Authored by Jonathan Turley,

In Hamlet, William Shakespeare famously wrote, “To thine own self be true.”

The problem is when others want to present a different “truth” long after you are gone.

Shakespeare is under an unrelenting attack in the United Kingdom from trigger warnings to censoring his prose.

Now, Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust has announced that it will “de-colonise” the Bard.

In the name of creating “a more inclusive museum experience,” the Trust is moving away from Western perspectives to avoid the dangers of “white supremacy.”

A prior research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins at the University of Birmingham raised concerns over just praising the writer. 

Even recognizing Shakespeare’s genius “benefits the ideology of white European supremacy.”

The new push at the Trust follows The Globe Theatre’s previous move to “decolonise” Shakespeare’s famous plays.

Again, while many of us denounce this type of revisionism, it appeals to this community of cultural overlords.

It is personally advancing for these academics and experts to seek to change or cancel such works.

The same voices are being heard in the United States. As we previously discussed, in a column in the School Library Journal, Minnesota librarian and journalist Amanda MacGregor questioned why teachers were even still exposing their students to this harmful influence: “Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir.”

Lorena German, National Council of Teachers of English Anti-Racism Committee chair and a co-founder of the Disrupt Texts forum, insisted “everything about the fact that he was a man of his time is problematic about his plays. We cannot teach Shakespeare responsibly and not disrupt the ways people are characterized and developed.”

It is time for the dwindling population of sane Brits to step forward and fight for their culture and heritage. These advocates have used academia and the media to attack the foundations of British culture. It is not enough to foster diversity in other areas, they must change and reframe how historical figures and works are presented.

They recognize this as a culture war, but have met little resistance. It is time, as the Bard himself wrote, to “Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.”

When challenging progressives to give an example of a socialized welfare state that actually works, they will invariably bring up Denmark with its extensive public subsidy programs.  However, the Dutch system only functions when the population is small and generally homogeneous (mostly European).  In the past decade, the far-left Dutch government under the Social Democrats has allowed over 1 million migrants to enter the country with a population of only 5 million.

The non-western population of Denmark is now 10% (or more), and a large percentage of this immigration is Muslim.  For such a tiny country, this kind of abrupt demographic change can be destabilizing.  The government was forced to respond with tougher restrictions on asylum and tighter controls on border. 

They have also instituted measures to prevent third world “no-go” zones – Third world immigrants have a tendency to pack into small areas and “tribalize” neighborhoods, making those areas into colonized enclaves.  The level of complaints from these people in the face of common sense immigration reforms is telling.  They see Europe as an open buffet; a place where they are entitled to feed until their buttons burst.  They cannot comprehend the idea that they could be limited in any way.     

The Dutch population does not feel that the restrictions imposed by Social Democrats are enough.  They want deportations. Critics argue that the party only decided to take the immigration issue seriously after growing pressure from the public, along with the threat of election defeat.  Their actions were too little too late and the Social Democrats were pummeled in the latest election.

Danish Prime Minister ​Mette Frederiksen on ‌Wednesday submitted her government’s ​resignation to ​the king after her ⁠three-party coalition ​suffered a crushing ​defeat in the general election, the royal ​palace said ​in a statement.  Parties are ‌set ⁠to launch potentially tough negotiations ​to ​determine ⁠whether the next ​government will ​be ⁠formed by Frederiksen or another ⁠party ​leader.

Socialist Democrats ran largely on geopolitical issues, including their handling of the Trump Administration’s attempted purchase of Greenland (Denmark still maintains extensive control over Greenland’s political and economic affairs). 

Frederiksen called the snap election in late February 2026 partly to capitalize on a temporary poll boost from her “firm stance” against Trump’s comments regarding Greenland. She also assumed her strong support for Ukraine and increased defense spending would win over the voters. However, her plan backfired.

Once the short campaign began, domestic “bread-and-butter” issues overwhelmingly dominated the agenda for the Social Democrats and most other parties.  They probably should have taken into account popular polls.  A recent Gallup poll in Denmark found that 54.5% of Danes are “completely in disagreement” or “in disagreement” with the statement that Islam is compatible with Danish values.

Only about 17.4% (3.3% “completely in agreement” + 14.1% “in agreement”) think it is compatible, with the rest neutral or unsure.  The same survey showed 33.3% of Danes view Muslim immigrants as a threat to the country.  The right-wing “Blue-Bloc” gained 8 seats, bringing their total to 77.  The right-wing bloc’s overall seat increase was driven mainly by the strong recovery of the Danish People’s Party, reflecting continued voter concern over immigration, integration, and welfare sustainability.  

The core issue of the Blue Bloc is deportations of incompatible migrant groups; a subject which progressive parties traditionally refuse to address, but one that is becoming increasingly important for the success of any political party in the west.  

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

If anyone still needed a concrete figure to illustrate the dramatic state of the German economy, the Federal Statistical Office has now delivered it. The country’s investment ratio is negative, as depreciation exceeds nominal investments. Slowly but surely, the lights are going out.

Public discourse in Germany often sounds monocaudal and lacks complexity. Regardless of which social conflicts, administrative difficulties, or economic issues are being debated, for the majority of Germans, the state is not the cause of many problems but the ultimate solution.

A majority of Germans regularly fall for the statist-arguing snake-oil salesmen of the major party cartel beyond the firewall. The solutions that Chancellor Friedrich Merz and his junta of green, red, and dark-red socialists apply to every problem arising from the long-term recession are simple and resonate with voters – as we have seen recently in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate.

To put it bluntly: more of the same medicine, more state intervention, more regulation, all intended to cover up the loss of control in the fundamental areas of our time – migration, the definition of our social system, and the organization of the economic framework.

It sounds so simple, socially warm, yet resentment-laden: higher taxes on the wealthy, squeezing heirs harder. Fundamentally, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are blamed for the energy crisis. Once these childish narratives are established, it’s eyes closed and full speed ahead on the path of green transformation, which has paralyzed the economy. Germany’s economy is running on wear and tear, consuming its own substance just to stay afloat.

This statist mindset, cultivated since reunification, comes at a cost. Economists call it “crowding-out,” which can be observed everywhere. Private-sector engagement is being crowded out by the NGO complex, green subsidy entrepreneurs, and all the incentive hunters who offer no real products or services on the market but are very adept at exploiting public funding.

Meanwhile, the real economy, the free private sector, is packing its bags. The widespread investment restraint of private industry spans all sectors. Whether in mechanical engineering, automotive, or chemicals, companies are retreating and increasingly investing abroad. In 2024, over €60 billion in net direct investment was withdrawn from Germany, down from €120 billion previously.

The data point released by the Federal Statistical Office on Tuesday is more than alarming. It proves that the situation has long passed the point of no return. This crisis is no longer avoidable. The statisticians in Wiesbaden reported the lowest net capital formation ratio since the chaos year of 1990: minus 0.23% of GDP. The figure shows that depreciation exceeded net investment – in other words, depreciation outstripped the renewal of the capital stock.

Germany’s infrastructure, building stock, and industrial capital are eroding over time and are not being maintained. It is clear that an economy unable to renew its capital stock in a market-conform, competitive way is falling behind. People are impoverishing, and society risks severe social upheavals.

It is baffling and evidence of deep-seated cognitive dissonance not to recognize the collapse of German industry for what it is: the dismantling of our prosperity. Since 2018, Germany’s industrial sector has lost about one-fifth of its production volume. This is not a normal recession – it is the fall as the table’s last-place finisher, potentially followed by the immediate insolvency of the entity.

Germany now survives on wear and tear, consuming its own substance while remaining silent to avoid confronting these threatening facts. The hospitality industry, a prime indicator of private household purchasing power, lost around four percent in real turnover last year and started this year at least two to three percent weaker. Households are holding on to their money.

The self-inflicted energy crisis, which now accelerates in public awareness through the Strait of Hormuz, has caused a shock. Yet it has evidently not been enough to produce political course corrections at the ballot box.

German statism has deeply embedded itself into the collective consciousness through the state education system, state-aligned media, and the constant barrage of green-socialist NGOs. This naive faith in the state is a deeply rooted, metapolitical anchor that cannot be easily uprooted.

In the Federal Republic, there is a real risk that society, in the coming years of crisis, will increasingly follow socialist charlatans. They present a painless therapy of simple wealth redistribution as a solution. It is as if a cancer patient, still with a chance of recovery, entrusted themselves to flower remedies, stubbornly refusing to confront the severity of the disease, its causes, and realistic treatment options.

Free media and truly independent academia are now called upon to counter this socio-political super-GAU – the return to complete socialist barbarism, which is becoming increasingly evident. Only a few media outlets, such as Tichys Einblick, are standing up against this decay.

The statist portion of commentary glorifies the nonsense fed into public discourse by pseudo-economists such as Marcel Fratscher of the German Institute for Economic Research. All of them, in one way or another, hang like puppets on the strings of state institutions and have no economic incentive to side with the libertarian renegades.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Via zeptabot substack,

Introduction

The modern nation-state is not natural nor permanent. It’s a technological product of the industrial era’s logic of mass warfare, bureaucracy, and centralized taxation. That logic is breaking down. In a world of cyberspace, mobile capital, and digital commerce and geography, brute force lose much of their leverage. You cannot conquer the internet with tanks, nor can a government easily tax a truly digital wallet whose private keys are hidden in someone’s mind. The Information Revolution is a shift in the logic of power as fundamental as gunpowder was to medieval knighthood. Every institution built on yesterday’s logic of violence will either adapt or crumble. This was the original thesis of the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). And in 2026—with the rise of China, the regional military conflicts now underway, and the polarization of politics both within nations and between them—that shift is no longer speculatory. It is existential.

What matters now is what kind of order will emerge from it. The battle is no longer between rival “-isms” competing for control of the same nation-state, but between two fundamentally different civilizational logics: an empowering future that facilitates progress and an authoritarian one that dooms humanity.

A civilization can survive poverty. It can survive corruption. It can survive decadence for a time. What it cannot survive indefinitely is the slow freezing of criticism, the politicization of truth, the administrative management of thought, and the suppression of the independent mind. If centralized authoritarian models become the dominant operating system of the twenty-first century, then the danger is that humanity becomes less capable of discovering what is true, building what is new, and expanding beyond its present limits. In other words, stagnation. And stagnation necessarily leads to extinction.

This manifesto therefore renews the sovereign individual thesis under harsher conditions. The survival argument is simple: decentralization is the only civilizational trajectory that does not end in extinction. The individual mandate follows. Do science. Build technology. Start or fund companies at the frontier—AI, DeFi, fintech, data science, space, neurotechnology, anything that compounds intelligence and autonomy.

For every unit of wealth created, disperse it: into offshore jurisdictions that compete for your presence rather than conscript you, and into cryptographic infrastructure that answers to mathematics rather than to ministers.

Sections I through IV establish the theory. Sections V through VIII show how to live it.

I. Progress Only Happens Where Criticism Is Free and Error Is Correctable

Human progress has a habitat.

Modern science became cumulative, self-correcting, and civilization-transforming within a moral and institutional ecology shaped by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment: criticism over dogma, experiment over inherited authority, open dispute over enforced orthodoxy, and a growing recognition that no claim is final simply because it is backed by rank or power (Deutsch, 2011). What mattered was a method that can be stated plainly as: reality must answer, error must be corrigible, and no authority may permanently close inquiry.

Decentralization is the political expression of that humility. It begins from the recognition that no ruler, committee, ministry, or expert class knows enough to centrally design the future. Discovery is distributed. Knowledge is local before it is general. Progress emerges through criticism, variation, risk, and recombination, not through administrative command (Deutsch, 1997, 2011).

Where thought is free, error can be exposed. Where error can be exposed, knowledge can compound. Where knowledge compounds, civilization advances.

Where criticism becomes dangerous, speech is narrowed, capital is trapped, and individuals are reduced to manageable units inside a bureaucratic machine, the range of possible futures contracts. Centralization misallocates resources. It narrows the imagination.

II. Every Decisive Breakthrough Has Come From Free Civilizations First

The United States achieved the first controlled fusion experiment in history to produce more fusion energy than the laser energy used to drive it at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in December 2022 (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 2022).

Europe’s Joint European Torus then set a record of 69 megajoules in its final 2023 deuterium-tritium campaign, announced in 2024 (UK Atomic Energy Authority, 2024).

China has simultaneously pressed forward with its own fusion program. Its Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST)—built on a tokamak architecture first conceptualized by Soviet physicists Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm and further refined across Western laboratories—set a world plasma confinement record of 403 seconds in 2023, then broke it again with 1,066 seconds in January 2025 (Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2025). EAST itself is described by its own engineers as a testbed for ITER technologies. China is now constructing the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), a demonstration-scale plant expected to break ground by the late 2020s, explicitly designed as the next step after ITER, the Western-led international megaproject under construction in France. China’s flagship fusion facility is, by its own characterization, an implementation vehicle for a scientific framework established elsewhere.

Each of China’s fusion milestones is a record in plasma confinement duration—engineering feats of operational endurance within a device architecture invented and theorized outside China. The NIF’s December 2022 result was a foundational physics threshold: the first time in history that a fusion experiment produced more energy than the laser energy used to initiate it. China has not attempted that category of result.

The modern West’s greatest contribution was the creation of environments in which invention could become self-sustaining.

The atomic bomb emerged from the Manhattan Project in the United States, culminating in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945.

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949—four years after Trinity. China followed in 1964, nineteen years behind.

The first full-scale thermonuclear device, Ivy Mike, was detonated by the United States on November 1, 1952. Russia followed on August 12, 1953. China on December 28, 1966.

The first practical transistor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey in December 1947.

The first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC, was built in the United States during the Second World War and unveiled in 1946.

The Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981—both products of the American free market—first transformed computing from a state and corporate instrument into a mass-market personal tool.

In quantum theory, David Deutsch, working in Britain, published the foundational paper on the universal quantum computer in 1985, establishing the modern theory of quantum computation.

The first cloud-accessible quantum processor was made online in 2016, and the first integrated commercial quantum system was unveiled in 2019, both by IBM in the United States.

China, on the other hand, launched the Micius quantum satellite in 2016 and achieved major quantum-communication and quantum-computational milestones by 2017, 2020, and 2021.

The record is consistent: authoritarian systems can mobilize labor, direct capital, and scale what already works with systematic, disciplined execution—but always within frameworks that open scientific civilization originated. As we can observe, “China is copying at terrifying speed everything the free world originates.” That strength is real. But it is downstream. What such systems cannot reliably reproduce is the civilizational ecology—tolerant of eccentricity, dissent, and unplanned combinations of ideas—from which those originals emerged. The decisive breakthroughs—first fission, first thermonuclear device, the transistor, the personal computer, net-energy fusion ignition—emerged first in civilizations that made criticism productive rather than obedient.

That inheritance can be lost. A civilization can live for a long time on imitation. But if every civilization becomes too centralized to permit genuine criticism, eventually there is nothing left to copy. When that happens, decline is inevitable, and eventually leads to extinction—as all resources available to the static world are exhausted.

III. The Free Market Is the Only System That Actually Discovers Solutions

Socialism mistakes compassion for intelligence and assumes that visible suffering is evidence that command must be superior to emergence.

The free market is superior because it is a discovery process. Prices encode information about supply and demand that no planner can fully aggregate. Profit and loss expose reality faster than administrative committees. Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system: all actual knowledge is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the transaction. Decentralization harnesses that complexity; centralization will starve you to death.

Markets lift people out of poverty—by far the most effective mechanism in history for doing so. Even under totalitarian regimes, an incremental relaxation of state control over production and trade produces rapidly rising incomes.

William Nordhaus showed that innovators capture roughly two percent of the economic value created by their technology—the other ninety-eight percent flows to society as surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic. A static morality says: solve the suffering directly in front of you. A civilizational morality says: build the engines that make fewer people poor, sick, and trapped across generations.

Nassim Taleb’s framework reaches the same conclusion from a different direction. Decentralized systems grow on volatility, error, and disorder—they are antifragile. Centralized systems suppress volatility, accumulate hidden fragility, and eventually shatter. A market economy processes errors continuously through profit and loss, killing bad ideas cheaply and at small scale. A planned economy suppresses error signals until failures compound invisibly and collapse catastrophically. The Soviet collapse was a fragility event—the accumulated cost of suppressed error, finally clearing (Taleb, 2012). That is what a decentralized system does: it processes failure continuously and cheaply, so collapse never has to be total. The free market is that system.

IV. Humanity Is Doomed on One Planet—and a Multiplanetary Civilization Cannot Be Centrally Governed

Fact: Humanity is doomed unless it becomes multiplanetary.

Solve every resource problem. End every war. Cure every disease. Feed every child. The sun still expands into a red giant in roughly five billion years, incinerating the Earth and everything on it. No redistribution policy, no sustainability framework, no amount of earthly justice changes that sentence. The only exit from it is leaving. As Deutsch observed, our history, science, art, philosophy, and moral values are, from the cosmos’s vantage point, “tiny side effects of a supernova explosion a few billion years ago, which could be extinguished tomorrow by another such explosion”—unless intelligence spreads far enough to prevent it (Deutsch, 2011). Stephen Hawking stated the nearer-term version with characteristic bluntness: humanity has “no future if it doesn’t go into space” (Hawking, 2014, 2016).

The objection—how can anyone spend capital becoming multiplanetary when we have the poor still here in front of us—is a false dilemma. Injustice always exists. The decel doomers who make this argument often also believe humans on Earth will probably go extinct within a thousand years anyway—through war, environmental collapse, or some other catastrophe. There is no substantial difference between extinction in a thousand years and five billion due to the sun’s expansion. Either way, we have to deal with it. We need to be on our way to escape velocity.

Another fact: Space civilization is necessarily decentralized. NASA analyses show one-way communications delays to Mars can reach roughly 21 to 23 minutes, with further disruption and blackout periods (McBrayer et al., 2022; NASA, 2024a). That already makes management harder. The principle becomes far more severe as humanity moves outward.

Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years away—a round-trip exchange takes 8.6 years (NASA, 2018). Kepler-452b is 1,400 light-years away—a round-trip takes 2,800 years (NASA, 2015, 2025). Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years away—communication crosses out of politics and into geological time (NASA, 2024b).

A civilization spread across stars cannot be governed like one compressed onto a single planet. Delayed feedback, local scarcity, environmental hostility, and divergent adaptation all destroy the fantasy of centralized control. Multiplanetary humanity decentralizes by physics as astronomical distance enforces autonomy.

V. Accumulating and Dispersing Wealth Away From Predatory States Is a Moral Imperative

Wealth is stored optionality—the capacity to migrate, fund research, defend speech, exit failing systems, and act without pleading for permission. Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted that individuals would “achieve increasing autonomy over territorial nationstates through market mechanisms” (1997). Mobile capital is the mechanism.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg warned in 1997 that as wealth became more mobile, states would turn against their most productive citizens with increasing desperation: “like an angry farmer, the state will no doubt take desperate measures at first to tether and hobble its escaping herd. It will employ covert and even violent means to restrict access to liberating technologies” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). We are living that future right now.

In November 2020, the Chinese Government cancelled the Ant Group IPO overnight—what would have been the world’s largest, at a $37 billion valuation—after founder Jack Ma gave a speech mildly critical of financial regulators. Beijing’s regulatory crackdown that followed wiped more than a combined $1 trillion from China’s biggest tech companies. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion; Didi, valued at $70 billion at its U.S. IPO, was forced to delist; the entrepreneurial business model that had driven China’s tech boom was, in the assessment of analysts, permanently extinguished. Ma himself disappeared from public view for months. The message was unambiguous: private wealth that grows too autonomous will be brought to heel. The state does not negotiate with capital it can still reach.

This is the coercive nature of the centralized nation-state in its full honesty. The accumulated capacity to relocate, fund research, exit failing institutions, and act without permission is precisely what Beijing’s model cannot tolerate.

We believe David Deutsch when he said that wealth is the set of all physical transformations that you are capable of bringing about. Accumulating that wealth and dispersing it into offshore jurisdictions and cryptographic cyberspace is therefore morally just. Every dollar removed from the reach of predatory institutions is a dollar withdrawn from the machine that kills the only process by which genuine knowledge grows. Left unchecked, it forecloses that growth. To starve that institution of capital is to fight for the survival of the species. Cryptographic infrastructure is the most powerful tool in this fight to date.

VI. Cryptography Is the Technical Instrument of Individual Sovereignty

Davidson and Rees-Mogg predicted in 1997 that cybermoney would become “the new money of the Information Age, replacing the paper money of Industrialism”—and that it would “substantially free you from the power of the state” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). The mechanism they described was Hayek’s: competitive private currencies, freed from legal-tender requirements, would force issuers to preserve value or lose customers—eradicating inflation by market discipline alone. Physical offshore jurisdictions had long allowed the wealthy to escape predatory taxation. Cybermoney would complete what geography had only partially achieved: an economy with no territorial jurisdiction, where “cyberspace is the ultimate offshore jurisdiction” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). The cows, as they put it, would have wings.

Bitcoin is that prediction realized.

Cryptocurrency altered a balance that had held for all of recorded history: for the first time, individuals could store value, communicate, and coordinate across borders in systems that do not require the permission of any institution to operate.

In the foreword to the 2020 reprint of The Sovereign Individual, Peter Thiel described the technology conflict of the Information Age as running on two poles: “Artificial Intelligence holds out the prospect of finally solving what economists call the ‘calculation problem’—AI could theoretically make it possible to centrally control an entire economy. It is no coincidence that AI is the favorite technology of the Communist Party of China. Strong cryptography, at the other pole, holds out the prospect of a decentralized and individualized world. If AI is communist, crypto is libertarian” (Thiel, 2020).

The reason Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin, kept his identity unknown is integral to Bitcoin’s history: had the creator been identified, “our too powerful central government would probably do some very unpleasant things to that person” (Thiel). Bitcoin’s founding anonymity was a design principle. An act of decentralized, individual liberty from the start.

Bitcoin’s implementation has been far from clean. Short-sighted cash-grabbers have hijacked the category and turned swaths of it into speculation and outright fraud. Governments and major institutions have moved to integrate cryptocurrency into regulated platforms rather than displace them—BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust accumulated over $91 billion in assets under management by 2025, making the world’s largest asset manager the second-largest known holder of Bitcoin, its ETF structure reintroducing the very centralized custody and intermediary dependence the protocol was designed to eliminate (Bitget Academy, 2025; TRM Labs, 2026). The subcultures that formed around crypto are often ideologically shallow, speculative, and corrosive to its founding purpose.

None of this refutes the underlying architecture. The potential of sovereign cybermoney remains infinitely worth pursuing because no better instrument for individual financial autonomy and exit optionality has been invented. The protocol itself is structurally resistant in ways its capture by institutions cannot undo. A Bitcoin transaction is a signed string of text. It can be transmitted by email, by radio, by any communications medium that exists. It does not require a Bitcoin node inside any particular jurisdiction. As one technical analysis put it: “a protocol cannot be blocked. Ports can be blocked but software quickly learns how to port-hop—see torrents for example. Impossible without shutting down all internet communications. If there’s a communications medium, there’s nothing stopping bitcoin blocks and transactions from being transferred over it” (Stack Exchange, n.d.). Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s earliest core developers, demonstrated the point at the MIT Bitcoin Expo by blinking a transaction in morse code. China cannot block Bitcoin. No government can. It can be built better, made to serve its true purpose more faithfully, and freed from the institutions that have tried to domesticate it. That is the work.

VII. Decentralization Is Not Inevitable—It Must Be Actively Fought For

Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote in 1997 as if decentralization were a tide—inevitable, irresistible, beyond the capacity of any state to reverse. They were only partially correct. The Chinese Communist Party read the same trends and built a counter-architecture: a digital panopticon that captured the Information Age’s tools and turned them toward total surveillance and nationalist control. Populist movements across the democratic world are closing jurisdictional exits, weaponizing tax law, and criminalizing the financial privacy that sovereign individuals require. The technology arc bends toward decentralization. It can be bent back.

This is the existential update to the 1997 thesis. The sovereign individual is the force that determines which direction history moves. Centralization wins through atmosphere: caution, exhaustion, guilt, and managed decline. That outcome must be actively refused.

VIII. What You Must Do

Depending on your circumstances, each of the following points may or may not apply to you. The more you can check, the better.

1. Obtain additional passports. Reside primarily in a country other than the one from which you hold your first passport. Keep the bulk of your money in a third jurisdiction—preferably a tax haven. Never leave your money in any jurisdiction that claims the right to conscript you or your descendants (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997).

2. Travel widely. Select alternative residences in attractive locales where you will have right of entry in an emergency.

3. Domicile your businesses offshore where possible. Structure corporations as virtual entities—“bundles of contracting relations without any material reality” held through offshore trusts—to minimize political surface area (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997).

4. Hold sovereign assets. A meaningful share of wealth in Bitcoin or equivalent seizure-resistant, inflation-proof, borderless instruments—not as speculation, as infrastructure. Cybermoney is the offshore tax haven that fits in your mind. Aggressive governments will attempt to bar effective encryption and fail—just as the medieval Church failed to ban printing, the technology will retreat to wherever authority is weakest and resurface more subversively (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997).

5. Avoid debt. Pursue savings with urgency. Structure compensation flexibly. “Debt should be avoided; savings and cost reductions should be pursued with greater urgency” as entitlement programs collapse and deflation accompanies the reordering of power (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). The sovereign individual does not depend on the system he is routing around.

6. Get equity. Invest in, co-found, or build companies, as salary is becoming less stable and trustworthy. “Jobs will increasingly become tasks or piece work rather than positions within an organization” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). Hold equity, not just a role.

7. Play long-term, iterated games with long-term people. All returns in life—wealth, relationships, reputation—come from compound interest. Trust compounds. Knowledge compounds. The growing danger of crime and fraud, Davidson and Rees-Mogg observed, “will make morality and honor among associates more crucial and highly valued” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). Pick people with high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity. Build relationships you can keep for decades.

8. Guard your mind. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto names the disposition required: “free thought, free speech, and free inquiry” and “an absolute rejection of resentment” (Manifesto, n.d./uploaded text). Do not let institutional credentialism or the political management of information corrupt unimpaired reasoning. “Thinking about the end of the current system is taboo,” Davidson and Rees-Mogg wrote—“you must transcend conventional thinking and conventional information sources” (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997). Ideas are the primary form of wealth in the Information Age.

9. Get out early. Those who recognize systemic collapse and reposition before the nationalist reaction hardens are consistently better placed than those who wait for social consensus. The window for frictionless departure narrows as the crisis deepens. “The dangers of a nationalist reaction to the crisis of the nationstate make it important not to underestimate the scope for tyranny,” Davidson and Rees-Mogg warned (Davidson & Rees-Mogg, 1997).

10. Refuse the moral vocabulary of stagnation. Wealth creation is not extraction. Jurisdictional optimization is not evasion. Ambition is not greed. Privacy is not criminality. Building technology is not exploitation. These framings exist to keep productive individuals legible, taxable, and stationary. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto identifies the source: a “mass demoralization campaign” run under names like sustainability, de-growth, stakeholder capitalism, and the precautionary principle (Manifesto, n.d./uploaded text). Reject every version of it.

11. Build foundational leverage. Skills that apply leverage to any domain: logic, computers, arithmetics, probability, statistics, and microeconomics—the tools that allow you to reason about systems, incentives, and price signals rather than just memorize facts. Add persuasion and communication, because selling—in the broadest sense of conveying ideas—is the other half of building. These are the foundations. Everything else compounds on top of them.

12. Build, or invest in, the technologies that widen human agency. AI systems that decentralize intelligence rather than concentrate it. DeFi protocols that remove institutional gatekeepers from finance. Cryptographic infrastructure that makes individual sovereignty technically enforceable. Fintech that routes around the rent-extracting intermediaries of the old banking stack. Every product that empowers the individual at the expense of the administrative machine is a contribution to the civilizational project this manifesto describes.

13. Build, or invest in, the technologies that extend human reach. Nuclear fusion—the only energy source capable of powering both a post-scarcity Earth and an interplanetary civilization. Neurotechnology that expands cognitive capacity and ultimately may permit the transport of mind beyond the biological substrate. Hibernation and long-duration life support systems that make deep space survivable. Cheaper launch, reusable propulsion, orbital manufacturing. These are the literal instruments of the transition from a single-planet species to a multiplanetary one. Andreessen’s challenge stands: “our forefathers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone”—the only way to honor that legacy is to build the next layer (Andreessen, 2020).

Every one of these imperatives serves the same end. The sovereign individual who holds seizure-resistant assets, operates transnationally, invests in the companies that widen human agency, and builds the frontier technologies is tending the decentralized ecology—of open inquiry, corrigible error, unimpeded conjecture, and free exchange—that David Deutsch identifies as the only habitat in which genuine progress has ever occurred. He is starving the institutions that would freeze that ecology. He is planting the seeds of a civilization capable of reaching the stars, rather than one that kills growth and shall live out its days in stagnation.

The stakes are high. It’s time to act.

The market barely had time to process news that alternative investing giant, Aresm had joined the private credit “gate parade” – where fund after multi-billion fund informed investors they would get only a fraction of their requested redemption from money invested in Software “not so perfectly money good” private credit loans – before finding out that the same Ares private credit fund, posted its steepest monthly loss on record in February, providing further evidence of the rapid decompression in the $1.8 trillion private credit market (which Goldman valiantly defended overnight, in what may prove very quickly to have been a futile endeavor).

The Ares Strategic Income Fund, a non-traded business development company launched in December 2022, lost 0.68% in February, according to Bloomberg calculations based on the fund’s regulatory filings.

February was the worst month for the broader leveraged loan market since September 2022, as the private credit shoes started to fall one after the other. Just this weekend we reported that “Blackstone’s Flagship Private Credit Fund, World’s Largest, Posts First Monthly Loss Since 2022.” And suddenly everyone is rushing to remark their fund from myth to something resembling a market (of course it will take them months to get there). 

Including a small loss in January, the Ares fund, which manages nearly $23 billion of assets, is down 0.7% so far this year.

The fund’s decline reflects the broader selloff in public debt markets, which Ares uses to assign prices to its assets, rather than losses on any specific investments, Bloomberg sources said, although if its software investments are even in the remotely same ballpark as other funds, watch out below.

Ares – aptly named after the ancient Greek god of war – officially launched ASIF on its wealth management platform and through investment advisers in April 2023 as part of a move to broaden its reach among individual investors (read: to get retail suckers in)..

As noted above, the Ares “performance issue” is not an isolated case. A similar fund managed by Blackstone also just recorded its worst monthly performance in over three years in February, which Blackstone attributed to wider spreads across public and private markets, as well as unrealized losses on individual names.

Both funds are still outperforming the leveraged loan market, which has delivered returns of -0.82% in February and -1.08% for the year through February, according to the S&P UBS Leveraged Loan Index. However, their outperrformance won’t last if the pressure is finally one to admit the truth about the rather sordid affair taking place with cash flows in a world of AI disruption and ahead of what may be a brutal stagflationary recession which could lead to default as high as 15% across the Private Credit space according to UBS. 

Meanwhile, as reported last night, amid mounting panic over the entire industry’s long-term viability which has led to a surge in individual investor redemptions from private credit, Ares followed in the footsteps of many of its rivals and decided to cap withdrawals from ASIF at 5% of the fund’s net assets, after investors asked to pull out 11.2%. In other words more than half of the redemption requests were gated. 

In a letter to investors announcing its decision, Ares pointed out the fund has delivered annualized returns of 10.6% since inception through the end of January and affirmed its dividend through June. Unfortunately, what investors were much more focused on is that the fund has pre-gated future redemptions as well, indicating it will only allow 5% redemptions max next quarter, when the cumulative “bank run” is already well over 10%.

Yet even now, greater fools are in abundance, and Blackstone’s attempt to repackage its loans as bonds in hopes of finding a new batch of gullible investors has worked: Bloomberg reports that not only did the world’s largest private credit fund successfully find enough investor demand to plug a $400 million hole, it even managed to upsize the new collateralized loan obligation deal, finding enough demand for the debt to boost its size by $50 million to $450 million from $400 million. 

The largest portion of the offering, rated AAA, was sold to investors at a premium of 1.28 percentage point over a floating interest-rate benchmark. That’s a similar risk premium to previous CLOs issued by BCRED. 

The increase in the size of the offering by the firm that shook down its employees a few weeks ago to fund the redemption shortfall from the very same fund, indicates that despite concerns about the risks in private credit, institutional investors are still happy to invest in deals backed by pools of those loans confident that a bottom has finally been found. 

Or maybe not.

According to former Goldman Sachs CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, the accumulation of unsold private assets on investors’ balance sheets is a warning that some may be overvalued — and a spark could trigger a widespread markdown 

“At some point there needs to be a forcing function or a reckoning that causes you to come to grips with what your balance sheet really is worth,” Blankfein said in a Bloomberg Television interview with Francine Lacqua.

The former Wall Street chief, who spent much of his career as a trader before leading Goldman during the financial crisis, when he was pitching subprime-backed RMBS deals to some investors while also pitching ways how to short those same subprime-backed RMBS to other investors (all of which culminated in a very theatrical congressional hearing), made his comments as the disruption caused by artificial intelligence and pockets of alleged fraud have caused jitters in private markets. The CEO also warned that the likelihood of a larger blowup has risen with the length of time since previous crises.

“The analogy I like to give is you accumulate tinder on the floor of the forest and eventually a spark will come,” Blankfein said. “But the longer between intervals where there’s a spark that sets it on fire, the more that accumulates.”

Maybe we should call what comes next a fire…sale. In which case, don’t worry Lloyd: it already started.

The former Goldman CEO has also voiced concerns about the growth of private credit in the portfolios of individual investors. “When you lose money for individual consumers — i.e. taxpayers and citizens — people in government get very, very upset,” he said earlier this month, sensing with delightful accuracy what comes next… 

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There is perhaps nothing more revealing about the desperate state of Hollywood than its obsession with digging up old franchises in a futile race to capitalize on audeince nostalgia.  In fact, it has been widely understood in the film industry for the past decade that almost no project will be greenlit unless it is a reboot, remake or “re-imagining” of a previously popular story property.

The problem, which everyone except Hollywood executives understands, is that you cannot recapture the magic of older hit movies, especially when your stable of writing talent is populated by an army of left-wing, pill popping ideological lunatics with no moral standards to speak of.  These kinds of people are simply incapable of relating to the common moviegoer.

This dynamic has led Hollywood down a path of financial destruction, with dozens of big budget films bombing at the box office in the past year alone.  Some projects have lost hundreds of millions of dollars and the smell of napalm is heavy in the air. 

One disastrous reboot attempt that set Hollywood on the path of total defeat is Amazon’s ludicrous Lord Of The Rings project, “The Rings Of Power”.  A non-canonical adaptation of limited parts of The Silmarillion, the show turns Galadriel, the personification of the pure feminine, into a spitting, angry feminist girl-boss that slaughters orcs by the barrel.  The show’s writing was saturated with sad approximations of Tolkien-style dialogue written by people with no life experience or wisdom.   

Tolkien was a historical linguistics professor who fought in some of the bloodiest battles of WWI.  His insight into mythology and the human condition was deep and compelling.  The idea that anyone in current-day Hollywood could hold a candle to him is absurd. 

The series was meant to exploit the pre-existing fanbase of the Peter Jackson trilogy.  Amazon execs bragged that the franchise was a sure thing, suggesting that the fans were a “captive audience” that would rush consume whatever drivel Amazon produced.

It was also clearly designed with the illusory left-wing “modern audience” in mind, and of course, that audience never showed up to watch.  Rings of Power is now considered a critical failure and a huge money-loser for Amazon.  But, one celebrity who jumped on the Amazon bandwagon early in the game was leftist propagandist Stephen Colbert, a self proclaimed Lord of the Rings “superfan”. 

Colbert was a primary promoter for the Rings Of Power series launch and at no point did he ever question the validity of the story or its major deviations from the spirit of the source material.  What better person to co-write the next installment of the Lord Of The Rings film series? 

New Line has recruited an aging Peter Jackson to helm a series of film spinoffs, but it’s hard to say yet how much freedom his team will have in the production.  The idea to include Colbert could very well bury the effort before it begins.

The announcement is bizarre, given The Colbert Show’s collapsing audience numbers and his dwindling popularity.  He is a largely hated figure in the world of entertainment and in politics.  But, the decision does make perfect sense if you consider the possibility that Hollywood’s only goal at this point is to destroy every single beloved franchise of the past and give a big middle finger to fans. 

The Amazon series proved that LOTR audiences could not be suckered or controlled, so, instead, it appears the industry is bent on petty revenge instead.  The tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set to be written by Colbert, Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee.  Colbert revealed that the film will be based on “Fogs on the Barrow-downs,” the eighth chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring  

The notion that a woke pariah and Big Pharma shill with no moral compass could ever write an adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, a story based on the honor and inherent goodness in the hearts of men, is rather insulting.  But, maybe that’s the point.     

Just days after we reported that trilateral peace negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, and the Trump administration had been suspended –  likely indefinitely – thanks to Washington’s escalating involvement in the Iran war, Reuters is now confirming the inevitable: Moscow is pressing ahead with a fresh springtime offensive while Kiev scrambles to hold the line.

As we reported before, from the collapse of talks in Geneva and Miami to Putin’s envoy shuttling back for what turned out to be fruitless charades, the Iran war has not only sucked up U.S. attention and air-defense munitions Ukraine desperately needs, but has also juiced Russian oil revenues at the worst possible moment for Kremlin planners. 

According to the latest from Kiev, Ukraine’s strategy now boils down to “building on recent tactical successes and battlefield innovations like mid-range strikes” to blunt the assault on the so-called Fortress Belt, the heavily fortified cluster of cities in Donetsk including Sloviansk (northern anchor), Pokrovsk, and Kostiantynivka. Russia, fresh off capturing nearly all of the key logistics hub at Pokrovsk this winter, has already launched a battalion-sized push northeast of Sloviansk and smaller probing attacks around the southern end of the belt. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Finnish analysts at Black Bird Group are calling it exactly what it is: Moscow creating conditions for a broader offensive now that the ground has thawed.

Sloviansk authorities just ordered the compulsory evacuation of children as Russian forces sit a mere 20 km away — a grim sign the “deteriorating security situation” is no longer hypothetical. Russian General Staff chief Valery Gerasimov boasted last week that the offensive is “underway in all directions,” explicitly naming Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Kostiantynivka as targets. Over the past four days alone, Ukrainian General Staff data shows Russia conducted more than 600 assaults across the front, with the heaviest concentration (163) near Pokrovsk.

This is precisely the momentum we highlighted in our March 17 piece, “Russia Touts Capture Of A Dozen Ukrainian Settlements In Opening Weeks Of March,” where Gerasimov himself confirmed 12 settlements “liberated” in just two weeks, with street fighting already deep inside Kostiantynivka.

Ukraine’s Counter-Narrative: Drones, Starlink Sabotage, And “Metrics”

Kyiv isn’t exactly waving the white flag. Officials point to modest territorial gains last month – around 400 sq km in Zaporizhzhia, the first net positive since summer 2024 – aided in no small part by Elon Musk’s crackdown on Russian Starlink usage, which reportedly scrambled Moscow’s comms. Ukraine’s new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov (the former digital guru) is pushing a “technology-driven, metrics-focused” plan, claiming Ukrainian forces are now eliminating more Russian troops than Moscow can recruit.

Analysts like Rob Lee at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Vladyslav Urubkov of the Come Back Alive charity acknowledge Russia’s manpower edge but argue improved Ukrainian drone integration and tactical assaults could cap Moscow’s gains at a few hundred square kilometers per month. ISW, for its part, expects “some tactical gains” around the Fortress Belt in 2026, but no major breakthrough.

The Real Story: Manpower, Money, And Distraction

Reality check: Ukraine is still bleeding manpower, struggling to recruit enough bodies for the meat grinder, while its finances teeter after Hungary vetoed a €90 billion EU loan package this month. Russia, meanwhile, watches oil prices soar courtesy of the Iran war, boosting export revenues (earlier we reported that India purchased 60 million barrels of Russian oil courtesy of the recent unsanctioning by the Trump admin). And those U.S. air-defense stocks Ukraine relies on? Now being diverted to the Middle East theater.

President Zelensky himself admitted on Sunday that Russia is exploiting warmer weather to intensify operations, a far cry from the “we’re winning” rhetoric that dominated Western media for years. Commanders on the ground describe the expected Russian playbook: multi-axis pressure to rupture Ukrainian formations at weak points, with armored pushes (now rarer thanks to drone dominance) signaling Moscow’s desire to accelerate.

The “Peace” Theater Was Always a Sideshow

Recall our coverage of the endless cycle: Zelensky exploding under U.S. pressure in February (“no time for unsuccessful decisions”), Putin reportedly floating intel-sharing swaps tied to Ukraine aid, and European meddling that only prolonged the agony while Russian forces kept grinding forward.

The Iran conflict didn’t just pause talks — it exposed the whole farce. Washington can’t mediate while fighting on another front, Europe can’t deliver the cash, and Kyiv can’t hold the line forever against a Russia that has already captured thousands of square kilometers since 2025.

The grinding war of attrition continues. Fortress Belt under assault. Peace talks? Suspended, likely indefinitely, especially with the world’s attention glued to that “other”, far bigger war.

The world’s biggest energy execs are currently at the annual CERAWeek conclave in Houston where, understandably, they are dropping bulletin bombs reeking of fire and brimstone, and warning the already critical oil/gas situation will only get worse if the pre-war status quo isn’t restored (which incidentally will be great for their bottom lines… until the world is tipped into a recession).

Take US oil giant Chevron, which warned that California is careening toward an energy crisis because of the Iran war (which will likely be resolved soon), and that the company may quit refining oil in the state unless officials roll back taxes and regulations (which is unlikely to ever be resolved as long as Dems are in charge of the Golden State).

California is highly exposed to the disruption rippling across commodity markets because it imports about 20% of its refined fuels from Asia. But as extensively discussed here, oil product shipments from China, South Korea, Singapore and elsewhere are at risk of slowing significantly as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, leaving Asian nations struggling to meet their own demand at home let alone export to California.

Chevron’s oil refining head Andy Walz said the potential for fuel shortages in California is his worst fear: “We have refineries in Asia that are having to cut crude, and so they’re going to make less products,” Walz said in an interview Tuesday. “What if San Francisco doesn’t have the jet fuel it needs? Or Los Angeles? Or maybe gasoline?”

And as if to confirm his warning, just hours later the price of California Diesel hit a record high just above $7 per gallon, or $7.072 to be precise. 

That topped the previous record of $7.012 in June 2022, in the first months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Since California is disconnected from the US fuel-making centers of Texas and Louisiana, it is essentially an energy island. That’s compounded by multiple refinery closures in recent years due to increased costs driven by regulations designed to fight climate change and cap oil industry profits, not to mention the state’s toxic and oppressive regulatory regime. 

As a result, California consumers are more exposed than most other Americans to surging energy prices because of the Iran war. They already pay nearly $6 for a gallon of gasoline, compared with a national average of close to $4, due to the state’s ruinous legacy “green” regime. It’s a growing political problem for Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is expected to run for president in 2028.

“California has decided that they’re going to rely on imports,” Walz said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “It’s a dangerous game”, Walz added tongue-in-cheek.

California officials should declare an “energy emergency,” reform its climate and tax rules and promote in-state oil production, Walz said. Without such action, Chevron could quit refining in California within a decade, he said.

A spokesman for California Governor Newsom’s office said oil companies are “cashing in” on the war in Iran and running a “coordinated campaign” to attack California. In other words nothing will change until prices get to be so high, the state’s residents demand change.

“If they’re serious about protecting consumers, they should direct that concern where it belongs: at Donald Trump. There’s no end in sight to Trump’s war taxing American families at the pump,” the spokesman, Anthony Martinez, said in an email, confirming Newsom’s plan is… to pretend there is no problem.

Meanwhile, anyone with a brain can see what’s coming: the problem in California is one of the state’s own making, Walz said.

The Trump administration has already used emergency wartime powers to authorize Sable Offshore, a Houston-based driller, to restart oil production off the California coast. The president has also temporarily waived a century-old maritime law called the Jones Act to help make it cheaper and easier to ship gasoline, diesel and other commodities between US ports.

Meanwhile, California already has the nation’s toughest fuel standards as well as a carbon cap-and-trade program that critics say forces consumers to pay the highest prices in the nation. Its goal to reduce carbon emissions 85% by 2045 relies heavily on a near-complete phaseout of gasoline-powered cars and a large reduction in heavy industry — including refining. 

Nonetheless, California remains the country’s second-largest consumer of gasoline and the largest market for jet fuel, for which there’s currently no practical low-carbon alternative. The Democratic state’s recent revulsion toward Elon Musk, and Tesla, has not helped the looming fuel crisis. 

“The California intent to offshore carbon to other nations has offshored their security of supply,” Walz said. “They’ve offshored jobs and they haven’t had any impact on carbon.” 

Chevron, which has tankers sitting idle on each side of the Strait of Hormuz, is taking the unusual step of shipping Gulf Coast oil to California through the Panama Canal as the war disrupts shipments from the region that West Coast refiners typically use, Walz said. 

China has already imposed a fuel export ban as shipments from the Gulf dwindle. If the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked long enough, other Asian countries could follow suit. Chevron’s scenario planning initially looked at the Strait being closed until the end of March.

“Now our scenario plans are worse,” Walz said. “It’s going to be longer and we’re trying to look around the corner.”

California is home to more than 30 military bases. That includes one of the largest in the US, Travis Air Force Base, which Chevron supplies from its Richmond refinery.

“I think the US government should be concerned,” Walz said.

But wait, there’s more because the state’s green lunatics threaten to make an already dire crisis something truly historic: new emissions rules proposed by the California Air Resources Board, if implemented, threaten to drive costs for the state’s remaining refineries even higher. Chevron estimates the additional expenses could hit $500 million within five years.

“They need to abandon the tax on refineries or they won’t have any refineries in 10 years,” Walz said. “If it stays that way — Chevron will be gone in 10 years for sure. We won’t be able to make it.”

* * *

But it’s not just California that faces a historic crisis: Europe is about to get crushed as well. 

According to Shell CEO Wael Sawan, Europe will soon begin to experience the same kind of disruption to fuel supplies that Asia has faced due to the war in Iran in recent weeks. Sawan said the effects of the conflict continue to ripple out across global fuel markets, first in South Asia, then Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, and increasingly in Europe as April approaches.

“We are trying to work with governments to just alert them to the various levers they will need to pull, including on the demand side, including what they need to do around storage,” he said Tuesday at the same CERAWeek conference. 

Just like California, expect Europe to do nothing besides pointing fingers, until it is too late. 

With stocks closing solidly in the green despite some painful wobbles during the day, one sector was a notable laggard: the same sector that had dramatically outperformed the S&P since memory prices soared last October: memory stocks, most notably MU and SNDK.

In his EOD wrap, Goldman tech specialist Peter Callahan wrote that while there wasn’t that much actual “angst” out there, his clients complained of plenty of “sanity checking” on the sharp downward moves in memory stocks (MU / SNDK lower vs. OEMs higher) and especially “the 5 day slide in MU as Micron has underperformed the SOX by 20% in 5-days, starting with the company’s blowout earnings report; that move ranks as the largest 5 days of underperformance relative to Semis/SOX since 2011.

What caused today’s remarkable slump, which at one point saw Micron shares fall over 6% and Sandisk sliding 9% before paring losses, with other notable decliners including Western Digital (-6.7%) and Seagate Technologies (-8.5%)?

The answer was the latest announcement from Google Research, which after the close on Wednesday unveiled TurboQuant, a compression algorithm for large language models and vector search engines, that shrinks a major inference-memory bottleneck: it reduces an AI model’s memory 6x, making it 8x faster with the same number of GPUs, all the while maintaining zero loss in accuracy and “redefining AI efficiency.”

Introducing TurboQuant: Our new compression algorithm that reduces LLM key-value cache memory by at least 6x and delivers up to 8x speedup, all with zero accuracy loss, redefining AI efficiency. Read the blog to learn how it achieves these results: https://t.co/CDSQ8HpZoc pic.twitter.com/9SJeMqCMlN

— Google Research (@GoogleResearch) March 24, 2026

The paper is slated for presentation at ICLR 2026, but the reaction online was immediate: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince called it “Google’s DeepSeek moment.“

To be sure, the announcement from @GoogleResearch generated massive engagement, with over 7.7 million views, signaling that the industry was hungry for a solution to the memory crisis.  Everyone – except for the memory producers – was ecstatic.

Within 24 hours of the release, community members began porting the algorithm to popular local AI libraries like MLX for Apple Silicon and llama.cpp.

Technical analyst @Prince_Canuma shared one of the most compelling early benchmarks, implementing TurboQuant in MLX to test the Qwen3.5-35B model. 

Across context lengths ranging from 8.5K to 64K tokens, he reported a 100% exact match at every quantization level, noting that 2.5-bit TurboQuant reduced the KV cache by nearly 5x with zero accuracy loss. This real-world validation echoed Google’s internal research, proving that the algorithm’s benefits translate seamlessly to third-party models.

Just implemented Google’s TurboQuant in MLX and the results are wild!

Needle-in-a-haystack using Qwen3.5-35B-A3B across 8.5K, 32.7K, and 64.2K context lengths:

→ 6/6 exact match at every quant level
→ TurboQuant 2.5-bit: 4.9x smaller KV cache
→ TurboQuant 3.5-bit: 3.8x… https://t.co/aLxRJIhB1D pic.twitter.com/drVrkL7Pw4

— Prince Canuma (@Prince_Canuma) March 25, 2026

Other users focused on the democratization of high-performance AI. @NoahEpstein_ provided a plain-English breakdown, arguing that TurboQuant significantly narrows the gap between free local AI and expensive cloud subscriptions. 

He noted that models running locally on consumer hardware like a Mac Mini “just got dramatically better,” enabling 100,000-token conversations without the typical quality degradation. 

Similarly, @PrajwalTomar_ highlighted the security and speed benefits of running “insane AI models locally for free,” expressing “huge respect” for Google’s decision to share the research rather than keeping it proprietary.

The implication is clear: if Google can achieve the same inference results with one-sixth of the hardware, then demand for memory chips will collapse in inverse proportion – the same ravenous demand that until recently sent DDR prices as much as 7x higher in just 3 months when the memory bottleneck for AI became apparent…

… and more recently sent inference-heavy NAND Flash prices also surging.

If this sounds similar to the infamous Pied Piper algorithm from Silicon Valley, it’s because it is, all minus the jerking off part :

Prominent cryptocurrency analyst Kaleo captured the sentiment perfectly, tweeting: “So Google TurboQuant is basically Pied Piper and just hit a Weismann Score of 5.2.” This reference to the fictional show’s compression metric demonstrates how deeply the cultural comparison has resonated. Technology commentator Justin Trimble echoed this perspective, simply stating: “TurboQuant is the new Pied Piper.”

Of course, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but the premise is there: taking existing hardware and achieving a far better compression result.

A quick technical side note on how Turboquant achieves this remarkable improvement in efficiency per decrypt:

Quantization efficiency is a big achievement by itself. But “zero accuracy loss” needs context. TurboQuant targets the KV cache—the chunk of GPU memory that stores everything a language model needs to remember during a conversation.

As context windows grow toward millions of tokens, those caches balloon into hundreds of gigabytes per session. That’s the actual bottleneck. Not compute power but raw memory.

Traditional compression methods try to shrink those caches by rounding numbers down—from 32-bit floats to 16, to 8 to 4-bit integers, for example. To better understand it, think of shrinking an image from 4K, to full HD, to 720p and so. It’s easy to tell it’s the same image overall, but there’s more detail in 4K resolution.

The catch: they have to store extra “quantization constants” alongside the compressed data to keep the model from going stupid. Those constants add 1 to 2 bits per value, partially eroding the gains.

TurboQuant claims it eliminates that overhead entirely.

It does this via two sub-algorithms. PolarQuant separates magnitude from direction in vectors, and QJL (Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss) takes the tiny residual error left over and reduces it to a single sign bit, positive or negative, with zero stored constants.

The result, Google says, is a mathematically unbiased estimator for the attention calculations that drive transformer models.

In benchmarks using Gemma and Mistral, TurboQuant matched full-precision performance under 4x compression, including perfect retrieval accuracy on needle-in-haystack tasks up to 104,000 tokens.

For context on why those benchmarks matter, expanding a model’s usable context without quality loss has been one of the hardest problems in LLM deployment.

Now, the fine print. “Zero accuracy loss” applies to KV cache compression during inference—not to the model’s weights. Compressing weights is a completely different, harder problem. TurboQuant doesn’t touch those.

What it compresses is the temporary memory storing mid-session attention computations, which is more forgiving because that data can theoretically be reconstructed.

There’s also the gap between a clean benchmark and a production system serving billions of requests. TurboQuant was tested on open-source models—Gemma, Mistral, Llama—not Google’s own Gemini stack at scale.

The punchline: unlike DeepSeek’s efficiency gains, which required deep architectural decisions baked in from the start, TurboQuant requires no retraining or fine-tuning and claims negligible runtime overhead. In theory, it drops straight into existing inference pipelines.

That’s the part that spooked the memory hardware sector – because if it works in production, every major AI lab will run much leaner on the same GPUs they already own. Or said, in terms of P&L, AI companies – already deeply cash flow negative – and which are suddenly bleeding even more profit margin (which they don’t have but assume they did) to soaring RAM prices, have found a software way to require far less hardware – potentially as much as 6x less – and thus flip the table on the memory makers who are generating massive profits precisely because they refuse to produce more memory in what some would call cartel-like behavior. In doing so, they may have eliminated the entire physical memory bottleneck, courtesy of the memory cartel which magically can’t find any new supply until 2027 or later.

But wait, it gets better: because if Google has already found a compression algo that achieves such phenomenal efficiency improvements, it is virtually certain that further optimization – and competing algos – will surely lead to far greater efficiency, reducing the amount of hardware needed even further. 

And just like that, suddenly the memory bubble which was built on the assumption that demand for DRAM and NAND will persist will into the future, looks set to burst as software may have just solved a very sticky hardware problem.

Indeed today’s plunge in stocks may have been just the first step.  The market’s reaction reflects a realization that if AI giants can compress their memory requirements by a factor of six through software alone, the insatiable demand for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) may be tempered by algorithmic efficiency.

As we move deeper into 2026, the arrival of TurboQuant suggests that the next era of AI progress will be defined as much by mathematical elegance as by brute force. By redefining efficiency through extreme compression, Google is enabling “smarter memory movement” for multi-step agents and dense retrieval pipelines. The industry is shifting from a focus on “bigger models” to “better memory,” a change that could lower AI serving costs globally.

Ultimately, TurboQuant proves that the limit of AI isn’t just how many transistors we can cram onto a chip, but how elegantly we can translate the infinite complexity of information into the finite space of a digital bit. For the enterprise, this is more than just a research paper; it is a tactical unlock that turns existing hardware into a significantly more powerful asset.

The Google paper goes to ICLR 2026. Until it ships in production, the “zero loss” headline stays in the lab, but the market isn’t waiting and the mere threat that demand for memory may tumble by orders of magnitude could shock the entire ecosystem. In which case, buy puts on the Kospi, which is about 100% overvalued if the “memory benefit” of its two core stocks, Samsung and SK Hynix, disappears. Come to think of it, short everything memory. 

For more, please see “Google’s new TurboQuant algorithm speeds up AI memory 8x, cutting costs by 50% or more“

Lawyers for Elon Musk and Tesla are seeking to have a Delaware judge removed from cases involving them, arguing her neutrality could be questioned after her LinkedIn account “liked” a post about Musk losing a recent trial in California, according to Financial Times.

Musk’s firm said the interaction with the “inflammatory” post created “a perception of bias against Mr. Musk in these cases, recusal is necessary and warranted”. The post referred to a federal case where a jury concluded Musk had defrauded Twitter investors, a decision that could cost him billions if it stands. A consultant who worked with the plaintiffs even took a jab at Musk and his legal team in that same thread.

Judge Kathaleen McCormick responded that she didn’t realize the post had been liked until LinkedIn alerted her.

She stated: “I either did not click the ‘support’ icon at all, or I did so accidentally. I do not believe that I did it accidentally,” suggesting uncertainty about how it happened.

FT writes that the situation is another chapter in Musk’s strained relationship with Delaware’s courts.

McCormick has previously ruled against him, including decisions to void Tesla’s massive $56bn compensation package—though it was later reinstated on appeal despite agreement with some of her criticisms.

Musk has long expressed distrust of the state’s judiciary, even relocating Tesla’s incorporation to Texas. During a prior dispute with Twitter, he told jurors: “We were unlikely to win the case in Delaware because the judge [McCormick] was extremely biased against me.”

McCormick still oversees a separate Tesla-related case tied to shareholder claims about excessive director pay. She said she will consider stepping aside and also noted that she lost access to her LinkedIn account after the incident.

The controversy reflects wider concerns about judges’ activity on social media. In 2025, another Delaware judge stepped away from LinkedIn after facing backlash over his posts.

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