From the Code of Hammurabi to your Experian credit report, the logic is identical: if the number goes down, you cease to be a person and become an asset to be liquidated. This chapter explores how we replaced human judgment (“He’s having a bad month”) with binary code (“Access Denied”). You should read this if you want to know why a database in Utah has more control over your life than your own mother, and why the ledger is the only god that actually answers prayers (usually with ‘No’).
Category Archives: The Emperor’s New Suit
We like to imagine our ancestors lived in peaceful harmony with nature. The archaeological evidence suggests they were actually clubbing each other to death in a swamp in Kenya. This chapter argues that ‘Peace’ is just a marketing term for the brief pause while we reload. Read this to learn why the ‘Defence Budget’ is just a polite term for ‘Paranoia with a Credit Card,’ and why humanity’s killer app has always been… killing.
For 200,000 years, billionaires didn’t exist for a simple biological reason: you can’t hoard a mammoth. It rots. This chapter explores how the invention of the silo broke the ‘law of rot’ and allowed humans to stack wealth for the first time. Read this to understand why equality died the moment we figured out how to keep dry pasta for more than a week.
You didn’t just sign a contract with your employer; your ancestors signed a biological mortgage with wheat. This chapter argues that civilization is essentially a pyramid scheme where the bottom layer is built on ruined knees and rotting teeth. We look at how humanity traded the freedom of the savannah for the security of the dentist’s chair. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t a fair trade.
Apparently, humans have spent millions of years evolving to run free on the savannah, only to invent a system and technology where we sit in traffic all day to pay for a gym membership to run for hours on a stationery treadmill. This chapter traces the history of the ‘Upgrade Trap’—from the misery of early agriculture, which, Yuval Harari labelled history’s biggest fraud—to the horrors of a Mars colony contract. You should read this to find out exactly how much freedom you lost the moment you clicked ‘I Agree’ without reading the text.
We are destroying Earth with technology, so we must use technology to escape to Mars, a planet that has no air because it lacks technology. This prologue exposes the ‘Mars Paradox’—the idea that the billionaires breaking the planet are the only ones selling tickets to the lifeboat. Read this to learn why your retirement fund is currently invested in a carnival barker’s promise to turn a radioactive desert into a glamping site.
You aren’t failing; you are iterating. This chapter tells the story of Emperor Maximillian, who realized that the only difference between a naked lunatic and a visionary genius is the quality of the press release. We trace the history of the ‘Pivot’—the Silicon Valley art of turning a catastrophe into a feature. Read this to understand why the most valuable skill in the modern economy isn’t engineering; it is the ability to look a crowd in the eye while wearing nothing but a curtain and call it ‘Premium Content’.
