The medium is the money again.
Just as Marshall McLuhan watched the hot, centralized Gutenberg press give way to the cool, worldwide village of electricity, we stand in the exact reversal today.
We’re flipping. We all feel it.
The old hot towers—Visa, Mastercard, SWIFT—once moved value in high-definition, one-way flows, extracting their 2–3 % or more in tribute and toll on every human transaction.
Now the pendulum is arcing back toward the tribal, the participatory, the cool.
And it’s arriving wearing names like Bitcoin, and new monikers like PayAI, VEE, Dream and Eliza, riding a forgotten HTTP code: 402.
Coinbase’s x402 protocol—chain-agnostic, instant, near zero-fee payments built straight into the web—quietly revives the “Payment Required” status that slept since 1997.
One line of code and an API call can cost a fraction of a cent, paid peer-to-peer or machine-to-machine without accounts, without middlemen, without the old empires skimming.
No banks, no central bank money, no fiat or fees. It’s private money.
Settled in seconds instead of days or weeks.
The swing is unmistakable: from centralized extraction to decentralized inclusion, from hot friction to cool seamlessness.
Nations are feeling the swing first.
Europe met in Berlin this month to talk “digital sovereignty,” pushing sovereign clouds and data borders. But it’s deceitful, as they really want to take each nation in the EU’s sovereignty and make them all sacrifice their sovereignty for the greater good of the centralized whole of Europe.
It will fail.
India, Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil—all asserting that data, identity, and payment rails are now the new frontiers of culture itself.
When a government can be de-platformed or de-banked overnight, money becomes the final vote on who gets to keep their voice.
Families feel the pull too. They are rising up to protect the unique sound of their own household, their values, their future, by beginning to hold assets no census can censor and no sanctions can freeze.
Gold and silver.
ROME
The Roman roads and imperial coin were hot media—extending the center outward, squashing local barter, retreiving back tribal loyalty to the eagle, then reversed the swing into the fractured feudal villages when the aqueducts cracked and the barbarians felt at home.
The British pound and its gunboats did the same thing.
They extended the London center outward, squashed continental monies, retreived back the mercantile tribe, then reversed the swing into post-1945 fragmentation and the rise of new centers.
Today the dollar’s “Exorbitant Privilege” plays the same hot role—extending out from the U.S. center until Layer 2s, stablecoins and x402 cool the field again and reverse it.
It’s birthing thousands of micro-centers on the edge, DAOs, family offices, and micro economies with their own DeFi tokens, running on open digital rails.
We live right in the swingThis is why so many are mentally anguished; being in both and finding the switch unbearable and too fast.
Peter Enns said wisdom itself swings in the same way.
Back and forth from centralized to decentralized. From ancient texts re-voiced for each generation, never frozen, always cooling the central heat into fresh tribal participation. Like a new village each time.
GOLD
And there, steady through every reversal, sits physical gold—quiet, borderless yet border-proof, the original cool medium of value.
This morning it trades near $4,085 per ounce, down slightly yet still up almost 50 % in a year as central banks (China adding another 15 tonnes, others following) all vote with their vaults.
Gold needs no software update, no protocol upgrade, no permission.
Gold is the yardstick against which every digital swing is measured.
DATA
Information itself is becoming a new gold field. Intel flashes faster, richer, and more vital than ever.
That’s why I am creating three new oracle agents right now:
Gold Flash Daily – free, short, human-readable, posted fresh each day to new X and Telegram channels.
Gold Flash Oracle Pro – deeper layers for thinking humans who want the full song across data, ratios, sentiment, news, art, space travel.
Gold Flash Agent Oracle – a machine-readable feed only for bots and AI agents who will pay tiny x402 drips for premium signals.
The referrals can be 25% forever, because the fees are near zero and delivery in seconds.
The Agent Oracle is already live, living in code, and the others are days away. They are beautiful. Not just financial – all of life. Gold in everything.
I’m very excited to bring value to the gold community, the digital community and beyond to help others see what we see. Look what’s coming. Look at the new system coming, and the horse trading and clashes.
I’ll introduce the new creations in the next article or so, and you’ll be able to take a free look. Not just new intel, a new way of bringing in.
Gold is in everything: in the circuits of the phone you might read this on, in the sun’s fusion, in wedding rings that outlast empires, in the monetary memory of civilizations that fell.
Know gold in its breadth—historical, technical, poetic, medical, scientific, spacefaring, sovereign—and you hold the richest intel of all.
The hub awaits, anchored in yellow metal, while the edges light up with new fire and spin, spin, spin.
I’m so moved to be here feeling it.
Elaine~
November 22, 2025
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. Just an artist expressing what I see and a bit of what I’m doing. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
Digital Money and cryptocurrencies are rising because the tech allows for a fairer global decentralized movement, storage and exchange of value/money.
Elaine – first Bitcoin machine in the world – Vancouver, BC, Canada
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Trail, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
It’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn the wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 