So there they were again—ghosts of Neal and Allen and Jack—beat-eyed and barefoot in the halls of a digital inferno, walking soft along the edge of a Wi-Fi signal, and they were whispering from the stars: “Everything real is hidden in the margins, kid.” We’re living in a time strangled…
The Right Kind of Mistakes
You sit at the bar and watch the man at the other end. He is old. He drinks slowly. He does not look at anyone when he lifts the glass. He just drinks and thinks and waits. There is a way a man looks when he has lived his life…
The Rational Light of Cooperation
There are truths that lie so close to the heart of human experience that we pass them by daily without recognition. We step over them as one steps over a sleeping beggar in the street—not out of cruelty, but because the sight of them touches a nerve we cannot bear…
The World as We Have Always Known it – Ends with a Whimper
The bugs are gone. I noticed it years ago when I drove west through Kansas and never once had to smear a moth from my windshield. It was the kind of thing you don’t think about until it is missing. Then you think about it a lot. When I was…
Mass Society – How Will it Impact Humanity?
For most of human history, society has been an intricate mosaic of distinct communities—villages, towns, religious congregations, and localized cultures—that functioned as semi-autonomous entities. Each possessed its own customs, traditions, and guiding philosophies, shaping individuals through the shared values and collective memory of their particular community. However, with the advent…
What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
There is a question we ask almost every child. We pose it lightly, with a smile, often in moments of calm or celebration, as if inviting them to enter the theater of possibility: What do you want to be when you grow up? At first glance, it seems innocent enough,…
The Company Store Never Closed
It’s easy to forget that America once ran on company stores and scrip. Coal miners in Appalachia were paid in vouchers redeemable only at their employer’s shop, and the prices were high enough to keep them permanently in debt. It was a tidy arrangement for the owners: keep your workforce…
Excuse Me, Are You Leaving or Moving In?
I was sitting in my car in a Target parking lot, watching a young woman do everything except leave. She had entered the car a full five minutes ago, and yet, there she sat—head down, thumb scrolling, completely oblivious to the line of hopeful motorists circling her like vultures around…
From Capital to Control: How the New Aristocracy Took the Reins of the World
By the time steam engines hissed and factory chimneys began their long exhale over 19th-century Europe, something profound was shifting in the world’s balance of power. The old aristocracy—those with family crests and ancestral lands—was slowly giving way to a new class of power brokers: the capitalists. But this wasn’t…
The Mythology of the Economy and the Enslavement of the Soul
There is a strange piety that governs the modern world, a religion that no one names but that commands greater obedience than any god ever known to antiquity. It is the mythology of the economy. Its rituals are daily performed, not in temples, but in offices, factories, fields, and screens….