Category: Internet Culture

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 113 and Competence

I’ve never found it amusing to watch people be incompetent. The fool isn’t funny to me. Television shows with shitty protagonists who can’t do their jobs, and don’t care, make me sad. I don’t find The Office enjoyable. I never understood Arrested Development. I didn’t even attempt It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The shows I gravitate towards are the ones where people want to make good things. Where the competence is the point. Shows like The West Wing, Star Trek, Mad Men, or The Expanse, where striving to be better is either the core virtue or the central tension.

I hate watching dysfunctional workplaces. Shows where the protagonist is fighting against bumbling bureaucracy don’t inspire laughs for me. They make me want to avoid ever being in a large organization. I still fear organizations like Human Resources. The pop culture obsession with being a knowing cynic makes me despair. How is it better to know something sucks, but rather than try to make something better, you laugh about how it all sucks? It’s not fucking funny to me. It’s sad.

I don’t know when America culturally made the transition from believing those at the top had earned it to knowing it’s all a charade but it certainly wasn’t in my lifetime. When I came of age Clinton was already a liar. We knew the history of Vietnam and Watergate so why anyone gave a shit about a blow job was beyond me. The trend only continued with the aftermath of 9/11 and our forever wars. The Obama era seemed like it provided a reprieve for people at least pretending like achievement was a virtue but the backlash was so severe I worry that was actually a fantasy.

I wonder if the “fool” or the jester archetype has become our default aspiration. If entertainment has decided its simply more appealing to play for laughs than the boring tedious reality of building stories around competence don’t get made. We don’t see the inspiration of good work.

Which sucks as being competent feels amazing. Sure I play for laughs and shitpost on social media but I want to assure you that none of that feels as good as doing work well. I don’t care what kind of thing you are making. It can be a meal or a billion dollar company. The satisfaction of competence is deep. No laugh I’ll ever get from a shitpost will ever feed the soul like a real achievement. A sincere creation hits different. Not to say that humor has no plays or that a shitpost doesn’t have virtue (I will and have gone on at length about the creative necessity of shitposting), but that being a fool isn’t the only enjoyment in life. The enjoyments I relish most are where I’ve shown myself to be competent. And I like watching others be competent as well. So please share your accomplishments with me. Even, or especially, the small ones. I think it’s just great.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 111 and The Attention Economy

I like media. When I first moved to New York I had big dreams of getting hired to work at Condé Nast. This was almost immediately crushed by the reality that I was of average financial wealth (I moved to the city with about $500 and lived in a women’s SRO), not from a noteworthy family and notoriously poor at respecting authority.

But I was lucky enough to arrive in the media capital of the world just as blogging was turning into a cultural phenomenon. So it turns out I didn’t need to work for some bitchy queens to get a toehold in the industry! I was also wise enough to realize there was absolutely no fucking money in media early on so I watched many of my peers climb the ladder in new media jobs without being a member of the media myself.

I found ways to make money on marketing, branding, e-commerce and new media businesses. It was a lot more lucrative. Consequently I now have a large number of media friends (disclosure time) without any of the cultural baggage of being in media. Unless you count the time I was the first person to livestream fashion week. Which I didn’t technically have credentials to do but it got covered in Women’s Wear Daily.

I’m really grateful I never got suckered into actually being in media as I’d probably be broke, miserable and exhausted. And then if I admitted I was exhausted I’d have a bunch of the older generation of media folks dunking on me for saying that. Which is how I got into a shitposting thread with Glenn Greenwald today. Who I think might actually be in on the joke about grifter click culture.

If you don’t work in media I think you’ve got an inflated sense of their power and independence. It’s actually hard to make any money so you are always living at the whim of executives and editors. Most of them got into the business to tell crucial stories (naive but like good) and are stuck living at the mercy of a business that isn’t that lucrative.

A lot of bad faith arguments get made equating institutional power to individual power, and while it’s true having the power of the New York Times behind you matters, it’s also true that any random blogger like me has more freedom to pursue ideas than a staffer at a newspaper. So I think it’s sort of a reflection of insecurities anytime anyone gets worked up about media power. Especially if you know better as some of the older media folks like Greenwald do. These beat reporter exist in hierarchies with bills. They don’t have the freedom to shitpost like me or Glenn Greenwald. We are wealthy and independent. Beat writers are fighting constant turf wars just to stay employed.

It can also be true that beat reporters have to fight a constant battle for attention and clicks in order to stay employed. This means we get culture warriors and posturing. But both sides of each debate are engaged in a kind of elaborate attention grift. So when Taylor Lorenz or Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi sucker you in with a position on who is most virtuous the answer is whoever pays them. And guess who is paying? You and me. Our attention is getting monetized into all kinds of nifty revenue streams. I know this because that’s how I make my money. So next time you get worked up about the evils of media asking yourself why you are paying attention and who is benefiting.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 108 and Energy Vampires

Recently I’ve been watching a mockumentary about vampires living in Staten Island called What We Do in The Shadows. It’s surprisingly funny for what you’d imagine is a set of basic gags. My favorite running joke is a type of vampire called an Energy Vampire. Everyone in the house is your standard drinks blood loved forever vampire except “Colin Robinson” who is an energy vampire. He lives forever by draining the life force out of people. It’s the most common type of vampire.

As you probably guessed Colin Robinson is meant to remind you of vampires you probably have in your own life. The show runs heavily off “boring” jokes but the real kicker is how energy vampires are perpetual victims. Colin Robinson is always sucking you in with pity and apathy. Energy vampires prey on your emotions.

As you might expect they have an episode about social media and Colin Robinson gluts himself on the low quality but copious amounts of energy available. There is also a troll joke. It’s pretty funny because it rings true. One accidentally viral tweet and suddenly your energy is being sapped by a crowd of vampires. The extremely online eventually pick up some Van Helsing skills to keep their energy from being drained. I like to think I rarely spend time online without my garlic, holy zingers and reply through the heart stakes.

The real issue is when you discover you’ve got an energy vampire in your real life. I recently realized someone was draining my life force. I thought they were a friend but a set of misunderstandings I finally realized they’ve been sucking me dry for years. They are pretty good energy vampires as I actually thought I liked them quite a bit. It took one overdrawing of my energy to wake me up to the reality that their tactics exhaust me. With the energy vampire metaphor you can enjoy a laugh as to whether this behavior is malicious or not. Energy vampires need to feed! But the end result is you feeling shitty.

As much as Colin Robinson jokes amuse me I do think I need to keep my energy vampire away. Their last feeding left me feeling tired and obsessive. I let the shitty feeling they induced in me upset other people close to me. And that’s just fucked up. Then energy vampires get even more energy. So I’m going to try to keep them at bay. I don’t need to prolong the life of someone feeding on me and I certainly don’t need to waste my boy immortal life as someone else’s emotional food.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 101 and Closed Ecosystems

The One of the most important novellas in the formation of my technical philosophy was actually written by a science fiction author Neal Stephenson. “In the Beginning there was the Command Line” should be taught in every history of computer science course. Go download it now for free and enjoy 70 pages of riffing on the utopian possibilities of open systems, the accessibility of closed systems and who is the ultimate winners of computing becoming a closed system (surprise it’s Disney).

The premise of the essay is simple. There are two core tensions in how computing has been distributed: open versus closed. The basic manifestations of which philosophy you pick have significant impact on what your users can build but also how accessible your machine or application will be to users. Stephenson focuses on the GUI or graphical user interface, perfected by the closed Apple computer universe, and how it has made computing infinitely more accessible to the masses while also taking away some of the power and flexibility of the original command line interface of prior generations.

In the battle for powerful and hard versus easy but more limited, Americans chose easy and the rise of the GUI began. Dicking around with your computer, let alone your phone, almost isn’t possible without graphical representations of computer programs. Even though said programs are ultimately manipulated several systems down on a command line (you know the “hello world” text interface you might have seen on some NCIS dad cop procedural hacker show) most of us have thoroughly bought into the desktop metaphor of the original Apple GUI. And yes this is old news. This problem of the GUI got won in the eighties. But the basic problem of open versus closed still rages on with us.

The current debate is most vivid on in the financial world with crypto, Bitcoin and decentralized finance as we all yammer on about DAOs and NFTs. But you see it in social media as creators become locked into closed platforms from which export of their content is almost not an option as without distribution and audience access their work means nothing. Creator economy businesses can make money from individual closed platforms but struggle to build businesses as they are too tied to one type of revenue stream. If they are big on say YouTube or TikTok but can’t take their audience elsewhere that’s an issue. Imagine a world where they could take their business with them not be locked into one revenue stream for a platform they cannot change.

What I’ve written here is more like an appetizer course for the philosophy debate and not an argument. I have an opinion in the debate which is that open ecosystems are better for more types of people but I’m also writing this on an iPhone. But I’m writing using WordPress on my own domain rather than choosing a closed platform like Substack. So it’s not exactly a simple binary outcome for anyone ever. Which is all the more reason to go read the novella now.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 95 and Context Collapse

I have reasonably high social intelligence. Yes I’m willing to flex on this. I’m able to suss out the contours of most situations quickly and code switch my language, aesthetic and context cues. Sure as a white woman in America’s vast “upper middle class” many social interactions and norms are designed for my comfort. But I spend time in spaces that are very much designed to exclude like finance. But I rarely feel out of place as I can find some point of intersection that allows me to find purchase with the leader (or norm setter) that sets a group’s context. To say that this is beneficial is an understatement.

I recently came across a piece of writing titled “A Theory of Collision Spaces” written by scientist who goes by the handle Generativist. The intended audience is folks who think probabilistically or at least have a firm grounding in computational thinking but if you have a head for logic you should be fine. The topic is how social media can do often lead to what is called “context collapse” but you might recognize as “people screaming at each other in bad faith in the comments section.”

The premise of context collapses is that online we may theoretically interact with infinite possible audiences. Infinite contexts makes it much harder for us to adjust or code switch such that we can telegraph that we care about the audience to whom we are speaking. It’s not impossible but it’s much harder. This is how one can make a statement that sounds innocuous but will end up pissing off some group that will come down hard on you. If the reaction is bad enough some audiences call it cancel culture.

Because I have a high social intelligence I’m less prone to getting caught in a context collapse situations. A quick scan of a profile and a few sentences of text is generally enough for me to subtly adjust my language and response. Of course, I cannot adjust for how others respond to me but I can respond to how they respond to me.

Think if it as second derivative social signaling. Limiting the possible permutations enables safety driven actions on my part. While I cannot survive an internet mob (no one can) even a tweet that goes reasonably viral is still bounded by social cues. The more adaptive you are at these cues the less likely you are to instigate a context collapse.

A lot of reasonable people have concluded that context collapse and internet mobs make social interactions on the internet too risky. The likelihood of encountering someone who will go splat against your reality and make a fucking thing out of it is none zero.

But I’d argue you have a weighting bias issue for the magnitude of the risk. You are much more likely to build something of worth from being social than you are to become “canceled” and I think this Theory of Collision Spaces essay just might convince even the twitchiest rationalist groupie. Why? Ensemble learning and computer mediated relationships are super powers for humans. Our ability to extend our thinking has two powerful tools in this era. We can learn from others. And our tools like our computers and their application layer act as extensions of our mind. But don’t my word for it. Nothing I can say will remotely compare to the paper as I’m just not as smart as this scientist.

So you get that social media has many opportunities for expanding our mind. So how do we become comfortable with the perceived risk? One point I want to get across here is that assuming all interactions online are bad makes for poor heuristics. So why is it not as risky as you think?

“Social cues mal-adaptively increase the unconditional variance of expressions while minimizing the group-conditioned variance.

Basically social media makes you lean into identity cues. We fight with negative identity opponents and align with positive identity proponents. The only issue? You might be talking to someone like me that code switches. “You cannot easily distinguish between unreliable counterparties, deceptive ones, and whether or not you are wrong.” So you could be talking to someone deliberately fucking with you, someone who legitimately just misunderstand or you yourself might be wrong. How do you know? You don’t really. All this “in group” signaling doesn’t make a ton of difference. It’s just the environment of the internet honing some badly social engineered aspects that are not inherent to the human mind or social behavior.

So go read that piece. Tell me what you think. And then go enjoy being social on the internet! Don’t let being wrong or being polarized scare you. We are still figuring out how being part machine mediated. A few bumps are to be expected

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Aesthetics Chronicle Finance Internet Culture

Day 89 and The Real Fake Fendi

What is real? Do originals exist? Can we determine the source of creative genesis when we stew in the folklore of cultural memetics? A knockoff has its own reality steeped in the accretion of culture.

I was once was asked by a tourist for direction’s to find “a real fake Fendi” when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I was honestly stumped by this inquiry. Was there a fake that had inherent realness that other knockoffs did not possess? Was there a vendor who sold the most authentic mimicry of Fendi which the tourist wished to find? I had no clue how to answer. Did they mean the realness one sees on the catwalks overseen by RuPaul? But which kind of realness? The creation that evokes the spirit of its inspiration? A realness so over the top and yet absolutely true to its essence. Or perhaps the blunt direct feedback that no construction no matter how convincing is the original artifact. Is is serving realness? I honestly didn’t know. I just told them Canal was one block north.

But perhaps authenticity isn’t the issue. In drag authenticity is manufactured. In fashions’ knockoff districts the question of authenticity is a layered confect of replication adhering to the aesthetics of the original. In some cases it actually is the original conveniently lost from some faraway inventory count. The real fake Fendi might in fact be real.

I bring this all up because in Illegal.Auction’s second collection we have curated a selection of the most outrageous instances of authenticity being the commodity sold in the NFT space. None of what we have posted are originals. They are all knockoffs. But like the real fake Fendi how can you tell? What makes something original in digital spaces. All is perfectly replicable. And no we have no new answers from Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction either. But maybe you will. You can buy a token of these real fake NFTs. Like the real Fake Fendi realness is in the eye of the beholder.

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Aesthetics Chronicle Internet Culture Media

Day 87 and Information Processing

I occasionally enjoy dropping a deliberately provocative tweet just to see where people will land on rorsach wordings. I particularly like ones that can be read depending on your place in cultural issues haven’t reached consensus. which is exactly why people get angry. I did this on a whim yesterday asking “is listening to audiobooks reading?”

About 70% of folks said yes. 30% said no. But the reasons why were fascinating. The majority probably doesn’t care about semantics (the minority do which I will get to) but a good chunk cares about the connotations associated with how we learn or retain information. Mostly as a function of diversity and inclusion as many folks find reading to be inaccessible for reasons of neurodivergence or focus.

I relate as I don’t process audio easily so prefer subtitles and transcripts. Sometimes I feel bad about this as folks occasionally moralize about the value of mediums I don’t find accessible. There are plenty of things that I can’t engage with or experience in its original form because of disability. I’m just not particularly angry about it. But I am also left with all of the high prestige ways of consuming culture and none of the lowbrow. Like bummer I don’t have podcasts but I still have Dostoyevsky

That’s ultimately the interesting point about asking if reading and listening are similar. What do we consider to be higher processing? And does that matter? Some folks definitely moralized on the issue on. It’s sides. If you retain the information who cares how you got it. And accessibility is its own value. Pop culture is arguably more important because of its accessibility. This is why memes are folk art. They produce a very low loss form of high meaning to content ratio

A third of folks wanted about the definition used. A lot of semantics of information consumption. If you fall into the camp of caring about how we discuss information processing there is an amazing book called the Alphabet and the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image about the transition from image to binary communication and the changes in our neurological structures by a surgeon called and Leonard Schlain.

Like the actual debate about what types of processing is happening and how it affects our structures is worth having. But so much of Twitter boils down to the moral scolds and the rage woke fighting over ideas of worth and assigning value and status. I’d rather discuss how our minds process and that impacts the trajectory of our civilizations.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 85 and Collective Progress

I am extremely online. I think it’s the best place to spend time if you want to thrive. Hands down nothing has ever beaten internet communities at improving the quality of my life on every metric. I know it sounds a little utopian but every skill I’ve acquired, job I’ve had and crucial piece of knowledge can be tracked back to the web.

I could have had a slower path in life with regular credentials and prestige building jobs with the right signals but none of those old rules have hung around long enough that I’m confident I would have made it as far in life. I needed the extra edge from living extremely online. I think we all do.

Life moves too quickly in modernity for us not to come together to survive it. Progress is going to be collaborative. Individual efforts and silos with us all competing for place and resources. Competition maybe served its purpose in a world of resource scarcity but as wealth is less dependent on rent seeking and property ownership and more on innovation and technical progress, then collaborative work has better incentives.

This may sound a little stupid but every time I ask Twitter for a ridiculous piece of advice like “ does anyone lift while high” I get incredible pieces of insight. It sounds like a dumb question and like click bait but I’m probing for similar cases of physiological response, chronic pain and a desire to biohack to better health. And yes it turns out if you have inflammation lifting weights while stoned is a great way to encourage a behavior that promotes lower inflammation with an inflammation lowering drug. It’s a virtuous cycle. And I would never have known without shitposting health nuts on Twitter. I’m not going to get that nuanced a piece of information with specific context out of a doctor or any credentialed body that works to reduce risk. I’d love to see a double blonde study proving the benefits of toking and squatting. Some knowledge is meant to be epistemic. The internet is our culture now. So share your weird finds with your tribe. It gives us all a better shot at better lives.

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Chronicle Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 84 and The Thursday Styles Problem

The Thursdays Styles problem is about zeitgeist, wealth, perception and power. The New York Times publishes its “styles” section on Thursdays and Sundays. Generally speaking if you work in media, public relations or culture, you are aware of the general trends that will emerge on Thursday ahead of time. For the sake of argument let’s say I know directionally on Tuesday in private what will be featured on Thursday in public.

If you know “what everyone knows everyone else knows” ahead of time, there is a lot of money to be made as Tuesday person. For more on the second derivative issues in zeitgeist I highly recommend Epsilon Theory. If you can sense the zeitgeist ahead of time & move to take advantage of it you can be a Tuesday person.

Alas it’s not as lucrative as you may imagine to be a Tuesday person. A Thursday person who lives exactly on the zeitgeist can take advantage of “in the moment” culture moves. Good entrepreneurs do this well. Most consumer companies hit “right on time.”

This is why venture capitalists will ask “why now” as they may have invested in a Tuesday Person who hit the zeitgeist too early and couldn’t capitalize on it. It really pisses off the founder who knows “but I was first.”

As a Tuesday person, I hate when this happens. I loathe seeing people I perceive as less capable or intelligent than me hit a zeitgeist moment exactly on Thursday. The trouble is they are right. They won. They got the timing right. I didn’t.

And yes being a Thursday mover is good. But it’s crucial to understand who can win this game. The only way to win the Thursday Styles problem is to be in finance, media or culture work that can place a call option on the Thursday future on Tuesday. You have to be able to hold an opinion on the future zeitgeist long enough for Thursday to get published.

If you cannot hold your zeitgeist long enough for Tuesday to become Thursday when “everyone knows everyone knows” being right early serves no benefit. You need diamond hands. And yes, you will be wrong 9 times out of 10.

So you need to ask yourself if the New York Times cuts a piece and it takes another week to run can you hold out? If the markets don’t make a Tuesday idea hit, can you wait till it becomes common knowledge on that metaphorical Thursday? It’s a question for all long holds to ask themselves.

It requires patience to be a Tuesday person. And it takes resources. Knowing you will look wrong for a bit. Knowing that you will lose money when Tuesday knowledge takes longer to become Thursday Style’s common knowledge. If you can hold it’s the ultimate form of future leverage. That’s alpha.

And better yet, it’s “possible” to influence. Publicists make their clients on Tuesday shine on Thursday. And capture the upside. Folks who are extremely online spot how market makers make zeitgeist hit. Cathie Wood at ARK Innovations has been playing the media in exactly this way. The largest experiment in making Tuesday thinkers hit before Thursday is Margit Wennmachers at a16z.

Centralizing zeitgeist and monetizing it with future calls with narratives they tell on platforms they own stakes in has massive potential. The smart money is turning their Tuesday zeitgeist into Thursday Styles and taking it to the bank.

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Chronicle Internet Culture Media

Day 78 and Media Panics.

Skepticism of media and its value isn’t exactly new. The powers that be have disliked letting the masses have a say since we got uppity enough to print and interpret religious texts on our own. The Catholic Church really hated Martin Luther. Yeah, fuck you clergy! Reformation forevah!

The history of moral panics about the negative influence of media is long and we are consistently skeptical of any new medium. From Gutenberg’s printing press, to social media. Even America’s founding fathers were all media skeptics despite being avid users of the eras hottest new medium the pamphlet.

But the skepticism comes at a cost. It’s after we’ve lost our history that we bemoan that more effort didn’t go into saving the Library of Alexandria from Julius Caesar’s troops or celebrating the good fortune that western civilization’s canon was maybe preserved thanks to Irish priests saving books after the Germanic hordes sacked Rome. It cost a fortune to find everything we lost from Roman and Greek antiquity during the Renaissance.

It just seems to me that if we are going to have a panic about the loathsome interests of media to preserve power and harm progress, we should maybe look at the history of who was usually interested in resisting literacy, libraries, and the free flow of information. Popes and Caesars that’s who.

I get it, neo-reactionaries want to burn down the cathedral of soft cultural power, but are sure you aren’t actually Julius Caesar shoring up your literal power? Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. A16z is the nexus of Silicon Valley power after just a decade investing and they are going hard against institutional media by becoming a new media power. Sure, they are historically new powers and think of themselves as scrappy upstarts, but consider for a moment that maybe they are the barbarian hordes about to be in power in our New Rome. The Germanic hordes also won, by the way.

It generally looks like the winners of these media panics are the ones who actually hold the power, even if they perceive themselves as being upstarts. Caesar, the Barbarians, and our founding fathers won and became the entrenched interests. Something about becoming what we once fought against eh?

It turns out archives are important. And it’s expensive to rebuild them during enlightenment eras. So maybe don’t be a fucking derp lord and rather be clear eyed of the motivations you have for “hating media” and desiring to lay seiege to the cathedral. At least Curtis Yarvin is actually honest about wanting non- egalitarian systems, unlike the majority of media skeptics.

I am open to critics who think the media is one-sided and self serving to their interests and political alignments. I also agree that the progress demands excellence from everyone. But how we determine excellence is very much up for debate. Media has generally been the forum through which we reach cultural consensus. And yes, it’s an ugly process and those with distribution usually win: Guttenberg died penniless, the poor entrepreneur didn’t have enough readers, and search engines without users died when browsers picked winners. A fact which I’m sure the team at a16z is aware of given how the browser Netscape made Yahoo a winner in the search wars for a time through distribution.

I don’t actually give a ton of fucks about the motivations of venture capitalists, Dark Enlightenment proponents, or skeptical rural conservatives. I think they all have a point and I’m old enough to remember when the left and labor was the dominant skeptics of media power. Back to Guttenberg, I kinda dig the narrative that he was just a hustler doing speculation, which just proves motivations and actual impact are not as morally crisp as history suggests so judging who the actual “good guys” are may be impossible in the present moment.

So what’s the path forward?

I’m generally on the side of skepticism and decentralization because distribution and archival is crucial to innovation and progress. Decentralization is hardier and less prone to sackings. I am utopian about the value of informational access in the history of achievement. That means more people having more access to information and being allowed to research, weigh in and distribute without fear so we can achieve breakthroughs in technology. That means more media not less. And yes that means significant tensions about truth and facts.

If I’m picking sides I think Balaji Srinivasan is directionally correct about the role of ledgers and citations in the media’s decentralized future. He and I don’t always agree on which players are doing good work and who are most dangerous, but we share a common goal of access to excellence.

Finally, we need to be clear eyed about our motivations and the history of how this has panned out in past media panics. There is a good chance we aren’t Martin Luther or Guttenberg. We want to be Julius Caesar. Or at very least the Germanic hordes. Which is ok. Power is good. Organizing around power can further valuable interests and anyone who has worked at a startup is familiar with the joys of banding together behind one visionary to achieve it. We should admit it. And get on with the future of information and human progress.