Category: Chronicle

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 65 and Shitposting

Being emotionally vulnerable in public is one of best things I’ve ever done in my life. The second best is easily shitposting.

If you are not extremely online (how did you get here) shitposting is the deliberate act of soliciting a response online. It’s traditionally used as a lower effort way to shape engagement and discourse. Partially because social media has made sharing opinions so easy, the act of crafting a nuanced argument and presenting it to an interested audience has become equally weighted to attracting supporters and advocates.

This isn’t as terrible as it sounds. Audiences can be built by anyone now. Shitposting allows creators who have a firm grasp on concise and comprehensible language to get across their point to anyone. Rather than suffering through pontification by elevated voices protected by institutional gatekeepers, we can hear bursts of truthful hilarity from nobodies. Think of it as somewhere between “the emperor has no clothes” and “from the mouth of babes.”

Having a firm grasp of the shitpost has elevated my voice in a way I’m not sure any amount of power or prestige could have done. Sure on the internet no one knows you are a dog but also don’t know you are a woman either (avatars aside). Quick bursts of wit can penetrate in a way that centuries of systemic bias simply can’t do.

The shitpost is always provocative but generally the best ones are in service to an obvious truth. This is culturally a part of meme sharing. Memes gain traction because they are immediately comprehensible despite containing layers and layers of deep context. In this way they resemble our richest multimedia experiences. It isn’t quite “a picture is worth a thousand words” because shitposta can often be Tweets but there is something to the truth that descriptors and adjectives just can’t reach. Meme and shitposts are often quite funny as humor is the fastest way to be legible to a large audience. But it isn’t necessarily a prerequisite.

Shitposting is also inherently anti-authority. It makes no calls to justice or power. It implodes sacred cows. I suspect one of the reasons I don’t believe in cancel-culture as a massive threat is because any anonymous asshole can put out the fever of a mob.

I highly recommend doing more Shitposting. Start in your private chats if you aren’t brave enough to do it on named profiles. Or create an anonymous account. Just start getting your truest stupidest thoughts out there. You won’t regret it.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Startups

Day 64 and Addiction

I’ve been working through unconscious mindset issues and self limiting belief systems as an active exercise the past few months.

I’ve been really hung up on the value of pain and discomfort. Somewhere along the line I became convinced that working hard is morally good. And over time that developed into an addiction to work. I got off on being seen as someone who never quits.

This workaholism eventually had the consequences of forcing me into quitting everything in order to survive my addiction. I didn’t have a choice at a certain point as it was stop being a workaholic or quite literally die. My health failed me so I could have a second chance. I’m still grateful that I chose life but not a day goes by where I don’t wonder if it was the wrong choice. What is living if I’m not killing myself?

Realizing that rock bottom was a choice was a bit of a shock to me. I always thought it was an external forcing mechanism that finally freed you from your addiction. I had a very Augustinian “make me good but oh not just yet” understanding of my addiction.

And because my addiction is considered virtuous I’ve had a lot harder time seeing the value of letting it go. We look down on drinking, drugs and other sins. Work isn’t on the list of seven deadly sins. Sure I get pleasure from working but I can’t separate it entirely from the external validation I got from being “good” especially from people I perceived as my betters. And because I had a challenging relationship with my father as a child (he is also a workaholic) this put me in a precarious position when dealing with older white men. In other words, anyone who will ever finance me or mentor me, as technology and finance has an extreme demographic skew. I was constantly in a place where I wanted validation from these elders to soothe my inner child. I would do anything to show them I was good and worthy. I’m sure there is a Biblical or Greek tragedy angle to a child so deeply committed to being sacrificed for their father.

All this was compounded by the feeling I got when people who were my peers put me on a pedestal. They wanted me to be a martyr as much as I wanted it. And some of them will likely never forgive me for not being their own personal Jesus.

This all leaves me with very mixed feelings as I know I hit my rock bottom and it’s time to leave behind my addiction. And it’s very much time to rid myself of enablers who pleasured and profited off my disease. But it’s so much a work in progress. I feel the desire to jump back in to work and say yes to everyone who wants my work. I love it and they want it. But I need to find a way to only ever commit to those who want me to be well and thriving.

Too many people profit off of the deep desire workaholics have to always be producing. Capital and eager teammates can easily see a workaholic as a better bet for making money. I’m sure most don’t realize it is predatory because they assume we can stop. The sad truth is I’m not sure I would have stopped. I just got lucky I became too sick to carry on. So this is me committing to only working with those who want me on their team if I’m healthy and “sober” because I’m not going back on the “bottle” ever again. I just hope it means my work will be better for it. I think it will but it’s one day at a time.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 63 and Directionally Correct

I default to action over inaction. Don’t know if something will work? Try it!

I’ve never struggled with paralysis by analysis. I intake a lot of information and then even if I’m not sure I’m entirely correct I’ll still jump if I’m confident I’m directionally correct. This had proved to be a good recipe for startup work and financial gain. But I’m learning this methodology is fairly shitty for health.

Medicine needs a little more patience and a lot more precision. Data points accumulate and you can only effectively progress if you can isolate what is causing distress. I fucking hate this. I want to throw a thousand drugs and supplements and protocols at my body and just move “directionally” towards health. Portfolio theory doesn’t really work on autoimmune diseases as it turns out.

Thanks to an incredible functional health doctor I have been making fast strides in my quest to control my autoimmune disease. My pain has been under control, my spinal swelling is down, my energy is up and my focus is clear. So I was particularly frustrated last week when adding a new drug to my regimen wasn’t clearly “correct” and I had no way to tell if it was directionally correct. I just have to wait it out.

I had terrible migraines. My pain spiked. My sleep suffered. And all I wanted to do was throw more drugs and supplements at the symptoms so I could get back to life. I have been doing more investing, advising more companies, and taking on more personal projects. I didn’t want to lose that. I love working.

But unlike with startup life I can’t just muscle through it and see if my bet will pay off. We have to be careful. Systemic cascades are bad in biology. Think cytokine storms and covid19 cases. I could easily undue all this progress in my pursuit of action over inaction. We need to be more certain that my body can handle this new drug regimen and winging it isn’t an option.

So I’m stuck being patient (pun not intended). I can’t push it. Directionally correct isn’t good enough. And that means slowing down so I can go fast later. In some areas you need higher degrees of certainty.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 62 And Who Can Make Art

My ego dislikes debate, but my heart leaps at tension.

Over the weekend, my friend Phil and I decided to make a functional art installation called Illegal.Auction. The premise is simple: we are selling Fungible Tokens (or NFTs) of Culture. 

Unsettled ideas of generation and representations colliding with abstractions like finance are important issues both culturally and practically.

Art is for itself, so who cares either way. A certain dogmatic insistence that “medium is the message” is pervasive in the critiques. Are movies different than books? I don’t think they have anything to do with the price of milk. It reminds me of the classic Annie Hall scene (speaking of artistic intent and harm) where Marshal McLuhan explodes on a chattering group “you know nothing of my work.” Woody Allen’s character concludes the scene if only real life were like this. Well on Twitter you can recreate this scene everyday!

It is funny because commentary is distinct from creation. And a lot of people have takes on McLuhan that he himself doesn’t agree with. But who cares right? Interpretation of art is ostensibly art.

It’s very interesting to see just how angry people get about the worth and value of culture in particular. As if it’s some monstrosity to comment on the abstract financial value of some creation with worth that cannot be extracted.

If it were so easy to make value judgments about art then we would trade it on the Chicago exchange like pork bellies and orange juice. Not that we don’t already sell art and trade it and frankly it has been a massive tension through the history of human creation how we value that work, but now many have decided to insist that art is non-fungible. Not interchangeable on a one to one basis like an apple. And yet we are acting like everything can be valued and traded so easily with NFTs. By making art tradeable on exchanges, we have made some thing inherently non-fungible, fungible.

This is ultimately where Illegal.Auction came from. These conversations are important and transformative. That we choose to represent the tensions with representations of reproductions of jpgs of art is part of the art installation. That it is a functional sale is in inherent to the tension.

There is a part of me that is really worried that because I am not a practicing artist that is paid for work or represented in a gallery, that I don’t have a right to comment on these issues. I am a technologist and I do work in finance and the overlap of disciplines makes this an inter-disciplinary question in my mind. It seems like some people disagree with my right to create art (and certainly the morality of remuneration).

But if we insist that only artists can make art I don’t have any right to make installations remixing software and representations. But I’m not sure anyone reading this is comfortable with that world. I am not.

I think people want there to be simple yes no questions to these things. Is it legal? Did you steal? Is it a transformative remixing of a cultural artifact? Is it worth $1 million? And the truth is is that there is no easy answer to what political system is best or how much some thing is worth. Trillion dollar industries are based around the fact that we don’t have clear answers. Irate commentary doesn’t help any of us understand the infinite questions of worth and creation. It is good to do and helps further understanding but its crucial to remember indignation and moralizing is a function of ego.

Personally I don’t think that wealth has any moral value. I don’t want to have to be wealthy in order to be valuable. Or if a piece of art I make does make money do you have a right to tell me it is objectionable because this isn’t how you make money? I guess you do. Whether you can stop me from doing it is a central questions for the ages and also literally why it is important to create pieces like Illegal.Auction in the first place.

This commentary I think is worth having. Not whether speculative infinite land grabs with financial instruments make you worth more to billionaires. They probably do. That’s fine! I think people are mostly offended by the idea that non-artists can make art. Especially if a transaction takes place. If we had stamped illegal on the jpgs and blocked out NOT ART on them would it have made it better? Conceptually I’m not sure that that’s true and probably reflects the viewer’s own sense of value and worth more than a legal, political or moral reality. Also I personally think it cheapens the point just to make concessions to dogmatic insistence on ownership in a space that isn’t settled because frankly it cannot be.

Much of the narrative and coverage around NFTs is that they delineate ownership, value and origination more cleanly. I’d argue that they are actually having the opposite effect. NFT’s are ripping away edifice and abstractions that we use to assign value and worth. And that makes people uncomfortable.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 60 and Never Saving Anything For The Swim Back

I’m feeling scrambled today as I’m not quite in a place where I can push myself without consequences but I’m also not so sick that I can’t work at all. It’s an awful liminal state where I’m working what is probably the actual productive output of an average person but still need to buffer in time for medical shit.

I honestly contemplate just lying about being sick some days. I could hide the disability of chronic illness and no one would be any wiser. Well minus the public posts about being sick but you get my meaning. I’d probably have to get a little bit better at scheduling work during consistent productive hours, push through when I feel like shit, and then crash when I wasn’t on the clock. I’d be seen as a little unreliable but definitely enough that I could manage as a director at some company.

I’m not sure if this says something bad about me or about the expectations of the American workplace. Probably a little of both. I’m clearly a bit of an outlier and we don’t actually expect that much output from the average worker. When I’m operating at my full capacity I blow away workloads. I sometimes doubt if I’ve ever been at full capacity and I’ve been faking it my entire life. I’ve never been completely hale and hearty. I’ve always had a tendency to put on a show when I’m in public and then retreat into recovery when in private. I’ve been a very boom and bust person.

I don’t really want to live this way though. I’d rather run a marathon than be a sprinter that is collapsing after each race. I recognize that in some way this pattern of intense work and recovery isn’t sustainable. It’s also clearly an addictive pattern. But I’m too scared to admit that I don’t really know what a consistent healthy working life looks like. I’ve been an addictive compulsive worker my whole life because I never trust that I can rely on my good hours to be consistent. I gulp at each hour of feeling well like I’ll never get them again. The fear that this is my last shot at feeling well is palpable.

One of the most formative pieces of art in my narrative self is the movie Gattaca. In a dystopian future, children have their genes edited before they are born. The protagonist of the film “Vincent” played Ethan Hawke is an “old fashioned” human conceived without any edits. He has a heart condition and other frailties. His brother Anton was given edits. Despite being an “in-valid” Ethan Hawke is able to find his way in to a space program using contraband genetics. His brother is furious and cannot figure out how his disabled brother is able to beat him. This fraternal tension plays out in two swimming competitions. The invalid brother Vincent bests his genetically superior brother Anton. Twice. How did he do any of this!?!

“You wanna know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton; I never saved anything for the swim back!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe9Fc34GozY

I really internalized this logic as a teenager. There is no gene for the human soul. Winning is not about being superior it’s about giving it your all. I bought this. So I never saved anything for the swim back. Except that maybe this is a shitty strategy for anything but races. That if you need more than to win a swimming match you can’t go all out every single day. That this is actually a strategy that will kill you.

Of course, I am petrified that this isn’t true and I should be swimming like Vincent every day. That he was right that greatness is forged in extreme effort. That I should give my all till I collapse. But then what?

I’m stuck in a behavioral pattern of self limiting fear that I must always be striving or I will literally be dead. It’s live at the edge till I win. But win what? Sometimes you fail. That’s how you learn. Failure is a crucial part of success. But if I am always swimming to failure I’ll never recover enough to learn from my failures. I’ll literally be dead in the water. So I’m stuck in this place of fear where I know I can’t always give my all but I don’t really yet believe that there is any other way to succeed.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 58 & The Line Between Progress and Woo

While I spent my childhood deep in the western canon, now I spend my leisure hours reading science fiction. I’m just gaga for space operas, singularity stories, transhumanist breakthroughs and anything else you might put in a paperback to showcase “the future” right around the corner.

I’m what you might call an old fashioned technical progressive. Everything the future brings has a bright side. It’s probably the counter cultural hippie heritage I have. A better life is just around the corner.

Add in the additional nuance of having a chronic autoimmune condition and you can see how the line between science fiction and woo is a little blurry for me. One day a supplement is part of your favorite biohacking routine and the next it’s in the business papers making news as the latest breakthrough for life extension. That’s a real drug by the way. It’s called metformin and I take it every day.

I play around with a lot of weird “science-not-yet” stuff like a pulsed electromagnetic field to produce an analgesic effect in my spine. And I get made fun of pretty regularly by scientific method folks who scoff at basic studies that haven’t fully satisfied their curiosity.

But I honestly don’t care. I want to feel well. I want to thrive. Why wouldn’t I be trying out the latest treatments, supplements and pharmaceuticals? Why wouldn’t I experiment on myself. I don’t want to wait for everything to be double blind studied to death in twenty years. Will it kill me? No. Great let’s go.

We’ve given up on the joy of progress in my generation. We’ve let our imagination sour on the birth right of scientific advancement for the human race. It’s sad we’ve become so cynical. And sure, I often critique predatory health care that sell shame cures to the worried well. But are we confident we understand the line? I’m not. That electromagnetic device I thought was woo? My fancy upper east side New York rheumatologist used to have one in his office but found patients would rather take a drug than spend an hour on a machine even if the efficacy was the same.

Why is it so impossible that I might cure my spinal pain and reset my immune system? Is that crazier than landing Perseverance on Mars? I don’t think so. Sure I don’t like hucksters or charlatans either. And I still think places like Goop prey on desperation. But do I want to believe? Yes! Because progress happens. And it is making our lives better. We can expand our lives. Live better ones. It’s not a hopeless spiral to the destruction of the planet and our species. But if you want to come along for the ride you might have to tolerate me doing some weird shit. Till we prove it of course.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 57 and The Fungible

Finance commodifies. The value of one thing must be stacked against the value of another. We can put “a thing” in a ledger and trade it for another thing.

Making something that is not a commodity into a piece of property that can be valued, traded, sold, or transferred is the natural order of financialization.

Not content with turning food or labor into commodities, we have created financial products to divine literally anything into an asset that can be owned, traded, or hedged against.

We’ve decided on fancy vocabulary words like fungible to make the basics of human reality seem more exciting. Or maybe just to charge more for it. 2 and 20 requires a bit of song and dance I suppose.

Fungible is a funny word too. Interchangeable makes more sense. It has more inherent meaning when brought to the context of finance. Sure, we bristle at the idea that our labor, our time, our creations are interchangeable, but we assign values to them so human creations largely have value that are easily exchanged. Finance commodifies. Just because you are unique doesn’t mean your creations aren’t things.

This week we sell non-fungible tokens (nft’s). A financial person might stop and think “ok, but I prefer the fungible, as I myself trade interchangeable things”. And this isn’t, it’s right there in the name. And if I’m not, I damn well better be doing it with something that has a price we agree on like a dollar or an ounce of gold.

And yet here we are with the NFT. Art lands in this category. It is unique. It is non-fungible (say that at a party and see how fast people walk away). It is unique it and cannot be made interchangeable. And yet we sell set.

So how do we trade it? How do we assign value? This contradiction tickles the minds of thoses who have aggregated many interchangeable items with agreed upon values. The rich I mean. The rich enjoy the tension inherent in a thing not being a fully agreed upon commodity. A “not thing” can be worth more than a “thing” precisely because we don’t agree on it. Even if the process of assigning something a price can often feel like it is toeing the semiotic line of “not a thing” assigning value brings it into “thing-ness” by anchoring its reality to the present.

Signifiers are required. The semiotics of value. The desired exchange. And so we toss technical terminology on top like fungible and pretend these frameworks make it easier to turn a “not thing” into a “a thing”

The non-fungible token. It is right there in the name. It is not interchangeable. And yet it has an assigned value. It has been funged.

Standardization, interoperability. Tradeability, liquidity, immutability, scarcity. Amazing what finance can do to a “not thing” in no time at all.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 56 and the Indignities of Physical Existance

I was raised in a “walk it off” family where my father got walking pneumonia like clockwork once a year. Working through it was just what tough Scandinavians braving the world did. We are tough people that can ride out the indignities of physical existence.

I find myself saddled with that self limiting belief to this day. Even as I recognize the importance of restorative rest for building physical and emotional gains. It’s hard to let go of the addictive tendency to prioritize pushing the work when you should be recuperating.

I’ve been trying out an an antibiotic that just doesn’t agree with my stomach. I found myself with a mess on my hands and the kind of emotional exhaustion that only comes from physical embarrassment. I soiled myself and I just wanted to shower and take a nap. But I had calls so I pushed through as I was excited to hear a pitch from a founder. Afterwards I was a mess. I had dug into my energy reserves and was starring down a migraine and a panic attack. Wisely I got myself in bed and took a few hours to get back to a baseline. Called my doctor and asked if there was a different option which there was.

I’m jealous of people for whom daily life isn’t a constant balancing act of scheduled obligations and exciting opportunities butting up against the reality that bodies are unreliable and even fragile. I’d give anything not to constantly have the back of my mind taken to with supplements, medications, treatments, tallies of how long I’ve got before I need a break. To be free of the many bodily concerns that have come to define my existence. Oh how I envy those that never worry about what new thing their frailty will bring them today.

The feelings passed and I was able to go for a long hike in the snow in the afternoon. But the fear of never knowing when my body will go from reliable to requiring help is a burden I’d like to give up. I’m hard at work trying to make it a reality.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 54 and Fat Fingers

I’ve got an overactive immune system which has occasionally manifested itself in frustrating skin conditions like eczema. They are mostly irritating but rarely debilitating. Case in point? Despite being on a variety of immunosuppressants I got some inflamed skin which got infected. I stupidly ignored it despite it being my thumbs. This matters because my right thumb is bandaged up and covered in antibiotics making typing very challenging.

Literally none of this matters except to say that my longform writing for today is just going to be one paragraph because my only other option is talk to text and that will leave this even more rambling and disjointed than usual. But I have to put something on paper every day so this is it. Hopefully tomorrow my thumb is fine and I can get back to writing about start ups, or finance, or Neil reactionaries, or whatever I damn well please.

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Chronicle Startups

Day 53 & The Process

Startup land can feel exclusionary and clique driven. Looking in from the outside it can seem as if all the power and money is concentrated into a few groups that only fund and hire their friends. Less charitably it looks like a circle jerk.

While this isn’t an incorrect perception, I believe why we think it is exclusionary is very different from the reality of why it is exclusionary.

Startups are tight knit because successful companies have high psychological safety. We all tend to work together again and again and back each other’s plays because we have built up a high trust environment in order to survive. Even if we don’t exactly see the vision someone else has we trust that they will find a way to make it into a reality.

We don’t trust that this is true for everyone. Ideas are like assholes in that everyone has got one. It’s the ability to turn a formless expanse of ideas and hopes into a company that makes a product it’s customers like. It’s extremely hard to make something new. Harder than you can ever imagine if you haven’t tried it. So people who make a living out of making something from nothing have developed a set of heuristics that let us determine if someone outside our circle is capable of making “a thing” to prove their ideas can become reality.

We tend to overweight people that build tangible things. Even though many of the most crucial skills in business are the less quantifiable ones. We tend to overweight people that have demonstrated any kind of success in zero-to-one work even if what they want to build isn’t remotely related to what was done in the past. This is how despite most of my experience being in advertising tech and e-commerce I was backed to make cosmetics. People had faith that I could flip the bit from off to on.

While this may make it seem hopeless if you are currently not inside the system that’s not what I hope you take away. Startup people love watching newbies make the leap. I cannot overstate the fondness we have for someone gathering up the courage to spring into the unknown. I used to hate the phrase “I’m rooting for you” till I realized everyone actually did want me to succeed. They just rightly realized I needed to learn the hard lessons in my own time. They could give me all the advice in the world (and believe me they did) and sometimes I just needed to make the mistake in order to learn the lesson. The mistakes allowed me to succeed.

Of course, we always hope people will learn from our advice and not require the pain of a fucked up cap table or a growth plan that missed target because we burned our cash position down to three months runway. But most people that are genuinely good at startup work appreciate that only the person actually “doing it” can make the choices that lead to success.

So startup folks will always be excited to give back and encourage those that want to try “doing it” too. If I have a clear ask I find I get an answer from even the most successful and prestigious. Literally CEOs and world famous developers of entire languages will just email you back. It’s honestly miraculous. I have invested in cold emails. Championed them to my nearest and dearest. Because we believe that the process of making something from thing doesn’t exclude anyone. You just have to show someone that you will try to make your vision a reality.