Year: 2025

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 1782 and Sweeping Rolls and Unrunnable Rapids

Navigating the rifts and eddies in the river of human scale time takes more skill and endurance than I fear I have.

Even if I assume that Earth time still running on any sort of human scale (which I don’t believe to be true), I find myself wondering if it’s better to head for the riverbank for a moment. Like Lewis and Clark, I only dimly understand where this river will let out.

I once paddled lightly, easily, even joyfully with the currents of my time. When I capsized, to continue with kayaking metaphors, I would simply snap myself back upright with a sweep or C-to-C Roll roll and carry on downstream spluttering wet and bursting with laughter.

Kayaking the Zeitgeist River was a fine past time for the quick witted and able shouldered amongst us. One could build an entire career by correctly the judging the river of time. And what fun it was to carry along with friends as time did most of the work.

But ever more frequently, I search for the eddies to pull myself out of the stream to stop for a while. Tired and hurting, I look for a refuge to catch my breath and slow my heart. As the timeline rages on without me, through crashing white water and its drowning currents, I wonder if I should even be alone on these waters at all.

Simply staying upright is now a bare minimum of a concern. A hip snap and good instincts does little when the course never ends and the rapids unexpectedly turn from a fun day of Class III rapids to Unrunnable class VI without so much as a posted sign. There are no maps or forecasts to be had. Your gear might be whatever you brought onto the water in entirely different conditions.

There be dragons here? Hardly so dramatic a metaphor applies from naval history pertains to river ways. But it’s no less dangerous for its lack of vista. Unseen rocks, snapped branches and water logged organic materials rise and decay into froth and burble. Lurking like so many unseen estuarine creatures swimming inland.

I already feel as if the tattered veil which separates our shared reality with whatever exists beyond is far too fragile. That any one of us can choose to run the rapids of passing time serves to remind me of how fraught the pastime of participating in history can be.

A small kayak with one intrepid soul can be righted quickly. But an endless run of rapids designed to sink any who choose to run it? The public experience of our shared time should not be such a battle. We all want to see where we are going don’t we?

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1781 and Paradise Lost in The Torment Nexus

The center does not hold. It is not holding. We are just not adapting to the changes in reality quickly enough.

If you get too close of a look at the basics of what’s necessary to survive a world where the trust is breaking down it’s hard to look at.

It doesn’t feel like we are going quickly enough adapting to a world where the state can’t perform its old functions and smaller entities like businesses and families need to maintain a heightened awareness of the larger context.

The joke has always been “don’t invent the torment nexus” but we seem to always invent the torment nexus if it will have a good return on capital. And we need to take this outcome quite seriously.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1780 and Being Cooked

I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.

The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?

The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.

Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.

The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.

It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1779 and Panic at Disco, Panic In The Waymo

I don’t quite know what it is about San Francisco but it’s just not my town. I love so much about it San Francisco. And it has much to love. But I’ll never love it the way it deserves.

I love what once represented in culture, technology and history, I love its portrayal as the epicenter of a certain kind of future. Whatever universe got us to Star Fleet Academy seems even if 2025 was pretty bleak for them too. Most importantly I love my friends San Francisco. It’s impossible to base a career on startups without spending some amount of time here.

But I just do not love being here for any amount of extended time. I find myself in an absolute misery adjusting to it every time.

Even when I lived and worked in neighborhoods with microclimates more suited to my preferences, I struggled. Dry, sunny and friendly is surrounded by gray, damp and miserable. And you can’t easily get out of where you live. Everything is 30 minutes away by car and the only way around that is biking.

The rolling hills in the 7×7 block that make up the core metropolitan area are a fair representation of my moods and the city’s fate. You can enjoy spectacular highs but you see the lows spread outward before you and it makes you question why you should have this unfair vantage point. Right up until you are trapped by the mountains at the horizon. San Francisco makes it easy to forget the rest of the world.

Some people manage to find an entire world here. I envy that. All I ever feel is hemmed in. It deepens whatever mood I am in, and heaven forbid I experience a depressive fit as you can roll very dark and deep here.

The expense, the hassle, the status games, and somehow (still!) the lack of women are all points in its disfavor. You can tell it’s a boom town because it’s where men seek their fortune and women don’t seek the men with fortunes. San Francisco is probably the best advertising for women seeking men beyond their utility. And they have tried importing the art hoes it just work. I promise it’s been tried.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1778 and Uncanny Hyperborean Aurora

It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.

It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.

So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.

The universe was dancing with geomagnetic storms
Reds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.

What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.

Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.

Stars, pines and the northern lights
Categories
Aesthetics Homesteading

Day 1777 and Spacing Out

Yesterday a severe geomagnetic storm hit Earth. I had been following its trajectory for a few days I think space weather is a fascinating topic.

Last year I was in Europe during a G5 event which is considered an extreme storm. It proved to be as unsettling as it was beautiful. Also migraine inducing. Just half an hour in the sun and I felt completely awful.

Naturally I wanted to tear the effects. I went out for a late afternoon stroll just as the storm first began to hit and I found myself in a rage over “this and that” as my vision flickered with red and green.

I thought I was so mad I was seeing red but I suspect the more logical explanation was that space weather affects us here on earth.


G4 (Severe) storm levels reached on 12 November at 0120 UTC (8:20pm EST)! Geomagnetic storm conditions are anticipated to continue into the night. Stay informed at spaceweather.gov for the latest. The included aurora images are of the aurora shining over northeastern Colorado.

I thought I was getting the auras that occasionally accompany a migraine for many people but now I’m not so sure. I rarely get visual disturbances in my migraines. Still our bodies run on electrical signals too. And I went outside just as the planet was getting hammered at the full severe G4 limit.

Alas after sunset I don’t take any particularly good pictures of the auroras that painted the skies though many others posted pictures from Montana.

I was focused on health needs from hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy to a stint in our 180F Finnish cedar sauna. The glory of nature’s night is best experienced without a phone and ideally sweating out the day. No need to try to capture a picture of the moment. I was in the moment

Later, as I went outside freshly oxygenated, sweated out and showered, most of the sky had cloud cover.

The night was uncannily still. We usually have a lot of nocturnal noises as we have a whole ecosystem of creatures on our property and out into the mountain range above us, but I didn’t hear a peep. The animals must feel the space weather as deeply as we do.

Thankfully today dawned (with me having had a poor night sleep as expected) with all our homestead creatures out and about on the pond from duck to muskrat. More solar activity is expected so keep an eye on the NOAA forecast.

A pair of MilFred Muskrats with one of our ducks photobombing in the background
Categories
Community Culture Politics

Day 1776 and Remembering the Specifics

A little quirk of my personal record keeping that day seventeen sixty six of writing coincides with Armistice Day and in America now Veterans Day.

A lot to be said for how Americans always make it about themselves. World War I because an entirely new scale of war that did not exist when we fought the Red Coats for self governance.

And that has a lot of foreign interventionism in it. But we won that war so the assist from the French isn’t seen as pesky meddling. Imagine how the British press must have covered that at the time.

It’s still hard not to think about how different Americans post colonial future could have gone. We stabilized into a democracy and went in meddled in other people’s wars.

I don’t know why it never occurs to most Americans now people meddle in our problems with the intent of making us an easier target. One man’s nation is another nation’s propaganda target. Americans get targeted too.

The soft grey war is much harder to see when the wars we are taught to remember get lumped into one holiday honoring all veterans.

Wars aren’t specific anymore for us and this is a bad thing. My generation got the “global war on terror” and we learned our lessons in ways far too abstract for most and concrete in ways.

That disproportionately affected regular people rather than the wealthy inner core. Hard to consider how that plays into other nations calculations. Just seems like remembering the specifics of a conflict might be helpful to staying a thriving nation.

Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1775 and It Is A Lot Easier To Just Be First

I often wonder how it is that venture capital remains so male-dominated when most of the work is the same skill set as a fashion editor or a style writer.

Sure, you occasionally see a man with good taste, and the twinks and gays are obviously the best of breed in both venture and fashion. But the game is basically the same. And yet fashion is dominated by women and venture as an esoteric sub-asset of private equity is very much not.

Let’s compare. Venture is a small, tight-knit group of people, who run on backchannels and gossip, and absolutely everything is determined by being the first person to land the next hot thing.

Now there is an avant garde who sets trends which then get validated with market success. In venture these are the earliest angel investors. In fashion, it’s the indie publishers who slog through the upstarts and pick who to champion.

The angel investor hopes their deal will go to later stage investors just as the trendsetting editor hopes their designer pick makes it to Vogue. Picking the next “it” thing and riding the wave to fortune is the goal for editor and designer, just as it is for investor and founder.

I personally think my skills are validated just as much being the person to get Mansur Gavriel added to the right boutiques as I am being the first check into Valar Atomics.

I took my bag to a breakfast at a boutique investment bank (you know the one with the summer camp) and happened to be meeting with an investor who loved the bag so much that the founder of their luxury ecommerce investment picked up the bag to stock immediately. Well over a decade later, I still carry that bag almost everyday and so do millions of other women.

Now ask yourself if this next story sounds pretty similar. I sent a direct message on Twitter to a young founder who seemed interesting. He had a quickness to his thought I respected as well as humility that set him apart.

Alas I didn’t like the company he was working on at the time and I didn’t like that he wasn’t its CEO. Sounds like “the food was bad & the portions are so small” sort complaint right? Well, I just thought he was so good he should be the lead in whatever he did next.

The young man had partnered with an experienced elder (which was probably wise for that industry) but the founder was clearly the dynamo in that situation. I told the founder that straight up. He had earned complete candor from me.

We began talking about what he really wanted to build. His intensity was awe inspiring. And his vision was just so crazy that I knew I had to back him. Many phone calls and strategy sessions later I wrote a check. It would take less time than I’d dared dream for others to see what I saw first.

Two years and change later, that young man is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics which just raised 130 million dollars to make small modular nuclear reactors. Isaiah Taylor may have been a diamond in the rough when we first met, but I knew he’d sparkle in any setting.

To see him now as the jewel in the crowns of many much larger funds and backed by much more impressive and capable people than me feels amazing. I’ll always have the satisfaction of being the first to know he was going to be the next big thing.

And that’s not so very different from helping select the hottest hand bag of the last decade. Like Jeremy Irons’ character in finance classic Margin Call, I know the value of being first.

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”

If Isaiah’s work is successful, it will be an awful lot bigger than the hottest handbag. It will materially change the conditions of fueling our lives.

And while I am pretty smart, I knew enough to act first. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to just be first. And if I’m lucky, I’ll carry my bag and own equity in Valar for a long time to come. Read the full story in Bloomberg with a gift link.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1774 and Haywire Hell Handbaskets

It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.

I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.

2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.

And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.

Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.

And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.

And yet, I’m still unwilling to consider the centralized approach. We’d be eaten faster just like whales fished into oblivion by mistakes in the Soviet math.

It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.

However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.

We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1773 and Post-Rats in An Irrational World

Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.

Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?

That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.

Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.

Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.

We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.

Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.

I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.

Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.

I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.

Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.

I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.