The Curious Engineer

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Justin Murphy

jmurphy.studio

Writing by Justin Murphy on philosophy, social science, technology, and independent scholarship.

Essays / personalSociety / politics / economyAI / ML

’23’24’25’26
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402 from 12 Jun 2023 to 7 Dec 2025
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now and then (1 in the last year)
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2025 16

  1. The Supreme Court Should Be an Ensemble of LLMs
  2. The Bari Weiss Strategy
  3. In Domestic War, Beware the Rabble
  4. Alexander Karp's Iron Cage: A Review of The Technological Republic
  5. Plato's Playbook
  6. Deregulation and the State Arms-Race Each Other Into Cyberspace
  7. Plato: The First Indie Scholar (Plus a NorCal Meetup in 3 Weeks)
  8. The Body Count Climbs Through a Series of Globewars
  9. Ecstatic Swoons
  10. Markets Manufacture Intelligence, Politics Upgrades Paranoia, and Tries to Get a Grip
  11. A Blow to the Head
  12. Catastrophe and Child's Play
  13. Homo Sacer and the Invention of Reading
  14. The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 3)
  15. The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 2)
  16. The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 1)

2024 50

  1. Nietzsche's Big Mistake: Three Ideas on Christianity
  2. Manny Farber's Rhizome
  3. On IVF and Embryo Selection
  4. Libidinal Economies
  5. Dostoevsky vs. Nietzsche
  6. Deadline Tonight
  7. You Can Probably Just Have It
  8. Walls as a Service
  9. Logistically Accelerating Techno-Economic Interactivity
  10. How Renaissance Rationalization and Oceanic Navigation Locked Into Commodotization Takeoff
  11. The Life of Spinoza as an Independent Scholar
  12. No Doesn’t Always Mean No
  13. On Angelicism and Post-Academic Futures
  14. Angels and Communication
  15. The Divorce Revolution: How a Social Tragedy Became a Personal Triumph
  16. Video Game Syndrome
  17. Deadline tonight
  18. Seminars, Meetups, and Dinners in NYC, Philly, Austin
  19. Wittgenstein's Religion
  20. Heraclitus, Nietzsche, John the Apostle, and a Wyoming Trip Report
  21. The Social Mobility Illusion
  22. Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy
  23. What to Do After the Orgy
  24. Ask for the Truth: Marshall McLuhan's Catholicism
  25. Society Is a Corpse That Purges at the Mouth
  26. The Montaigne Paradox
  27. Write to Yourself and Yourself Alone
  28. Looking for Spinoza by Antonio Damasio: Detailed Summary
  29. Time Capsules and Air Lifts
  30. Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier: Detailed Summary
  31. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by René Girard: Detailed Summary
  32. Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest by Nick Land: A Detailed Guide
  33. After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre: A Detailed Guide
  34. The Rising Returns to Focus
  35. On the Unleavened (A Thought for Easter)
  36. North by Northwest 2024: The Annual Other Life Meetup
  37. The Height From Which No One Is Cast Down
  38. There Is a Time to Polish Your Rifle and a Time to Fire
  39. A Simple View of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective
  40. The Auteur and the Ghetto
  41. Nietzsche on the Pride of the Philosopher in Contrast to the Slave
  42. On the Miracle and Scandal of Education
  43. The Magic, the Money, and the Madness
  44. Introducing the New Monthly Print Issue
  45. On Suburban Kings and Academic Revolutions
  46. Diogenes on Excellence and How to Be Unstoppably Happy
  47. On Idea Hoarding
  48. St. Francis and the Obscure Logic of Cultural Influence
  49. Unpopular Truths About Mate Selection
  50. And We're Back... Welcome to Other Life 2024

2023 336

  1. Nick Land on AI Acceleration
  2. Lacan, Leibniz, and English as a Programming Language
  3. There is No Winning the Culture War
  4. The Independent Scholar's Guide to Twitter/X
  5. Virilio, Parenting, and the Network State
  6. On Form, Israel, and the Death Athletic
  7. Emerson's 21 Principles of Self-Reliance
  8. On Shakespeare, Wyoming, and Merely Staying Afloat
  9. Return to the Future of Classical Education
  10. The Billionaire Gentleman Scholar
  11. Generate Subtle Tweets From an Essay in the Style of the Author
  12. How to Build Software With Natural Language
  13. Recursively Self-Improving Writers
  14. Plato, Prose, and "Selective Breeding"
  15. The Rigor of Angels: Kant, Borges, Heisenberg
  16. The Delirium of Reason: On William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984)
  17. Montaigne, Mary Emerson, and the Race to Own Yourself
  18. Intent on Truth: St. Augustine's Philosophy of History in The City of God
  19. If You Can Articulate, You’re All Set: Russell, Yeats, Gaddis
  20. Everything You Know About Audience-Building is Wrong
  21. War as the Truest Form of Divination: On Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian
  22. "Ask for the Truth:" The Medium and the Light by Marshall McLuhan
  23. The Solitary Volcano: Four Lessons from the Life of Ezra Pound
  24. Cybergothic: From John Milton to Nick Land
  25. Ezra Pound and the Aristocratic Spirit
  26. Signaling Through the Flames: Artaud's Inquisition
  27. Catholic Instead of What? By Alasdair MacIntyre
  28. René Girard's Anthropology of the Cross
  29. On Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927)
  30. The Industrialization of the Mind
  31. Excess Vitality and Reversible Modernity: Wyndham Lewis, Leo Strauss, and the Art of Reading
  32. Literary Outlaw: Three Lessons from William S. Burroughs
  33. The Weight of Glory
  34. From Self-Pity to Pulitzer: Lessons from the Life of John Kennedy Toole
  35. Harold Bloom's 4 Rules for Reading
  36. Reading is Selfish, Elitist, and Anti-Social
  37. Welcome to the new Other Life
  38. ȘȈǤƝȘ 63: Reality Splitters
  39. ȘȈǤƝȘ 64: Only Physicists and Dancers Escape
  40. ȘȈǤƝȘ 65: No Other But This Eternal Life
  41. ȘȈǤƝȘ 66: Variant Judgment
  42. ȘȈǤƝȘ 67: The Naming Power
  43. ȘȈǤƝȘ 68: Urbit Apocalypse
  44. ȘȈǤƝȘ 69: Texan Cybergothic
  45. ȘȈǤƝȘ 71: Imperceptible War
  46. ȘȈǤƝȘ 70: Small Games
  47. ȘȈǤƝȘ 72: Nomads Never Travel
  48. ȘȈǤƝȘ 73: The Greatest Hazard of All
  49. ȘȈǤƝȘ 74: Cold Winds
  50. ȘȈǤƝȘ 75: The secret of victory
  51. ȘȈǤƝȘ 76: Power Whispers
  52. ȘȈǤƝȘ 77: Water in the Desert
  53. ȘȈǤƝȘ 78: Abysmal Knowledge
  54. ȘȈǤƝȘ 79: Rite Makes Might
  55. ȘȈǤƝȘ 80: Flatline
  56. ȘȈǤƝȘ 81: Grace and Gaucherie
  57. ȘȈǤƝȘ 82: Fear in the Clever
  58. ȘȈǤƝȘ 83: The Imperceptible House
  59. ȘȈǤƝȘ 84: Secret Agents
  60. ȘȈǤƝȘ 86: Enlightenment How?
  61. ȘȈǤƝȘ 85: There Is No Regime
  62. ȘȈǤƝȘ 88: Subdued to Fate
  63. ȘȈǤƝȘ 87: Self-Reliance
  64. ȘȈǤƝȘ 90: Kings of the Realm
  65. ȘȈǤƝȘ 91: The Smoking Room
  66. ȘȈǤƝȘ 92: The Duel After the Masquerade
  67. ȘȈǤƝȘ 93: Well Directed Attention
  68. ȘȈǤƝȘ 94: Kindness Is Not Fondness
  69. ȘȈǤƝȘ 95: An Edifying Death
  70. ȘȈǤƝȘ 96: The Unbearable Repartee
  71. A Child is Not the Most Important Thing
  72. A machine superintelligence might never display itself
  73. A Realm of One's Own: Urbit and the Next Creator Economy
  74. A Theory of Verbal Inflation
  75. Abjection
  76. AcademiaLeaks, University of Chicago Edition
  77. Advancing to Level 2
  78. Algorithms and prayers
  79. Against the Epistemic Status
  80. All men by nature desire to know
  81. An automated system for delivering high volumes of exclusive content to patrons
  82. American Cities are Vastly Superior to European Cities
  83. An Effort Allocator for Content Creators
  84. Are the greatest beneficiaries of Effective Altruism its proponents?
  85. Are Politically Correct Students Better or Worse Students?
  86. Aristocracy and Communism
  87. Audience structure on the Left and Right of new indy media
  88. Bear Traps
  89. Barbarians Past the Gate
  90. Becoming Imperceptible (1)
  91. Beware, rationalism!
  92. Bioweapon
  93. Calling all indie thinkers (literally)
  94. Camping in Bear Country
  95. Can you do a PhD if you have ADHD?
  96. Catholicism as Nomad War Machine (Deleuze and Chesterton)
  97. Caviar Cope
  98. Communism Is Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Nothing Else
  99. Cyber-Hype Techonomics: The CCRU and Crypto
  100. Database Animals, Financialized
  101. Decouple intellectualism and intelligence
  102. Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned #9)
  103. Deleuze, Cybernetics, Evolution, Academics
  104. Deleuze’s Troublesome Inheritance (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)
  105. Depressive capitalist realism
  106. Democrats wanted strongman rule way more than Republicans — until Trump arrived
  107. Disconnected
  108. Disrobed Academics, Crimethinc Anarchism, and the Resurrection
  109. Does a country's separation of powers affect its status culture?
  110. Durkheim Meltdown
  111. Dr. Samuel Johnson: Hustler, Savage, Grifter, Great
  112. Early Days of Defacing the Currency (How Academia Got Pwned 10)
  113. Emerson on the American Scholar
  114. Educated Errors? On Perceptions of Trump's Ideology
  115. Eichmann in Oxford
  116. Empty Pockets
  117. Eric Weinstein's Error
  118. Evaluating Exit Modes: Resign or Be Fired? (How Academia Got Pwned 11)
  119. Every Angel is Terrifying by Riva Tez and Praxis Society
  120. Explaining Who Gets to Speak at Universities
  121. Exponential Satanism: Girard and Digital Technology
  122. Ezra Pound and the Curse of Genius
  123. Fear and Dissembling
  124. Fascism over yourself is called autonomy
  125. Flannery O'Connor and the Mysterious Secrets of Writing
  126. Free Hierarchy
  127. From the Imperceptible Country
  128. Fully Automated Luxury Communism as Rousseauean Techno-Commercial Cyber-Manorialism
  129. Fully automated personal brands
  130. Garden State Cybergothic
  131. Genetic research disrupts racist views of welfare
  132. Getting High on Easter Sunday
  133. Hallow be thy name
  134. Gunslingers and Iconoclasts
  135. Hard Forking Reality (Part 1)
  136. Hard Forking Reality (Part 2): Communication and Complexity
  137. Hard Forking Reality (Part 3): Apocalypse, Evil, and Intelligence
  138. Hateful Silence
  139. Heard Mentality
  140. How accurate social valuation of individual characters generates true communism
  141. How Academia Got Pwned (1)
  142. How I'm Successfully Digitizing Another Professorial Function: Consulting
  143. How many readers do you need? Kierkegaard only hoped for one
  144. How to Deal With Punishment According to Nietzsche and Spinoza
  145. How to kill the grump in your head (Deleuzean #NiceRx?)
  146. How Urbit Wins
  147. Hunger Games But Really Slow
  148. Hyperstition Americana
  149. I think I built a Liberal Arts college on the internet
  150. I Have a Dream (How Academia Got Pwned 6)
  151. If education is signaling, does moral signaling become a viable major?
  152. Inscrutably Obvious: A Paradox of Technological Change
  153. Intelligence as a political cleavage
  154. Introducing Deleuze vs. Heidegger on Technology, Enslavement, and Escape
  155. Introducing monthly seminars
  156. Introducing Statistical On-Chain Analysis
  157. IRLmaxxing Against the Soydevs, Indie Magazines, Filmmaking, Urbit
  158. Is Facebook the Largest Corporate Fraud Ever?
  159. Is it racist to use the Kekistani flag?
  160. Is parental social status a mixed blessing? On toleration for occupational drudgery
  161. It's rational to move somewhere beautiful to write
  162. How to know if you’re talking to a wokescold: A scientific method for preventing IRL flame wars
  163. Left Singularity
  164. Lessons from Nietzsche’s Awful Publishing Results
  165. Let’s make personal computers rugged, dignified, and enduring
  166. The Other Life Gift Guide
  167. Other Life News and Links (February 6, 2019)
  168. Life update from the Sunshine State
  169. Make Communism Elite Again (Corralling Desperate Hordes Is Not a Blueprint)
  170. The Meaning of Clubhouse vs. Taylor Lorenz
  171. Millennials, Migrate to Mountain Mansions
  172. Modern Liberalism Is Not Peace, It's Pacification
  173. Multiple heuristic equilibria (cognitive patchwork)
  174. Mushrooms, Modafinil, and Mass Shooters (How Academia Got Pwned 2)
  175. The New Frontier of Personal Computing
  176. Mussolini: A Wormhole in the Fabric of History?
  177. Not everyone needs to be heard
  178. Not making progress or losing motivation?
  179. Now, wars start themselves
  180. NXIVM was a rationality cult
  181. Occupations and Their Ideologies
  182. On Agnes Callard
  183. On British Reservedness and American Boisterousness
  184. On Intellectual Twitter Beefs
  185. On Not Being Fired (How Academia Got Pwned 12)
  186. On the business model of the private intellectual
  187. On Those Who Worship the Big Other
  188. On Writing in the Age of Machine Intelligence
  189. Open Letter Concerning Luke Turner
  190. The Optimal Podcasting Process for Indie Thinkers: Automate and Proliferate
  191. Other implications and observations
  192. Paul Skallas Is a Scammer and I Called It in 2020
  193. Paid Vacation Begins (How Academia Got Pwned 3)
  194. Personal Computer or Personal Enemy?
  195. Personal Knowledge Management is Bullshit
  196. Peter Thiel's Theory of California
  197. Planning a tour, would you like me to visit you?
  198. Post-Structuralism and False Authority
  199. Progress report for first book project
  200. Quick note on a site change
  201. Radical Europeans of the Twentieth Century — In Color
  202. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, and Intellectual Strategy
  203. Rap is not art but it’s cool
  204. Reasons why the IHME model might be under-predicting coronavirus deaths in the USA
  205. Reasons not to start an online magazine
  206. Religion, guilt, and creativity
  207. Religion is an extra-rational condition for the possibility of rationality
  208. Remodeling the Units and Flows of Intellectual Production (How Academia Got Pwned 8)
  209. How Renaissance Rationalization and Oceanic Navigation Lock Into Commodotization Takeoff
  210. Reputation (How Academia Got Pwned 5)
  211. Respectability Is Not Worth It (Reply to SlateStarCodex)
  212. Results from Based Deleuze
  213. Rethinking intellectual production models (How Academia Got Pwned 7)
  214. Review of Based Mansion LA: Observations, Finances, and Bibliography
  215. Riva Tez on Epistemological Freedom
  216. Samo Burja and the New Private Intellectual
  217. Satisfice Money, Maximize Freedom
  218. Scientific introspection and the analytical advantage of average people
  219. The Seldom Frequented Path
  220. Segmentation and personalization for philosophers and scientists
  221. Sell Outs and Sell Ins
  222. Shared roots versus hard forks
  223. The Shock is Almost Lethal
  224. Show Me
  225. Signs 89: Exiles in This World
  226. Signs of Life, May 2021: Truth is a Schelling Point
  227. So what if I’m afraid of death
  228. Social AI is Coming
  229. Some news and updates resettling
  230. Some personal reflections on Jordan Peterson
  231. St. Augustine, the Kernel, and the Long Run
  232. Should you start a Substack?
  233. Stream Theory
  234. Student debt is worse than a bubble
  235. Study finds the relationship between genes and earnings increased after 1980
  236. Suicide should be slightly stigmatized
  237. Technocommunist Vectors: Radar Edition
  238. Technology, Class, and Ideological Realignment
  239. Terre Thaemlitz on why you should just stop
  240. Testosterone is declining because it's illegal
  241. The Billion Dollar Personal Server
  242. The Case for Annexing Mexico and Canada
  243. The Categorical Dual of the Blockchain
  244. The Catholic Coordination Game
  245. The Crypto Reformation
  246. The Cybernetic Trinity
  247. The Cyberpositive AI-aligned Communism (CAIC) Protocol
  248. The Devil Is in the Denial
  249. The Facts of the World Are Not the End of the Matter: On Wittgenstein's Religion
  250. The Freedom-Specificity Tradeoff
  251. The First Problem of Being Perceptible Is Being Manipulated (Becoming Imperceptible 2)
  252. The Great Flaw in West Coast Thought
  253. The Highest Human Activity
  254. The Highest Ranking Non-Player Characters (How Academia Got Pwned 4)
  255. The Highest Reason is Always the Truest: Emerson's Method
  256. The Human Cartel, Part 1: The Working-Ruling Class
  257. The Imperceptible Country
  258. The Improvement Illusion
  259. The Imperceptible Mechanisms of Deep Community
  260. The interaction of education and race on Trump approval
  261. The Key Ideas of Leo Strauss
  262. The Long Run is Getting Shorter
  263. The net-negative utility of Utilitarianism in the long term
  264. The New Cyberpunk
  265. The Non-Fungible Aristocracy
  266. The Next Men of Letters
  267. The non-linear effect of ability on earnings in the computer age
  268. The Other Deplatforming
  269. The Patchwork Intellectual
  270. The Psychology of Prohibiting Outside Thinkers
  271. The Psychology of Supporting Open Borders
  272. The rich are more communist than they're allowed to be
  273. The Second Problem of Being Perceptible Is Motivational Highjacking (Becoming Imperceptible III)
  274. The Second Golden Age of Blogging
  275. The Singular Importance of Being Correct
  276. The Struggle of the Independent Scholar
  277. The Sweet Smell of Success
  278. The time to withdraw
  279. The Two Paths to Power
  280. The Two Meanings of Reaction (Excerpt from Based Deleuze)
  281. The Univocity Debate in a Nutshell
  282. The Unreasonably Negative Effects of Podcast Listening
  283. The Violent Focus of Francis Bacon
  284. The Vortex of Tiny Effects
  285. The worst that can happen is nothing
  286. The Young Balzac: Disordered Knowledge, Strange Student
  287. There are no humans on the internet
  288. Theology and experimental method
  289. Thousands of Lovers Executed for AI Safety
  290. To Become Rich and Famous, Take a Vow of Poverty and Anonymity
  291. Tools, sequences, and workflows
  292. Tour stop in Raleigh, North Carolina this Thursday May 16
  293. Truth = Joy = Power: Spinoza's Galaxy Brain
  294. Two kinds of hustle
  295. Unfair Competition (How Academia Got Pwned 13)
  296. Utilitarianism incentivizes suffering, or victim culture as a child of rationalism
  297. Virtues of the Desert
  298. Wang Yi's Other Life
  299. WASP Microaggressions (MY #METOO MOMENT)
  300. We Are All Conspiracy Theorists Now
  301. We Still Don’t Understand the Attention Economy
  302. What am I doing?
  303. What Happened to National Geographic?
  304. What I'm reading: Ernst Jünger
  305. What is an "image of thought" for Deleuze?
  306. What Would I Do Without This World
  307. When does blogging become worth it?
  308. When Kipling Met Twain
  309. When not to go with the flow
  310. Why Do Muslim Immigrants and Western Leftists Like Each Other?
  311. Why I’m interested in blockchain tech for creators
  312. Why no depiction of Hitler is evil enough
  313. Why Virtue Ethics is Probably Correct
  314. Why Write One Book When You Can Speak 18 Volumes?
  315. Will the pandemic have partisan effects on voter turnout?
  316. Will the University of Austin Succeed?
  317. Writers are Losers
  318. Writing is a Single-Player Game
  319. WYRD PATCHWORKSHOP
  320. You can be neutral on a moving train
  321. You can’t be smarter than you are
  322. You don’t have writer’s block, you’re just being evil
  323. If you're a content creator, you're a tiny startup (you just don’t know it yet)
  324. Reality Patchwork and Neo-Feudal Techno-Communism (Transcript)
  325. CS Lewis, Edith Stein, and How to Make It as an Indie Writer
  326. Girard and Baudrillard on Pandemics and Plagues
  327. Housewives on LSD and other secrets about the psychedelic revolution
  328. How Chris Williamson Grew Modern Wisdom From Zero to 450k Subscribers
  329. How to Dominate Substack with Genetic Blackpills
  330. How Plato Made Himself the Most Influential Thinker Ever
  331. If You Build It Correctly, God Will Come To Dwell
  332. "Insanely Bullish" on Urbit with Uqbar Founder ~timluc-miptev
  333. On Virtue Ethics and Why Effective Altruism is Wrong
  334. On Zero-Knowledge Crypto-Anarchy
  335. Should Bitcoin Have a King? Curtis Yarvin on Crypto
  336. The Harvard Finance Bro Building an Urbit Network State From El Salvador