You know I am old as I just don’t consume or create short form video content. Every new trend that filters to me on Twitter or on my reader feeds presents as sadness to me. I don’t fully understand them and probably never will.
I left Williamsburg in 2010 for Manhattan’s Chinatown as even the south side past the JMZ had become too expensive. The loft I shared above Future Perfect on North 8th and Berry was getting expensive on just the other side of the Great Recession. It was a loud place to live and a lot of fun but I needed a lease with my name on it and prime Williamsburg wasn’t it in 2012.
I wasn’t in a position by 2012 to buy an apartment but neither did I have any debt. So I’m sure that made me better off than the Zoomers coveting my life just before New York would go ZIRP. Not making a fortune wasn’t too bad when you could still enjoy a lot of hipster consumer choices.
You can’t blame the Zoomers for feeling like today’s economic volatility and social fragmentation makes our “before times” life look relatively utopian.
I’ve previously enjoyed when my own past lifestyles are the subject of nostalgia rehashes on social media. Now I think worried as no one should be too obsessed with the past. Especially not the young.
Shopping in a highly bifurcated consumer market is an unpleasant experience. No more so than over the great shopping holiday that has become Cyber Season.
Regular consumers feel gaslight enough as it is by smart pricing strategies and persistent inflation. Their trust that they can make a better purchase is at a low. Their Black Friday looks very different than it did during the ZIRP years.
But many brands are battling it out for the ten percent of consumers that do 48% of the spending. And that is a brutal business. I can’t spend time on image or video social networks for fear of triggering some kind of shopping allergy. Being in that group of consumers makes you a target.
And very few of them are battling on the merits of their products. I went brand by brand through my usual suspects of Black Friday brands and found better deals and less to like.
I bought cashmere and skincare and I still don’t know if I got scammed on the cashmere. Ironic as I’m buying seconds of items I already own hoping the sourcing didn’t change in the intervening seasons.
I genuinely miss the Ann Taylor of 2010 when I worked there. You wouldn’t think it would be a glory year for the brand but there was hope. It was still publicly traded American brand. And it had a real estate portfolio of stores to envy from Madison Avenue to the Magnificent Mile.
Imagine an American brand like that now. It had strong supply chains, good relationships with vendors and it had just hired a hot new young executive with a hot new designer.
This was when you could imagine an MBA reinventing a brand’s look for a new generation of working women. Millennial feminism was on its way up, a blonde Gen X feminist beauty from Harvard led the charge and everyone believed. Heck maybe we’d even see a female president who wore our pants suits.
And we know how that broader cultural story turned out. We made pant suits cool for a brief moment in time and private equity ate the brand and now it’s shit. But I know we did good work and I’m glad our MBA leader landed on her feet at Amazon.
I just look at where I shop now and I look at Ann Taylor and the prices are roughly the same but it’s not the same cashmere sweater for that $200 absolutely anywhere. And if you want that sweater be prepared to spend over a grand.
So while I did a little shopping I think maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe I’ll get a good batch. But it’s not always a sure thing. I got my replacement retinols. And I finally found my old Mansur Gavriel tote (going on year 12 or so) for roughly the same price as I bought it.
I’ll use my beat up on still but I thought hey maybe they still make good bags. But I don’t know if their private equity guys are any good. Fingers crossed as it’s a great tote.
Like anyone who has worked corporate retail, I keep a close eye on Black Friday narratives. I named a few sales I thought were particularly unusual in my beauty blog based on how I shop for myself on Black Friday. I am a very value driven customer even though I will spend a lot with a brand who earns my trust.
I’ve found there to be less and less worth shopping across fashion, beauty and other consumer goods. Still I do use the holiday to strike a better bargain with a brand I might consider becoming a regular with.
Now you have to wonder about higher end customers who use Buy Now Pay Later options like Klarna. Is this just an extension of the freedom we afford luxury consumers in their lives if bizarre credit choices. Why not spend a little more to not require additional liquidity. Maybe that is a more efficient way of social signaling on Instagram for some. I think I’d be worried about that consumer. Their defaults are on another planet.
As for myself I like buying an extra retinol serum and some fancy shampoo. I am not buying $400 moisturizers being resold by Quince. Thats just a little too odd for me. But maybe I will get those weird recovery boots. I wonder what luxury purchases that don’t use extending credit say about my financial niche.
I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.
Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.
But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.
I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.
Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.
One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.
Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.
She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.
It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.
This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.
Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.
Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.
The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.
I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.
There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.
If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.
The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.
These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.
I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.
The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.
I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.
I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.
The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?
The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.
Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.
The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.
It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?
It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.
It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.
So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.
The universe was dancing with geomagnetic stormsReds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.
What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.
Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.
There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.
The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.
As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!
The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.
MAWP!
Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.
Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.
This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.
Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.
Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.
If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.
I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.
I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.
I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.
I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.
To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts
I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.
I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.
I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.
A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.
Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go
Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”
Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.
This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.
While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.
It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.
And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.
The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.
Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room
I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.
It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.
I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.
A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.
The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.
And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.
Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.
