Go to https://medium.com/future-history for Spectology’s blog.

These are a delicious, spicy, numbing, flavor-packed snack. I tried to build a recipe which is satisfying in small amounts—it’s something you’ll want to eat a few at a time rather than by the handful. I developed this recipe because most the recipes I could find didn’t really live up…

Donald Trump isn’t simply a petulant boy, and it’s dangerous to describe him that way — [TW: emotional & sexual abuse tactics] I came across a tweet the other day that gave me pause. I had seen this in action. There are plenty of sources calling Trump a child: Eggers wrote the piece from the above tweet, multiple outlets have interviewed child psychologists and experts…

I wanted to present a list of speculative fiction novels that have helped me understand the election of Trump, and inform my view of how things will unfold. This list doesn’t claim to be anything other than me recommending books to others, and is in no way definitive. It’s narrow…

In which my job and guilty pleasure are fruitfully combined. — While I was at General Assembly, we had a tradition of asking new hires a few questions to get to know them better. Some are the typical (who are you, what are you doing here, where are you coming from). But one stands out: what is your guilty pleasure? While…

“The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and why decentralization isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This is somewhat of a long post, something I’ve had kicking around for a while. It’s pretty critical of bitcoin as it currently exists, particularly the social structures surrounding bitcoin. …

How evolving org structures can lead to strong systems.  — Legibility is a concept introduced by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State. Governing bodies, he posits, simplify the world through abstraction to make it easier to understand and control. German foresters of the 18th Century viewed forests through the lens of revenue. They ceased to value…

Memories of a rural Alaskan youth — I grew up in rural Alaska. Winters were rough—not a lot to do, very dark and depressing. I spent a lot of time just staring at the stars. Up there, far away from civilization, the light of the stars cuts through the cold, dark sky and opens up the entire…

There are a number of science fiction novels where the net is this turmoil of code/object/beings that fight each other in this memetic ecosystem. Code snippets preying on other code snippets. Lying in wait or hunting. Nice metaphor, but not the way code works. But what happens when a comedian…