A practical guide through the landscape of type systems, from everyday generics to dependent types that prove correctness, with examples in Rust, Scala, and Idris

Many features of human experience that feel natural are historically produced. Individuality and consciousness belong to this category. They emerged through specific cultural practices to solve problems of coordination, responsibility, and long-term planning. Computation and capital now solve these problems faster, at larger scales, through external processes. As decision-making, memory, and meaning-production migrate into automated feedback loops, the inner self loses its function. These essays trace the construction of modern subjectivity and examine what happens as the conditions that produced it dissolve.

Ergodic Group is organized around the observation that certain systems change character through sustained engagement. In these systems, repetition refines execution, experience carries forward, and accumulated judgment reshapes future outcomes. Time is not neutral. It filters error, stabilizes standards, and reveals structural quality. Systems differ less in what they produce than in how they behave under repeated contact with reality. Contemporary society is accelerating across technical, cultural, and organizational dimensions. Cycles shorten, signals multiply, and coordination occurs under constant pressure to respond. This acceleration compounds itself, tightening feedback loops and compressing decision horizons. As pace increases, many structures continue operating while gradually shedding accumulated judgment and internal coherence. Activity persists while formation weakens. Systems appear functional even as their capacity to learn erodes.

We believe crypto has been incredibly successful at providing a trustless financial layer for the 21st century. In particular it has found product market fit in two main areas: In developing countries providing aids and tools to individuals that need to fight against inflation, censorship and for companies and individuals to be able to business. Internet native communities that need a financial layer in the web that allows them to express and coordinate at a scale that wasn’t possible before. They have created new financial assets and markets that seem absurd from outside. Many times they are also absurd from the inside. People that don’t live in a developing country or that didn’t grow up with the internet have enormous difficulties understanding crypto because they don’t have skin in its game. They believe crypto doesn’t have any “real” use case or that is not serious enough. They are right. The thing is that we are living in a world that’s is becoming more absurd. Memes do not only make you laugh anymore, memes are now winning elections.

Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) and other cryptographic and distributed systems primitives will help society create tools that can be used by everyone. ZKPs enable a party to demonstrate a statement to other parties without revealing any information beyond the proof. In more concrete terms, this enables a person to show another person that the computation they did is correct without having to redo it and without even having to grant access to the data that was used.