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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.

Viewpoint = what someone thinks

Mythos = the story-world that makes those thoughts feel true

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Re: 'silver is an industrial metal and has no monetary value'...

The awakening is spreading and everyday people are looking for a place to keep their cash.

They are getting priced out of gold - silver is their only option.

It is ultimately the people who will decide what has monetary value and what doesn't.

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Source: An (edited) comment from:
https://youtu.be/tQa6mNXcM4s

We can see an underlying doctrine: People can decide the monetary standard.

And another one: Gold is too expensive for the average person, therefore it can't be the primary monetary standard.

What is most interesting to me is that it is a democratic inversion of the goldbug mythos, which says:

1) People must adapt to the most powerful monetary standard.

2) The best monetary standard will have the highest price.

Summary:

Goldbug mythos: monetary truth is discovered.

Silverbug mythos: monetary truth is ratified.

Bitcoin is the first modern monetary system that is outside of the political control of any state.

In the pre-modern era (earlier than the French Revolution), gold (and to some extent silver) was above the state. If the state issued too much currency, its value would visibly decrease relative to gold.

However, tech advancement caused gold to become too difficult to protect on a small scale. Gold centralized into a few major locations inside states. It became impossible for an individual to escape the effect of money printing.

Inflation is effectively another tax. (It also destroys the measuring stick that we use for value, and therefore for business.)

For most young people, a house is out of reach. This was one of the only remaining ways to escape (somewhat, and badly) the debasement of inflation.

For the next 15-30 years, despite the scams / fear / uncertainty / doubt, I think that Bitcoin will remain the most achievable method available to a young person to save for the future.

The first wave of Bitcoin Banks have started to emerge in the form of Bitcoin Treasury companies such as Metaplanet, Twenty One, and MicroStrategy. They are all trying to do one thing: acquire as much BTC as possible and use it to generate returns in whatever way possible for their shareholders.

In short: they are attempting to bridge the gap between the old Fiat system and the new digital asset system by treating Bitcoin as a stock, not as gold.

I don't have a concrete idea of how Bitcoin can be used in finance but I do know that using it to create returns as if it were a stock is unlikely to work in the long term.

I believe that a good use of time is to research and experiment with how a group of individuals can come together a collectively grow a stockpile of bitcoin. Step two would then be how to financialise that or issue a token on top of the Bitcoin whoch could be used everyday in a small geographical area.

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When you communicate because you engage in local trade and you all share economic bonds that will continue from generation to generation, you will become cohesive. This bond is broken when the federal government allows companies to relocate their foreign workforce into your neighborhood, destabilizing local cultural bonds and disrupting the intergenerational structure; the entire community becomes atomized. People stop participating in civic life because if their children will not inherit their efforts, why should they continue to put in the effort?

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https://tompnoid.substack.com/p/part-2-white-people-dont-exist

'
This is why friendship is often the product of something else: work, school, church, children, sports, errands, waiting rooms. It is produced not by misery, but by enough common friction to make conversation natural. Modern life has spent decades eliminating that friction. We can work without offices, shop without stores, exercise without gyms and communicate without looking anyone in the eye. Each improvement is defensible, some phenomenal. Together they made interaction with people increasingly optional.
'

“Hard Things Worth Doing? The Economics of Friendship” by Roland G. Fryer Jr. (The Wall Street Journal, published July 2026)

Just as we utilise artificially created physical friction to maintain our physical health (e.g. gym), we perhaps need artificially created friction in our lives to forge friendships.

/

We've had fast languages like C and C++, and then we've had safe languages like Lisp, Java, and Python. The safe languages were all slower. Common wisdom said that a programming language could either be fast or safe, but not both. Rust has thoroughly disproved this, with speeds rivaling C even when writing safe Rust.

What's even more impressive is that Rust achieves safety and speed without using a garbage collector. Garbage collectors can be very useful, but they also tend to waste a lot of memory and/or create CPU spikes during GC collection. But more importantly, GC languages are difficult to embed in other environments.

The big innovation leading to this "fast safety" is the borrow checker.

...

The gist of it is: each piece of data has exactly one owner. You can either share the data or mutate it, but never both at the same time. That is, you can either have one single mutating reference to it, OR many non-mutating references to the data.

/

https://rerun.io/blog/why-rust

Young people in the modern world are being asked to act as heirs when they are actually tenants.

They were raised on expectations of:

autonomy, self-expression, mobility, romance, meaningful work, home ownership, and gradual upward movement.

What they got:

High housing costs, delayed family formation, wage shrinkage relative to assets, bureaucratic job markets, credential inflation, social atomization, and:

an online world that floods them with stimulation and eliminates real status, real community, and real purpose.

They are surrounded by immense wealth, advanced systems, and unprecedented flows of information, but they have no prospect of ever owning any of it.

Without the old established pathways into meaningful levels of agency + ownership, they cannot develop into social adulthood.

History suggests several different outcomes to this situation.

One thing is for sure: The current setup is not a stable state and will not continue. It will change into a new state.

(Disclaimer: There are no trusted sources on the internet.)

It seems Q-Anon / Alex Jones might've been _fundamentally_ correct about the Western elite.

Paedophiles, cannibals, vampires.

"What is to be done?"

This question is now a more fundamental, there-are-monsters-in-the-dark one. Anyone living under the money-printer is living under _that_ moral order.

It seems appropriate to frame this apocalyptically, specifically in a Genesis 6:22 way.

The choice is now moral. The world is wicked and we must build an arc.

I do mean this practically. I don't see a way to raise a family unless you build an arc with others that do as God commands.

I also can't stand the idea of not fighting against evil.

I'd like a death of the self. Huge pendulum swing. We've gone full self-realization and it's been catastrophic. Time to kill the ego and hear the word of God again.

Otherwise, I don't see how we don't get herded, bled, and eaten by vampires.

New article:
https://telablog.com/children-and-a-shared-vision-of-the-future

Excerpts:

"... This was in accordance with the ancient belief: man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him..."

"... fertility remains far below any desirable level. The reason, I suspect, is that something more fundamental is missing: a shared grand narrative..."

"The most interesting question to me is: What story comes next ?"