Annals of Now

Tech History

Your Brain Is Running 17th-Century Firmware: The Tulip Bubble and the Neuroscience of Every Market Crash Since

In 1637, Dutch merchants were mortgaging their houses for flower bulbs. The mechanism that drove them to do it is the same one that drove retail investors into Dogecoin in 2021 and dot-com stocks in 1999. The hardware hasn't been updated. Understanding the original bug report is the most useful thing a modern investor can do.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech History

The Oldest Complaint in the World Is About Teenagers

Long before TikTok, long before video games, long before rock and roll, adults were convinced that the younger generation was uniquely, catastrophically lost. The historical record disagrees — loudly, repeatedly, and across every civilization that ever kept one. What the annals actually show is not a crisis of youth, but a reflex of age.

Mar 12, 2026

Tech History

Same Exploit, Different Century: What Rome's Information Wars Reveal About Our Own

The Roman Republic did not collapse because its citizens became uniquely irrational. It collapsed, in part, because sophisticated actors learned to weaponize the cognitive vulnerabilities that all humans carry. The mechanisms documented by platform researchers in the 2010s were already running at full speed in the Forum two thousand years ago.

Mar 12, 2026

Tech History

When the Data Was Right and the Experts Were Wrong: The Enduring Logic of Professional Self-Defense

In the 1840s, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis proved that doctors were killing their patients — and was destroyed professionally for saying so. The mechanism that buried his evidence is not a relic of Victorian medicine. It is running, largely unchanged, through every field where new findings threaten established careers.

Mar 12, 2026

Tech History

The Rise, Fall, and Reinvention of Digg: A Story of Internet Power, Community, and Survival

Few websites have shaped — and then lost — the internet's cultural conversation quite like Digg. From its early dominance as the web's premier social news aggregator to its spectacular collapse and subsequent reinventions, the story of Digg is one of the most instructive cautionary tales in Silicon Valley history.

Mar 12, 2026