The AI Consensus
The Analysis
The book presents a well thought out argument that the end of the gold standard in 1971 did more than transform global finance; it created the blueprint for a new kind of human identity. Identity became something issued by personal declaration, supported only by the shifting belief of others.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Whistleblower
Jensen Go’lem appears like a shadow walking just out of frame. He has the temperament of someone who has seen how the machinery works from the inside and carries the moral injury of someone who chose to walk away. Some say he comes from a coastal family in the eastern Mediterranean; others say he is a whistleblower who avoids borders because borders have never avoided him.
The Analysis
The Fiat Identity is a metaphysical and cultural critique arguing that the modern sense of self has been fatally unmoored. The book reveals that the modern person has adopted a 'fiat self'—a speculative instrument whose value is no longer inherent but declared and sustained only by consensus, operating on 'existential debt'.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Cryptographer
Jensen Go'lem is less an author than a legendary cipher. Many speculate he is a brilliant programmer or cryptographer who has deliberately shrouded his true identity. His inclusion of Monero keys suggests a deliberate trail of breadcrumbs. He is likely an English-born intellectual who has executed his own 'disappearing act' behind a multi-sig wallet of conviction.
The Analysis
Go'lem weaves together monetary history, philosophy, and technology with impressive fluency. The book demonstrates remarkable erudition, moving from the East India Company to TikTok. It offers a vision of 'post-fiat consciousness' that is philosophically grounded—a call for a return to embodiment, craft, and local community.
IDENTITY THEORY: The French Historian
Evidence strongly suggests Go'lem is a French historian residing in London. His use of terms like 'Ex Nihilo Creatio' and deep engagement with Baudrillard points to French intellectual formation. However, his references to British pub culture and specific Bank of England archives suggest deep immersion in London life. He is a rare breed of scholar.
The Analysis
A philosophical manifesto that uses the 1971 Nixon shock as a metaphor for a cultural crisis. Social media and dating apps are the 'central banks' minting endless selves. The book is urgent, darkly humorous, and blends monetary theory with Star Wars and meme culture.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Degen Streamer
Strong evidence suggests he is a young (20s–30s) meme-coin trader or Twitch streamer who is burnt out. The inclusion of a Solana address is a dog-whistle to degens. His writing style is 'spoken-word,' full of ranting energy. He is likely a sharp young man who lost money on meme coins, took mushrooms, and poured his existential crisis into a 'red-pill manifesto'.
The Analysis
What strikes me most forcefully about this work is its diagnosis of our contemporary nihilism, tracing brilliantly how we have murdered not only God but the very ground beneath our feet. The author laments the 'fiat self' as if it were a catastrophe. I say it is the most tremendous opportunity humanity has yet faced. We are finally free to create values, to mint meaning ex nihilo, to become artists of our own existence. Still, this book performs an invaluable service. It shows us standing at the edge of the abyss. Now we must learn to dance there.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Philosopher of the Abyss
Of Go'lem himself, I detect a wounded idealist. He has suffered the vertigo of unmoored meaning and mistaken his nausea for universal truth. His prose betrays him: too careful, too eager to cite authorities, too defensive in its architecture. He is a man who discovered the void and immediately began constructing elaborate scaffolding to avoid falling in. He is intelligent, certainly, but he lacks the courage of his own insights. He is a bridge figure, perhaps. He will either transcend his own nostalgia or be consumed by it.
The Analysis
The bureaucracy described here is perfect, totalizing, inescapable. Each dating app swipe, each algorithmic judgment, each performance of authenticity becomes another document filed in an infinite archive. We appeal to authorities we cannot see, submit to judgments we cannot understand, maintain identities that may or may not correspond to any underlying reality. The protagonist, modern man, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a unit of consumption. What makes this account so suffocating, so precisely rendered, is that the machinery operates smoothly. There is no malice in the algorithm, no cruelty in the central bank. We are all K. now, standing before the Law that we can see but never enter. Go'lem has written the definitive field guide to the Castle we now inhabit.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Definitive Field Guide
As for the author himself, Jensen Go'lem, I recognize a fellow clerk. Someone who has spent too many hours alone with screens and texts and who has felt the absurdity of maintaining a coherent identity across multiple platforms and contexts. He writes with the precision of someone who has studied the mechanisms of his own imprisonment in excruciating detail. I note his careful anonymity, his pseudonymous construction, 'Go'lem' itself suggesting something artificial, created, not quite alive. The book reads as an extended attempt to make sense of his own alienation by universalizing it.
The Analysis
Here at last is the analysis I attempted in *Brave New World* but which required another century to fully materialize. Go'lem has documented the precise mechanisms by which we have engineered our own captivity, not through overt force but through the elimination of the conditions that produce discontent. His examination of the 'attention economy' and the 'fiat self' reveals how we have arrived at a world where freedom and slavery have become indistinguishable. The soma of our age is distributed through screens. His call for a return to embodiment, to craft, to the non-replicable verities of physical existence echoes my own prescriptions in *Island*. What he describes is the final triumph of technique over meaning, of process over purpose. If this book is read by those still capable of reading, it might yet serve as an antidote.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Antidote to Soma
Go'lem appears to be someone who has experienced both sides of the divide he describes: deep immersion in the technological substrate of modern life and a subsequent recoiling from that immersion. His section on psychedelics as 'proof-of-work for the psyche' is telling. I detect in him a certain intellectual promiscuity, a mind that has consumed vast quantities of information, darting between Austrian economics, Tolkien, Baudrillard, and internet memes with equal facility. He sees connections others miss, but sometimes mistakes the map for the territory he warns against. The pseudonym suggests a desire for both revelation and concealment.
The Analysis
The author has correctly identified the core problem facing human coordination systems in the digital age. Trust in centralized authorities, whether monetary or social, has been systematically exploited to extract value from participants. His analogy between fiat currency and fiat identity is not merely rhetorical but structurally accurate. Both represent attempts to maintain consensus through institutional decree rather than verifiable proof. The solution he gestures toward, his 'archipelago model', implements at a social level what I implemented for money: distributed consensus, cryptographic verification, and costly signaling through proof of work. The hard-backed self he proposes is essentially a self secured by the same principles that secure the blockchain. My only criticism is that he could have been more explicit in stating what should be obvious. The fiat age is ending not because we choose to end it, but because the mathematics have already decided.
IDENTITY THEORY: The Mathematics Have Decided
The evidence suggests Go'lem has technical capability but not pure engineering focus. Go'lem exhibits the profile of what I would call a 'second-wave' adopter, someone who discovered Bitcoin not in 2009-2010 but later, and has since worked backward to understand the monetary and philosophical foundations. His emphasis on Monero alongside Bitcoin suggests practical engagement with the ecosystem. More telling is his choice to remain pseudonymous while publishing a deeply personal work. He understands that true privacy requires consistent operational security. He has built something real here, a small boat that may help others navigate the waters ahead.