There were some hints and mentions of this on SN already (#1504139, #1506425, #1477313), but long-form quarterly print magazines take for effing ever to get out there... and then I had to wait an appropriate amount of time(!) to republish it here...

Anyway, Scott Dedels' new(-ish) book -- from spring 2026 -- is a Bitcoin book at an entirely new level. The Age of Time: A Journey Through Consciousness, Reality, and the End of the Modern Illusion really rocked my world/core being when I read it in the seemingly endless summary months of May-June.

new and old covers... which one do you like the most??

Below is the review that ran in Bitcoin Magazine Print's The Quantum Issue a few months ago, the mentioning of which was a condition of me republishing the reviews on SN. (Also, speaking of ugly covers...)

"Reading Scott Dedels’ great new book on a deadline is an absurd irony." 

One part of me screams to read quickly, find the author’s nuggets faster, and distil his core message more productively. Move on, time is scarce, the next thing beckons. Another part of me, the one profoundly engaged with the text, consumes its meaning and senses the vibrating truth in the words.

The frictions with lived reality and the glitches in my own observed Matrix come to coherent fruition in the time-obsessed tale Dedels weaves.

...fuck, Den can craft words sometimes...

“We have more time-saving devices than any generation in history, and yet we have never felt more rushed” (page 183), he says and I’m nodding along. “We are generating more information than any civilization in history and storing it in the most ephemeral medium ever invented” (pages 122-23), he writes and I can’t but be stunned by this mundane realization — “content created by morning and forgotten by tonight” (page 33).

Looking around at our built environment, dreaming of the grand, awe-inspiring cathedrals of ages past, Dedels concludes that “[w]e’ve surrounded ourselves with architecture that whispers ‘this is temporary,’ and then we wonder why nothing feels solid” (page 113). The oddness strikes that “[t]he modern world could technically build a cathedral or pyramid, but it lacks the temporal and cultural infrastructure to justify the effort, [for] a lack of time consciousness” (page 121).

The Age of Time isn’t a Bitcoin book — at least not initially. The word emerges for the first time on page 163 (or 153 if you count the quote from Gigi’s classic “Bitcoin is Time” essay), and the powerful vision the author brings becomes clear only in the conclusion. The surreptitious way of introducing Bitcoin, without fanfare and technobabbling, situated in a story of temporal psychological loss, is novel and wonderful.

And honestly, that far into the book the reader is already so onboard with Dedels’ flowy mind and civilizational-alternating idea about time that a rebellious, invisible internet money is peanuts in comparison. (Or, quite plausibly, they’ve long since abandoned the effort on account of his high-flying, hippie-adjacent drivel.)

The book is a “story about how time became something imposed rather than something inhabited” (page 17), and our modern obsession with tracking, measuring, timing, and doing things ever faster is a cognitive misstep misaligned with human nature. Our constant digital interactions and reality-invading notifications bringing messages from far away “forces the brain to stop, absorb something new, and rebuild the present from scratch” (page 146). When we do that repeatedly, we lose track of what’s real and where we are.

“People say time feels like it’s speeding up or slipping away. The reality is blunter: the mind can no longer hold a stable now. Relentless acceleration is an assault on meaning and our systems that form it” (page 146).

He traces the beginning of where we went wrong to the mechanical clock — the exactness of time-keeping that underlies everything from doomscrolling (the smartphone being the extreme descendant of the clock) to valuing work by the hour, to the societal virtues of being on time. We “traded seasons for schedules, cycles for quarters, and lineage for lifestyle” (page 17):

“What began in bell towers as civil discipline, and expanded through pocket watches as personal discipline, became with the factory the direct mechanization of human life. […] Biological variability became a problem to solve.” (page 69)

He’s obsessed with an antediluvian world he refers to as deep time, “the ancestral operating system of human cognition”, which he conjectures “shaped how our ancestors built, worshipped, planned, and understood themselves” (page 129).

We lack that. Our collective story is… partisan hatred? Binge-watching Netflix? The SpaceX IPO? Caught the game last night?

“The shape of a civilization always follows the shape of the time it inhabits” (page 209)… which is why our monuments are fleeting and unimpressive.
Most people can feel that something is wrong in the way we live and have organized our societies, and Dedels brings an astonishing story of what that is.

“The clock became the silent governor of reality, replacing celestial cycles and seasonal rhythms with uniform hours that applied equally everywhere and to everyone. […] We learned to measure time so precisely that we forgot how to inhabit it.” (page 17)

Evidently, the book is heavy on beautiful verbiage and symbolic in chapters being clock times, but short on tangible solutions. The turn toward a self-help book toward the end becomes, unfortunately, the only way out. 

The problem of modernity is speed. The ever more exact measurement of time and connectivity since the beginning of the mechanical age has enabled communication and transportation at odds with our humanity. It has thus infinitely compressed the way we live; smartphones, with their BREAKING! BREAKING! alerts, are always ready to jolt us out of whatever semblance of ‘now’ our minds have desperately tried to stabilize.

Bitcoin’s timechain, by contrast, cannot be sped up, its existence and predictability a welcome deceleration that lets us synchronize and embrace a “slow, shared, and real [rhythm], bounded by physics”. It is “the first time in history that humanity can coordinate around deep time at a civilizational scale, precisely when the alternative is a future administered down to the millisecond” (page 224).

Every well-written book with a powerful message consumes you, but The Age of Time may genuinely have changed my life — though Dedels claims it wasn’t his prose doing it but merely something hidden inside me, “glimpses of a different temporal interface coming back” (page 275). I believe him. 

"And in the age of (block) time, life will never be the same again."

BOOK on BOOKS Archive

Bitcoin: Separation of Money and State, by Josef Tětek (#1586863)

The Bushido of Bitcoin, by Alexandar Svetski (#1584380)

A Progressive's Case for Bitcoin by Jason Maier (#1574659)

Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy, by Vijay Selvam (#1573664)

Better Money? Gold, Fiat, or Bitcoin by Lawrence White (#1556942)

I Am Not Your Bruh: 21 Keys to Sound Parenting, by George Mekhail (#1548087)

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (#1540851)

Gradually, Then Suddenly: A Framework for Understanding Bitcoin as Money, by Parker Lewis (#1536970)

Fiat Ruins Everything: How Our Financial System is Rigged and How Bitcoin Fixes it, by Jimmy Song (#1530254)

Bitcoin One Million, The Final Chapter of Fiat, by Fred Krueger & Ben Sigman (#1521960)

Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, by Roger Ver (#1525907)

The Philosophy of Bitcoin, by Álvaro D. María (#1517354)