Category: Internet Culture

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Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1868 and Educating An An Entire Species or Start With Your Family

A viral essay was posted a few days ago by a Matt Schumer meant to help introduce the current state of artificial intelligence tools to people who do not work in technology.

It’s a very compelling piece of writing (or maybe it’s just reading), which I believe is well received by normal people especially older family members or technical skeptics. They are often the hardest to reach because of age and experience gaps and a smooth essay goes down well.

The author is the founder of HyperWrite. His company offers a suite of AI writing and research tools. So yes, his excellent writing and wide reach (over 40 million views so far) were achieved thanks his fluent use of AI for both writing and promotion.

The end result of using tools is an excellent essay distributed far and wide. Or if you prefer, the end product was a tool shaped object which gave people a sense of understanding. That’s valuable.

Don’t let his usage of AI in producing this writing and publishing stop you from taking his points seriously. In fact, it should encourage you to read it and consider if you want to share it.

You too will soon be competing in a world where regular people like Matt are capable of super human feats. Perhaps you’d like the same leverage for yourself and your family.

All of us can learn to work with the amplifying effects of networks and artificial intelligence algorithms with practice and usage. Allowing us global reach and potentially maximizing the potential of our insights and points of view. That should make us feel better about where we are headed and not worse.

I feel it is useful to share the essay with your skeptical family and friends who are either scared, confused, angry or indifferent about the rapid changes because it is the current reality we all live in.

I know it’s hard as a middle aged professional to learn new tricks. I’m in the middle of it too. But we have to educate all of us and it’s going to take some time. I’d rather we get started on it. And on that note my lunch break from Montana’s digital innovation committee is only an hour so I’ll get back to it.

Categories
Internet Culture Travel

Day 1860 and Some Technical Difficulties On The ISP Side Perhaps

I’m not anywhere particularly unusual (a European capital) but all of my end to end encryption applications, most crucially Signal and Twitter are not working.

Nothing will send and I’m not receiving messages now either. Why? Well, I’ve got conspiracy theories but I doubt it’s sinister and I’ll boot up a VPN in the meantime if it persists.

I am nearby several embassies (of the regions you might expect to be dicey including my own) and just uphill of city’s international school so maybe one of them is being a dick.

Or perhaps the Airbnb I am using has an ISP provider that is throttling end to end encryption for some reason. For what reason I couldn’t fathom but I am annoyed. YouTube is streaming in full glory on an enormous television but I can’t text in peace to my loved ones.

So this blog post will have to serve a test post to let folks know that I am fine and anyone who needs to know where I am does which is to be fair a pretty darn small list. I’ll move if the issue persists. I’m a mere 7 kilometers away from the center of the city where the internet was working fine earlier today so I’ve got no idea why I’m having issues now. If I’d known I’d have done my writing earlier. A part of me wonders and worries about what might eventually stop my writing experiment being a communication blackout. Though I never thought I’d have a problem in Europe. That is the stuff of authoritarians right?

I have got unpleasant notions about why a European city and its nearby embassies wouldn’t wish to let people communicate freely and privately on websites with end to end encryption. It’s just amusing they are happy to let me watch Netflix and Youtube. The New York Times has no problem getting through nor my other media applications on my phone.

Having been behind America’s first freedom to compute act, I suppose I’ll let my emotions run a bit wild here as a treat. It seems especially concerning that this sort of informational throttle by big European ISPs seems possible and even likely. That embassies might want to extend a little protection beyond their very high walls seems even more probable. Which is not very nice of them.

It makes my mind go straight to propaganda campaigns and not technical difficulties. In this day and age, we should never take for granted our right to express ourselves via compute freely and privately. Stay frosty and I hope this post makes it to you.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 1850 and Midlife (of The Blog) Crisis

I feel so lost right now. Some things are going quite well and others are not. This could be a metaphor for my own life yes (and it is) but I intended the post to be about feeling lost in my own writing project.

I don’t know if it is the midlife of the blog, but it’s not the beginning anymore. Half a decade of writing is quite clearly an edge case. But why do I keep doing it, what am I trying to say and am I trying to reach anyone? I’m not sure I have an answer.

The open internet increasingly feels like a fantasy from a different time. I still believe that the internet is meant for humans to connect with each other freely and openly and I love this utopian ambition of shared interoperable protocols for communication.

So while I write this daily log for myself, my records, and my desire to improve my thinking skills it’s obvious it’s not just for me. Being a part of the records of humanity is no small thing. I want to be in the records. I want artificial intelligence to be trained on my work. I want my voice to be heard by those who wish to hear it.

It’s prideful but I believe that I have something valuable to contribute to our collective next steps in developing new kinds of intelligence. I want these models and their future programs (dare I say progeny) to be trained not just by governments or corporations but through contributions from regular individuals like myself. I’m just not quite sure I know what my best contribution looks like anymore.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1844 and Sorkin Syndrome

I have no idea how Netflix decides on its content deals but I enjoy popping into a new region and being shown classics from another intellectual property catalog than America’s list

Last year the entire Star Trek catalog from Captain Kirk to Deep Space 9 was available in Europe on Netflix. A content deal I knew wouldn’t last but enjoyed.

Who isn’t soothed watching a world where Captain Picard manages a crisis with a team of rational officers committed to collaboration and curiosity? Probably most people but I’m a nerd.

I am pleased that Gene Roddenberry gave us space cowboys and turned it into a camp art franchise for the ages. Paramount its owner is now owned by Larry and David Ellison. The IP being owned by someone made wealthy through computing seems on brand. But it also means it Star Trek isn’t going to show back up on Netflix anytime soon even in Europe.

As an owner of franchise television I understand their motives. But as a consumer it makes good sense to run your content through a VPN. As an American you tend to forget it’s necessary until a foreign government dings your social media. The United Kingdom amirite?

For normies who don’t tempt speech laws on Twitter for fun, I’d expect the benefits of a VPN would be getting to an old television show that isn’t shown in your region but maybe your average Netflix user isn’t that sophisticated. Or they want to be sure they don’t break the rules who knows where the ethics of intellectual property are anymore.

All this is to say with Star Trek gone I was curious what would replace it in my rotation of shows on Netflix but not owned by Netflix. And sure enough a new pile of content changed over in 2026 and I was given Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing on my Netflix as I moved into a new region.

That’s a fantastic world even less likely yo emerge than Gene Roddenberry’s space socialism. A world where American liberals run a coalition of competent and patriotic civil servants who are working for a patrician economics Nobel laureate who ran New Hampshire? Things really were different being the neoliberal consensus broke down.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Reading

Day 1831 and A Stenographer For Everyone

I hate to use a dictation software to write a piece that I typically write with my own two hands and ten fingers but I’m not entirely sure that I see the difference between typing out a hundred words a minute on a mobile phone versus saying something a little more slowly to a stenographer application. I use Wispr Flow

I’m sure if you are a Paul Kingsnorth type, you would be happy to remind us that we’ve lost the “steno-pools” filled with women whose job was knowing just how to speed their notes to keep the dictation flowing. Those jobs are gone as the personal computer made its debut.

I don’t mind writing as I can write just a little bit faster than I can talk. And I often find that my dictation is less pulled together than my writing. But isn’t it funny that we should have reached this point so many centuries later? Yeah.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1809 and Hating Content Management Systems

I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. Like rounding the corner to twenty years (in actuality going on 17) of time in the open source content management system.

Blogging was the new hot thing when I was in college. Blogging platforms emerged out of the strange tendency millennials and Gen Xers had for publicly sharing their own self reflection. I presume we got this from the Me Generation who raised us.

“I learned it from you Mom and Dad!”

Those early generations of social media all had flavors of being oriented towards writing with some multimedia mixed into mediums that were immersive and hyperlinked m but also narratives shared in reverse chronological order because the norm.

We went from Geocities to Livejournal to blogger, Typepad (RIP), and WordPress over the course of a few booms and busts. If you were blogging before 2005, you probably could have made a career out of it.

I don’t just mean writing, though lots of bloggers because professional writers, but whole online communities turned into careers from fashion and beauty to legal and financial.

Alas, the type of person who might once have made a wonderful career out of being a writer was caught out by the gutting of print media. America lost especially the kinds of middle class aspirant jobs that local news and independent publishers once provided for all kinds of creatives.

I’ve watched many platforms attempt to replace media jobs. Tumblr once hired a stable of writers. So did Medium. Neither ended well for anyone. Watching the comings and go of platforms and networks instilled a kind of paranoia in me about owning your own space.

I prefer posting under my own name on my own domain on an open source maintained piece of software as a back. I don’t pretend like I own my distribution on any social media channels. I’m sure Twitter will always be around wink wink.

So I am inclined to distrust Substack though I am reading more and more on the platform and I’ve enjoyed writing my own beauty blog there in the last few months. Thus far they managed to thread the needle on making money and making a social network and I don’t feel fearful that it will suddenly disappear like I once did.

Which is really a shame as it’s designed almost completely for the Gen C and Millenial set who really wished they had media jobs. The most successful did have media jobs and realized they could make more as an independent niche like the venture beat or by pandering to a very specific demographic or market that the giant media platforms don’t like.

These professionals class writers have a preference set for how they do content management and writing that just doesn’t remotely overlap with how I like to write. They want easy peasy hit publish. I want mobile. I want cross platform writing. It’s funny to finally have a content management system solve for monetizing and it’s just not made for me. But distribution and payment matters so I’m not booting up anything on my own without handling that first.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1805 and Dark Leisure, Time Violence & Outputting Value

Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The Mythical Man–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.

The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.

I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.

Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.

If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways without getting fired, in this new artificial intelligence roll out we see another type of value capture mismatch between input labor and firm.

We are seeing what Fabian Steltzer calls Dark leisure. Others call it shadow user innovation.

Innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management doesn’t get counted and workers are reticent to be transparent.

the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org

so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”

Fabian Steltzer

Anthropic released a study on the supposed stigma attached to using artificial intelligence at work. Humans are already reacting to artificial intelligence as if it were an existential threat.

Except it’s been generally existentially freeing up to this point. Anyone who has used commercial large language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?

Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agents than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.

The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!

We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.

We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual has a theory of consciousness systems they believe makes this is a form of time violence.

Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity

The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence

– Idea Nexus Ventures

We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising, so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage as long as you can. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.

I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up, but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1803 and Anemoia

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.

The newest TikTok trend involves Zoomers pretending to be happy millennials in 2012 Williamsburg Brooklyn. They romanticize millennial optimism as unpolished and carefree for some sort of shared but unreal nostalgia for pre-gentrification Brooklyn.

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.

Michael Milaflora brought to my attention Gen Z’s “anemoia” which is a broader trend. A 2023 study in Emotion journal found 68% of young adults report nostalgia for past decades they didn’t live, linked to rising anxiety levels post-pandemic.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1797 and Last Minute Cyber Week Shopping

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.