Category: Culture

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Culture Preparedness

Day 883 and Ride the Edge

If you aren’t comfortably with the current standards of living on average, I’d consider shoring up your resources now. As our planetary resource situation doesn’t appear to be getting better.

As more first world countries come to terms with slowing growth (perhaps even degrowth), resource scarcity is going to affect daily life in uncomfortable and visible ways we can’t smooth over with shrinkflation. If you aren’t prepared to live life on a harder setting, you should begin as soon as you are able to prepare for that reality.

I’d like to think about this problem with a bit of distance. What if we have a coercive state and social consensus for something you’d consider a personal preference or choice, but civil society views as as deviant? You will need to find ways to look like you are conforming even if in private, you are not. So how do you do so?

You may find it helpful to not stick out. In that situation there are two ways to survive an attack. Being protected and in the middle of the herd. Or be as far away from the herd as you can be.

Anyone on the edges of the herd of social consensus, but still within the second or third standard deviation from the norm may get hurt. Forced metaphor of the brutal blue curve but you get what I mean. Better to be a true outlier, as the secondary standard deviation will be forced by a brutal bell curve to fit in better.

If we add in artificial intelligence to the equation, we’ve got even more effective tools for monitoring and surveillance of out-group behavior and even easier mechanisms to deploy social shaming force at scale to insure social adherence. The panopticon is us. An army of Karens armed with the probability you will deviate waiting to pounce.

See for instance a social shaming quote tweet campaign. Now imagine it’s state sponsored propaganda but organized, through the seemingly spontaneous egregores of populism, add a dash of rule by authoritarianism and you’ve got yourself quite a problem. The wisdom of crowds can look like mania.

I got a small taste of being shamed yesterday by my neighbors in a Frankfurt Airbnb. Air conditioning use is frowned on in Germany now for both social reasons and also failing energy policy. Shutting down the nuclear power was a bad idea.

I’ve been suffering from an autoimmune issue, exacerbated by allergies and pollen, so I’ve used the air conditioning on 80 degree days. This was enough to get my neighbors to complain to me twice. I attempted to comply by going to a hotel but quickly found that no hotel would let me turn the thermostat below 72 degrees.

I decided to brave the noisy neighbors and run the air conditioning at the Airbnb in the end, but I didn’t appreciate having to lay our personal health problems to justify a private decision. Now extrapolate this out to genuinely serious situations. The disability issues are often an early lens into wider social attitudes on freedom, choice, value and worth.

You have to decide now if you want to hide in the middle of the herd. Can you pass? Are you able to fit in or do you have some deviance in your life? If you aren’t sure you can pull off average, you must ride the edges. Be as far outside the herd as you can. Maybe on the edge you can find a pack that will defend you.

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Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

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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 is a marketing gimmick. There is a propaganda machine even if it’s not organized by a sub committee of party loyalists. The vox populi push on our taste and our media industry will show them what is worth mimicking. Marketing works.

So it’s always amusing to see a bit of Americana marketed back to yourself. I saw this street advertisement for what appears to be a sincere sort of western show?

The Bosshoss Electric

I’m consuming an entirely different genre of Americana than someone in Frankfurt. Which I admit I’m not sure I fully understand as I think it’s maybe a sincere musical that has a western sparkly rodeo theme? Again the semiotics on it would require a critical theory degree. Which I guess you could get in the city of Schopenhauer.

Momma don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys. Rodeo seems like a brutal pastime in a country with no social safety net or functioning medical systems. Maybe that’s why it can be romantic here in Germany. Maybe you’d get medical care if you ever came in contact with a bull.

Speaking of semiotics, I’m rewatching Yellowstone while in Frankfurt. Yes it’s amusing that the yuppie woman reclaiming her lost Western upbringing by moving to Montana is watching a soap opera about land barons outside of Bozeman. Simulacrum. Something that replaces reality with it’s representation. I knew Foucault would come in handy.

Dicke Butz authentic American cuisine
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Culture

Day 874 and Steady Hand

All the science fiction I read as a kid has been a great trial run for the current reality. We have synthetic selves, AI chatbots, embedded intelligence, and money run by a consortium of your peers.

That’s not too shabby considering that my favorite utopian science fiction Star Trek depicted San Francisco as a crime ridden dystopia with a vast chasm of financial inequality. Oh wait.

I didn’t expect future shock to be so tiring. I expected a bit more fun and optimism and a little less doom, fascism and reactionaries. But I guess like all humans, we forget that our history is just repetitive series of discovering that power corrupts but human ingenuity prevails at solving the problems we bring in ourselves.

How long that luck holds is now in our hands. I sure hope we don’t fuck it up too much as we fuck around and find out. And if I’m going to survive future shock I need to take care of myself, stay one step ahead and make sure I have a little fun along the way. A steady hand and a calm nervous system is necessary for a chaotic world.

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Culture Politics Reading

Day 869 and Novelty

When I was a university student at Chicago we went through a two year core cannon which was mostly meant as a Great Books exercise. I’ve still got a dozen rainbow colored books dubbed the “Western Civilization” readers. I treasure them.

My professor was a scholar named Katy Weintraub. She was the better half of the beloved Professor Karl Weintraub. The classes were famous for good reason. I’ll forever be grateful for having been taught the western cannon by someone as capable as her.

One lesson that has stuck with me is the dangers inherent in the human urge for newness. She brought up the insidious, cumulative effects of novelty nearly every lesson.

History was driven by “newness” and its consequences. Each new historical moment was an opportunity to be reminded how fraught with the peril novel ideas and changing cultural mores could be. Death, war, famine, and conquest lurked behind an original idea.

Every rebellion, reformation, and new republic started with some asshole sharing a bright idea. And it tended to get you killed, even if your particular form of novelty got widely adopted down the road. See Christianity, various flavors of democracy, the printing press, and the Enlightenment to name a few.

The “best” part of modernity appears to be that everyone from yours truly to Donald Trump can constantly float novelty trial balloons from the comfort of their own toilet. Best and worst are doing a Janus double duty of meaning here.

Professor Weintraub might remind us that all forms of novelty are dangerous. New ideas represent change. And change is destabilizing even if we later recognize those changes as positive.

I’m certainly feeling the destabilizing effects of having to be alive during living history these days. I bet you are too. Turns out we don’t live outside of history at all. Maybe I finally understand why novelty represented such a danger in Professor Weintraub’s mind. Change has been, historically speaking, pretty hard on those living through it.

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Community Culture Travel

Day 864 and Parks and Recreation

All the shops are closed in Germany on Sunday. This is a basic fact I somehow always forget despite regularly being in Europe. They are serious about their day of rest.

Without the ability to go grocery shopping or otherwise pay for goods or services, Sunday becomes a day for getting your life in order. As long as you planned ahead for it. Which I definitely didn’t. But I made a go of it anyway.

I made myself coffee and did a mobility routine. I took a long bath with epsom salts. I did a load of laundry and set it outside to dry in the sun. I cleaned the bathroom so I could enjoy another bath later in the week. I washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen.

Then I found myself wandering the busy streets past closed shops and bustling parks. While the grocery shops were closed, the playhouses and calisthenics parks were open and absolutely packed.

Frankfurt has public spielhaus or playhouses in the parks for children with activities and equipment. When I walked by I saw teenagers playing basketball and elementary school children painting.

For the adults there are calisthenics stations on the river where you can workout in public any time of the day or night. I’m not much for pull ups I did end up playing around with a thirty minute body weight workout of squats, mountain climbers, pikes, bridges, leg raises, dips, planks and push ups. It just felt like a fun thing to do.

And isn’t that a pleasant thought? That on a sunny spring day it just seems nice to be outside playing. The dream of parks and recreation is alive in Frankfurt.

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Culture Homesteading

Day 856 and Spring Into Action

It’s been a beautiful week in the Gallatin Valley. Every single morning on my daily constitutional walk I notice new growth. Very suddenly we went from of melting & assessing snow damage to bright and sunny spring green.

The more northern latitudes get a shorter growing season (in fact we will get more snow) but the season is one of magnified intensity as our evenings stretch towards 10pm before the light is gone. And so on this first weekend of May we’ve begun taking action on spring. Hobby farmers spring into action.

Alex slicing open a bag of manure in our back pasture in preparation for tree planting
A man, a hole, and a shovel

My husband and I have no idea what we are doing but with the true spirit of fuck around and find out we began anyway. Our running joke is that Alex is a #ManofAction as there is just simply so much more practically to do when you live on land for which you are ultimately responsible. It’s a lot of fun and very grounding.

And as you might guess the most liberating feeling in the world is being held accountable for yourself and your choices. So even knowing full well you are basically that dog typing on a computer subtitled “I’ve got no ideal what I’m doing” you carry on anyway.

I’ve got no idea what I’m doing Golden Retriever Typing

While I did a few laps around the pasture and helped with a bit of the lighter work my role was mostly to capture the fun and excitement of trying something new. We picked two apple, two plum and one cherry from Starks Brothers to add in after a fall planting of a number of apple trees. We’ve got no idea if any of this is going to take. We’ve read some books but that barely counts.

Our cyberpunk John Deer free of computer parts along with a few stages of planting

Meanwhile inside the homestead I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. I’ve been appropriately assigned gender formative roles as I actually enjoy keeping things attractive and beautiful. The closests need turning over from the wool and layering over to tee-shirts, sundresses, and linens. Alex mostly goes from button downs to tee shirts. Jeans are swapped for cargo shorts. Being a man is simpler.

Winter boots need to be put away and flats, sneakers and sandals brought to the front. Alex had more work gear and footwear as he does more of the outdoors work than I do so shoes are more Alex than me.

Heavy winter oil and moisture rich cosmetics will give way to lighter water creams and ceramides. I don’t change retinols but I may add in more C and lactic acid for turnover in the heat. Alex meanwhile gets away with a basic vitamin C moisturizer and SPF.

I alas have not dealt with getting my hair trimmed in sometime but the reminder that it’s time to cut off dead ends is ultimately a spring time ambition. Hopefully you had the good sense to prune in the winter. My husband is lucky enough to simply buzz his head. Happy spring everyone and may your rituals enjoyable to you.

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Culture Homesteading

Day 828 and Unscheduled

One of the things I’ve done to treasure about Montana is easy it is to hang out with people if that’s what you want. Maybe it’s the community we’ve cultivated, or maybe it’s just the people who gravitate to the Rocky Mountains, but it’s just really conducive to normal unscheduled human time together. People just hang out.

Now sure we live in a pretty special weirdo valley with Gallatin. I’m a child of a weirdo mountain town valley. Boulder and Bozeman remain very fundamentally similar attitudes on life even if in Montana you’ve got way more space. People are friendly and people are weird. The tolerance and acceptance is what you’d expect from a high trust culture.

I’ve got trips to big cities ahead of me. I’ll be in New York City in the coming weeks. It only took a half dozen texts to block my calendar for a full 72 hours in Manhattan. There is surprisingly little room for chill hangs. Honestly I was impressed so many people wanted to spend time with me. But also booking out that time is how New York works. The days are scheduled.

I’d prefer a world where it’s simple to say just come on over. We can do that in Montana. Friends come over. We always have house guests. But in a city I can’t afford to just rent out a whole bar or event space so it’s not like I can have a big gathering unless the weather is good enough for the park. So perhaps that’s just the nature of higher competition venues.

But I will say it’s awfully nice to just have amazing people just hang out and be normal with you. Maybe you go for a meal. Maybe you have folks over for a beer. Sometimes people bring their dogs. And it’s just a real nice way to live. Lots of space to be private and plenty of joy to be found in occasionally being a social animal.

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Culture

Day 797 and Women’s Day

I remember a gentler more optimistic time when I received a “holiday” like International Women’s Day with some amount of positivity. I’ll grant it was mostly as an excuse for marketing and public relations but it didn’t offend me. Now in the harsh reactionary landscape of 2023 I fucking loathe it.

There was a time when I discussed issues like equity and inclusion and felt proud to ask for more space for women in the many male dominated spaces where I spent my time. I like startups, economics, math, science fiction and libertarianism so you could say I’m used to be one of the few women. And I never felt like I didn’t belong.

That is until I started taking up space. Once you’ve asked to be treated as not just one of the boys but as the leader of the pack you start to notice the snarls. Still I didn’t mind. Being top dog is always going to involve some fights. Let’s just say I’m glad women were allowed into the back door of the startup economy by handling Ecommerce. I didn’t mind having to earn my way in by playing in girly spaces like shopping. The money spends.

But I didn’t have to fight any men to do it. I found a way in on my own terms even though I might have preferred something a little less clearly marked as “for girls!” Because I’ve come to believe that no one wants a more diverse world. Diversifying industries that felt safe to men like startups was fought tooth and nail because who wants to give up ground that they fought hard to gain. I’m sure the men all bleed for their positions and nobody wants more competition. I get it.

It’s all a bit of polite fiction because the reality is power is always earned (or taken) and if you think life is a zero sum game you might believe me gaining power is your loss. I don’t believe in zero sum so I’m a little more “win win” but I get it. I see your pain.

So it’s with that dose of realism that I’ll ask you to pardon me if I am skeptical of the value of some corporate holiday to celebrate women’s contributions to the world. We are half the fucking planet. Of course we contributed to the fucking outcome! I don’t need a damn day for that.

Just because men kept women in the house (or cave or whatever) for a couple thousand years doesn’t mean we didn’t build this world too. We bore your children and made your food and kept the hearth.

We gave your dumb asses advice and kept you civilized because that’s what you asked from us. And yet somehow in modernity, men resented women for civilization even though you sure seem like you love the power and wealth that came with civilizing.

The new masculinity Internet influencers say it’s so emasculating to stop being brutes. It’s these women and their demands for respect and inclusion that is so burdensome. Fuck feminized society they howl. Return to tradition! Ok, so which one is it buddy? You want to be a warrior but you also like wearing those Gucci loafers too.

So yeah fuck all the way off. In fact, let’s get grosser. Suck my blood cunt. No one is buying me off with a holiday. It’s tacky. Like buying flowers for your wife after you did something bad. Just own up to it and fuck the flowers. Be a man.

So that’s my message on International Women’s Day. Be a man. It’s what everyone wanted right? Oh and suck my bloody cunt. Let’s stop with the special holidays and get on with building the world together. You know, like we used to do.

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Culture Reading

Day 795 and Fabulous Fabulists

If you’ve got the gift of gab, and I do, you are probably also familiar the entire family tree of talking. And like any family, gabbers have their share of black sheep. Weaving a a yarn or telling a tall tale both come to mind.

But in order to tell a story, it’s almost impossible to avoid every form of sensationalism and embellishment. Fabulists are fabulous company. And depending on your own history with inherent knowability of truth (and it’s many sparkling facets) you may find varying degrees of fanciful details either deeply offensive or absolutely necessary. It probably boils down to your relationship with your parents honestly.

I’ve had to sing for my supper my whole life and I don’t particularly mind it’s burdens. My father was once a champion story teller and his relationship to reality was always tenuous simply because he was an eternal optimist. I’ve chosen to view this as a positive.

It is however hard to live in a culture of sensationalism. When every piece of media from memes to the paper of record is bombarding us with every angle of every story, deciding on the truth feels impossible. It’s sensational because our senses simply cannot possibly glean every facet of a situation. If you’ve ever been close to a news story I’m sure you can intuit the issue.

We’ve got an entire culture of fabulous fabulists ranging from Fox News opinion hosts to Kim Kardashian to the New York Times Editorial Board. Who you find most trustworthy in that bunch doesn’t really say much about you anymore but we sure like to pretend it does. Just remember if someone is telling you a tall tale you don’t have to believe it. But it probably helps to enjoy listening to them. And the truth is we all do.