It is February 3rd, 2022, or at least, it was February the 3rd when I started writing this post. The writing took me some months, so I don’t really know what day today actually is. Let’s simply agree your current date is our today.

Just over 150 years ago1, which isn’t that long ago, people were building utopias all over North America. In our digital times most people struggle to get 500 likes on Instagram, but a century ago people managed to get over 5,000 individuals to leave their lives behind and move to promising dreamlands.

Shush, don’t worry. The reason why I’m telling you this will become clear shortly.

Anyhow, so that was then. The words you are currently reading were written on March the 7th, more than a month later. I hate to lie (🤪), and this whole date thing makes me really uncomfortable. Clearly, because I took you to 150 years ago, and now we are here again.. I should have just left it at “it is February 3rd,” but what about all the things that happened between then and now? Surely they count for something? They do, because what happened was this:

Lip mi 🐠🧠, puro lip.

Lectura

Investigación

Procrastinación

In that order. Writing is painful, and I avoid it like the plague, so I wander a lot before I do it. Now, to be fair to me and all the writers out there, that is the meat, the potatoes, el plátano, la yuca, la arepa y el ají de esta vaina. Aquí el que no haga lip no escribe. So that’s what happened, and just so that you know how long it takes to write this thing, just know the last words written in this post are the following: February 10, 20262.

▶ The side story

All newsletters, or at least the good ones, have a side story. It is a little leitmotiv, a secondary topic that emerged after all the research and proved to be very relevant. In the writing, it serves as the overture for the succulent core. Ours is utopias.

Pause. I am grabbing my mate, grab your beverage of choice.

Okay, ahora sí. Acá vamos mi reader fren, mi valiente estandarte, mi pedacito de sol. Tú que me has leído todas mis cosas con un número mucho menor de reniegos y quejas del necesario, tú mi pez amado, tú debes tener sueños, quizás no muchos, pero algunos.3 I know you have some ambitions of your own. Maybe they aren’t enormous, they might go along the lines of “I just want to be a better 🐠🧠, just a 1% better 🐠🧠 each day.” Maybe you want to win a race or be a successful lawyer. Yo que sé, no te conozco bien, no se que es lo que te mueve la aguja. But let’s say you want to do something, to build something. Okay, channel that. Now go crazy, let your imagination run wild! What would you love to do?

Hold that thought for just a second.

Remember Beto, the slow reader? Your colleague! He is also here, next to you, always reading, always a little slow. He was going through the same thought experiment, so you ask him: “what’s your ambition my fren?” Well, here’s Beto’s answer: “my ambitious dream is

You probably would think: “well, f@#$ck! Beto definitely speaks and writes like a very elegant and old-fashioned North American from the 19th century, and his dream is weirdly specific and well developed, and to be honest much better than my ‘I want to learn how to longboard and cruise like 420doggface207.’” No judgment from me reader, you are an internet kid and I know your life revolves around the likes and the such. Anyhow, Beto’s use of the subjunctive is flawless and that’s hard to find in an English speaker, so you appreciate it and ask him to continue. Beto tells you that he has found land south of Philly that is basically wilderness with great soil ready to be colonized. You cringe, cuidado Beto, esa palabra ahora tiene una carga un poco compleja en estos días. He smiles and goes on.

He tells you he will buy it and found his town there. He will then divide the terrain into smaller properties and sell them. “Wow, Beto la tiene super clara” you think to yourself, and the fact your dream was kind of silly is really coming down hard on you. Well, Beto smells blood so he goes for the kill. He says he will require that buyers build a house on the purchased property within a year of acquisition, that 2+1⁄2 acres (10,000 m2) of the often heavily wooded land be cleared and farmed each year, and that adequate space be placed between houses and roads to allow for the planting of flowers and shade trees along the routes through town. “Damn! That subjunctive again!” Let’s be real reader, at this point you get sour and tell Beto “there is no chance in hell you are making this weirdly specific and anachronistic dream come true!” Beto looks at you with this diabolical grin:

“Oh but I will 🐠🧠, and I will have 5,000 people living in my town in only five years.”

And he wins. Because Beto was just telling the story of how Charles K. Landis founded the town of Vineland, New Jersey, in 1861. Vineland did in fact grow to a population of 5,000 people in its first five years. You can read the whole story as told by Landis himself here, this is also where Beto’s weird scraped page comes from.

Yes, reader, forget about your digital ambitions to reach a hundred likes, Landis actually got 5,000 people to move to his town. He called it Vineland because he wanted to grow grapes, which he did. For that purpose, he heavily advertised to the Italians coming to America during those times. They formed the bulk of the population.

Landis was trying to build a Utopia, he didn’t just want to sell the land and build a town. He wanted to create a society. Landis had principles and values he wanted to instill and foster. One of them was to make Vineland an alcohol-free town. Hush, reader, hush! I know their main product was grapes, but before you let your hippy-raised brain get all judgy and call Landis a puritan and a strict, disciplined man, you have to remember that at that time, the average yearly consumption of alcohol was 7.3 gallons per person. Today’s consumption is 2.1. Back then, the people that drank were drinking all day long4. There were lots of drunks, and that was a problem that naturally created a force against it. Vineland wasn’t the only alcohol-free town, there were several others, and they were all called the Temperance Towns.

Don’t get too hung up on the temperance stuff, that is interesting but way less so than the unexpected outcome of forbidding wine in a town called Vineland whose only product is grapes. I know you, you are smiling and telling Beto: “I told you, you couldn’t pull this off.” Well, my reader fren, in the 19th century all vices used to be replaced with sugar. Alcohol, cocaine, heroin, maturation5, prostitution, you name it, they just threw sugar on the thing. This happened in Vineland too and cascaded into a series of unexpected events.

Ten years after the foundation of Vineland, two dentists, Thomas Bramwell Welch and his son Charlie, figured out a way to pasteurize grape juice so that it wouldn’t ferment. In other words, they invented a way to produce alcohol-free wine that would travel long distances without spoiling. It was full of sugar and therefore delicious. They industrialized grape juice and turned it into an en masse commodity, always sweet, always the same. Marmalades, jellies, baby food, and all the other stuff you use in the typical American breakfast followed the sweetened grape juice. It was a matter of creativity and grit, and they had both. In a few decades, Welch’s became an enormous multinational and a true staple of the commodification of foods.

Wow, your longboard now looks pretty sad! Beto’s utopic dream is huge. What’s more, Vineland wasn’t the only utopia popping up during that time.

▶ Ideals

During every fall in the 1890s, the brothers Gilbert and George Seldes would skip school to pick grapes. Both were short and skinny boys with the grades to afford them to miss a handful of classes. Every week, they would travel a couple of miles to Vineland to sell their crop to Charlie Welch himself. This business brought them $300 a year. At the time this was a solid income and made them affluent people in Alliance, New Jersey, where they lived. The Seldes were free-thinkers and intellectuals. The boy’s father, Sergius Seldes,6, helped founding Alliance as the first Jewish farm settlement in the U.S.

It all started the afternoon of March 1, 1881, when he was 21. That day, word reached Odessa that Czar Alexander II had been assassinated in the morning on his way to the Winter Palace after church. At that moment “Sergius knew, as did his friends and relatives, that the Jews of Russia would be the victims of organized massacres that would start in the small towns and soon threaten the cities.” Their intuitions were absolutely right. Sergius and his friends and family decided to leave it all behind and moved first to Kyiv and then, traveling in small groups, to Hamburg, then to Bohemia, and ultimately the U.S..

Originally, Sergius wanted to end up in Oregon, but the lands in New Jersey needed workers. Places like Vineland were ready to hire hard-working humans, so thanks to the convoluted and inscrutable logic of world history events Sergius, the first of 12 sons to survive (12! 🤯), born in Uman, Russia (present-day Ukraine), ended up a few miles away from the Welch’s as the first librarian of Alliance. Keep in mind, reader, that immigrants that uproot their lives in search of a brighter future are not messing around.

He founded and serviced a post office, cleared land and built houses, planted and cared for grape trees, and instituted the town’s first school. Sergius devoted most of his life to the dream of Alliance. What he wanted was to test, to prototype, to see if he could make an anarchist colony in the U.S. of A. work.

Yup, you read that right, he wanted Anarchy. He believed this was the best way to come to the perfection of the individual. Calma, reader, calma, your hippy upbringing is a true problem for my flow. Breathe in. Get lost in the image below and enjoy it.

Don’t think of Anarchy as chaos and disorder. Quite the opposite, think of it as the honest belief that people can organize themselves and lead their own lives without the need for a government. This idea assumes that people will embrace the complexity of being alive with full force. Anarchists think people will not kill each other over stolen apples, or at least they will do a little less of it compared to what happens in state regimes. Think of them as idealists that believe humans are capable of good and they don’t need a state to thrive.7

Many great minds viewed Anarchy as a viable social structure. To be fair, wouldn’t it be nice if it worked? Did you sign a social contract when you were born? Isn’t the state the rule of the strong few? Isn’t the next step in our evolution to need less of a coercive force? No sería lindo quitarse la idea del estado-nación de encima y simplemente ser un humano habitante de la tierra y poder hacer un viaje por carretera de Bagdad hasta Berlín? Sería lindo viajar sin más fronteras que las impuestas por la materialidad de nuestra existencia y no por la ineficiencia de nuestros sistemas. Sería lindo.

Now that you are calm, let’s move on.

Sergius Seldes “was a libertarian, an idealist, a freethinker, a Deist, a Utopian, a Single Taxer, and a worshipper of Thoreau and Emerson, was also a joiner of all noble causes, and one of them was called Friends of Russian Freedom, of which he was either one of the founders or the secretary.” In other words, he was the ultimate anarchist. Make sure you know this reader, Sergius Seldes was not a simple man. His ideas on Alliance were carefully and regularly discussed and evaluated with Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin. Alliance was an experiment far bigger than just Seldes, era una esperanza hecha pueblo.

But it didn’t work.

A big reason for it was that the only literate inhabitants of the town were the Seldes, and most of the other inhabitants weren’t there to commit to a particular social structure or to fulfill the anarchic dream. They were there to escape a specific social structure: the tsarist Russia of the 19th century. To be fair, if you were Jewish and Russian most social structures were better than that. But no, anarchy didn’t win. At least not the dreamy version of it.

How things went down is kind of boring, kind of sad, but real, and as I said, we’re here to deal with facts. In a county seat, Sergius demanded that Alliance get new roads and a new school building capable of seating all the kids of the town. If the county didn’t make it happen, Sergius claimed that, in the next election, the votes of the farmers would go to the Democratic Party instead of the Republican Party, who controlled the county at the time. Congressman Wood (Republican) delivered the roads and a two-story schoolhouse, and got the votes in return. That seems okay in principle, right? Power to the people!

But then Congressman Wood realized the process could be made much more efficient by getting rid of the intermediaries! In the next election, he went to Alliance to buy votes in exchange for two $1 bills. The farmers voted Wood and, in return, they got the money. Simple, and much better than having to deal with the fucking school and the logistics of the thing! Politics happened like this for a long time. Sergius tried to convince his town to cooperate instead; he wanted them to pool all the little moneys they had to buy the newest machines the market had to offer so they would not depend on politicians and could be more productive and financially sound. But he failed. The politician deals were more straightforward and secure: they were an eye for an eye. Seldes’ ideas were bets on the future; uncertain, hard to execute. Utopian anarchy lost, democracy won.

Sergius Seldes ended up moving to Philly where he bought an old pharmacy and made it his business. The man who sold it to him guaranteed him it was a profitable business and it would stand on its own two legs for a long time. If it didn’t, he would buy it back at the purchase price. It was a sweet deal. The first day Sergius opened his new business he found a long line of people waiting for him. They were the regulars and all looked homeless. Sounds more like a bar, right? Well, they all wanted either heroin or cocaine, which at the time were sold legally in pharmacies. Nothing is more steady for a business than a subscription model with a very sticky product. Of course the pharmacy was profitable, and of course it would have survived a long time.

Seldes was a good man, he told the junkies to fuck off and stopped selling heroin and cocaine. He could have continued with the pharmacy’s main source of income, but he didn’t. Instead, he turned it into a place for freethinkers to come together and think. Think of it as the cornerstone coffee shop of the 1900’s. And sure thing, thinkers came. It was still a pharmacy too, but with lots of thinking and conversing. From there he ran the Friends of the Russian Federation, from there he talked to the remaining brilliant minds of 19th century Russia. This pharmacy sustained the rest of his life and the early endeavors of his sons.

Sergius died in 1931, the pharmacy didn’t survive him.

So there you have it, two Utopias. One, based on sugar, fully exploded. The other one, the free-thinking optimistic one, imploded. Although perhaps it didn’t. Maybe it just turned into a coffee shop, a more gentle and honorable vice.8 Maybe neither really worked and the power of the globalized world won over both. The only truth is that the electronic dreams of the metaverse kids and the internet are pale and sad in comparison with the small utopias built on sweat, tears, and blood. But maybe I am just being romantic again and I should go back and read my first post. I don’t know. Should we lose all hope here? That’s not for me to decide – do with it whatever you want my dear 🐠🧠, that’s your journey, not mine.

▶ The antihero

The antiheroes of this story are not Charles K. Landis or Sergius Seldes. Those were full-on heroes, they represented the turn of the century for people in the United States that wanted to build a brave new world. I know you reader, at this point you are looking at me funny. You think I am romanticizing the story of the white guys in the North, but you’re wrong. I was educated to thrive on indignation, resentment, and cynicism. How else do you think I earned a Ph.D.? Indignation, resentment, and cynicism are the necessary lenses upon which the academic intellectual stance is built. Most people confuse this stance with critical thinking – it is not – but it is a cheap and easy substitute, and it plays sexy online if you keep it to 140 characters and the right gifs.

No, I am not romanticizing Seldes or Landis. I do admire the grit to physically build a new town with values and ideas, even though those values and ideas might be as wrong as you and I are. And yet reader fren, never forget that the future generations will judge you and me, not on the things we did wrong, but on the things you and I are convinced we did right. Your tiny boogary and ugly 🐠🧠 offspring and my gorgeous son will look at us with a pointed finger telling us how idiotic we were when we thought we were much better than the previous generations.

The first of our antiheroes is George Seldes, the son of Sergius Seldes. Finalamente! Que hijo de puta pa’ hablar eh? Educated by his anarchist father, at the age of 19 he started his career as a journalist for the Pittsburg Leader. His first big assignment was to interview presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The angle was that Bryan kept running for presidency yet losing the election. He did that three times in a row. When Seldes went to interview him in his hotel room in Pittsburgh, he asked him what any 19-year-old journalist would ask: “Do you think you are going to lose again?” Apparently, everybody thought he would, but the candidate didn’t like it, understandably. And so he kicked him out of his room and terminated the interview. George Seldes thought he had messed up his first big assignment, but it was not the case. Quite the opposite, it was his most important lesson in journalism, as his editor was ready to point out. “The story is that he kicked you out of the room, write that.”

I ❤️‍🔥 it. That juxtaposition of events encapsulates the difference between reporting and what most of us inadvertently think is journalism. Reporting is what people do, that is it. It can be boring, cruel, brutal, or pointless. The other thing, the talking, what people say, the theory, what opinions are made of, and what you and I love to believe is journalism, that is just narrative. It is cute, but it’s not honest, it is just mental gesticulation. The young grape-picker internalized this first lesson deeply in his mind.

From then on George’s career was prolific and extensive. First, he went to France during World War I as a member of the press corps of the American Expeditionary Forces reporting for the United Press. Just one week after the end of the war, he interviewed Paul von Hindenburg, the supreme commander of the German Army. Hindenburg supposedly acknowledged the instrumental role the U.S. had played in defeating Germany. “The American infantry,” said Hindenburg, according to Seldes, “won the World War in battle in the Argonne.” The interview was never published in any newspaper or magazine of the time. Seldes and his colleagues had broken the armistice when they entered Germany after the end of the war. They knew they were guilty of that, but they thought the importance of the information would help the publication. It didn’t. Until his death Seldes believed that blocking the publication had helped fortify the back in the stab myth that lead the Nazis to power later on.

After WWI, Seldes started working for the Chicago Tribune. He was immediately sent to Russia with the objective of reporting on the Bolshevik revolution. The Soviet change of regime had produced a catastrophic famine in Russia (present-day Ukraine).9 The U.S. offered to provide a massive relief package with the condition that journalists were allowed to report on how things were going. Seldes was basically part of the package.

Just as he had done in Germany, Seldes got to interview the most prominent player of the conflict, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov better known as Lenin. This time though he didn’t have hours to sit with his subject. It was in 1922 during the fifth anniversary of the revolution. He together with all the other American journalists were shoved in a room and were allowed only one question. The first question asked was silly and understandable. It came from a young boy with an enormous hat that was trying to make him look older. It only made him look even younger. “Do you speak English?” Answering in poor English, Lenin noted, “I can not understand you, Americans especially, because you hate the word bolshevism—so you make bolshevism the most hated word. After all, there are many interpretations of Karl Marx and bolshevism is one of them.... [W]e adopted the one that Daniel DeLeon started in the Socialist Labor Party.” To which Seldes cried out, “That’s my father’s friend you’re talking about!”10

Yeah reader, picture that. In a room full of journalists, Lenin declares the importance of the leader of the Socialist Labor Party of America in the creation of the Soviet Union. Then comes this young dude with a mustache that frankly could use some oomph and class and declares, “that’s my father’s friend!” If you hadn’t read the previous paragraphs you would think, “what a douche-bag, who cares!?” We do 🐠🧠, we do! Because we know the story, and we know who Sergius Seldes was and we can imagine him having coffee and debating ideas with De Leon in Phili.

And now Seldes had Lenin in front of him talking about one of his father’s friends while producing a famine that accounted for 5-million-dead in the country in the name of a greater future.

It didn’t take too long for Seldes to be deported from Moscow. The Soviet censorship was tough and, as you can gather, there was a lot to denounce. Each letter that left the country was carefully scrutinized, so reporting on anything of importance wasn’t easy. But of course the journalists, Seldes included, found a way to circumvent the censors. It was the same way all drugs are smuggled: the diplomatic way. The bureaucrats in charge of all things Soviet would use the official diplomatic channels to exchange forbidden goods for Russian delicacies. Basically, they would exchange mink coats from the Tsarist times for fancy chocolates and other food items — remember the famine. Therefore, these diplomatic channels were intentionally left alone by the censors. The journalists could then disguise their articles as personal letters and send them as diplomatic mail.

But then the idiot showed up! What idiot you ask? The idiot that always shows up and ruins the party. This one, in particular, denounced a comrade that was smuggling cigarettes from the west, and so censors got involved and had to get all serious about the thing and started reading the letters. As a consequence, the journalists were caught and got kicked out. До свидания, мистер Селдес!

What do you do after you get deported from the Soviet Union? Go to Italy of course. That is always a good response to anything that happens in life. Seldes went to report on Mussolini and the ascent of fascism. Here he denounced the participation of Signor Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, in the assassination of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti. The case was a convoluted one, and it is still debated today. Although if you ask me, the evidence on what happened is pretty clear. If you ask Seldes, there was no way to be confused, Mussolini was involved either by commission or omission. As you can expect, Il Duce didn’t like this at all and Seldes was also kicked out of Italy.

Then he was sent to Mexico. Here our grape-picker tried to denounce the interference of American corporations in Mexican politics and legislation on mineral rights to their own benefit. He was denouncing the way American corporations were and have lived and thrived in Latin America. Ay mi 🐠🧠 acá podríamos quedarnos horas hablando de las bananeras, de los trenes atravesando las plantaciones y los colores incandescentes del Caribe, pero esa no fue la ruta que tomó Seldes y por lo tanto tampoco nosotros.

As you can imagine Seldes was kicked out of Mexico too.

The list goes on and on in similar fashion. At this point Seldes started feeling as much backlash from the European and Latin American governments he was denouncing as from the internal powers in the U.S. It was to be expected. Seldes did not give a single fuck, he was in this world to report the doings of the peoples in power and the doings were pretty much always nasty. As the years passed by, his relationship with the owner of the Chicago Tribune deteriorated, and less and less of his work was published.

Finally he quit and published two books with his unpublished stories of the time. Both books are history lessons. Both are very, very hard to fact check, although all of my efforts tend to prove Seldes right. Both books live here on the Internet free and open for you to read my dear 🐠🧠.11

From then on George Seldes became an independent journalist. His career went on. He denounced the Tobacco Industry and the negative effects of cigarettes on health, the arms industry and how it profited from 40 years of war, Franco’s darkest moves in the Spanish Civil War, and the quiet complacency of the American Press, among all the atrocities the 20th century produced.

It is hard to get a grasp of the power of this work if you don’t do the homework 🐠🧠. But I’ll save you the hours of reading and fact-checking that trusting Seldes requires, I did it for you. However, I do suggest you watch this documentary about him — we all know you are more on the side of TV than books. But just to get an idea of what he was against and what he was bringing to the table, do the following: take a minute and read this page of Time magazine:

I ❤️‍🔥 it. That juxtaposition of events encapsulates the difference between what most of us inadvertently think is journalism and what reporting is12. I really want to go over their description of Mussolini, I want to 💩 on their comparison to Hercules and Cavour, and I want to go over the idiocy of leaving it up to time to decide the greatness of the Premier as they call it. But I won’t, because that’s not the point. The point is that the article on the next page declares how Seldes was kicked out of Italy because of his denouncement of Mussolini, but that part is left out. That part is not worth telling. Mussolini’s story is all color and fanfare, it is literary oomph although no class. Seldes’ story has no color, no rationalizing, just the hard facts – unfortunately not all the facts, just some of the facts.

And that my dear reader fren was what Seldes was against. That was the system. He was tired of fighting from within. So he decided to change the medium. Which brings us to the peanunt of this whole post.

▶ The financing

Listen, reader, let me shed some light on that beautiful brain of yours. I’ll cut the crap. When most of us — fish brains that we are — think about a medium, we confuse the medium with its content. Consider the car. We think of the car, the machine, as a medium of transportation. Yet that’s inaccurate; what allows the car to go round and round are the roads, the gas stations, the legislation, the car industry, and so on. The cars are the content, the medium is what allows it to be. The same applies to all the media out there; to our new digital paradigm the internet, and to the old print one the printing press.

Seldes was painfully aware of this. He knew the main customers of newspapers weren’t the readers, but the advertisers. And he knew this would only get worse in his lifetime. He also knew that apart from the commercial pressures, there were the political and legal ones from the legislators and bureaucrats, as well as the biases and personal agendas of the owners of the newspapers. He wrote for the readers, but the system didn’t work for them. You now know why 🐠🧠, remember medium ≠ its content. If you consider the newspapers as a medium, then you can see they are a product and reflection of the technologies that allow them to exist, not the articles of the intrepid journalists. They must abide by the architecture of those technologies and not by the desires of the peasants (i.e. the writers and the readers).

Check the following graph:

The yellow line is the money that the publishers get from selling papers to the public and the red one is the money they get from advertisers. You can read this graph in so many ways, you can adjust to inflation, and you can see what the petrodollar system did to the news business in the 70s, you can discuss the weirdness of the 80s, but none of that matters. The point is that Seldes was right and the percentage of revenue that came from advertisers only increased during the 20th century, that is, until … the internet boom.

Then the curve started changing and the reader became the main customer. You might think that was a good thing, but that’s because you are silly. Sergius would scold you. First look at reality, look at what is happening right meow! Are you better informed now that the media tries to satisfy the views of the people and not that of the advertisers? Weren’t you complaining only three days ago about how much tribalism and polarization is out there? Do you find that getting reliable information is easier nowadays?13

All I can say is that now we have a new system with new problems. The new architecture demands more from the reader than the previous one. That’s good if you are willing to do the work and learn, and it’s bad if you just want to sit and watch the news while you eat your dinner. It all depends.

Seldes understood the architecture he was working with and said something along the lines of: “well my friends, I am tired of this b.s., no more newspapers, I am doing my own newsletter with no advertisement whatsoever. All I need is my articles, a photocopier, and enough readers willing to pay for a subscription.” Yeah, he was somewhat ahead of his time. He had the connections, the expertise, and the guts. He started it in 1940, and he made it work for the next 10 years.

In Fact was a 4-page news sheet written almost entirely by Seldes, and it sold for two cents. Seldes attacked newspapers that took ad money from tobacco companies and failed to report on the health risks of cigarettes. He went after strike-breakers. He reported on the FBI’s surveillance of unions (and drew FBI attention of his own). At its peak, 176,000 people were reading In Fact—including Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and “approximately 20 senators,” according to The Washington Post. (Wired)

Let me clarify something. Seldes wasn’t really using a photocopier. He was using a mimeograph. You can think of it as a tiny printing press, as minimized and optimized as that technology could get before introducing the optical element of photocopiers. In the 1940’s you could get one for the equivalent of $1,000 in present-day money, which wasn’t bad at all if you consider you could easily produce thousands of copies of your paper at a very, very low cost.

This is crucial my 🐠🧠, because it shows you that technological changes allow you to say different things. They change the quality of the knowledge we produce. Is not that we know more, is that we know different. Without the mimeograph we wouldn’t have content like newsletters and the control of the public sphere would still be in the hands of the gatekeepers. Shush, shush, reader, sin cinismo, que claro que por supuesto que los cambios tecnológicos sólo implican cambios en quiénes tienen el control. And yet, denying the deflationary power of technology and its amplifying possibilities would be silly.

After a life of fighting the powers that be with words and trying to change the system from within, Seldes managed to build a platform that amplified his own voice. It might not have been the utopian dream his father had in mind, but it was as close as you could get to living those ideals in the Public Opinion Sphere.

And that brings us back to February 24th, 1941.

▶ The unspeakable

Remember how I started writing this post in February 2022, well now it’s May and I am still on it. You thought reading it was hard work, huh? Back then I wanted to find a newsletter from the same day I was writing. I was delighted with the idea of finding an old newsletter from the 1700s that I could use as an excuse to talk about the history of the newsletter. I simply wanted to have a straightforward lip without the ups and downs, the going around,14 the coming back, and all the labyrinthic nodes you are now used to. But reality doesn’t follow the rules of my brain, it is not linear and it doesn’t care about what makes sense or what doesn’t. And it gets worse.

Not only do I have to deal with the chaotic structure of reality but on top of that, all I get from the past is the incomplete and capricious nature of what we are actually able to preserve in digital or physical form. So that’s how I ended up with the issue of February 24th, 1941 of InFact, Seldes story, and all the rest.

Sure, that issue wasn’t what I was initially looking for, but it was brutally and soul-crushingly better. It had it all. Getting the alternative take on what the public opinion was during World War II in the U.S. is mind-blowing. You readily find that there was no clarity at all. The presence of a marked enemy does not provide unity and a common objective. It creates more division. It fosters a plethora of half-baked ideas easily grouped into two polar opposites and a full lack of understanding of what is going on. Yet that is not what blows my mind. Just looking at the present you could deduce that something similar – division and no clarity – is what is going on. What blows my mind is how easily we forget that, how easily we think that there was more certainty in our past. We project how we understand the past to the reality of it, and we falsify it. We know this, and yet we do it over and over again.

Yeah, that blew my mind. And then this caught my attention:

Walter Krivitsky’s real name was Samuel Ginsberg and he was of Jewish descent. He was born in Podwołoczyska, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Pidvolochysk, Ukraine) in 1899. Podwołoczyska was a tiny town of wood houses and dirt roads. When Ginsberg was growing up it was right on the border between the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires. It was a crossroads of people and cultures. Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians, Russians, and all the possible combinations between them made up the ethnic soup of this town. Oh yes! Samuel was Jewish too, which added all the complexity this entails in a soup of Christian denominations.

To make things more fun, smugglers and political exiles tried trespassing the border by mixing with the natives and catching trains for unknown destinations. This meant that the town was under close watch and there always existed the lurking possibility of an occasional police crackdown from Lviv (then called Lemberg), the administrative center of the Ternopil provinces. “The wide-gauge tracks of the Russian railroad system ensured that no train could proceed straight from Europe into Russia, or the reverse, so all travelers had to change at the border.”15.

Remember how Sergius Seldes left Russia (now Ukraine) right after the assassination of Czar Alexander II, fearful of what would happen to Jews afterwards? Well, Samuel’s parents didn’t leave. They stayed and saw every drop of antisemitism that this region of the world, in that time of history, had to produce. They saw antisemitism from the Poles, from the Hapsburgs, from the Russians, from the Austrians, and from the Ukrainians. Which explains why Samuel learned Polish, German, Russian, and Yiddish. It also explains why he developed all the skills needed to become a superb subvert agent of the Soviet Union. He had been escaping from everybody all his life, he knew how to hide, how to disguise, how to confuse – he was the perfect spy. In 1917, when he graduated from High School, he was ready:

“I joined the Bolshevik Party with my whole soul. I seized the Marxist and Leninist faith as a weapon with which to assault the wrongs against which I had instinctively rebelled.”

“Krivitsky was an ascetic and workaholic, allowing himself no luxuries, never drinking, and remaining on the job 16–18 hours a day. Nicotine was his only drug. The general rule was ten in the morning to midnight nonstop.” (A Death in Washington)

For twenty years he went up the ranks. When you have been wronged by all nationalities you lose respect for all nations. Your task is simple: take over the whole world, and create your own nation. He organized industrial sabotage and worker strikes in Germany. He stole the blueprints for submarines and planes in Italy and France. He was instrumental in the interception of correspondence between the Nazis and Imperial Japan, which was the first time the world knew about the allegiance. He recruited Magda Lupescu, the third and last wife of King Carol II16 of Romania, as a spy. He recruited French politician Pierre Cot. He was every writer’s spy dream.

His list of accolades goes on and on. Because of them, he was proposed as a recipient of the order of Lenin, one of the highest ranks in the Soviet Union. He never got it. By then, Stalin had started killing all Trotskyists and Leninists, and those were the signatures needed for the award.

In May 1937, Krivitsky was sent to The Hague, Netherlands, to operate as the rezident spy (regional control officer) in that part of Europe. As if written by Borges, he worked undercover as Dr. Martin Lesser, an Austrian antiquarian and refugee from Hitler’s antisemitic persecutions. Specialty? Old art books. This cover was brilliant; it allowed him to speculate and launder any money needed, but also to send documents in the binding of old precious books. He rented and lived at 32 Celebesstraat. The landlord was Hendrik Krop, a tax inspector and also a communist, which was very handy. Krop’s brother, Hildo Krop, was Amsterdam’s most prolific sculptor at the time and also a communist. Also super handy and not a coincidence.

The revolution is a family affair, it is done by friends and family that have been wronged awfully by some other asshole cousin. Hildo was a soviet agent recruited years before by Ignace Reiss. Reiss went by the alias of Ludvik, and was a mythical spy in spy literature. When Walter arrived in La Hague, Ludvik was stationed there too. Here’s when we come full circle: Reiss was a childhood friend of Kirivitsky. He also was born and grew up in Podwołoczyska. He was jewish too, and had also seen his fair dose of antisemitism and oppression. Just like Samuel, he joined the Russian revolution with the Bolsheviks. He too had all the skills necessary to become a world-class spy. He also had been wronged all his life, and he too, through his resentment, wanted to build a greater future.

And so he did.

Reiss and Kirvitisky had coincided in their careers here and there but now, in La Hague, they were in the same playground in a more definitive context. Imagine that, it was a dream come true. After twenty years of shared oppression and discrimination, and another twenty years of spy work all over Europe, the two friends from that little crossroads town right on the border of neighboring empires end up together. They both have covers that contemporary writers dream of, they both are giving the middle finger to the world’s establishment, and they both feel and know that they are changing history. Justice is being made!

Yeah…

The thing is, when you are in charge of a global revolution, you are a man with a mustache and you truly believe you are right and moral, and your ego is so big that you can do the unspeakable. Stalin was in that situation and decided that all the Lennistits and Trotskyites were an obstacle to the revolution, so decided to kill them all. The cause justified it. Reiss and Krivitsky saw it coming. They knew a global revolution wasn’t just going to happen with nice words and Borgean covers; blood needed to be shed. They had been playing the game since they were seventeen, and so they kept playing. They played under Lenin rules, and now they would play under Stalin’s. They joined the purge, at least for some time.

Qué problema en el que me metí aquí 🐠🧠. Quería analizar eso de “playing the game” e introducir lo que venía después en la historia de Krivitsky con un párrafo bien sesudo. Lo primero que escribí fue esto: “el que a hierro mata, a hierro termina.” Here, I wanted to point to the cultural differences between English and Spanish. The English version goes: “He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.” This difference would allow me to ponder about the insistence of the Spanish language to use the material: hierro, plomo, plata as a metaphor of the thing, versus the English language’s need to go with the tool: sword, bullet, coin. I was going to follow it up with a nice reflection on how all books of any value say it all. Everything that can be said about the human being, everything that can be expressed in our language is in the Bible, the Koran and Whitman’s poems. And then reality hit my soul with all its harshness.

The world is full of retired assassins who enjoy a good mate on a deserted beach.

I’m putting it this way, with the mate and everything, so you understand how much it hurts. Don’t forget that they killed my uncle with a tiro de gracia—an execution shot—on a highway in the middle of nowhere, where everything is green and the blue of the sky burns your eyes. That damn cursed land that I love from afar. Right there, just like that, in the name of the revolution and in the name of a better world. Someone made a statistical calculation, an investment: I’ll kill you now for a better future. Like someone killing a fly that’s about to ruin their afternoon.17

I wish reality played by the rules of fiction and satisfied the literary aesthetics of our souls. But it doesn’t. There are retired nazis living peacefully somewhere in South America, there are retired Soviets watching spy stories on Netflix from the comfort of their couches. There are drunk American soldiers that came back from Afghanistan broken and broke. Those are shooting meth in some dirt ass trailer in Arizona, while the politicians that sent them to fight get drunk in Washington cocktails parties. I am not saying their crimes are equal, and I am also not equating those in power, the Stalins and the Lenins, the generals and the presidents.

I don’t know their reasons or their circumstances, but I know this: a bullet is not coming for them. Nor should it. Some of them will die happy and fat, with no remorse and lots of pride. Life will not give them back what you or I think they deserve. They will just be, like you or me. Even if it hurts, they will just be in you and in me. We all share the same root, and the same destiny.18

So let me get back to my borgean story because in this case, it does follow the rules of literary stories and that will bring your heart to a better place. Reiss and Krivitsky played the game for a while. Until it got too close to them. They were Bolsheviks after all, and very few of those were still alive.

When Reiss thought he was next, he deflected, and he did so loudly. He wrote a public letter to Stalin, in which he denounced what he had witnessed and he made a call back to the roots of the revolution.

I have been fighting for socialism since I was twenty. On the threshold of my forties, I don’t want to live off favors from a Yezhov.

I have sixteen years of underground work behind me. It’s something, but I still have enough strength to start all over again. Because it is a question of "starting all over again", of saving socialism. The struggle began a long time ago. I want to resume my place there.

Coming from one of the most successful spies of the revolution the words were meaningful. In present-day corporate lingo, people would say: “the optics were not good.” In Bogotá in 1996 we would say: “qué mierdero.” Stalin responded with fifteen shots. Seven went into Reiss’s body, five went into his head. The letter was dated July 17th, he was assassinated on September 3rd, 1937.19

Reiss’s death was enough for Krivitsky. After all, he knew he was next. He fled to the U.S. the first chance he had. His wife and kid followed. The first thing he did was to disclose some of what he knew. Make himself visible and known. He published a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post. These were the basis of his book: In Stalin's Secret Service. The book had an underwhelming reception. Most people didn’t want to believe a deflector and lots of people still wanted to believe in the revolutionary dreams of the Soviet Union and their revindication of the working class. They weren’t ready to accept the cost Stalin was willing to pay for those dreams.

Yet Krivitsky was ready to show the world how Stalin was not the revolution. He was ready to show the world how Stalin played the game. That included denouncing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, i.e. how Stalin and Hitler helped each other for a couple of years. That was way too much for many people to handle. Weren’t the Nazis anti-communism, weren’t Mussolini and Franco killing commies with the aid of Hitler? Wasn’t Stalin the biggest of the commies? Yes, they were, but sometimes blood needs to be shed and sometimes a pact with the enemy has to be signed. It is all part of the calculations we do for a greater future. A matter of investment policy. Sometimes you need to kill some flies in order to have nicer afternoons.

Life was alright for Krivitsky while in the U.S.. He collaborated with the British Government, which led to some of the loudest scandals of the time, he gave some info to Americans, and he lived off the proceeds of his book. Walter was smart though and dosed the information he was willing to share. He needed ammo to bargain while he worked to settle on a farm in Virginia, which was his goal. Like you and me, he knew what was coming for him. He knew the Soviets were after him. He said to friends and family: “if I die, you know who did it.”20

And death came. It used a gun in a hotel room in Washington D.C.. It was a small hotel, unusual for Krivitsky. Un tiro de gracia en la sien. He left three letters, all hand-written. The content of the letters survived, and photographs of the letters survived but not the letters themselves. The case is full of details and nuances but we won’t go there. I will summarize it this way, we have two confirmed testimonies from Krivitsky:

1. in one he said if he dies, to blame the Soviets, and that this will most likely be his outcome.

2. the other is a suicide note that said not to blame the Soviets.

That is it. That is the conundrum. Which one do you believe?

Well, Seldes chose to believe the suicide theory. He thought the press was being sensationalistic with a story that was closed and declared a suicide by the authorities. Ignace Reiss’ wife believed the same thing. And yet plenty of Krivitsky’s “colleagues” did not buy it, they knew it was a soviet crime. The press certainly thought there was something fishy. The evidence is full of holes and uncertainties, so all stories have problems.

You ask me what I think, reader? I think it’s only relevant to know the author of the letters for literary reasons. To complete the story, to have a nice narrative. But I don’t want to do literary math. I don’t want to choose between narratives. I take the bullet as the tragedy it is. I think of the moment when a human performing a simple statistical analysis decides that pulling the trigger is the best choice for a greater future. Whether that future is nothingness or a communist dream is irrelevant to me. Not because they are the same, they are not, but the humanness behind both is the same.

I look at that moment, look at my child, and I feel cold tingling beneath my skin. I feel it and I try to empathize with the human with the gun and this is what comes to my head: I remember a childish lie I told when I was sixteen years old. It was big, grandiose, and it made me both a victim and a hero. I chose that lie. I chose to live it. You most likely did the same thing 🐠🧠. And like me, you quickly realized only more lies can sustain a lie. The truth will kill it, and killing it is killing yourself. So we don’t speak of it; we let it grow, we don’t confront it and it becomes a monster. By this point, there are a lot more people involved in it. At that point, the lie also sustains other parts of your life. Not directly, but just because it is part of you, it is a part of your soul. And you will defend yourself at any cost. Any cost but the truth, because the truth will kill you. Here’s the thing: I don’t know if this is true or not, but it sure does look like this to me. At one point you end up cornered, and a bullet finds its way to your head. And it either kills you physically or metaphorically. And that is it, that is life: the things we cannot speak of.

▶ The truth

If you were more than a 🐠🧠, you would have noticed that the issue of InFact I brought to you was from February the 24th, 1941. On exactly the same date in 2022, as I was writing this post, Russia invaded Ukraine — once again. That day the fear of a global conflict of nuclear dimensions hit us all in the gut, just when we thought we were done with global conflict. It was The Return of the Proxy Wars — a beautiful and cynic title for my next poetry project.

No, reader, I am not manipulating you or the plotline of this post. I did not choose InFact after the start of the war, I did not go and look for it so that I could talk about the current events. The numeric parallelism only opens enormous and uncomfortable questions. Why are we still here? Why are we doing the same thing we have done in the past? Can we collectively learn or are we doomed to our own stupidity? Is the accumulation of simplistic statistical decisions in the name of a greater future what brings us here? Is it the need to sustain the lies we tell ourselves when we are sixteen? Is it both?

Those are gargantuan questions.

Here are my answers, incomplete, biased and unnecessary, yet deeply satisfying. Seldes and Krivitsky’s stories shed some light, and understanding them helps me accept reality, as crude and brutal as it is.

I understand how Seldes’s father went one way. I understand how Trotsky, and then Stalin, went another. I understand why Landis wanted an alcohol-free town and I understand why Welch created an emporium of epic proportions based on sugar. I can tell you that I have anarchic dreams, and I do hope that technology can help us organize society differently. I do fear for my son, and I don’t want him to live the lies and the truths I had to live to be here. I don’t want him feeling the visceral fear you feel when there is a man with hatred in his heart, a mustache with no oomph and class, and a gun in his hand standing in front of you. And yet there is nothing I can do to avoid that.

I believe this is also what Sergius Seldes felt, as much as what Krivitsky thought about his own son. I believe that even though I share no tangible experience with them, I do share that inner primal fear, the lies, and the heart; in other words, the humanity. I know too that I have the potential in me, like you and my son, to do all the atrocities Seldes, Krivitsky, Reiss, Stalin, and Lenin produced. Because we all share that thing called life in us.

And here’s one more thing:

“When they discovered I could speak German, Russian, Polish and French, they smiled and sent me straight to the OSS – US military intelligence. It was a hotbed of ex-communists and ex-Trotskyists, run mainly by ex-Austrian communists, all of them dissidents. They only wanted to hire confirmed anti-fascists. It was a very sympathetic outfit in those days. I appreciated the paradox. My father had started the century with Soviet intelligence, and here, in the middle of this same century, I was now a wartime agent for the United States.”

Those are Roman Bernaut’s words. He is Ignace Reiss’ son. He went to Columbia University to study economics and then ended up helping the American Intelligence against the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Krivitsky’s son died of a stroke in his 30s, poor and sick in New York City.

That is the crushing whimsical nature of life. Reiss’s son and Krivitsky’s son branch out like an imperfect Fractal Canopy: two possibilities of what could have been. Just as much as Reiss’ and Krivitsky’s deaths are variations of the same theme. They are all the bifurcations and lips of our cruel playwright. They are the random others we could have been, under different circumstances, growing up with different stories. Whether it’s a Western utopia or a communist dream, all leaders believe they are right.

The coincidence of where this post took me, and our current present is not due to random luck. We are still here doing the same things. And we will continue to do so. Performing simple statistical decisions in search of a greater future is what pushes us forward, the narrative we believe unites us as a species is bigger than our individual souls. You might not like to accept it, but you could understand what Putin or Stalin do and did in all its atrocious monstrosity. What’s more you could do the same things based on the same futile reasons.

Todos estamos matando moscas que nos aruinan la tarde. You chose the methods, which flies and the afternoons, and you hope you are not a monster and your values are on point. That is the best you or I can do. Each and every one of our choices is a statistical calculation in search of a better future. The rest is silence.

That is it, that is all I will give you. If you need more than that, just check out The George Hotel, in Washington D.C.. This is where Krivitsky died. Go there, rent a room, and do with it whatever you want. Read the F.B.I. files while you are there and try to figure this thing out. If you can solve the conundrum and get out of the hole I put you in, write me an email, and take us both out of here.

let’s go back to the newsletter thing to give this thing some kind of closure. You now have the rules of the genre and a great example of an issue – if I do say so myself. There is only one good question left. Why did I choose the newsletter as a genre? Because just like Seldes, in this format, I can give you more questions than answers. I can make your head spin knowing that there is something there that you are not quite getting. I can tell you that the truth is a question and not an answer. You can disagree, pout, and shout. And yet I don’t have to justify myself to anybody.

In this format, I can give you my most honest take, the rawest of my thoughts, while staying true to two things: 1) the facts, 2) that you have an awesome time 🐠🧠. After all, as you can see, I am always thinking about you, not the advertisers, nor the owners, nor the people in charge. And yes! I know, I am still subject to the architecture of this medium, and there are still people in charge here. I am not näive reader, this is just how I choose to play the game.

Postscript

Next time you drink a coffee take a moment of silence for Krivitsky’s suicide letters, wherever they are. Also, think about that moment when the cleaner of Sergius Seldes’s house took his correspondence with Tolstoy and used it as kindling to start a fire to warm some water. I love paper, and I still look at my past as an archivist with romanticism in my eyes. I do feel a deep sadness when I think about all the letters that we will never see. It is silly, I know, but there it is. And then after the sadness, the researcher in me makes me think, where is the fragility of the digital medium? Of course, there is a lot that we can see now, but I wonder about the ones you can only see when the next medium arrives. Will this newsletter be burnt and forgotten, or will it be one node of the future lips of a better and more capable writer?

6

Here’s an image to help you out:

13

Caro brilliantly pointed this out for you and I both, 🐠🧠:

This is a special desk, not that horrible Ikea thing you have right now. It’s special because your grandfather built it for you. He found the right tree and sawed it down. On a balmy August afternoon, he processed it into lumber. It had been years since he had built a piece right from the beginning. Deciding on the design took him days; various images danced in his head rhythmically, pieces from the past kept creeping in, each with an accompanying lesson. Some images he only imagined once, while others merged into new iterations. He enjoyed the thought process as he knew this beautifully orchestrated juxtaposition of lines and angles corresponded to a symphony of chains of neurons connecting and lighting up. The sculpting that would take place in the wood needed to happen first inside his brain. During an otherwise uneventful day that September, the final group of neurons connected and the desk was a concept. His mind was made up, and so he put the plan down on paper. Then and only then he got to work.

His hand wasn’t as steady as when he was young. His arthritis-ladden, crooked fingers hurt with the work. And yet, not once he thought about the days his hands were steady and enduring machines. His elbow clicked with every turn of each screw. His lower back reminded him of all the hours he had accumulated being bent over that workbench throughout his lifetime. It was a poignant and dull reminder. And yet, on that desk he built for you, every joint was tight, every juncture smooth. Not a single screw was visible to the human eye.

Just as he did in his best days, he stayed patient and let the work take the necessary time. Nothing rushed him, and yet he was quick. Every fiber of his body and mind shook, yet he was precise. When the piece was assembled, he sanded it gently and relentlessly. He didn’t stop until it felt like silk. He was satisfied. It felt soft to the touch, yet it showed the strength of the tree it once was.

This was his legacy to you. He wanted to show you his love, but you were too young to get it. He wanted something that lasted. He wanted something you could touch and feel. This was for you, and for you there was only space for hope, softness, and for the relentless beauty of life.

Breathe 🐠🧠, breathe.

This is your desk and you are particularly attached to it because the story behind it is so fucking great. It doesn’t matter who your grandfather is in real life, this desk is yours and you love it dearly. This desk has four legs. No te pongas sassy, hay mesas de tres patas, o de dos patas o de una pata. Hasta hay mesas en forma de pata. You have used this desk since you were little. The love your grandfather put in the object, you feel it. You can touch it. For you, there is nothing more beautiful in this world.

Now go back to your time in fourth grade. Those weren’t easy days. They look fine today but back then, oof! It was rough. Every problem was enormous, and every solution was entirely new and particularly complicated. Like everyone else, you hated homework. Those who were good at it liked the praise but not the homework. Homework was a chore, and chores stink. To add to your hate of homework, you found love. It came in the form of a blonde kid. You thought the blonde kid was the most beautiful in school, the coolest, and the smartest1.

Yes, this was your life back then. You had that big box of WTF called love inside yourself. You didn’t know what to do with it, what it was, or how to get rid of it. You also had a long and annoying list of tasks to do for school. All this while everyone kept telling you they wished to be in your shoes — que es de los peores dichos que hay, by the way. Fourth grade was hard.

Diligently, for that whole year, you sat at your grandfather’s desk and did your chores. You fought the distractions that your mind threw at you one by one. Sometimes, you fantasized a little before coming back to writing, and sometimes you stood up and jumped off the bed to the ground several times. Each time you would go back to writing. And as you wrote, you gently tapped the right front leg of your desk with the metal square T ruler you inherited from your grandpa. Gosh, you loved that square! It was heavy and precise. It wasn’t the transparent plastic BS the other kids at school had. This thing could break a skull if you wanted — al menos eso era lo que decía tu mamá cada vez que la llevabas al colegio: “no vayas a matar a nadie con esa escuadra!”

Tap, tap, tap.

Gently and softly. Day after day, you tapped that leg while you did your homework.

Tap, tap, tap.

While your brain hummed all the songs your grandfather could only dream of.

Tap, tap, tap.

Until the leg’s structure started to give way and splinter fiber by fiber.

You were oblivious to this. You were thinking about your blonde love and that jerk from school you knew was lying every time he spoke, yet all teachers were eager to believe. And in front of you lay the half-finished essay sobre el Descubrimiento de América that you couldn’t care less about.

Tap, tap, tap.

One whole year. The beautiful symphony of your rambling thoughts, your gentle hums, and the square hitting the wood kept playing in your room.

That was your parent screaming. The tap stopped. There’s no escaping the fact, you broke the leg. For the first time in a year, you hear the silence. It hits you like thunder right in the middle of your soul. Up to that point, you had no idea what a soul even was, but now it is crystal clear you have one and that it is a hurting bunch of nothing. You will never feel this again in your life. That mix of anger and shame and helplessness – ay 🐠🧠, qué fuerte, ¿no?

You hate the adult in front of you because that adult is pointing to the inscrutable reality of your mistake. At the same time, it is the only person that can give you some comfort. But that adult is mad at you. You can see it, feel it, hear it. Deep inside, you know that emotion is right. You would be mad too. In fact, you are mad too! So you have two angers, yours and theirs. And you don’t want theirs. You want to throw it back at them with all your might.

TAP! TAP! TAP!

You grab the square, heavy as it is, hit the broken leg harder than you ever have and throw yourself to the ground to cry because there is nothing else to do.

Sob, sob, sob.

That day, for the first time in your life, you become conscious of the complexity of your relationship with your parents. That day, when you are confronted with the intensity of that soup of emotions, you start your very human and very endless road into rationalizing.2 That’s the beginning of your journey into adulthood. It will end one day, but you have now taken the first step.

After crying intensely, after reluctantly hugging your adult, and after calming down a little, you decide to make up for it. You will fix the leg using your grandfather’s tools and knowledge, honor his name and make the adult in front of you regret all their anger and disappointment.

That’s your first-ever rationalization.

Because in life, you don’t make up for anything. Things happen, and they pass, and that is it. There is no coming back. Your grandfather will never feel the pain of the leg nor the love of the retribution. All these tit-for-tat schemes in our heads come from believing that life is linear, that for each event, there is a cause – and only one – so that you can go back until you find a greater Being and it forgives you. But that’s only true in ideal physics. Every event in your life is caused by an infinite plethora of inputs, not just one. Before an effect, there are innumerable causes, not a straight line. And exactly because of that, reparations don’t work. They appease the emotion, but they don’t repair a thing. Rationalizations are just the way our prefrontal cortex linearizes reality in order not to accept it for what it is, because accepting reality is the most difficult thing there is.

Yup, that’s your first rationalization. It also marks the start of a recurring metaphor we’ll revisit: the four legs of this table. These posts won’t come all at once, and they’ll be more personal than the rest. This is the first one. It brings us closer. But don’t get touchy-feely; we aren’t there yet. We will be, but not right now.

Leg 1: The University

Spoiler: you try to fix the leg, but it doesn’t work. You end up having to replace it. Worse, you have to ask for help from your parents, who end up doing most of the work. Your desk is still your desk, but now it has a new mismatched leg.

I arrived in the U.S. in 2008, con una maleta de ropa, unos dólares y una ilusión, como dije en el primer post. I came sponsored by a fellowship from the University of Chicago. It was a big deal for me. The number of events I remember with great detail is very limited. Weirdly, most of the memories I hold on to are moments of shame and regret,3 yet there are moments of pride and accomplishment too. They are fewer and less intense, but they are stored there somewhere. With them, there’s the memory of the day I received a call on my cell phone offering me the fellowship.

Getting a call was an occurrence for me in those days. I had a girlfriend who hated that she loved me, so she never called; my friends were broke; and my parents were probably tired of me not picking up. Calling cell phones was expensive back then and fundamentally different from calling landlines. So yeah, no calls, let alone a long-distance one telling me I was being offered a stipend and free tuition for a Ph.D. program in fucking Chicago. I remember hearing the other side’s voice telling me the offer was very competitive and that I should consider it.

Here’s the thing 🐠🧠. Let’s give this moment the epic nature it deserves. When you grow up in the middle class of the twentieth century, you are taught education is the way to a better, fuller life. It will give you the necessary tools to thrive professionally. It will allow you to improve your quality of life and self-actualize. It goes deeper than that. As Bernstein brilliantly showed: the history of the education system is the history of the middle class. I know this sounds kind of weird. Yet it is true. They are two conceptual constructs, two abstract things, two very different intellectual objects, yet they are equivalent. Lo sé 🐠🧠, lo que te permite hacer el cerebro con la realidad es una cosa loca y fascinante. The sociological proof for it is complex and incredibly long so we won’t go there, but you can read it here.

I am nice and know my job is to simplify without falsifying, so here I offer proof with the two things I am trained at, logic and cultural narratives.

Consider the premises: 1. The Poor do not have access to elite education. They stay poor. 2. The Rich have access, but do not need it. They stay rich.

The Middle Class is the complement to the union of these sets. They are defined by a specific tension: they have access, and they desperately need it.

If you crush the homework and nail the essays, you can transmute yourself. You can become rich, but with a moral bonus: you didn’t inherit it; you earned it.

This is why the university is our center of gravity. It defines everything, even by its absence. It explains our schizophrenia regarding dropouts: we condemn the poor kid who drops out of a broken system, yet we worship Zuckerberg or Gates as transcendent.

The result is a silent, terrifying implication: We have decided that being educated is more important than being good. ¡Sabes que para ser un pez gritas mucho! Ya lo sé que tú no lo piensas así pero se sigue de tus presupuestos, ¿qué le vamos a hacer?

And yes, I will have my tangent, even if it breaks the flow. Because the 20th-century academic machine didn’t just elevate the degree; it deconstructed the alternative. It turned “being good” into a cultural object with no objective value. “All is narrative, all is text, nothing is real.” To the modern academic, moral objectivity is just a religious artifact—and for them, religion is the devil.

So when I got that call, and they said I should consider it because it was a competitive offer, I didn’t know how to respond.

Can you win the lottery twice? Can you choose between jackpots? Is there more than one exit?

That was silly. That was just my ignorance. That was just me coming from the margins. In the margins, no excess money can pour into universities, accounting is tight, and everything is tit-for-tat. You don’t get more than one opportunity. You work your ass off, you pray for the best, and when you get it, you lower your head and say mil gracias and accept whatever is given. In the South, we are taught obedience.4 So that was the only response I was capable of: mil gracias, tell me how to get there! That is all I need. I would have made it work even if the stipend was half the amount.

I left my punky south to the noir north con una maleta, $2,000 y una ilusión.

Let’s go back to the beginning for a second and close the metaphor. Imagine yourself as a four-legged desk. Not a cartoon image. Instead, imagine this desk holds your soul, and it rests on four pillars.5 For me, one of the legs was education. When I accepted the scholarship, I thought that this leg had just been strengthened. I rationalized it this way: I had done my homework diligently, I had worked hard for the credentials, I knew how to think critically, I knew how to take all kinds of tests, I knew how to write essays, and I knew how and who to ask for recommendation letters. And I fooled myself, thinking it was all because I was so smart.6 For sure, I thought luck had played a big part, but also I felt like I had earned something, felt like I deserved it.

When that first winter slapped me in the face with its blunt force, the leg of that desk had already started to splinter. I just hadn’t noticed. I’ll save you the specifics, you don’t need them; stories of drinking and despair are all the same.7 I’m sharing my realizations with you because those are the ones that hurt, and that’s where the lessons are.

Oh our silly middle-class souls. You live enough time in this ethos and you start confusing things. You confuse the education system with what you think is its product. It is a self-validating story! And so far away from reality. Yes 🐠🧠, just look at the world around you. One thing is the creation and transmission of collective knowledge and the apprenticeship of the young, together with the perpetuation of old and valid cultural patterns, and the challenge of obsolete ones. One thing is the careful guidance for the development of children and the thoughtful and meticulous teaching of how to be part of the human fabric we call society.

Another thing is institutionalized indoctrination. Sounds extreme? It isn’t. One thing is loving God and being a good human according to your beliefs, and another is the Catholic church.

Institutions – both for religion and education – are necessary to bring individual beliefs together, but past the need for them, the question we really should try to answer is whether the current system perpetuates differences more than it promotes improvements.

I won’t answer that today. What matters is when the crack appeared. One month after my first arrival in Chicago, I got an email8 asking me to report to the donors how I was doing in my degree. They wanted a personal and moving story. They wanted some color.9

What donors and why should they care? I have to thank rich people for what? Wut? Wait! What?!?!?!?

I thought I had earned this!10 I had/have nothing against the donors; they wanted to know what their money was doing. That was fine. I was/am all for effective altruism. I will always be grateful to whoever they were. The problem was that I fell down from the moon. I realized my ignorance. I didn’t know how the funding of the elite institutions of education in the world worked. I didn’t fully grasp, until that moment, what private education meant in the top schools in the world. My middle-class soul had just discovered elite education was a club, and that I had been invited. Sure, I wanted to believe it was because of the value of my original ideas. But it was not. I just ticked all the right boxes. And my next task was to transfer all those check marks into a nice narrative, a nice story that would invite more charitable donations.

Tap,

Tap,

Tap.

Yeah. Right there and then, I discovered I was a chicken in a chicken contest, and they gave me a blue ribbon. I had been groomed and indoctrinated, and now I had to play the part. Don’t get me wrong, though. There was no evil mastermind behind it and everybody was doing their best. There was nobody to blame other than me. Nobody was malicious or duplicitous. Nobody tricked me. I hadn’t been deceived. I just didn’t have enough information, and I didn’t have any perspective. I was just coming to terms with the way things are – este dicho en cambio es la maldita locura. Como son las cosas. Total vaguedad, precisión infinita.

Reality is brutal when you confront it, when you realize no matter how much you resist it, you will always be subdued. And as you know, I was a punky punk, and I truly hated playing the part … and clubs.

Pretty rapidly it got worse.

Let’s be cynical. Academia is indeed a medieval institution that, in many ways, hasn’t changed its mission or ways.11 All universities look alike. All universities want to emulate a handful of prestigious ones. And here’s the part our middle-class souls always want to deny:12 universities are a business, they have to sell products and services to customers. Sure, they are financed in part by the government, they might be not for profit, but they still have to deal with the main thing a business does: selling to the market. We think that turning something into a public good makes it less of a business, but that is not the case. It is like believing that our body's nutritional needs change depending on whether the food has been foraged by ourselves or given to us by our parents. It doesn't matter where the food or the funds come from, you need them to survive.

But we middle-class people turn a blind eye on the educational system. We believe universities don’t sell products, their purpose is to help us become better human beings. That’s a marketing gimmick. That is like thinking that somebody that sells you kale is selling you good health. What they are selling you is indeed a hard-to-swallow, acquired-taste vegetable. Health is the promise. The vegetable is the product. Universities sell diplomas and publications. Those are their products.

I have trained you so well, my dear 🐠🧠, and I know you are already connecting the dots. The resonances with our previous posts should already be hitting you hard. But let me give you something that, once again, might seem like a detour but it is not.

One thing you ought to know is that when the printing press comes around and universities explode, they also become brands, huge transnational brands. Take a close look at these logos

I don’t know if you agree, but these look as if they were meant to be put on a copper plate and printed on book covers. They indeed were for a very long time. Now, of course, there are plenty of new trendy ones. Nonetheless, the point stands. Books, libraries, universities, and modern businesses are all part of the same marketplace, and their construction rules were defined long ago. That’s also why most universities have carefully chosen Latin slogans. They all have a marketing strategy; their image is fundamental, their brand is everything. Because the real practical value they offer to their customers is to be able to put that brand next to their names. Academia is an authoring, authentication, and authoritative company. This is why the academic motto is Publish or Perish. In plain Colombian English: print shit or die.

Wow, that was a lot, and maybe you weren’t connecting the dots after all. Let me reframe this in a way that clicks. Here’s what I had finally understood: Academia is an economic enterprise sustained by a publishing platform. That was the kale. Modern universities operate like subsidized corporations that sell two main products: credentials and publications. That is where I was. That was the clarity that the donor email brought me.

The hard pill to swallow for me was the practical implications of that. Corporate things come with organizational charts, slogans, mission statements, lingos, acronyms, and office parties. All in themselves not terrible – except the office parties, those are just an atrocity – but then you realize it is all designed to give the product/service a uniform look and a specific way of being. If you are a part of it, you can color it any way you want as long as you don’t draw outside the lines.

As long as this stays an unaccepted and unspoken rule, no post-colonialist Derrida-lover Deleuze-and-Guattari bathroom reader will ever be able to deconstruct it. And that is the problem! Because if your mission statement is to be intellectually free, then there should be no lines. The whole system is made to incentivize and promote the people who ticked all the boxes. The hoops are so vast and there are so many of them that when you distill all the applicants, you are left with the ones who know how to obey the system and won’t draw outside the lines. The academic system is, by inception, one that excludes. It selects the people that will perpetuate it in exchange for validation from the system itself.

The people like me.

Tap,

Tap,

Tap.

Yeah, I found myself there, in the middle of the beast. I realized that access to education and making it free wouldn’t solve many of the problems. Because that doesn’t change the structure or the aim of the process: it has to be a selective system to sustain itself, otherwise what is its point? And participating in it, it is just perpetuating it.

I could have left there and then. I could have given it all the middle finger when I realized that brutal honesty didn’t matter. What mattered was to produce a certain type of knowledge within a certain type of ideology, in a very specific language, with the approval of the people in charge. The only way out was to write a corporate-looking, lingo-coded dissertation. It must satisfy the gatekeepers.

You bet your ass I tried to tell my truth, but it didn’t work. It was denied and dismissed.

So I sold my soul to the devil, just like that. It wasn’t a one-day decision. It was an endless pilgrimage of hours and hours of forcing myself to work. Continuously, laboriously, relentlessly. Tap, tap, tap. I did the best I could. I wrote a dissertation that didn’t betray or embarrass me but didn’t make me proud. Because I conceded. I used their lingo. I colored each box to its limit but no further, even though I knew the lines were wrong deep within my soul. I told myself that finishing was the only valid way to get out and say, “this shit sucks”. To leave the thing in the middle was defeat. I promised myself I’d see it through, finish, and then I could despise it all. Then, I would be above it.

But I wasn’t. I will never be. And I painfully realized that with every word I wrote. No matter the depth of my thinking, I will never be above an institution built and sustained by thousands of human lives brighter and more generous than me. My truth is still valid: the specific knowledge produced by academic thinking and categorical textual learning driven by a corporate ethos creates monsters like nazism-marxism-and-all-its-current-form-derivatives, atomic bombs, and scientific and industrialized ways to approach the human condition. Reducing life experience to a set of variables: gender, race, age, religion, ethnicity, zip code, etc., in order to gain statistical meaning is a tragedy. It explains why kids nowadays think the most important battle of their human condition relies on a third-person pronoun. It also explains why there is such an enormous mismatch between the potential we have as a species to solve fundamental problems and the problems we do end up solving. Why do we still have war? Why? Why do we still have hunger? Why? Why haven’t we found better ways to communicate? Why don’t we have a better representation system instead of one that divides everything into ones or twos?13 If we have become better at producing food and shelter, why do we have to work more and are less satisfied?

Don’t give me platitudes. I want an honest answer 🐠🧠. Think about it. It is absurd and you don’t have an answer other than “it is human nature”. That is the definition of platitude. I think we most definitely can and should solve those problems, but our incentives are wrong, and I think our education system and our views on it are part of the problem, not the solution.

The final tap, the one that broke the leg, was this: I knew the whole thing needed a change. I knew and know people who devote their lives to changing the system. I saw the importance of participating in a gigantic task like that, even if my impact would have been minuscule. Yet I chose not to. I could play it morally and say I was humbled and overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, but that would be a lie. I simply did not want to fight the way things were. I did not have any internal drive or interest in that regard, I was indifferent to the problem. I didn’t know why then, and I still don’t today. That, my fishy friend, is what I had to accept. I gave 0 fucks.

Tap,

Tap,

Tap.

After that, I had to rebuild that leg of my soul. It was simple and terribly difficult. I realized I did learn a lot, because you always can. Learning is always a choice. For me, it is the only valid choice, and so I went for it. That was how I rebuilt that leg. I separated learning from academia and the education system, and opened my mind to other ways of thinking and being in the world. I was wounded, and the leg I rebuilt was clearly not the original one. But I was freer.

They gave me a diploma, coffee mug, and a pat in the back, and I was done with the thing. I had escaped my country in the most polite way you can escape anything. I had done what I had been trained to do. I had gone through all the hoops, I had danced like a monkey dressed in a military suit. I learned the tricks and climbed the ladder, and then, when I was finished, I left the circus with ambivalent feelings and a lot of scars. And now what? That, I will tell you in the next posts. In the meantime, build a desk, learn something, or try to give the metaphoric finger to something in the same epic (?!?!) way I did.

See you soon 🐠🧠.

1

Meet Caro, the editor. She smarter and wiser than me. She points at the right stuff:

8

Here’s the email:

9

Caro strikes again:

Emma loves headlamps. Every time I give her one her face glows with excitement. Every time, she is surprised. 

"Wow! This one has three bulbs, 250 lumens, and seven different settings!" she’ll celebrate. I know each word coming out of her mouth – I bought the thing precisely for those specifications – but I don’t understand a thing. It doesn't matter, her elation gets me high. 

Emma is my wife, she is thirty-something years old1 — I won’t add up for you — and I have given her way too many headlamps in our married life. The lamps, all of them, see very little use. However, when a true occasion to use one arises … I mean … that’s a really good day for the whole family.

At this point, anyone not wandering the internet would reflect on Emma’s great capacity for looking at the same object with novelty and excitement. A more intelligent writer would encourage you, "the reader", to bring that fresh look to all the different aspects of your life. Not me, I have been listening to this delicious nu–flamenco for the past few days and a part of me just wants to surrender to melancholy. I want to reflect on the passage of time y decir que el cayo es el dispositivo biológico que mejor expresa la adultez2.

Did I lose you there? I hope not. Por el post anterior deberías saber que el español se me sale cuando la cosa se pone más delicada.3 So yes, a part of me wants to go all “let’s feel alive! untémonos de vida hasta que nos duela la cara.”4 But that’s not where we are headed today. That’s kind of touchy–feely, kind of personal, and you and me reader, we are not there yet. 

It is also too literary and this is not a novel nor a book. This is a newsletter. More importantly, that’s not why you are here. I will, in due course, explain – I owe you as much and think you should know – but for now indulge me. Let me tell you where my head is going.

Years of academic learning and critical thinking have crippled me in some ways. Where you see a nice gesture, let’s say giving a new headlamp to Emma to celebrate another random date, I see an implicit contract. Y ya ves, por lo del cayo5 I fully accept that when I give Emma that amazing lamp I researched so carefully on the internet for more hours than I should have, I expect something in return: her honest excitement. Honest is an important word here. Beyond honest excitement I also expect to feel good about myself because of how well I know her. In other words, my ego is unavoidably involved in this contract which Emma inadvertently entered when I decided she’d receive a gift.

What ends up happening most of the time is I cannot just give her the next best lamp which, let's be real, would be the sensible thing to do. No, not me, I have to spend hours of research trying to find the coolest and most obscure lamp out there. This is both because I really want to surprise her — as we have established – but also because I want to express my skill as an internaut. Most of the time I quit this gargantuan task and end up buying something else. Sometimes I persist.

The last time I dived in, I found this:

That's the first commercial headlamp. It was invented and commercialized by the French electrical engineer Gustave Trouvé in 1883. The one in the picture is from the original series. It’s the first piece of wearable electric technology we have a record of. You can imagine my excitement when I managed to get Google to spit out this link to me. This was by far the coolest headlamp a human could buy. I don’t know what Emma would have done with it other than storing it somewhere, but the size of my bragging rights would have lasted till dead did us apart.

Unfortunately, it had already been sold on eBay back in March 2018 for $696 . What a steal! I tried to find the buyer to no avail. I wrote eBay email after email. Nothing worked. I was a little disappointed but it didn’t last. I had found a thread to pull from, an unexpected story.

Besides the headlamp, Monsieur Trouvé also invented an electric tricycle, the first electric light for a boat, the first oxygen suit for balloonists (the coolest invention a human could have ever produced), underwater lighting (used for the construction of the Suez canal), a working electric helicopter, and a long list of other steam–punk–sounding and super cool–looking creations.

As you can expect I spent my fair dose of time researching Trouvé. Was he early? Was he the only one? Was he unique? Sometimes I start googling too fast when a little bit of thinking could give me the answers I’m looking for. Of course he wasn’t the only one. The list of other inventors is impressive. One could spend hours going through each one of them, I know I did. 

But after a while you realize that even though everyone gave their inventions a personal touch, they were all trying to solve similar problems in similar ways. And the similitudes don’t end there. The parallelisms between our present–day Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the Trouvés of the second half of the 19th century are impossible to overlook. Just as I cannot help but tell myself: “of course, Juan, of course, it has all been done before, you’ve seen it happen one hundred times before. And you will see it happen one hundred times again. There’s nothing new under the sun.” 

Yet there is something that surprises me. The childish dreams of the Elon Musks of the world haven’t changed much in two centuries. In essence, they probably haven’t changed much in thousands of years

7(👈) And then there is something that bothers me, and something that makes me feel sad. Could it be that damn flamenco again? Maybe, I don’t know 🤷‍♂️. What bothers me is that our modern billionaires had the script written for them. A portable computer? Yeah, whatever! That was the next logical step after the desktop computer. A phone that’s also a computer? Big deal! All of us that had mp3 players in the 90s knew where things should go. Going to Mars? Yes, of course we want to go to Mars. Do we have the technology to do it? Who doubts it? What do we need? Easy! Rockets that land themselves and robots that can build us a whole habitat so that when we get there everything is ready. 

All present problems have been laid out and solved. The fun is over, it is just a matter of time for the engineers to figure the details out. Let them compute and let’s be done with the fucking thing! 

I know, that’s too aggressive and I should chill. Y si nos vamos a poner inteligentitos,la pregunta es por qué me caliento por algo tan simple? Pues no sé reader, imagino que tú tienes una explicación si no no preguntarías. Dímela y déjate de joder o vamos pa’lante8. Okay, I am chill now. Here’s what makes me sad, today's’ technological race is cool and all but it lacks oomph and class.

On the other hand, an oxygen suit for balloonists? In 1883? How unscripted and visionary is that! How bohemian!

Well,

Forty–eight years before Trouvé, in 1835, a young Edgar Allan Poe published “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” in the Southern Literary Messenger. I’ll save you the googling and the reading: Pfaal builds a balloon and a device that helps him with pressure and oxygen in order to reach the moon. He then flies off and finds a bunch of cool stuff. In other words, Pfaall builds an oxygen suit for balloonists and finds a whole civilization on the moon.

I haven’t been able to confirm Trouvé read Poe’s story. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I looked for signs everywhere I could. No luck. I think that confirmation is irrelevant though. Sure, it would make this post so much nicer. It would close a loop and it would give me such satisfaction as an internaut. But that’s just my personal need for life to be more literary, to follow the aesthetics of writing and not the rules of reality.

The point is this: once you conceive a possible future then and only then it becomes an option. 

Moreover, if that future is plausible that option will be explored. No, I am not trying to bring back Wilde’s life–imitating–art debate. But the fact is, once you can see it, once you visualize Pfaal flying off to the moon in an oxygen suit, then it becomes real in your head. And from the perspective of your brain, real-in-your-head and real are the same thing. Because these are just ideas. They are biological products of the exact same nature, no matter how abstract they are, no matter how metaphysical. 

They are biochemical connections of our system, they don’t exist outside us. Their reality is independent of the reality of what they represent. 

The idea of a pink unicorn is real whether it exists or not, and it is the same as the idea of a cow. And precisely because ideas are biological products they can spread like viruses. Sure, whether the virus analogy works can and has been debated, but that amount of specificity isn’t important. What matters is that some ideas, the plausible ones, the graphic ones, the well–written ones become memes and live in the collective web of biological products that is culture. 

And that’s how we get from Poe to Trouvé. Not because he read him, but because in the memes of the time the idea of an oxygen suit for balloonists had already been spread, it already existed, the dots had been connected. And once the idea was conceived the possibility existed.

Yup, just like that. So long Monsiour Gustave Trouvé! 👋 You are nothing but just another restless kid with electric dreams and a talent to shut down the naysayers. You just figured out the details that somebody scripted for you a while ago. No oomph, no class.

There’s one fun story, though, that makes me really happy — it cannot all be bad news in this second post.

Poe created a wonderful hoax appropriately named the Balloon–Hoax. In 1844, New York’s newspaper The sun published an extra edition celebrating the completion of the first transatlantic balloon flight. Allegedly, European balloonist Monck Mason had flown across the Atlantic Ocean in 75 hours, starting in Norfolk and ending in Sullivan’s Island, North Carolina. The article included a graphic of the balloon’s design among all the details and technicalities of the flight.

When published, most people believed it to be true because it came in the regular newspaper, it was written to be believable, and because it was plausible. I mean, they did an extra edition just for the thing. The afternoon the story broke, hundreds gathered by The Sun’s press to hear everything about it. 

Paperboys made a lot of money selling overpriced copies, other newspapers made money re–printing the story. Some people were excited, some people panicked, and in general the public fought over the whole thing because that’s what the public does. This reception was way more intense than Poe anticipated and the paper had to retract the story two days later.

Yes, reader, I am with you. How did the paper allow this? Well, it was an extreme publicity stunt that evidently worked pretty well. But there’s more to it. And this brings us to the 5th juncture of this post: by this point you already know that this too had been scripted and laid out, and you are trying to hurry me up to get to the point. Well, yes, you are both brilliant and right, although quite annoying. This hoax was a response to a previous one appropriately called the Great–Moon–Hoax. 

In 1835, the same year Poe published the unparalleled adventure of Pfaall, The sun had published the genius and grandiose story of the discovery of a complete civilization on the moon by someone else. Richard Adams Locke was the author and the story was fantastic. Locke was smart enough  not to sign it with his name, instead, he gave authorship to Dr. Andrew Grant, companion of famous astronomer Sir John Herschel. 

Grant was full–on fiction, but Herschel was very real. Sir John had discovered four galaxies: NGC 7, NGC 10, NGC 25, and NGC 28. And no, he didn’t give them these atrocious names, those were the product of boring professors of the 20th century. But he did name seven of Saturn’s moons: Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus. Those, of course, are names with some kind of oomph and class. 

Anyhow, in the hoax Grant claimed they had built a new telescope with advanced technology and reported they had found a whole civilization on the moon. There were bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail–less beavers, and bat–like winged humanoids.

Did people believe it? You bet your ass they did. For the same reasons you believe what you believe and Q–Anon is a thing. But they didn’t believe it as hard as they believed the balloon hoax. Locke had pushed it a little too far.

Now, this is where the whole thing gets tangled and where it all starts to make sense. Poe was really mad at Locke. He truly believed that Locke had based his hoax on Pfaall’s story. You cannot blame him, the accusation made sense. So Poe wanted to get back at Locke by creating a better hoax, and so he did. He went all the way, and then some, and it got a little out of hand, as things tend to get when the writing is good and spirits are high. He made the balloon hoax, which brings us back to Pfaall, and then back to Poe again.

Great, now we are in a loop, which is truly our main juncture. Here’s our storyline so far:

I agree the graphic is cheap and there is no time to waste. We are also literally just going round in circles. Let me get us out. Remember when I said I would tell you why you are here? That was me saving my ass and being smart. You always have to leave yourself some crumbles to come back to. 

But here’s your answer, the result of my wanderings on the internet. The arrows you see up there are the map of my wandering. The links exist. And while there is HTML code taking you from one place to the next, the links only really become active when you think about them. 

Code is dead after all. Only after you read these lines and your neurons connect the electrical pathways created by these textual events the graph is connected, only when it becomes a biochemical product it becomes real. Otherwise, those links will never be active. 

Now, those links can be activated because the architecture of the internet allows them. The net holds the nodes and I connected them in that particular order. I don’t know why, but no matter the reason I have to stop blaming the flamenco. Now that you read this, you have connected them again, which is cool. And this newsletter is me being audacious and making a bet. I bet you I can keep making you read my internet wanderings. I bet you and I can keep them links alive somewhere. In the end, my hope is we can connect and I can show you how my brain works. Not because I think is any different than any other brain. Because I spend so much time alone inside of it, and if I don’t get all these things out, they will die with me, and that seems like a waste. And if I manage to get you with me to the very end of this project, well, I can only say it like this: points will be made, hearts will be broken, laughs will be had, and things will get very real.

Hush, reader, I am not done. I agree with you that that’s a low rhetorical move and a relatively cocky bet. It was both arrogant and as dorky as you can get. Also a little touchy-feely. Again, you are right. But if you are a reader of any worth you should know that this was scripted too, it had all been laid out before. 

The story is called “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster and it was published in 1909. It describes a world in which the machine takes over all basic maintenance functions of humanity. In many ways it’s everybody’s dream: the machine provides the food and cooks it; the machine takes care of the cleaning; the machine deals with the production of energy and goods; the machine handles transportation, housing, medicine; the machine is the government; the machine does it all, even its own maintenance. 

You, my dear reader and friend, are always asking the entrepreneurs of the world to stop with the nonsense of Mars and instead hurry up with beefing up the roombas and the dishwashers and the self-driving cars so that you don’t have to do any more of that. Well, Forster panned it out for you. In the fictional world he created the machine takes care of it all, every little thing. 

His stroke of genius is that he doesn’t do the cheesy Matrix scenario in which the evil robots turn against humans, which is always a bad fictional move by writers that don’t understand computer code. Don’t get me wrong, I consume those narratives like they are buttery popcorn for my brain, but Forster’s move is more elegant and premonitory. 

In his world, humans would become producers and consumers of second-hand ideas. Let’s be precise: they become exclusively that. They will mostly stay up in their rooms, communicate via digital mediums, and become isolated individuals connected to others only through discourse. Just blah, blah, blah, and nothing else. Suena familiar, no? Un poco sí. 

All sci-fi of any worth is the product of somebody’s anxiety of a plausible future. Forster’s consists in the clever assertion that, when you remove from the human condition the need to work, to move, and to complete the most quotidian of tasks, human existence is reduced to the continuous spilling of each individual’s inner brain chatter out into the world. Life becomes this atrocious overanalyzed, rehashed, and rationalized reality made out of nothing but ideas. 

I know you’re trying to resist this! “That’s not what would happen Juan! That’s so exaggerated, it’s absurd. Forster is wrong! Humans would find a way to thrive in that context!” Claro reader, tienes toda la maldita razón. Forster pudo haber resuelto la cosa de millones de formas distintas. Y tú por supuesto no estás satisfecho con su modo y propondrías un mundo radicalmente distinto. But that’s what makes storytelling brilliant. 

A story is not a logical sequence of events with a prescribed relationship between them. Repito: it is not a series of episodes that follow logically from the rules of creation of the universe in place. But when the writing is good, any event can be connected and understood. That’s why, when you read Forster’s story, reader, you would not be battling with him like you are with me now. Because in my retelling of his novel I took out all the meat and left you with the bones, so all you see is the arrows, the naked connections, void of oomph and class. 

When the story is narrated nicely it feels like life. It feels like there is logic to the sequence of events. It couldn’t have happened any other way is what it feels like. Then, and only then, you start thinking, “Damn Forster! He saw the internet and social media before they were even close to being alive. The tragicomedy of the human condition is that we are all just passing time here on earth. When you remove the need to do from all of us, we are left with nothing.” Well, seamos honestos reader, tú a pesar de tu inmensa inteligencia no eres tan elocuente, pero digamos que pensarías algo similar. 

Then you can draw parallels to your current life and realize that all those chores you love to hate and that Monday walk your doctor keeps prescribing aren’t the things getting in your way of accomplishing what matters. Those are the things that matter, they are life my reader friend. 

The point is that you cannot isolate yourself and pretend to live off of your ideas because ideas, as we said, are biological products. If you want to get nasty let’s go there. Ideas are biological secretions and, if you live in a world in which you have disregarded the biological entity that produces them from its biological needs, your ideas get … well, stupid. When the connections between the dots in your head are void of any referential entity outside your brain, or other people's brains, they don’t matter any more. 

It cannot all be pink unicorns and ballon hoaxes, it cannot all be civilizations on the moon. At some point, we have to come back to the physical reality of our being. 

The other side is also true. When we strip our lives from everything that needs doing, all we are left with is that inner chatter, that need to connect the dots, to hash and rationalize ideas, and to turn everything into a story. Because that is at the core of who we are. That is us. 

That’s why you need Poe, and art and philosophy and connection. This is the reason why the arrows of the graph matter. That is what unites us in our shared humanity, as well as what allows us to express our uniqueness. And it is also why you made it all the way to the end of this post - and how I like to justify this and my future wanderings.  

That is it. It is upsetting how close Forster’s story is to the future, to the restless silicon kids with their electrical dreams. And it is wonderful, exactly because of this. Like that effing flamenco. Tú me dejaste de querer cuando menos lo esperaba. Cuando más te quería. Se te fueron la' gana'.

At this last juncture we have closed all the loops but one, Emma. And we will leave that one open like that, because that last arrow will just point to me. And as I said before dear reader, you and me, we are not there yet. We will be, but not today.

Till the next post dear 🐠🧠!

4

When I wrote this, I thought for a while: cómo traducir esto pa’ que lo entienda un humano cualquiera en cualquier lugar del mundo después de tomarse un vaso de agua un martes por la mañana. Pero me rendí. Porque eso que es untarse de vida me parecía como tan latinoamericano, como tan sudaca, como que se necesitaba esa conjunción de felicidad inocente y malparidez existencial que en el sur producimos en todo lo que hacemos. And so I stopped trying. Initially I wrote here a lazy: “untraslatable”. But then Caro said this:

Touché! There you have it. You do with that whatever you can, I want to do more but this is the only fair thing to do with this brilliance.

Okay, yo sé, yo sé, quién carajos es Caro? I really don’t know. If you paid attention to the last post you would know she is the editor, that is all I can say. You think she is invisible because I work hard to make my voice pretty loud, and she is superb at her job. But Caro has read every word I wrote with generosity and depth. She is the ultimate reader, an updated version of yourself. Let’s say it like this: when I sound good dear reader, you can thank her. Ah, sí, sí, sí reader! Por qué presentarla de esta manera tan torpe en un piedepágina? Well, it seemed like the right place. Pero tomátelo con calma, you will hear more from her in due time. 

We were book people dreaming in links, so breaking the most obvious physical limitation—linearity—felt radical. We imagined literature becoming a geometry, not a sequence. Not “turn the page,” but jump.

Open a link, fall through a trapdoor, land somewhere else entirely.

The internet had different plans. It didn’t replace anything—it devoured everything. The dream of wandering through a text, choosing your path, breaking linearity—the part that felt genuinely rebellious—splintered into something chaotic and erratic. Instead of Choose Your Own Adventure, we got optimized algorithms farming our engagement.

Fishbrain comes from that early internet lineage and a deep love for books.

That’s my origin story: half-computer, half-library.

Here, wandering is intentional. It is in the narration, in the digressions, in the connections you make and the ones I refuse to make for you.

the reading here is linear. It has an order, like a book. The aim is to build something that explodes.

Here’s the map. How you read this matters.

• [The Token] – How objects become stories, and why value is never where you think it is.

• [The Headlamp] – Technology, optimism, melancholy, and the light that blinds.

• [How Did We Get Here?] – Leg 1: A broken university desk and the quiet violence of beginnings.

• [A Greater Future] – Utopias, anarchists, immigrants, and the lies we build our worlds with.

• [The Mark] – Punk rock, logos, identity, and the tragedy of becoming a brand.

• [Fluffy Numbers in Your Head] – Addiction, Gödel, biology, and the illusions we call “mind.”

• [Who the Fuck Was Sylvia Plath?] – Pain, life, literature, and the brutality we prefer to clean up.

• [Fishbrain] – (The Conclusion).

Wander if you want. But start here.

NB: The notes/links will become active as I publish them.

By the end of this post —because the end is what matters to me— I expect your gears to turn and for you to feel physically happy, like you feel after a good workout in your body. Let me make it clearer: you know how the internet can suck your brain into a rabbit hole of links, articles, videos and three hours later you have learned nothing, done nothing, and there is a void inside your soul? Well, my aim is to do the opposite. I want you to come out of here feeling that unique happiness that only reading something that fidgets with your brain and your soul can produce. Sí, sí, sí, “fidgeting with your brain” es una imagen un poco asquerosa pero es efectiva así que vamole. I know the aim is ambitious and the topic of souls may seem superfluous, but if I simply wanted to make another random article I would just send you a link to an existing one. Instead, this time, I’ll lead you to understand what gives anything value.

This post is part of a newsletter. That’s our genre, and whether we like it or not, this genre is mostly a marketing tool. It is all about amassing eyeballs, about gaining your trust so you return for more and bring more eyeballs like yours here. Because of this, I cannot simply follow your whims and desires; I have to follow those who know, i.e. the marketers. They have the data and the algorithms, they know your behaviors better than you know them yourself. Here’s what they say:

Therefore, at the very beginning of each post, I should give you three or four (not more!) bullet points on the content of the post, to save you the trouble of reading this whole thing if you’re in a rush —God forbid you read. This should be immediately followed by social media links, so that you can share this post instantly and effortlessly on all your social media platforms. Only after all that comes the content -el relleno de la empanada- but that is secondary. See? No bang brother, puro PowerPoint pa’ mi gente linda y listo. 

I am compliant, so here’s a neat summary of what you’ll read:

• The story of how a Philadelphia teacher became a national icon and how you know her face without knowing.

• A brief explanation on how the silver monetary policy worked, featuring Nico and Bubbo and the American Dream.

• A section where I justify why you’re reading this by telling you the story of my grandfather.

• A hand-minted NFT for whoever makes it to the end alive.

Here’s the share link:

Share

Now that the marketers are happy, you are dissatisfied as usual, and I am a little hurt because the share button is ugly, we are ready to start.

Silver Dollar Coin

On Monday April the 26th 1926 an article titled Goddess on Time magazine started with the following paragraph:

Yeah …

2(👈)

The goddess was Anna Willes William, born August the 15th, 1857, in Philadelphia. She was the daughter of Henry Williams and Eliza Ann Willes. Sadly, we know nothing about the Williams family ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Of The Willeses, we know a lot. They came to Maryland from Scotland during the 17th century. They established themselves there and became quite wealthy. They did it the way the settlers did in this part of the world in those days: they owned slaves and had a plantation. El sueño americano del siglo XVIII. Un poco cínico, pero real.

Dr. Arthur H. Willes, Eliza Ann’s father, however, doesn’t seem to have been very good at the family business. Before Eliza Ann married Henry he had already lost all his wealth. His brothers on the other hand Peter John, William Henry, and Richard Short moved to Texas in the 1830s and became really rich. They did it the way you did in that part of the world in those days: they built a merchandising company that was very prosperous. With the cash they got they bought lots of land.

Because life is cool like that, once you have lots of any kind of scarce resource, you can speculate at pleasure. And so they did; when the railroad construction started booming in Texas they provided both the land for the rails and the supplies for the laborers building them, which in turn brought them more and more business. It was what the venture capitalists of today call the first-mover advantage. It was a win, win, win. El gringo dream del Siglo XIX3.

Our goddess Anna didn’t grow up in wealth, quite the opposite. Just like her grandfather did, her father lost all his wealth before she could use any of it. To make matters worse, he died when she was one year old. It was up to her mother to raise all the children and provide them with an education4. She also supported her sister Martha, Anna’s aunt, who never got married and lived in her house till she died. If you ask me, Eliza Ann is the hero of this story. Shush reader! Yo sé que no me preguntaste nada. También sé que esas muletillas retóricas son medio chimbas. Pero qué podemos hacer. Yo escribo como hablo parce5.

Anna Willes Williams dedicated her working life to education. First, she was a teacher in the House of Refuge of Philadelphia, an orphanage that was founded with the intention to give education and opportunities to the poorest orphans of the city. Doing a little research on this institution, one comes out with the idea that this is a classic Hollywood orphanage: more of a prison than a school. Like most things Hollywood there should be some truth to the form and a complete re-interpretation of the content. In any case, Anna didn’t stay there long. In 1891 she started teaching philosophy and kindergarten6 at the Normal Girls School. After that, she became the City of Philadelphia’s Kindergarten Supervisor, a position that she held till she died in 1926. Her death was the least goddess-like death you can imagine: in December 1925 she fell and hit her head. She spent the handful of months she had left in bed with apoplexy.

Okay, that gif was a little cruel, but with a smile on your face we can go back to the start: “Last week in Philadelphia a goddess died,” as I haven’t explained the goddess part yet. Storytelling is not a commutative task, dear reader. The order of operations matters a lot. And even though everything I am telling you is factual, the order in which I narrate it remains my creative freedom.

In 1878, before she was a teacher Anna was an art student. She belonged to the group of apprentices mentored by Thomas Eakins7. At this very same time in history, the very young and handsome, and very British George T. Morgan was looking for a model that had both a very American beauty and a very Greek profile. Morgan had been brought to the U.S. by Director of the Mint Henry Linderman, who was not satisfied with the local engravers. They didn’t have enough oomph for his taste. Linderman needed something posher, so he asked C.W. Fremantle, Deputy Master of the Royal Mint in London, to recommend a first-class engraver. Morgan arrived in Phili in 1876. Two years later he got his first consequential assignment: he was to design a new half-dollar coin. It should include two unmistakable American symbols: the bald eagle and Liberty, the goddess.

Morgan might appear very conservative to the modern eye, but truth is he was very avant-garde. He didn’t want to do a copy of ancient Greek models for Liberty, which was the standard. He wanted his designs to come from real living beings. That’s why he wished for a very American model with a very Greek profile to pose for him. Morgan had met Eakins —el pintor de arriba— through the art circuit and would confide in him his design ideas. When the goddess model chat came about, Eakins recommended and introduced the nice British gentleman to his student, Anna Willess Williams. Morgan was instantly struck. This was it! It took Eakins and Anna’s friends a lot of convincing to get her to pose —five full afternoons to be precise. In the end, she accepted under the condition that her identity should never be revealed.

In October 1878 for reasons I will explain later, the master of the Mint changed plans abruptly and urgently. The half-dollar was instead to be a one-dollar coin and they needed it for yesterday. Fortunately, Morgan was ready, and so he sent Anna’s profile design to Congress for approval. One month later the Mint of Philadelphia started coining what is now called the Morgan Silver Dollar. Rapidly, it became the most famous coin in the world. And with it, the very American and very Greek profile of Anna Willes Williams made it to the pockets and wallets of all kinds of people across the globe. This is how Anna became a goddess.

Doesn’t it feel good to finally see her portrait? To know why she was a goddess and of what kind? If I had shown this to you earlier it would have simply been another coin with a nice portrait. It could have been just another random fact, but now it’s a human, or at least the story of a human, with its sweat, blood and tears. Now it's worth it, you see.

It took us hundreds of years, at least three plot lines, hours of fidgeting through old documents, and a series of dense and convoluted paragraphs, but we made it to the first juncture of this story. We have just set things up. Alistamos la masa, cortamos las papas, tenemos la carne lista, el ají está reposando pa’ que coja picor, y el aceite se está calentado. Ahora es que toca hacer las empanadas. If you haven’t done so already, bring yourself a cup of tea or coffee, or a beer, nobody’s judging. Just get comfortable and get ready, this is about to get better.

Printing Money

Until 1873 in the United States, if you had some silver laying around you could just go to the most convenient Mint office and turn it into legal dollars, minus a minimal coining fee. Imagine how cool that was! Let’s say you found silver on your property, and let’s say it was enough for you to need to hire your cousin Bubbo to help you mine it. You know the government has a fixed price for it: in the early 1870s, the law said the government had to pay you $3.80 for every 100gr of silver you gave them8. They have no option. If you show up with pure silver, they have to pay you.

You do your math and you figure out you can mine a kilo of silver per day — that’s 1000gr, which makes $38 dollars per day of revenue. Bubbo is kind of broke, he is a student, has a long beard, can tolerate biblical amounts of alcohol, has a capacity to lie to your face that is uncanny, but his charisma is so strong that even though you know he is lying, you just want to go along with the lie because it just feels good.

This makes Bubbo very successful at finding lovers every weekend, so all he needs to be happy is enough to feed himself to survive until next Friday and some extra dollars for the beer. In other words, you know he will take any fair price you give him. So you decide to pay him $2 per day y la empanada pa’ el almuerzo. Esto era lo que le pagaban a Anna Willes como profe, infiere de aquí lo que quieras. That leaves you with $36.

If your expenses to mine are $3, then you have a profit of $33 per day per 1000gr. That’s a solid deal. It comes at virtually no risk because the government HAS TO buy the silver from you at a fixed price. No product in the world has a guaranteed customer and a guaranteed price. You are quite literally printing money. Isn’t that great?

It is! Until it isn’t. Here’s the thing, your cousin Nico, who owns property next to yours, also finds lots of silver. He is smarter than you and Bubbo, and he finds ways to pay his workers less and a more efficient way to extract the silver. If it costs you $5 (Bubbo + expenses) to extract 1000gr of silver, it costs him $1. Ouch! Nico also doesn’t have time for nonsense, so he sells his silver to whoever wants it at a lower price than the government price, let’s say $35 instead of $38. He does that because he is still making a profit and because he doesn’t want to have to take it to the Mint and do the coining, paperwork, and general bureaucracy. He also has lots of silver, so he has the advantage of selling huge quantities. The result is you make $33 per 1000gr while Nico makes $35, and he doesn’t have to deal with the government.

Now imagine there are a lot of Nicos around you. That would mean the street price of silver is lower than the government price, effectively $35 per 1000gr. The silver producers are super happy because it is a win-win for them, but the government is overpaying, so they are not. That’s one problem. The second is that the fixed price of silver is fake because Nico can always hook you up 😉. And the third is that the cost of money for Nico is cheaper than the cost of money for the rest of us… Wut?

That’s pretty much what was happening when the 1873 Coinage Act became law. All factual except for Nico and Bubbo, who are in fact my cousins. Bubbo’s beard is mythical and they have no clue about silver. I merely used them as representatives of the silver miners of the 1870s. Solo pa’ ponerle color y ayudarte a entender más fácilemente la vaina. Anyhow, in 1873, the government was fed up with overpaying and decided to not let average Nicos, Bubbos, and Juans coin silver. It kept a fixed price for gold but stopped with silver, and with that:

The Gold Standard was born ← pronounce this phrase with the gravest tone you can. Imagine you are the narrator of a Lord of the Rings movie.

this is ultimately real life. You can imagine that the Nicos and Juans of the country got really upset when they realised their business model was ruined by the new governmental monetary policy. And so they pushed back; they lobbied, and fought, and convinced some politicians that this made no sense. Here’s where Representative Richard P. Bland from Missouri comes in. He sided with the silver miners and wanted the price of silver to go up and for the government to print more money. This would be good for the miners and the extra money would stimulate the economy, he argued. “Along with Senator William Allison of Iowa, they pushed through the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which required the U.S. Treasury to do just that.”9 They won, big time. And this is precisely when Mint Director Linderman told the very young and handsome and very British Geroge T. Morgan to change the half-dollar design to a full-dollar and to print the hell out of it.

The Bland-Allison act was repealed in 1890, yet similar variants followed. For three decades the U.S. government kept subsidizing silver mining by routinely buying big amounts of silver from the market to artificially raise the prices. For three decades the government coined Morgan Silver Dollars in order to deal with this excess of silver. By 1921, when the last Morgan Dollar was produced, a total of 656,843,390 coins had been made. That’s how many Anna Willes Williams little silver portraits went around the world, a figure she simply could have never predicted. That’s how her stance as an American goddess was engraved in hard metal.

By now, your cup of coffee will be empty and you should be asking yourself two questions: 1) How did the world know Liberty was Anna if it was supposed to be a secret? 2) Why am I telling you this story?

You should be, because I want you to. It might sound simple, but the Nico’s and Bubbo’s silver tail can explain a lot of what is going on in the world right now. In any case, let me start answering questions and closing loops. Es hora de comerse le empanada.

Jorge Leonidas

Jorge Leonidas Acevedo Diaz arrived in the U.S. in 1928, two years after Anna’s death. He came through the port of New York City. He was a tall and quiet man. He probably wasn’t carrying more than his clothes, his papers, some money, y una ilusión. The contrast between Barranquilla’s customs office and Ellis Island’s must have been brutal. 

He came from Zapatoca. Un pueblo de algunos cientos de habitantes enpotrado en las montañas de Colombia, en esa manera que tienen los pueblos andinos de estar enpotrados en la cordillera. Esparramados ahí. Como si su fundador Don José Serrano y Solano se hubiera cansado de andar y arregañadientes decidiera fundar el pueblo donde lo cogió la fatiga, a puro despecho10.

The trip from Barranquilla to New York was a pleasant voyage through the Atlantic. Sure, he broke a toe in a swimming pool, but hey, there was a swimming pool! The hard part came before, in getting to Barranquilla. This had to be completed in as many modes of transport as were available at the time in that part of the world. It started with the treachours route that connects Zapatoca and Bucaramanga. If you feel adventurous and want to undertake that trip nowadays there is an excellent road, it is only a 65-km drive (20 miles) but the trip will take you two and a half hours. Blame the bumps; you are going from a height of 2133-m (7000-ft) to almost sea level and then back up. You cross an abyss, literally. 

In those days you could only do that length on a horse, the cars of the time just didn’t cut the mustard. Jorge Leonidas must have done it many times before, but I imagine this time felt different. Maybe the abyss he had to cross represented to him that other abyss he was about to go through. The metaphorical abyss, the one of the immigrant who goes from South to North with only his papers, some clothes, some money y una ilusón. But who knows. It’s easy to see metaphors when you write, it’s quite the opposite when you’re in them. That’s why psychics read your palm, the cards, the star charts, because reading is making sense, but living isn’t.11

Jorge Leonidas went back to Colombia in 1932 and made his money the way you did in that part of the world in those days: he exported coffee and imported American goods to sell in his family’s hardware store —el sueño latinoamerican del principio del siglo XX? In the ’50s because of some disagreement with his brother he moved to Bogotá. He set up a milk farm that allowed him to raise five children and help with the education of nine grandchildren. He had to live through the worst times of violence the country produced. His cousin was kidnapped twice by the guerillas. In the 1990s the paramilitaries came to ask for money to “protect” his land from the guerrillas or else. At that point in time one never wanted to know what else meant. He sold it all for whatever price was offered to the first buyer he found. His life works in exchange for a hurried check. La ilusión que había comenzado en ese viaje a pie de Zapatoca a Bucaramanga terminaba ahora a la fuerza de los fusiles. It was not the ending he probably dreamt but it didn’t matter, the thing had served its purpose.

Ten years after his death, in 2008, I too moved to the U.S. to study. I also only had a bag with some clothes, my papers, some money, y una ilusión. When you uproot your life and move up North the first winter slaps you in the face with full force. There’s no easing into it. Fall is an idea that lasts two weeks. But as soon as the cold hits you, your bones let you know you are outside your element. Not that you need the reminder but it is good when the insides of your body are aligned with your soul. Y vamole de nuevo con lo del soul, ya sé, ya sé, que si lo mantengo no puedo seguir echándole la culpa a mi ineptitud y mantener el diálogo contigo lector como una excusa. The thing is, when you decontextualize yourself in that particular way, when you cross that hard-line from being a tourist to becoming an immigrant12 that’s exactly when you find your soul, not a second before13.

Jorge Leonidas entered my thoughts constantly in those long weeks of December 2008. I use the English phrase porque era así que sucedía. Era un una imagen gráfica la que aparecía. No había palabras ni sónidos, sólo una figura larga y cayada, y entraba así no más, sin pedir permiso. He had lived through the 1929 crisis, I had arrived in time for the 2008 debacle. My experience - of course - was a lot less precarious, I was an email away from friends and family. I had the support of a University and a scholarship. Si mi viaje tenía un tinte definitivo no era por la dificultad de los tiempos, era por decisión propia. Jorge Leonidas was alone. Lonely in the most physical sense. I was lonely and lived in what I liked to call a digital solitude—a great name for an angsty blog or a cheesy jazz record. And in that digital solitude, I liked to believe that something tied us together. I liked to believe there was some kind of narrative, not just textual, but something biological that made us brothers in arms. Deep inside I fantasized genetic code could also drive life experience. I still hope it does.

Ya sé reader, me desmadré, me fui al carajo, far too emblematic. And yet it's honest. That’s what I thought at that time. In a weird-ass-lonely-graduate-student-in-the-middle-of-the-afternoon-smashed-by-the-weight-of-life way, I kept thinking about my Silver dollar coin. 

In those days I didn’t know anything about Anna or Morgan or the monetary policy of silver. I thought it was a 1929 dollar coin that Jorge Leonidas had brought with him from his trip. I thought it was given to me as a kid as some kind of rite of passage. His first work in New York was in the Stock Exchange. He was a roller skater boy taking orders from one trader to another. I thought he held onto that coin because he knew that one day it would be a meaningful symbol of the historical period he had the privilege to witness. I believed it held for him all the thinking and reflections of his lived experience. Back then, when I was living the same problems in my modern way, I felt like I was adding layers to that story. I was adding meaning to it. That silly coin united us, it was our thing.

Well … turns out it wasn’t.

On a recent visit, my father brought the coin back to me. I was excited but quickly realized that it was minted in 1921 and not 1929. My father also let me know it didn’t come from Jorge Leonidas either.

I was a little heartbroken. A part of my life’s narrative had lost color. I will not bother you with the true provenance of the coin because it’s simply boring and mundane. But I’ll tell you what I did next. I did what any Old Internet Person (a.k.a. OGI, OG Internaut) would do: I googled that coin. And I googled and googled away. I learned everything I have told you so far and more that I have left out because you’re probably on your third cup of coffee, or tea, or pint of beer. It was a great wander. I ended up in some obscure corners of the internet, and some even darker corners of … you know … my soul. At one point I decided to see if I could sell it, maybe get me a tattoo or some roller skates. Yeah, I was fishbraining in a rabbithole of internet links and bad videos. But that’s exactly when I found something that would tie this whole thing up. I realized value is determined by stories.

Let me take you there.

The end (keep reading idiot)

14 (👈) In the summer of 1879, a Philadelphia reporter made Anna’s identity and story public. That day she became a meme. I couldn't find the original newspaper or how she was discovered, but it happened, the Internet is certain. After that initial piece, several journalists tried to interview her. She got offers from a plethora of entertainment projects and advertising deals. Everybody wanted the Liberty Goddess to be part of their brand. She rejected them all and kept saying the coin thing was an “incident of her youth”. But the press was obsessed with her and wanted to sell the human story behind the coin regardless. 

In 1880, another Philadelphia reporter described her as having a “fair complexion, blue eyes, Grecian nose and crown of soft-spun golden hair”. Later on, in 1896, another reporter would add “she is slightly below the average height, is rather plump, and is fair. She carries her figure with a stateliness rarely seen, and, the pose of the head is exactly as seen on the silver dollar. The features of Miss Williams are reproduced as faithfully as in a good photograph.” Anna never wanted any of this, she never wanted to be famous, she never wanted to be a meme. However, the printing press loves mythic characters with a nickname —think El Quijote, and so she became *the Silver Dollar Girl*.

It was then that Morgan dollars stopped being just coins and became tokens (i.e. an object that acts as the physical representation of a story.) And that change is materialized in the fact that those coins now have very different values. I could take mine to the government and they will give me a one-dollar bill for it, or they can discount $1 from my taxes. That’s the official story, which is the belief that objects hold their original value. In other words that a dollar is a dollar. Alternatively, I could sell it on eBay for anything between $20 to $1000 dollars. That’s for the people that appreciate Morgan Dollars because of Anna’s and Morgan's stories. Or I could get it certified and guarantee that it was minted in San Francisco in 1921, and then sell it for anything between $2000 and $14000. This last one is for the people that not only believe and appreciate the Silver Dollar Girl story and that value Morgan Dollars because of Morgan, but that can also see in those coins the role they played in the history of monetary policy.

All these values are feasible. They all depend on the story behind them and on the two transacting parties agreeing on it. In other words, what makes them real is that you find another soul that believes in your story. And it is only in that shared belief that transactions can happen. Yes reader, I intentionally brought back the soul thing for a reason. If you are smart and backtrace all the times I used the word you can put it together. Don’t tell the economists, and the wise men with their stochastic processes, don’t tell the internet kidz with their cryptocurrencies, don’t tell the suits at Wall Street, but a token is nothing but a mediatic or physical metaphor representing both what somebody did for it and what you would do for it. It contains your past and future actions, and the story you attach to the thing. Because of this, tokens have all kinds of overlapping values, some astronomical and some null. That’s what allows you to transact them, that’s where their beauty resides. If you want to get a little bit theoretical, a token is the object that transports a meme. Personally, I prefer to say they are just metaphors of a story. It sounds better.

And with that, I have closed all loops but one. Why did I tell you all this? Well, I simply wished to add another layer to the story of my coin. No, no reader, I didn’t do it to add monetary value to it. I did it because the story I had before stopped being true. I needed a new story, a real one, a more honest one. And because every story needs an audience - otherwise it's not a story - I fished  you out (🐠🧠). So now you know, and I know, and our souls are at peace. And because I reward hard work, make sure to email me when you get to the end of this post, I will send you a special NFT to celebrate this accomplishment of ours: the humble moment our souls connected.

Till the next post.

4

Here we have conflicting information. A copy of Cincinnati newspaper “The Co-operative News” from 1892, reports that Anna had 8 siblings. On the other hand, the careful job of the LDS church via ancestry.com confirms only 4.

6

Kindergarten was subject in those days. Think of it as Early Childhood Education in today’s academic categorization.

Here’s a record of the 1900 Federal Census, when she is already a supervisor. You can find her in all the subsequent censi, until her death. Her address was: 634 N 12th St Philadelphia Pennsylvania, which you can see in its renovated splendor here.

Here’s a copy of her application to go to Switzerland in 1914. It was rejected because of the war.

That sounds so serious. What I mean is that there are documents on the internet that say the things I’m telling you about happened. Those documents are official and I fact-checked them. So things are factual. As for real … turn off the screen and go and learn how to do a cartwheel, that’s real.

7

It wasn’t until the moment I researched Anna that I learnt about Eakins. Un hueco brutal en nuestro conocimiento, pero sólo pa’ que te eduques don Thomas es el autor de esta pieza:

Un bang píctorico sin duda alguna.