Category: Media

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Biohacking Media

Day 1204 and Moral Panics

I do not care for podcasts but I listen to a Bloomberg podcast called Odd Lots for entertainment. I’m an avid participant in the niche in-group you might have once called Financial Twitter. The hosts of the podcast Joe and Tracy are part of this community as well.

Usually I listen to it for the fun expert guests who come to do commentary on their corner of the markets. Today’s episode was titled how the American workforce got hooked on adderall. Which I personally think is a very provocative title.

Over the last few years, users of the popular ADHD drug Adderall have been frustrated by regular shortages in getting their prescriptions filled. Various regulatory and supply chain factors have contributed to the inability of producers to keep up with demand. But this raises the question: why is there so much demand in the first place? How did a significant chunk of the labor force — from tech workers to Wall Streeters — begin using the drug as an aid for their work and everyday lives? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Danielle Carr, an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, who studies the history of politics of neuroscience and psychology. We discuss the history of this medicine and related medicines, what it does for the people who take it, and how market forces opened the drug up to almost anyone.

Odd Lots “Hooked on Adderall”

My impression of Danielle Carr was of a nuanced thinker with a lot of historical insight who happened to have haplessly taken on some academic moralizing about whether the wrong class of person might be abusing stimulants. I’m perhaps the wrong class of person to be commenting as I don’t use any stimulants stronger than a cup of coffee in the morning.

I was struck how the narrative eventually came to demonizing market demands in contrast to the I’m sure completely neutral national health systems. The theory being we might keep better track of the vulnerable in such a system struck me as classist. Adderall may be an American healthcare market issue only because those poor London bankers have another go to black market stimulant. We just don’t mind because they make money.

Moral panics around pharmacological intervention seem to be a flavor of the decade sort of thing. Prohibitions catch on when the wrong kind of person gets themselves into trouble of abusing something that was otherwise contained to social sanctioned consumption.

Perhaps in less inclined to judge on these things because I don’t witness the abuse but I also think paternalism is the excuse schoolmarms and aristocrats love in equal measure.

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Internet Culture Media Politics

1196 and Reality Crazed

Just when I think shit cannot get any crazier reality absolutely fucking mogs me.

“Surely” I say to myself. “It cannot get more weird, more brazen, more chaotic, more fucked up, more absolutely unreal.”

And then it absolutely fucking does.

What if I told you there was a funny movie about dysfunctional airlines?

Getting second passports is normal don’t you know? I guess us regular professional class moves to Montana because we stupidly believe in America but everyone else is splitsville.

But don’t worry Italy welcomes digital nomads. I’d personally go to Tallinn though. But if you like Riveras hit up Albania. Thank me later. Never too early to think about where you might find yourself as a refuge.

Looking for something a little more exotic? I got you. How about some drugs. No really.

Hack the planet! Hack the gut biome! Hack your cavities? It’s possible the effective altruists saving us from bad teeth with polyamorous sex parties? I learned about an experimental probiotic from a sex worked based Austin. No I am not kidding. Her name is Aella. Iff you don’t know what this means I’ll spare you. But I’ll leave you with this.

Unless you are an investor like Yishan here, the way to get it is to pay $5000 for an appointment at a clinic in Prospera, the libertarian-run ZEDE on the island of Roatan currently suing the Honduran government for a third of the countries GDP

True Anon Pod

Now to be fair this is excellent affinity marketing. Who else would know more mouth bacteria than a hooker right? Well actually you’d be more likely to get gets thrush from that sort of extracurricular which requires an anti-fungal not an antibiotic but I’m quibbling.

In even stupider news, control of the senate might be up for grabs and the control hinges on a dude who might have lied about shooting himself for reasons? I don’t fucking know. I’m not a mercenary. But I hear Erik Prince is a dope podcast interview.

Anyway, the Gen Xer didn’t shit about reality biting. But the rest of us might be getting an idea.

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Media

Day 1186 and Return To Non-Normalcy

I first sensed it when I picked up a copy of the Financial Times going through Heathrow in February. I was behind the news cycle. I read through the pink paper and felt informed.

Normally I wouldn’t be satisfied with just one news source. No matter how much I overweight my personal preferences to business papers I wouldn’t limit myself to just those publications.

But then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to get up on the nuances of the day. I love the news business and even I felt weary about wading through the firehouse.

If a new hound like me who loves reading reactionaries of all stripes couldn’t do more than scan some financial numbers how did everyone else feel? Not good, not good at all.

The Normie Restoration

We are reaching a fascinating moment in history in which you can be shockingly well informed about almost anything in real time.

Naturally this means we “know” less than we ever did. I can read propaganda from every viewpoint straight from the source straight on Telegram chats. The most informed know they getting just a fraction of the story.

During the Great Dislocation (roughly 2019-2023 though many of us went into much earlier), there was a new openness to seeing beyond institutional consensus. We saw a flourishing of open condemnation of all forms of institutional knowledge and media was at the epicenter of much of that rage.

Many groups did not do well with the newfound power they had found in the hands of shifting alliances and new attention.

My theory is that the lunatic fringes of both the left & right have handled their digital powers poorly. As they did not handle the attention with care we will see a return to mass media preferences as people return to “non-normalcy.” Our trust has been spread too thin and too far and everyone has to tend to their own.

Who, or even what, ends up being the mass media substitute going forward ks not yet settled as the waning days of cable television & national papers will not disappear until the Boomers move on.

We are starting to realize little value is accrued by sourcing news from many sources as more competing narratives spin out to Cray Cray Land. Everyone has become audience captured. And not all audiences are equal. Not all voices are equal either.

People may think I’m insinuating that it’s about control or truth or ideological niche. I want to disabuse you of this notion. Media is about attention. People with different goals want your attention focused on what they think is important.

Anyone with responsibility has an attention limit. People with responsibilities are the people with power. They can’t manage with endless attention conflicts. They can and do resolve these conflicts on their attention all the time.

And many of them are about to resolve that by not paying attention. So you have to ask yourself if you think they are wrong. The new non-normal isn’t very forgiving of distraction.

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Media

Day 1184 and Discourse is Back but Sharded

The era of shared media narratives with simplistic framing and consensus seems gone. The information sphere is now like glass shards with many distinct realities according to Axios.

I think we have many more than twelve realities as class, politics, identity and material concerns overlap. The Internet has allowed all of us to develop esoteric and idiosyncratic knowledge. More types of reality are coming into contact with each other.

Because power laws drive the internet sometimes it seems like everyone is paying attention to the same thing all at once. We get crazily intensified reactions. People go absolutely bonkers over morality plays.

It was impressive to me to see New York Magazine create two intensely viral shared discourse moments in one week with their Dr. Huberman “scandal” and “the equally explosive “Age Gap Marry Rich” essay.

Being curious I looked up the editorial team and found it was journalists I recognized from my time in beauty and fashion. There was recipe for inducing cultural virality discovered by Teen Vogue in leaning into what is loosely call identity lifestyle. You experience culture like fashion or makeup through very specific symbols of interconnected identities. For some reason lifestyle choices makes people really crazy. It seems Lindsay Peoples the editor is a generational talent at evoking response.

The Cut’s new masthead changed from 2022

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1183 and Not Personal

If you aren’t familiar with the term “parasocial” I’d encourage you to dive into the term and its impact on our culture.

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms.

A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona,[6] becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification.

Wikipedia Parasocial Interactions

Because so little in daily life feels personal or reciprocal as intermediation and automation split us off from past norms of one-to-one relationships, parasociality is on the rise.

You and I are likely to be in some kind of parasociality in this blog post. It’s not a new phenomena having been theorized as far back as 1956, but social media’s ubiquity has now put all of us into varying degrees of parasocial interactions with each other. We have opinions about personas from movie star celebrities to niche Twitter accounts.

We don’t seem to have these parasocial relationships just with humans. There was a an era of corporate brand marketing (that seems to be fading) where we interacted with brands like as friends. I followed all sorts of Twitter accounts for brands that acted like personalities in the golden era of “funny” Twitter.

Yet as more and more people are becoming brands it seems that the old school idea of a brand as a an amorphous corporation is disappearing.

Perhaps it’s because we encouraged the cultivation of personal brands as a professional marketing necessity. Millennials leveraged carefully manufactured profiles to climb the last remaining rungs of the old career ladder.

Naturally this strategy has some drawbacks. During the Great Awokening/Weirding we saw inexperienced humans cope with the ramifications of having a reputation that extended far beyond work, family and community. Now we loosely call it cancel culture though it took years for the term to become less contested.

I’d like to encourage more people to not take things so personally. It’s not bad for be in parasocial relationships. In life we have varying degrees of intimacy and boundaries in even our closest relationships. No one is exactly one person or even persona. Next time you get really upset at someone else’s behavior try to remember it’s not about you. If someone gets upset at you recall that this still applies.

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Media Politics

Day 1172 and Inference Ups

Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.

A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself

How does a catalyst work PerplexityAI

I delivered a series of schizo-style-poasts so lucid that I turned them easily into an essay on the natural rights basis for the freedom to compute. I barely labored at all to connect the dots. Years of reading, learning and reasoning condensed into form with a few simple connections.

I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.

Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.

I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.

Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library

I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.

Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.

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Finance Media

Day 1157 and Maybe Things Are Good

I remember learning about economic malaise, inflation and oil wars in the seventies at school.

The grand narrative I was raised on was that deregulation led to the go-go eighties as Reagan leaned into free markets as the mood of America changed.

I’ve read a lot of takes in the financial news and on Twitter that suggest we are in a similar period. I tend to land more towards Kyla Scanlan’s position that the Vibecession may be over. And yet we cannot agree on if things are getting any better. We are confused.

So we have this number that no one knows where it’s coming from, yet we are using it to make informed decisions on headline text which informs what is happening in the economy – but also informs how people should feel about what is happening in the economy. No wonder the sentiment is off! No wonder people are confused! It’s hard to understand what’s happening, and that makes all of this so much harder

Kyla Scanlon “Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore” on Epsilon Theory.

I’ve got lots of reason to be optimistic. I see the shock and confusion and culture wars and I still see people who are optimistic.

I’ve taken to joking around about decisions by saying “fuck it, e/acc!” I am extremely online and it’s a contagious cultural meme to root for the future. And so maybe things are getting better.

There is a same shit different day quality to the long now. But I see more and more people committing to build things. Gold rushes are a patten humanity seems to follow at every changing of the generations. Maybe we’ve got reason to think we can come out of this moment better. Or at least work to make it so.

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Media

Day 1122 and Zombie Media

The lifespan of a media brand is an odd thing. Commanding attention and influencing the opinion of large audiences is hard work. Distribution of information has changed a lot in my lifetime which has shaken the business of media.

Some generational powers like Vogue have managed to hang on even as the internet democratized access to changing fashions. Newspapers, which have consolidated fiercely, are no longer local city standard bearers. The most financial success went in national directions like The New York Times.

Everything is fighting a losing war against the Internet. Weeklies that were concerned with recapping the goings on in the world have all but disappeared. The Economist almost made the transition to the the digital era but lost its way.

For me it was when John Micklethwait left The Economist for Bloomberg. I loved the publication as a teen & twenty something. I miss it still, but once its paywall was up and the editors I trusted were gone, it ceased to exist as an influence in my world. Influence can wane quickly. I read Bloomberg now.

Other media outlets have gone to battle in the Hobbesian war of all against all and seem to be competing with rage headlines and audience capture niches. These are the ones that concern me the most.

Wired Magazine was beloved by the first wave of Internet and technology enthusiasts. Its essays defined the era. Now it seems to have turned on the promise of technology entirely with panicked headlines about the dangers inherent in a new form of corporate structure.

A Dangerous Home for Online Extremism: DAOs

For me, seeing Wired doing this sort of thing is akin to the moment in a zombie movie when a friend or family member is bitten. As they are reanimated from the dead, you are in grief and shock, but also must quickly accept your friend is gone and what is in its place is able to harm you.

For what it’s worth, I have been arguing for the innovative potential in decentralized autonomous organizations for years. I appreciate the spotlight being put on them. But I’m also sad to see a media brand lose trust. It’s not so easily regained.

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Media

Day 1117 and High Variance

I don’t know where the first few weeks of the year went, but I suspect they disappeared into the maw of panic over 2024 reality. No narrative alignment holding as “current thing” means that everyone is looking to exert leverage to make their pet causes pop.

I’ve closely watched a number of important events unfold in real time with unexpected and very dramatic conclusions. To then subsequently seen the non reactions from our various institutional leaders is upsetting for most people who are paying attention, I’d say everyone else is enjoying the rollercoaster but it would clearly be a joke. No one likes it.

I am myself waging a war against the instinct to contract and react. Let me quote myself from Day 784 where I posted my press appearance in a Vanity Fair piece. Insufferable flex I know.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on

Dissident Fringe.

We are in a high variance moment for good and for bad and if you cannot handle the ride please find ways to get off of it. Take care of yourself because when you feel nuts you act nuts.

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Media

Day 1115 and Jangling

Trying to make a buck on the internet usually means knowing your audience. And knowing when your audience will pay.

I keep hitting paywalls on blogposts and I think folks really over estimate the value they deliver to readers. You want to sway my viewpoint to your side but instead you jingle your penny jar for a captured audience of seals. The audience capture that has to happen to make someone really take off requires some pandering. People like their echo chambers.

Because I myself am serious about persuading people to shared ideals it offends me when otherwise useful pro-social content that would drive forward the adoption of better information is needlessly cut off for a “below the fold” $60 a year subscription that is thrice what I pay for Vogue.

If you are selling useful actionable services that make other people better in some measurable way it’s not too hard to close a fair deal on the internet. There are lots of businesses with lots of valid marketing funnels.

But if you are trying to persuade people to an ideal or some truth that you believe must be shared I beseech you to share it widely. We humans operate such fragile nodes of coordination. We must actively work to align people to causes. Propaganda and self interests can only win out over aligned incentives if we give our attention the loudest bidder. Don’t contribute to an information environment like that.