Matt Taibbi, who in turn quotes Anne …
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#10 [2025-06-01] Sam Gödel-Conway: Conversations with ChatGPT #1 | An exploration of how to make a new, productive online forum that improves the professional lives of its members. https://chatgpt.com/share/683c0e22-e854-800b-ae9d-c89b2784b4ac Selected points: - Let users build recognizable profiles with credibility signals. - Auto-generate a public user portfolio from high-quality posts. - Stronger credibility signals come from traceable, structured, exportable proof of value, not just social likes. Make every user look like an author worth citing. - Require public sponsorship by an existing user for a new user to join. - Treat reputation as a slow-earned, high-stakes currency, not a social freebie. Make it traceable, limit its issuance, and watch the graph. - Meta-Point: You’re not building a “forum.” You’re building a reputation graph with social context and visible lineage. - Data Science is a good target field. Content-rich, collaborative, shareable, professionally helpful.
#11 [2025-06-01] Duncan Tertius-Froude: Good article. Thanks for sharing. The author quotes Matt Taibbi, who in turn quotes Anne Applebaum: “Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic suggested a reason resistance hasn’t been more forceful is a divide among protesting demographics, between those playing by old rules, and those ready for obliquely-defined “new” solutions.” Further, I suspect the counter-revolutionaries are searching for a new sacred cause. BLM and the voter coalition it galvanized were enough in 2020 - it won the streets and the polls, but events have made that winning narrative untenable (especially Israel-Palestine). Now, MAGA has won the polls and could feasibly win the streets if they needed to. If I was a counter-revolutionary, I'd be scouting for the force that will drive young men to act for those “new” solutions.
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#12 [2025-06-04] StJohn Piano: Israel - spiritual anachronism | https://substack.com/home/post/p-165004319 Israel has become a “spiritual anachronism.” It is a nation very much of the 1930’s and has been scrambling to find a justifying principle, or at least some public relations principle, outside of that world that is now gone. ... The definition of evil, the opponent, of the Western world is national socialism; a national socialism that is the dominant intellectual strain in Israel’s foundation. ... public principles have to correspond to feelings, not to intellectual demands, and there’s no feeling like the desire for survival. ... Israel is hardly a theological state now, nor could it be unless it is ruled by judges of the Talmudic law. But public authorities as well as the people at large seem to have settled on a religious flavor, if not exactly a full or clear religious justification, let alone a pious religious life, for Israel’s existence.
#13 [2025-06-04] Guillermo Pablos Murphy: Can Liberal Democracy ban it's opponents? | [Friend]: Liberal democracy needs to stop playing nice. People who openly oppose it or promote ideas that attack its foundations shouldn't be allowed to run. [Me]: No doubt that would be more effective (if "win" = preserve the current system) than what the liberal-democracy-organism is doing now. But I'm not sure it could, even if it wanted to. The ruling class may have lost faith. Can it still mobilize courts, legislatures, and armed men to outlaw and arrest opponents? I say arrest because if you just disqualify a popular candidate, you’ve only kicked them out of your game. That doesn’t stop them—it may just mean switching to a game liberal democracy isn’t good at. Take the US: anti-MAGA elites can’t rally young men to defend their institutions, while MAGA leaders can rally theirs to dismantle them.
#14 [2025-06-05] Sam Gödel-Conway: Sacred myth of the modern West | """ Every civilization is built upon a myth. Not a fiction, but a frame - a sacred narrative that defines the borders of good and evil, maps the structure of the world, and carves meaning into the chaos of time. For the modern West, that myth is the Second World War. We do not merely study that war; we worship it. It is the holy text of the present order, the last moral certainty in an otherwise relativistic age. The world we inhabit was birthed in its ashes, and our institutions, both supranational and domestic, trace their legitimacy to its outcome. """ https://substack.com/home/post/p-164131361