Once upon a time on the internet

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I wonder if today I would be living a more fulfilling life if, 30 years ago, I had studied philosophy instead of computer science. It mostly happens when I’m uberbored at work or pissed at my boss. Young-me was in doubt for months between studying physics and philosophy. That doubt led current-age-me to end up exactly where he is today. All our life choices are haunted by the ghosts of the choices that might have been instead, or whatever Roland Barthes said. And, as logical counterfactuals are always true because their premises are false, if I had studied philosophy, I would be logically happy by now. Not sure if logical happiness is different from regular happiness, but this is irrelevant. Today I’m in need of a rupture. Let the timeline in which I graduate in philosophy, with a dissertation titled “Lead, Gold, and Cryptograms as Payment Systems: An Alchemical Journey around 16th- and 17th-Century Europe” begin. In 2003, Bitcoin and Yeezy were not yet a thing, but today I could write a paragraph comparing Giordano Bruno and Kanye West: they both sold the idea that one can get rich quick using a technology so advanced it cannot be distinguished from magic, and they both burned, one more literally than the other, once their machineries went mainstream. It doesn’t matter if the position along the celestial sphere is calculated on silicon and read on screen, or by hand and bound in folio, the trick is far older than this old dog: those who know how the machinery works can sell certainty to those who do not even know where the machinery begins. In the other timeline I’m an engineer, I build complex intelligent machines. In this timeline I will let the engineer burn.

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Once upon a time on the internet