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Come find it on my twitter or substack…

Oh! Lenin probably wouldn’t have enjoyed cryptocurrency at all, but he did say there would be ‘decades where nothing happens and weeks when decades happen’… and so it goes with crypto: last week was a week when decades passed. 

Vitalik Buterin, the 27-year-old creator of Ethereum, casually and without warning made transfers worth about $1.5B into the accounts of an Indian coronavirus charity (Crypto Covid Relief) and Gitcoin, an open-source project funding ecosystem…

Predicting life in 2040 (a WiP)

As an ‘artist’ I believe you have to endure pain and work hard for any success you achieve, and suddenly, accidentally, here I am with a good job and a mushrooming wad of cryptocurrency, and I’m about to get married again. Life is good, and getting better, and I feel like an old cow given a last glimpse at a daisy-filled pasture before the bolt is driven through its brain. 

One moment some of my more financially sophisticated friends were joking about bidding up the price of Gamestop shares, the next moment the stock price was going parabolic. 

Then came the crackdown, which looked like something out of a 21st Century cyberwarfare playbook: first communications were disrupted, the communications platform Discord suspended investors’ efforts to coordinate; then came OpEds and commentary to vilify and discredit the tech-bros and meme investors, and when that didn’t work, the platforms closed positions. 

Just before a truck filled with dynamite is driven into the arena and set off, Robert Stone’s wretched protagonist in Hall of Mirrors, Reinhardt, stands on stage at a racist rally, clutching a microphone to his lips to address an audience that’s about to explode into racial violence. 

Hidden from view, down in the tarantula-infested Big Bug Creek below are the yurts and concrete cubes where the transient residents live. I lost my virginity to an Italian translator in one. A rival for her affections wept and pounded the door while it happened, and tried to run us down in his champagne gold BMW the following morning. (He’s now a famous architect).  

Given that today is Turkey Day here in the U.S. and your appetite for our beautiful, brutal cyberpunk now is likely at a low ebb, I thought I’d pass along a story I wrote. (Erin’s edits were a huge help with this piece.) Look out for another [much cyber-ier] missive next week about charter cities and the great reset.

Thanks again for all of your support, especially to my subscribers! I’m touched you read my work and have made this Substack adventure a very positive experience. We got 3,800 views last time!

Click here to read The 19th Noble Grape

Deep underneath Chelsea around 8th Avenue there are dungeons; themed rooms where leather- and vinyl-clad women act out their clients’ unspeakable desires. Read more from my latest Substack essay

What I loved about Jay Robert Nash’s (1976) Hustlers & Con Men was the way it depicted scamming as a parasitic ecosystem curling through the equally carnivorous American sales monster. Nash focuses on individual scammers and loosely categorizes them, ending with a glorious “chronology of cons.” 

In each mini bio the swindler eventually gets his or her comeuppance, and on their day in court they blab about how it wasn’t the money that lured them in, it was the thrill of conjuring another story and contouring it perfectly to fit a mark. 

My favorite took place in 1950 in Wetumka, Oklahoma, a town of about a thousand not too far from my old teaching post in Tahlequah. 

Living in Northern California and writing about engineering research for living means I’m compelled to do something entrepreneurial so here it is:

The McGirk Effect, a monthly magazine written by a single author (me) covering the unusual, exciting territory of contemporary American life.

There will be juicy features, interviews, original photos, reviews, videos, art, and experiments with machine learning.

I’m calling it a glimpse of “Our Cyberpunk Now” 

Coming soon: a review of Jay Robert Nash’s (1976) Hustlers & Con Artists set against contemporary crypto startup culture. Buying a bogus superfake Rolex from Wuhan and much more.

The weightier, meatier, more deeply researched writing will be available for a mere $5 a month. I’m told reading it will boost your luck and lengthen your limbs and resod your bald spots.*

Please don’t feel obliged to subscribe unless you think you’d enjoy it. I’ll be sending teasers so you can make your mind up whenever you wish.

In the meantime I’m happy you’ll be joining me on what promises to be an exciting adventure.  

James