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Complex systems and writings thereof…
If you’ve landed here, you’re probably interested in some combination of money, institutions, governance, and the ways complex systems—once built—seem to acquire their own momentum. This site is meant to be a simple home base for my writing. I’m keeping it intentionally spare: a place to publish work that sits between academic register and public…
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Money
Most people interact with money through its most immediate, personal interfaces: swiping a card, seeing a balance rise/fall in an app, handing over bills, watching crypto tickers, feeling the weight of coins, or stressing over paycheck deposits. These feel like direct, tangible “money” actions—spending it, saving it, earning it—so the brain defaults to treating this…
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Bitcoin as a right of exclusion
Most conversations about Bitcoin are identity fights—pro, anti, or exhausted. They tend to oscillate between reflexive dismissal and euphoric embrace. I’ve written a lot about Bitcoin in other venues. Here I’m more interested in the institutional reality of money and monetary systems. Bitcoin forces a few questions into the open: From my view, Bitcoin is…
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Legibility Is Not Neutral
A recurring theme in my academic writing—across financial compliance, bankruptcy, and criminal justice—is that governance depends on legibility: the ability to classify, measure, and compare. It was the late James C. Scott and his books Seeing Like a State and Against the Grain that put a name to an action I had observed and wrangled…
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Monetary System Formation
Most arguments about money start with definitions: medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account. Useful labels perhaps—but they often show up after the interesting part. What I care about is monetary system formation: how a society moves from scattered practices of credit, dues, settlement, and accounting into something that becomes stable enough to…
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D.L. White 