Well well, look at me merging my interests: book reviews for Siggy, insane flowy reading, and promotional articles for BTCHEL.

The first time I read Ioni Appelberg’s great Abundance Through Scarcity was in a D.C. hotel restaurant at the height of the last bull market. It felt celebratory and appropriately lifted my gaze from the depravity of that lost, despicable, politicized city. Money is civilization; civilization is energy; energy propels us forward, technically, and outward, spatially. Our destiny is to become a space-faring nation — or to perish.

Because I’m different, the times are different, and Ioni actually updated and revamped the book this year (meaning the book itself is different), it’s hard to tell exactly why reading Abundance this time around is an altogether different experience.

It still has the same lift-your-goddamn-gaze flavor. It’s still obsessed with space and human civilization — quite often the Roman one. It still celebrates money as this insane, improbable, incredible cooperative device between humans. It’s the silent patchwork/bind knitting us together as a species, as a civilization, as the economic collaboration that is the world economy.

Also, look at all those SN linkbacks! Are you not entertained?!

The Urgency I Didn't See the Last Time

What I saw this time reading the revamped Abundance was an urgency I didn’t notice last time. We are running out of time.

The rhetorical twists he uses hit like gut punches. Voyager, the hopeful satellites we (“we”) sent out at the peak of the space race, were filled with human language, whale songs, art, and some small collection of the best of what we are. Sent out for an unknown future and improbable meeting, it “keeps going, unchanged, because it was built at a moment when civilization still believed in tomorrow….

"We are the ones who stopped.”

Fuck.

Abundance is mostly a hopeful book, the way Ioni strikes me as a hopeful, kind soul. It asks the reader to lift their gaze and consider human life and existence on a larger scale, on a longer time frame, doing something more important than your everyday life. And if it hits right, it asks the reader to work diligently for civilization’s success and thriving instead of its decline.  

It’s also a doomerist, terrifying story — reminding us that what we’re doing here in Bitcoinland is much more important than number-go-up or preserving wealth from the value erosion that is money printing and inflation.

This week, you’ll find Ioni giving a lecture on Bitcoin and longevity on Friday exclusively for the OG stage, and be part of the main stage panel session on “Sauna, Meat, and Sun: Bitcoin meets Biohackers” on Saturday.

Be in HELSINKI or be SQUARE. You know the drill