Month: April 2023

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 850 and Complicated

I’m coming off of a very intense week having been in Texas at a conference. I have a lot of integration work I need to do on the ideas and emotions I was exposed to during the week. If you weren’t following along I talk about erasure, inclusion and summer camp among other topics and I’d definitely click on erasure if you haven’t read it.

I’ve got some complicated emotions on how the wider crypto industry and our ambitions for decentralization and power sharing will play out. There was a lot more building energy and a lot less fluffy grifts but trust in any of what is being built is at an all time low. And it’s basically our fault. So that’s always fun.

There was talk of throwing the governmental eye of Sauron onto the artificial intelligence community so crypto can catch a breather. I felt like this was exceptionally dangerous as an attitude as I believe crypto only really matters if artificial intelligence succeeds as machines need machine money.

I’ve been doing a lot of work to seed what I consider to be genuinely underserved communities who have been excluded from mainstream computing’s benefits as I think we all deserve a say in how currency and monetary systems will work in the future. The dissidents range from the transgendered sex worker to insular religious communities.

Power sharing remains a challenge for humanity and our incentive structures are producing a number of second and third order problems. I remain committed to a pluralistic community that maintains appropriate boundaries and liberties. But I sure don’t know how I reconcile that some folks are hellbent on domination and submission.

Categories
Community Startups Travel

Day 849 and “Oh I Follow You!”

I’ve been in Austin for Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference. I’m flying home to Montana today after five intense days of work. But if the on the ground reception is any indication, I nailed this year with my talks and vibes. I might actually be good at my job.

Conferences can be tricky if you are a speaker. You’re obligated to hold attention & entertain while also getting across complicated topics like governance contracts. It takes energy and preparation to do it well.

This year I was a bit less academic than last year as Marc Hochstein and I hosted an interactive town hall which was spicy as hell and my loud carnival barker voice carried. A bit bigger than just a talk and I think it was a hit.

By the end the room was packed with folks passing by and stopped to see what we were discussing. A bunch of smiling energetic faces and a loud lady in a full length dress is a bit eye catching out on a convention floor stage. I got so much positive feedback.

Heck, I was in a bathroom where I overhead an attendee discussing the panel the next day with a gentleman who was also panelist. The attendee raved to the panelist and said “that chick” really held everyone’s attention on topic. A good performance all around.

I called Consensus a “summer camp for adults” as it all your crypto friends get together for it. An expensive paid conference with a lot of talent and speakers makes for excellent serendipity. I felt like I made new connections and even a new friend or two.

It felt easy as in a small community someone like me gets to enjoy the benefits of niche fringe micro-celebrity. I kept hearing over and over “I follow you on Twitter” along with “she’s so funny on Twitter she says the shit you are thinking.” I’ve got to admit it feels good.

And I think it was fun for Alex who spent part of the week hearing folks tell him that while he’s great (and everyone loves his homesteading adventures) but they are really more excited to meet his wife. Dare I say I’m a trophy wife?

It’s super fun when your internet frens and parasocial relationships come together in actual reality. We were all happily saying “oh I follow you” to each other all week. I miss everyone already. But I’m happy to be home in Montana.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 847 and Erasure

I hosted an interactive town hall for Consensus this afternoon. The topic was the path forward for building communities online, offline and IRL with cryptocurrency, decentralized autonomous organizations and maybe even network states.

I’ve been working on this town hall for several months. I worked with Marc Hochstein to refine the thesis question, build the flow and topics, bring together speakers from unique ecosystems and projects, and horse trade the various bit of social capital required to get interesting content out the door. I worked hard on it. I felt I was one of the owners of the panel.

Builders of new types of communities – online, IRL, and hybrids – roll up their sleeves and discuss how they’ve addressed challenges from 60,000-foot strategy to immediate on-the-ground tactics in a zero-trust world with high trust expectations. Topics include: governance and accountability; organic scaling through consensus (who and what decides on whether it is achieved); the architecture of sustaining and driving loyalty; navigating regulatory hurdles; uncertainty around novel governance structures; and managing information and workflows around who and what is trusted.

I was proud of my first question as I felt qualified to ask having once been the founder and leader of an organization. Conway’s Law is a familiar adage in software design. Simply put, what we build is a reflection of who we are and how we communicate with each other. So I opened the town hall with this as the thirty thousand foot view.

If what we build is a reflection of the organizations that build it, then crypto is a reflection of this room. Assuming you believe our goal is economic and monetary solutions for everyone willing to align with our reformation, are we living up to this ambition?

We had a lot of ground to cover. Issues of institutional distrust, transparency, governance, and decentralization’s promises for inclusion. But reactivity means we go to base emotions. An older woman asked the panel (not me though) why there weren’t more women on the panel. Needlessly to say I took that personally. Ain’t I a panelist?

I just brought the hammer down on this poor woman who wanted to call my panel a “manel” because lady it’s fucking erasure I worked for months to bring this group together, I’m on the stage as an expert, and you think don’t I count?

She said I was the moderator. Which like yeah it’s my fucking show because I have the expertise to bring the leaders together as I’m a peer. I shut it down as we had deeper questions on what inclusion means than Boomer feminism or Girlbossing woke-ism can manage.

The beauty of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the ecosystem of L2s like Stacks is any of us can validate what’s going on. There is no “man” or patriarchy or systemic oppression keeping you out of learning and using the tools. Maybe they reflect their builders who haven’t always been inclusive but now all of us together can earn and build like anyone else. We can make our tools reflect us by insisting on being seen.

I regularly have my background and expertise and existence questioned by everyone. And I just keep showing up. So I’d like to say sticking a girl on a panel does nothing for inclusion. But being a woman who organized a serious (ly) weird town hall on community should also mean my experience counts as much as anyone else’s.

I want everyone to count. You count. I count. Your gender or sexual orientation doesn’t discount you unless you discount yourself first. I regularly make sure I’m seen and I want you seen too.

The way to count is by speaking up and making sure that men aren’t the only ones who contribute. Don’t want to make your gender or sex a thing?

Go ignore gender & sex and & identity entirely and be an anon with a Milady pfp. I came to crypto to be a sovereign of my own body and choices. It’s your choice. None of us are victims.

I was amused as dozens of women came up to me after with enthusiasm about how we do inclusion in crypto because we don’t need to be restricted by Girlbossing or Boomer feminism. We include ourselves as the system is inclusive by design.

Decentralized systems include us all. And that’s a future they can’t exclude us from. Do you want to categorize every identity into perfect little corporate identities and slogans? I don’t. We can build a future where we are free to be you and me. Ok Boomer?

Categories
Startups

Day 846 and Serendipity

Last night I arrived in Austin for my favorite annual cryptocurrency event called Consensus. If you are participating please consider coming to my interactive town hall on Thursday at 1:30pm where we have an hour of panel & audience discourse on the future of trust & community.

I am excited for this panel as I feel like I’m ready to own my experience as a professional community builder. It’s been a job in the social media era for a bit. But it’s only recently that we’ve realized the ecosystem of builders is tightly knit together by a tapestry of overlapping passions and competencies. It’s lots of different kinds of nerds.

We arrived earlier than expected which enabled us to go to an event with Jon Stokes (I was slightly more excited to see his wife Christina but Jon knows I adore him too). While we had lots of folks discussing heady issues like the network state, it is most joyful for me to discuss the more human aspects of life in a community. Who was looking after the kids and which one of our neighbors is housesitting. Practical daily living things felt like the natural connection of humans beings working together.

From there we went to a dinner with one of our most cherished real ones Ben Huh. The man knows food so I was thrilled to be feeling healthy enough to stay out and enjoy a meal with a table of deeply weird unabashedly themselves people. When we did introductions the question was “what is something you are obsessed with right now?”

The answers were wide ranging. High temperature cooking, textile pattern making, reality dating shows on Netflix (not for the record me but I am also obsessed), showing up as you are, sewing the perfect custom dress shirt, raising goats, riding tractors, reading science fiction mind bender The Three Body Problem, and mastering nervous system regulation (this one is me).

I felt like everyone I saw that night was one of my fellow travelers. The serendipity of overlapping passions and curiosity showed me so many ways I connect with diverse humans. I encountered politics as disparate as reactionary fascist and shitlib standard as everyone comes to grip with a future that feels as yet unwritten. There is a lot of serendipity on the frontier. It’s nice to be reminded that the future is built together.

Categories
Medical

Day 845 and Fucked Fertility

A bit of discourse stirred up a lot of grief and sadness for me. Noah Smith did an analysis of the much discussed Atlantic piece “The Myth of the Broke Millennial.” His breakdown is excellent and I recommend the Twitter thread where several of my geriatric millennial friends weigh in on how late in life security has come for many of us and how precarious it still feels.

What jumped out at me most in Noah’s breakdown is whether millennials will feel financially secure enough to have kids if it’s indeed true that we are getting less precarious.

That matters as a question as having children appears to be a driving force towards conservative politics but also a general preference for less government involvement. Noah wondered if millennials will be less woke and less inclined to socialism if we don’t turn out to be downwardly mobile. The theory is we might be if, and it’s a big if, we feel secure enough to have children.

There is one age-related factor that appears to draw people to the right, however: having children. Fertility rates are down, and Twenge discusses some reasons for this in her article. But what really matters for politics is probably not the number of kids that get born, but the number of people who end up having any kids at all.

I’ve got bad news on this front as the first wave of elder millennials who haven’t already had kids probably can’t. Why? Our women are aging out of fertility before they find the security they feel they need to consider having kids.

By the time millennial women get to a place where it seems feasible we’ve long entered “geriatric pregnancy” territory. I froze my eggs right before it was considered a geriatric situation. Which is give or take 31-32 now as we redefine fertility. I am now 39.

Now that’s a longer story for me personally as freezing my eggs felt like a consumer decision, was marketed as insurance policy, and ended up being a life changing catastrophe. And I still don’t have kids.

The process of egg extraction triggered an inflammatory disease and I may never be able to carry to term. And I have complicated grief stricken emotions about the entire affair. And we spent a small fortune getting me healthy enough to go back work.

But my suspicion is that many millennials will learn that fertility isn’t as easy as they imagine if they try to deal with it past 35 let alone past 40.

And we simply cannot seem to discuss the issue in a way that is productive. The discourse is toxic as cultural warriors, often men weigh in with their complex emotions about what it means to have a family, support children and generally deal with women’s health.

Shaming and controlling women’s bodies doesn’t really do much for the cold hard reality that we failed many millennial women by assuring technology could solve for the hard questions on fertility. So we marketed these new medical options and sold it at premium. Silicon Valley mounted a whole campaign to freeze eggs for its female workforce.

I’m afraid we are too deeply entrenched in a culture war to discus this productively as most of the people I see with the message that fertility is complex tend to view things in a more traditional context.

I personally love playing a tradwife on Twitter because I’ve learned a lot about how reactionary feminists and baroque online misogyny views motherhood. They talk to me and I’ve listened.

But we need to get women of all politics and preferences and family structures involved in this conversation as a full decade of millennial women are going to need to consider their relationship to their own fertility and bodies in short order. And for many of us it’s too late.

Treatments like IVF and egg freezing & extraction are expensive and have considerably more risk than we are comfortable discussing. Surrogates are a quarter of a million dollar expense which disgustingly is for bureaucratic costs not the surrogate herself. If you want multiple children it’s not crazy to plan for a million dollars. And don’t get me started on how adoption plays into all of this.

A generation of fucked fertility with myriad corporate profit motives driving decision making sounds like the stuff of conspiracy and cranks but don’t be fooled by extremism. We’ve done a shitty job investing in women’s healthcare in America and it will have consequences.

I know it’s scary to look at head on. I regularly break down with my own grief on the matter. I’ve been looking at it for years. Having a serious health crisis brought on by family planning has been a blessing to my marriage but that blessing has enormous costs. I’d expect this process of addressing the fertility of a generation of women to be challenging for us all no matter your personal choices or politics.

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 844 and Blooming

Spring is in the air. Not in Montana so much as it’s still mud season, but metaphorically. Life is blooming and blossoming all around me after what feels like a lifetime of winter. Everyone in my orbit is flourishing and optimistic about how they are choosing to live their own lives. Which is wild as I’m friends with a lot of doomers.

The cost of an exceptional springtime was quite high. The flourishing is happening amongst those in my ecosystem who addressed their suffering head on in deep dark winters of soul and body. Between the pandemic and the financial calamities in the following polycrisis, people had it rough.

I’m not saying any of that is over so much as I’m seeing people reconcile that life is just going to be bumpy for the foreseeable future. Maybe it was always this bumpy. I gather that Americans are the ones experiencing the most dissonance on a changing world because we had it pretty good for a long while.

But it’s a choice to come to terms with a fallen world. Both in the Christian sense and in the wider “shit is crazy” sense. We still need to be housed and fed and educated and kept safe. Especially if times bad. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still applies. But if you take care of your own needs you can blossom even in hard times. Maybe even especially. Spring follows winters.

Categories
Travel

Day 843 and Panic Procrastination

I have to pack for a trip to Texas and I’ve spent my entire day panicking about it and not doing it. Mind you I’ve done nothing else of particular value while panicking. Except I suppose my daily health routines. The rest of the day has been me feeling ashamed and massively over texting in group chats to avoid packing. I just don’t want to do it.

I hate packing. I hate travel. None of it appeals to me. If you’d like to know why I’ve written about my most common recurring nightmare.

I never leave on the trip. The dream never lets me finish packing. I guess my unconscious hasn’t figured out how to proceed that it wasn’t the packing that scared me, it was leaving behind the life that I thought was safe. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare, packing up my life, being afraid of being dragged someplace I don’t want to go.

I’ve moved thirty eight times in my life and traveled constantly as a child (and still do as an adult) and I’ve never quite shaken how traumatic it still feels to my inner child who just wanted to stay in one place for more than a year or two. If I never had to travel again in my entire life I would honestly be happy.

With that thought I am going to go take some drugs, remind myself I am able to pause between my reaction and my action, and stop procrastinating on this packing. Maybe I’ll cry a little first.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 842 and Sucks to Suck

A lot of folks are suffering right now. And I’ve got all the empathy in the world for just how rough it is to live in this modern moment. So I want you to really hear what I’m saying knowing that I do it out of love.

It’s sucks to suck

I’m currently sucking at a bunch of stuff in my life. Because I’m learning new skills and expanding my horizons. I am just sucking big hairy balls as I go about the process of embarrassing myself becoming competent through failure.

Thankfully I am surrounded by a family who loves me and wants me to improve. They don’t mind if I suck because sucking is the first step in success. If I don’t suck at something I’m probably not pushing myself to learn. And just because I’m afraid of sucking is no excuse. Everyone sucks sometimes.

And I get it. It sucks to suck. I hate how uncomfortable it makes me feel to fuck up. I am regularly failing at lots of shit on what feels like a daily basis.

And I do often want to crawl into a hole and stop doing new things so I can enjoy the feelings of power and competence at things I am already successful in.

And yet I don’t want to stay in my comfort zone. Even though I am intimately familiar with how much it sucks to suck. I hate the feeling of having not tried even more. I’d rather shoulder the risk of the fuck ups than live with the crushing anxiety of not shooting my shot.

Because more than it sucks to suck, it really fucking sucks to not even try. It eats away at your soul. You wonder if your life could be better. And I am here to tell you yes it can be. My life is fucking awesome right now. And it’s awesome because I tried. I spent a lot of time being embarrassed.

I didn’t get everything I wanted. But like those damned boomers said, you might find that you get what you need. So go ahead and suck. The path to happiness is on the other side of it. Don’t give up just because it sucks to suck.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 841 and Market Always Wins

One of the most canonical pieces of knowledge in startup land is an adage from a 2007 post by Marc Andreessen. What makes for a successful startup? Product, team or market? He concludes that Market Always Wins.

Its similar to another aphorism I like. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” I think of them both as Newcomb’s Paradox explainers. In an irrational world, it is irrational to behave rationally. Sometimes bad shit made by bad people has a market. Sometimes good shit made by good people doesn’t have a market.

I am always interested in different flavors of the cold hard reality that if no one wants to buy what you are selling nothing else matters. You can have a great product and be absolutely brilliant but it won’t matter if nobody wants the thing.

And this is all on my mind because I don’t think anyone wants to pay for Twitter Blue The great Blue Check removal has happened and it’s not going great.

The sheer copium of the arguments being made for the value of the blue check to users astounds me. For reasons I assume have to do with emotional insecurities, the blue check came to represent something about status. But it was always a feature that was valuable to Twitter the company but not strictly speaking Twitter’s users. Twitter was a cool place to be because lots of verified cool people would talk to each other. You got to occasionally talk to them and you knew it was the real deal. This made Twitter valuable. I don’t know why this is so hard to grasp.