It’s clearly the deep dog days of summer as I’m in a bit of a mood. I’ve got all kinds of things on my mind and yet it’s slow going executing on anything. The doldrums has certainly gripped me. And yet I take hope.
This corner of Twitter is going through a paroxysmal fit of whether it’s rational to be embracing pro-social behavior. Without having to cite all my sources we had Jane Goodall being packaged into a deceleration meme about removing a billion or so people.
So I think my entire mood when staring down the barrel of the future is “what’s it going to cost me in my soul?”
At this stage of the simulation I have to ask What color are the pills, and how many people are dying?
The cost of knowing it’s not just about us is slamming into the hard reality that you can’t do a damn thing about other people. And so we have to ask if we preserve what we have or do we leap into the great unknown. I don’t know anyone who is in the mood for much safety at the moment. There doesn’t seem like much to be had.
It’s a war of all against all on the internet. And I don’t recall being conscripted into any kind of war but here I am up to my neck in ontological shock and crisis of meanings as I read the news.
It’s our autonomy of mind that is threatened by this unholy troika of smartphones, social media and linguistic weaponization, and there is no more important struggle today than to defend ourselves against that threat.
Humans have nervous systems that are easily hijacked. You give us something to imitate and within a few weeks we’ve learned a new way to get a social advantage. And so we have massive social cataclysms as the rules change. And the rules are changing fast.
It’s not as if America gives a shit about maternal health or women but hey here is a podcast about a porn star who specializes in anime’s less savory fetishes. Is your teenage boy an Andrew Tate fan? It’s time to enjoy a reactionary period.
Obviously this has anyone older than forty asking if the western world under attack. Is questioning liberalism actually the psy-op? Are we fighting amongst ourselves? Do you even know what memetic agents you are infected by?
I sure don’t what brain works in carrying but I don’t think animated porn is for me. But I also got taken in by lots of questionable narratives on modern medicine, fertility and children too. Untangling yourself from the desires you were given is exhausting. Good luck unpacking who jacked your frame!
I slept quite a bit last night. I slept more this afternoon. I can’t say why I needed so much rest. But what I can say is that I dreamed a lot. Odd, florid, turbulent dreams too demanding to be ignored.
It’s unclear to me what my unconscious was tidying up. Was it the detritus of ego death or the toxins being flushed by my glymphatic system? As my favorite meme suggests, “porque no los dos?”
I’ve not been much inclined to engage in the day’s online dramas as I’ve been too distracted by my own dream roads. My own life has too much of a hold on me today.
I gather there has been arguments about pagan vitalism and post-Christian morality. The persistent agony of feeling like life is no longer about living has scrambled the brains of our young. Extremist communities have infiltrated our meme spaces. White nationalists and Nietzschean fanbois insist on their own righteousness.
And who can blame the lost boys from looking at these scandals? Ontological shocks are coming at a fast and furious pace, all while the depths of the abyss are staring back.
Nothing is sacred and all is permitted. Everything is sacred and nothing is permitted. Keep at the permutation until you’ve reached enlightenment. Or until you’ve died.
I’ve not felt the need to swim in the deep end of offense. I require no taboo or reactionary behaviors to feel as if I’m alive. My dreams even at their most intense remain mere reflections of the enormity of my own life. I have lived large and with more agency than I ever dreamed possible.
I’ve been enjoying a bit of accelerationism in my own life. I’ve been pruning attention and refocusing myself and was rewarded with a lot of change. All of which feels good to me. I’m relieved to be happy now that I have steadier days.
But I have the choice to have a steady till and my own hand will guide me on the course. If that requires nervous system work or grocery shopping. Or both. Or something entirely. Please do what you need to keep yourself steady in the storm.
The rising volume on complaints about the mainstream media has struck me as a little bit silly as I’ve been entrenched in skepticism of institutional authority my whole life. Thinking the news had a bias isn’t new and conspiracy is practically an American art form. So be careful out there.
When I was a kid in the late nineties we still had the national broadcast evening news as the center of discourse. I was considered a bit odd for being interested in news at a young age but my hippie parent had a healthy skepticism for institutional authority so they encouraged it.
I remember before the mass adoption of social media and self publishing, if you wanted an alternative perspective you had to turn to AM radio. If you were lucky you lived in a college town and had access to library cooperatives and computer labs. If you were very lucky like me, your parents had invested in personal computers and internet access early on so you could mix formal libraries with early choose your own adventure newsgroups online.
Thanks to the confluence of the above factors I read Adbusters, went to the local anarchist book cooperative and listened to Art Bell late at night. I was practically stewed in every early conspiracy and counter culture narrative that had any amount of reach. If a zine cared or an indie publisher could cobble together a story I read it. This lead to a general fascination with media and how Americans decided on what was credible and what viewpoints were discouraged.
I was a curious child. My family welcomed skeptics and mystics. This is perhaps what happens when you take children on meditation retreats. I got inoculated to a lot of crazies, cults and whackadoodles because America has always been where utopians gather. Our evangelical cultures have led to uniquely American interpretations of our Gods. And I loved nothing more than watching these subcultures flourish.
My family bought a cable news package and I watched CNN and Fox News battle it out. I read Naomi Klein and Marshal McLuhan. I convinced my mother to get me a subscription to the Economist when I was fifteen. Embarrassingly I used their motto in a year book quote. I talked my way into a job famed talk radio juggernaut 77WABC when still technically in high school.
If there is one thing I learned from this lifelong obsession with who controls what we think, it’s that we rely on the same simple narratives over and over again. The conspiracies of yesterday are the facts of today. We change our minds. We recycle the same prophecy. If you start seeing a lot of chatter about aliens remember we’ve had this news cycle before.
In other news, I’ve had a bit of a hard week and I’m shutting down a lot of access points so don’t take it personally. The churn is here.
Maybe we’ve just reached the point where the warring info-hazards that are our closed garden social media feeds have decided to make us all literally go insane. I can’t entirely tell as I’m loathe to give up algorithmic level control on any of my feeds and do not use social media that doesn’t offer me a chronological feed of my own choosing.
I watched Idiocracy when it came out and I did not want to believe that it’s always been true we’ve allowed our world to be overrun by our unregulated appetites but PinkyDoll is just a hardworking Québécois hottie who has no time for your bullshit. Yum yum yum! yes yes! Gang gang!
And to tie together my title on all this, while I like Cherry Crush’s work I can’t back the white elf who says no spicy. It’s just too weird. Stay safe out there people and don’t let the brain worms get you.
A regular theme of my writing here is the pace of accelerating change. There is rarely a break from “life happens” for any of us because that is the human condition. But I must say it’s really taking a lot to manage for some Americans who have had enormous systemic advantages for several decades now and are reacting poorly to even the potential of loss.
I believe the best way to overcome the loss of these advantages is by banding together in teams and collaborating to solve bigger problems together. Everyone brings a unique viewpoint.
If you are like me, teams are necessary for survival. I can survive on my own but it’s a much smaller more circumscribed life.
I have accepted that whatever character sheet got built before my arrival (genetics & chance) requires some min-maxing as on my own I’m not particularly independent or self sufficient. Yes, libertarians recognize our interdependency. It’s called division of labor.
Min-maxing is the character-building strategy of maximizing a specific desirable ability, skill, or other power of a character and minimizing everything else, seen as undesirable. The result is a character who is excessively powerful in one particular way, but exceedingly weak in others.
And so whatever I am left with in this character sheet feels a bit like I got stuck with a lot of weaknesses. But why not simply lean into it. Faster pussycat, kill kill.
We act like our attention is a static thing. You have reading habits and social media patterns and your attention is allocated to what makes the most sense for whatever demographic you have settled into for your life choices. But it can always be changed. And maybe your attention choices don’t serve you.
We have fantasies about our independent mindedness, especially in America. But we are all a product of other people’s attentional priorities. What you are focused on is quite often molded especially for you.
It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”
Take the principle of this iconic scene from The Devil Wears Prada and apply it to every single area of your life where you made a choice as a consumer, worker, hobbiest, parent or any other identity with a collective meaning.
I’m taking this problem very seriously at the moment as we may be in for a significant attention economy realignment. Big chunks of the social internet appear to be up for grabs as legacy networks like Twitter, Reddit and Stackoverflow go through significant identity alignments issues as competitive pressures from artificial intelligence and increased attention allocation automation. The algorithms are fighting for you.
None of this is bad or good necessarily. Some of it is us fighting to make make some areas more competitive and perhaps other areas will be shown to be unsustainable. And sometimes it’s just management. Don’tk make the mistake of dickriding for someone that is as human as you or I. Stay smart out there and think critically for yourself.
Being valuable for your data has always been a bit of weird feeling for individuals. Because you on your own may have experienced quite varied mileage on being remunerated for your skills, contributions and other ineffable qualities.
We value athletes and business executives and the extremely beautiful and the particularly intelligent and getting paid to be any combination of that is bound up in dumb luck and how you compete in an economy with other humans.
Individually we are all quite unique. But the ways in which we are packaged, marketed, sold and controlled by our social, national and family contracts and norms can make it feel like we are put in boxes. Demographics.
Some professions are very refined at saying what facet of a person is worth something to another person responsible for selling, let’s say, designer clothing or commodity groceries or financial services. We call that cost of acquisition.
The adage in my age of the internet was always “if you don’t pay for the product then you are the product.” And that insight has tainted social media from the start. Even if it was a great deal for all the free users of the social website who didn’t mind using something for free because they couldn’t monetize their attributes at that scale. Generally unless you were in a small class of power users social media didn’t make you money and you weren’t that valuable.
And since you were the product being marketed and sold, other people who market and sold other things (advertising if you will) generally found it was in the best interest of a social media business to make sure there was plenty of flavors of you the user (perhaps SKUs or stock keeping units) on hand so if an advertiser wants to buy access to say a late thirties professional woman with a high net worth, she is online and can be shown an advertisement.
It helps to have active users like that readily available so she might be enticed to buy a $5 sparking water laced with drugs and sugar substitutes. Yes I went to Whole Foods today.
So it’s a mystery to me why you would implode the vast and intertwined delicate tapestry of entrenched network effects so that you can instead deliver less access to the network whose major value is keeping specific demographics on a website for extended periods happy and engaged. But I am not Elon Musk.
Elon Musk rate limiting user access to Twitter because “extractive data” rationalizing
As the age of artificial intelligence trained on reams of user data (available via API or application programming interfaces) gets going the owners of the social web are scared they are getting screwed. Reddit shut down access which is a real blow to Google whose best type of search for niche answers has been amending “Reddit” at the end of a query.
If Elon Musk is selling a dopamine drip of content and access then shutting off the tap is a baffling decision. And I’ll admit I got off the internet today because the strain of whatever is actually happening at Twitter (rumor is server issues and back end chaos and unpaid bills) meant none of my tweets would send.
I quite hope this will be better tomorrow as I rather liked the old system of my data and attention for access to the great wide open feeds. And I actually paid $8 for my account. Can’t imagine what everyone else is experiencing.
I was busy working for most of the day on an investor update for chaotic.capital. It’s really dope and I’d love to have any prospective LPs read it to see how we are navigating the moment. Chaotic is my humble pre-seed fund for weirdos building shit to survive the current planet wide disjunction. The general sense of history restarting from its fuck Fukuyama slumber is a clear and there is stuff to build.
When I do deep work I try to give myself some space between me and information feeds. But I find it hard to entirely shut for more than a few hours. I monitor many threads across many interest groups with vastly different interests. I flow it back to me and my investments.
As I sit comfortably in my Montana home on the edge of the American empire, I obviously can’t help but worry I’m a Cassandra doomed to know horrible truths. But this becoming a bit of a hobby for all of us isn’t it? We all watch nervously as history unfolds with little influence on the broader strokes.
My fear is that we’ve all become armchair war dogs cheering on whatever professional grade propaganda works for the current moment. And we must be careful not to let ourselves be controlled by that chaos nor amuse that we know what is happening.
I firmly believe in having a locus of control and acting within it. Today I wrote up the current state of all the vibes I’ve seen and synthesized in my market status report. I then named the bets I’ve taken with our capital. I explained why I think have the greatest chance at resilience in a world that is more and more chaotic by the hour. And then I showed the work on how I found the deals and made connections for my portfolio that was unique to me.
After I’d wrapped it up and got my operating partner Alex to be sure all the operational work was settled I opened up my feeds. It was Swan Lake time. The head of mercenary organization Wagner Group was maybe, or maybe not, declaring a coup against the Russian Defense Minister. Who knows what’s going on! Certainly not me.
Cue the rampant speculations. My Telegrams are going wild. Signal is on fire. I am scrolling through sick jokes and CIA theories and extremely funny memes. Everyone is rushing to exert influence and partisan narratives on top of what looks like a Tom Clancy novel. And even he’d agree this week was a bit on the nose with the submarines and the Soviet comebacks. So let’s all remember the world is complex and we know so very little so let’s keep taking responsibility for the moves we can make and helping others do the same.
