Month: August 2021

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 223 and Actually OOO

I’ve got a nightmare of a migraine. Ironic that I should right at such length about being available or out of office yesterday only to find myself utterly incapable of being pretending today that I am available. If you want a better essay of the day then I’d click out to yesterday’s as the rest is just an exercise in willpower not quality.

If you’ve never had a migraine consider yourself lucky. I’m prone to about one a month and I’ll let you use your imagination as to why they are so regular on a monthly cadence

For this particular migraine the light and noise sensitivity are debilitating but today it’s the nausea that’s the worst. Somehow the pain and tension can be so bad you literally cannot imagine tolerance for food or smells. I’m struggling to drink water.

I can’t really fathom how I’ll have enough to say to qualify for “write every day” but here I am with the CMS open and typing out sentences that appear to be coherent. I suppose three paragraph with a few links, a title and the proper tagging qualify as showing up for the day. Every day I write. Every day some small creation. Even though at the moment I’m trying to work myself up to the idea of eating some rice in the hopes that I’ll be able to take some medication and settle my stomach. Good enough.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 222 and OOO

I’m out of the office. I’m OOO. I’m not available. I’m off the grid. I’m on vacation. I’m on leave. I’m out sick. I’m out for family.

Whatever your reasons, the idea of being unavailable, actually being unavailable is increasingly at odds with reality. It’s rude to not be available. People notice if you are on social media dicking around after all. And I’m always fucking off on Twitter. And that means I am default available right?

I have an app that allows people book time with me without the hassle of checking in called Calendly. The theory is you maintain times you are available and you avoid a bunch of back and forth. The reality is I don’t maintain it. Virtually no one ever uses it except a couple close business partners. Because of that lack of integration into my workflow, the app is rarely ever booked unavailable. I don’t really use it or maintain it but a few folks have the link and being polite and nice, they try to use it rather than bother me asking if I’m around. Then it’s a comical back and forth of me explaining that no I again forgot to alert the app I wasn’t available. Again. Exactly the sort of interaction the app is supposed to help you avoid. It’s fucking embarrassing and it’s happened a half dozen times.

This happened again this week when I had explicitly intended to take off all of it as I’m recovering from a medical procedure. My brain is a bit foggy and I forgot to ask my husband, who more often than not is forced into managing my ineptitude with logistics, to make sure the damn app knew I wasn’t available. He’s got an elaborate system of multiple calendar applications that all talk to each other and sync up and if I just put “OOO” into one of them then all the apps would know. I’m too stupid to actually manage any of it. I figured eventually I’d hire an administrative assistant I deal with it when my schedule became more complex. But it isn’t that complex yet and I didn’t think to block the calendar after my procedure. Which makes me feel like an idiot. Why is it so hard for me to manage a damn calendar?

And such is my emotional block with being unavailable that I am literally writing a post about it rather than simply deleting the app entirely and texting my friend and partner back that I’ve fucked up again and the app was incorrect. Again.

Maybe it’s because I really want to be the kind of person who is available. That I’m the sort of person who is consistent and has routines that can be relied upon and thus has calendars which reflect the reality of my availability. That I am the kind of person who manages their application layer, personal data and thus has promptly corrected for any changes that may have occurred to my routines and seen to it that it percolates into the operating system of my life. Maybe this is why I’m obsessed with manners and class this week. It’s just a Freudian unconscious embarrassment that I’m bad at manage a calendar.

Alas it doesn’t really matter. I’m not the sort of person with a calendar. I’m the sort of person who will write a thousand words about the culture of availability, the way we mediate we our time and attention with technical applications, and my own emotional relationship to the acronym “OOO” rather than text back “actually I’m out this week!”

I’m counting on this being amusing rather than irritating in this particular instance as despite it seeming like I’m around and available, I’m actually extremely out this week and depending on my recover the next two. I hope it will be funny when I tag them on Twitter and share this post. Because it’s actually extremely embarrassing for me.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 221 and Somnambulance

Around 1pm today I was overcome by a kind of drowsiness. I couldn’t seem to shake the feeling so I lay down. For the past 5 hours or so I’ve been in a not quite waking not quite sleeping state. I wasn’t dreaming but I couldn’t force wakefulness on myself either.

I had to crawl my way into just enough consciousness to call and text my therapist to let her know I wouldn’t make my session or group therapy. Had I not seen proof I left a message when I woke up I would not have been surprised to learn that I had been somnambulant texting. I barely recall managing the effort.

I had a medical procedure a few days ago so I am likely still recovering from the stress my body endured. But I’ve felt reasonably energetic. I was entirely unprepared to fall into a liminal state between consciousness and sleeping for most of my day. I could tell I wasn’t fully awake but I couldn’t quite tell if I was asleep.

I kept trying to force wakefulness upon myself only to find my mind falling further away from the effort. It felt like some horror movie effort where a character has been put under but is still aware of what is happening to them. I didn’t love it. But clearly I needed the sleep. I was just barely able to get myself up to take my evening medications. Certainly wasn’t what I was expecting out of my Monday but so it goes.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 220 and Crypto’s Publicist Part 2

Yesterday I wrote about my proposal to create an activist DAO to engage in public relations for crypto. The goal of the organization would be to create a groundswell of support for the space, it’s values, and opportunities as well as engaging in support for a more positive regulatory environment.

If you would like to hear more about why I think it is time for the wider decentralized crypto community to engage in a public relations and media campaign please see my post yesterday. Today I am putting down further notes on what I think our values and priorities might be. As always, this blog is a work in progress so consider this my thoughts as of now that are open to being edited and changed.

What kind of values are crucial in a PR or communication DAO or interest group?

  • Open
  • Participatory
  • Trustless

It’s important that whatever we do on behalf of crypt it must be done in the spirit of the space and why so many disparate types of people believe in its values. While there may be structures like executive teams, core teams, board members and studios and contractors to execute on our mission we want to use the tools and transparency of crypto.

But to what purpose are we organizing? We will create content and engage in conversations to shape media narratives and public sentiment aimed at promoting the positive elements, potential, and impact of crypto.

How will we do this? We will hire publicists to promote our stories in mainstream media along with commissioning content meme-ers and creators to share opinions. We will engage with spokespersons to share talking points created from the priorities of the community. We will place our content, from memes to editorials, on our own properties as well as in supporting communities and member publications.

I expect I’ll be doing quite a bit more note taking and research. If you want to be a part of this effort I’ve started a shared Google doc for collaboration. Email me Julie @ chaotic dot capital or DM me @ AlmostMedia. This won’t be built in a day but together we can push it forward.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 219 and Crypto’s Publicist

Most industries have interest groups. Publicists, lobbyists, and spokespeople weave together stories, talking points and preferred legislative agendas. Anyone or any group is free to discuss why their preferred business or issue is worthwhile and convince others of their view. We have a marketplace of ideas. Sure, not all interests are good but anyone is free to promote what they believe in. So why aren’t we doing anything for our cause in the crypto community? I say it’s time crypto had a publicist.

Not every country allows for this. The crypto community has an obligation to recognize that when we fight for our own interests it isn’t just we who benefit. The entire world benefits from open, decentralized and permission-less systems. What we do benefits everyone who wants to live in a freer world. It’s time crypto had our own activist DAO to protect and promote our values.

I am proposing the formation of an activist DAO promoting the use of crypto. Our goal is to advocate for positive popular culture narratives about crypto. We vote on our issues, stories and key initiatives through the DAO’s native governance tokens. The DAO will hire publicists and communication professionals to promote our stories in mainstream media along with commissioning content meme-ers and creators to share opinions. Policy is crucial but public perception is faster and pushes the right policy down the right.

As place holder I’ve purchased CryptoCommsCoalition.org. The Crypto Communication Coalition. I am working on a shared collaboration doc in Google Sheets to collect input, feedback, and priorities. Anyone who is interested can participate in our effort. Email me Julie @ crypto comms coalition dot org or DM me on Twitter.

We need DAO creation specialists, legal experts, memers, streamers, Reddidters, governance folks, publicists, lobbyists, fundraisers and a thousand other specialists I haven’t thought of yet. This won’t be easy but it’s an eating our own dog food moment for crypto. We can use our own tools to advocate in a participatory, transparent and open way for our own interests. If banking and big oil can can afford publicists then so can we. gmi.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 218 and Brain Fog

Being physically sick sucks. But having your mind take a turn for the worse can be worse. I’ve written about being in the grips of pain and the fear I have of exhaustion, but I don’t think I’ve written about what it feels like for one’s mind to struggle.

Whenever I read about recovering from covid and it’s challenges I can’t help but notice how often brain brain gets mentioned. The Lancet published a study of over 80,000 people that offers some concerning evidence that Covid has significant impacts on brain function.

“Finer grained analysis of performance across sub-tests supported the hypothesis that COVID-19 has a multi-domain impact on human cognition.”

If you don’t rely on your mind to make a living maybe the prospect of losing cognition isn’t as scary. Though I doubt it. I’d argue that the primary fear of losing one’s mind has much more to do with feeling one cannot communicate as effectively with one’s loved ones. We tend to get used to our cognitive capacity and finding it lacking can be quite terrifying.

I’m quite lucky that my own disease, ankylosing spondylitis, messes with my spine and not my mind. I’ve generally retained my sharp mind even if my body occasionally fails me. But I’ve still felt the frustration and confusion that comes with reaching for understanding and problem solving and coming up short.

Occasionally if my pain is bad enough my mind feels like it slows. It’s almost imperceptible but it’s still there. Like I am grasping for something that’s just an niche or two out of place on a shelf. You reach expecting it to be there and startle with confusion when it’s not. You adjust and get your grip and can carry on, but you are frustrated as you felt sure that the extra inch wasn’t supposed to be there.

Lucky for me this is fairly rare and easily solved with an NSAID. Once acute pain recedes my thinking is quick again. But what if it wasn’t? How would I learn to cope with that sense that my thinking wasn’t as clear as normal? Sure, maybe aging will do me in eventually, but I wouldn’t chose anything that could slow my mind.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture

Day 217 and Reasonable Accommodation

Accessibility is an interesting topic for Americans as we pride ourselves on being the land of opportunity. Every citizen has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, in practice the outcomes of this pursuit are wildly unequal. But we all generally agree that every American should be given the same chance to pursue it. We want the American dream to be accessible. Equal access matters.

I feel this particularly strongly because I’m disabled. I have an autoimmune immune condition called ankylosing spondylitis. My immune system attacks my body and it manifests in occasionally inconvenient symptoms like swelling in my spine that makes walking painful.

Thankfully I was born an American and I live in the twenty first century. We’ve got modern medicine. So my life can basically be normal thanks to immunosuppressant drugs. If you didn’t know my medical history (ok that’s unlikely as I write about it, like, constantly) you couldn’t tell I’m disabled. I’ve had absolutely equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. I’m deeply patriotic as a result. No one treatments me like a second class citizen.

But I get the impression that some people might try. Invisible disabilities have some upsides, you get treated normally, but the downside is you can see the kind of unconscious discrimination and bias people have because they’ve got no useful signifier like a wheelchair which reminds them to keep their mouth shut around you. Which means I hear a lot more of what people really feel. For which I’m grateful. I’d rather know if you think I’m less equal than you.

Watching able body healthy folks discuss vaccines has been a real trip for this reason. The sick and the elderly are ostensibly the reason we engaged in efforts like stay at home orders and now vaccinations and masking. We’ve made reasonable, and occasionally unreasonable, accommodations for the sake of our most vulnerable. The vast majority of Americans did what they could.

Now the accommodations are becoming more more permanent and less inclusive. And I wonder if they are reasonable accommodations for everyone. New York City is instituting vaccine requirements for indoor dining, cultural venues, and indoor public places.

People are going to get a really clear message: if you want to participate in our society fully, you’ve got to get vaccinated. It’s time,” NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference.

I want to participate in society fully. But getting vaccinated hasn’t been easy for me. I am one of the small number of immunosuppressed Americans for whom the vaccine either isn’t an option at all, comes with significant risks, or doesn’t work at all. It’s a misery to not be able to take advantage of one of science’s most significant achievements. I want to be successfully vaccinated very much. It may be possible but it’s costs are very high for me.

Now I grant I have no intention of going to a concert in Manhattan but it hurts to see people casually suggesting that all people who remain unvaccinated did so as a personal choice. It’s not really a great choice pursue a destabilizing course of treatment that may take away my ability to walk and cause significant pain. But sure. Call it a choice. I wouldn’t wish it on you.

People like DeBlasio do not seem to recognize that the message being sent is I can particulate fully in society or I can be one of those dangerous anti-society anti-vaxxers. It’s “one of us or one of them” and the “them” are bad guys. I’m not anti-vaccine. I think it’s generally safe for the vast majority of people and I hope that if you are healthy that you make the choice to get one. But not all Americans are so lucky.

So I beg you to reconsider your choice of words when discussing how much you disdain the unvaccinated. How it’s your choice to be an outcast of society. And don’t phrase policies like DeBlasio did. I deserve to be a part of society too. You made reasonable accommodations for people like me. Saying that I’m now a societal outcast is exclusionary. It’s pretty fucking in-American. Find a damn reasonable accommodation maybe.

And sure I’m not going to be attending anything at Madison Square Garden. But don’t legislate that into a final demarcation. Don’t caste me out forever. It’s not like I don’t know it isn’t safe for me. But maybe one day I’ll feel like it’s worth the risk to dine inside with friends. Maybe that’s an unhealthy impulse to take such a ridiculous risk, but so is drinking and eating fried foods and I’m allowed to make those choices without legislative interference. If I wear a mask and show a negative test maybe Bill De Blasio can see it in his heart to let me chose my own risks. But don’t for the love of America say that the unvaccinated can’t participate in society. I promise you will not like where that leads. A second class citizenship has never ended well.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 216 and Annihilation

My parents were hippies. Thanks in particular to my mother’s great interest in the spiritual world, I spent time in ashrams, communes and retreats as a kid. One was a great big sprawling former summer camp in the Catskills. I adored spending time there.

There is something amusing about being in a Christian family who has decided to study Kashmir Shivaism in an old Borscht Belt resort. But it was thanks to these adventures in expanding our minds and spiritual horizons that I learned about Shiva the Destroyer. And Shiva has had a profound impact on how I think about startups.

I won’t get into the full theology of Shiva but he creates, protects and transforms the universe. His power is set against the goddess Shakti (sorry Parvati can’t get into your whole deal) for a kind of death and creation in one balanced whole. To this day, I chant Shiva’s mantra “Om Namah Shivaya” when I mediate. It more broadly has a meaning of the “universal consciousness is one” which I tend to interpret as ego death. Shiva is the destroyer of my ego for which I am grateful.

The idea that creation and destruction were interlinked, and indeed matched, spoke to me as a child. Some kind of pre-rational understanding of the first law of thermodynamics. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Maybe Shiva and Shakti are just godhead metaphors for the eternal spiral of creation and destruction that we’ve come to dimly understand thanks to the study of physics. I’m neither a theologian nor a physicist.

But I am a business person. Shiva lead me to appreciate the economist Joseph Schumpeter. You see, metaphysics aside, I took the lesson that destruction wasn’t inherently bad quite to my heart. That sometimes, for new things to be formed in the world, old manifestations needed to be destroyed or transformed. Schumpeter’s gale or, more commonly, creative destruction, held my imagination.

I thought to myself “dismal science my ass!” Economics has dedicated an entire discipline to the study of apocalypses and the utopia’s that are created in their wake and we call it good business management. Wealth by way of eschatology. Obviously I was hooked.

According to Schumpeter, the “gale of creative destruction” describes the “process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”

Startups are known for their creative destruction. Small changes and innovations slowly, and then all at once, implode and destroy old ways of doing business. if we are lucky more wealth is created in the process. Sometimes enough to change entire cultures and people for the better. And sometimes not. But if there was ever going to be a god of startups I think it would be Shiva.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 215 and Leisure

I’ve got a bad relationship with work. Since I was a teenager I’ve been compulsive about the idea of hard work. I don’t know how I got to have a problem with the Protestant Work Ethic but it seems likely I developed it long before I read Max Weber and found it’s comforting rationalizations about work’s inherent morality.

I’m fascinated by things like commodity aesthetics, the history of consumption, and theories of leisure & status. Partially because I got a kick out of supposing I was a better person than those wretched lazy types. I wasn’t so sophisticated to sneer “rentier” class as kid but I was well on my way to veneration of hard work and productive capital. An economics degree finished the job.

This was compounded by growing up in a family that worshipped the culture of Silicon Valley. The innovation of computers and the people that worked all hours to bring their creativity to the world were the most important people on the planet. They hadn’t quite crossed the cultural rubicon of power that the tech industry has now, but the power of making the future was hard work and heady stuff even before it captured the mainstream. I wanted to change the world like the people my father admired

There was a time when computing and automation raised questions of a new era of leisure. If we could move all of the work we’d previously done manually to automated systems perhaps humans could ascend to The Culture of Ian M Bank’s novels. In a distant future of abundance, sentient AIs run industry and production, so humanity can do, well, whatever it likes.

But we haven’t achieved a post scarcity world. If anything accumulating resources and showing you’ve done it by the rules of the meritocracy makes hard work even more crucial. You’ve got to play and win two games. You’ve got to make the money and show you’ve demonstrated the proper status while doing it. It seems like leisure is losing the battle quite soundly.

I’ve been pushing all year to get back to hard work. I’ve worked hard at my health. I’ve committed myself to biohacking. But really what if the obsession with working myself to the bone is killing me? I’ve been completely relaxed as I prepared for a medical procedure this week. I’ve never felt better. Which forced me to ask myself if maybe I better come to live leisure like the way I have loved work. It might be a much better life for me. The future sentient AIs might approve as well.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 214 and Their Rules

“If he wants to play their game, then he has to learn their rules.” – Downton Abby

I’ve been on a bit of a kick with taking notes for my grand unified theory of shitposting. Naturally I’ve been obsessed with the British aristocracy melting down during modernity in Downtown Abby. A great deal of class implosions make for excellent drama. Class and it’s privileges are crucial to understanding who can get away with what. And I’m becoming rather sure that shitposting is a way of changing the rules, through satire, of who gets to accumulate social capital.

I own a reasonably good library on the intersection of class, wealth, and capitalism. I suspect that sort of preoccupation isn’t that odd of a leaning when you come from family that jumped from working class to bourgeois and had set its sights even higher for their children. And it’s reasonably amusing that I file the topics together in my head and on my bookshelf.

Class, Greed, Liquidated, Capitalism and of course Zizek.

Money has never been the determining factor for class, but the American preoccupation with capital has led us to develop elaborate social mores to try to distance that we have overlapped wealth and status into the term “upper class” in this county. We don’t have peerage so things like taste and creativity has come to dominate. We absolutely hate the nouveau rich and disdain people with bad taste.

I spent a number of years working in “style” which is the overarching set of professions that dominate who has class. I worked for luxury houses, founded a cosmetics brand and even did marketing for a very high end gym. All of the kinds of things you can buy to demonstrate you have good taste and thus are worthy of being considered upper class.

Honestly it seems easier to have to learn the manners of the aristocracy than to have to bother with keeping up on style. At least those assholes had a consistent dress code. But an elaborate set of social distinctions overlaying signifiers on who has taste and credentials is fundamentally more accessible. Hipster are social progress.

Showing you’ve got the capacity to read social signals has lead to a lot of weird shit. Our current preoccupation with critical theory for one. But it’s opened up class status to people who are capable of demonstrating their understanding of what it takes to occupy their place on the ladder. And yes I think shitposting is the new Harvard degree or house in Newport. I guess it’s no weirder than marrying someone with an estate on a cold island off the coast of Europe.