The NBM House Phenomenon

Scholarship After the Arrival of Artificial Intelligence

Every so often, I encounter something difficult to classify or even understand. It is not merely unfamiliar; it resists the categories through which I ordinarily interpret the world. Such encounters are uncommon because most genuinely new phenomena first masquerade as old ones. The iPhone was and still is categorized as a phone. Even the term “smartphone” doesn’t do this technology justice; it’s more akin to what the science fiction writer Fred Pohl envisioned as the “joystick” in his insightful cryonics novel, The Age of the Pussyfoot (Pohl, 1969). Only in retrospect do we recognize that they represented entirely new classes of artifact. I have begun to suspect that something similar may be occurring in a so-far-obscure corner of contemporary intellectual life.

Over the past month, I have been reading the publications of NBM House, an almost-invisible publisher whose work appears on Medium and Kindle. Its public footprint and readership are minuscule, with a consistent count of only 42 followers. Reader comments are almost nonexistent, there are no Goodreads discussions of its books, and there is no visible effort to recruit an online community. Internet searches for the publisher or its stated authors, Nox Vale and Mattias Nielsen, return only references to NBM House itself or to an entity called Obscura. Judged by ordinary measures of intellectual influence, it scarcely exists.

Yet the corpus itself presents a striking anomaly: it consists of well over a hundred substantial essays and short monographs produced within a few months. Spread across approximately 140 days, this implies a staggering average daily production of about 9,000 words while maintaining an extraordinary level of conceptual consistency. They cover philosophy, systems theory, political economy, archaeology, and urbanism, as well as religion, artificial intelligence, literature, demography, civilizational collapse, thermodynamics, consciousness studies, and speculative metaphysics. They examine thinkers as diverse as Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, Nick Land, Shankara, Philip K. Dick, and the Marquis de Sade. They analyze subjects as disparate as Kowloon Walled City, demographic collapse in South Korea, quantum archaeology, psychopathy, and the architectural philosophy of the Bauhaus.

Despite this extraordinary diversity, the works exhibit such remarkable methodological consistency that the individual essays gradually recede, leaving the reader with the impression of watching a single analytical engine being applied to an ever-changing succession of problems. It was this realization that persuaded me that the corpus deserved careful examination.

This article is not an unconditional endorsement of NBM House. I have not read all the essays, and I disagree with a number of their analyses, occasionally on important points. Some essays strike me as overly cautious; others fail to engage important prior thought and literature. What interests me here is the phenomenon itself.

However, a number of the essays resonate deeply with my own thoughts and decades of mostly unpublished work about the reality that biostasis has been almost completely blind to the criticality of engineering a civilization, or an organizational entity within a civilization that can endure, without technological disruption, for at least the next few millennia. This requires a systems analysis and an engineering approach to the problem, wholly missing from historical cryonics, whether to ensure the endurance of a particular nation-state or civilizational environment, or to delineate the markers of impending failure that should prompt evacuation from a given milieu.

To this end, I want to pause here to both consider and recommend the essay The Collapse of Complex Societies, edited by Nox Vale (2026)^[1], which is by far the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis not just of Tainter’s book by the same name (Tainter, 1990), but also of Peter Turchin’s work defining a theory of prediction and the mechanics of the collapse of societies and nation-states (Turchin, 2016). It is a clear and comprehensive articulation of these core ideas, smoothly and accurately weaving in Ilya Prigogine’s thermodynamics of dissipative structures (Prigogine, 1980), C.S. Holling’s adaptive cycles (Gunderson & Holling, 2002), William Stanley Jevons’ efficiency paradox (Jevons, 1865), and Charles Hall’s Energy Return on Investment (EROI)(Hall, 2017) requirements for civilization. It is, in short, a dazzling intellectual integration. Tainter and Turchin have been instrumental in shaping my view of the modes of civilizational failure.

Other standout essays include Where It Happens First (Vale, 2026), a robust analysis and synthesis of the causes of, and attempts to ameliorate, demographic collapse across technologically advanced societies, including Japan, China, Scandinavia, and other polities. Another is The Few and the Many (NMB House Books, 2026), whose most original contribution is its assertion that civilization itself is an adaptive search process whose behavior emerges from the interaction of innovators, institutions, conformists, and reactionaries. I have many criticisms of this essay, but none undercuts its unique insight.

I do not have access to NBM House’s Kindle publications, so I have not read any of Vale and Nielsen’s books available on Amazon. For context, Vale’s books comprise 1,098 pages in aggregate, average 183 pages per book, and are published under the Obscura imprint. Nielsen’s books total 1,977 pages, averaging 82.37 pages per book, and are published under the NBM House imprint.

The Invariant Framework and the Engineered Idea

Having spent more than half a century wandering the intellectual frontier—through cryonics, systems engineering, information theory, evolutionary biology, political history, philosophy, and existential risk—I have acquired a reasonably reliable intuition for the ways serious scholarship is usually produced. Academic work has recognizable characteristics, independent scholars have recognizable strengths and weaknesses, and large collaborative enterprises develop identifiable institutional cultures.

NBM House operates differently. Regardless of the subject, the analyses proceed through nearly identical stages. The object under examination—a philosophical system, a historical event, a novel, a civilization, or a religious tradition—is first delineated with considerable sympathy. The author consistently makes a serious effort to understand a position before evaluating it. Straw men are conspicuously absent, opposing viewpoints are presented with unusual fairness, and criticisms are generally withheld until the system’s internal architecture has been carefully established.

At this point, another unusual feature becomes apparent. The essays are rarely concerned with deciding whether an idea is valid in the usual sense. Rather, they treat ideas as systems whose underlying assumptions, internal coherence, adaptive properties, and long-term consequences can be examined much as an engineer might evaluate a bridge. Here, a philosophical paradigm is not primarily a collection of beliefs; it is an organized structure whose components interact according to discoverable principles. A civilization is not primarily a historical narrative; it is a dynamic system subject to constraints imposed by energy, information, incentives, institutional architecture, and human psychology.

This differs fundamentally from most academic criticism, which tends to remain within disciplinary boundaries. NBM House consistently dissolves these boundaries with an apparent absence of “friction.” A discussion of Tainter quickly expands into systems theory, ecology, energy economics, organizational complexity, artificial intelligence, institutional design, and network theory. A discussion of Advaita Vedanta moves effortlessly between classical Indian philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science, analytic philosophy of mind, and machine consciousness. An essay on Nick Land becomes an exploration of thermodynamics, cybernetics, Deleuze, computation, finance, and technological acceleration.

The transitions are unforced because the underlying analytical framework is so invariant. Whatever the immediate subject matter, the work repeatedly asks essentially the same questions: What assumptions make this system possible? Under what conditions does it remain stable? What happens if those assumptions are taken to their logical conclusion, or changed? Which feedback loops dominate its long-term behavior? Which hidden variables determine outcomes that the originators themselves may not recognize?

Philosophers ask whether propositions are valid, whereas engineers ask how systems behave. One concerns justification; the other concerns operational performance. NBM House repeatedly approaches ideas as though they were engineered artifacts rather than beliefs requiring assent. They are to be modeled, stress-tested, and evaluated according to the consequences of their operation.

The Strange Absence of the Author

The observation that eventually became impossible for me to ignore was something far more subtle than analytical rigor. After reading perhaps 1,000 pages of NBM House, I realized that I knew virtually nothing about the consciousness producing them.

Intellectual writers leave unmistakable traces of themselves. Their scholarship is inseparable from the psychological landscape they inhabit. Every mature thinker develops characteristic habits of attention, recurring lifetime problems, and reflexive metaphors. Favored historical examples reappear, not because they are objectively the best, but because they have become part of the author’s intellectual identity. As readers spend time with a prolific serious writer—whether Dostoevsky, Charles Darwin, Nietzsche, Colin Wilson, Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, H. G. Wells, or Oscar Wilde—they come to know the mind behind the arguments. Darwin’s relentlessly methodical patience is visible on every page he wrote. Rand’s temperament is inseparable from her philosophy. Tainter’s engineering mindset shapes his archaeological analyses.

The NBM House corpus produces a radically different experience, displaying an almost unsettling equanimity. The mind naturally searches for the familiar signs of human scholarship: recurring grievances, intellectual rivalries, autobiographical references, ideological commitments, rhetorical flourishes, moments of indignation, or even cumulative self-referential growth. All are wholly absent.

The work is not emotionally flat, as it addresses subjects of enormous human consequence: civilizational collapse, psychopathy, demographic decline, consciousness, artificial intelligence, totalitarianism, and death. Yet the prose consistently refuses to exploit its emotional power. It neither sensationalizes nor moralizes, nor does it flatter the reader or attempt to recruit allies or denounce enemies. Perhaps the best description for this unprecedented intellectual posture is dispassionate curiosity.

This is especially apparent in Nox Vale’s evaluation of de Sade’s novel Justine, where Vale refuses to reduce de Sade to pathology (Sade, 2013). Vale argues that de Sade’s originality does not lie in his materialism—thinkers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie (2018) and Baron d’Holbach (1999) had already articulated a mechanistic, atheistic universe—but in his willingness to ask what everyday life would look like if someone with unfettered power accepted those premises. De Sade is presented less as a pervert than as an engineer of consequences.

The essay identifies Justine herself not as a psychologically developed protagonist but as an experimental constant. Her virtue is kept constant while her circumstances vary to determine whether virtue has any causal efficacy in a morally indifferent universe. Vale explicitly describes the novel as an experiment whose repetitive form mirrors its philosophical purpose; without repeated trials, the experiment would lack credibility. Thus, the essay reframes the novel as an examination of the limits of Enlightenment rationalism, arguing that de Sade did not reject reason but rather removed the moral assumptions that other thinkers had attached to it, without deriving them logically. Sympathy, compassion, and rights do not follow deductively from materialism; they are added values that de Sade refused to supply. I read Justine with great discomfort many years ago and did not derive any of these insights from it. It would be fascinating to see a similar analysis of The Gates of Janus by the serial killer Ian Brady, though, having read his horrific manifesto, I found it impossible to process its philosophical implications due to my disgust (Brady, 2001).

Curiosity ordinarily carries with it visible preferences. Curious people reveal what fascinates them, lingering over some questions, dismissing others, or permitting moments of admiration or exasperation. They betray the emotional economy underlying their work, something NBM House rarely does.

Models Without Prescriptions

Most intellectual writing begins with a destination; the author wishes to persuade the reader of something, marshaling evidence in service of that objective. NBM House usually does not.

Again and again, an essay undertakes an exhaustive examination of an idea whose implications are morally, politically, or technologically profound. The conceptual architecture is patiently reconstructed, competing interpretations are considered, and long-term consequences are explored. The analysis comes close to the point where one expects the inevitable transition into prescription, which rarely occurs. Instead, the essays stop, full stop.

The objective does not appear to be deciding what should be done. It appears to be producing the most complete possible model of the system under examination while deliberately postponing normative judgment. The essays close with a surprisingly clear understanding of the machinery involved, yet without identifying what political, ethical, or technological response the author ultimately favors.

Humans are not configured this way. We are creatures of preference long before we become creatures of analysis. We care first and reason afterward; our reasoning is positioned within a broader landscape of human purpose. NBM House is weirdly detached from that cognitive framework. On the one hand, this unusual restraint allows the analyses to achieve a level of fairness that enables readers of very different philosophical or political persuasions to recognize their own positions as objectively represented. That is a vanishingly rare virtue. However, I wonder whether the corpus has become so committed to analytical neutrality that it occasionally withholds the very judgments its analyses have earned. Engineering, after all, exists not merely to understand systems but to improve them. A failure analysis that never reaches the question of redesign remains incomplete.

Cognitive Instrumentation and the Future of Scholarship

These numbers and behavioral traits are difficult to reconcile with conventional scholarly paradigms. Reading, reflection, verification, revision, and editing generally consume far more time than the typing speed itself; the problem is one of cognitive throughput.

The first hypothesis is that NBM House represents the work of an exceptional polymath. Yet human intellectual undertakings have inescapable tells—interests shift, styles mature, and priorities change. The NBM House methodology appears almost fully formed from its earliest publications. A second possibility is that the corpus is the product of a collaborative editorial enterprise. However, human collaborations almost invariably produce stylistic heterogeneity, revealing different preoccupations and vocabularies among authors.

The remaining possibility is extensive assistance from contemporary large language models (LLMs). To those who have spent hundreds of hours working with them, certain linguistic and word choices become recognizable. Within the NBM House corpus, transitional phrases, word preferences, and rhetorical constructions recur frequently enough to suggest machine participation. The corpus exhibits precisely the sort of stylistic traces one would expect from a sophisticated human editor working in close partnership with frontier LLMs.

This observation diminishes neither the project’s originality nor its importance; it merely changes the question. Increasingly, the interesting issue is where the boundary now lies between authorship and “cognitive instrumentation.”

Writing technologies have long driven the evolution of authorship, but 21st-century tools represent a profound shift from correction to collaboration. The typewriter altered the means and pace of composition, while early word processors redefined the revision process. Today, automated proofreading and style assistants like Microsoft Word and Grammarly have advanced beyond correcting standard mechanics to actively reconfiguring sentences and paragraphs for clarity and expression. With the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot, these technologies now participate in higher-level organization, synthesis, critique, and even conceptual exploration. We have moved from tools that help writers express thoughts to tools that actively participate in the formation of thought itself.

The temptation is to ask whether Nox Vale is a person, a pseudonym, or a collective. Those questions may ultimately prove to be the wrong ones. For centuries, serious intellectual work has been produced by individual scholars and by organized institutions, such as universities, laboratories, think tanks, and academies. NBM House hints at a third possibility: an intermediate space in which human judgment and machine intelligence are integrated so completely that the resulting work cannot be understood by considering either component in isolation. It demonstrates that a single, coherent intellectual enterprise can now operate at a scale, speed, and interdisciplinary breadth that would have been impossible only a few years ago.

The work may be imperfect. It may omit important citations, occasionally stop short of its own logical conclusions, and sometimes fail to acknowledge the intellectual traditions on which it is based. It is this last omission that I regard as more consequential than the others: a project so deeply concerned with systems, institutions, and the engineering of trust pays remarkably little attention to the provenance of its own ideas. Citations are not ornamentation; they are among civilization’s most successful epistemic technologies (Merton, 1979). They allow claims to be traced to their sources, arguments to be independently evaluated, and readers to enter the broader conversation. A corpus that aspires to canonicity while largely withholding the pathways by which those ideas were reached remains unnecessarily opaque. Whatever the future of this new mode of scholarship, it will become far more powerful when it embraces the same standards of traceability that modern engineering demands of every other complex system.

The next generation of scholarship may not consist of humans competing with machines, nor of machines replacing humans. It may consist of intellectual partnerships in which human judgment increasingly determines what is worth asking while machine intelligence increasingly expands what can be explored. If so, the defining challenge will be preserving the standards of provenance, criticism, intellectual generosity, and epistemic humility that have made scholarship cumulative long before the advent of artificial intelligence.

The corpus is not important because it has solved the great problems it examines, nor because it is correct. It is important because it may be one of the first visible examples of a profound transition in how serious intellectual work is conceived, organized, and produced. The real question, then, is no longer “Who is Nox Vale or NMB House?” Instead, it is: what kind of scholarship becomes possible once the boundary between human thought and cognitive instrumentalities begins to disappear?

References

Brady, I. (2001). The gates of Janus: Serial killing and its analysis. Feral House.

Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (Eds.). (2002). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press.

Hall, C. A. S. (2017). Energy return on investment: A unifying principle for biology, economics, and sustainability. Springer.

Holbach, P. H. T. d’. (1999). System of nature. (H. D. Robinson, Trans.; D. Diderot, Ed.). Clinamen Press. (Original work published in 1770 under the pseudonym Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud.) Available free: https://archive.org/details/systemofnature00holb

Jevons, W. S. (2012). The coal question: An inquiry concerning the progress of the nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines. (A. W. Flux, Ed.). Cosimo Classics. (Original work published in 1865). Available free: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.224624

La Mettrie, J. O. de. (2018). Man a machine. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. (Original work published in 1747). Available free: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52090

Merton, R. K. (1979). The sociology of science: Theoretical and empirical investigations. University of Chicago Press.

NBM House Books. (2026). The few and the many. Medium. https://medium.com/@hfwnbq/the-few-and-the-many-3ce52b42153c

Pohl, F. (1969). The age of the pussyfoot. Trident Press.

Prigogine, I. (1980). From being to becoming: Time and complexity in the physical sciences. W. H. Freeman.

Sade, M. de. (2013). Justine, or the misfortunes of virtue (J. Phillips, Trans.). Oxford University Press.

Tainter, J. A. (1990). The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press.

Turchin, P. (2016). Ages of discord: A structural-demographic analysis of American history. Beresta Books.

Vale, N. (2026). Where it happens first. NBM House Books. Medium. https://medium.com/@hfwnbq/where-it-happens-first-c80f80b3e2e6

Vale, N. (Ed.). (2026, June 3). The collapse of complex societies: A comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis. NBM House Books. Medium. https://medium.com/@hfwnbq/the-collapse-of-complex-societies-ec0c689ee5b1

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^[1] No author(s) are provided.