Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism

“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.” — Marie Antoinette

Culture is a web of metaphors, which we use to filter the raw information of the world into a distillation of the communal relevance of individual yet shared experience. “Metaphors make connections which are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers,” Scruton argued.

But eventually we are left with nothing sacred, nothing we can take seriously. It all becomes a self-referential circle jerk of irony descending slowly into total relativism without an anchor; nothing to which to be relative; without a meaning; without a social truth in sight.

Elemental gold approximates what Nick Szabo called unforgeable costliness. Brilliantly anticipating contemporary pushback against “wasteful” Bitcoin mining, in Shelling Out, Szabo explains, At first, the production of a commodity simply because it is costly seems quite wasteful. However, the unforgeably costly commodity repeatedly adds value by ena

An obsession with utility is high time preference and selfishness incarnate. It is a maximization of flow and a rejection of stock. It is a worship of consumption yet a disregard for investment. Scruton captures the essential long-termism of a proper appreciation of beauty wonderfully: “Put usefulness first and you lose it. Put beauty first and wha

Perversely, irony relies on some remains of cultural capital in order to coherently express its destructive message. If elevated beyond commentary and analysis to its own pedestal of artistic value, its essence become desacralization and the making trite of deep truths we might prefer to respect and conserve.

The creation of good art is necessarily mindful of interpersonal compromise and personal sacrifice because it is a quest for social truth. It speaks to the human condition, not the artist’s condition.

When we ponder the layout of ancient cities, we must acknowledge that they are the by-product of thousands of years of human tinkering. People came together in villages and tried different living arrangements. What worked, they copied and expanded. What didn’t work, they discarded. That is, if those experiments hadn’t already killed or disbanded th

This is sacrifice and compromise personified: One can always create something trivially original on the grounds of trivial individualism. The challenge is to create something meaningful to others and true to oneself that manages to say something new, or at least newly, to infuse just enough individual creative spark as to manipulate the common pool