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 argument—structured enough to be testable, readable enough to be useful.
What I’m trying to understand
Most debates about money (and, increasingly, Bitcoin) collapse into slogans fairly quickly: barter myths, fiat myths, “store of value,” “medium of exchange,” “hard money,” “soft money,” and the rest.
I’m interested in a different layer of explanation: monetary system formation—how monetary orders arise, stabilize, and change over time as institutional solutions to bounded constraints.
That pushes the inquiry away from money-as-object and toward money-as-infrastructure:
- how states and institutions see populations (legibility, classification, measurement)
- how they allocate risk and manage uncertainty
- how they enforce obligations (and where enforcement fails or mutates)
- how systems ratchet—how feedback loops and path dependence can stabilize routines while also generating frictions that accumulate, distort, and sometimes destabilize
This isn’t a morality play, and it isn’t a single-cause story. It’s an attempt to describe the machinery: what has to be true for a monetary order to persist, why certain arrangements scale, and what the side effects are when they do.
Why write about compliance, bankruptcy, policing, and money in the same place?
Because they’re not separate subjects at the “infrastructure layer.”
Anti–money laundering, investor protection, bankruptcy doctrine, drug treaty constraints, hiring screens in policing—these are all examples of how institutions build administrative systems that translate messy reality into categories that can be acted upon. That translation is always partial, always distorted, and often self-reinforcing. But it’s how modern governance works.
If you want a shorthand for the research program, it’s something like:
Institutions persist not only because they work, but because they fit—they align with incentives, moral narratives, administrative routines, and political constraints, and they generate constituencies that defend their continuation.
That frame applies to compliance regimes just as much as it applies to monetary systems.
What you’ll find here
I’ll be posting in a few recurring modes:
- Short essays that test a single claim or mechanism.
- Notes while drafting and revising larger work (with the jargon sanded down).
- Explainers that treat contested topics—especially in monetary debates—more like institutional questions than ideological identities.
- Occasional “bridges” that connect the long-arc institutional story to contemporary questions about Bitcoin, sovereignty, surveillance, and the meaning of “exit.”
I’m not aiming for hot takes. I’m aiming for clarity.
Where to start
- About: the short version of who I am and what I’m doing.
- Books: my monograph project (The Architecture of Obligation) and earlier reader-facing work (The Great Realignment).
- Research: peer-reviewed articles and shorter commentary pieces.
A small promise
I’ll try to write in a way that makes disagreement possible.
D.L. White 
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