Category: Internet Culture

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Internet Culture

Day 689 and Dick Riding

As chaos continues to unfurl around the world, the tendency towards hero worship is getting out of control. Cults of personality are having a moment absolutely everywhere, even as we are treated to even more spectacular variants of the Emperor Has No Clothes. You’d think the recent flameouts in finance, technology and politics just this week would make us all a bit more skeptical of authority and yet that does not appear to be the case.

You cannot go onto Twitter without exposing yourself to someone’s daddy issues disguised as a low rent business school case study thread. I was concerned about the information hygiene as platform capacity degraded. But I honestly wasn’t expecting the first disease that actually emerged. Twitter is in the throes of an emotional venereal disease.

I am talking about dick riders.

If you are not familiar with the term, being a dick rider means praising absolutely every move of someone you perceive as having more power than you. Dickriding is a particularly uncomfortable form of reply guying wherein you praise absolutely every move of the person whose dick you are riding.

It’s especially virulent among regular people without personal expertise or exposure to the problem at hand. Not knowing any better is not however a prerequisite for dick riding. You can lend your credibility to someone else by using your expertise to rationalize just about anything.

Humans love power and hierarchy. I guess it makes us feel safe to believe that someone knows what the hell they are doing when we are afraid. But the sad reality is that we are all human. Even the most accomplished and brilliant among us are still saddled with bias, self doubt, insecurities and blind spots. If you are inclined towards the religious, we are all sinners. Though I’d recommend you combine that with a side of grace as I don’t mean this to be judgmental.

I realize it’s pretty funny to bring up the redeeming power of grace in the context of sexually explicit slang. But I do think it’s helpful to remember that even the worst of us have redeeming qualities and even the best of us have flaws.

So if you are tempted to engage in dickriding because you think someone is better than you, might I encourage you to consider that we are all equals in the eyes of God. Or at very least equal in the face of a good shit post.

I’m a straight woman so I like riding dick but I don’t know what excuse the rest of you have.
Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 685 and Brainworms

I am very good at media. It’s a passion as well as one of my few hobbies that has stood the test of time. If I wanted a regular job I think I’d enjoy for more than a couple year stint I’d probably pick publicist. I say this add context to the topic I plan to discuss.

Because I’m so experienced (and also naturally talented) at the attention disciplines, I can spend time consuming information that isn’t mentally or emotionally hygienic for the average person. I have outstanding informational immunity. I stare into the abyss so others don’t have to. I monitor it all, from extremist groups to the most normie mainstream media. I have always made my living by intaking and organizing information.

Unlike your drunk uncle or wired Gen Z nephew, I can withstand information environments designed to “pill” you and hijack your dopamine responses without ill effect. Frankly I’m disappointed I’m not a literal William Gibson character as I certainly feel like Cayce Pollard existentially.

So I hope you take me seriously when I say I think it is time for all of us to pull back from extended raw regular Twitter consumption for a little bit. It has become an info-hazard rapidly and almost accidentally as its new management attempts to reinvigorate features and drive cost cutting (some of which I support). I don’t know if it is going to collapse or get reinvented but Twitter as it is right now is unstable.

The degradation of features and rules of engagement is happening too quickly and unpredictably for me to surf continuously like I have in the past. Context collapse is pervasive. There are gaping holes in informational hierarchies from experiments to both nerf and boost accounts through verification chaos. Responses from trusted accounts don’t make it to my alerts. I used to browse on reverse chronological non-algorithm view but it appears so broken in my feed it’s unclear how or why things are being surfaced.

And these concerns barely scratch the surface. Twitter’s immune responses to competing agendas, trolling and chaos agents are broken as the duct tape and physical labor of its team has been slashed. Raging information infections that typically remain contained to their ecosystems are spreading to main feeds. You cannot control your information environment when it is collapsing all around you.

You are going to get brain worms if you are not careful. If even a twenty year professional with exposure to the darkest corners of content (from 4chan to Gawker to groypers) no longer feels safe in this information war zone than you might want to consider restricting your own consumption for your own mental and emotional safety. I’ve decided to cut down on browsing until the platform stabilizes. I’m rebooting my email inbox and newsfeeds. I am choosing to open news apps directly rather than waiting for my networks to surface news. I just don’t feel safe drinking from the raw feed on Twitter right now.

In other words, if it’s not safe for me then it is definitively not safe for you.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 678 and Winging It

I went for a haircut today. I’d been riding a haircut since May so it was a little embarrassing. I’d let it go from princess to dirty hippie.

Joking with the hairstylist a bit about being a bit weird we ended up commiserating over how much we enjoyed Twitter. She agreed that Twitter always felt like it was more real. Like people let it all hang out. And recently we all collectively realized that everyone is just winging it.

Nevertheless it can still be kind of a shock when it goes from “oh anyone can become one someone with hard work” to “oh fuck everyone is a fraud.”

I am I’ll admit a little shook about Sam Bankman Fried. I’ve got minimal exposure but I have interests that have been funded by funds that do. And that is really distressing to me. It always feels like at the center of the bullshit in this industry lurks some traditional finance fuckers not doing their math. And I do admit that chaps my ass. Sets us all back.

I do think plenty of the world is just winging it with a good faith and open heart. But for the sliver of sociopaths who know enough about governance and fiduciary duty and still decides that nah I’ll mix up some assets and ownership. Fuck you that’s regular old fraud and it sucks.

And what’s worse is you bring this on to our house. The people who do want to build a Plan B and who sincerely believe that a fairer more open accessible financial system is a global good. The people with shitty passports and communist governments actually need access but go ahead and you do some light self dealing. This isn’t important enough to you. Cool. Whatever. Nothing was riding on this.

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Internet Culture

Day 675 and Muddled Ideologies

Some neu-feminine viral thread arguing women are not meant to work structured 9-5 jobs because of our reproductive cycle hit my Twitter feed today. The author argued menstrual hormonal cycles represents an innate biological need for longer creative and restorative cycles in women. Or something. I am not here to argue biological essentialism.

The thread itself wasn’t all that weird just a bit of a throwback. I am all about working with your normal cycles and not against them but I just can’t get to “this is why raising children and the home is our natural environment.” Normally I’d view this sort of thread as standard natalist “be proud of being a woman” stuff and move on. I even kind of agree that we have ignored women’s hormones to our detriment.

But the way it came into my feed was a bit wilder than your usual retvrn dork. A Christian Nationalist personality that I keep tabs on had retweeted a Nazi larper (no really his avatar is the Gigachad with a Swastika chest tattoo) who had commentary about the biological inferiority of women based on this thread. He made some lewd jokes about how any attempt to live beyond the home and our children was clearly a lie.

This whole mess of muddled ideologies hit my feed just as I was enjoying a bout of PMS anger and I strongly debated responding with a well actually “we also hot chip and twerk” but I wasn’t entirely sure I needed to give them the attention of an outdated meme format. Which is also why I’m not linking to any of it. Sorry you have to take my word for it but you can probably search for it with these details.

The constant thrum of reactionary throwback accounts is pretty typical on Twitter. The casual disdain for anyone outside of your immediate in-group (which in this case was so small it literally excluded all women) has become so normalized it’s honestly not a shocker I’m seeing natalists, dominionists and Gigachad Nazis on my Twitter feed advocating for increasingly wild viewpoints.

Muddled hate is part of the appeal of the internet. But also damn if it’s not also the worst part. But if you ignore and block all of the worst bits you might be surprised to discover that actually people still believe all kinds of wildly hateful shit. And I’d rather know so I can stay ahead of any pogroms. But that’s just me. Don’t forget to vote in the mid -terms!

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Internet Culture

Day 671 and Greatest Show on Earth

I cannot tell if I’m absolutely utterly sick of watching Elon Musk take over Twitter or if I’m having fun watching it all.

Like Musk I am a Twitter addict. I’ve been a power user for the last several years as it was the hottest ticket in town as the media circus around America’s partisan emotional meltdown fomented in the wake of Trump’s presidency. If you were interested in news then Twitter was the place to be from about 2016 onwards.

The funny it is that I’ve had access to Twitter since basically day one but was never a consistent user. A friend was an early employee (so early he went to work for the podcast company) while I got to watch it all play out from the start it didn’t really capture my personal usage for sometime.

I absolutely wasn’t a power user in the early years. I was much more interested in blogging at the time. I ran an advertising network for bloggers and was absolutely obsessed with media. Media was much more interested in WordPress and subsequently Tumblr than it was in Twitter. And I wanted to be where media spent it’s time. Media took a while to really cotton into Twitter.

I was so disinterested in Twitter I didn’t even keep my original handle. I went for years without really being an active participant on the platform as a user. Which was ironic as I did quite a bit of advertising on Twitter.

When I sold my advertising network Coutorture, I decided I needed a corporate job to level up my skills. I ended doing advertising buys and heavy integrations with Twitter as I first went to an agency and then eventually brand side as an advertiser. I was no joke the first brand to live tweet the Super Bowl.

I was a director at an agency that ran digital for Pepsi and I ended up as the voice of Sobe. I was embarrassingly Lee the Lizard during the Super Bowl. At the same time I was also running a second Twitter account for Pepsi based on an SNL skit called PepSuber. We thought it needed to be live tweeted for maximum effect. No joke I was on a conference call with Lorne Michaels at 2am the night before the Super Bowl. The absolute coolest thing I did on Twitter though was probably the first Twitter aggregator. Through my friend I got access to the Twitter API and built a dashboard called Tweefreshing for Pepsi. It was Pepsi integrating all the best tweets of the day for you. It lasted like a day before it got abused. I know simpler times right?

Twitter has gone through a lot of ups and downs as an advertising destination and as a nexus for power and users. It’s always been a circus. It’s never really managed to grow up as a destination for advertisers. I don’t know where it’s going and this is clearly a nostalgia post for me. But over time it won me over. I went from a bystander to an advertiser to a power user. And I remain hopeful it will find a way to remain the greatest show on earth.

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Internet Culture

Day 669 and Nudging

It’s a nice day to be blogging today and I appreciate the nudge to be reminded of one of the Internet’s most sacred numbers by my terminally online brain worms.

Where you spend a lot of time clearly affects your social norms. As I am a citizen of the internet numbers like 69 and 420 will forever and always be titillating. Twitter in particular has a fondness for our sex and our weed. But Twitter has lots of other social norms and not all of them are so friendly and fun.

If the new management at Twitter could fix one element of the platform, my choice would be their nudging “your reply is hostile” prompts. I am, as Spock once said of Captain Kirk, prone to colorful metaphors. I swear. A lot. And the Twitter “be friendly” screen is a constant companion of mine.

Twitter sending me a warning that “Most people don’t post replies like this”

I was goofing around in a thread about ham radios that we should become ungovernable to our HOAs. Sure some Karens might take offense at me lobbing f bombs at the authority of your home owners associations, but most people wouldn’t. I’m not going to train Twitter’s algorithm to recognize this social nicety though. T

Now I could comply with the screen and edit my tweet. I could comply and say actually no I’m not being hostile I’m making a joke. But freaky they should let me say fuck HOAs if I want to even if it’s not a joke. And I’m not going to conform to this social grace. If anything the screens little nudging hand encouraging me to be nice makes me want to push back even harder.

I’d love to see the metrics on if this improves behavior or not as human nature suggests it might make it worse. I know it makes me more hostile. I double down on my responses just because inhumane algorithms are coded as “the man” in most media. I will not comply. And like my response I am become ungovernable, destroyer of Twitter norms. Oppenheimer got it right.

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Internet Culture

Day 660 and When Extremely Online Goes Terminal

I committed one of the cardinal sins of the extremely online yesterday. So much discourse was happening I overwhelmed myself. Just like an endless stream of stuff was hitting my hind brain and like an idiot I just kept drinking from the firehose of engagement. I stayed up till 1am.

I’m typically careful about how much central nervous system stress I’m willing to tolerate. It’s a hazard of the job when being visibly online and searching for investments is mostly virtual. Purposely consuming a significant amount of bad news or scrolling the deep cuts of the dark corners of the message boards is meant to be done in small doses. I have no need to push my endocrine system into permanent fight or flight. No one does. It’s very counterproductive.

Going into a sympathetic nervous response is a part of life though. Some stress is good. I have an entire routine for soothing an overstimulated vagus nerve. I take adaptogens. I meditate. I live in Montana with plenty of open spaces and fresh air. I am skilled in discerning agitprop from all corners of the information wars. When I dive into the dopamine river I do so responsibly with the right tools. Don’t try this at home kids.

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune from drowning in the dopamine drip. I just have a good chance of pulling myself out before it’s too late. Around 9pm or so it became clear that even after a quiet dinner, some CBD and THC gummies, and relaxing television with my husband that I was in fact still very much in sympathetic response.

I panicked a little bit as hour after hour passed and I continued to be reactive. I’d started a negative flywheel. I took an Ativan fully expecting the steroid of the mind to knock me out. It did not. And so giving in to all my worst impulses stayed on Twitter. Fuck it if the good rare drugs weren’t doing it. I said “let ‘er rip!” I had recently finished the Bear.

Today I undid the damage. I slept until my body decided it was time to wake up. I followed my supplement routine carefully. For the TMI readers I had about a dozen orgasms. I slept some more. I stretched and took a walk. I took a long leisurely shower with every possibly form of exfoliating and conditioning I could imagine. And now at the end of the day I think I might have pushed my case of terminally online back to a place of merely extremely online. Let that be a lesson to everyone.

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 654 and Inappropriate Language

As much as I love to joke about getting cancelled on Twitter, I’ve never actually worried about getting dinged. I resisted getting a Blue Check and otherwise pursuing the trappings of being a power user as I was confident that my real world connections would overcome any algorithmic nonsense.

Digital power still resides on a firmament of real world power. I figured I know the right people in real life at Twitter, so short of me encouraging a coup while also being the President of the United States of America, I was pretty safe in maintaining control of my account. This was perhaps a bit naive and I knew it.

The algorithms do in fact come for us all. I got an unprompted warning today that a user on my account (I’m the only user but whatever) had been deemed to be using inappropriate language.

A Twitter warning saying my account AlmostMedia has inappropriate language so is ineligible to run advertisements

At some point I had the power to run promoted posts, otherwise known as advertisements, but because I have angered the language police at Twitter I am now no longer allowed to pay to promote my own speech. I guess I overrode the “are you sure you want to tweet this most users don’t use this speech” warning one too many times.

I swear more than average for a woman but probably a lot less than average for someone in finance. My account is notably a shitposter account. I remain fascinated by social status and access of all kinds, and shitposting remains of the higher status activities in social media culture as it demonstrates you need not be censored by social mores or common decency. Except apparently I can be.

You can get worked up about whether this infringes on my speech as I can say anything I like but now I’m no longer able to pursue any paid reach. This is the popular theory that everyone is entitled to free speech but not free reach. Or I guess in my case paid reach.

To be honest I had no intention of buying any paid reach advertising on Twitter. The folks I care about generally seem to get my Tweets and I’ve got no sense I’ve been shadow banned. Well, ok now I am worried but I wasn’t before this goofy warning.

To me this feels like a reminder that Twitter just doesn’t give a fuck about its power users. I am a well networked and well liked (or well hated) account with powerful followers in the core demographics that matter on Twitter.

I sit inside a nexus of media, finance and Silicon Valley personalities that care a lot about the platform even as the platform mostly doesn’t give a shit about us. Which is arguably why we’ve all spent six months giving a shit about Elon Musk buying Twitter. When a power user gets banned from advertising producers it’s not really a problem for the user, it’s a problem for the ad products team who is fucking up making money. You know, their job.

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 651 and Best Guess

I’ve loved the discourse of indignation that has surrounded rich men doing deals via text messages. There was lot of hand waving about the death of genius and the meaning of it all. Isn’t it such a scandal our best and brightest are just saying shit on Twitter DM?

I suppose if you never worked in startups or finance it might come as a genuine shock that rich techie people are no better or smarter than anyone else. Why the fuck do these dorks control all the money and resources then? I’d say it is because they are willing to make their best guesses.

One of my favorite scenes in Star Trek is Spock struggling through a series of calculations and informing Captain Kirk that he may need to make a guess. Kirk’s response? That’s extraordinary! Spock is naturally confused. Dr McCoy or Bones has to do some translating.


Bones: He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.
Spock: Then you’re saying… it is a compliment?
Bones: It is.
Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

Star Trek IV The Voyage Home (The Whale Movie)

Everyone is just muddling through and making their best guesses. Even the best and brightest among us are struggling to make it all work. I’m not suggesting the folks making the Twitter deal are as good as Spock but they are just making their best guesses too.

And for whatever reason they are willing to put a lot of money, time and reputation on the line to see where their best guess might go. That’s pretty courageous in its own right.

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Internet Culture

Day 615 and Look Back

I recommend having habits from which one doesn’t deviate. I’ve come to appreciate how much the daily exercise of writing has come to provide a kind of scaffolding on which I hang the rest of my day.

But it can be easy to get lost in a habit too. I had originally started the act of daily writing as the habit. But I sometimes forget that there is more I can do on top of the foundation I have laid over these past eighteen months. I could integrate more of my past writing into the daily writing. I could do more to make it visible. I could do more to make it accessible. I could do more to make it durable. Perhaps now that writing every day is a firm habit I can expand on it.

In that spirit I am doing a little link round up on what might warrant a look back. A few posts that I thought were particularly good. A few posts that reflect some of the zeitgeist that I am digesting. And a throwback that some of my internet friends reminded were worth while.

The Thursday Styles Problem is probably one of my favorite essays. It’s about who knows what when and how that power flows.

I did a few write ups about masculinity and the internet. Two are about groypers. One is about cucking in the imagination of the American conservative. Or be careful as you can absolutely get brain worms from the internet.

I also had an essay on doing errands and the reality of living your daily life in a time of collapse. It pairs well with this bit about shrinkflation and consumer packaged goods.