Year: 2025

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1672 and Don’t Cross Algorithm Streams

It’s easy to tell yourself that social media is bad for your mental health just as it’s impossible to really avoid all of its pitfalls. Something about staring at the abyss and Nietzsche amirite?

I doubt Nietzsche could have imagined just how far his work would go. His words consumed not from books but diced up at the end of the event horizon of TikTok’s and Zoomer Twitter.

Now it’s not Leopold and Leob at the far end but the users who make inference goon caves out of Schizophrenic networks.

You’ve got to watch out for that recursion mania as your ego shatters itself on your own bullshit.

The difference between my own hand build list of news sources, personal updates, Twitter feeds and the ideally programmed set of algorithmically optimized content for me and my own biases probably isn’t too different but the act of doing some of it is its own reward.

It’s just important not to let the worst version of yourself browse too hard down the dark corridors of the algorithm. It just might drive you crazy in the abyss.

Categories
Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1670 and Bile and Spleen

I am, as per usual, having a shitty summer. Once we cross the Solstice it’s me hanging on to sanity by ny nails praying for the return of winter.

I can’t recall a time I had a good summer except perhaps jn the hazy memories of my early twenties when I was probably too stupid, traumatized and physically healthy to know one way or another.

Now I’m smarter, sicker and I’ve done enough emotional work to actually feel it all. Don’t knock that desensitized disassociation kids you may miss it when it’s gone.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Back in the aughts & the briefly booming Obama ZIRP teens, our global climate weirding just had not hit New York City hard enough for me to have really bad summers.

I always had a window air conditioner and enough cash to run it. Either way, a summer where I wasn’t miserable isn’t a memory I cant access now. It’s sealed off under the pain of the now. The past being a foreign country and all.

I’ve certainly not had a good summer in the last decade. I’ve got daily tracking data from the last six years of my life and the summer is just an unending torment of bad biometrics, pain, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder. Bet you didn’t know it has a summer variant did you?

I’m always sicker when it’s hot. So it’s just bile and spleen for now. Almost enough to make me want to toss the entire daily logging project till the torment lifts. Since I won’t do that I’ll pour the misery on page.

I can’t wait to see what August has in store for me. My cold comfort is knowing I will be enjoying a long week of financial news. At least that you can do indoors locked up under the air conditioning.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1668 and Rounding The Corner

I really feel the weight of month of July today as I am just now getting the sense I am making a recovery. I did not have post surgical wound care for an abscess on my list of “to do’s” for the month but here I am.

Nor did I expect to work through a pathology report on my own while cobbling together the best blend of infection coverage through a globe spanning set of physicians and sub specialties.

I didn’t know what a sub dermal panniculitis was or how to treat an infection where that was a proximate side effect. But I learned and I managed my care to a much better result. I had real consequences from disinterested burned out doctor and I had to step up.

Frankly I’ve spent more time on artificial intelligence projects doing differential diagnostics on myself than I ever conceived was possible. I owner my own data and inputs and I could make inferences while corroborating it with physicians who are more interested in my care.

I am a slow healer and there is a high cost associated with immune suppression biologic drugs for chronic autoimmune conditions. I have no choice but to be active in my own care and tools as simple as a deep search on Perplexity take you so far.

There is a high cost to healthcare in America and it’s not getting any better. That I can now reliably use any number of commercial AIs to break down lab and pathology reports is a huge boon to all of humanity. Real miracles are happening because someone used AI to double check blood work and symptoms.

Healthcare gets rationed by price or by time and we’ve never really known an abundance of trained doctors in my lifetime. But we might have an abundance of intelligence about healthcare in our lifetime.

Part of put quandary with care in America is regulatory capture by organizations like the American Medical Association and others of its ilk. Of course they prioritize what works best for keeping their continued privileged position on care.

I lost a lot of time this month to health but I gained more than I realized. We are seeing changes in a system that has only ever known scarcity. And we know it’s not good enough.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1666 and Disability Rolls

It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.

Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.

I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.

But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.

I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.

Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.

Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.

We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.

Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.

Categories
Media

Day 1665 and Getting Outside of the Problem

I try to spend real time living outside of America every year. It started as a slightly eccentric experiment in on the ground sentiment filtering as the pandemic dragged on.

I wanted to get outside of the informational bubble of being inside the America media’s production timezone. You probably don’t realize it but hard news mostly runs on American timezones.

And while it is exhausting to be inside it, the bigger issue is that American news drowns out the rest of the world and its news. It distorts everything around it.

I sometimes need to get outside the din of the American worldview to really get a sense of what is happening in the world. I can hear real sentiment more clearly outside. Signal can always get through the noise of living in the worlds largest media market and dominant timezone.

Our celebrity culture coupled with English language domination of television and the internet means American news (and its adjacent distribution & amplification businesses) means our media reaches the world more than the world reaches America.

I’m not saying our politics or news always makes it to Americans or the rest of the world. Sure some state news subsidized outlets exist but this stands to change a little as Voice of America, NPR and PBS have funding struggles.

It’s more the cultural product of media and its noise that hamper its consumption in America. We have too much of a good (bad) thing and it’s impossible to fully tune out. We export so much culture it’s a glut.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1664 and Pathology Report

Well, we finally got the culture and pathology reports back from the hospital in Istanbul. For those not following along I had an almost emergency surgery of an abscess that got infected.

And it’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. I dislike the useless preventive care dermatologist who dismissed me even more now.

The good news is that nothing malignant or cancerous is going on. The bad news is that the abscess was a gnarly mix of acute and chronic inflammatory issues that turned from a basic case of folliculitis (albeit 3cm deep so required slicing) to a nasty MSSA case that is resistant to the doxycycline typically prescribed. Yay.

Didn’t know hairs could grow sideways and frack your tissues till they produce a juicy abscess.

A little synopsis of the reports thanks to our favorite LLM Perplexity analyzing the reports with the additional context of my health history, recently bloodwork and current medical regimen.

  1. Pathology Report Review
    Gross Description
    • Multiple grey-white tissue fragments, largest 0.6×0.3×0.3cm.
    • Specimens from the excised lesion.
    Microscopy
    • Neutrophilic (PMN) inflammatory exudate on surface, consistent with acute infection.
    • Proliferative vascular stroma, frequent erythrocytes, and mixed chronic inflammatory infiltrate (suggesting ongoing/recurrent inflammation).
    • Fibrinous exudate, abscess cavity, active chronic inflammation, granulation tissue: typical of a maturing or organizing abscess.
    • Panniculitis: inflammation extending into subcutaneous fat.
    No evidence of malignancy was found.
    Interpretation: This confirms an abscess with active, mixed (acute-on-chronic) inflammation and granulation, but no neoplastic (cancerous) changes.
  2. Microbiology Report Review
    Culture
    • Growth: Staphylococcus aureus (methicillin-sensitive; MSSA)
    • Sensitive: Erythromycin, fusidic acid, linezolid, teicoplanin, tigecycline, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole.
    • Moderate: Levofloxacin.
    • Resistant: Tetracycline.
    Gram Stain
    • Numerous leukocytes and Gram-positive cocci in clusters, confirmatory of acute bacterial infection and consistent with S. aureus.

So the doxycline and indeed any of the basic tetracycline types I’ve been taking are useless. The extra five days of Augmentin were all for naught after I finished the Cipro. Thank goodness for topical antibiotic I am using is fusidic acid.

I’ll be moving to erythromycin orally and hoping for the best as once I finished the Cipro I started Augmentin which seems to have been functionally useless as a holding pattern antibiotic based on this report.

I’ve had a systemic staph infection before and it’s no fun. I’ve done IV antibiotics and I don’t know if I’d like a repeat. It’s my hope that Erythromycin does the job from here.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1663 and Panem et Circenses

Catching up on the going’s on of the world this Monday as I reorient myself back to productivity after a very long ten days of surgery recovery is brutal.

The algorithmic response on the internet to a story of a random affair being revealed on a kiss-cam is unsettling in light of the actual empire changing realities playing out at the same time. I don’t want to study the angles of a professional chief executive and his human resources lead becoming entangled.

I keep hoping studying Rome will prove useful in facing the moment but I have nothing better to say than the satirist Juvenal. Bread and circuses continue to serve their purpose in distracting us from our obligations to engage in the making of our own future.

So what do I think deserves your attention? Take time with the artificial intelligence tools that are on offer from every major technology company out there (well except Apple).

Become literate in the new types of search and discovery that connect across inference so you don’t confuse the tool for something it is not (a God or a Devil or worthy of driving you mad).

Learn how to automate something you do regularly and find tedious. See what kind of business processes in your own work might benefit from automation. Go do a rabbit hole on a health problem and see how context reveals things about your own body.

Decide how this new informational access and connection affects things in your own relationship to the power. Decide what it might do to your nation state if you live in a democracy. What kind of economic system will arrive as we have expectations of automation, transparency and information even as we have more tools than ever to obfuscate and confuse?

Do you want more centralized power systems and power flowing to those who run those systems (corporate or state) or do you see the value of decentralized systems and protocols that let you engage with your own preferences? And I don’t just mean what kind of delivery food or Netflix you prefer.