#Alden

Back to the Bearer Asset

I did not lose faith in open AI, open science, or decentralized infrastructure. I lost faith in the assumption that every important coordination problem deserves an investable token. That was the economic reckoning. Then five mornings at Stratford added the political one: every registered claim has an owner, the owner takes sides in an emergency, and the strongest monetary-economics argument of the decade — Alden's — quietly assumes the emergency never comes. This is the essay the authoritarianism series kept promising: what a bearer asset is actually for.