Category: Culture

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Culture

Day 1360 and Strange Days

Maybe it’s always been “strange days indeed” and it’s naivety to think otherwise. You’d think the children of American hippies and yuppies would be some of the most cynical people alive and I’m regularly shocked by the sincerity of normies.

And so while my hippie mother made sure I got all of the John Lennon, even the later years, I can’t say nobody told me they’d be days like these. I pretty much came into this skeptical of authority because America’s baby Boom liberals won the culture war.

A lot of propaganda has been slung for and against Uncle Sam. And we let people talk. Mostly. Media filtered a lot for us and now the internet has broken what little trust we had after Nixon. Not as if everyone remembers how we got here.

Americans barely handle the responsibility of our open information environments any better than your average culture. We let it mostly flow. And now it’s all strange days. If you pay attention it’s hard not to feel like it’s all falling apart at the seams. But maybe that’s normal.

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Culture Preparedness

1355 and Critical Desalination Point

Being under the weather over the weekend, I’m watching comfort content. I like science fiction and big splashy science disaster porn.

I finally watched the 2019 Chinese “Wandering Earth” based on a short story by Liu Cixin

It was nice to see a big budget Chinese film with some modest Warrior Wolf diplomacy but it was mostly interesting because of the immense engineering projects and the scope of the thing.

I loved Roland Emmerich movies as a young woman. Splashy big budget movies that turned on goofy science jargon like “we’ve hit a critical desalination point!”

Dennis Quaid is an Everyman scientist

Remember a time when NOAA scientists could be heroes? Yeah it didn’t work that great. Trust the science. Alas we don’t have the same respect for government scientists in the era before Covid. I wonder what it would take to save the world.

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Community Culture

Day 1349 and Worry Not

Through Robin Hanson’s link round up today I came across a review of a book by Joyce Beresen “Warriors and Worriers” that has a novel thesis on how different sexes cooperate and compete.

Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

The Survival of the Sexes: Warriors and Worriers

The reviewer Tove K of Wood from Eden suggests that Bereson’s work shows that worry and fear may be playing a part in our current fertility crisis for women.

If women worry more about competing for resources than men because their social competitions are zero sum (versus men who must be more cooperative for group defense) than I can see how if you get to fear being a driver of inferiority. If you are struggling with poverty or resource constraint you might be living in fear. It’s hard to imagine that there are infinite games. Maybe too many of us can’t see beyond limited zero sum “us versus them” resources competitions.

In that theme, Bryan Caplan wonders if only fear (and shame) can sway the highly impulsive as they are not as able to see cause and effect.

When I grew up young women experienced rather pervasive fear and shame on becoming pregnant. Now we see more women convinced to pull back from the risk of children entirely.

What I can’t quite square in these theories is how much actual resource constraints play into this versus the subjective differences in resources we see in our social groups. Is it all a comparison game?

You may be doing objectively better than any of your ancestors but still feel inadequate next to a lavish Instagram feed of an influencer. If you don’t think you can live up to the high standards of parenting required in American life maybe you’d worry yourself into a smaller family.

Or as many are choosing you’d worry yourself into no children at all. Last week the Surgeon General said Americans were in a crisis of parental stress. Who wants that? I’d say that women should worry less but if our biology says “only the paranoid survive” the future of humanity will take more than just our evolutionary instincts. We need to want to live.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1345 and Class Consciousness

I have written about classism, class anxiety, and class status as part of my interest in how we form group identities. Searching just for the world “class” turns up 504 mentions on this blog.

That seems like a lot but I’d argue that no other identity marker (even race & gender) determines quite so much about your life and trajectory as your class. Yes, even in America. Perhaps especially so in America. If you aren’t read up on the topic I recommend Paul Fussel’s Class: A Guide Through America’s Status System.

Yesterday I happened to be sitting next to a trio of twenty somethings during transit. After glancing at their outfits and listening to their animated discussions, it seemed clear they were either upper class or professional management class. Being both curious and nosy (and having no way out of listening in) I rudely but playfully asked:

Ok I’ve got to ask, are you business school classmates or cosplaying as extras from Industry?

This intrusive question seemed to amuse them and we fell into a long conversation. It turns out they had in fact become friends while getting their MBA from a top European business school. I didn’t inquire into their private family lives obviously but I’d guess that means I was right about both class buckets.

We had a chat about hoe business school was the best decision they could have ever made for their social lives in particular. The class work was fine but it was the friendships that made it worthwhile. Business schools provide an entirely different sort of class experience if catch my drift.

I found it quite pleasant to be in a random IRL social situation where discussion ranged from Biden’s opposition to the US Steel acquisition to the implications of Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay for the professional management class. Usually that requires Twitter or a Bloomberg podcast (they were fans of Odd Lots).

Naturally this begs the question as to how much I am aware of my own class consciousness and how much I do or don’t fit into my own class (having made the journey through multiple classes).

Do people prefer to socialize within their own classes? I found it relaxing to discuss some class coded topics without fear of looking like a privileged asshole.

Which isn’t to say I think of myself primarily in class terms. Last weekend I attended a gathering of friends & internet mutuals with significant class diversity including lower, working, middle and full on class-opt outs. It was there I realized I was the only person I knew who ever publicly discusses cross-class relationships. This despite cross-class relationships being a significant factor in upward mobility.

I assume it’s as normal as any other kind of cross-identity relationship but now I’m not so sure. Do you socialize outside your own class? Do you even think about it? And most amusingly, is it déclassé to discuss one’s class?

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Culture

Day 1344 and Feeling Bubbly

I am changing the time zones I work as a few projects and founders work different hours than I do. So trying yo available across a bunch of different hubs is going to be the stuff of my next few weeks.

And I’m trying to adjust to London time and calculate out GMT+ N as time zone delirium makes wonder when it’s morning in Singapore.

Naturally I want some caffeine. The fatigue from bad sleep, a poor recovery and the constant pulling up of different calendars to double check times is breaking my brain.

I do a coffee in the morning as a part of my wake up ritual but caffeine beyond that is not quite my thing.

At any my lunch (early for Americans and normal time for London) I decided to get one of those charmingly small cans of Diet Coke. I had a choice of glass and tiny tongues to pluck each individual ice cube into the beverage.

I was not feeling awake enough for that sort of European singular cube nonsense. My American mind literally cannot comprehend. I’m not much for soda or caffeinated drinks but if anyone gets in the way of my ice I’ll be feeling much less bubbly.

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Culture

Day 1339 and Alienation

I don’t feel strongly alienated from the world. I am not confident I have the right to be at war with my reality. Certainly I’m frustrated with aspects of my reality and I’ve taken actions to feel more at peace with my lot in life.

Perhaps because of this bias towards action, I’m familiar with many flavors of alienation. Those seeking to remedy it are the people who bring change.

Being dissatisfied with the world is the first step in applying your will to solve your dissatisfaction. Some of us will build great things by doing so.

Through that lens, I have had the good fortune to meet many people alienated from and by the world. They don’t wallow in it because the point in the dissatisfaction is to take action to remedy it.

Problems naturally range from daily quotidian ones to full system wide issues. Even small actions are enough to remedy the feelings that arise from feeling separate or out of step with the world. Modernity isn’t a permanent state even in its own age.

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Culture

Day 1335 and Open Season

We are so close to being out of the long horror that is Summer. I’m ready for a change. I can almost taste it. The temperature hasn’t really dropped yet but the shortening of the days feels like a balm to my nervous system.

Yet oddly it wasn’t nature that cued me in. I saw a tweet from a New Yorker complaining about the 7 train not running on the first weekend of the U.S Open.

With unpredictable and uncanny seasons off from the baseline of my childhood, it can feel like I rely on cultural markers for seasonal shifts more than temperature changes.

I grant a chill in the air may come at random when you live in the high variance mountain West so maybe it fits that a complaint from a city is a better marker as to last call of summer. They like in concrete and need the reminders. Tennis in New York means fashion week is just around the corner.

I’m ready for the season to open. I look forward to pilgrimages to the cities to keep business turning. But I’m going to enjoy one the last weekends before we are all called back to the churn of industry. For those lucky few who harvest I pray for bounty.

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1333 and Tagging Identity Algorithms

I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.

Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.

There are now reality dating shows about being autistic on Netflix so you too can be neurodivergent and accepted into a wider pop culture narrative of being part of normal living. Everyone wants love right?

Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning

I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.

Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.

It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.

Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.

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Community Culture

Day 1329 and Monkey See Monkey Do

I finally finished listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Peter Thiel. I prefer reading and writing but I put it on at 1.5 speed while exercising and eventually powered through

I usually prefer peace and quiet when I workout, but I thought it would be nice to catch up on popular culture. It’s something others enjoy so why not engage in some mimicry. And it did inspire some of yesterday’s writing if only tangentially.

I’m lucky enough to be internet friends with the peerless Luke Burgis. His hugely successful book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life introduced popular culture to philosopher Rene Girard.

I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the topic thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows.

What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”

Why do you want the things that you want? Well to get back to the Rogan/Thiel podcast, humans are still “monkey see, monkey do” when taking action and pursuing a desire. Mimicry is a powerful explanatory principle for human nature.

Not knowing who or what to emulate is surely a source of anxiety in our current moment. What constitutes the good and the true seems especially unclear in our long now modernity. Which way western man? As social animals we look to each other. If you want to give others something worth mirroring you have that power. Equally who you choose to emulate impacts others. Choose wisely.