When you ask people how to best build your personal brand, they'll recommend consistency, finding one's niche, becoming if not an opinion, at least a thought-leader. When you ask people what you should learn, it's usually related to paving the way for your future career aspirations or, at least, something that seems immediately useful. I too fell into these traps at first. I am sure it works for some, but it didn't for me. When I started working in crypto, all I wrote were introductions to ne...

That's how I feel quite a bit these days. And it's not just because I'm forced to using Notion at work (that is enough of a pain honestly for one human) - it's also because I feel consistently like being the odd one out for trying to argue against de-humanizing ways, against ways to strip all dignity away, from winning the race to the bottom just for the sake of quick attention. I know this doesn't go in a Tech Bro's bird brain (oh wait sorry... actually pigeon brains have double the neuron d...

In the last weeks, I spent an unusually large amount of time in transit. From moving across half the width of Germany to flying back from Tbilisi after an off-site, which took me door-to-door a casual 12 hours (including the 30 minutes I walked in the rain back home because I couldn't be asked to wait for a bus, nor did I feel like taking a taxi in this economy). It got me thinking. About the presentation by Rory Sutherland, I watched one year ago on YouTube, wondering whether we're too impat...

I think that a lot recently. It has nothing to do with going through a crisis of the self. I'm doing just fine. But ever since I've been ghostwriting, at times I wonder, what the f*ck are we (I) even doing here. This isn't the first time it's crossed my mind. I remember vividly working under a pretty useless CEO once, who couldn't even formulate a comprehensible sentence in Telegram chats. The next thing you know, I see a book supposedly written by him in the Business section of my local book...

A warm wall of hot air hits me in the face as I step through the door I just held up for a seemingly never-ending stream of people. "What are these people doing here? Don't they have jobs?" my inner monologue goes on before concluding that the same is true of me. Yet here I am on a sunny Monday at 3 p.m., about to step into an institution said to be long dead: the mall. As a teenager, malls were a meeting place I never entirely understood. In that regard, my evolution as a person is thoroughl...

The best way to make yourself unpopular in crypto isn't to be a misogynist, a liar, or even a fascist - quite the opposite, those might even be somewhat celebrated. Instead, all it takes is digging out Marx's works and pointing out that the man who gave Capitalism its name had some insights into the relationship between society and capital that weren't all about crushing the bourgeoisie and bringing about a revolution. This much ahead, I am not a Marxist nor do I believe that we just need to ...

It's always trusting less, not more, in this industry born from disdain for the existing centralized financial systems that failed us badly in 2008. I don't want to argue about corrupt huge behemoths here - and anyway, for a flavor of fictional authoritarian bureaucracy gone wrong, there's Kafka. The system ain't great. And yet, I wonder whether the trustless property we imbue the technology, the blockchain with, might actually contribute to how we v...

Today was one of those days... well, technically, it still is because it's just early afternoon. But I already know my productivity will be low, which is fine because defining yourself via your output means you've bought into the system. It's a trap. The longer I am in crypto, the more often I ask myself, am I in the wrong here? Am I the insane one? It sure could seem that way when the most visceral reactions to someone on a NEAR livestream accidentally showing nudes was for people to fawn ov...

A while ago I watched the Netflix documentary "The Only Girl in the Orchestra" following Orin O'Brien, the first woman ever to join the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. 80% of its background music comprised Beethoven's 7th symphony, the second movement (Allegretto). The rest was some Bartok. Since then it's been stuck in my head. Even if you aren't into classical music, you'll recognize this Beethoven, alongside the famous fifth's first movement, which goes Da-Da-Da-Dum - see, you know it. 😼...

Cover: Augustus Vincent Tack's "Time and Timelessness" - I loved this one in the Denver Art MuseumDuring an AI agents meetup, I went to this year, I had the audacity to ask the panel a question they didn't see coming. Why they didn't see it coming is not that big of a mystery. Tech, especially as edgy as ours, often has a tendency to detach its developers from the lived reality of what we lovingly call normies. That includes not thinking much about what actually motivates people to overcome i...