Category: Internet Culture

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Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 208 and Boundaries

It’s fairly common to struggle with boundaries. The desire to come through for everyone is strong, but not half so strong as the fear that if you set a firm boundary, then no one will accept you for where you are and what you want. What if love is only ever available on someone else’s term? This is a terrible fear straight from our inner child.

We’ve turned loyalty into a obligation test. But how perverse is that? “If you love them, set it free” is a culturally touchstone for a reason. We want the freedom of choosing our the loyalty that works for us. And we know each demonstration of loyalty means nothing if it wasn’t in consideration of the other person’s boundaries, needs and desires.

I suppose this hit me today because I’ve been astonished to see athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles holding their boundaries firm. They loyalty to sports, their countries and to us as fans only matters if it’s given freely and with joy. They owe us nothing, so when they do perform as their most elite selves, it’s what’s most beautiful and courageous thing. It’s a feat without ego. Those victories come in freedom.

Prioritizing one’s boundaries and well-being doesn’t need any apology or explanations or attempts to change yourself to fit another, if someone requires obligation on their terms it’s natural to feel invaded.

It’s the most loving thing in the world to set out what you actually want and need. It’s always the right thing to do. We don’t own each other. We each get to choose what’s best for us. And that fear we won’t be loved if we stand firm? Let it go. We always feel safest and most cared for when we know what we are offering is genuinely wanted.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 177 and Unaesthetic

Aesthetics are opinions. And opinions are totalizing. I’ve been on some bullshit recently about how taste is totalitarian. Mostly because I care about how aesthetics turn into politics. But aesthetics are almost always personal choices (except our biology which is another discussion entirely) which gives them wide latitude to be all encompassing.

That aesthetics are choices matters. We choose to articulate our aesthetics. If our tools have the capacity to articulate an aesthetic vision with clarity and fidelity it’s often been the choice of artists to render their vision closely to what is in their mind’s eye. Or sometimes we say fuck it, who cares, there is virtue going in the other way. I’d argue that is unaesthetic.

A deliberate decision to eschew aesthetics is literally the definition of unaesthetic. It’s not an insult. It’s just a choice. If we can tell something is a deliberate choice to pursue an aesthetic that is unappealing, unpopular, ugly or otherwise thumbing its nose its nose at beauty that is unaesthetic. Which is its own aesthetic. And it’s fine for that to be your taste but it is a taste.

Normative standards and boundaries are powerful. So rejecting them has become own own artistic and culturally pursuit. It’s become so popular “punk is dead” has become a layered insult.

Modernity has been on about how the search for universals of beauty is both hegemonic and homogenizing for most of the last century. That means everyone has to have the same standard and because we have the same standards we all tend to look alike. Think Stepford Wives or South Korean beauty pageant queens.

Understanding and telegraphing cultural norms of beauty is generally considered crucial for social competence and often for participation in any group. Think of how awkward it is to wear a suit into a startup or not wearing any makeup for sorority rush.

Sometimes I think beauty and aesthetic standards wish they were as totalitarian as technology. Protocols are literally limitations on what can and cannot be done. 8Bit and pixel art were originally protocol standards. What could be rendered wasn’t a limit of imagination but our tool sets. That’s why we obsessed on rendering and fidelity for so much of the history of computing. We’d say shit like “look how crisp” and we’d mean it.

That’s not true anymore. If anything we’ve got issues with too much fidelity. The uncanny valley of hyper reality upsets our mind because it’s hyper real. Aesthetics now has to cope with the ability to render even the most elaborate vision to exact reality. Now that’s a cool problem. But if you want to sell pixel art, call it punk, and tell me it’s actually a cool commentary on protocol limits that’s fine. But I’m going to call it unaesthetic. But it’s not worth being insulted about.

Unpopular take but crypto punks are unaesthetic
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Internet Culture

Day 170 and Ass

I’ve got an hourglass figure and my favorite exercise is the barbell squat. That has over given me a fantastic ass. An ass that just won’t quit. Even after some health challenges my ass has been reliable as hell. So yesterday, without really thinking it over, I decided to share my appreciation for my ass.

The first response was from one of my girlfriends (who also has a great ass) sharing some body positive vibes. That was basically my expectation for likes and replies on a “feeling myself” tweet. It’s fun to share positivity on social media.

But then…it took on a life of its own. Comments started pouring in. I replied to virtually all of them. I had threads with best selling science fiction authors and anonymous replies guys. I got retweeted by big crypto and investor accounts. Venture capitalists and dirt bags had equal weight. I cracked wise and made jokes at my own expense. We made a party of it.

Obviously people joined in on the fun. Because shitposting is fun. Dunking, dumb puns and innuendos are enjoyable. But I think it’s something more than that. I believe in the cultural and emotional value of shit posting. Shitposting levels the playing field.

Audiences can be built by anyone now. Shitposting allows creators who have a firm grasp on concise and comprehensible language to get across their point to anyone. Rather than suffering through pontification by elevated voices protected by institutional gatekeepers, we can hear bursts of truthful hilarity from nobodies.

Hilarity is part of the social media experience. Many people have tried to hijack Twitter for the purposes of looking smart and influencing others. Thought leadership is an entire profession now. You’ve got Zen Koan advice Twitter abutting against “in this thread” tweet storms that are academic thesis quality. Which has been great for learning. I follow a lot of folks who use both formats. Being smart is cool.

But the essential nature of social has pushed back. The shitpost reigns supreme. We’ve had an enormous backlash against self serious Twitter. And that backlash has been rewarding folks who say weird shit like me.

Ironically, all the clout chaser and words of wisdom folks had their need to appear smart backfire on them. Shitposting is now a high status activity. Being smart isn’t high status. Being chaotic is high status. Leaning into the shitpost is high status.

You have really powerful people with enormous platforms saying ridiculous shit. I’m a reasonably respectable founder and angel investor and I’m talking about my butt. And the medium rewards you for it.

And I think that is OK. Not everything needs to be brilliant. Trust is built on the understanding that we are all humans. And sometimes humans feel themselves. Sometimes we get sad. It’s all part of the process. And if sharing your truth is what gets clout and audiences I think that’s a nice thing. I’d rather have status for being vulnerable than being brilliant any day.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 167 and the Naughties

I arrived in New York City in January of 2006. The aughts were an interesting time to be in New York. The recovery from 9/11 gave the city a sense of resilience but the Great Recession hadn’t reshaped the financial landscape of the country just yet.

I moved to Manhattan because I wanted to work in fashion. I didn’t have any relevant experience. I’d studied economics. But I was a blogger and that turned out to be enough to find a way in.

I met a man in the comments section of our respective fashion blogs as back then back links were an acceptable form of socializing. We both moved to the city the same week. He would become my cofounder on a fashion media startup and also my boyfriend. Yes it’s as dysfunctional as it sounds. Don’t worry we are still friends.

We’ve got a lot of fond memories of the Aughts. New media was just coming into its own. The possibility that it might change industries like fashion seemed exciting and democratic for style. No one had figured out how to grift by “influencing” yet. Which meant actual influence was still possible.

That first generation of bloggers was more influential in moving industries like culture than the commercial milieu we have now. Less lucrative certainly but the impact was significant. Good stuff actually emerged from living instead of someone imitating living.

My friend (the ex and cofounder) are considering writing a chronicle of our time. Partially it’s an exercise in nostalgia. It was a lot of fun. Maybe it’s a bit of an ego trip to think we could’ve even write some fiction that ties together the ethos and the aesthetics of that moment.

Back then we hadn’t cracked up the media industrial complex into algorithms and big automated ads dollars. A lot more got done in restaurants, bars and parties. The city itself hadn’t turned over into the complete plutocracy that dominates now. The kleptocrats needed the financial industry to implode and get bailed out for that kind of real estate takeover. Before the bailouts maybe the rest of us good maintain the delusion that we too could strike it rich. Now the distance is too great.

It was an era when Condé Nast mattered. Finance was a thing the cute guys with ambitions for money did, not yet a space that was entirely populated by Hedge Fund guys set on moving to Planet Billionaire.

And holy fuck the parties were great. Classes mingled more without the stratification that came out of the Great Recession. You could be someone even if you lived in a shitty barely heated no hot water squat loft on Bowery. It still cost $1600 but better than the 16K a month I saw it go for recently. You could get into club if you had some style. Instead of convincing people you mattered because you had a bunch of followers you had to convince someone you were cool.

I know this all sounds like bullshit old person nonsense mumbling about past good times. So if we do write about the Aughts it will take a lot better writing to make it compelling. I think it’s possible as I still retain a sense of place that I think is worth sharing. I’ve got ridiculous stories that could make for a fun read. So I’m putting the energy into the universe that I’ll capture those moments and share.

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Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 161 and Phone Calls

A meme came across one of my group chats yeh other day that my friend said contained “strong Julie energy.” My response was oh yeah “phone calls are violence” and promptly turned it into a tweet.

Obviously I’m leaning into another extremely online joke with “thing is violence” which made for a good viral moment. But I really do hate having phone calls on my calendar. Not everyone agrees with me. I heard a lot from folks who insist that the human connection of one to one phone calls is superior to the written word.

Honestly I call bullshit on this. It is some Luddite nonsense to insist that written communication platforms are inherently inferior to voice. We thought phone calls were dangerous and weird when they were invented.

Unless I’m speaking with an entrepreneur (or my mother) I try to encourage folks to communicate with me asynchronously. Voice communication is slow and lossy. It lets you ramble and insist that tone and human emotion are more crucial than you being a crisp thinker. Which is maybe true in certain situations. Emotions and tone and context are important. But it’s not a substitute for you being a shitty communicator.

I’m not going to waste 30 minutes on something that can be communicated in a few sentences if you just think ahead and collect your thoughts. Call me an asshole but it’s not worth me slowing down my day so I can listen to someone struggle to organize their point.

And I get it, folks want to think things through together in a group. You know how much that sucks if you are the one pulling all the weight in the call? A lot! It’s exhausting. Stop expecting other people to think for you. It’s a dick move. Honestly fuck that noise.

I’m not getting on a damn phone call until I’ve exhausted all over ways of communicating and organizing a topic. Only then is all this nuance and emotional context shit a worthwhile endeavor. Do your homework before you insist on scheduling a call. It will be more productive and take less time.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 154 and Mixed Feelings

I’ve been in a hazy “did that happen place” emotionally after the news that Stack Overflow, where my husband spent 8.5 years, sold for $1.8B. Obviously it’s a lot of money to just appear into our lives. It’s not the first exit for Alex Miller or me. I’ve had 2 acquisitions for companies I have founded & he’s had an IPO for a company he was early to join. I also lived through multiple exits, financings IPOs & bankruptcies as a kid as I’m the child of a startup family. So why does this hit different?

I think part of it is that our other wins tended to come from “faster” companies. My first acquisition came within 2 years of founding. It wasn’t a lot of money but let me pay off student debt & get more stable. Alex was with Yext for a comparably shorter period and when it IPO’d he’d long ago left for Stack Overflow. And that was only a win because he was lucky enough to be able to borrow money to exercise his Yext options or it would have meant nothing. That happens a lot to early stage employees. They cannot afford to exercise and get nothing when a big exit happens. It happened to me when the company that bought mine exited to someone even bigger. I couldn’t afford to exercise. I never had the heart to calculate how much I would have made.

We’ve had secondaries over the years. Sometimes equity gets taken off the table in later stages financings and it benefits early employees. Those changed our calculus a lot when it happened to us. We put together a financial plan and a future as a family with our startup earnings. We made decisions based on whose turn it was to risk & who to run downside. Being a startup spouse means a constantly balancing act of supporting years of low salaries, long hours and stress. And while it’s not easy to be the wife of an early stage employee it’s probably even harder to be the husband of a founder. Startup families live through a lot together.

Stack Overflow was “the” company in many ways for Alex where he spent the better part of a decade and the majority of our marriage working to build the company up. He was employee 32 when he joined as chief of staff. When he left it was over 300 employees and he was the GM of the SaaS business.

When he left Stack we didn’t expect a payday beyond what salary he had earned and perhaps a bit of secondaries. He’d done good work and built amazing things but when you leave you don’t want have the emotional capacity to think about things like big acquisitions or IPOs. When Alex left Stack it was a deeply emotional process for us. A lot of therapy for both of us. Because startups aren’t just the person it is their family that consents as well to these long journeys. Remember that every executive team member or founder has a family that will live through this startup experience too.

After 8 years I knew Alex needed a change. He had given Stack his all. His absolute best. But leaving was hard. In order to leave a company where you invested your whole self (and your family’s) you have to come to terms with how you feel. We cried. We worried. But Alex made the choice. And we didn’t look back. It’s too painful in some ways. You love your startup

You keep in touch with everyone. Alex remains friends with the entire team. We share hobbies & interests and a million group texts with topics as varied as hydroponic tomatoes m, our crypto portfolios and hunting season. We stay at each other’s homes. The bond is deep in startup teams.

Given that bond it’s almost funny how when you leave your imagination on big outcomes can stop. The thing you dedicated yourself to for years is now growing and thriving without you. It never leaves you even if you need some distance.

When we got the call the number was overwhelming. The distance we had created suddenly evaporated. Alex burst into my room where I was meditating and told me the strike pierce. We did some calculations. We checked them. It couldn’t be? It was. The startup had finally delivered the check. We’d done it. Another startup made it.

I want people to know that this kind of largess is mostly random. Everyone works hard in Silicon Valley. Startups are a choice & a state of mind and those of us that chose to do it willingly go into ideas doomed to failure. Or meant for the stars. And it can feel like a crap shoot. Idiots get enormous paydays and brilliant innovators barely make enough to scrape by. The meritocracy isn’t as real as we think. This isn’t to suggest that the Stack Overflow team doesn’t deserve every penny. They do. We earned the payout. The bad years were hard. Miserable. But everyone believed in the community & the power of software developers. But also no one earns these big paydays. It’s a gift. And we are grateful for it.

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Finance Internet Culture Startups

Day 151 and The New Capital Networks

A lack of network has generally meant capital constraints if you were an entrepreneur. Being hooked up with capital allocators was crucial to being a good operator. Access tended to compound over time like interest. Which is why we make “funny because it’s true” jokes about how successful founders usually had a head start in a few areas. I’m not saying that is going away, but decentralized finance is fucking with some of the consensus knowledge around how capital gets raised and deployed.

And what convinced me we are moving towards an inflection point, over the next decade, where capital allocators and operators decouple, wasn’t my tony Silicon Valley network. No, I’ve had access to the minds of those players for years. What clicked my mind into a position to take action? I spent an hour and a half getting a tutorial from one of my anon reply crypto friends on yield farming and liquidity mining. I don’t want to blow up their spot but Alpha Ketchum dropped a lot of knowledge on me today. And it shifted my energy from belief into understanding. From there action will be seen in my investments.

I’m still chewing through a lot of the details but I’m going to make a bet that scaling DeFi is going to require significant institutional capital and the support of experienced operators to realize its full potential. Thats why I’m invested in folks like Cambrian and Martin Green and would love to get my dollars into Arca and David Nage. That’s why, of my four thesis areas I’m pursuing in my own fund Chaotic Capital, two are explicitly dedicated to both organizational and systemic flexibility and how it plays out across new business opportunities.

We’ve seen capital decoupling from traditional centralized authority systems and trust based networks. The perpetual fundraising machine of tokens, coins and market making techniques like yield farming, are funding everything from esoteric art projects and to the next generation of insurance. Thing about that, the innovative companies that drive growth won’t have their capital needs met just on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. If you don’t believe me look at what has already been built

Exchanges → SushiSwap, Uniswap, Bancor, 

Insurance → NexusMutual, Cover

Derivatives → Perp Protocol, Opyn,

Credit Markets → Aave, Compound, Maker

Middleware → Chainlink, Grt, 

Asset Management → Enzyme, Yearn Finance

Aggregators → 1inch and Matcha 

Categories
Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 150 and Hypersigils

In the beginning there was the word……or the command line. Naming a thing used to be the literal path to power. Now we are pretty meh about the whole thing. Ritual magic is kind of a satanic panic middle brow thing in America even though we have a history of throwing in with prosperity theology. We’ve got entire evangelical communities dedicated to naming and belief with the expectation it will generate wealth and manifest prosperity. The meme magic folks who wished Trump into office were really just regurgitating Norman Vincent Peale prayers. Plenty of folks like to blame this kind of magic on like Max Weber with his Protestant Work Ethic but I’m mixed on it as I don’t think he envisioned Pentecostals when he said hard work was a moral good.

A friend of mine who knows my interest in both capitalism and its underlying energy in culture suggested I watch an old talk from illustrator and comic book author Grant Morrison.

Honestly you should pop it out and watch the whole thing if you have any interest in creation. But especially if you are interested in chaos. He discusses a term he coined called a Hyper Sigil. He is building on contemporary chaos magic which isn’t too far off from manifestation theology. He contends that bodies of art but really any form of creative work can be turned into collective signs of meaning with willpower and force. He literally means they are magic and if this interests you go read Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll. If that doesn’t no biggie the following point still stands. We have sigils in America that are pretty literally manifestations of power.

Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hairstyles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings… The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summoning up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent… Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance.

I’ve completely fallen down a Grant Morrison hole as this kind of thinking is crucial to work in attention economy trades like communications, public relations and marketing. But I’m frankly a lot more interested in the practical aspects of how he conceives of himself as a chaos magician and how he we can all affect the reality around us. I’ve purchased his Invisibles comic. When he says imagination is the fifth dimension he literally means it. Multiversity is rad.

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Internet Culture

Day 139 and Saving The Insights

One of the unexpected aspects of having audience, even a small one, is wanting your good shit to be saved for them. I regularly find myself saying shit to my friends or my husband only to stop myself and say “that needs to go on Twitter!” And then occasionally to their chagrin I will open the app and attempt to condense the insight or joke into 140 characters. If it’s a longer point I’ll open up WordPress and attempt to get the thesis on paper.

A significant upside to saving good shit for an audience is that you have a written record. There is no worse feeling than completely losing an insight because you didn’t write it down. I dislike phone calls or Zooms because I’m not a natural born note taker. If I’m just shooting the shit I’m prone to forgetting whatever I just said. I can spend an hour feeling like I’ve really dug into a point only to find myself with complete amnesia because I neither shared it nor did I get a note down. By stopping myself and recording it to social media I find I retain more of the good stuff. I guess I’ve accidentally created a workflow where my note taking system is posting it to Twitter. Sorry Evernote turns out the killer feature for note taking was actually having reply guys.

This system of trusting an audience to have immediate access to your good shit does takes some getting used to. I’ve written about my fondness for shitposting as an inherently healthy emotional act. Sharing who you are without any filtering is scary. But it’s a muscle that can be developed. When I am working with portfolio companies or my communications clients I encourage them to just start getting content out on whatever platform is easiest for them. I picked Twitter as I’m most comfortable with written formats but I obviously also find blogging on WordPress to be easy. Instagram or more visual platforms make me anxious. Formal platforms like LinkedIn make me second guess every word. For me immediate unpolished platforms where I can just say shit is the way.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 136 and The Ease of Centralization

We are a few days into a news cycle where Elon Musk’s corporate socialism interests and/or environmentalism has pushed the Bitcoin discourse to a fever pitch. I don’t begrudge Elon because it’s hard out there for someone who takes government subsidies and we’ve all got to lean into our economic interests. The renewable energy credit system is a policy choice and my neoliberal friends would argue it’s a good one. It’s also one that currently pay’s Tesla’s bills.

Tesla makes most of its $ from RECs, not cars. Last year, it made $1.58bn from sales of RECs to gas-powered auto companies (which must buy to offset their CO2 emissions). Tesla has never been profitable without REC sales to bolster its auto margins.

That’s about to change. Last week, @Stellantis (i.e. PSA Group + Fiat Chrysler) told @LePoint it’ll meet carbon emission rules this year. That means it won’t need to buy RECs from $TSLA anymore.
Fiat Chrysler accounts for $2.4bn of Tesla REC sales from 2019 to date and 55% of Tesla sales since 2008.

What I think is really interesting is that Elon DOES know a lot about money, in particular the benefits of a centralized trusted player. Which he himself points out since you know PayPal. Centralization has been pretty crucial to fast efficient financialization especially in modernity. Of course that has some downsides as institutional power tends to accrete. Good and bad amirite?

The exciting thing about cryptocurrencies is that they may offer us they same scale as global institutions but without the whole plutocrats and fossilized bureaucracy part. Not that I’m advocating for Ethereum or Consyns.us but they put it well in the below quote.

Whereas our traditional financial system runs on centralized infrastructure that is managed by central authorities, institutions, and intermediaries, decentralized finance is powered by code that is running on a decentralized infrastructure

We’ve got a couple decades of experience in computing on the challenges of decentralized infrastructure. It’s not easy and it has costs. The costs are both significant in time and money but the benefits are significant as well. I personally find the argument that systems which are not centralized are less fragile and it is worth diversification into systems that are less fragile. I often chose convenience and speed but I also put significant effort into having systems that can withstand crisis and disasters as well. Security has always been about trade offs. And cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, is about making some trade offs in efficiency for the sake of hardening of financial system. I’m philosophically inclined towards this. If I’m trying to solve global warming and getting to Mars I might find this less compelling as I’d rather focus on efficiency. This is also why environmentalists make great villains as they decide on that choice for you. I’m not saying Elon explicitly going for Bond villain but it’s an aesthetic.