Other Life

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control with Jacob Siegel

April 17, 2026

Jacob Siegel is author of The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. We discuss his thesis that the U.S. has shifted into a new form of governance where digital protocols and data infrastructures have displaced traditional legal and institutional sovereignty. Drawing on his experience as a U.S. Army intelligence officer who used Palantir in Afghanistan, Siegel describes what he calls the "paradox of information": these systems appear omnipotent but routinely fail to deliver ...

On Fatherhood (Reply to Matt Walsh, TMZ, etc.)

January 16, 2026

I had a tweet go viral about fatherhood and the responses were fascinating. Matt Walsh did a segment on it, TMZ did a segment, thousands of parents shared their own takes. In this episode, I reflect on what the discourse revealed to me.While I love my children deeply, I often find the act of playing with them tedious. The massive backlash to this basic fact contrasted sharply with the private support I received from many fathers. I use this experience to explore a theory about modern fatherho...

"Neo-China Arrives From the Future:" On Nick Land's Sino-Futurism (The Meltdown Lectures)

October 13, 2025

In this episode, we analyze the sentence "Neo-China arrives from the future" from Nick Land's 1994 essay "Meltdown." For Land, Capital is an autonomous intelligence from the future and China is the privileged site of arrival due to its lack of Western moral constraints. We cover China's Special Economic Zones, Land's predictions of Western decline versus Eastern acceleration, and the concept of Sino-futurism. Looking at the data, we find that Land's concept here is surprisingly prescient and ...