Totally agree, a distinctive, compelling voice is hard to hone (probably because some of it is just natural gift) and the writers who have one are really special.
This is a great record
Yes, as soon as she’s old enough she’ll be on #nostr to talk about books and post coffeechain gm photos of Tom waits. Some things go without saying. nostr:note1e077gltgg8ez7lav904t7s509rpn06xj7lv894j5vtkwjf5yrkzq2suxcp
Of course! He’s got a kind of mysticism to him that I love. His voice is what I imagine the guy from nowhere who stumbles into or materializes in a town and proceeds to divulge the deepest secrets of the universe to the residents sounds like.
I’m partial to Libra, personally. Underworld is his long opus, but good places to start with him are Libra, White Noise, and Mao II. He wrote all four of these books one after the other chronologically and it’s one of the more impressive winning streaks in literary history in my admittedly biased opinion.
And even then, to paraphrase Richard Flanagan, memory eats the truth of any understanding. When it comes to treating history almost like a character in itself, I’m more of a DeLillo guy myself: 
My 2.5 year-old daughter 🥹 
American Pastoral - Philip Roth 
The fiat system tends inevitably toward hyperfinancialization.
A #bitcoin system, widely adopted, inevitably tends toward definancialization.
Hyperfinancialization erodes and suffocates culture.
Definancialization gives culture room to breathe, grow, and flourish.
Gm #nostr 
So when I was in undergrad, my thesis was on negative vs positive freedom in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
It dug into the idea that in modern America we have lots and lots of negative freedom (freedom FROM external constraints) but a pretty shallow, if not nonexistent, cultural conception of positive freedom (self-determination, self-autonomy, self-actualization…basically okay no one’s telling you what you can and can’t do now how do you find fulfillment in your externally free state).
The two concepts can be kind of roughly analogized to having a thousand channels and no one telling you what to watch (negative freedom) but you have to pick something to watch, knowing your time is scarce and irretrievable (positive freedom).
The interplay of these concepts underpins Wallace’s famous commencement speech at my alma mater. Everybody worships something, and in America you’re mostly free to worship what you want (negative freedom), but how to choose wisely what one devotes oneself to is the issue (positive freedom).
For those who don’t know, the unifying plot point in Infinite Jest is the existence of a film (the “Entertainment”) that is SO entertaining that those who watch it basically lose interest in doing anything else and feel compelled to keep watching it over and over until they die.
Some terrorists want to disseminate the film in America because Americans are, they argue, uniquely susceptible to this film. The reason for this susceptibility is the subject of an ongoing conversation between two characters (Marathe and Steeply) which is essentially an extended, though fragmented, discussion of negative vs positive freedom.
Wallace wrote this book before social media. These days I think of the Entertainment through the lens of addictive, incendiary social media algorithms. One could argue we’ve died a kind of cultural/spiritual death as the result of these technologies.
One question I think worth considering is how much has social media, as well as state co-option of mainstream media, degraded our negative freedom (in addition to obviously degrading our positive freedom)?
#bitcoin and #nostr are both mostly negative freedom technologies. But there are very interesting ways of looking at them from a positive freedom perspective. They are tools to combat the seemingly implacable and ubiquitous cultural forces that impede our ability to pursue positive freedom.
Bitcoin, as sound money, can allow adopters to sort of buy back their time, clearing space to pursue more abstract things like self-actualization, fulfillment, etc.
The more I think about Infinite Jest the more I want to figure out a way to merge negative freedom bitcoin culture with an under-discussed, under-explored positive freedom bitcoin culture. If we’ve died a kind of cultural/spiritual death as the result of things like addictive social media, endemic entertainment, mainstream media, etc., my hope is we can have a revival, a renaissance, and a Cambrian explosion of art and culture through the advancement of technologies like #bitcoin and #nostr.
Negative freedom is only one half of what we need to be flourishing, productive individuals pursuing our respective highest purposes. We need positive freedom too.
Anyway, more to come.
Was just discussing with one of my buddies the other day about how Infinite Jest has turned out to be almost breathtakingly prescient in the way it attempted to capture the effect of wall-to-wall addictive entertainment on a populace and what freedom really means (positive vs negative freedom) in such an environment.
Gm #nostr 
Erik your recent ep with Hodl on the progressive bitcoiner was really terrific. It was raw, honest, rigorous, and yet still kind. Very much appreciative of your work and your presence.
“What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child?”
-Delmore Schwartz
#coffeechain 
Gm #nostr 
