Modern culture has eroded the conditions necessary for sustained thought, argues Katherine Dee in The Spectator. She traces the decline to the ever-present hum of television and later the smartphone, which “was in our pockets, our bedrooms, our every waking moment.” What has been lost, she contends, is silence—the space where imagination and synthesis once flourished. Dee cites neuroscientist Marcus Raichle’s work on the brain’s “default mode,” which activates in stillness to process memory and construct identity. Today, however, even meditation is packaged as a consumer product, with apps like Headspace and Calm selling “temporary relief from a world that never stops asking us something.” The absence of silence, she writes, “breeds the absence of thought.” Dee suggests that recovering quiet, however uncomfortable, could restore our capacity for creativity and self-reflection in a hyperstimulated society.
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A satirical B++ talk styled as a “top-secret briefing” by Urban Hernandez revisits Operation Orchestra, a fictional agency plan to undermine Bitcoin and open source software. He imagines bureaucrats preferring “clean” tactics over black ops, highlighting strategies like Replace-By-Fee, which allegedly “destroyed instant payments,” engineered forks such as Bitcoin Cash to dilute branding, and futures approvals that suppressed price. Symbolic operations included commissioning a castrated bull statue to demoralize the “number go up” crowd and likening the approval of a spot ETF alongside the jailing of a developer to Caesar’s sacrificial parades. The parody underscores how narratives, regulation, and infighting can weaken communities as effectively as technical attacks. While entirely tongue-in-cheek, the presentation reflects genuine concerns over surveillance, market manipulation, and regulatory capture, warning that Bitcoin’s resilience depends not just on code but on its ability to resist coordinated social and institutional pressures.
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Tyler Wellener, Chief Strategy Officer at Tyr Capital, argues that the “Bitcoin treasury trade” is shifting from balance-sheet accumulation to institutional reinvention. In his essay, Building Banks Out of Bitcoin Treasury Companies, he notes that over 100 firms are mimicking Michael Saylor’s strategy of raising capital via at-the-market offerings (ATMs) to buy bitcoin, but warns that this model is “a crowded, zero-sum game.” With dilution and convertible debt hitting structural limits, Wellener calls for an evolution into bank-like institutions. He outlines three pillars: holding BTC with disciplined issuance, launching trading desks to generate non-dilutive, market-neutral yield, and building credit arms to issue structured products. “The future belongs to the treasuries that evolve into bank-like entities: disciplined, income-generating, and capital-efficient,” he writes. By deploying BTC dividends and professional treasury management, he suggests these companies could define the financial architecture of the Bitcoin era.
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Ars Technica reports that Anthropic is preparing to settle what could be the largest copyright class action in history, brought by authors over AI training data. US District Judge William Alsup confirmed that a settlement in principle has been reached, with preliminary approval expected by September 5. The case, initiated by three authors but expanded to cover as many as 7 million claimants, exposed Anthropic to “hundreds of billions of dollars in potential damages” and, by some estimates, more than $1 trillion. Authors’ attorney Justin A. Nelson called the agreement a “historic settlement” that will benefit all class members. While Alsup had earlier found some of Anthropic’s training use to be “fair use,” the settlement avoids definitive legal precedent. Legal experts told journalists the move signals a “stunning turn of events” and could reshape how AI firms handle copyright liability.
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