##### Why would you build a castle that is not a castle? When I was a kid, castles were serious business. Holiday trips had to feature enough visits of some piles of crumbling stone to keep me and my brother compliant with the rest of my parents plans. Over time, I became a castle connaisseur with a distinct taste for what makes a cool castle, and being the judgemental kid I was, more importantly a taste for what defines a shitty castle. In a nutshell, a castle had lost its justification for existence when it was not gritty enough. As I grew older, my judgement became more nuanced and I realized that what disqualified castles the most were castles not meant to defend anything, but only to resemble actual fortifications. 10-year-old me enjoyed a good fortress and hated the chateau. Every time I ended up disappointed in a 19th century palace villa with skinny walls that would fall faster to a battering ram than dark age palisades I wondered: Why would you build a castle that is not a castle? In 1676, Leibniz discretely visited the infamous Spinoza in his modest workshop, where he maintained a humble business of grinding lenses. Leibniz was eager to meet the man that had published the most radical ideas of his time, considered so dangerous that it got Spinoza expelled with colorful words[^1] from his religious community and led him to spend his life in the intellectual underground. At the core of Spinoza’s thinking lay a simple yet powerful logical argument: because a truly infinite God must encompass all reality, nothing can exist outside of Him, meaning He does not stand apart to create the universe but is one and the same as Nature itself. Consequently, in a radical break from the thinkers of his time who believed God created a world of independent physical bodies and immortal human souls, Spinoza argued that everything in the universe is simply a different physical or mental manifestation of God himself. This idea was positioned to drive a powerful wedge into the rigid belief systems still in place to defend 17th century European philosophy against the progress of reason and the sciences. If God is not the guy with a beard watching and judging us from a cloud but some abstract omnipresent quality, who would do the job of letting hellfire rain on sinners and atheists? Despite few is known about the short meeting of Leibniz and Spinoza, it seems that Leibniz was profoundly impressed and unsettled by the ideas of his fellow thinker. After Spinozas early death, Leibniz increasingly positioned himself as an opponent to Spinoza. Eventually he proposed the fancy idea that everything was built from an infinite number of tiny "Monad" units, each of them containing its own tiny immortal soul which still had to fear hellfire from above. In public, Leibniz claimed the monads were designed to defeat Spinozas radical findings.[^2] Yet many assumed that actually, Leibniz understood his counter-theory was not strong enough to resist the ideas that Spinoza brought into the world.[^3] It seems Leibniz build the theory of Monads, officially designed to defend the holy order of things against intellectual attacks of a new kind, while he knew his complex system would not stand the test of time against the rising secularism. First it seems Leibniz was frightened by the implications of Spinoza's theory. He worried that mankind, while becoming able to do everything, would loose the capability to care about anything, including itself. Beyond spiritual concerns though, Leibniz seems to have been driven by very practical social implications. Openly supporting Spinoza was toxic for 17th century careerists like Leibniz, who despite becoming ever more wealthy, was always concerned about his economic security.[^4] It is tempting to dunk on Leibniz for being an opportunist first making friends with a humble guy like Spinoza and later post-humously denouncing him. 10-year-old me wants to put him in a box labeled "Hypocrites", right next to Robert the Bruce who sits there since 1995 for betraying Mel Gibson in Braveheart. But there may be more nuanced ways to look at it. Learning about the Monads of Leibniz I wondered: why would you build an intellectual system that is not really defending anything? Why dig a moat around your position, when you already know it will not slow down anyone or anything? In 1519, King Francois I of France started building his famous castle of Chambord, but had to interrupt the project a few years later for a war with the Italians. During the famous 1525 battle of Pavia, Francois made a bad decision by charging ahead with his medieval lance riders in full Braveheart mode, first blocking his own artillery and shortly after being trapped by Pikemen and Arquebusiers, captured subsequently. Underestimating gunpowder units like that is a rookie mistake in Age of Empires 2 and you would assume Francois learned his lesson. Interestingly though, when the french king could return home a year later, the works on Chambord continued as before. 1800 workers were moving 220.000 tons of of Stone[^5] to build a huge castle despite the sponsor of the project just had been defeated by weapons that would crunch these feeble walls surrounded by a fake moat in minutes. Once you see the pattern of "elaborate defences build by people who know they won't hold" it's hard to not see Chambords everywhere. In 2023 the famous "There is no Moat" memo[^6] leaked from Google, starting a discussion in the booming AI industry about how long proprietary frontier models would remain competitive against open source competitors. Since the release of the memo, a growing ecosystem of mostly chinese open source models is rapidly closing performance gaps to the market leaders, while these cheaper alternatives are being adopted globally.[^7] In May 2025, some months after the cheap but powerful chinese model DeepSeek R1 launched with global acclaim, OpenAI announced its weird acquisition of "io", the design company of Ex-Apple Design Chief's Johny Ive for 6.5 billion dollars. In a cringy, expensive looking YouTube reel, Sam Altman and Johny Ive exchanged courtesies over a coffee, vaguely pointing to a fancy AI-native personal gadget they would built together. Almost a year later, not much is heard of this cooperation but news on a lost trademark lawsuit on the brand name "io". The whole move seems expensive, complicated and somehow bound to fail from the beginning, like.. a contemporary way of building a fake moat the Leibniz way? Historians are divided why Francois I continued Chambord after his return[^8] but the castles official website proposes an explanation: Chambord was never meant to be an actual fortress, but a symbol of the Kings attachment to the disappearing era of Chivalry.[^9] Now this might be considered merely an expensive expression of nostalgia, but I think there is more to it. Spending immense amounts of effort into building a fancy complex thing in itself is a demonstration of power and Chambord just may have worked this way for the french king. In 1539, while the castle was still under construction, Francois invited Charles V, the very royal he got captured by in Italy for a diplomatic exchange. The workers had to scramble to finish the sleeping quarters for the Italians, but the effort seems to have been worth it, as Charles V is cited declaring Chambord was "a synthesis of all that human effort can achieve".[^10] While Chambord obviously is the quintessential shitty castle of my youth, it may have served its purpose as a tool of power and propaganda when gunpowder technology transformed military tactics in hard to predict ways. In a similar fashion, burning billions with acquiring a small design company may have been a smart move for OpenAI at a moment when the markets were expecting a new strategic direction to justify a 500 billion dollar evaluation only based on a chatbot, an API and the buttery voice of Sam Altman. Acquiring the most famous product designer alive and comiting towards building some kind of new hardware platform may just have been a convincing enough signal for investors, even if the actual device they build eventually would fail in similar ways as previous attempts in this domain. As Venkatesh Rao lays out [in the foundations of his 2026 Book Club](LINK) (which led me to read about Leibniz & Spinoza in the first place), Late Modernity is populated by "energetic zombies"[^12], still haunting the present with ideas from the past. The Monads, Chambord Castle and maybe soon a weird video of Sam Altman and Jony Ive drinking coffee in San Francisco may be considered zombie ideas in their time, but sometimes it may be hard to tell. How to separate the zombies from ideas worth interacting with? It could help to become a connaisseur of moats. A 13th century moat had honest functional value. A 16th century moat, like the one surrounding Chambord, maintained performative value as a demonstration of power. The moat surrounding 19th century Neuschwanstein (the castle on the Disney Logo) was purely ornamental, designed to please its eccentric sponsor Ludwig 2nd of Bavaria. The King of Swamp Castle in Monty Pythons 1975 "The Holy Grail" ridiculed the idea of moat fortifications entirely.[^13] In the same way actual moats progressed from a serious statement to performance, to decoration and eventually ridicule other ideas and frameworks may move through similar cycles, recycled by time with decreasing relevance for the actual course of history. The more functional flaws you find, the more likely you are facing a dead facade, not a working fortification. A more generous read of Leibniz would consider the Monad system not as a self deceiving, hypocritical move against his own convictions, but a pragmatic strategy to secure his economic and political base in a climate that shifted against him. Given his anxiety for material security, Leibniz could not have joined the Spinozists in their intellectual rebellion, but had to stay aligned with the rich donors that financed his career. A part of me wants to dispel Leibniz, but the more I think about it, the more it seems this kind of judgement just carries as much hypocrisy as its target. Today, Chambord is a buzzing tourist site in France, the fragile philosophy of Leibniz has been famously ridiculed in [[The Best of all Possible Worlds|Voltaire's Candide]] and the mysterious device OpenAI and Ive may release in the near future has already become a target of online humor and fake Superbowl ads.[^11] Seeing others build complex things bound to fail is entertaining and relatable, because scrambling to get by is a timeless necessity. This may be why useless moats earn their place in the heart of pop culture. A lot of people, myself included, would like to be as straight-forward in their decisions as Spinoza. Yet we end up maneuvering like Leibniz: If you do not know how the rules of a dangerous game are changing, projecting power on a plane you still control can be a smart move. It invites everyone to pay attention to the things you are strong at, not the things you struggle with. So why would you build a castle that is not a castle? To use the power you still have to build something fancy that is good enough to keep yourself in the game until you might have a better idea. ## Edit ## Red Thread / Sequence - [ ] Compress the Spinoza exposition (paragraph 2, "At the core of Spinoza's thinking") to ~2 sentences — only what's needed for the moat metaphor to land - [ ] Consider reordering to reduce ping-ponging between Leibniz and Chambord/OpenAI (reader has to hold Leibniz across a long detour before the "more generous read" payoff) ## Consistency of Thought - [ ] Decide whether to name the tension between Claim A (performative moats as forward-looking power projection) and Claim B (performative moats as backward-looking defensive/nostalgic gestures) — or pick a side ## Transitions - [ ] Fix the jump into the Rao paragraph — either integrate "energetic zombies" / Late Modernity so it pays off beyond one paragraph, or cut it - [ ] Add a bridging sentence before "A more generous read of Leibniz" (currently jumps from Monty Python → Leibniz re-evaluation with no connective tissue) ## AI Flags - [ ] Replace "more nuanced ways to look at it" (paragraph 5) — filler use of a Tier 1 word - [ ] Drop "profoundly" from "profoundly impressed and unsettled" (paragraph 3) - [ ] Consider replacing "simple yet powerful logical argument" with something sharper - [ ] Replace "In a similar fashion" (OpenAI/investor paragraph) — formal transition, cut or simplify ## Housekeeping - [ ] Fill in missing reference: `==ref detail==` tags in footnotes 2, 3, 4 - [ ] Fill in missing reference: `==reference google memo==` in footnote 6 - [ ] Fix placeholder `(LINK)` in the Rao paragraph - [ ] Typo: "despite few is known" → "despite little being known" (paragraph 3) - [ ] Typo: "Spinozas" → "Spinoza's" (paragraph 3, multiple instances) - [ ] Typo: "Leibniz build" → "Leibniz built" (paragraph 3) - [ ] Typo: "loose" → "lose" (paragraph 3) - [ ] Typo: "post-humously" → "posthumously" (paragraph 4) - [ ] Typo: "comiting" → "committing" (OpenAI/investor paragraph) - [ ] Typo: "connaisseur" → "connoisseur" (appears twice) - [ ] Typo: "Johny" → "Jony" (first mention in OpenAI paragraph — correct on second mention) [^1]: "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under Heaven." [[Reading The Courtier and the Heretic]] [^2]: Leibnitz on Spinoza: *"On the contrary, it is precisely by means of the monads that Spinozism is destroyed."* ==ref detail== [[Reading The Courtier and the Heretic]] [^3]: For example, Lessing suspected that Leibniz actually was *"a Spinozist by heart"* ==ref detail== [[Reading The Courtier and the Heretic]]. Later Russel stated that *"Leibniz fell into Spinozism whenever he allowed himself to be logical; in his published works, accordingly, he took care to be illogical"*. ==ref detail== [[Reading The Courtier and the Heretic]] [^4]: Leibniz to Antoine Arnault: *"There is nothing, I think, upon which I have brooded more earnestly over the course of my life, however short, than the problem of assuring my security in the future, and I confess that by far the greatest cause of my philosophizing as well has been the hope of winning a prize not to be disdained—peace of mind—and the ability to say that I have demonstrated certain things which have heretofore merely been believed or even, in spite of their great importance, ignored."* [[Reading The Courtier and the Heretic]] [^5]: see the french wikipedia for details on Chambord.  [^6]: ==reference google memo== [^7]: "The adoption of Chinese models is picking up in Silicon Valley, too. (...) Among startups pitching with open-source stacks, there’s about an 80% chance they’re running on Chinese open models (...). Z.ai limited new subscriptions (...) after demand surged, citing compute constraints. What’s notable is where the demand is coming from: CNBC reports that the system’s user base is primarily concentrated in the United States and China, followed by India, Japan, Brazil, and the UK." https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/12/1132811/whats-next-for-chinese-open-source-ai/ [^8]: "The actual function of the castle is not entirely clear. Francis I paid special attention to the project, yet he visited it rarely and died before its completion. It may therefore be considered an architectural testament to the monarch’s Italian ambitions. However, its setting within a massive [park](https://www.britannica.com/art/park) of 13, 425 acres (5,433 hectares) demonstrates that it also served as a grand [hunting](https://www.britannica.com/sports/hunting-sport) [lodge](https://www.britannica.com/technology/lodge-dwelling)." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-I-king-of-France [^9]: "Take a close look at the keep, at its corner towers, its enclosure, its moats with their water, and you will see them bringing back to life a form of military power that may no longer be real, and is emphatically allegorical. More than thirty years after the construction of the last fortified castles was completed, these features serve as unmistakable architectural citations of bygone times. In the eyes of the contemporaries of François I, they conjure up recollections of a declining universe of chivalry, universe to which the young sovereign, who was the last chevalier king, remained nostalgically attached." https://www.chambord.org/en/history/the-chateau/architecture/ [^10]: Obviously [great-castles.com](https://great-castles.com/chambord.html) should be considered a valid source for this article [^11]: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-fake-super-bowl-ad-alexander-skarsgard-dime-device-2026-2 [^12]: This term is taken from Venkatesh Rao: "Arguably, the bulk of the _energy_ of the world will continue to flow through late-modern pathways for at least our lifetimes, even if very little of the _evolutionary intelligence_ of the world flows through those pathways (hence “zombie” or perhaps “energetic zombie” would be a better term, like the ones in the Korean movie, _Train to Busan_)." https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-divergence-machine [^13]: "Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up." https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0071853/quotes/?item=qt0470610