Year: 2023

Categories
Startups

Day 814 and Odd Hours

I’m a little bit of a work fetishist. I’m into shit like routines and the Protestant work ethic and I avidly participated in hustle culture. But I regret to inform you that most of it is a lie.

So much of your professional life ends up getting wasted to slavish gestures to productivity porn. It’s just not how real life works. But it sure looks sexy when you lay it out like an Instagram reel.

But maybe it’s not always just for show. Maybe there is something you don’t understand about how things do or don’t work. So you accept some social norms to fit in with others and you find their advice on shit like sleep more and get high quality protein is sort of first principles.

You have the basics of being a responsible adult and learning from others while you do it. We have a grand shared culture and some of it is useful and some of it is superstition and sometimes it’s not clear which is which. But shared meaning is how humans organize. Maybe there is value to meetings.

Point my dear whacky zoomer autists is you need to be able to be a functioning member of civilization despite what Covid may have revealed. You have to accommodate other people’s lives even if you don’t like everything. Welcome to the herd.

And honestly you should have to learn to fit in a bit of life that overlaps with real humans. Even though we have total access to our most niche nerd fandoms online, we deal with normies in real life.

But I’ve also come to realize that performance is a game. And you can train yourself to go from zero to halfway decent if you just make an effort. But the real art of it all the tip and tricks and how-to guides comes down to just doing the work and figuring it out. The intangibles make you an expert. That’s the stuff you spend a life refining and it doesn’t ever take a break. It’s why all the super successful people are also kind of fuck ups.

Sometimes the weird is genuine as they have rethought a an assumption about the world and intend to make their vision known in the world. And that’s not done on bankers hours.

I work on Sunday when something happens and the momentum shifts and you know that adding your gravity to the matter could make a difference. And so you go the extra mile for someone else because it’s about us trusting each other to work with reality but also see each other as we are. And most of us are weird and it’s fine and you’ve got to work the way to makes your weird shine.

If you are good at your niche and you apply your knowledge and tell it straight then sometimes you do some magic and it moves your universe. So yeah sometimes you’ve got to keep weird hours to hold space for the possibility.

Categories
Media

Day 813 and You

I took some of today off to watch television as I’ve been in a bit of an overwork tumult. I finished the 4th season of the psycho-sexual thriller You starring Penn Badgley.

I recommend the streaming series on Netflix (I’ve not read the books on which it is based) unabashedly to all women who have ever dated men seeking to save them and to men with mommy issues seeking salvation in broken women.

I may get a bit spoiler-y in this post so now might be the time to peel off if you don’t like knowing anything about a show though I promise to avoid big plot twists.

I was struck recently by an excellent Twitter thread from journalist and my favorite therapy poaster Heidi about how men are socialized to “never be the bad guy.” I felt it was particularly salient as I finished the newest season of You which hinges on the tricks ego plays on you to help you ignore your shadow.

Realizing that what you do and who you are are not the same thing but that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is kind of the whole enchilada of therapy. If you’ve ever worried you are a bad person or struggled with shame you recognize this.

You makes some clever stabs (pun intended) at dealing with the darkest manifestations of this by pairing women who need saving with a serial killer. Empire of skulls becomes a bit more than metaphor as it closes in on how wealth intersects with mommy and daddy issues and inter-generational trauma. I really do recommend it watching it.

In true “it’s hip to be square” American Pyscho style, it’s unclear how much we are meant to consider whether it’s possible to have “a good kill” as an intellectual exercise. What we do end up considering is that shadow integration work is invariably a dangerous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde affair. And what kind of lies we are willing to tell is a function of our relative power as it intersects with a traumatic childhood.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 812 and Stress

My internet experience recently has shown me some touchy people. Maybe it’s the stress of the global banking crisis. Or the random panics about Bitcoin. Or the AI panic. Or presidential perk walks. Or extreme weather. Or rising tensions with China. Maybe someone got the wrong coffee order.

Or maybe, in my case, I’m snippy and touchy because I’m having a terrible flair up of my ankylosis. I forgot what a challenge pain can be to manage. Then it comes roaring back after a period of intense stress and I forgot myself.

I’m just noting it for today as I’ve been working nonstop. I’ve had houseguests without fail for three straight weeks (five in total) for reasons mostly personal but occasionally with professional overlap. It’s just been a bit.

So no elaborate intellectual ramblings today or extremely online rabbit holes. It’s just a check in to say I’m not quite dead yet.

Categories
Politics

Day 811 and Hierarchy

I came across an interesting bit of reading on the relative stability of hierarchies of violence today. It’s a tidbit on a Substack so epistemic status is that I learned something and I’m thinking a lot about trust as we live through various crisis points in real time on networked media.

The article that starts with prison gangs and the weight of violent action on bosses and gets deep on hierarchical stability and selection pressures. I really do recommend the reading as it gets into Scottish kings, American federal bureaucracy, and military service academies.

I’m working on improving my theory of organizational structure because somehow I am one of the louder “thinks in public” about corporate governance and decentralized autonomous organization. It’s a bit of an accident as I am just very interested in how collectives organize resources at different scales.

Some of investing thesis surrounds a nexus of how we organize decentralized power when centralized powers wish us your in-group to be illegal or killed. It’s a salient question for all of us in an age of institutional failure and I’m keen to learn more about what works in the most adverse situations.

Skarbek might call this market competition for governance, an Italian futurist might say “War is the hygiene of the world”, a musician might say a rolling stone gathers no moss, a survivalist that the quickest stream is the freshest…But the phenomenon remains. the devil reigns in hell… because where else are you going to go

I’m a doomer but only because I’m keen to head off going to hell. I’d like to avoid us having to return to a Hobbesian war of all against all just because we’ve gotten a little tired of liberalism because it allows for out-groups to live and let live. So putting it out there that functional systems can be stable and maybe stability isn’t our only goal.

Categories
Media

Day 810 and 90s TV

I’ve not had a lot of spare time for entertainment and recovery in what turned out to be a very busy month. This left me in a small quandary as Alex and I finished both a comedy and a hour long drama right before all hell broke loose.

My husband and I tend to always have a short form sitcom and a longer prestige piece in rotation depending on how tired we are at the end of the day. We’d run through all the comfort shows and couldn’t fathom testing a new something more serious.

I’m not entirely sure how but we decided to pick up two classic 90s era shows. For our comedy we picked That 70s Show and for our drama we picked the procedural NYPD Blue. Our expectations were that these would be easy to watch simple shows without much depth. And boy were we wrong.

I don’t recall watching a ton of television when I was a kid and I doubt I would have been allowed to watch gritty cop dramas. But the way folks kvetch about how network television sucks I went in expecting middle brow fare. Millennials have had both streaming and cable for so long we’ve come to expect tv that caters to our preferences tend to look down on anything made for the masses.

As it turns out, having to appeal to broad swaths of people actually has some advantages. Both shows are steeped in deep emotions and relatability. The writing is snappy and straight forward. The characters are multifaceted even as they work through their personas.

The fact that I’m relating to the struggles of a shitty racist balding drunkard detective and a pack of Wisconsin teenagers is probably a positive thing. Shared humanity is getting lost in consumer preferences and social identities.

We think unless we see ourselves on the screen we couldn’t possibly relate. And I’ll say I’ve appreciated more representation in entertainment as I often feel hopelessly un-relatable. A

nd yet I’m enjoying relating to humans that never even existed as portrayed by professional liars. So maybe there is something in that. The human experience is the thing, not that the experience must demonstrate it’s connection to your life.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 809 and Powerful

I’ve been through the gauntlet over the last month. And despite the nauseating rollercoaster of it all, I feel powerful. I am happy that I’ve drawn upon who I am and the boundaries required. It’s been liberating in a professional capacity but I can also see how my personal life got bigger and better as well.

The future is looking as uncertain as a Paul Atreides without the spice. I cannot see how it resolves. I see only hard choices and responsibilities both individual and collective. And I feel ready to hold my ground on what I contribute. But I will be holding others to theirs as well.

We’ve got a long ways to go. Many people do not wish to see things as they are. Issues both material and social are gripping America and by extension the world as the dollar hegemony comes into question over powerful institutional distrust. The power that comes in holding your gaze on what it could all mean and not turning to panic in fear is immense. I am not turning away.

I hold the knowledge that I can do everything right and still fail. I have faced the no win scenario. The Kobeyashi Maru of it all is that sometimes we lose. And we will feel it. And those feelings matter. But then we shoulder the burden and do what needs to be done. The only one who can save you is yourself. And I chose to see the power in the hard choices.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 808 and Left Eye

I’m literally sick to my stomach. I’ve got a twitch in my left eye. We’ve got dozens of competing factions in a massive narrative war online gunning for total social collapse and I’ve got multiple actual real live friends I care about deeply who think that THIS IS IT. Lemmings off a cliff would not be too far off as a metaphor.

There are multiple state, corporate, private entities working on a narrative collapse. Every single one of us needs to push back and say no. My only advice is to simply ignore them if you have already done basic preparations for your own life. If you haven’t it’s probably too late to do much more than treat this like a snowstorm.

Maybe Trump gets arrested. Maybe the money printer goes brrr. But you should assess your own risks as a responsible adult. Get out cash, buy some bottled water and get groceries for the week and keep calm. If it is indeed times for guns and butter the price of Bitcoin won’t matter.

I know I committed to a daily discipline of writing and I am doing it but I want to get off the internet and sleep for a thousand years. I’ll never get any work done or maintain my health and sanity if I don’t. So I am writing this and going to go about my life. You should too. And please nobody flee to El Salvador. I’ll write again tomorrow but if I’m quiet it’s because I am refusing to add any more fuel to this narrative fire.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 807 and Hyperinflation

Everyone calm the fuck down and stop panicking while we consider the most dreaded phrase in Silicon Valley: “Balaji was right”.

Sometimes people use a method of persuading you from the extremes. Remember “he means it seriously but not literally?” It works, it nudges the new position into your frame of reference and anything else feels moderate by comparison. But you get to choose what you adopt. You can be optimistic, you can chose new ways of being, you control yourself. But warning: it takes so much energy and effort, which I know because I did a lot of work to adjust my life to tail risks while still believing that you have to live your life.

Also, I’m not going to censor anything, so if you’ve got an inclination to cuss me out for not being on your “side”, I’d ask you to remind you that I’m human and winging it just as much as you are. Let’s all remember our humanity.

So are we going into hyperinflation in the next 90 days with Bitcoin going to $1,000,000?

The Next 90 Days

I mean, an apocalyptic scenario is pretty hard to do in ninety days no matter what is happening. Because life finds a way and as my husband Alex likes to say, people revert to the mean. So while I don’t fucking know and neither do you, I don’t think on balance the physics of hyperinflation in 90 days works from where we are now, when talking about the US in particular.

I’m not doing elaborate math though I’ve read the materials. I can make some good guesses based on logical observations of my available data and on human nature. And I think a shock of that magnitude is basically the end of the world. And as much as I think we’ve got to end denialism about how bad shit is for a lot of people, I’m also not sure it’s going to go sideways that fast. Maybe I’m over indexing on having read Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire”.

And to the idea that “it’s ok, we’ll all just move to a Bitcoin economy: we’ve got a so much work ahead of us to make crypto and in particular Bitcoin work as a viable alternative for a practical economy it’s not even funny. I think I’m reasonably active in crypto (though probably not as much as you think on a day to day basis). I participate in some DAOs, I have bags with Bitcoin. I believe we can build a better future. But we are small and the problem is big and we need more of you to come in and build it with us if you want an alternative economy that’s actually usable by everyone.

I think this is a good thing because I have had some good experiences with how American capitalism works but I think we can do better. I have some money but I’m not .01%. I like capitalism but I’ve experienced the deep lows of navigating a chronic illness in America before everyone became obsessed with fragility. I’m not saying the systems works.

So while I think a change is ultimately coming (and I’ve made plenty of bets to that effect), I’m not so sure I want the apocalypse to come just to further that end.

After all we can’t build software if it’s the end of the world. Which isn’t a huge leap to make if the dollar hegemony collapses before August. Literally nobody wants that. But a lot of people want more options and it’s our jobs to convince them we can provide it.

So we can use Bitcoin but again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Changing Systems

But I want to be transparent about what I am weighing. I believe we have some negative trends that haven’t been addressed in fractional reserve banking. I believe our world has strained trust about state run capital and currency feels inherently political.

We aren’t that far off the church and state separation, historically speaking. And it took a long time for the separation to hold. But even if time moves faster now, I’d be surprised (though not shocked) if we took down money and state in a quarter. Maybe I’m underestimating dramatically on the exponential. I clearly don’t think it’s impossible because I live in Montana and my revealed preferences tell you something. But I also live near a yuppie city and I make investments in a market economy. I’m torn.

So do I think it takes more time to unwind an empire? Yeah I do.

Do the network affects at play impact monetary policy? You tell me.

We poured a lot of cash into a lot of hands and we have the option of gossiping at scale in public. It feels like no one learned anything from GameStop but I can assure you I did. We don’t totally understand emergent behaviors. Egregores are real and we can summon demons, though we probably shouldn’t and I think it’s a little weird to do so because I’m not confident it won’t kill me.

And there’s a lot of new ground to cover. More deeply tied financial systems, and networks magnified 1000x. Last time around we barely had a functional Twitter and now we have, well ok it’s barely functional now (jk but not).

So we shouldn’t in fact continue to do that by building credibility through showing our work and support and investing in that future?I think so. It’s astonishing it’s as cheap as it is now given how much opportunity it provides. But again we have to keep building it out.

Opening the Window

Finally, one tactical issue I want to address is that Balaji may simply be trying to expand our minds on the possible in front of us and how fast we can do it. I believe the most pejorative way of describing it is manifesting but you can in fact apply energy to making a system move in your favor.

One way you do that is by opening the Overton Window on what is possible and seeing if people step up to the plate to build norms and tools that further your cultural view of the world.

So if you really believe that a change is coming and that people need to prepare for it, yes you push even farther than you might think is actually going to happen. That way, even if someone only comes halfway there, they’ve landed right where you think they need to be.

All this to say: chill out everyone – we’re living in the fastest, craziest times there have ever been and it’s damn easy to get sucked into the vortex. So take a step back, breathe, and make your decisions from a place of calm, not panic.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 806 and Inputs

I’ve had a very intense month. In the past thirty days I feel like I’ve lived an entire lifetime of emotions.

I had some exciting but modestly controversial press in Vanity Fair about how chaotic the future looks in America. That brought a lot of attention and new LPs in chaotic.capital who want to invest in solutions for living in a rapidly changing future shocked world.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and I had to grapple with complicated emotions on being present for family and the aspirations I have for a life that doesn’t align with disability.

Within a few days of getting back I had my sense making capacity crash override my brain into a snowblind. I thought I was going a little crazy but no it was because a bank collapsed. Then I heard some dog whistles about euthanizing people like me.

And finally I realized there is no point in doing my own writing in the wake of ChatGPT4 and decided that I’d do it anyways because organic human brewed content from Montana is fun to make.

It’s been an astonishing amount of inputs into my system and I am leaving out a lot of personal life details that I’ll leave folks to guess at. As exhausting as all of the above sounds it only represents a fraction of the work and emotional energy I brought to bear on expanding myself to meet this moment.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 805 and Legibility

Being inscrutable is a tactical asset in our extremely online age. As more informational influence campaigns are waged, it becomes easier to invade your headspace if you are too predictable.

I’m not saying that being predictable isn’t worthwhile. If you have a firm foundation of philosophy or religion that dictates a stance sometimes you just have to own it. I’m a libertarian and I often walk the line of what I consider to be foundational beliefs in the value of other people’s freedom in relation to mine.

But I also live in reality where the grey of living in a civilization is a lot less clear. Anyone who doesn’t admit to this fundamental tension is untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned.

This of course makes me legible. It is one of the buzzwords in my favorite online spaces. It is the art of how we make ourselves legible to others such that we can see and be seen. I rather like this philosophy overall.

But I am also quite sure that if you give someone an opening to fuck with you they probably will. It’s definitely a risk to be seen. It makes you a target. But it’s also how you become a beacon. So it’s an over under decision on how much you care about other people attacking you is up to you. But if you open about experimenting with life and how little you know it almost always turns out alright.

There is a theory of public relations, much popularized by Steve Bannon and legal discovery, called flood the zone with shit. And sometimes not giving your enemies a sense of who you is because you are always in process of becoming more and bigger and inscrutable and then suddenly you are in the Heart of Darkness.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

So everyone be optimistic and find your people but remember everyone is going to be playing the same game. So I’d definitely recommend you don’t cheat and play the long game.