Category: Internet Culture

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 263 and I’m Baby

One of my friends got me an embroidered “I’m baby” patch with a Moomintroll holding a knife in place of the original Kirby. It’s an elaborate play on the “I’m Baby” meme and was a truly excellent Christmas gift. I’m a fan of the Finnish children’s author Tove Janson who created the Moomin series and also emotionally baby and my friend knows it.

Original “I’m Baby” Kirby meme vs a photo of my Moonin “I’m Baby” embroidered patch

The “I’m baby” meme is generally a play on why someone should be allowed to continue with their behavior or emotions without consequence. It’s a kind of elaborate joke about wishing to dodge responsibility if only for a few minutes. Obviously it’s very popular with Gen Z but it’s really more about wishing to live in a world where it’s even possible to be a baby when life feels overwhelming.

The original meme came out of an emergency but it’s come to be a kind of wishful demand and hope that one can just well be a baby for a bit and have someone else handle it.

Moomintroll is an excellent stand in for Kirby in the meme because in the Finnish cartoons he never has to live without Moomin Mama. Moomintroll is an archetypal baby. The Moomin universe has constant catastrophe (no seriously there are floods and asteroids) but Moomintroll can always count on Moomin Mama. It’s a soothing set of books for children obviously but it’s also just nice that there are parental figures to which one can turn. That’s a fantasy we all have at some point. Especially when shit looks bad.

But being baby also means someone else has to be the adult. The willful insistence on being baby is about giving your power to someone else. Unless you are literally baby (in which case how are you reading this blog) you’ve chosen to put someone else in the position of power. Which is an important lesson for adulthood. You always have the power. Even if you chose to be baby. Especially if you are baby.

So be careful when you say “I’m baby” and act helpless. You gave up your power. And that’s alright. Being helpless can be a totally cool sex thing and it’s great to chose your kink when. But you’ve got to have consent for that shit. Bringing someone else into your fantasy of being baby might be non-consensual. When my friend jokes that I’m baby it’s because he knows I like to give up my power. But alas it’s a fantasy and I can’t go back to being Moomintroll for real. But it’s a nice patch right?

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 261 and Game Drama

I have been playing a mobile massively multiplayer online game for a couple of years. It’s a pay-to-play game that mashes together every mechanic and trope into one stupidly expensive pile of unoriginal comfort. I absolutely love playing it. It’s called Lords Mobile. It is entirely worth playing if you appreciate the craftsmanship and conversion marketing. It doesn’t gave any unique creativity but that isn’t the point. It’s just perfectly executed to be an engaging game. I cannot recommend this game enough if you want a soothing “everything and the kitchen sink” social game.

Because it asks so little of the gamer intellectually, the appeal of the game is in the community of people. You work in teams of 100 called a guild. This can be a very low key camaraderie situation or the kind of bond where people spend tens of thousands of dollars to compete together in their chosen hobby. Needless to say if you are in the group that really spends real money and time you get to see human nature nakedly on display. It gets wild.

Ive seen guilds explode because a guy was cheating on his girlfriend with another player. That mistress then destroyed 30,00 worth of gear and destroyed the guild. I’ve seen people steal maxed out gaming accounts worth over $100,000 with no recourse. Just poof you trusted someone with your keys. Ooops!

And today I saw three dudes try to convince their guild that the leader of the group was stealing from the guild because she’d allegedly been in sexual relationships with all of them. It doesn’t sound like she stole anything from anyone but they resented that they had spent money on gifts for her account. The guild didn’t believe the dudes. It’s their problem if they want to buy gifts was the general consensus.

The level of human drama is probably even more enthralling than the game. And the game is designed to be very engaging. I don’t watch reality television but I have to imagine it has a similar “oh no she didn’t” spirit. If you enjoy watching the depths of sorrow and the purity of genuine human connection it’s worth a try. Just be warned that you may become emotionally attached. I definitely have. I’ve met some dear friends in these guilds. But I’d recommend you not give anyone your credit card. Or if you do don’t go whining about it to me.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 260 and A Good Schtick

I admire a well executed gimmick. Being clearly branded has become a necessity in digital life. Living life at a scale larger than your local community turns out to require we communicate who we are for easier communication.

Mediocre marketing people will insist that you find areas you can “own” in planning materials for promotional campaigns. They want you to find a schtick. But you better like what you come up with as you will be forced to repeat your greatest hits ad nauseam.

It’s not that they are wrong. Repetition is pedagogy. Which is a fancy way of saying in order to teach you must repeat your lessons. Humans usually require hearing something a few times before the information will stick. But then it can be very hard to dislodge a piece of information that we’ve become convinced is true. That’s why it’s much harder to change a brand than it is to build one. We get indignant when we feel someone has mislead us with their brand.

That’s why you need to be very sure if you are going to dig into a schtick. The temptation to go full Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow can be tempting. It’s seems like it’s an easier path to attention and awareness if you develop a clear point of view. But be warned, if you change it people will get mad at you. If you explore shades of grey you will get called a hypocrite. Nuance is the enemy of clarity. And clarity is required to reach big audiences.

I swear half of cancel culture is just assholes who don’t understand that their friends may see them as whole empathetic humans who are more than their schtick but the masses won’t. And remember you too are a member of the masses and judge others hypocrisy just as harshly as they judge yours. That’s like the basis of all Abrahamic religions. If the golden rule was easy we probably wouldn’t need to attend various worship services regularly.

So if you see someone with a good schtick admire it. But recognize it’s a Faustian bargain. They sanded off some portion of the wholeness of their being in order to be easier to understand. And if they drop some portion of that gimmick in the course of their lives it’s worth showing a little grace to them. You’ll appreciate it when you require the same.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media

Day 251 or NYFW SS08

Today is Star Trek day. The original series debuted 55 years ago. I was searching for a photo of myself as a child wearing a captain’s uniform to commemorate it and instead stumbled upon a file containing my old WordPress blog. So rather than find an adorable picture of me in a red jumpsuit I found this picture from September 10th 2007 waiting for the Marc Jacob’s fashion show.

Several invitations to Marc Jacob’s fashion show for his spring 2008 collection seen from above. A blackberry, an iPhone & a recorder are scattered between wine glasses, a carton of cigarettes and two arms.

I used to be a fashion blogger you see. I have a few dubious CV distinctions, one of which is being the first person to live blog fashion week (at least according to Women’s Wear Daily). In the late aughts just before the Great Recession, it was a hell of a time to work in fashion and I wanted in. Being utterly unqualified I did what any kid would do and started a new media company. It went pretty well, we turned it into an ad tech company, sold it, and survived “RIP good times” but before all of that I partied professionally. A lot of business in fashion used to get done over drinks in fancy hotel lobbies while we all clutched our Blackberries.

This particular photo represents a time when Condé Nast still mattered. I was at the Mercer Hotel with my friend Lauren Goldstein Crowe (also apparently economic writer Felix Solomon). My friend Lauren was the newly installed fashion columnist for the new glossy magazine about money called Portfolio Magazine. We were killing time in the then trendy Soho hotel before the always reliably two hours late Marc Jacob’s show.

I don’t actually remember if I legitimately had an invitation or if I snuck in with Lauren that season. Back in 2007, if you can believe it, social media was considered very uncouth and no one has begun writing “bloggers are taking over the front row” thought pieces yet. Could have gone either way.

Portfolio was the last hurrah of the print behemoths, a glossy magazine dedicated to the culture of finance, so naturally I was appreciative that I could tag along with my much better financed friend. Condé Nast reported spent 100m on the magazine and I appreciate that some small portion of that went to drinks before the fashion of the season. Lauren is an especially erudite editor, of the sort who writes deeply studied long form work, so the fact that Condé Nast was paying to send her to fashion week was pretty decadent. She wasn’t a mid tier market editor who needed to see the clothes. She covers culture so the entire milieu was her domain. The gossip before the shows absolutely counted.

Of course, the business of media couldn’t support that sort of thing forever with changing advertising models and Condé Nast didn’t really keep up with the times. It’s a real loss. People like me ended up winning and it’s been perhaps a net loss for some things that were valuable cultural artifacts.

I spent no more than a couple grand getting our rinky dink operation up and running. We still managed to publish faster than anyone else. I had several meltdowns in service of that effort. In hindsight it was probably a waste but it felt so very new and urgent to be publishing things at the very second a look went down the runway. Now fashion week is an exercise in instant publishing and live-streaming everything from a million perspectives. But the actual studied writers don’t get expense accounts and drivers and corporate Blackberries anymore. If they are lucky maybe they have a blog with a subscription. Lauren knew it even then. She and I slowly occupied the same basic space in the ecosystem. She was just 15 years ahead of seeing it.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 247 and Rooting for You

I watched a viral video of a young white American kid who claims to have quit a 100K job in order to pitch YouTube star Logan Paul for a job. It’s really hard to watch because this poor young man just utterly shits the bed on asking his favorite social celebrity to take a chance on him. He can’t even tell Logan what he is best at. He doesn’t know himself and thus cannot capitalize on his moment in the sun to show his worth. Honestly it will break your heart.

The shitty sad part of watching this kid utterly fail at self advocacy is if you are in a position of power you genuinely want to help people if they are clear about how you can do so. No one wants to say no. We all want to get to yes.

Being asked “what are you good at?” is an empathy driven open ended “get me to yes” kind of question. Logan Paul, never a celebrity I’d have previously associated with emotionally empathic, actually encourages this young fan. Even in a short clip he encourages him.

It breaks my heart a little that this kid doesn’t have anything to say for himself. Even saying something small like “ I’m the best getting groceries quickly” would have given him a chance.

I think the reason this hits me hard is that everyone has emotionally been that young man. Asked someone to help and just utterly bombed. I know I’ve taken a swing and asked powerful connected intelligent people to help me and then subsequently failed to rise to the moment. I carry those emotional failures with me. I think we all do. It’s what drives us to be better. Those moments of defeat can remake us for success. They course correct us. But only if we don’t let don’t let those failures beat us for good. We have to see the patterns that brought it into our life, accept that it’s our failure, and let it improve us.

That’s why it’s so important when you are in a position of saying no to someone to do it with as much grace as Logan Paul. I know it’s a weird sentence to type. We owe it to ourselves to there to hear them at their lowest moment with the hope may eventually become the path to their better self. Because surely someone once did that for you. That’s wisdom.

It’s hard getting a concise answer to “why you” and finding and accepting the truth of what you are truly better than anyone else is at is a lifetime of work. Being able to do it when you are young is what makes for a life that will give you satisfaction instead of disappointment.

I genuinely believe we want to help others get there. I used to hate when someone who turned down one of my pitches would say they “were rooting for me.” I thought it was dismissive. Now I choose to understand that that most people want to help you succeed.

If someone accepts time to talk to you it’s probably because human to human they would like to get to yes. I now take “we’re rooting for you” as sincere. Maybe it’s not in some cases but why not default to good intent first?

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 246 and Culture Bores

Anytime a new conflagration breaks out in the culture war I worry. What if this is the time I finally get information poisoning? I’ll surf the discourse and try to wrap my head around the issue. If it’s just a minor flare up, an outbreak of zeitgeist, my rational antibodies react swiftly and I bounce back from any emotional reactivity without getting sick. But when it’s full blown infection of the entire body politic I am not so lucky. I will succumb just like the rest of the country.

To fight off cultural contagion it will take several days of inflammation. I’ll be hot, bothered and have muddled thinking. It will take all of my energy and focus to see through what is the immune response and what is the infection. And then only then can I begin to consider treatment to get back to an emotional baseline.

Yes I am absolutely torturing a metaphor here but I’ve dealt with several cultural infections over the last year and it’s been a mess. My natural immunity to poor information environment isn’t total. Raging partisans spewing talking points can infect anyone. I’m sick of being infected just because I read the news. No one can be expected to quarantine their entire lives from current events but it sure feels like the isolated forever crowd is winning when someone tells me “just don’t pay attention.”

I encourage you not to be a culture bore. A culture bore is someone who spreads culture war contamination. Sure you might not realize you are infected. But you can take sensible precautions and it makes the informational commons better for everyone

Don’t spread a malicious informational meme unless you are willing to let others get infected. Which you might be. You might be a partisan. I don’t know. That is your right. But then you’ve got to ask yourself if I am sharing some tidbit of bullshit am I doing so because I think it’s beneficial? Or am I an unwitting carrier of some viral nonsense?

Sure I get it. It sucks to consider that your meme hygiene might be bad! I’ve been there. I picked content up from some dive account that only retweets resistance grifters and regretted it later. I’ve liked some kooky tweet from an account who turns out to believe the January 6th insurrection was patriotic. We’ve all done it. But for the sake of everyone else enjoying the information commons and being decent citizens together try not to do it deliberately.

Categories
Internet Culture Reading

Day 244 and Crypto Fiction

Science fiction has often been the proving ground for reality. Without Star Trek I doubt I’d be typing this out on my own personal tricorder (mine is called an iPhone). Imagination begets reality. Much of the internet was charted in the genre of cyberpunk long before the rest of us got online.

I think we are entering a new phase with crypto and I’d like to compile a list of foundational texts that have given us the imaginative framework for concepts like the metaverse, DAOs, and smart contracts. I believe this to be a distinct genre from cyberpunk even though classics like Snowcrash transcend both genres.

For instance I don’t think Neuromancer is a crypto novel even though it is an internet novel. I’ll have to work through my logic and categorization on that front but my instinct is that novels that explore networking and computing are not in and of themselves crypto novels. They have to include some aspect of decentralization to qualify. Further aspects like self executing logic for corporations, societal organization, peer to peer and permission-less code and other similar themes I think all fall under decentralization.

Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson – the original metaverse novel. Hiro Protagonist literally inspired Stack’s Hiro. Full disclosure my husband is the COO. Ironically he has not read the book.

Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge – what is basically boomer has to adjust to economic life that is organized around what are functionally DAOs with the help of his granddaughter. This grossly oversimplified plot shouldn’t be used to judge the book which is actually a singularity story.

Daemon & Freedom by Daniel Suarez – the predictive text finisher for Gmail takes over the planet by creating a smart contract. If you ever wondered what would happen if what if Grammarly becomes Putin this is for you. But I do think it is an excellent exploration of how DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) could replace the corporation.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow – you could include any of the books in his Homeland universe but this one pushes home a bit harder how centralized services destroy privacy which is core to why we need peer to peer permission-less systems.

Analog by Elliot Pepper – While it is technically a thriller trilogy there is an augmented persistent metaverse that is run by an organization that transcends the corporation to be something much more. Plus it has lobbyists, self destructive energy billionaire and engineer heroes.

Acellerando by Charles Stross – it starts in the home of the corporation Amsterdam and pans out from there to include things that look like smart contracts that are in fact too smart, lobsters, shell corporations, and the eventual end logic and utility issues brought on by the logic of “always be growing.” Also snag Neptune’s Brood which deals with the monetary policy implications of faster than light travel in a galactic civilization that needs slow stores of value. Cold wallets!

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

237 and Crypto-Optimism

As much as Silicon Valley and startup culture claim a kind of techno-optimism, in the wake of the social media partisanship, science skepticism and climate concerns, it feels hard to really dream big. People say catch phrases like “it’s time to build” but we all understand there are limits to the problems we solve in capitalism’s current markets. And no one believes the government can solve anything.

Any possibility or big dream can be clouded by its politics or cultural baggage if you let it. We yell about cancel culture but it’s really a lack of imagination. A kind of giving in to the boundaries of what is acceptable has captured the moment.

But I’m noticing a genuine mood of possibilities in crypto. A levity that believes in wide open horizons. Instead of the long horizon, crypto sees a bright one.

Maybe it’s because crypto’s proponents genuinely believe it will be possible to toss out legacy systems. Crypto is still so new the disillusionment of compromise to human nature, design dependencies or aggregate power seem far away. The problems that plague ant endeavor haven’t become inevitable. No wonder the mood is ebullient. We are genuinely happy in crypto.

You can imagine a world in which the DAO destroys the corporation. You can imagine a world in which artists are paid directly by patrons in effectively priced markets which respect their ownership. You can imagine expensive and exclusive financial products being automated away so even a small independent entity can access the best without bleeding out through a dozen service fees. Everything could still be a utopia.

And while I know it won’t it feels really great to be optimistic about something.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 236 and Founders Who Write

A heuristic I’m playing with for assessing founders is how good they are at writing.

And while this approach to vetting a founder is a practical method (everyone writes) it’s obviously limited. But I think it is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an approximation of founder capacity in a swift and asynchronous way. I like to see examples of founder writing whether it is Tweets, blog posts, technical documentation or a Notion document.

It’s my belief that we’ve overweighted salesmanship, pitching & synchronic communication methods (remember reality distortion fields) which has led to prioritizing messianic style founders. A rousing keynote speech used to be the gold standard. But this may be less relevant as teams go fully remote and more work is done asynchronously. Your capacity to document and communicate meaning at scale is crucial as a founder.

The canonical example of a founder who telegraphed competence and meaning through writing was Joel Spolsky. The Joel on Software blog established him as ur technical writer and gave us documentation culture which blossomed in Stack Overflow.

A more recent example for me is Devin Finzer who I discovered through his technical writing. Long before OpenSea was a clear winner in the NFT space, Devin’s writing caught my attention as his crisp clear articulation on the basics non-fungible tokens was legible to everyone.

My guess is this heuristic of focusing on writing instead of showmanship will improve overall diversity of founders & companies in a portfolio as less bias creeps into asynchronous documentation whereas mirroring & social cues easily tilt pitching in favor of certain classes of people

I’m also keen on folks who like messaging culture. Being able to hop in and out of conversations is crucial to team building & scaling. Those that are happy to DM & chat to build rapport in distributed fashion more easily will succeed at building relationships in a remote first world.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 234 and Information Poisoning

Do you ever read a tweet and check the person’s mutuals to make sure you understand the context?

Because I follow a number of extremely different communities with wildly different priors, it’s actually quite a challenge to see if someone is black pilled, red pilled, tankie or neo reactionary.

I consider it crucial to keep a balance of crazies in my timeline lest I accidentally get pilled by one group simply by mere exposure bias.

That’s a good argument for following as diverse a group as possible. A full timeline is one with a thousand biases blooming. This is good for keeping an open mind but it is also a protective technique known as flooding the zone. It is much harder to determine where one’s sensibilities lay if they consider counsel from all.

The downside is that we call people out for following “wrong think” in some corners. The only way to inoculate against that risk is heavily telegraphing that you follow all kinds. Impossible to show purity so to protect from any charges you muddy the waters.

I’ve noticed that progressive tech & red pillers are especially gnarly about policing for thought purity. It is relatively easy to fight back against, but then you have to be committed to seeing ALL zeitgeist which is exhausting.

I had to stop consumption for 48 hours last week. Floating above the discourse generally stokes my creativity. I live on the energy of the zeitgeist. But a few issues (vaccines & Kabul) are so upsetting that I just had to stop and recenter.

I think I have what might be labeled natural immunity to discourse. It doesn’t usually hurt my emotional state. For me, discourse functions more as a barometer of positions I follow to indicate long term movements.

Very rarely does it overcome my long term stakes. When it does it’s usually because I have information poisoning. It doesn’t happen too often. And I can shake it fast. But it’s not easy to cultivate for most people. I think it might be innate. That natural immunity I mentioned. Some people just have a higher tolerance for information toxicity and flow rates. Best to find out what yours is and to sense in others their informational environment as well. It’s edge.