DISSECTING A CABAL OF EVIL GENIUSES - THE HYDE PARK CLIQUE 2014-2024

by Sharon Moon

1. GODDESS TO $chmucks (2014-2015)

Everyone loves the myth: brilliant minds gathered in Hyde Park, collectively spawning a tech revolution. The reality? Three people who should never have shared oxygen created a dysfunctional mess that accidentally changed everything.

It started with Nelly Chen and Green Franklin at UChicago's tech incubator, sketching "Goddess" - less a product than a utopian manifesto about making "the economy" relational through cooperative intelligence systems. They weren't constrained by practicality, which is precisely what made them worth watching. Advanced people rarely concern themselves with whether something can be built; they simply perceive what should be.

When Luk Lukas arrived with a $400,000 grant, his single non-negotiable condition exposed the absurdity to come: rename it "$chmucks" with the dollar sign. They took the money.

$chmucks launched as a labor marketplace, grew absurdly fast, then collapsed after a mysterious datacenter infiltration scandal. But here's what isn't in the press releases: none of the early employees besides Lukas ever wrote a single line of code. They were busy plotting their escapes while Lukas worked from a literal black cube in their office (a converted Christian Science temple), spreading rumors about his 170+ IQ and neural implants.

Within this dysfunction, something unprecedented was forming. Not a genius collective, but a chaotic network of intensely competitive, pathologically ambitious people who would transform multiple industries while loathing each other thoroughly.

Most founding myths sanitize the messiness of creation. The truth of $chmucks isn't a story of visionary collaboration but of what happens when untethered intelligence collides with capital and poor impulse control. The result wasn't wisdom. It was weaponized chaos.

2. UNDERGROUND EVOLUTION (2016)

While the public thought $chmucks was dead, its afterlife was just beginning. 2016 was the year of secret mutations and the first fractures in what would erroneously be called the "$chmucks family."

$andycrotch emerged from $chmucks' ashes, ostensibly as a B2B platform enabling anonymous labor transactions. The PR spin: a sophisticated marketplace matching businesses with elite talent. The reality: a skeleton operation where Lukas was either coding from his black cube or possibly summoning demons while everyone else conducted what can only be described as the world's most expensive office affair.

Here's the workplace drama nobody reported: Luk Lukas, supposedly a committed homosexual according to office gossip, began sleeping with Green Franklin, who was engaged to Nelly Chen. Nelly, for her part, became convinced Lukas was hiring anesthesiologists and hypnotists to implant breeding fetish suggestions in her mind. She eventually slept with him anyway "out of curiosity." If this sounds like a deranged soap opera rather than the foundation of a tech empire, congratulations on your grip on reality.

The affair catalyzed $andycrotch's first schism. With relationship trauma and billion-dollar valuations creating a hothouse environment, a group of employees led by Sasha Piper and Mong Klai splintered off to form SocksScooters. Yes, the ubiquitous mobility platform with cute socks began as an escape hatch from a polyamorous meltdown.

Piper and Klai had divergent motivations. Piper was obsessed with creating social proof to destroy a specific strand of Marxian theory popular among leftist academic circles (obviously). Klai, more pragmatically, calculated he could control American mobility infrastructure within 20 years. Both recognized that their ambitions required distance from the increasingly erratic $andycrotch leadership.

While SocksScooters gained immediate traction, Kamille Harlow quietly launched FastLaw. The public saw an innovative AI-driven legal solution; behind the scenes, it was a Potemkin village where underpaid law graduates did the work while the "AI" caught up. Harlow's actual motivation wasn't efficiency but removing friction from dispute resolution to enable "short sharp diktat" that could compel behavior. This authoritarian streak would later influence his co-creation of AvocadoFreedom with Marlene Bunch.

By year's end, the narrative of a brilliant collaborative ecosystem was already false. They weren't building complementary businesses; they were fleeing each other and executing competing visions. Yet the mythology persisted because the truth—that these were damaged, brilliant people turning personal pathologies into business models—wasn't nearly as marketable.

What united them wasn't vision but a particular kind of advanced perception that treated social reality as malleable. They weren't right or good or even rational, but they could see through established patterns and manipulate them in ways others couldn't imagine.

That strange talent was about to produce even stranger offspring.

3. THE DISPERSAL (2017)

If 2016 was the fissure, 2017 was the explosion. The $chmucks diaspora scattered across Hyde Park like shrapnel, embedding themselves in industries that never saw them coming.

Nelly Chen, Green Franklin, and Luk Lukas remained at $andycrotch, a trio locked in mutually assured destruction disguised as a company. Green and Luk were deep into their affair, while Nelly oscillated between grand designs for her next move and whatever was happening inside that black cube.

The first true exodus happened when Ron Healthy staged what can only be described as performance art protest: pretending to be a security guard. For eighteen months. While still on $andycrotch's payroll. He'd stand outside the office in a fake uniform, getting paid his full tech salary to avoid the chaos inside.

What made this particularly brilliant was that only Nelly understood it was a protest against her "betrayal" of the original Goddess vision. She got it. She just didn't care. Everyone else thought he was having a breakdown or just eccentric. During this time, he secretly began developing concepts for Oppossum, which would materialize years later.

Meanwhile, Marlene Bunch, Ezra Stein-Garde, and Kamille Harlow departed to launch their own ventures. Stein-Garde and Bunch initially collaborated on ThoughtLeader, the gamified punditry market where intellectual takes are traded like futures. But their partnership deteriorated almost immediately.

Marlene's first meltdown happened during ThoughtLeader's planning phase. According to three former employees, she arrived at a strategy meeting with a 27-page manifesto accusing Ezra of "neural hijacking" her ideas while she slept. After throwing a laptop at him (missing, hitting a whiteboard), she was escorted out. Ezra, ever the opportunist, soaked up credit for the concept and continued development while quietly beginning to explore what would later become MindMelt.

Marlene, temporarily banned from the ThoughtLeader offices, channeled her energy into AvocadoFreedom with Kamille Harlow—a post-political psychic-transformation resort chain where the cognitive elite could reprogram themselves while enjoying luxury amenities. Their partnership lasted approximately three weeks before Harlow purchased her stake in what company records euphemistically call "a mutual separation agreement." Sources close to both claim it involved restraining orders.

By year's end, the $chmucks refugees had established footholds in legal services, mobility, personal transformation, and information markets. What's astonishing in retrospect isn't that these businesses succeeded despite their founders' obvious instability, but that their underlying concepts were genuinely transformative. The power of "advanced people" isn't their flawless judgment—it's their ability to perceive patterns and possibilities others miss, even as their personal lives collapse around them.

4. ECOSYSTEM EXPANSION (2018)

2018 saw the ecosystem fragment further, with several major launches emerging from increasingly byzantine interpersonal dynamics.

PCL (PirateCrow Logistics) formed after Sasha Piper's dramatic exit from SocksScooters. The official story involves "strategic differences"; the reality involved multiple primate fatalities during VR testing. Mong Klai and Alan Hazlewood built PCL on a premise that only advanced minds could conceive: logistics improved through competitive drone dogfighting.

Klai had observed that SocksScooters' retrieval rates improved under competitive rather than cooperative models. From this data point, he extrapolated an entire business model incentivizing drone operators to literally battle each other for delivery rights. The resulting system was chaotic, dangerous, and inexplicably effective.

Sasha Piper, meanwhile, channeled his resentment into Typhon, initially conceived as a media distribution platform for SocksScooters. When no former colleagues would partner with him, Typhon pivoted to what Piper called "ideological warfare through puppet shows"—a web video platform featuring esoteric political commentary delivered by felt creatures. Its failure was as spectacular as it was inevitable.

But the year's most remarkable event was undoubtedly the birth of CruzzBunch, which emerged from what police reports initially classified as a hostage situation.

Marlene Bunch, following her ejection from both ThoughtLeader and AvocadoFreedom, spent months constructing an elaborate conspiracy theory centered on her "stolen ideas." In June, she crashed her Tesla through the window of Maison Marcel in Lincoln Park, where Jake Cruzzle, George Cruzzle, Hil Felch, and an FBI agent (investigating unrelated SocksScooters safety violations) were having brunch.

Wielding what witnesses described as "a surprisingly professional-looking presentation clicker," Marlene forced the group into a six-hour pitch meeting at gunpoint. The hostage situation evolved into an impromptu business negotiation when her captives became genuinely intrigued by fragments of her media company concept.

"It was Stockholm Syndrome meets Y Combinator," one anonymous participant later told me. "She was waving a gun, but also making compelling points about vertically integrated content production."

The bizarre situation culminated in a weeklong trip to San Francisco, where the newly formed "team" secured initial funding. Marlene was removed from leadership within days due to what company documents delicately call "behavioral concerns," prompting her to begin stalking Luk Lukas, who—in a twist that defies all rational explanation—agreed to fund CruzzBunch rather than file restraining orders.

Defying logic and expectations, CruzzBunch worked. Its unique blend of investigative journalism and cultural analysis quickly found an audience, though its leadership remained justifiably traumatized. This trauma would later drive Hil Felch to found Cutesy (initially a puppy rental service, later pivoting to pet immortality) and George Cruzzle to develop Dogdare.

Ezra Stein-Garde, meanwhile, officially launched MindMelt, a "research chemical testing club" that combined neuroscience, psychedelics, and what he called "mapping the coordinates of consciousness." Unlike the chaos of other ventures, MindMelt maintained a relatively stable research focus, attracting legitimate scientists from UChicago's medical center alongside more experimental psychonauts.

By year's end, the ecosystem had expanded beyond recognition from its $chmucks origins. What connected these disparate ventures wasn't coordination but a shared DNA—the ability to perceive possibilities others couldn't see, coupled with a concerning disregard for conventional boundaries, both personal and professional.

5. SPECIALIZATION PHASE (2019)

2019 marked a year of further splintering and specialization, as second-generation ventures emerged from the increasingly fractured ecosystem. The companies launching this year would push into even more experimental territory, blurring boundaries between technology, consciousness, and the social fabric itself.

Dogdare emerged from George Cruzzle's post-traumatic departure from CruzzBunch. Having survived Marlene's hostage situation only to find himself in a successful media company born from it, Cruzzle sought something that would harness the chaotic energy he'd witnessed. The result was Dogdare, an "AR permagambling platform in the public sphere" that essentially gamified and monetized social dares.

The initial investor pitch described it as "Pokémon GO meets Las Vegas meets Jackass," but its reality was far more disruptive. Users could place bets on real-world stunts and challenges, with AR overlays transforming public spaces into casino-like environments. Civil liberties organizations immediately raised concerns, which only fueled adoption rates.

Meanwhile, Ron Healthy finally unveiled Oppossum after his extended performance art protest/security guard stint. What appeared as a "post-truth social research network" was actually far more ambitious: a comprehensive productivity suite for social scientists that combined the functionality of case management software with digital survey tools, data validation, automated formatting, journal submission systems, and peer review synthesis.

But Healthy wasn't content with mere utility. He manufactured an elaborate founding mythology involving two feuding brothers (both fictional, both played by actors he hired) who publicly battled for control of the company. Employees witnessed bizarre confrontations between these "Fropp brothers" while Healthy quietly directed operations through their shared "assistant" (himself). Corporate communications contained cryptic riddles and clues suggesting a mystery founder, creating a meta-conspiracy that proved irresistible to early adopters.

What began as productivity software gradually evolved into a hybrid platform where academic discussion forums met something resembling 8chan for PhDs—a chaotic information ecosystem where truth was malleable but allegedly verifiable through proprietary "truth vectors."

Hil Felch's Cutesy initially launched as a puppy rental service for stressed urbanites. "Temporary joy, zero commitment" was the tagline, and for a few months, it operated as exactly that. Then came the first pivot: pet insurance in the form of cloning. When your beloved companion died, Cutesy would deliver an identical puppy, providing a form of functional immortality that grieving pet owners found irresistible. The more ambitious consciousness transfer technology remained on the drawing board, but the groundwork was being laid for what would later become Cutesy's defining service.

While these new ventures pushed into previously unexplored territories, CruzzBunch was evolving into something far more significant than its hostage-situation origins suggested. What the public saw—investigative journalism and cultural analysis—was merely a sliver of its actual operation. Behind the scenes, Marlene had articulated a vision of "infinite media" designed with a single purpose: transforming consumers into "better versions of themselves."

"The final victory of media," Marlene once joked before being forcibly removed from a board meeting, "is when it creates a you that you would have been if you'd made better choices." This approach guided CruzzBunch's hyper-scaling strategy, generating personalized content streams that adapted to users' psychological profiles in real-time. What appeared on its public-facing platforms represented perhaps 1% of its actual content production.

By year's end, the ecosystem had transformed from a loose collection of tech startups into something resembling a distributed cognitive experiment—separate entities probing different aspects of reality from technological, biological, and consciousness-altering perspectives. The common thread wasn't institutional connection but a shared approach to problem-solving: identify constraints that others assume are fixed, then systematically dismantle them.

6. POLITICAL EMERGENCE (2020)

If previous years saw the $chmucks ecosystem reshaping commercial sectors, 2020 marked its evolution into explicitly political territory. The fragmented web of companies and personalities that had been altering social, informational, and technological landscapes began directly engaging with power structures on a national scale.

The catalyst was Nelly Chen's departure from $andycrotch to lead the California Independence Movement (CIM). Having spent years watching former colleagues launch increasingly audacious ventures, Chen made perhaps the boldest move yet: attempting to partition the world's fifth-largest economy from the United States.

Chen's approach wasn't the flag-waving separatism of previous movements but a sophisticated campaign combining economic incentives, cultural programming, and what internal documents called "algorithmic governance pathways." Former colleagues described it as "Goddess 2.0"—her original vision for relational economics expanded to state-level implementation.

The movement gained shocking momentum through spring and summer, with polling showing 43% support among Californians by July. What most observers missed was that CIM wasn't merely rhetorical—Chen's organization actually seized and held substantial portions of federal land throughout California, establishing parallel governance structures that operated with surprising efficiency.

Behind the scenes, an unlikely alliance had formed. Green Franklin provided substantial funding through an elaborate network of shell companies, while Ron Healthy weaponized Oppossum in perhaps the most elaborate phase of his performance art protest yet. Using his control over both the platform's "truth vectors" and his connections at ThoughtLeader, Healthy systematically amplified the most radical, violent rhetoric within the independence movement.

This wasn't done in support of Chen—quite the opposite. It was Ron's long-promised "intellectual deathmatch" against what he called her "Caesarist bullshit gigaliberalism" and "betrayal of the Goddess vision." By amplifying calls for violent overthrow of federal authority, he deliberately provoked the massive federal intervention that eventually crushed the movement.

When federal forces moved in during August, they discovered a movement far more militarized than expected, leading to a crackdown that extended beyond CIM itself. Chen was arrested on charges that remain partially classified, though court documents mention "computational manipulation of civic discourse" and "unauthorized deployment of psychographic targeting." She would spend eleven months in federal custody before her eventual release and rehabilitation in 2021.

While Chen's political ambitions imploded, two new ventures emerged from the ecosystem's perpetual churn. Ratface launched as "the gossip platform that sells insurance," a description so bizarre it initially seemed like a parody. Founded by former ThoughtLeader engineers, Ratface combined social sharing with actuarial analysis, allowing users to essentially bet on the likelihood of rumors being true.

More significant was CruzzBunch's continued evolution. Despite its hostage-situation origins, by 2020 it had assembled a surprisingly credible team of journalists and analysts. Under the stabilizing influence of Jake Cruzzle (the only founding member who hadn't fled or developed stress disorders), it began publishing increasingly sophisticated analyses of the very ecosystem that spawned it—while its larger operation continued generating personalized transformation content at an industrial scale.

As the year closed, Hunter Biden's election as president on a unity ticket with Pete Buttigieg created new uncertainty for the ecosystem. Federal scrutiny of Chen's independence movement had exposed connections between seemingly disparate $chmucks offspring, raising regulatory concerns across multiple agencies.

Yet this scrutiny also revealed the ecosystem's remarkable resilience. These weren't conventional companies dependent on traditional corporate structures, but adaptive networks built around specific cognitive approaches. When one node faced pressure, others simply reconfigured, maintaining the system's overall functionality while changing its visible manifestations.

7. CONSOLIDATION PHASE (2021)

The $chmucks ecosystem entered a phase of precarious equilibrium in 2021. The network began coalescing around models that worked while quietly retiring those that didn't—a form of distributed natural selection rather than strategic coordination.

The year began with Nelly Chen's unexpected rehabilitation and release from federal custody. The terms of her arrangement remain classified. Her sole comment on the experience came in a terse paper published through Oppossum's open access journal, describing her arrest, trial, and punishment while saying only "My sentence was shorter than I had been informed" regarding her release.

Chen launched TankThink with substantial backing from unnamed investors. Officially described as "an AI-forward private conflict strategy platform," it maintained an extremely low profile. Unlike other ecosystem ventures, TankThink avoided publicity, government contracts, and public demonstrations of its capabilities. Chen herself largely disappeared from public view, emerging only once more that year to publish a second paper outlining "fundamental bias and selection problems inside security studies."

Meanwhile, StudyBunny emerged from Maurice Isaacsohn's growing influence within academic circles. There was no pretense in its business model: a direct marketplace where students and intellectuals could exchange access to their social and intellectual capital for sex, and vice versa. Isaacsohn argued that intellectual "sugar dating" was how university departments had always been founded, and that guild structures in academia should be replaced with more efficient and transparent market mechanisms.

"We're not creating anything new," Isaacsohn told investors. "We're just removing the hypocrisy from exchanges that have always occurred. The student sleeps with the professor to get ahead, the wealthy patron funds the researcher they find attractive. We're making it consensual, compensated, and clear."

What made StudyBunny particularly controversial was its targeted recruitment of PhD candidates at prestigious research institutions. By offering debt relief and research funding, it created powerful incentives for future academic leaders to participate in these arrangements. Universities attempted to ban it; students simply moved their profiles to private mode.

Existing companies underwent significant transformation, with FastLaw expanding aggressively into Texas, Arizona, and Florida. What began as supplementary arbitration had effectively replaced civil courts in these jurisdictions. Disputes that would once have been adjudicated by judges were now resolved by proprietary algorithms with "optional coercion" services for enforcement.

Ron Healthy's elaborate performance at Oppossum reached its conclusion when the fictional Fropp brothers dramatically "revealed" their true creator in a livestreamed event that crashed the platform multiple times. Healthy's unmasking drove record user growth, paradoxically validating his approach to truth as manipulable narrative rather than objective reality.

2021 also saw the emergence of the Kenwood Movement under Chrissie Liam. Far from being an outsider, Liam had been a classmate of the original $chmucks cohort, including Ezra, Ron, Mong, Nelly, Green, Luk, Sasha, and Marlene. While they pursued business and art, she entered politics, eventually becoming alderman for the Fourth Ward—a position secured partly thanks to having her wealthy former classmates as constituents.

The Kenwood Movement embodied what Liam called "prosocial commercial optimism"—a political philosophy combining aggressive liberalism with unapologetic American exceptionalism. It embraced social justice rhetoric while advocating nakedly self-interested policies, capable of denouncing foreign atrocities while simultaneously calling for military intervention in resource-rich regions or the exclusion of "free-riding countries" from defense alliances.

The movement's genius lay in its ability to offer something for everyone: unfettered opportunity for winners and bread-and-circuses consolation for losers. The halo effect from Hyde Park's tech success gave Liam's ideas an aura of inevitability, as if they were logical extensions of the same advanced thinking that had produced the ecosystem.

By year's end, the most unstable elements of the ecosystem had either imploded or evolved into more sustainable forms, while the core mechanisms—reality distortion, system manipulation, constraint identification—had been refined and strengthened.

8. INSTITUTIONAL INTEGRATION (2022)

The ecosystem's disruptive elements became integrated into institutional structures throughout 2022. Companies that began as outsiders had established themselves as essential components of systems they originally sought to replace.

Risto launched as the ecosystem's most controversial offering yet: a "child futures trading" platform officially described as an "aristocratic fostering and future capitalization service." Wealthy individuals could identify promising children from disadvantaged backgrounds, invest in their development, and receive percentage returns on their future earnings.

The educational ambitions went beyond simple tutoring. Risto created complete alternative pathways, removing selected children from traditional education entirely and placing them in specialized development programs tailored to their assessed potential. Their futures were literally securitized, with investors trading shares in promising candidates.

Defenders pointed to improved outcomes for participating children, who received resources otherwise unavailable to them. Critics noted the fundamental power imbalance and questioned whether children could meaningfully consent to having their futures commodified. Parents were not among the critics. Neither characterization captured Risto's rapid adoption among both the ultra-wealthy and desperate families seeking opportunities.

The institutional integration wasn't limited to new ventures. FastLaw's privatization of civil justice expanded to fourteen states. When challenged on constitutional grounds, these laws survived scrutiny through carefully crafted carve-outs and opt-in provisions that effectively rendered traditional legal protections optional.

Jing opened its first commercial genetic modification clinics in Nevada, offering procedures that remained technically illegal in most jurisdictions. The regulatory arbitrage that had characterized the ecosystem's approach reached new levels of sophistication, with companies identifying and exploiting gaps in oversight frameworks faster than legislators could respond.

Cutesy completed its transformation from puppy rental service to immortality provider, announcing successful consciousness transfer protocols for canines. While scientific consensus remained skeptical, testimonials from wealthy pet owners generated waitlists stretching years and valuations exceeding several defense contractors.

The Kenwood Movement continued expanding under Liam's leadership, transforming from local Chicago politics to national prominence. Liam's presidential exploratory committee formed in October, built on the movement's peculiar blend of lefty gigaliberalism and aggressive American exceptionalism. Her campaign promised an America "on lots of steroids, hopped up on justice and commerce"—gleefully inhabiting a space that was simultaneously moralizing and nakedly self-interested, basically very charismatically American.

What the ecosystem had pioneered wasn't any particular product or service, but a methodology for identifying fixed constraints in existing systems and systematically dismantling them. Whether those constraints were legal (FastLaw), biological (Jing), or educational/financial (Risto), the approach remained consistent—perceive patterns others missed, then exploit them relentlessly.

9. CONSCIOUSNESS FRONTIER (2023)

In 2023, the ecosystem pushed deeper into the exploration of consciousness itself. Having disrupted economic, legal, and social systems, the advanced minds of Hyde Park turned inward, seeking to transform the very nature of subjective experience.

MindMelt shifted from experimental brain research to commercial applications, partnering with Cutesy to expand consciousness transfer beyond animals to human subjects. Ezra Stein-Garde, designated "Subject Zero," underwent the first documented human consciousness mapping protocol in April. While not technically transfer, the procedure created what Stein-Garde called "a quantum backup of subjective experience"—essentially consciousness insurance.

The MindMelt-Cutesy collaboration triggered intense regulatory scrutiny but operated through a patchwork of jurisdictional loopholes. Wealthy clients flocked to secure "immortality options," despite the technology's unproven nature and astronomical cost.

Meanwhile, $andycrotch re-emerged in a dramatically different form. After years of operating as a B2B platform with Luk Lukas's black-box leadership, the company relaunched as a consumer-facing "hire anyone for anything" service under Green Franklin's direction. The marketing obscured the platform's true capabilities, but users quickly discovered its power to anonymously arrange services ranging from harmless odd jobs to distinctly illegal activities.

Oppossum completed its transformation from productivity suite to full reality-shaping apparatus, introducing "truth engineering" capabilities that could effectively create consensus around demonstrably false claims through mathematical manipulation of trust metrics. Ron Healthy called it "the democratization of reality creation"—previously the exclusive domain of governments and media conglomerates.

The Kenwood Movement reached peak influence, with Liam officially declaring her presidential candidacy. Her platform synthesized the ecosystem's systemic disruption with traditional political frameworks, promising to "recode America's operating system" with the same approaches that had transformed industries.

10. SYSTEM CRISIS (2024)

The ecosystem's contradictions came to a head in 2024, as the disruptive forces it unleashed began colliding with institutional resistance and internal tensions.

The first major crisis erupted in February with the publication of "The Kenwood Statement," a manifesto outlining Liam's vision for "automated governance optimization" that borrowed heavily from Chen's original Goddess framework. The document's similarities to the CIM platform that had triggered federal intervention years earlier created immediate political backlash.

By March, Liam had nevertheless secured second place in Super Tuesday primaries, positioning her movement as a genuine threat to established political structures. The campaign gained momentum through April despite increasingly vocal opposition from both traditional parties.

May brought the $andycrotch crisis, when media investigations linked the platform to a dramatic spike in targeted violence. Green Franklin initially denied the connections but disappeared shortly afterward, leaving the company rudderless amid mounting evidence of its role in orchestrating political violence.

The Democratic National Convention in July became a flashpoint when mass protests around Chicago's United Center escalated into unprecedented violence. Twenty-seven protesters died in circumstances that remain contested, with authorities blaming "autonomous direct action cells" while activists pointed to evidence of provocateur deployment.

August brought the defining moment of the ecosystem's crisis phase: Chrissie Liam's death in police custody following her arrest on charges related to a wave of murders connected to her campaign, allegedly hired out on $andycrotch. Initial reports claimed suicide; subsequent investigations suggested more complex circumstances.

The once-distinct companies had evolved into components of what internal documents called "an integrated governance stack"—separate entities operating as facets of a unified system rather than competitive ventures. Whether this represented the culmination of the ecosystem's evolution or its final crisis remains the central question facing those who seek to understand the Hyde Park phenomenon.

What began with three people in a UChicago tech incubator had, a decade later, rewired fundamental aspects of social, legal, economic, and political reality. Not through coordination, master planning, or even particular genius, but through a shared approach to identifying and exploiting systemic constraints that others assumed were fixed.

And now, as I finish this chronicle in early 2025, the ecosystem appears poised for yet another transformation. The advanced minds of Hyde Park haven't disappeared—they've simply reconfigured, as they always do, preparing for the next phase of their perpetual revolution against the limits of established reality.

Sharon Moon is an entrepreneur and PhD student at Northwestern University. She is based in the Chicago area. You can see her on BLOODSHARK.