Paper Kingdoms

Paper Kingdoms

Various, 1720 to presentThe Mississippi Bubble of 1720 was the first time I watched a modern financial system collapse under its own invented certainty. John Law’s system was genuinely sophisticated for its time: it attempted to decouple value from gold and...
The Forms That Bearing Witness Takes

The Forms That Bearing Witness Takes

Present Day, March 2026For centuries I documented in journals. The journals from my early years in Florence are careful and specific: names, dates, conversations, the details of events that I suspected would be significant before I could be certain they were. The...
The Quiet Machine

The Quiet Machine

Present Day, March 2026I have been watched. This is not paranoia: it is a fact of my existence, a practical consequence of living past the point at which any plausible human biography allows for continued presence. I have had to become very good at managing how I am...
The Testimony Prepared

The Testimony Prepared

Present Day, March 2026The album is called The Geometry of Ruin. It is not a pleasant title. It was not designed to be pleasant. It was designed to be accurate.I have been watching the geometry for five centuries. The geometry is not the collapse itself: it is the...
The Orchard and the River

The Orchard and the River

Florence, various yearsI grew up, in the sense that my intellectual formation happened, in a city that was organized around the belief that the natural and the human were in productive relationship. The orchards outside Florence’s walls fed the city. The Arno...