Project Alexandria
On the project to build the world's largest, digital library.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Zero-knowledge proofs separate what is verified from what is revealed, ending the forced choice between participation and privacy.
Why the Way of the Warrior
You're in deep and no one's coming to save you.
Cryptographic Foundations
Cryptography shifts trust from institutions to mathematics, and that shift carries every privacy primitive the book later builds.
The Crypto Wars
Crypto controls failed against builders, held against defaults, and locked in the two-tier privacy equilibrium thirty years later.
In the name of Jesus (A Poem)
A few days ago, I couldn't sleep. As it often happens for me, I ended up writing...
The Analytics Stack
Commercial firms assemble surveillance no agency could lawfully build, and the state buys the output as a service.
Corporate Surveillance and Data Extraction
Corporate data extraction inverts the market: the advertiser is the customer, and the user supplies the raw material.
Financial Surveillance and the State
Financial surveillance is triangular intervention. The state forces banks to watch customers, and CBDCs strip the buffer entirely.
Careful, Icarus
Tying identity to onchain activity is problematic in more ways than one.
Money and Privacy
Money emerges by market process. Sound money carries privacy alongside its three classical functions; fiat lacks all four.
Privacy as Capital
Privacy tools are capital that compounds across uses; institutional promises last only as long as state goodwill does.
The Economic Value of Privacy
Privacy aids exchange by guarding deliberation and negotiation from observation that chills marginal trades and distorts the rest.
Sleep in a Net
Mexican matrimonial hammocks beat beds for comfort and free the whole room when unhooked. Sleep diagonally, flat back, anywhere on earth.
Information, Scarcity, and Property
Property rights apply to scarce things. Information is non-scarce, so privacy stands on self-ownership, owned media, and contract.
Chapter 5: The Axiom of Resistance
Systems can be designed to resist external control. The claim rests on computational hardness and the record of deployed tools.
Licensed To Exist
When your identity is a credential the government can revoke, your rights have already become licenses. When your money is programmable and state-issued, your freedom to dissent has a price tag the state can set to infinity. When your face is the key to your own bank account, your body is no longer your property, it is state infrastructure. Digital ID, CBDCs, and the quiet war on cash are not separate policy initiatives. They are three components of a single architecture
Chapter 4: The Argumentation Axiom and Self-Ownership
To argue is to presuppose control of body and mind. Coerced surveillance breaks that presupposition and counts as aggression.
Chapter 3: The Action Axiom: Privacy as Structural Feature
Privacy is built into the structure of human action. Deliberation and the asymmetry between actor and observer are structural.