Category: Culture

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Culture

Day 1071 and Easier Than You Think

I’ve got an intuition about performance and prestige. I believe all things being equal, if you are talented it is easier to get ahead in a prestige industry than a performance driven one.

My theory is that when it’s all performance your competition is stiff. When the workforce isn’t compelled to perform, it’s easier for you to win if you are good at what is valuable.

My intuition comes from having worked in several prestige logic areas including media, fashion and cosmetics. Some of the workforce in those industries do it only for prestige so compete merely on metric. If you can the level that makes the business make money or achieves the goal of the organization you out level those driven by only prestige as you perform.

Many industries compete on social capital and prestige which are different simply from doing the job well.

So I’ll say this probably applies to approaching anything considered valuable. Attractive women, the very famous, and similar dynamics. People assume they can’t compete.

But if you have the native skills for what is actually valued you can probably hack it by taking a shot. It might be easier than you think.

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Culture

Day 1067 and Commonality

I have deliberately cultivated an interest in how people rally around a common idea.How do you get multiple players to agree to fix their attention and resources? By agreeing to the rules of course!

I hate to reduce living human systems to variables but we clearly can encourage and discourage values. And what we value isn’t all that rational. But you can intuit many of the incentives that go into complex coordination problems.

I think it drives intelligent systems thinkers absolutely crazy that there can a calculable set of inputs and we still don’t quite grasp how the output came to be. The engineering minded and the highly numerate can find human intuition quite foreign. Cue memes about autists.

I happen to think that most humans don’t vary all that much from our biology though and you can backtrack a lot about a situation by assuming everyone is going through some baseline similarities.

And we’d be better served trying to understand what most people are going through is at least legible through common ties to basic instincts like hunger and fatigue. Animals having animal reactions is still the reality for even the most edged case among us. We can tolerate a lot when we think of the shared bonds of human culture coming down to needs we all share.

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Community Culture

Day 1061 and Network State Alliances

A not uncommon occurrence for me is getting a DM from a journalist who is running down a story on some extremely online social movement that is gaining normie traction. I am adjacent (sometimes literally given my Montana neighbors) to dozens of uneasily aligned communities. And I chronicle it with a lot of writing.

Who knew hippies libertarians would be as tolerated as we appear to be but somehow we ended up a as the Switzerland of the culture wars. I guess being a tolerant group has benefits. And we’ve held a consistent position which probably helps. Dislike of centralizing control no matter may be simplistic but human nature is makes me prefer it. I bet it’s a default position for plenty of people.

Maybe it’s because my identity is a little hard to pin down but my blend of constituent parts means I’m a trusted party to everything from crypto libertarians to “back to the land” religious revivalists. I am a big believer in the big tent acceptance that America offered.

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Culture

Day 1060 and Bullying

Have you ever been bullied? I gather it’s a common experience. I am not sure if I was bullied much as a child. It’s possible I was but I think it’s equally possible I have always had enough social power that I could have been a bully myself.

I do know I was raised on stories about the importance of standing up to the powerful and fighting for the weakest. If you saw someone being taken advantage of in a situation it was your obligation to render aid. I assume these stories hindered any inclination to bully myself but I can’t be sure.

At this point in my life I struggle with whether to believe my ego and its narratives about dominance and power. Any stories I might have about being a victim to circumstances have to contend with the objective reality of how well my life has gone.

I feel it would be dishonest to suggest I’m not powerful. And I don’t feel as if I was unduly dominated or coerced by others in my younger years. Maybe I’m wrong.

A common story seems to be the intelligent suffering abuse from the stupid but powerful. Maybe I didn’t experience this because I was a woman.

I knew I was intelligent but it was not a hindrance. I don’t know if that’s a typical experience. Lots of intelligent people seem to experience social discrimination from those with status and standing that are insecure about their own intelligence. I was only ever treated well for being intelligent.

I suppose I’m thinking about bullying, intelligence and dominance because the current moment in artificial intelligence is focused on whether or not intelligence is what makes the difference in civilization and its progress.

I dont assign a ton of value to raw intelligence because so many other factors matters to humans. We are social pack animal. Plenty of idiots hold power and plenty of very intelligent people can barely feed themselves. But if folks who have taken IQ tests want to feel superior I can’t really blame them. I feel superior for all kinds of random non-factors like my taste and my hobbies. It doesn’t mean I am superior.

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Community Culture

Day 1059 and Socializing

The hardest part of any holiday for me is the socializing. I enjoy spending time with our friends, neighbors and family. It’s just such a high cost activity.

The twinge of jealousy that I feel towards the extroverted and able body is real. I don’t necessarily want to change who I am. I’ve come to terms with my body’s limits and my own preferences. But I sure wish I could turn myself into a high energy extrovert without any health issues when I need it.

I feel drained from the short round of social interactions I had over the past few days even though I enjoyed every minute of it. I just see it in my biometrics.

My heart rate variability dipped into the teens. I got blinking reds on on stress, energy and health on my Welltory monitor. Whoop is recording high strain scores despite me doing little but sitting and talking. I have been sleeping 9 to 10 hours a night for over a week.

I suppose acceleration is tiring. But oh how I long to not have the normal pleasures of life be so damaging. Because I am going to chose my passions over socializing. It’s much easier to justify my work and spending my energy on my portfolio of startups. Advocating for causes close to my heart. If I have a limited budget I rarely chose to spend on the pleasures of company or socializing.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1053 and Revivalism

You’ve gotta have faith.

I am a little surprised to find myself discussing what appears to be a genuine revivalist movement from all walks of life.

“This particular corner of Twitter” is neo-Shakerism. The singularity is always coming is coming for the computer nerds. The rationalists are pitted against futurists. Steely realists admit to having woo sensibilities about the nature of reality.

But we are also being subjected to surprisingly archetypal forms of the hero’s journey in every single news story and social media narrative at alarmingly rapid rate. A rational man is going to want to wag the dog. We do a little kayfabe. The crowd cheers its hero.

But also mere men are elevated to strange statuses. You can believe in a cause but be unsure of the martyrs and mercenaries that fight for it. I feel like if you were really that horny for the Roman Empire you’d have more dates handy on Caesars and the savior and be a little less focused on the Gladiators and the bread and circus.

But we’ve got people who can conjure fire and this time it’s not priests but machine learning engineers who write fan fiction about British Boarding schools that are in charge. The biggest dork you know gets to summon God. It’s not that irrational to worry we’ve summoned elder gods isn’t the of the divine right? Folk stories have some meaning right?

And like sure Bayesian inferences says maybe you should worship a Flying Spaghetti Monster. I say watch out for those Babylon death culture memetics because we didn’t have the right inference field about the sun for most of history. The trickster god can be summoned as sure as the devil. Lets remember information hygiene was not good for most of history so it paid to have some prejudices.

Nevertheless the worship of men has gods has generally been iffy. And so, and I can’t entirely explain it as evidenced by the rambling writing in doing this weekend, but the hive mine of the Internet feels like a real team effort at controlling popular opinion about the arrival of the promised land.

And sure I have recency bias. While I was in Amsterdam for the Network State Conference I was missing a gathering of what amounts to Christian hippie revivalists. Another node of my network that m feels adjacent to both technology and culture was at a Catholic divinity school in Washington D.C. Meanwhile my feed makes whisper jokes of mystery cults and computational power. Worship is powerful. I’ve talked to all sorts of rationalists into new forms of woo and, magic. We speak of queens and divas and witches. Everyone is sure that something is coming and they feel the divine.

It’s within these networks of social organization and belief where I see clashes of power and organization. There are political theorists and economists contending with what a centralized higher authority might do make for more efficient resource allocation. Appeal to authority! We have any number of radical thinkers who are essentially rogue elements of human consensus who are if they seized with a little bit of “agreed on common good” we can revolutionize how we do resource allocation. Central planning is so scientific. Tith!

I feel a little bit like the drama of everyone having access to social media has made us all participate in elaborate fan fictions about who moves the world. I see all over my timeline Zoomers staning over Schopenhauer and Heidegger and Kant as if they were secret movers of history. And they are.

We’ve got a genre of signalling on the internet where if you find a theorist whose mother wrote a nasty letter to him for being socially awkward you’d get people discussing general trauma dumping. Did you understand that? I’m sorry to say you have brain worms and you’ve been trained on a steady diet of rebellion and empire. Be safe out there.

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Aesthetics Culture

Say 1048 and NERDDDDDS

Nerd was an insult when I was a child. But I’m not entirely sure I knew that. Probably because my mother kept me modestly sequestered from the wider world by sending me to an esoteric school and not letting me watch much television. I didn’t have my passions sanded off by social pressures or popular culture.

I didn’t realize how lucky I was. My teenage rebellion was trying to be become more normal. And like every middle aged person I came to appreciate the benefits of my upbringing only in time. But I have learned that it was only feeling safe to be a weirdo that saved me.

I don’t mean it in any conspiratorial fashion but the wider masses of humanity aren’t particularly enamored of anyone who isn’t normal. It’s simple and not all that sinister. We need norms.

I’m sure you’ve noticed how much more terrifying the world feels as we share fewer and fewer norms in common.

We’ve always used norms as a way to keep control of the weirdos and the freaks. Not all of us were bad in any meaningful sense. Just weird. Most of us were probably weird about specific passions like trains or makeup or punk rock.

But eventually everyone who is right about their particular weirdness gets absorbed back into society. Weirdos are rejected until they became so clearly right that we all adopt them. I promise you that lots of shit you think is fucked up weirdo shit will be hailed as transformative.

We just generally want the fruits of the nerds to be harnessed for the wider benefit of all of us. And it’s scary to see something you love and understand the nuances of become absorbed into a less pure thing. Even if you really want your specific nerd niche to be enjoyed by more people. I mean look at how insufferable Star Wars fans are.

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Culture

Day 1045 and History Repeating

I’ve been feeling grateful to be older. I’m also feeling grateful to have been educated in a family that valued learning history. The more I see how much we repeat the same stories, the more I realize we just don’t change very much. Maybe the characters and the contexts change, but we sure like to hum a familiar tune.

I’m glad as I acquire more context that I am even able to see another turn of the wheel. It makes me feel like I’ve got a chance to avoid being caught in the churn. If you are a fan of science fiction you might recognize the churn from the Expanse. I’ll let one of the heroes explain it.


Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new.

The Expanse

The rules change. But the game remains the same. Human nature doesn’t really change at all just our circumstances.

And as circumstances change so do the rules of how we navigate the world. But the real game has only one outcome. You win and the prize is surviving. The rest is just context.

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Culture

Day 1044 and Wholesome Escapism

I’m a bit under the weather after a whirlwind of work and travel. My brain is absolutely mush and I’m enjoying a number of unpleasant symptoms.

I wanted to spend the day catching up on Internet shit as anytime I spend extensive time offline I feel compelled to catch up on my backlog of reading and the rivers of feed content.

But Twitter is in such a state that trollbaiting Aryan Lebensborn fiction with a Jewish cucking kink twist is now a multi-day viral meme. And if you don’t understand any of that please enjoy the bliss of that ignorance. It’s almost enough to make me miss trust and safety teams.

So I tried to escape from the horrors of the feed by watching a more wholesome variety of pornography. And by that I mean competence porn. I’ve written before about how competence is my love language.

I was a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a child. The fantasy of working with a team of brilliant capable friends who problem solved with science, skill and self improvement was perhaps not the best introduction to the reality professionalism and workplace dynamics.

Now as an adult I have nostalgia for a time when I believed that everyone strove for the kind of workplace excellence like the crew of the Starship Enterprise. So I was pleased to find that the newest season of the offshoot cartoon Star Trek: Lower Decks was offering me wholesome escapism of just that flavor of competence I fantasized about as a child.

Lower Decks nails the nostalgia without being too overweening or preachy with its messages. I don’t really want a Dark Federation timeline. Ive got my own shitty multiverse of doom so I rather prefer the wholesome escapism of highly competent officers and joyful human empathy.

If you are a hardcore Trekkie with a lot of canonical details in your head you might enjoy it. I know I was happy for the distraction from reality.

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Community Culture Politics

Day 1033 and Agency Explosion

I spent my entire day at The Network State conference in Amsterdam. I was impressed by just how many competing visions people had for how we might self organize into a modern sovereign societies.

Naturally people who aren’t sold on a traditional geographic nation state, as a philosophical or practical matter, are a very diverse lot. And most of them are some flavor of dissident. You don’t go looking to create a new state if you are happy with the current regimes. By the looks of the crowd, a lot of people are disappointed in their elites.

So diverse was the content that you could probably find both religious fascist reactionaries and collectivist post-rational atheists on the same floor.

You can find all of the content online and I would encourage you to watch it. You won’t agree with everyone (lord knows I didn’t) but you will see competing visions for how law, currency, education and information sharing can be structured. You will likely find arguments that strike you as morally repugnant. And probably a few that have you clapping in agreement.

It was actually a bit refreshing to see people take firm stances on their values and their limits. I’m not always thrilled to see where some people would place my personal rights (women’s rights somehow remains a hotly contested space) but the “grey tribe” crypto libertarians do their level best to accommodate everyone at the protocol level. Sometimes people you dislike use common infrastructure. Welcome to civilization.

What I saw, as Brook from Vibecamp put it, was an explosion of agency. The people gathered together believed that the future and the spaces they inhabit can be negotiated without intermediaries. Everyone believed they had agency in forming their own network states.

That’s a pretty revolutionary stance. I’m not surprised to find that we don’t all agree on how the revolution will play out. But it’s nice to see that people believe they can build a better a better world with the tools they have available to them.