Month: May 2025

Categories
Community Media Politics

Day 1611 and Ridiculous Remnants

I am sympathetic utopian communities of all flavors. I myself have many dystopian worries because I’d prefer those utopias. I believe we are capable of more when we work together. America is a strange coalition even when we strain at the boundaries of pluralism.

It feels so hard to do this right now as we come up against our alienation from each other. Everybody is in pitched battles for control of the narrative of our future while so many of us battle individual nightmares in the here and now. We can do so much better in reaching for a future for each other but it’s all politics up and down.

The podcasting tech right are three years late to the effective altruists versus effective accelerationist meme wars (EA vs e/acc) as we we are subject to yet another round of Anthropic fear mongering over its potential power as a developer of artificial intelligence. Screaming its the end of white collar jobs tends to rattle.

If I had 3 billion in revenue, the horniest model on the planet and some weird Benthamite fetish I’d probably say less catastrophic shit personally but Anthropic is battling the eye of Sauron SaaS brotherhood of OpenAI’s aggressive financialization needs.

Meanwhile even the most determined of religious nationalist Rod Dreher is experimenting with transhumanism. Or he let an artificial intelligence write an essay in his style responding to the New York Times. Or that is how much he respects David Brooks. The professional pundit class might be listening to the doomers but they experimenting with optimism.

This is a funny way of getting into the New York Times having a panic attack as an institution as its way through various forms of nationalist and revanchist thought.

The least capable morale vehicle imaginable in establishment thought David Brooks took a swipe at Patrick Deneen and VD Vance for their nationalism. Because neoconservatives really understand why Americans in the abstract feel a duty to each. I’m sure during the global war on terror he advocated for it was all very philosophical.

I myself am not very sympathetic to many veins of nationalist thought I was intimidated to be seated on a panel with Deneen this spring as he is a formidable scholar. Speaking on the aims of technology he is much more of the academy and the Citadel than I am.

I feel I have an obligation to engage with all types of political thought as technologists have found themselves with power in America on where. We have to consider how we build and to what benefit. I feel in some way that technologists (especially the optimists) are a political constituency but also a worldview and we coexist among others.

The diverse array of opinions and different constituencies in America are battling over what constitutes the good. America is the land of some degree of diversity and we cannot only serve a narrow band of interests. I am often afraid of the other parties in that debate because I do understand that it is power at stake but I engage because we all have the power to do so. Even if it seems ridiculous sometimes.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 1610 and Tempting Fate

As I was going about doing “prepare for the worst so the best may come” set of chores I chose to brag about our travel pharmacy packing.

As Elon Musk leaves government service there has been a flurry of media hits. I don’t know anything about his personal medical situation nor is it my place to comment but I found it comical to suggest that 20 drugs in a daily medication box was nefarious.

New York Times “Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama”

Those are to put it mildly “rookie numbers” in the biohacking business. And it’s barely a dent if you practice the kind of global chaos preparedness that we do. So I bragged about it and showed one of our global travel kits.

Ray Kurzweil isn’t making it to the singularity on less than 40 supplements a day so I sure as heck ain’t setting out into emerging economies with anything less than a full set of bacterial, viral, and gastrointestinal remedies.

And as we care about things like being first responder trained and able to render aid to our community, we joke that you really can’t be a pro-social prepper if you don’t carry an AFAIK kit.

As I was being snide about our the value preparedness, outside in my own backyard we were being tested. And as soon as it happened I felt completely unprepared. Pride does indeed go before a fall.

We have a beautiful red fox that has for several seasons lurked around our property. We also keep laying hens. Alex has hardened the chicken coop to make sure they did not have a chance to get in. Nature and domestication co-exist uneasily.

We have never seen the fox out in day save in the dead of winter. In the spring we rarely ever see the fox.

So whenever we let the chickens roam generally we keep a keen watch on them. We’ve gone a few seasons with this working but letting your guard down can get you.

Alex was walking down our long drive to retrieve a trash can and let the roaming chickens out of his sight for less than five minutes. In that time the fox raced out from behind foliage and took one.

We caught it all on camera. Having taken one (we could not find her) the fox came back not more than ten minutes later and tried to grab another chicken which point Alex saw and intervened. The fox dropped her but she has a puncture wound.

I finally hear the ruckus and come outside. I see feathers everywhere and figure it out as soon as I see feathers. .

This chicken is alive

I’m pulling out my phone and asking the LLMs how do we care for an injured chicken. Turns out it’s not that different than human.

I run to find the supples for cleaning and disinfecting. I find the topical antibiotics. It all takes much longer than I think it should. Alex cleans her up and she seems fine. But wont know how she recovers for a bit. Now I will do a review of our supplies and their locations as I am reminded that there is no such thing as too prepared.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.

Categories
Finance

Day 1608 and TACO Trading

President Trump got pissed at CNBC Washington correspondent Megan Cassella for asking about a meme and now we have to worry about his reaction.

To quickly summarize, there has been a joke amongst the financial set about TACO trades.

The “TACO” trade, which is short for Trump Always Chickens Out. The tongue-in-cheek term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, has been adopted by some to describe the pattern in which markets tumble after Mr. Trump makes tariff threats, only to rebound just as sharply when he relents and gives countries more time to negotiate deals.

It’s been a reliable dynamic of the spring that high tariffs or “negotiating tactics” are introduced and the market drops and then we get a reprieve when the White House reacts and the cycle continues. Robert Armstrong noted the trade maybe a month ago but it’s been ongoing since Liberation Day in April. I don’t know why you’d ask Trump about this as of this as of course he’s going to react poorly but maybe some shorts decided to wag the dog.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” Trump told the reporter, calling it “the nastiest question.”

I have a bit of a monkeys paw relationship to this entire administration. I am in favor of significant reforms to the federal government and I am an avowed skeptic of central banking’s role in a complex and chaotic economy.

But I’m also a business woman. We can do all the TACO trades we like, but that’s not building anything and no one can do meaningful investing even medium term investment this climate.

As much as I appreciate criticisms of corporate power they are the only constituency who is fighting back on this. Like it or not, they represents the interests of shareholders and workers and this is wreaking havoc on everyone from Shopify storefronts to Procter & Gamble.

I’m not opposed to changing things and seeing what happens but the roller coaster makes it much less appealing to do business.

In other news, I am still waiting on an import nod a hyperbaric chamber so I’ve get some personal skin on this game.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1607 and In-Groupie

I didn’t watch the latest season of the middle brow sci-fi for normies show Severance but I am going to be using the term “innie” as it’s caught cultural relevance enough to be helpful.

The idea of having inner and outer lives is a source of both misery and joy for sentient creature. I imagine it varies widely. So does our need for connection with others who can understand our inner selves.

I made a little “let’s be in-group” together tweet today as I myself like to feel a part of the network just as much as I enjoy inviting others into these networks. To be a part of a group and feel as if you are safely on the inside seems as close to a universal human experience as any.

There are corners of what are called “the cozy web” where it can feel safer to pick and choose who is in-group. I am of the mind that any platform, including more openly hostile ones, can offer the chance to form those bonds. I welcome you to be a part of mine.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1606 and Woody Allen Panopticon

The internet loves to have fights over which intellectual, religious, artistic, or political views are discredited by the sins of its people. We have to police all kinds of things lest the youth get the wrong impression.

If you dig into any serious gathering of humans you will be shocked by human nature. You shouldn’t be but Americans have it pretty good so we often are. This despite us living in a Woody Allen panopticon where we cannot separate the man from the work. We are forced to look at others sins constantly.

And it’s upsetting I won’t lie. Way more people than you’d like fall into the pederast camp. I didn’t even know that was a word till I met some Italians. Blessedly free of this knowledge in lived experience. Woody Allen, Michel Foucault (he gave us the panopticon) and Socrates were all committing sins against children. I’d argue you can skip Annie Hall but you shouldn’t skip Plato or Foucault.

Depending on whose authority you crave you the real danger to watch out for is different historical flavors of Marxists and fascists and where they settled.

Plenty of academics and journalists dislike understanding humans for who they were in their time and judging them in context of their output.

That’s dangerous according to more than a few scolds in the media and the academy. Drop the term Straussian and see how it goes over at a dinner party. Dangerous truths ahhh!

There are lots of little shibboleths for discerning which Hegelians took a turn with the Italian futurists. Have you heard of Russian Cosmism?Also dangerous. Don’t even get me started on what it means that JD Vance may or may not be an Ulster Scott and what that does or doesn’t mean to certain sects of reactionaries.

I honestly can’t keep up despite being as relatively close as one can come to being expert weird future fixated movements while not being a historian or a journalist.

Guilt by association in the process of living through history is both a horrifying and sticky business if we look too closely. I have a shelf full of Modernist Marxists which I’m certain wouldn’t have allowed me to survive the Red Scare despite my intense dislike for communism. So beware the Woody Allen panopticon. It comes for everyone. But also leave them kids alone.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1605 and No Blackpilling

We get regular reminders of how chaotic things are in our new hypersphere networked world that we have entire memes categories and full influence campaigns dedicated to blackpilling people into nihilism.

No blackpilling meme

The fatalism and determinism expressed on the internet is the experiences reality for plenty of people and it’s probably not limited to a few radicals. The presumption that any of these pills are limited to incels misogynists racist cranks is comforting but incorrect.

I’ve written about blackpilling before as it’s a common theme in overcoming the exhaustion of an unsettled era. Chaos is emotionally and physically debilitating because of our biological experience of it.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Dissident Fringe

I also believe it’s a deliberate strategy by virtually every player in the great games of power and influence to make us feel nuts. Everything is a conspiracy. Everyone is a villain except your in-group. Except it’s not.

It’s always crazy in Philadelphia
Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1604 and First Weekend of the Season

It is so beautiful today in Bozeman it almost doesn’t feel real. It’s warm but not hot. It’s sunny but we have fluffy clouds breaking up intensity. Cool breezes waft in and out without ever really turning to wind. I hope our entire summer has this weather.

Because of the holiday weekend the town has fully switched into “seasonal” mode from daily New York flights to way more availability at restaurants and service. One of Alex’s friends from college is headed into Yellowstone with his whole family from grandparents to kids.

Mountain towns make as much money in the summer as they do in the winter so you always wish for fluffy snow and cool clear summers.

The snowpack is smelting, the grass is green and the sky is oh so blue

While Yellowstone is worth the travel, I appreciate being able to work and hike all flavors of public trails from city to state in Bozeman.

On days like today I want to fully throw myself into a Bryan Johnson super adherence biohacker as I want to be able to enjoy as much of our summer as I can outside.

Categories
Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 1603 and Seasonal Ambitions

In a past life I worked in marketing for the luxury gym Equinox I could go on about the fascinating complexities involved in selling a future that actually requires you to do more work than most just buying it. But I digress.

Some businesses are seasonal and fitness an easy example of this phenomena with its January resolution sales.

The lesser appreciated but no less important bump was always May. People believe this is the summer where they really get into their bodies.

You’d think people would join gyms at non prime-times but they don’t. Humans like that change is possible at every seasonal juncture.

And we are not wrong to have those aspirations. It’s beautiful to think this is the time I’ll really do it. This turn of the wheel will be the one.

Categories
Homesteading Internet Culture

Day 1602 and Greenfields

As part of the unfortunate adjustment to constant chaos, I find myself considering the balance of assets and skills we have at our disposal and how best to deploy it.

I increasingly feel the limiting factor being time, which makes one reconsider the investment one makes into your body. If we have green fields of possibility as information automation begins its march across the first world what should we be doing? If the Industrial Revolution knows less change than the Intelligence Revolution I’d be surprised.

I continue to think it’s mostly a game of energy, compute and property rights with a sprinkling of physical safety (this will get weird). How many people gain power is up for grabs. I think we’ve got the potential for a great elevating of talent.

I personally feel empowered as someone who has contributed to the training data. The internet was built by me and my kind.

The weirdos who write wikis. The experts who give away their insights on Twitter like pearls before swine. Bloggers who write on WordPress have a taxonomy advantage as a standard of the open web.

Having written so much of ourselves into artificial intelligence I shudder to think what we’ve done it wrong but I see the good people bring to virtual communities and I think people being people has always been this way. Those opportunities are perennial.