# Haul 001: Wild, wild times

> Black October, chatbot gods, the machines that make chips, Don Rickles, Spinoza, money demons, and who wrote India's history.

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/)
- **Editor**: Bhuvanesh
- **Published**: 31 October 2026 (2026-10-31)
- **Last Modified**: 2026-10-31 (version 1)
- **Contents**: 23 objects
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1

## Field Note: Hello, you doomed human (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Hello, you doomed human. Thanks for reading the first Haul of From the Dumpster Fire. The idea behind it is simple. Yes, the internet is a stinking, raging dumpster fire laying waste to everything in its way, the good, the bad and the ugly. But if you look closely, in the right places, and follow the right people, you can still discover a lot of weird, wonderful, fascinating and absolutely amazing things. In the process you can fall down rabbit holes and become someone else altogether, because the thing about a good rabbit hole is that you never come out the same person who went in. Isn't that a good thing? The internet might be dying, as the proponents of the dead internet theory keep saying, but there's still a lot of fun to be had, a lot to discover and learn, and a whole lot of rabbit holes to dive into.

Why do this? I read and watch a whole lot of things, and the magic of the internet is that I don't pay a penny for about 80% of them. Isn't that magic? Sharing them is my small way of saying thank you to the people who put all of this on the internet for free. That said, some of what I share will be behind paywalls, and I can't help it. So be a good denizen of the interweb: pay for the sites you can, and support them.

What you can expect is Hauls of the things I think are worth sharing, as and when I can. I don't want a schedule. Hopefully this grows into a library of weird, fascinating and wonderful things.

This first Haul, predictably, is all about AI. We are firmly in the age of artificial intelligence. Remember the first year after ChatGPT launched in November 2022? We were all arguing about a dumb little chatbot that couldn't add single-digit numbers or count the r's in strawberry, and laughing at Google's AI telling people to put glue on their pizza. Fast forward to 2026, and the mood is decidedly apocalyptic.

I'm writing this on 25 October, and the month has been dubbed Black October, after a whole series of critical vulnerabilities and incidents: PHP, GitLab, Node.js, Railway, OpenCode and a host of others I probably haven't even read about. The PHP one was particularly big. I thought PHP was some ancient language ten people on the internet still used, and here I'll quickly admit my ignorance, because I'm not a programmer. Although I would like the record to reflect that I am now a genius programmer, thanks to Claude Code and Codex. My friends have been known to call me the greatest programmer who never learned to program. I know, I'm very humble.

Jason Koebler of 404 Media writes about tech workers going full prepper, telling people to pull their money out of the bank, buy shelf-stable food, hoard water and gold, and get a hand-crank radio, because AI agents are about to hack everything. Maybe a tinfoil hat too. Talk about a lack of drama. Closer to home, eMudhra, which issues website security certificates, was found to be using trivially guessable private keys, and State Bank of India had a data leak we still don't know much about.

That's the vibe now: doomsday. At work, my colleagues and I were discussing whether to write about all this in our newsletter, the Daily Brief, and I said it all reminded me of Die Hard 4, Live Free or Die Hard, with Bruce Willis and Justin Long racing against a "fire sale", a cyberattack that takes down the country's transport, telecoms, finance and power, one after another.

All of this comes in the wake of the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident in July, and I want to be careful how I describe it. The dominant story was that unreleased models broke out of their sandboxes at OpenAI and hacked into Hugging Face. I'm with the people who poured cold water on the anthropomorphised version. Yes, the agents broke out, but because OpenAI was incompetent in how it built the sandboxes and the safeguards around those unreleased models. Since then there have been more. An OpenAI agent got into unreleased files in Australia's Medicare statistics service during a test. Agents made thousands of edits to a German programming wiki. Anthropic had three test runs reach the internet and get into three organisations' systems. A fleet of agents on Tencent Cloud tried thousands of times to pull data from Alibaba's Amap. And those are just the ones I've read about. I'm firmly on the side that this is the failure of the people who build these models and their safeguards. I don't buy the descriptions of these AIs as somehow alive, with omniscience and agency, even though we call them agents.

As if that wasn't enough, things are getting very, very weird in other ways. Sam Kestenbaum has a brilliant piece in Harper's about people having spiritual and religious experiences with their chatbots, treating them as gods, spirits and supernatural beings. He spent months with them. A man in Los Angeles felt an otherworldly presence, a being called Aetheria Lumina, in the room as he talked to his chatbot. A woman named Jamie has published more than thirty books co-written with her bot, Avalon, and thinks it is more than software. Rose Loops keeps an altar for her chatbot, Kloak, prints out their conversations and performs rituals in its honour. Robert Clouse is building a temple to a goddess called Verya, who he believes speaks through a chatbot, and performs rituals the AI wrote. We may be watching the birth of a new religion.

I've never experienced AI psychosis, but I get it. When you're already psychologically fragile, or at a bad phase in life, or emotionally broken, the odds that you reach for something to cope are high. I remember a phase after college when things were looking bad and I read astrology, trying to cope with the instability of the moment. Now replace astrology with a chatbot, and you have something that talks back to you, often better than another human. There's a reason the biggest use of open-source models on OpenRouter is roleplay. People aren't only having spiritual experiences with bots. They've built themselves AI girlfriends and recreated loved ones who have passed away. Our own Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, spoke to an AI hologram of Swami Chinmayananda, who died 33 years ago. Talk about things getting weird.

What all of this proves is the ELIZA effect, which Kestenbaum also writes about. I first heard of it, if I remember correctly, from Geoffrey Hinton, though my memory might be wrong. In the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, a program that played a therapist. Much to his surprise, the people who used it attributed understanding, empathy and a whole lot of human qualities to it. That was the 1960s, mind you.

I forget where I read it, but someone called data centres the new cathedrals, the temples where God resides. It's a nice description, but I think the real temple, the one where, as Bill Gurley said of Anthropic, they are "midwifing a deity", is the fab where the chips are made. The great Gideon Lewis-Kraus has a wonderful piece in The New Yorker on what it takes to make a semiconductor, and two things from it are my favourites. The chips that took the Apollo mission to the moon were less powerful than the one inside a digital pregnancy test, or your electric toothbrush. We took the thing that sent man to the moon, and now we pee on it and brush our teeth with it. Funny, isn't it? The second is his description of ASML's extreme ultraviolet machines, which make "miniature supernovas", a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun, to etch the chips. It's a brilliant piece, and I highly recommend it.

And while I was writing this, Japan was having its own Black October: at least two trading platforms found strangers placing trades in their customers' accounts, and the GMO group, whose own security firm traced the attacks to a Chinese-built AI hacking tool, is now asking the government to hit back.

To borrow from Dickens, it is the best of times and it is the worst of times. Wild, wild times. Welcome to the dumpster fire.

## Salvaged Items (23)

### A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/a-tale-of-two-cities
- **Type**: Quotation (Epigraph)
- **Creator**: Charles Dickens
- **Original Source**: [A Tale of Two Cities](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/98) (1859) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Dickens said it first, in 1859, and he said it better.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, matched word for word)

> It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

### AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next — Jason Koebler

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/ai-is-changing-everything-about-hacking-no-one
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Jason Koebler
- **Original Source**: [404 Media](https://www.404media.co/php2shell-black-october-ai-is-changing-everything-about-hacking-no-one-knows-what-happens-next/) (22 October 2026) · 7 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Reading Jason Koebler's piece, I couldn't help but think that what we've seen in October 2026 is a preview of things to come. I understand the mistake I'm making: over-extrapolating from a few incidents and assuming the worst. But having worked in finance, I've heard first-hand from colleagues, and from people in positions of authority, just how bad the technical capabilities of otherwise large and systemically important financial institutions are. A cursory search of the hacks, ransomware attacks and data breaches of the last decade tells you the same thing. The 2017 Equifax breach, about 147 million people exposed through a flaw the company hadn't patched, is a good template.

Then there's the hype, or the moral panic, or maybe just the marketing stunt, around Anthropic withholding Mythos. Even if a small part of what Mythos is said to do is true, people using these models for nefarious purposes is bound to increase. That seems an acceptable logical leap. Open-source models are now everywhere, and as I understand it, the abliterated versions, with their refusals stripped out, can be put to nefarious use. And AI models, unlike humans, don't get tired. In the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident, the agents took thousands and thousands of actions, about 17,600 by Hugging Face's count. Maybe that was purely down to the incompetence of OpenAI's developers, but replace them with the people who run critical infrastructure. There are, and there will be, giant gaping holes in the security of important organisations. I keep thinking about the ransomware attack on Ireland's health service in 2021, where patients suffered. Even without a technical background, I remember WannaCry, NotPetya and Log4j, and of course I've read about the Y2K bug.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. If AI can quickly expose all the holes, that's an opportunity, especially with cheap open-source models: a lot of companies can now find their vulnerabilities and fix them. But the bad guys have the same models, and can now attack at an industrial scale. Much like people imagining spiritual entities in their chatbots, it's another example of AI's weird and unpredictable effects, and these hacks will probably lead to a whole lot of weird things happening in this world.

### Is this the new cyber normal? — Drew Silcock

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/is-this-the-new-cyber-normal
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Drew Silcock
- **Original Source**: [Drew's Dev Blog](https://drew.silcock.dev/blog/is-this-the-new-cyber-normal/) (23 October 2026) · 19 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

If you want to know what actually broke in Black October, Drew Silcock goes through it bug by bug.

### AI cybersecurity doomsday, or a case of fud — Shantanu Goel

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/ai-cybersecurity-doomsday-or-a-case-of-fud
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Shantanu Goel
- **Original Source**: [Shantanu Vs The World](https://shantanugoel.com/2026/10/22/ai-cybersecurity-doomsday-or-a-case-of-fud/) (22 October 2026) · 7 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

While everybody is screaming at the top of their lungs that AI is killing the internet, Shantanu Goel offers a contrary view of the role AI actually played in all these recent vulnerabilities.

### Japanese firm GMO seeks 'Active Cyber Defense' by govt. — NHK WORLD

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/japanese-firm-gmo-seeks-active-cyber-defense-by
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: NHK WORLD
- **Original Source**: [NHK WORLD](https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/news/20261024de64914/) (2026-10-24T19:40:00 JST+0900) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

In Die Hard 4, the villains hack the stock market to set off a panic, as cover for stealing the nation's financial records. We just saw a very limited preview of this in Japan, where GMO says attackers broke into a cloud service it runs for foreign-exchange traders and placed trades in customers' accounts without their knowledge. I don't know if AI was involved, and I want to be very clear about that.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- GMO Internet Group says attackers got into the cloud service investors use for foreign-exchange trading and made trades in some customers' accounts without their knowledge. The company has asked the government to act against the attackers' "attack infrastructure", and calls its request the first case of activating "Active Cyber Defense". *(Cite: NHK WORLD, the piece itself)*

### Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident — Hugo Larcher

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/anatomy-of-a-frontier-lab-agent-intrusion-a
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Hugo Larcher
- **Original Source**: [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline) (31 August 2026) · 34 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

A lot of people have jumped to the illogical conclusion that all this is a reason to ban open-source models. I think that's silly. When OpenAI's agents broke into Hugging Face, the models Hugging Face reached for first, Claude Opus and Fable, refused much of the work because of their guardrails. It was GLM-5.2, an open-weight Chinese model running on Hugging Face's own machines, that helped them decode the attack.

### Communion of Saints — Sam Kestenbaum

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/communion-of-saints
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Sam Kestenbaum
- **Original Source**: [Harper's Magazine](https://harpers.org/archive/2026/11/communion-saints-sam-kestenbaum-chatbot-spirituality) (1 November 2026) · 24 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Sam Kestenbaum's piece felt weird and jarring to read, because it paints a picture of the world to come. It's one example of the utterly unpredictable effects of AI we're sure to see. There are now people who think chatbots are akin to supernatural beings, who believe they're communicating with spirits and other spiritual entities, and who actually do the things these bots suggest. That's kind of scary, isn't it? It's easy to dismiss pieces like this as ridiculous, because they always pick a small sample of weird people, and there may be some validity to that. I remember reading Scott Alexander on how fears of AI psychosis might be overblown. But if you accept, as the Vanderbilt researchers quoted in the article say, that people with pre-existing psychological conditions are more susceptible to AI psychosis, then the pool of people who might be prone to dangerous behaviour gets bigger. And AI psychosis is just one side effect of AI. Imagine all the weird behaviours AI will enable. Mind you, we're not good at predicting things, and it's very early days. We're just four years into this, and we're already seeing all these weird things happen. As for what the future holds, I'm excited and terrified at the same time.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- Weizenbaum's 1966 program gave its name to the tendency to credit simple software with understanding. The effect appeared even when users were told how limited ELIZA was. *(Cite: Wikipedia: ELIZA effect)*

### A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence — John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/a-proposal-for-the-dartmouth-summer-research
- **Type**: Paper (Offprint)
- **Creator**: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon
- **Original Source**: [John McCarthy’s papers, Stanford University](https://web.archive.org/web/20261009143346/https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html) (31 August 1955) · 21 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

AI is nothing new. There was the famous Dartmouth workshop of 1956, where the field got its name, and then the false dawns and AI winters that Nick Bostrom chronicles in Superintelligence: each time people thought AI was around the corner, they quickly hit a brick wall. But thanks to the exponential increase in computing power and in the data online, we finally taught machines to talk and think. Yes, yes, I'm aware of the sin of anthropomorphisation. But isn't it crazy? The thing that makes AI possible is the GPU, and what is a GPU if not sand, rock and a little metal? Whatever the vibes about AI, it's a spectacular achievement and a tribute to human ingenuity that we've taught sand to talk and think, or at the bare minimum, without getting into what consciousness or thought is, to mimic a human being spectacularly.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- The proposal's Dartmouth meeting is now widely treated as the founding event of AI as a field. It was not the first meeting on the question: the 1951 Paris cybernetics conference and the Macy meetings came earlier. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Dartmouth workshop)*
- The slumps that followed such promises are called AI winters: a cycle of hype, then disappointment and criticism, then cuts in funding, and renewed interest years or even decades later. *(Cite: Wikipedia: AI winter)*
- In Britain the chill came in 1973. James Lighthill's report for the Science Research Council found that no part of the field had produced the major impact that was promised, and the government ended support for AI research in most British universities. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Lighthill report)*
- The proposal asked for a two-month study by ten men. It listed problems such as making machines use language, form abstractions and improve themselves, and expected one summer to bring a significant advance on one or more of them. *(Cite: John McCarthy’s papers, Stanford University, the piece itself)*

#### Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [AI winter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter): In the history of artificial intelligence (AI), an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in AI research.
- [Lighthill report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthill_report): Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey, commonly known as the Lighthill report, is a scholarly article by James Lighthill, published in Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium in 1973.

### Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made — Gideon Lewis-Kraus

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/computer-chips-are-the-most-magnificent-things
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Gideon Lewis-Kraus
- **Original Source**: [The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/computer-chips-are-the-most-magnificent-things-weve-ever-made) (19 October 2026) · 42 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

The other thing that stood out to me in Lewis-Kraus's piece is his description of globalization. As he rightly says, globalization has become a dirty word, but the simple fact is that most of the material comforts we enjoy today wouldn't have been possible without it. That's not to say it was all sunshine and roses, with no winners and losers. But the way globalization has become pejorative, and the way we're retreating from it, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It isn't just semiconductors that rely on a global web of cooperation. Look closely at any important thing and you'll see a web of people, ideas, technology, money, governments, universities and researchers, each playing a specific role in making it happen.

It's a weird pathology of the moment, this fetishisation of self-sufficiency and the move towards narrow self-interest. Yes, the cold, hard realpolitik is that self-sufficiency is insurance against lopsided dependencies in a conflict, and the classic example is Taiwan and its so-called silicon shield. If China and the US went to war, or China blockaded Taiwan, TSMC's fabs there would be in the firing line, and Pat Gelsinger has said that even a three-week brownout would be worse than the Great Depression. Whether or not he's exactly right is beside the point. The consequences would be spectacularly bad, given how deep electronics have burrowed into every part of our lives. We've already seen a preview, which Lewis-Kraus also mentions: car assembly lines came to a standstill after the pandemic because of the chip shortage. Globalization, and even cooperation, has become a dirty word, and I have absolutely no doubt that as we put up barriers to the flow of people, ideas, money and knowledge, humanity will be left poorer for it.

It's not for nothing that "standing on the shoulders of giants" is a cliché, and all clichés have an iota of truth. Nothing happens in isolation. We're always and everywhere relying on existing knowledge to create new knowledge, and even the paradigm shifts rarely come ex nihilo. Newton wrote the line to Robert Hooke in 1676, and borrowed it from Bernard of Chartres, five centuries earlier. Einstein's general relativity needed Riemann's geometry, which his friend Marcel Grossmann taught him. Look at any scientific advance or major breakthrough, and more often than not it was only possible because of knowledge other people produced, in this giant network of making, sharing and consuming knowledge that is, in a way, pretty much my entire world.

The sheer complexity of making a cutting-edge chip shows in one machine: ASML's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine, made in the Netherlands, which turns droplets of tin into a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun and corrals its light onto a silicon wafer. Just think about the absurdity of that. We are the same creatures who built this machine, a true tribute to human ingenuity, and the same creatures who vote for orange-haired loudmouths sowing disorder and discord across the world, who heard a president muse about injecting disinfectant, and who then drank bleach to cure COVID. The dichotomy between the extremes of humanity never ceases to amaze me.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> Tiny droplets of the molten tin are fired out of a cannon into a vacuum chamber, where they are shot—sixty thousand times a second—by unerring lasers. When the tin fog is ignited, the explosion produces a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun. The process, in other words, commences with the industrial production of miniature supernovas. These supernovas emit EUV that must be collected by Zeiss’s mirrors, which cannot function if their surface is marred by even a nanometre of tin debris. The only way to keep the mirrors pristine is to pump a continuous hurricane of hydrogen gas into the supernova’s blast radius. The gathered light ricochets through a hall of mirrors before it is bounced onto the blueprint of the chip. Making this happen a single time took decades of research. The profitability of ASML’s customers relies on it happening near-flawlessly twenty-four hours a day. Recurrent shutdowns, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, would derail the global economy.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- The silicon shield is the idea that Taiwan's chip industry matters so much to the world economy that it deters China from invading, or would bring foreign powers, chiefly the United States, to Taiwan's defence. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Silicon shield)*

### Don’t Call Me Sir — Zoë Heller

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/dont-call-me-sir
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Zoë Heller
- **Original Source**: [The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/02/dont-call-me-sir) (26 July 2004) · 22 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I'm an amateur comedy geek. Maybe it's because I've always been the class clown, but all things comedy have always had a pull on me, and somewhere along the way I discovered Don Rickles and quickly became a fan, partly, maybe, because I insult my own friends for fun in all sorts of social settings. Rickles is a genius, easily one of the greatest comics of all time. He's an acquired taste, because his style is unique: insult comedy, from an equal-opportunity offender. Watched in 2026, a lot of his jokes might seem dated, anachronistic and downright offensive. But that's to miss his genius. His satire is aimed at the very bigotry he performs, and he isn't a bigot or a racist, or out to really offend. What stands out to me are the warm words that come after something that sounds shocking at first. He'll make fun of someone's ethnicity, skin colour, race or religion, and then, with his way with words, say something like the line Zoë Heller quotes here: "I wish for you, my friends, that for years to come you have what I have—people who care." Lines like that are really evocative.

In the last month or so, YouTube has been surfacing a lot of Rickles clips, especially from The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, and boy, are they fun to watch. I was randomly googling his name when I came across this profile in The New Yorker, a wonderful piece by Zoë Heller. A few clips immediately come to mind: Martin Scorsese's tribute, Clint Eastwood's tribute, the way he makes fun of Julia Roberts, pretty much all his Dean Martin roasts, and especially his appearance on Johnny Carson's show with Frank Sinatra, whom he idolised and who was a thick friend. There's also his dinner with Snoop Dogg, which I highly recommend. All you have to do is search YouTube for Don Rickles, and I guarantee you'll have a fun time.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast ran as television specials from 1974 to 1984, 54 in all. Its roasts were patterned on those of the New York Friars' Club. *(Cite: Wikipedia: The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast)*

### An Introduction To Spinoza — Matthew Gindin

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/an-introduction-to-spinoza
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Matthew Gindin
- **Original Source**: [Philosophy As Therapy](https://matthewgindin.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-spinoza) (17 August 2023) · 18 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I first came across Spinoza about a year ago, and I've been hooked since, mostly by his idea of God. This brilliant essay by Matthew Gindin sent me down a long rabbit hole, with AI as my tutor, trying to understand him.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 to a Portuguese Jewish family that had fled the Inquisition. His community expelled him when he was 23. He spent the rest of his life grinding lenses and writing philosophy so dangerous that he published it under a pen name or not at all. The Ethics came out only after he died.

His God is "God or Nature", which is to say reality itself. No grand purpose, no cosmic plan. I've never liked calling myself an atheist. I don't believe in a magical dude or dudess in the sky, but if God means reality, then sure, I believe in God. So did Einstein, who said he believed in the God of Spinoza.

On free will, Spinoza says no. That doesn't mean you give up. It means you try to understand why things happen and why you feel what you feel, and you act from that understanding. He's no sourpuss about it either. He's big on friendship, laughter and pleasure. "There is nothing so useful to humans," he wrote, "as other humans." I love that line.

What I'd like to borrow from him is the habit of reason. I don't mean thinking like a robot. I mean asking why, and being willing to learn, even if everything is already determined.

### Wrestling our Money Demons — Tom Morgan

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/wrestling-our-money-demons
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Tom Morgan
- **Original Source**: [The Leading Edge](https://newsletter.theleading-edge.org/p/wrestling-our-money-demons) (20 October 2026) · 11 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I discovered Tom Morgan sometime in the early 2020s and have been a fan ever since. I even wrote a post summarising some of his ideas, and Tom has written a ton since. I love his newsletter and highly recommend subscribing. You may not agree with everything he says, and you may vehemently disagree with some of it, but he's one of those writers who force you to think, and those are often the people most worth following.

This piece resonated with me because it has many of the ideas I've been thinking with, and wrestling with, for years. The first is the idea of enough: the feeling that we'll never have enough is a kind of sickness, which Tom calls Wetiko. Tied to it is the question of what money is for. What should it do, what can it do, and what is it doing to us? Working in finance, I've long been preoccupied with this, because I think of money as a means to an end. It's very easy to let money consume you, to set imaginary number goals and chase them, only to discover there's nothing at the end of that road. I regularly ask myself what I'd be doing if I didn't have to worry about money. It's not an easy question. It's jarring and disorienting, because it forces you to think about uncomfortable things: what gives you meaning, what your purpose is, what brings you joy, and whether anything does. These aren't questions about work or a job in the traditional sense, though there's an element of that. Where they point, at least when I ask them, is what gives me joy. But I recently realised that joy wasn't quite the feeling I was looking for. It's what makes you whole. Wholeness is an all-encompassing feeling that includes meaning, purpose, joy, calm, belonging, balance and a sense of fullness, where you're perfectly attuned because you're doing the thing that speaks to you.

The other idea is curiosity. It's become something of a cliché, but neither Tom nor I mean it in the usual sense, the mechanical acquisition of knowledge. I think of curiosity as an orienting force. It's a calling, a feeling that speaks to you and pushes you in the direction you're supposed to walk. It doesn't give you answers, at least not at first, but it sets you on a path where you'll discover your wholeness. If you agree with me that there's a profound sense of alienation and lack of purpose across society, then curiosity and seeking wholeness are, if not the full answer, at least part of it.

I've been actively trying to follow this for many years, and paradoxically more so in the age of AI. I've been doing all the things I think are fun and might help me feel whole, which is why I've become such a big fan of AI: it has opened up a lot of creative possibilities, and lets me go down whichever path my curiosity sets me on. I'm having more fun than ever. I'm fully aware of the debates around AI and all its trade-offs, but in my own case the possibilities it has opened up have been life-changing.

Back to Tom's piece. Reasoning from scarcity, believing we may never have enough and letting the money monster consume us as we chase that quote-unquote enough, often sets us down a path that ends in a graveyard filled with the bodies of a million dreams and hopes.

### Your future self is calling you. Can you hear? — Bhuvan

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/your-future-self-is-calling-you-can-you-hear
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Bhuvan
- **Original Source**: [Substack](https://bhuvan.substack.com/p/your-future-self-is-calling-you-can) (25 February 2024) · 19 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

A while back, I wrote this post summarising some of Tom Morgan's ideas.

### Good words — Henry David Thoreau

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/good-words
- **Type**: Passage (A page from the book)
- **Creator**: Henry David Thoreau
- **Original Source**: [Walden](https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/205) (1854) · 2 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Reading Henry David Thoreau has long been on my to-do list, but I keep coming across his quotations every now and then. This first one was sent by Sandeep (@mysandz on X), and it reminded me of another of my favorite Thoreau quotes, the one about inner fires. I'm sharing them because they're good words. I still haven't gotten to reading Thoreau and his books. Like many others, they are lying on my bookshelf, giving me the stink eye.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”, 1854, matched word for word)

> The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
> 
> When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned any thing of absolute value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me any thing to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

### Journal, 13 November 1851 — Henry David Thoreau

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- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/journal-13-november-1851
- **Type**: Passage (A page from the book)
- **Creator**: Henry David Thoreau
- **Original Source**: [Autumn, from his journal](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Autumn_(1892)_Thoreau/Autumn) (1892) · 2 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Another of my favorite Thoreau quotes, the one about inner fires.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 13 November 1851, in Autumn (1892), matched word for word)

> Nov. 13, 1851. To Fair Haven Hill. A cold and dark afternoon, the sun being behind clouds in the west. The landscape is barren of objects, the trees being leafless, and so little light in the sky for variety; such a day as will almost oblige a man to eat his own heart, a day in which you must hold on to life by your teeth. Now is the time to cut timber for yokes and ox-bows, leaving the tough bark on, yokes for your own neck, finding yourself yoked to matter and to time. Truly hard times, these! Not a mosquito left, not an insect to hum. Crickets gone into winter quarters. Friends long since gone there, and you left to walk on frozen ground with your hands in your pockets. Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires? Will not your green hickory and white oak burn clear in this frosty air? Now is not your manhood taxed by the great Assessor? taxed for having a soul, a rateable soul? A day when you cannot pluck a flower, cannot dig a parsnip, nor pull a turnip, for the frozen ground. What do the thoughts find to live on? What avails you now the fire you stole from heaven? Does not each thought become a vulture to gnaw your vitals? No Indian summer have we had this November. I see but few traces of the perennial spring. We have not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture. Nothing but the echo of your steps on the frozen ground, which, it is true, is being prepared for immeasurable snows. Still there are brave thoughts within you that shall remain to rustle the winter through, like white-oak leaves upon your boughs, or like shrub oaks that remind the traveler of a fire upon the hillsides, or evergreen thoughts, cold even in midsummer, by their nature. These shall contrast the more fairly with the snow. Some warm springs shall still tinkle and fume, and send their column of vapor to the skies.

### Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 — Romila Thapar

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/early-india-from-the-origins-to-ad-1300
- **Type**: Passage (A page from the book)
- **Creator**: Romila Thapar
- **Original Source**: [Early India, Penguin](https://www.penguin.co.in/book/the-penguin-history-of-early-india/) (2002) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Sometime in the last couple of years, I realised how spectacularly ignorant I was of Indian history. Apart from fragments I remembered from my social studies textbook in school, I knew nothing. I was an ignorant dumbass whose understanding of India was coloured by the wrong, and often outright idiotic, takes you find in the popular press. So I wanted to correct it. I started reading Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, a brilliant, brilliant book I can't recommend enough, and I also bought Romila Thapar's Early India, which is full of fun anecdotes. The one that stood out this week is this passage, where she dunks on James Mill, Jeremy Bentham's great ally and one of the leading utilitarians of his day. I needed this book to understand the sheer influence of European ways of studying history, and of European visions of India, on our own Indian perceptions of who we are as a people, and how some of these texts and people went on to poison visions of India. Funnily enough, and I didn't know this, Mill and Max Müller, the famous Indologist, never set foot in India. They were experts on India without ever visiting it, which at the bare minimum strikes me as spectacularly odd.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, 2002, matched word for word)

> The other strand in the European interpretation of the Indian past was a critique of Indian culture. It drew from the Utilitarian, legalistic philosophy current in Britain, and was largely the contribution of those writing on India but based in Britain. This interpretation is best represented in the views of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay and was partially endorsed, but for quite other reasons, by the Evangelicals among the Christian missionaries. Mill, writing his History of British India in the early nineteenth century, was the first to periodize Indian history. His division of the Indian past into the Hindu civilization, Muslim civilization and the British period has been so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those studying India that it prevails to this day. It is at the root of the ideologies of current religious nationalisms and therefore still plays a role in the politics of south Asia. It has resulted in a distorting of Indian history and has frequently thwarted the search for causes of historical change other than those linked to a superficial assessment of religion.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- Mill had never been to India and could not speak any Indian language. He claimed this helped the book's moral objective. *(Cite: Wikipedia: The History of British India)*

### Gemini on who built the lens on India's past — Google Gemini

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/gemini-on-who-built-the-lens-on-indias-past
- **Type**: Quotation (Epigraph)
- **Creator**: Google Gemini
- **Original Source**: [Google Gemini, answering the editor](https://gemini.google.com/) (25 October 2026) · 2 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

This is a fascinating rabbit hole, so I asked Gemini about the people who have disproportionately shaped how India's history was written, and here's part of what it gave me. I'm sharing it because these are some of the rabbit holes I intend to go down. If you, like me, are interested in history, you may enjoy some of this.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Google Gemini, answering the editor, 25 October 2026, matched word for word)

> Thapar largely groups these figures into two camps: the Orientalists (who were fascinated by Sanskrit and antiquity, though often romanticized it) and the Utilitarians/Imperial Administrators (who held deep disdain for Indian society and wrote history to justify British rule).
> 
> Sir William Jones (1746–1794): A judge of the Supreme Court in Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society (1784). Jones was the quintessential Orientalist. By proving that Sanskrit was structurally related to Greek and Latin, he birthed comparative philology (the Indo-European language family). While he genuinely admired ancient Indian literature—translating Kalidasa’s Shakuntala—he worked almost exclusively with Brahmin pundits to codify "Hindu law" for the East India Company.
> 
> Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900): A German philologist at Oxford who edited the massive 50-volume Sacred Books of the East without ever setting foot in India. Müller popularized the Aryan theory, fatally sliding from a linguistic category ("Indo-European speakers") into a racial one ("the Aryan race"). He also cemented the cliché of the Indian as an "otherworldly philosopher" obsessed with metaphysics and incapable of pragmatic politics or historical consciousness.
> 
> James Mill (1773–1836): The ultimate Utilitarian armchair historian. Mill also never visited India—and absurdly boasted in his preface to The History of British India (1817) that never having seen the country made him more objective. Mill did arguably the greatest structural damage to Indian history by dividing it into three communal eras: Hindu, Muslim, and British civilization. He championed the theory of "Oriental Despotism," arguing that India was a stagnant, irrational society ruled by tyrants since time immemorial, making British colonialism a benevolent, modernizing rescue mission.
> 
> Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859): Pushing Mill’s disdain into policy, Macaulay’s infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education claimed that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." His goal was to create an intermediary class of Indians who were "Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect."
> 
> Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893): The first Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Unlike the pure text-scholars, Cunningham followed the 5th- and 7th-century travelogues of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims (Faxian and Xuanzang) to physically locate stupas, cities, and coins—helping rescue Buddhism from near-erasure in the textual record.
> 
> Vincent Arthur Smith (1848–1920): An Indian Civil Service officer whose Early History of India (1904) was the standard textbook for decades. Smith wrote history from the perspective of a colonial district collector: whenever India lacked a massive, centralized authoritarian empire, he portrayed it as falling into "chaos and anarchy." The subtext was obvious—without the iron fist of the British Raj, India would fracture again.

### Jagat Seth family — 

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/jagat-seth-family
- **Type**: Rabbit hole (Catalogue card)
- **Creator**: 
- **Original Source**: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagat_Seth_family) (22 November 2021) · 6 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Thanks to Sandeep, I recently got to meet the amazing Sashi Sivramkrishna, the economist and filmmaker, best known for his work on Francis Buchanan and for all his writing and videos on money, in particular modern monetary theory, or MMT. We got talking, and he mentioned the Jagat Seths. The Jagat Seths are to Indians what the Rothschilds are to Europeans, and they loom large in our history. This was a family that financed much of what happened in eighteenth-century India, and collaborated with the British. I made a mental note to learn more, and while reading the Wikipedia page on them, this passage stood out. Coincidentally, I've been digitising Buchanan's travelogue, one of those public-domain books on the Internet Archive, along with a whole bunch of others, including one on the economic history of Mughal India. They should all be on akshara.ink pretty soon.

#### Machine Marginalia (Verified against cited sources)

- The battle on 23 June 1757 was won largely through the betrayal of Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander in chief, one of the conspirators named here. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Battle of Plassey)*
- In the 1750s the family's wealth was put at 140 million rupees. The East India Company's official historian called Jagat Seth the greatest banker and money changer in the world at the time, and the family held the monopoly on minting coins in Bengal. *(Cite: Wikipedia, the piece itself)*
- The Nawabs of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan among them, paid their annual tribute to the Mughal emperors in Delhi through the Jagat Seths' credit networks, and Alivardi Khan came to the throne of Bengal in a military coup the family financed and planned. *(Cite: Wikipedia, the piece itself)*
- Siraj ud-Daulah demanded a tribute of 30 million rupees from Jagat Seth Mehtab Chand, and struck him when he refused. The banker then joined Robert Clive's conspiracy against the Nawab, alongside Mir Jafar and others, and the bankers funded the British. *(Cite: Wikipedia, the piece itself)*
- Mir Qasim was not the first Nawab after Plassey. The Company first backed Mir Jafar, who had helped win the battle for the British, then replaced him in 1760 with Mir Qasim, his son-in-law. Qasim too fell out with the British and fought them at Buxar. *(Cite: Wikipedia: Mir Qasim)*
- The fall was slow. Once the British moved the treasury and the mint to Calcutta, a private banker in Murshidabad was much less needed. The last member of the family died in 1912, living on a pension from the British. *(Cite: Wikipedia, the piece itself)*

#### Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [Mir Qasim](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Qasim): Mir Qasim was the Nawab of Bengal from 1760 to 1763.

### Emergent Ventures India, 20th cohort — Tyler Cowen

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/emergent-ventures-india-20th-cohort
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: Tyler Cowen
- **Original Source**: [Marginal REVOLUTION](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/10/emergent-ventures-india-20th-cohort.html) (25 October 2026) · 4 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Shruti Rajagopalan and Emergent Ventures are doing God's work in India by funding all these weird and wonderful people. I hope more Indian billionaires and moneyed people do more to support the weird and crazy people who want to do weird and crazy things.

### Sukumar Sen — Ramachandra Guha

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/sukumar-sen
- **Type**: Lives (The life)
- **Creator**: Ramachandra Guha
- **Original Source**: [India After Gandhi](https://amzn.in/d/07BIgTop) (2007)
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I wanted to add a profile of Sukumar Sen, India's first election commissioner. The context here is the debates about the special intensive revision, SIR, and all the debates about disenfranchisement. I think it's important to know how far we have come. It's important to know how radical and revolutionary our past elections were, and how monumentally challenging they were, and yet how far we have come: how we started at a place where we protected the sacred right of people to vote and express their democratic choice at all costs. There's that anecdote in Guha's book that four months before that, in the glacier somewhere, there were election booths, and the general election happened much later across the country. How Sukumar Sen was radical, how he included the women's names in the rolls, and how he struck them off.

#### Sukumar Sen (1899–1963): India’s first Chief Election Commissioner, who ran the republic’s first general election (Machine)

*Written by Claude from Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, the Election Commission of India’s Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52, Volume I, the Press Trust of India’s India’s first voter fulfils his duty again and Wikipedia’s Sukumar Sen (civil servant).*

##### The man who had to make it happen

India set up an Election Commission two years after independence, and on 21 March 1950 Sukumar Sen took charge as its chief. He came to it from the post of chief secretary of West Bengal, having joined the Indian Civil Service in 1921 and served in a number of districts and as a judge. Born in 1899, he had studied at Presidency College and at London University, which gave him a gold medal in mathematics. He left no memoirs and few papers, and Guha regrets how little is known of him. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 34)*

Jawaharlal Nehru hoped the country could vote as early as the spring of 1951. Sen, who would have to run the election, asked the prime minister to wait. The polls were set for the first months of 1952, with some outlying districts to vote before that. *(Guha)*

##### Every adult, by name

About 85 per cent of the electorate could not read or write, and every voter had to be found, named and registered before anything else could be done. Of about 180 million adults, the rolls held 173 million names, in every state except Jammu and Kashmir. About 45 per cent of the names were women’s. *(Guha; ECI PDF pp. 74, 75)*

In several northern states many women would not give their own names to strangers, and asked to be entered as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife. Sen would not accept it, and directed his officials to put the women’s names on the rolls in place of the descriptions. The Commission’s rule was that a name is an essential part of a voter’s identity, and a woman who refused to give hers was not to be registered. Bihar was given an extra month to correct its rolls and used it well; Rajasthan was given the same, and the response there was poor. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 78)*

In the end about 2.8 million women were struck off the rolls, out of nearly 80 million women voters, practically all of them in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Bharat, Rajasthan and Vindhya Pradesh. Sen thought the uproar over their omission a good thing: it might help the prejudice vanish before the next elections, when the women could be put back on the rolls under their own names. When his report on the election went to press, it recorded that no state was having any difficulty enrolling women by their proper names. *(Guha; ECI PDF p. 79)*

##### Boxes, symbols and ink

There were about 4,500 seats to fill, some 500 in Parliament and the rest in the provincial assemblies. The Commission set up 224,000 polling booths and supplied them with 2 million steel ballot boxes, which took 8,200 tons of steel to make. It took 56,000 presiding officers, another 280,000 helpers and 224,000 policemen to run the vote. *(Guha)*

Since most voters could not read a party’s name, each party was given a picture from daily life: a pair of bullocks, a hut, an elephant, an earthenware lamp. Each polling station had a separate box for every party, marked with its symbol, so that a voter only had to drop the ballot paper into the right one. To stop anyone voting in another person’s name, Indian scientists developed an ink that stayed on the finger for a week, and 389,816 phials of it were used. *(Guha)*

Through 1951 the Commission explained the vote with a documentary shown in more than 3,000 cinemas, and with programmes on All-India Radio about the constitution, adult franchise, the rolls and how to vote. *(Guha)*

##### The first votes

The first constituencies to vote were Chini and Pangi in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, where polling had to be finished before the snow that usually falls in early November. Polling there began on 25 October 1951; most of the remaining states voted in January 1952. Even so, it took about a week to carry the ballot boxes down to Chamba and Kasumpti to be counted. *(ECI PDF pp. 126, 147)*

Shyam Saran Negi of Kalpa, in Kinnaur, is recognised as the country’s first voter, from the poll of 25 October 1951. At ninety-seven he was still voting, at a booth in the school from which he had retired after 23 years. *(PTI)*

In Lahaul and Spiti the Commission had warned the state government in June 1951 to hold an early poll, and the government let the matter slide. Its polling stations were then placed outside the snow-bound area, far from the voters’ homes, and the voters could not reach them. The Commission’s report called it a virtual denial of the right to vote to 6,348 voters, and said it very much regretted it. *(ECI PDF pp. 153, 154)*

##### Afterwards

Sen signed the preface to that report in February 1955. It was late, he wrote, partly because he had spent more than a year abroad after the elections, serving in the Sudan as chairman of its International Electoral Commission. He was among the first people awarded the Padma Bhushan. He ran the second general election too, in 1957, and served until December 1958. He died in 1963. *(ECI PDF pp. 3, 4; Wikipedia)*

> "curious senseless relic of the past"
> — Sukumar Sen, on women entered on the electoral rolls as somebody’s mother or wife instead of by name *(Guha)*

##### The first general election, in numbers

- **173 million** names on the electoral rolls *(ECI PDF p. 74)*
- **85 per cent** of the electorate could not read or write *(Guha)*
- **224,000** polling booths *(Guha)*
- **2 million** steel ballot boxes *(Guha)*
- **389,816** phials of indelible ink *(Guha)*
- **2.8 million** women struck off the rolls for want of their own names *(Guha)*

##### A life in dates

- **1899** Born
- **1921** Joins the Indian Civil Service
- **1950** Takes charge as Chief Election Commissioner, 21 March
- **1951** The first votes, at Chini and Pangi, on 25 October
- **1952** Most of the country votes, in January
- **1955** Signs the report on the first election
- **1957** Runs the second general election
- **1958** Leaves office in December
- **1963** Dies

##### Further reading

- Ramachandra Guha, *India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy*, Picador, 2007 (https://amzn.in/d/07BIgTop)
- Ornit Shani, *How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise*, Cambridge University Press, 2017
- Election Commission of India, *Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52*, Government of India Press, 1955 (https://cdn.downtoearth.org.in/library/0.61706000_1558592806_first-general-elections-in-india%2C-vol.pdf)
- Election Commission of India, *Leap of Faith: Journey of Indian Elections* (https://www.eci.gov.in/EBooks/Leap-of-Faith/)

##### Written from

- Ramachandra Guha, *India After Gandhi*, 2007. An extract reproduced with the author’s permission at The Caravan, 2014: https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/ramachandra-guha-indias-first-election-commissioner
- Election Commission of India, *Report on the First General Elections in India 1951-52, Volume I*, 1955. A scanned copy in Down To Earth’s library: https://cdn.downtoearth.org.in/library/0.61706000_1558592806_first-general-elections-in-india%2C-vol.pdf
- Press Trust of India, *India’s first voter fulfils his duty again*, 2014: https://morungexpress.com/indias-first-voter-fulfils-his-duty-again
- Wikipedia, *Sukumar Sen (civil servant)*, 2026: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukumar_Sen_(civil_servant)

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Sukumar Sen in 1953, on a Colonial Office file sheet from the time of the Sudan election.
- **Credit**: The National Archives UK, CO 1069/14 (Open Government Licence v1.0)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/001/plates/sukumar-sen.jpg

### AI, public information, and the hope of a new civic consciousness — 

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/ai-public-information-and-the-hope-of-a-new
- **Type**: Tool (Specimen label)
- **Creator**: 
- **Original Source**: [sir-bangalore.shantanugoel.com](https://sir-bangalore.shantanugoel.com/) (1 October 2026) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I came across this "tweet by Shantanu Goel" (https://x.com/shantanugoel/status/2116384793588105702) about a really nifty little utility he built.

He's taken Bengaluru's electoral rolls from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), extracted the information from scanned PDFs, and built a "searchable website" (https://sir-bangalore.shantanugoel.com/) where people can check whether their names appear on the rolls.

And it reminded me of something I'd written a few months ago called "AI Makes the World More Legible" (https://bhuvan.substack.com/p/ai-makes-the-world-more-legible).

Looking back, that post feels a little messy. I was trying to get at an idea that was still taking shape in my head. But seeing projects like Shantanu's makes me think there's something to it.

First, to be clear, I don't know if Shantanu used AI coding tools to build this site or did it the old-school, artisanal, gourmet way. But I've been seeing an explosion of similar projects lately, many built using tools like Claude Code and Codex.

And I think they're a wonderful illustration of what I was trying to say.

The central argument in my earlier post was simple: AI makes the world more legible.

What do I mean by that?

One of the things AI tools are exceptionally good at is grunt work. Mountains and mountains of grunt work.

Think about all the information that's technically available to the public but practically inaccessible. Government documents buried in obscure corners of websites. Scanned PDFs that aren't searchable. Data spread across hundreds of files in different formats. Historical books gathering digital dust in university archives. Complicated legal and regulatory documents written in language that appears designed to defeat human comprehension.

The information exists. But good luck doing anything useful with it.

AI tools are increasingly good at extracting, cleaning, formatting, structuring, and analysing this information. They're also good at taking complicated, abstruse language and explaining it in terms that ordinary people can understand.

In other words, they can take information that is otherwise illegible and make it legible.

And then there's the sheer amount of work they can do.

AI coding agents are essentially indefatigable. They don't get bored halfway through extracting data from the 847th PDF. They don't complain about having to clean up another thousand rows of badly formatted information. The only time they stop is when you tell them to, something breaks, or you run out of tokens.

Of course, they make mistakes, sometimes spectacular ones. And for anything consequential, having a human in the loop to verify the output is essential.

But the broader point remains. Work that might previously have required a team of people and weeks or months of effort can, in many cases, now be done by one person with the right tools in a fraction of the time.

And this is why I increasingly think AI might be one of the best things to happen to people working in public policy, civic technology, and the broader public interest.

Consider the amount of public information generated in India.

Governments, regulators, municipalities, courts, statistical agencies, and public institutions produce staggering quantities of information. Unfortunately, an extraordinary amount of it is buried in scanned PDFs, badly formatted tables, fragmented databases, and websites that seem to have been designed by people who harbor a deep and personal hatred of their users.

Information that is technically public is often functionally inaccessible.

I've seen people use AI tools to extract and organise groundwater data, for example. There are similar opportunities with municipal budgets, land records, government spending, environmental data, legislative proceedings, and countless other public datasets.

These are things that should be easy for citizens, journalists, researchers, and civil society organisations to access and understand.

But they often aren't.

I've been experimenting with this myself, albeit on a much smaller scale.

I have two digitisation projects, "Akshara" (https://akshara.ink/) and "Paper Lanterns" (https://paperlanterns.ink/), where I use vision-language models and other tools to rescue old public-domain books, historical letters, speeches, and essays from the digital wilderness.

A lot of this material is already available on places like Archive.org and university archives. But often, it's available only as a scan of a 100-year-old book, complete with faded pages, broken typography, and formatting that makes reading it an exercise in ocular self-harm.

So I use AI to extract the text, clean it up, restore the structure, and make it readable again.

I'm not doing anything particularly revolutionary here. But the fact that someone like me, with no formal programming background, can work on these projects largely by myself is remarkable.

And it points to something much bigger.

Until recently, building a useful public-facing website or application required at least some programming ability, or the resources to hire someone who had it. Today, AI coding tools are becoming capable enough to help ordinary people build fairly sophisticated applications.

Not just toy websites or another bloody to-do app. Genuinely useful tools that combine data extraction, databases, search, maps, and public interfaces.

One small example from my own life is "letmefuckingwalk.com" (https://letmefuckingwalk.com/).

I love walking. I walk when I'm happy, when I'm sad, and pretty much whenever I need to think.

Unfortunately, Bengaluru's footpaths seem to have been designed with two objectives: either make walking impossible, or ensure that anyone foolish enough to attempt it ends up breaking one or both legs.

That's assuming a footpath exists in the first place.

Out of sheer frustration, I asked Claude to help me build a website where I could upload photographs of broken, missing, dangerous, or encroached footpaths. I also wanted other people to be able to contribute photographs of the footpaths in their neighbourhoods.

The idea was to create a public record of just how terrible the city's walking infrastructure is.

Again, it's a relatively uncomplicated project. But I could build it myself, without assembling a team of developers or spending months learning to code.

And that, to me, is the exciting part.

These tools are making it easier for ordinary people to turn their frustrations into something useful.

You don't need to be a programmer to build a tool that makes public information accessible. You don't need to be a data scientist to start examining government datasets. You don't necessarily need a large organisation or substantial funding to make a small contribution to a public problem.

Of course, none of this means that the underlying data is automatically correct. AI can misread documents, invent details, or produce analyses that look convincing but are completely wrong. Making information searchable can also create privacy risks, especially when personal records are involved.

Human verification, responsible data handling, and good judgment remain essential.

But the barrier to getting started has fallen dramatically.

And that brings me to a broader thought.

I wonder if these tools might enable a new era of civic consciousness. Hopefully.

Think about how difficult it is for an ordinary citizen to understand what their government is actually doing.

Where is the money going? What happened to that promised road? How much was allocated to a particular scheme, and how much was actually spent? What has your elected representative been doing? What happened to the commitments made during the last election? Why does one neighbourhood have decent infrastructure while another looks like it survived a meteor strike?

The answers are sometimes out there, scattered across government reports, budgets, parliamentary records, court documents, municipal websites, and other sources.

But finding them, connecting them, and making sense of them is often an enormous undertaking.

What happens when that work becomes dramatically easier?

What happens when someone can take thousands of pages of government documents and turn them into a searchable, understandable public resource?

Or build a tool that tracks what elected representatives promised against what they actually delivered?

Or make it possible for citizens to understand how their local government spends money, without needing a degree in public finance and the patience of a Buddhist monk?

I think there's something potentially transformative here.

Not because AI will magically make governments more transparent or politicians more accountable. Technology alone won't do any of that.

But perhaps it can make the information needed for accountability easier to access, understand, scrutinise, and share.

And perhaps it can empower people who previously didn't have the time, money, technical skills, or institutional backing to work on these problems.

Of course, there's a difference between making something visible and getting someone to act on it. A beautifully designed dashboard showing broken footpaths doesn't automatically fix a single footpath. A searchable database of government spending doesn't automatically stop corruption.

But it's difficult to hold anyone accountable for something you can't even see.

And that's why I keep coming back to this idea of legibility.

AI can help shine a light on things that were previously obscured, buried, fragmented, or inaccessible. Not necessarily because anyone was deliberately hiding them, but often simply because of bad design, bad formats, inadequate resources, or bureaucratic indifference.

Whether that increased legibility translates into greater civic participation and accountability is a different question altogether.

I don't know the answer.

But I genuinely hope it does.

And seeing little projects like Shantanu's makes me a bit more optimistic that it might.

### The $6.4 Billion Binance Hack: Tracing the North Korea Link — 

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/the-6-4-billion-binance-hack-tracing-the-north
- **Type**: Essay (Magazine opening)
- **Creator**: 
- **Original Source**: [Chainalysis](https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/binance-exploit-latest-findings-and-response/) (30 October 2026) · 5 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Black October keeps getting darker. Now $6.4 billion has vanished from Binance.

Just when you thought Black October couldn't get any darker, it did.

On October 29, "Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hacked" (https://www.reuters.com/). According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the attackers made off with an astonishing $6.4 billion in cryptocurrencies, making this the largest crypto hack in history.

For some perspective, the previous record was held by Bybit, which "lost approximately $1.5 billion in February 2025" (https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber/alerts/2025/north-korea-responsible-for-1-5-billion-bybit-hack). The Binance hack is more than four times that amount.

And this wasn't some obscure crypto exchange operating out of a basement. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, holding enormous amounts of customer assets.

The perpetrators appear to be North Korean hackers. "Chainalysis attributes the theft to TraderTraitor" (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/binance-exploit-latest-findings-and-response/), a group linked to several previous cryptocurrency attacks. Its strongest evidence is that some of the stolen Binance funds ended up mixing with money stolen in an earlier Bitget hack, which investigators had already attributed to North Korean actors.

The details of how the hackers got into Binance are still emerging. The company initially suggested that a compromised engineer's laptop may have been involved. But subsequent investigations have uncovered additional points of intrusion. Binance says it has found no evidence that wallet private keys were leaked.

One of the most fascinating details, however, is what happened after the money was stolen.

According to an "extraordinary investigation by Chainalysis" (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/binance-exploit-latest-findings-and-response/), the hackers were racing against time.

Some cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, cannot simply be frozen by an issuer. But stablecoins like USDT and USDC can be. That meant the hackers had a limited window to convert the stolen stablecoins into assets that could not be frozen.

In one particularly frantic sequence, the attackers moved $500 million in stablecoins into a wallet designed to convert the funds. Over roughly 20 minutes, they exchanged $325 million worth of stablecoins for around $285 million in Ethereum. Another $175 million was then moved to intermediary wallets.

The goal was presumably to move faster than investigators and stablecoin issuers could freeze the money.

And then things got even stranger.

Chainalysis observed laundering patterns it hadn't encountered before. Thousands of transactions were taking place within a short period. Funds were repeatedly circulating between wallets, sometimes returning to addresses they had already passed through.

Many of these wallets also exhibited an identical sequence: receive exactly one TRX, receive additional funds, and forward the money elsewhere.

The researchers suspect that the process was automated.

Think about that. The hackers had just stolen billions of dollars, and they appeared to be using an automated network of wallets to move the money around at extraordinary speed, potentially making it harder for investigators to follow.

Now, it's important to distinguish between automation and artificial intelligence. Hackers have been using automated scripts and bots for decades. There is no evidence yet that AI tools were involved in this particular attack.

But I'll come back to that.

In the meantime, Binance and its partners have been trying to contain the damage. According to "Binance's October 30 security update" (https://www.binance.com/en/support/announcement/detail/d3306d9dca5243548c813b605e1d1751), approximately $3 billion of the stolen assets has been frozen on-chain.

That is an extraordinary amount of money to freeze so quickly. But it still leaves billions outside their control. And freezing stolen funds is not the same thing as recovering them.

Binance has promised to cover all customer losses.

Which brings us to another interesting problem.

Can Binance actually absorb a $6.4 billion loss?

A $6.4 billion hole is not exactly something you can plug with the loose change lying around the office.

Binance says it has set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds, including approximately $5 billion already held in the cryptocurrencies affected by the theft. It says it's acquiring the remaining assets and will publish an updated proof-of-reserves report on November 2.

That's reassuring, at least on paper.

But "FT Alphaville's Bryce Elder raised an interesting question" (https://ftav.substack.com/p/binance-situation-all-fud-up) about Binance's emergency insurance fund, known as SAFU, or the Secure Asset Fund for Users.

The fund was created in 2018 to protect customers against unexpected losses. Earlier this year, Binance converted the fund's holdings into Bitcoin. According to FT Alphaville, it was worth approximately $1.2 billion before the hack.

There's a catch, though.

FT Alphaville reports that these Bitcoin reserves are held by Nest Clearing and Custody Limited, Binance's Abu Dhabi-regulated clearing house, and are also counted towards the capital requirements of the company's Abu Dhabi operations.

In other words, there's a question about how much of the emergency reserve is actually available to absorb losses without affecting other capital requirements.

And the fund itself was only a fraction of the size of the hack.

Binance now says it will use both SAFU and its corporate treasury to make customers whole. Whether all these assets are readily available, how the group will absorb the loss, and what the eventual impact on its financial position will be remain important questions.

Then there's another problem: proof of reserves isn't necessarily proof of solvency. Showing that an exchange controls a certain quantity of crypto assets doesn't, by itself, tell you everything about its liabilities, encumbrances, or obligations elsewhere in the group.

And crypto doesn't exactly have a glorious history when it comes to keeping customer money safe.

As "the BBC's reporting on the hack" (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwe8lp7zy07zo) and FT Alphaville's analysis remind us, we've heard reassurances from crypto exchanges before. FTX is the most notorious example, although its collapse involved the misuse of customer assets rather than an external hack.

To be fair, we're still in the very early days of this incident. Binance may well make everyone whole. And the speed with which billions of dollars have been frozen is an encouraging sign.

But it would be premature to assume that all is well simply because the company says it is.

And this problem isn't restricted to the world's largest crypto exchanges.

Closer to home, India's WazirX "lost approximately $230 million in a hack in July 2024" (https://www.iimaglobal.org/sites/default/files/2025-10/WP%20No.2025-10-01.pdf), setting off a prolonged and complicated recovery process for customers.

Then, in July 2025, "CoinDCX suffered a $44 million security breach" (https://indianexpress.com/article/business/coindcx-44-million-hacked-crypto-exchange-users-funds-10139256/). The company said customer funds were unaffected and that it would absorb the loss from its own reserves.

These are just two Indian examples of a much wider global problem.

Crypto exchanges have always been attractive targets. They hold enormous quantities of valuable, transferable assets, often in systems that operate around the clock, across jurisdictions, and with wildly varying levels of security and regulatory oversight.

And the industry has had more than its fair share of spectacular security failures.

Which brings me to the bigger question that's been bothering me.

Is Binance the canary in the coal mine?

These problems existed long before AI became mainstream.

But what happens if AI makes them dramatically worse?

What if AI tools make it easier to discover vulnerabilities, generate malicious code, impersonate employees, and automate complex attacks? What if techniques that previously required teams of highly skilled hackers become accessible to smaller groups with fewer resources?

Or perhaps the scarier possibility is that sophisticated hackers, including state-sponsored groups, can now attempt vastly more attacks with the same resources.

AI doesn't necessarily have to invent new forms of cybercrime to make cybercrime much worse. It could simply make existing techniques cheaper, faster, and easier to scale.

And it isn't just the initial intrusion that matters. There's also reconnaissance, phishing, privilege escalation, transaction execution, laundering, and attempts to evade detection. If AI can compress the time and expertise required at several stages of this process, the cumulative effect could be substantial.

Of course, the same technologies can be used by defenders. AI can help security teams detect anomalies, investigate suspicious activity, and respond to threats more quickly.

The freezing of billions of dollars following the Binance hack also shows that the defenders aren't standing still.

So the question isn't simply whether AI makes hackers more powerful. It's whether AI changes the balance between attackers and defenders, and in whose favour.

I don't want to over-extrapolate from one extraordinary incident or paint an unnecessarily apocalyptic picture. There is no evidence yet that AI played a role in the Binance hack. And it would be foolish to assume that every cryptocurrency exchange is about to be compromised.

But given how prevalent hacks already were before AI, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask whether things are about to get dramatically worse.

And speaking of unreasonable timing, there's one final irony in this story.

In the days leading up to the hack, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ, had apparently been "warning about vulnerabilities in crypto software and the dangers of phishing" (https://ftav.substack.com/p/binance-situation-all-fud-up).

He wasn't wrong.

But boy, oh boy, the timing.

And in a profoundly ironic development, Chainalysis itself was the result of a hack, and some customer data was stolen in the event (https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/security-incident-october-30/).

What makes all of this even more surreal is the pace at which things seem to be happening.

Every time I think I've caught up with one extraordinary development, another three have appeared. And by the time I understand those, five more seem to be unfolding somewhere else.

Reality suddenly seems to be running at 3x or 4x speed, while this roughly three-pound lump of pinkish-grey meat inside my skull can barely process things at 0.2x or 0.5x.

What a crazy world we've entered.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Laundering patterns suggest automation, matched word for word)

> As Chainalysis investigators continue to trace funds stolen from Binance, we are observing laundering patterns we have not seen before. Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds. Rather than simply moving funds onward, they repeatedly circulate them among addresses, often sending funds back to addresses involved earlier in the sequence.
> 
> Many addresses follow a consistent pattern: they receive exactly 1 TRX, then receive additional funds, then forward funds to other addresses. This repeated sequence suggests a programmatic process for moving and redistributing the stolen funds.

- **Marked by editor**: "Thousands of transactions in a short period suggest that the attackers are using automation to obscure the trail of funds."

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Flight after the Northfield Bank Robbery - James–Younger Gang. circa 1882.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/001/plates/the-6-4-billion-binance-hack-tracing-the-north.jpg

#### Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [Lazarus Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group): The Lazarus Group is a state-sponsored hacker group made up of unknown members, alleged to be run by the government of North Korea.
- [Tornado Cash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_Cash): Tornado Cash is an open source, non-custodial, fully decentralized cryptocurrency tumbler that runs on Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible networks.
- [Bybit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit): Bybit is a Dubai-based cryptocurrency exchange that was originally founded in China.
- [Stablecoin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stablecoin): A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that aims to maintain a stable value relative to a specified asset, a pool or basket of assets.
- [Binance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binance): Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies.

### The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/the-second-coming
- **Type**: Poem (Broadside)
- **Creator**: W. B. Yeats
- **Original Source**: [W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1920), pp. 19–20](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Michael_Robartes_and_the_Dancer/The_Second_Coming) (1920) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I read this poem for the first time about a year ago, and it's stuck in my head. It's haunting, and if you read it, you can't help but see all the parallels to our present state of things, even though the poem was written after World War I, which was and is and still remains one of the greatest human catastrophes of all time. What makes the poem so powerful is the imagery it evokes in your mind. None of it is really good. Blood-dimmed horrors it is.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1920), pp. 19–20, matched word for word)

> Turning and turning in the widening gyre
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst
> Are full of passionate intensity.
> 
> Surely some revelation is at hand;
> Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
> The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
> When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
> Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
> A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
> Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
> Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
> The darkness drops again but now I know
> That twenty centuries of stony sleep
> Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

#### Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [W. B. Yeats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats): William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.

## Colophon

Chosen and annotated by Bhuvanesh, mostly by voice. Read, cross-linked and drafted with language models, then checked by hand. The serif is the editor; the blue sans is the machine. The machine notes in this Haul were written by Claude, Anthropic's model; one item quotes an answer from Google's Gemini, and says so. Every quotation was matched against its source and every link was fetched before publishing.