Bitcoin Tech Talk #505
Interesting Stuff
Artists Selling Out - Adam Mastroianni argues the 1990s anti-sellout ethic has completely collapsed. Back in the 90’s, Pearl Jam refused to make music videos for five years due to criticisms from fans and other bands. This has been replaced by a culture celebrating celebrity brand collaborations. The reasons are complex, but the one that stood out to me is that the everyone that’s successful in the fiat-induced arts are required in many ways to become influencers and that line between artist and influencer is pretty blurry. In a way this can be considered good, as the quasi-elite critic class has much less influence, but it also produces people like David Solomon and James Dolan, the CEO of Goldman Sachs and the owner of the New York Knicks respectively, LARPing as musicians at places like Lollapalooza.
Inconvenient Humans - Librarian of Celaeno argues that near-universal abortion of children with Down syndrome, exceeding 90% in many Western countries, reveals a spiritual sickness rooted in the rejection of the ethic of sacrificial giving. He reveals how pagan civilizations that practiced infanticide (Sparta, Rome) were eventually replaced by Christians willing to endure material hardship to bring children into the world, while Augustus's financial incentive programs for childbearing failed completely. The most provocative point is that accepting "the inconvenient ones can be dispensed with" logically extends first to all children, then to adults, like with the MAiD program in Canada. The connection between a culture's willingness to sacrifice and its demographic survival is hard to dismiss.
Female Immaturity and Feminism - Hannah Spier, MD argues that grievance-centered feminism functions as a developmental trap, preventing women from maturing. Gratitude, sacrifice, and reciprocity are essentially stunted by feminism, but necessary for adult relationships and parenthood. The main mechanisms are externalization of blame, victimhood as stable identity, and socially rewarded antagonism. The "mental load" discourse is a good example of such rationalization. Normal family burdens get reframed as evidence of exploitation, training women to see dependence, or two-way relationships, as inherently dangerous. Young women without children are now more likely than men to report not wanting parenthood at all, suggesting this framework is actively suppressing family formation.
Uniformity of Technocrats - Aaron M. Renn uses Columbus, Ohio to show how cities shifted from powerful, rooted families to professionalized technocrats who manage through consensus and stakeholder consultation. The technocratic model is more inclusive but structurally incapable of solving serious problems because its leaders optimize for career portability rather than local commitment. This produces a highly conformist policy, where every city essentially runs the same way. For example, during COVID Columbus, like many technocratic cities, followed national lockdown orthodoxy. The result is what he calls a K-shaped city: manufacturing booms coexist with 240,000 people in poverty and doubled food bank usage. Despite the D in DEI, popular in such places, there’s little diversity of ideas, creating the same failure modes, making them all fragile in the same way.
Deep Blue Families - Joshua Sohn examines why certain Democratic families in deep-blue D.C. maintain remarkably strong marriages. The answer is that they quietly borrow from traditional conservative values. These families are almost universally dual-income and educationally matched, yet fathers still out-earn mothers, and roughly a third attend church weekly, not exactly the progressive ideal. What really stands out is their deliberate rejection of "greedy" career maximization: elite government lawyers choose flexible, lower-paying roles over Big Law partnerships so they can do school pickup and PTA meetings. This is a subgroup of America that I’m interested in watching. Will they become more prominent with the demographic crisis at hand or will they go extinct as they flip conservative or drop out entirely?
What I'm up to
Debate Room - This was recorded a month and a half ago, where I debated some guy that was trying to convince people that Solana was good for something. We also talked about how real estate debases naturally, and how it’s inferior to Bitcoin as a savings vehicle.
Origin Seoul - I will be in Seoul, Korea for this event on July 18th. There’s a gathering of Christian Bitcoiners followed by a more general (secular) one afterward. Sign up and come on by if you’re in town then!
BTC Prague - I did two panels and a talk, but the videos aren’t up yet. The first was on self-custody and inheritance. I argued that most uninterested friends, heirs and relatives are likely to do very badly in recovering your Bitcoin. The second was on how to handle the abundance that’s coming where I argued that it’s not all rainbows and unicorns where people without sufficient self control will get more deeply captured. And the third was my talk on how we view miners and developers very differently despite both groups being human.
Nostr Note of the Week
