Ryan Collison

Everyone knows Moore's Law as the transistor count story. The deeper story is energy: each generation of chips did more computation per joule, compounding into the digital revolution we live inside.

No substance reshaped human civilization faster than oil. It built the suburb, powered the tank, created the petrodollar, and handed unprecedented leverage to whoever sat on top of a reservoir. The 20th century wasn't just influenced by oil — it was built from it.

The War of Currents wasn't just a technical dispute — it was a business war, a PR campaign, and a fight about whose vision of electrified civilization would win. Edison lost. Here's why AC beat DC, and what it cost both men to find out.

For all of history, civilization ran on muscle power. Then coal and steam arrived, and suddenly machines could do work that no number of human laborers could match. That transition changed everything.

A horse produces about 750 watts continuously. A laboring human, maybe 75. For most of history, these numbers were the hard limits of what any civilization could build, grow, or move — and they explain more about the ancient world than any political history.

Before farming, before writing, before civilization—there was fire. Richard Wrangham argues that cooking food was the single event that made us recognizably human.