The Wall of Systems

Every institution rests on a physical fact we mistook for a principle.

Money was private because paper cannot remember. The law was survivable because no society ever had enough eyes to enforce it. A sentence was proof that a mind existed. A face pointed reliably to one person, because there was only ever one of you.

None of these were principles anyone chose. They were facts about the physical world — and we built our institutions on top of them without ever noticing they were there.

This book is about what happens now that the facts are ending: not with a collapse, but with institutions that keep their shape and stand, for a while, on nothing at all.