Kernel

In 1993, Wired launched with Marshall McLuhan on their masthead. Silicon Valley loved “the medium is the message.”

McLuhan was famously faith-driven, a converted Catholic. He (alongside Ivan Illich) have served inspiration for @left_pad.

Best known as a steward of the pivotal open-source JavaScript compiler Babel, Henry (KB4) has spent much of his life creating open source tools – a social annotation layer for the web, a receipt printer, a faith-inflected OSS podcast. Throughout, he remains keenly aware of the effects of his “electric engineering.”

“Electric information environments being utterly ethereal fosters the illusion of the world as spiritual substance,” McLuhan wrote. “It is now a reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ. After all, the Prince of this World is a very great electric engineer.”

Those searing words anchor @left_pad’s (KB4) nascent Bible App.

“When God creates everything, he says that he creates humans in his image,” Henry told Kernel. “What that means is that we are meant to create.”

His feed-based Bible App is a new message in a familiar medium. It’s a tool built to subvert TikTok “brain rot,” and to create precedent for technology that provides more signal and less noise.

Cursory McCluhan readers may be surprised that he had more to say on his most known quote. "In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message,” he wrote in the 1974 essay, Liturgy and the Microphone. “It is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same."

Henry tells his story of where the medium & message intertwine, and along the way, encourages each of us to create our own.

we began Kernel nearly 6 years ago.

while Kernel's shape may transfigure,
the values at our roots do not.

happy 2026 🤓

Kernel is a residency for technologists pursuing high-quality work – from research to production – in crypto & beyond.

We offer:
▷ A technical & philosophical culture
▷ Accountability, refinement, & distribution
▷ A network of unusually talented peers

KB12 apps are open. Apply early by 12/31.

apply.kernel.community

Congrats to @PhilippZentner and the entire @lifiprotocol team on their recent Series A. We're grateful to have had Philipp in KB3.

He recently walked us through LiFi’s core thesis.

• Unified access to every major liquidity venue, aggregating bridges, DEXs, and settlement layers into the most optimal routes.

• A flexible API and an infrastructure stack, from aggregation to auctions to observability, monitoring, and policy engines.

• A network already trusted by 600 clients, including major wallets like Phantom, Binance, MetaMask, Robinhood, Ledger, and Gnosis Safe.

His words captured the moment: "It's the (age of the) token economy. The question is who is going to build the biggest gateway. This is what we have been building since day one. There is no other company in this space as well positioned as us to address this problem."

"How is it that we can learn together... to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, to the right degree?"

Learning is Kernel's mettā emphasis on No Signal's "first ten" (including @Skeletor_Space, @alanahlam, @PhilippZentner, @polats, @jakub_smekal and @akxsha).

The series focuses on the learning journey, an intentional departure from most web3 media. We stretch through the what and toward the why: How did you come to be working on this thing to which you are so remarkably dedicated?

Invariably, the answer illuminates No Signal's throughline: each fellow arrived to web3 after seeing extant systems fail their people, fail to achieve signal.

These first ten features cross four continents and myriad disciplines – from gaming to DeFi, reinforcement learning to social cameras, decentralized runtime environments to "wikipedia meets github for lawyers."

These are the people whose stories we are grateful to tell.