37: Advanced Malware w/ Arjen

By No Solutions September 9, 2026 · Edited September 9, 2026

How can we make maximum use of this technology without shooting ourselves in the foot too much?

“How can we make maximum use of this technology without shooting ourselves in the foot too much?”

Arjen & Gigi take a walk in Madeira.

This dialogue begins in the afterglow and exhaustion of another Sovereign Engineering cohort. Arjen has been living with NixOS, putting FIPS into the boot path before LUKS unlocks, and watching the SEC-08 demos turn from isolated hacks into pieces of a stranger, more coherent machine.

The center of the walk is the uncomfortable power of agents. If models can operate the whole computer, then they start to look less like tools and more like extremely capable malware that sometimes works in your favor. Gigi points to a new model for personal computer use: give agents broad access to the machine, but keep signing authority and key material outside their reach. Useful power at the edge, hard boundaries around the thing that matters.

From there the conversation loops back into TollGate and FIPS. Arjen talks through v2, local mints, e-cash as accounting for streamed resources, application keys, and the move from fragile intermediaries toward transports that can route through weird environments. Bytes, kilowatts, water, beer: the pattern is less about one payment rail and more about making access measurable, local, and hard to rug pull.

The final third drifts offline. Myco, Boris, Substore, the Offline Entropy Manual, the Offpunk Manifesto, and the local-first movement all become parts of the same instinct: build software that keeps working when the network disappears, when the store rug pulls you, or when you simply want to be AFK again.

In this dialogue:

why post-cohort decompression has its own strange rhythm
how clankers made NixOS feel usable without flattening its power
what it means to run FIPS inside the initrd before LUKS unlocks
how ZBD, Counter-Strike, sats in games, and fiatjaf sit in the prehistory of several later protocol moves
why the flat earther meme is a surprisingly good visual metaphor for missing the shape of a system
how TollGate changes when each access point can issue its own local e-cash
why streamed accounting can apply to more than bandwidth
what Johnathan Corgan is pushing toward with FIPS v2 and application keys
why agents should be treated as advanced malware once they can run the computer
how signer isolation lets the machine be useful without handing it the keys
why local-first, offline-first, and AFK instincts are becoming practical engineering constraints
how Myco uses nearby phones, mesh sharing, and FIPS to explore mobile transport
why Boris is an attempt to make reading durable, local, and harder to shut out
what the Offpunk Manifesto captures about disconnection as sovereignty
why in-person collaboration still has a bandwidth that video calls and feeds cannot replace
how John Vervaeke and distributed cognition keep showing up in the Sovereign Engineering design
why the next residency experiment in Vietnam may need to be narrower, calmer, and easier for families
why the closing answer is still simple: more SECs

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Recorded at 965,919.

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