On the machine, the sign in the window,
and the parallel society we must build.
I've spent fifteen years building in this space. I was there when we thought Bitcoin would change everything, Ethereum too. Under Snowden's slogan "Fix the Money, Fix the State," and under Occupy's banners "We Are the 99%," we worked to build the future. Back then, I watched the regime masterfully dissolve the Left's economic argument and replace it with identity politics. From then, I watched the future we were building get captured, co-opted, and as the general public flooded in, crypto too lost its way.
Somewhere in the past decade, I became disillusioned with this space. I stopped being able to maintain the comfortable fiction that things would work out on their own. There was a period — and I won't pretend it was brief — where I questioned whether any of this was real. Whether crypto could truly cut the head off the snake.
I questioned whether I was building monuments to my own naivety.
And what brought me back was not money. It certainly wasn't optimism. It was duty. The realisation that if the people who understand this technology — and are willing to build against the will of tyrants — if we don't build the alternative, then no one will. And we, as a society, will get what we deserve.
I stopped pretending. I stopped being afraid of what I'd find, of what I would say, and I stopped being afraid of what could happen.
Let me tell you what I found.
An economist named Raj Chetty asked a simple question: what fraction of children earn more than their parents? For children born in the 1940s, the answer was ninety percent. That is a society of prosperity — the mythical American Dream.
For children born in the 1980s — your generation, my generation — the answer is fifty percent. A coin flip. For future generations, that number is still falling.
Share of children earning more than their parents at age 30, by birth cohort.
In 1978, a single income could support a family. A house, a car, children, a pension. Today, despite the doubling of the workforce, two incomes often cannot even cover rent. Our wages have barely moved in real terms for nearly fifty years — while housing costs ten times more, education five times more, healthcare four times more.
This has been done systematically. It's been done over decades. And it's been done by design.
Approximate cost increase across essentials since 1978, in nominal terms.
She spent months driving around Indianapolis with her three children in the backseat. House after house. Eighty homes. Each time she would arrive, hopeful, only to find a hedge fund had already made a cash offer thirty minutes earlier. No inspection. No mortgage. Just a wire transfer.
A city employee in Fishers, Indiana started writing personal letters to homeowners — begging them to sell to a family before the investors came. That's where we are. Public servants writing love letters to strangers, pleading with them not to sell to BlackRock.
They say we are the most connected people, but in reality, we are the most atomised people that have ever lived.
Sixty-one percent of young adults report chronic loneliness — chronically, persistently lonely. Half of them said no one in recent weeks had even taken more than a few minutes to ask how they were doing in a way that felt caring.
We are spending a thousand fewer hours per year with our friends than we did twenty years ago. That's forty-two days of human connection — gone. Our pubs, once the centre of social life, are empty. We are algorithmically partitioned, and we are memory-holed.
A confident, happy girl. Eleven years old when she created an Instagram account, two years below the minimum age. The platform's AI engine immediately began steering her toward "thinspo" — images glorifying anorexia. It recommended accounts offering instructions for purging, extreme dieting, and self-cutting.
At twelve, she drew a picture of herself crying on the floor next to her phone, with the words "stupid, ugly, fat" on the screen and "kill yourself" in a thought bubble. By fifteen, she was hospitalised.
Meta's own internal research — leaked by Frances Haugen — showed they knew. Internal documents described tweens as "herd animals."
Layla had ADD. She wasn't stupid — she was bright, and she was creative. The school system could not accommodate her. While the other kids did maths, Layla drew patterns. Day after day, she sat in a classroom being told, in a thousand small ways, that she was broken.
Then one day, as her mother Ashley was driving home, Layla in the backseat tried to open the car door on the freeway. Thankfully, the child safety locks were on. When her mother asked what she was doing, Layla responded that it would be better if she had never been born.
Suicide is now the biggest killer of young men in the United Kingdom. In the United States, men account for eighty percent of all suicide deaths — nearly forty thousand souls a year. More Americans died by suicide last year than in car accidents.
An entire peoples — South Korea, the West — have collectively chosen not to perpetuate themselves, to go against their very survival instincts. And it's not because they don't want children. It's that the economic conditions make it irrational to bring new life into the world.
Housing. Wages. Loneliness. Suicide. Fertility. Mental health. Debt. These look like separate crises. They're handled by different agencies, covered by different journalists, debated by different politicians. But they are not separate. They are symptoms of the same machine.
Every metric I described — and more — wages, productivity, inequality, debt, divorce, housing, incarceration — every single one of them breaks in the same year.
They all fracture in 1971.
Six independent metrics. One year. The brakes came off when the dollar was decoupled from gold on August 15, 1971.
In 1913, a group of private bankers established the Federal Reserve — a central bank with the power to create money and lend it to government. It's called "Federal," but it isn't federal. It's called a "Reserve," but it holds no reserves.
For sixty years, the gold standard acted as a constraint. Then, on August 15th, 1971, the brakes came off. Governments could now print without limit, borrow without limit, spend without limit — and there was no external force to stop them.
Running alongside this engine, there is a political gear system that ensures nothing ever reverses. One party expands government, takes the blame, and gets voted out. The other party takes over, keeps every expansion, adds its own. Two hands turning the same crank.
Just last year, in 2025, the dollar fell thirty-nine percent against gold — the oldest store of value on Earth. The US Government Accountability Office said federal debt will surpass World War II levels by 2027. Not in a decade. Next year.
The IMF projects global public debt approaching one hundred percent of GDP by 2030. Forty-five percent of all sovereign OECD debt matures by 2027. UK debt is set to nearly triple over the next fifty years.
The interconnectedness of global capital markets — the speed at which shocks move — means when this ratchet reaches its end, it reaches it everywhere at once. There is no precedent. They are, in the most literal sense, winging it.
In 1978, a Czech playwright named Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he describes a greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia who places a sign in his shop window. This sign says: "Workers of the world, unite!"
The greengrocer doesn't believe in the unification of the workers of the world. He's never given it a moment's thought. He puts the sign up because it was delivered with the onions and carrots. Because everyone else puts it up. Because that's what you do when you want to be left in peace.
In our system, the signs are different. The sign in the window doesn't say "Workers of the world, unite." It comes in rainbow flags. It's in the slogans that the economy is doing great, to trust the experts, that you'll own nothing and be happy.
But the signs aren't only slogans. They're ideological. Words like racist, bigot, sexist, diversity, tolerance, equality. In at least one of those words, I bet you felt something akin to a mental shock — something telling you that you shouldn't touch it.
Once noble ideas have become weaponised empathy. Comply with them and you're safe. Question them and you're punished.
The system generates anxiety — through economic precarity, through social atomisation — and then it sells you the anaesthetic. Pornography. Video games. Algorithmic feeds. Fast food. Endless scrolling through content designed to fill the exact void the system created.
The same system that debases your money debases your mind.
Stop putting up the sign.
The government printed trillions during the crisis. The new money flowed to Wall Street first. Asset prices soared for the wealthy. And the inflation arrived at ordinary people's doors as doubled bills. That is the Cantillon Effect.
During COVID, she helped people breathe. She kept people alive. She stopped using the dishwasher. No television. Christmas lights into storage. She sits in the dark to save on electricity. And despite these efforts, her December bill doubled to $239. All she could say was: "There's nothing else I can do."
A woman who kept people breathing cannot even keep her own lights on.
Eleven thousand dollars in savings — mostly from tax refunds and stimulus cheques over her life. She didn't fall prey to speculation; she chose to save. The best interest rate her credit union could offer was half a percent — less than $60 a year.
Meanwhile, the same Federal Reserve policies that gave Wina sixty dollars generated $22.4 trillion in stock market gains. Eighty-nine percent of that went to the wealthiest ten percent.
Her entire financial future depends on Social Security — which the government's own actuaries say will be insolvent by 2034. The one thing Wina is counting on is a promise the system has already confessed it cannot keep.
A retired pharmacist. He worked thirty-five years and paid his own pension — without state assistance. Then the Greek debt crisis hit. The same ratchet, further along. His pension was slashed.
He left a note: "The government has annihilated all traces of my survival. I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans."
Then, in Syntagma Square, in front of parliament, he shot himself.
It happened in Argentina in 2001 — poverty surged from twenty-six to fifty-eight percent in just four years. It happened in Lebanon. It happened in Sri Lanka. It is happening right now in multiple countries. This trajectory is coming for the rest of us.
One day, Havel says — if you recall the greengrocer — something snaps. Exhausted from maintaining the fiction, he stops putting up the sign. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks. He steps out of living within the lie.
And in doing so, his life gets harder. His refusal cracks the surface of the lie. It demonstrates that another way of living is possible.
Havel called this "living within the truth." The parallel polis begins there.
One centre. Surveillance flows in. Authority flows out. Cut the centre and everything fails.
Many centres. Trust flows peer-to-peer. Cut any node — the network heals around it.
Once one of Czechoslovakia's most respected foreign correspondents. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968 and the regime demanded he fall in line, he refused. For twenty years he worked as a furnace stoker, shovelling coal in the basement of a building on the Prague subway. He said it "could have been worse — at least it gave him time to read."
He joined Charter 77. He kept the underground press alive. For twenty years, with no evidence that any of it would ever matter.
Then in December 1989, the Velvet Revolution came. One day, Dienstbier didn't show up for his shift. He was being sworn in as Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia. During the negotiations, they say he broke off from the talks to go stoke his furnace one last time. Days later, he took a pair of bolt-cutters and personally chopped symbolic holes in the barbed-wire fence along the Czech-German border.
From the furnace room to the foreign ministry. Twenty years of coal dust and patience. When the wall fell, the parallel institutions were ready.
And it didn't end with the Czechs. In 1844, twenty-eight weavers in northern England were starving. Shopkeepers were adulterating food — adding chalk to flour, gravel to oatmeal. They pooled twenty-eight pounds and opened a cooperative shop with four items: butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal. They were laughed at.
Today, cooperatives based on the Rochdale Principles serve between seven hundred million and one billion people worldwide.
Benda was an unemployed mathematician at a kitchen table. Dienstbier was a furnace stoker. You have a laptop, the internet, and cryptographic tools these people could not even imagine. The question has never been whether we can. The question is whether we will.
Technological advancement does not happen first in the material. Technology reflects moral choices. Look at what defines our age and ask yourself: what moral choices produced it?
Algorithms designed to addict. Platforms designed to surveil. Money designed to debase. CBDCs, designed for total surveillance and total control.
Logos is a different moral choice.
Crypto is a double-edged sword that can cut the head off the snake — the international fiat system, the surveillance apparatus, the machinery of control built on debased money. But we have to forge it right, and the truth is we haven't. At least not yet.
It's 2034. The same debt spiral that broke Greece and Argentina has arrived. The same crisis hits — because the same forces that have broken every over-indebted nation in history will not make an exception.
But the world the crisis arrives into is determined now, by what we build today.
Ashley didn't wait for the system to fix itself. She didn't petition a school board. She built a school — the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy. Then she and her husband grew it into the National Microschooling Center. She now serves the entire country.
And Layla — the girl who wanted to disappear — is fourteen today. She has recovered.
That is what the parallel society does. It's about people supporting people. And it doesn't ask for permission.
The West is in decline, and it will not collapse overnight. But today we can start building the support networks, the parallel institutions, the sovereign infrastructure. Today we can alleviate the consequences of the system. And in the ashes of the old order, we can create a renaissance of civil society — built by the people who refused to put up the sign.
That's what the Czech dissidents built in kitchens and basements. That's what we have the chance to build with tools they couldn't have dreamed of.
If you write code, look at the Logos stack. Read the specs. Run a node. Write a module.
If you are a builder of any kind, come join a chapter. Find what your neighbourhood is missing — a school, a food network, a mutual aid system — and start there. The Rochdale weavers started with four items. You can start with one.
But whether you write code, join a chapter, or simply carry this conversation forward — the deeper ask is the same for all of us. Stop organising your life around greed and status. Organise it around purpose, service, and the development of virtue and character.