Category: Internet Culture

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1369 and California SB-1047 Vetoed

Last night I received a push alert and then a flurry of excited text messages and phone calls. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the controversial SB-1047 artificial intelligence bill.

Gavin Newsom vetoes California’s contentious AI “safety” bill SB-1047

Twitter lit up with joyful streams of relief and praise for this decision. Everyone from politicians, economists, researchers, academic luminaries, open source collectives, founders and venture capitalists.

It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.

We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.

I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

These tools are extensions of the human mind. Consider that the first computers were just regular humans counting. We may have started with our fingers and toes as our first tools. And it wasn’t quick progress as the evolution from the abacus to modern computing took us nearly 4,000 years.

We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.

Consumer devices are better too. The computer I’m using to write this post has more power than the computers we used to send man to the moon. It’s 100,000 times faster with seven million times more memory.

Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.

But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.

We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1368 and Lending Credibility

The dead internet theory (or conspiracy theory if you must) supposes that machine generated content outweighs human contributions.

I don’t think we are there just yet but I am betting that artificial intelligence speeds up the process of replacing human content in areas where it’s unnecessary. Machines can act on their own and it’s good thing potentially too.

Being able to determine what is human intelligence versus machine intelligence may well be mitigated through trust-less cryptographic systems we take for granted. Handshake protocols for humans and machines.

Some content and transactions are just fine coming from artificial intelligence but others have to demonstrate a human identity. This may even require compute on human’s behalf

Looking forward, the ability to access compute at scale will likely parallel the right to transact. Identity will be layered and lending credibility and capital will look different. Who has credit and credibility?

As nations navigate their own risks, network state behaviors on the individual level will become more prevalent, driven by the need for secure, decentralized transactions that ensure autonomy in an increasingly unpredictable world.

The internet isn’t dying. It’s being reborn to serve the next stage of credible actors on our world.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.

I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.

Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n

Noble savages are as silly a concept as high minded aristocracy. You probably know a few maladaptive emotionally sick types within your own communities.

Next on Sick Sad World

Remember the long running joke of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert? Truthiness. Emotive truthiness reigns supreme as “news-like” content bubbles in the Internet of AI slop battle out the truth of an issue not with verifiable facts but verifiable feelings. Which one is more maladaptive?

We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.

If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.

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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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Internet Culture

Day 1337 and Leet

I’m officially a leet writer. I’ve now been at this daily writing habit for so long that on day 1337 I am cool saying I’m absolutely elite. I have done the thing consistently and gained skills. Because everyday is practice here I am l33t.

If this not-at-all humblebrag is confusing to you, let me explain why 1337 is a joking milestone to an internet kid like myself.

Leet, also known as “1337” or leetspeak, is a form of modified spelling used primarily on the internet. It involves replacing letters with numbers or other characters that resemble the original letters, creating a unique orthography. For example, “leet” can be spelled as “1337” or “l33t”

Leetspeak on Wikipedia via Perplexity

I’m no h4x0r but I’m not a n00b to being extremely online. While a being on the fourth year of a daily writing habit is nothing to scoff at I’ve been on WordPress for close to twenty years. It feels good to be leet at something as extremely online as blogging.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1328 and Weebs as New Social Elites

Yesterday, Occulus and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, posted a picture of him doing Nyan Neko Sugar Girl cosplay to his Twitter account. It’s a Fanime from 2010.

DragonCon enjoyers

On the heels of a sympathetic long form essay in Tablet Magazine that went viral, Palmer posting friendly cat girl jokes on main was clarion call to the one demographic that really matters in America right now. Nerds are the entry into the elite class.

Every flavor of nerd is flexing their might. Autistic weebs are claiming their power in the American elite class. And our politicians ans generals should be thrilled. It’s not not a moment too soon to put the engineers in on the great game

Showing off your niche knowledge is a favored elite game. Millenials & Zoomers understand their reality is being built upon arcane information and have gone for the deep cuts to keep up.

While on Tablet I came across their coverage of the Democratic National Convention where bizarre communist fervor from identities as inscrutable as Zoomer Hoxhaists are on display. Enver Hoxha being the infamous (and possibly crazy) communist dictator of Albania and not a good guy. But clearly some idiotic online intellectual has to treat history as if it were finding a cool band.

So if you subscribe to hidden knowledge as social capital then it’s time to read up on Gaetano Mosca and the Italian school of elitism. For discourse watchers, they were notable anti-fascist thinkers.

If you made it through the marathon Joe Rogan episode interviewing Peter Thiel you might have caught the memes about Chimp Empire. Well turns out that’s topical and an approachable angle.

every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled

The current elite class of interests has looked beyond our military industrial complex to to Silicon Valley. They have known for sometime if you want to beat the communists (or the fascists or the oligarchy) then partnering with the new nerd elite is now your move.

Don’t worry Douglas MacArthur was a red blooded American military man and a weeb. Autists long a good track record in defense innovation.

If you want an eye to the future then learn the ways of the weeb. Drone warfare and embodied habits? Take it a step further WinterMute. Your transgendered simulated intelligence running that drone was trained on green text and it’s time you learn to speak like a native of the hive mind.

Rise up cat girls! Now is the hour of the weeb. Do it for America. Do it for capitalism. Do it so we get some sick Mecha suits from Uncle Sam.

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Internet Culture

Day 1305 and Well Now I’m Scared

Things have taken a turn for the worse on the timelines. I’m not all that bothered by the feral internet, but I do occasionally find myself staring down the dark corridors of anonymous “holders of risqué opinions” and I wonder about my life choices.

I’ve written before about how I think our communication channels are where most of war gets waged now.

I can feel all the shifting crazies that come from an unstable media environment. Our endocrine systems are simply not built to metabolize this much information and noise. Signal is lost in the static.

I suspect a lot of rational voices will make the choice to bounce out of the moment simply to avoid the informational shrapnel. Alas these days it’s less of a metaphor. How quickly we forget that just weeks ago someone tried to kill a presidential candidate.

If rational people don’t want to engage. And given where we are with ridiculous hysterics over couch coitus I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. Well you will be left to the hyenas. Millions have already retreated to the cozy web. As they reemerge it’s only a reminder of how bad things are online.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1304 and Don’t Scare The Hoes

Twitter had a significant exodus of left wing and moderates as Elon Musk took over the platform. The ugly parts of the internet were allowed free rein on the platform and plenty of users didn’t have time for that.

If you had been raised on a tidy internet of moderation this was upsetting and you went back to moderate places. If you’d been raised on the feral internet you don’t really mind. I was raised on the feral internet. I’m twenty years into sharing space with lunatics.

Some people think the feral internet is is entirely male. And don’t get me wrong, user statistics show 4chan, Reddit, Discord and Twitter are mostly men. But there have always been feminine corners of the internet. And they are influential. Tumblr girls, MySpace, and Livejournal had plenty of the dark feminine before we cleaned things up the consumable Instagram age. Before Ballerina Farm we had much rawer Mormon mommy blogging from Utah. Remember Dooce?

Working in fashion beginning in aughts and teens, I had a front row seat to the dark era of Tumblr. I’d seen horrors arise from femcel message boards. Pro-Ana content was left to fester because no one cared when women kept the harms to themselves. Guess what, those girls aren’t all grown up and now they harm the boys too.

OnlyFans findoms predate lonely nerds and Reddit mistresses trawl /marriedredpill/ looking to get laid by insecure rich men coated in fear optimizing around pick up artist tactics.

Women are not the good guys on the internet any more than men are the bad guys. The dark places online are dark for everyone. Welcome to the equality we’ve fostered. Scammers and grifters for all.

Dopamine rushes and control fantasies run rampant among the fearful and no flavor of childhood trauma goes unanswered thanks to the persistent financialization of every human relationship. We call this a low trust society.

So you might think it unfair of me to request, as a woman, that the men do not scare the hoes as we travel the next 100 days to the American election.

A right thinking person might recognize that there is no advantage to be gained in the gender wars. We are all combatants in a conflict that serves none of us and does much to degrade us all.

But young extremely online women are crashing into young extremely online men and the result is bratty cop memes and couch fucking. Cat ladies fighting dweebs is not a good look. Some might call it deliberately demoralizing

The normies, who let’s be honest are mostly women, are scared shitless of the aggressive edge of online discourse. They don’t like any of this shit.

And I don’t think you will like what happens and who ends up in charge of we’ve got a terrified population. So knock it off. Be a man. That’s a gender neutral statement. Our civilization is for adults.

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Biohacking Internet Culture Startups

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Cyperpunk Anarcho-Tyranny

We are living in the past’s version of the future. The Cyperpunk I read in my youth is now the stuff of my daily life. It’s not as sleek as in fiction but it’s hard not to feel like it’s William Gibson’s world and I’m just living it.

The clubs looked a little sleazier as we escaped the aughts but we had a renaissance in technical tools for producing culture. Digital music and multimedia have exploded entire social media economies. Could Vernor Vinge be right and our economies will turn to creating data to train for the singularity?

We are only now getting Idoru but we are veering towards Burning Chrome. Half the anime avatars in accelerationist e/acc chats are wearing Mirror Shades and everyone watches for crypto rugs. But we are getting our Mt Gox Bitcoin back right?

What about borderless corporate worlds and mass scale surveillance identity? That’s here too. When William Gibson wrote “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” I wonder if he knew it would be the nexus of the network state debate?

I can turn on club kid techno from 2002 and look at a reality in 2024 and its aesthetic is pretty close to the details Jonny Mnemonic. A global pandemic that affects the nervous system of those infected which was accidentally released from a lab.

Johnny Mnemonic movie poster.

We’ve even got the LoTeks in a Luddite rebellion against a world connected by dubiously transparent artificial intelligence owned by actual Zaibatsu multinationals with more power than nation states. Fact and fiction spinning hyperstition better than Nick Land ever dreamed.

The vulnerability of our entire world to our digital networks was made dramatically apparent yesterday when Crowdstrike took a hot knife through the butter of corporate infrastructure and left us with blue screens of death.

It’s not real but it could be

Snowcrash and Crash Override? It’s better. We got amazing memes and elaborate fakes of the Blue Screen of Death. It actually did suck for airlines and banks because regulatory capture is the stuff of systemic risk.

And lest you think we’ve got no biohacking in this Cyperpunk world after the pandemic we have a renaissance in systemic & holistic approaches to medicine. Suddenly everyone is aware of the risk in agribusiness. Seed oils is normie stuff. Instead of turning Luddite the Danish invented advance metabolic medicine to cope. Everyone is on GLP-1 agonists.

Mix in the rise of nicotine and THC and you’ve got a national post prohibition bloom of folklore cures whose research has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies alike. Conspiracy? Maybe but just the sludge of industry.

When I look at my own work I see the future arriving. We fund decentralized compute and marketplaces for inferences. We fund open source database software. We fund multi-sigs for hyper transactional blockchains. We fund nuclear fission that pulls its materials the sky.

And in that all of the is our founders are global citizens who have to manage anarcho-tyrannical borders with visas controlled by incompetent governments and live through the geopolitics of wars fought with drones and propaganda. The future is already here. It’s actually pretty cool. Just watch out for nervous system tics.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1272 and GWOT

As an elder millennial fascinated by the mass media I have a lot of mixed feelings on the American government and how it waged the “war on terror.”

It is heavy on my mind with the current news of Julien Assange’s agreement with the American government.

I think a lot about media, and in particular the technology that powers media. An informed population can still act in its own best interests but what we get told affects what we perceive as our best interests. And as we become more informed naturally some skepticism of the intentions of power arise.

Media affects how nation states wage wars. As we’ve evolved from print to television to radio to the internet how we sell the costs of war changed. But there are always populations who pay enough attention to be skeptical.

The open internet was born of that skepticism of government even so much of the technology emerged thanks to America’s heavy investment in defense industries.

Scientists used to have a wide range of politics and it’s not a surprise that defending American interests is a popular idea amongst people who work for the government. But maybe you see things and fight for more accountability along the way.

The GWOT unevenly affected millennials. If you were middle class your kid probably didn’t join up unless being in the service was how you got to being middle class. There was no draft.

Being in Colorado I had exposure to folks who worked for defense contractors as a lot of the private sector had settled around the cluster of talent from Boulder’s science labs down to the Air Force Academy in Fort Collins.

But there has been skepticism in all the branches of government as it became harder to control the narratives. And Americans don’t particularly like the idea of having propaganda even though I’d argue we produce and consumer enormous quantities of it as a nation.

I wish I could be more cogent about any of this. I am regularly shocked by how little people seem to remember how we prosecuted these long wars. We quickly forget.

Don’t be too sure human nature had changed. Don’t be too keen to give the government power because you are afraid. We’ve already seen what they do with it.