Devin Baker

When confronted with transformations that feel total, we reach for religious language almost by instinct. That is precisely what makes it powerful enough to motivate and dangerous enough to excuse almost anything done in its name.

Just as traditional theology explains why a good God permits suffering, Altman’s framing explains why a good company must risk the end of the world. Catastrophe becomes not a failure of judgment but the necessary potential price of the ultimate upgrade to the human condition.

When we removed the vertical axis, God and heaven as the destination of history, we did not flatten the world, but tilted the horizontal axis, progress and technology, until it reached a pitch of religious intensity. The fervour with which contemporary technologists argue about the fate of civilisation is not an accident of temperament but a... See more

For over a thousand years, medieval Christianity supplied a complete account of where history was going and how it would end. History began with creation, fell with sin, moved toward redemption, and would conclude with a final judgment. When that worldview collapsed, gradually across the Enlightenment and in the centuries that followed, the... See more

second, the way to improve an information system is to increase bandwidth and reduce noise [2]

it turns out that blockchains do both. replacing human fallibility with cryptographic determinism reduces human-induced distortions and removes unnecessary moving parts, making the system more robust under stress. property rights, contract enforcement, and... See more

Before Shannon, engineers assumed that to improve communications, you needed to increase power. Blast your signal louder to overcome the noise. Shannon proved this wrong. What actually mattered wasn't raw power but structuring the signal with enough redundancy that the receiver could reconstruct the original message even through a noisy channel.... See more

one domain where the war between bottom-up knowledge and top-down dictation remained unsettled was the economic systems of the 20th century: communism vs. capitalism. communism sought to coordinate through top-down planning and socialized ownership. capitalism coordinated through voluntary exchange among individuals.

the western world, the soviet... See more

The work that lasts from this era will be no different. The companies that endure, the technologies that serve rather than consume, the institutions that hold their shape across generations when the founders are dead and the capital is restless and the market is telling them to be something other than what they are — they will have something at... See more

The businesses that lasted understood this. Each of them had something at the core that looked, to outside eyes, like irrationality. A refusal that made no sense. A constraint held well past the point where a rational person would have abandoned it. If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived... See more