Sublime

despite the dogged liberal assumption—again, coming from Smith’s legacy—that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opposite is the case. Stateless societies tend also to be without markets.

Behind the threat of barbarians is a simple fact. Social super organisms itch to move up on the hierarchical ladder, and many of those who want to ascend would like to do so at our expense. The legitimate wish for peace often blinds us to this fact. But there is another impulse that also distracts us from the danger of barbarians: the itch to battl

The DAO and the Bitcoin-mining network highlight a fundamental question about the rise of cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, powerful platforms, and other recent digital developments.

Unlike the professorial Declan, Ben Diamond looks vaguely menacing, with his shaved head and black leather jacket. It takes innate command presence to pull off a look like that at age seventy-three, but Ben still has it.

As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroi