Living in the Baroque Present
History does not repeat itself. It doesn’t even rhyme. History leaks. It seeps through cracks in time, dissolving borders between past and present until we are forced to live in multiple eras at once. This is not the future we were promised; this is the past, replayed on harder difficulties, accelerated by technology and burdened with memory.
We are living in a Baroque moment.
The late 17th century was chaos embodied—a world untethered from the certainties of feudal rule, stumbling toward something new. Kings became bankers, alchemists became scientists, and money stopped being gold and became trust. The old gods were dying, and in their place rose institutions, systems, networks. It was a time of competing visions, of Whigs and Tories, of banks and counterbanks, of cryptographers and cabals. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle captures this world in vivid, sprawling detail, but it also captures something more profound: the way chaos births order, and order births chaos.
Now, centuries later, we find ourselves in the same vortex. The tools are different—cryptography, AI, decentralized networks—but the patterns are the same. The collapse of old systems. The rise of new ones. The uneasy sense that the ground beneath us is shifting faster than we can comprehend.
Cryptography: The Struggle for Privacy in the Age of Surveillance
In Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, cryptography is the invisible hand that shapes the fate of nations. Bonaventure Rossignol, the king’s cryptographer, deciphers secrets that determine the outcomes of wars and alliances. Today, the battle for cryptography has shifted to the digital realm, but the stakes are no less existential.
Programmable cryptography is emerging as the new frontier. Initiatives like 0xPARC envision a world where cryptography isn’t just a tool for encryption but a framework for building entirely new systems of trust and privacy. Zero-knowledge proofs, zk-rollups, and privacy protocols like Tornado Cash and Railgun are the modern equivalents of Rossignol’s ciphers, allowing individuals to transact, communicate, and exist without being surveilled.
But this is a fragile balance. Governments and corporations seek ever-greater control over the flow of information, using surveillance as a means of maintaining power. In response, decentralized protocols like Farcaster and Nostr rise from the digital underground, offering refuge to those who understand that privacy is not just a right but a precondition for freedom.
Information is a weapon. Those who control its flow shape reality itself. The cryptographer, whether in the service of a king or a decentralized network, holds the keys to the future.
The Financial Revolution: Code as Law
Finance in the 17th century was alchemy disguised as mathematics. The creation of the Bank of England, the rise of public credit, and the speculative frenzy of the South Sea Bubble were experiments in turning debt into gold, trust into wealth. Stephenson’s Eliza navigates this volatile landscape with the precision of a hacker, exploiting inefficiencies and leveraging her knowledge of human greed to amass power.
Today, the alchemy of finance is written in code. Automated Market Makers (AMMs) like Uniswap, decentralized exchanges, and lending protocols like Aave operate as self-executing public goods. These systems, powered by cryptography and game theory, function without intermediaries, embodying the ethos of “code as law.”
But the financial revolution is not without its dangers. Privacy pools like Tornado Cash are sanctioned. Protocols face existential threats from regulators. The chaos of DeFi mirrors the speculative mania of the 17th century—unpredictable, uncontrollable, and yet undeniably transformative. In this landscape, the Elizas of our age thrive, wielding liquidity pools and governance tokens as their weapons of choice.
AI and the New Alchemy
If cryptography is the skeleton of the Baroque present, then AI is its soul—opaque, ineffable, and terrifyingly powerful. In Stephenson’s world, alchemy represents the tension between the mystical and the rational, the desire to transcend human limitations while remaining bound by human flaws. AI is our modern philosopher’s stone, promising to unlock the secrets of the universe while raising questions we are not prepared to answer.
GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, DeepSeek R1—these models are not tools. They are entities, born from data and computation, but imbued with something approaching agency. China’s DeepSeek R1, an open-source model outperforming its Western counterparts, feels like the work of a rogue alchemist, breaking free from the constraints of sanctions and secrecy.
And yet, there is mysticism in the way we speak about AI. People whisper of “alignment” and “deities,” of AGI futures and singularities of woe. Roon’s writings evoke a mythic sensibility, framing AI as a force beyond human comprehension—part god, part demon, part unknowable other. We have built a machine to think for us, and in doing so, we have summoned something we do not understand.
Like the alchemists of old, we are caught between awe and terror, marveling at the transformation of lead into gold while fearing the unintended consequences of our creations.
Living in the Baroque Present
The Baroque is not a time. It is a state of being. It is the moment when the old order collapses and the new one is born, when chaos and creativity intertwine, and the future becomes unknowable.
We are living in that moment. The networks we build, the systems we create, and the decisions we make today will shape the next century. This is not an era for certainty—it is an era for experimentation, for risk, for embracing the unknown.
Stephenson’s characters navigated their chaotic world with wit, cunning, and an understanding of the forces shaping their lives. We must do the same. Whether through cryptography, DeFi, or AI, we are forging a new reality, one code block, one transaction, one idea at a time.
The question is not whether history will repeat itself. The question is whether we will seize this Baroque moment and turn chaos into something extraordinary.
Milady.
