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Finance Internet Culture

Day 61 and The Semiotics of Ownership

I wrote a lot today. Like a LOT. Over the weekend my dear friend and erstwhile cofounder decided to make an interactive art installation to explore our interest in non-fungible tokens. We’ve been watching the explosion of interest in digital art, sports memorabilia, and tickets. We had a lot of questions about how value is […]

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Emotional Work

Day 926 and Hang Over

I don’t drink alcohol so this title is a little silly but I feel like I’m hungover. Maybe it’s having felt like I lived through several containment breaches in an unclear semiotics war. Maybe it’s some of the grief and loss from a death on midsummer. Maybe it’s worry about my husband’s upcoming oral surgery. […]

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 876 and Americana

Americans have a tendency to think of themselves as the cultural norm. The default setting of media and movies and magazines has been the American empire. The world’s taste orbited our empire during nearly all television and cinema. I hear we Americans make our problems everyone else’s problems too. It’s also a fantasy. Uncle Sam […]

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Community Politics

Day 871 and Collaboration in the Time of Cultural Cholera

Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration. Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is […]

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Community Homesteading

Day 839 and Chatty

I occasionally have the ambition to be less of chatty Cathy. I almost cannot help myself in Montana. I keep meeting folks who are into the same stuff as me and then I’ll just end up talking for an hour. Introverted Julie somehow always finds the homesteader, science fiction, alternative economy, crypto libertarian aesthetic studies […]

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Aesthetics

Day 666 and Mark Of the Bedeviled

Signs, signifiers and semiotics are a pastime and also a professional obligation, so naturally I’m excited to have arrived at day six hundred and sixty six (666) of writing every single day. While I’d like to think it’s been a positive experience, shadow work tells me a little bit of the devil is as surely […]

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Internet Culture

Day 570 and Fuck Boys

I’m a little too old to have ever thirst trapped. It isn’t that I wasn’t aggressively on social media when I was younger and single but the forms and semiotics of the space hadn’t codified yet. Clout was a lot more protean in 2014. I’m absolutely fascinated by how much sexual status is now played […]

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 471 and Masculinity

Much as I cannot stand Tucker Carlson, the man has a gift for getting attention. I came across a truly marvelous advertisement for a new special he produced called “the end of men.” Which, sure, well trod territory if you are extremely online but probably new to his older Fox News audience. The ad is […]

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Aesthetics

Day 126 and External Aesthetics

An essay by Amanda Mull, whose writing I generally enjoy, has an essay on fashion and the end of the pandemic. It’s an interesting read on how fashion and disease have intersected in history and how we might react to our own moment in history as the summer of the vaccine rolls around. But it […]

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Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 119 and Status Narratives

I’ve mostly worked inside insular industries. There is something about disdaining a club and then slowly forcing it to adapt to me that I find appealing. My handle on Twitter “AlmostMedia” wasn’t actually meant to be a joke about the ephemeral nature of timeline driven content (though it is now) but was an inside joke […]