Category: Media

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Aesthetics Chronicle Media

Day 43 and The Freeze

I’ve been watching the television adaption of Snowpiercer. So I’m delighted to have the polar vortex collapse that is chilling most of American dovetail so well with my current media aesthetics. I’ve always loved the cold.

Colorado has been in the single digits all day and will be below freezing for the weekend. I had to drive out to a doctor’s office for some treatments and was terrified I’d slip off the road at every intersection. As the sun slipped behind the flatirons a gloomy grey quickly turned into a pitch back snowstorm.

The aesthetics of disaster and apocalypse generally lean more towards heat and explosions but the subgenre of extreme cold holds our attention. Day After to Tomorrow, Snowpiercer, The Revenant, The Thing, The Grey and many other freezing fear movies capture an aesthetic.

The natural fear of cold isn’t just about freezing to death. Much of the claustrophobic feeling of cold crisis movies comes from isolation, loneliness and it’s resulting paranoia. It’s why the genre does so well when mixed with horror or action. Game of Thrones regularly intoned the threat of winter.

Freezes typically operate on bleak but wide open spaces like arctic tundra or within the confines of a station or refuge that quickly closes in on its people. Scenes of mayhem and violence come out of close quarters that are supposed to guard you from the even more fearsome freeze right outside your door.

All of this conditioning from film and television makes a weather condition like a polar vortex collapse take on a bit of an edge. I indulged in my pre-storm prepping shopping to make sure we has enough beef for stew and chickens for roasting. But that’s partially ritual. A sacrifice to the gods that says I am worthy to survive the bitter cold that is coming. It’s almost superstitious. But it’s also joyful. Humanity against the odds of Mother Nature. We’ve developed rituals and technology to live in the worst conditions.

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Chronicle Media

Day 29 and Momentum

I haven’t felt so invigorated by the internet in a long time. I’ve had a week of joyful chaotic fun alongside my virtual friends (which during pandemic times includes my IRL friends too). Without the alt right and their mascot President Trump sucking all the air out of the room I’m seeing a lot of relief. The slight diminishing of the existential threat has lead to a lot of what I can only call silly season.

Just about everyone I’ve encountered has been filled with newfound creativity this week. Stonk mania is really only a piece of the goofy energy. To be sure I’ve been riding high on the wave of GameStop and the other meme stocks (though to be clear we actually made money with a well timed bet on volatility and only bought one share of $GME for the fun). But it’s more than that. The giddiness that comes from any kind of upcrash raises spirits in all adjacent fields.

And as I spend a lot of time in financial and social media circles it’s been a hell of a party. Granted most of us are waiting for a hangover to hit but more than a few of us are wondering if we’ve tilted into an entirely new chapter of chaos as the world grapples with the power of loosely organized crowds.

Whatever comes next a momentum is building from the energy. We’ve seen a possibility that chaos can be fun and not destructive. A sorely lacking feeling in the last few years when memetic armies only fought on one side. Now it’s a free for all. And that is potentially a lot more interesting.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Media

Day 21 and The Fast

A perennial topic for the harried is the benefit of fasting. A timeless religious tradition and spiritual practice, fasting cleanses the mind and body. Typically when I fast I do it with food. And I generally do my 7 day water fasts over the Holy Nights between Christmas and epiphany. But as I push through the final stages of healing my previously chronic illness I am considering a media fast instead.

I have a consistent meditation practice but the kind of mindfulness that comes from a break in the information flow seems more appealing. I’m exhausted from the constant crisis of the past three weeks as we careened from Georgia to the Capital insurrection to media deplatforming and silencing to finally the Inauguration. I had my hilarious shopping binge where I picked up every relaxation facilitating product I could find. But perhaps it’s time to admit I need some forced distance between me and the information firehose.

A proper retreat requires a significant break with outside stimulation. Which I’m not entirely sure is necessary. But I am concerned about overstimulation from media arcs both political and pandemic related. In Dr. Sepah’s original writing on dopamine fasting he presented it as a way to regain control over automatic rigid behaviors that have negative stimulus triggers.

In his words this type of cognitive behavioral therapy “weakens the classical conditioning in a process called ‘habituation’, which ultimately restores our behavioral flexibility.” So perhaps rather than seek a fast or a retreat or a detox I’m simply looking to break the impulses and anxiety that the media arcs have implanted in me. I do not wish to engage in the narratives of anxiety or jubilation (neither have inherently more truth) when they are not my own impulses or emotions.

My energy and my emotions are my own. I need them for my own health. They are not meant to be manipulated by outside players with their own agendas. That I need my energy for my own reasons should not even need saying. Media or political players don’t own me. There is no moral obligation that I stay tuned in. My attention cannot save anything but myself. So I will explore putting some distance between myself and the media for a but. My goal is to break from reactivity that was created externally. I’ll still be writing daily. And I suspect I’ll dabble in the bits of Twitter that bring me enjoyment and connection. But I’ll give myself the space to heal.

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Chronicle Internet Culture Media Politics

Distraction unto Death

I wasn’t allowed to watch television as a child. My mother has a firm view on the pedagogical benefits of using your full cognition range as a developing child. She simply thought the television did too much work for you which hindered building mental acuity in a child. But she also has a more personal reason. She believes distraction breeds stagnation.

As I’ve mentioned before here, my parents were utopian hippies committed to the manifest destiny of Silicon Valley. A classic book of the radical “information longs to be free” crowd Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves To Death showed distraction as the primary tool of the tyrant. The real tyrant wouldn’t need force. They only need us to be distracted. Bread and circus for the plebeians to keep us complacent. In this sense my mother feared Huxley’s Brave New World more than she did Orwell’s 1984. In her view information need discourse, disagreement, and nuance. Television wasn’t a medium suited to debate. Particularly news programs who digested and provided a narrative and a moral arc. No one could discern facts or testable hypotheses from a story. That was an affront to enlightenment values, science, and frankly even religion (she hates when you drag belief into science). So I didn’t watch television as a child as quite literally it would make me stupid and lazy.

It is with this knowledge that I realize the main weapon the populist right has wielded the last four years was distraction. A constant drum beat of incessant crisis after crisis. Never having a moment of peace after outage after outrage was laundered through mass media insistent on making sure it never became normal. The #Resistance committed to remembering that “this is not normal” wore us down daily.

So in a way I think we have come out from under totalitarian thought. It was impossible to make progress on problems when one could only see the next crisis. The question is now how do we react from having constant distraction finally relieved? Do we realize the mess we are in? Distraction bred stagnation. But can we shake it off and begin to the think for ourselves again.

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Chronicle Media

Day 16 and The Yips

I’ve always felt safer knowing more than less. It’s a childish view as the world is filled with unknown unknowns and the quality of information someone like I can get is better than it used to be but also potentially dangerously over saturating. Safety is illusory. Knowledge only gives you so much.

And yet I’d rather be on top of the information wave than slip off the board and have it drown me. Silly a metaphor as surfing the web can be, its helpful. Your ride your information environment you never let it crash over you. But last week I lost my footing on the information and got dragged under the wave. I was drowning in emotions. So I gave myself some time to catch my breath on the proverbial beach. I asked my husband to stop sending me information flow. I bought a bunch of relaxation driven products (because consumption ever solves anything). I promised myself that I would give myself more distance between myself and the yawning sea of media. And I became afraid of getting back on the board and riding the next wave. I got the yips. Every time I tried to navigate a story critically I couldn’t think it through. All my finely tuned skills for being extremely online. Poof! I thought perhaps I’d reached a point where media would only provide me anxiety and not power and knowledge. But after a few days of hikes, conversations with my mother, lots of meditation, and hours of talks with friends I found myself back online today surfing. The yips has passed. I had some good insights. And I was back on the wave again. Confident and without anxiety.

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Chronicle Media Politics

Silicon Valley Isn’t Modern and That’s Why It’s Good

My favorite genre of essay is elites discovering the system is fucked. The latest to catch my eye is ostensibly about a mother for whom the medical system failed her child and who then like Alice in Wonderland has to completely reset her expectations of reality. It’s a spectacular piece of writing in Tablet Mag by Alana Newhouse that weighs in on many topics near to my heart like modernism, Marxism and the aesthetics of the future. It’s helpful to understand the context from which she writes which is conservative Jewish American which is an uneasy set of political priors in our current moment (she hints at biological essentialism and the benefits of religious community order which are to put it mostly just not my jam). But this gives her a firm base for the cultural critique of both socialism and the individualism of which I’m a proponent.

She references back to an excellent piece in The Verge about the flatness of millennial Silicon Valley consumption. It’s a significant and widespread aesthetic of ease and consumption we’ve all experienced. Some of us even like frictionless capitalism as she lays it out.

I also think she’s dead wrong about about both it’s causes and it’s main perpetrators. She blames Silicon Valley for the great flattening. Lays at its feet the horrors of socialism and capitalism alike with a hearty dose of Soviet aesthetics as its anchor.

But that’s just not the historically accurate view of Silicon Valley. I like to think I have some authority on the subject at hand for a multitude of reasons. If anything I am emblematic of her thesis. I’m someone who has fallen through the medical system by being spat out of the ringer of hustle culture. I also chose this fate willingly.

And it was not the aesthetics of Silicon Valley, late stage capitalism or libertarians who set my fate in motion. Or even American Calvinists (again I would know ask me how set theory and Russels paradox made me a born again Calvinist). It was the fucking boomer hippies.

Hear me out. I know this as I was born in Fremont (Palo Alto’s poorer sister) to a family of hippies who immigrated to Silicon Valley because they were devoted to the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog. Information wants to be free and all that early optimism. They get woo. They were Age of Aquarius believers. They weren’t remotely modernists or Marxists. Hippies may be have pretended to be collectivists but in the end they were all about the pursuit of selfish enlightenment.

So I guess she gets the communitarian roots of it quite right. She simply missed the inherent radicalism of its early adherents. And I suppose it’s easy to forget this as most of the successful adherents became quite wealthy and became the anchor tenants of NIMBY towns like Boulder and Big Fork. They became the things they never wanted.

In other words Silicon Valley hippies became the Boomers their millennial and Gen X children know and hate. I honestly feel terrible saying this as my parents are the light of my life and I owe everything to them. My mother in particular hates being called a Boomer. As it’s come to represent an inversion of their core beliefs. It’s not really fair to be honest. They are better people than the term flattening could ever suggest.

Nevertheless it is true that Stewart Brand’s legacy is a complex one. The network society didn’t at all emerge into the utopia they envisioned. I believe it haunts them. It’s the great shame of their generation that their legacy on the turning of the cultural wheel would do so much to harm the very people they built it for: their children. And it wasn’t at all their intention.

Silicon Valley people are radical. But they actually believe quite a bit in hierarchy. They just believe it is earned. Founders wouldn’t be worshipped as messianic figures if this weren’t our culture. We wouldn’t have significant and elaborate sets of cultural capital signifiers if we believed in communists aesthetics of equality. Just because the outcome appears brutal doesn’t make it brutalist. Bertolt Brecht would be appalled to be compared to the radicalism of Silicon Valley’s meritocracy. It’s probably helpful to remember that Jacobin revolutionaries are not the same as those who exalt in the unique power of individualism.

But it’s a common historical fallacy Americans try to evoke as we become more and more uncomfortable with just how close our worshiping of liberties can overlap with the nationalist strongman of fascists of yore.

But the difference is the network state of Silicon Valley is a philosophy of freedom. It’s deeply retrograde in some aspects. It exalts the possibility of excellence for all that chose the system. That’s why America has been the country of immigrants in modern imagination. Being an American was a choice. So was Silicon Valley. The network is a choice. No one is born jacked in. Eventually you make a choice to be a part of it. The question I have is why do so many of us think we are victims of the choices we made?

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Media

Talking to Press for Normies

Interacting with the media used to only be a concern for politicians, executives, and law enforcement. You would give a press release or stand up in front of a podium for questions, and that was about it. Now virtually anyone can become the focus of intense press interest, meaning the skills to interact constructively with media is becoming crucial for any normie trying to survive online.

I’m going to write up a four part series on the basics any slob can use to make sure that when the time comes (and it will come), you don’t accidentally immolate yourself. I’ll break it down into four parts.

  • What to say
  • Who to say it to
  • When to say it
  • How not to fuck yourself

Today is part one in the series and we will focus on “what to say” should you find yourself talking to a reporter.

First, and this may seem obvious, but the press are not your friends. They have a job to do. Many people find it insulting that a reporter will chat you up, seeming all friendly like, only to find themselves portrayed in a light they didn’t expect. They blame the reporter. But it’s not the reporter’s fault. The responsibility for coming across the way you want is on you.

Step 1 is to Figure out your main point. If that’s the only key insight that gets communicated, you will be happy with the result. That means you need to plan out what you need to communicate. Rehearse it in your head. And do not deviate from what you planned to say. That means don’t give out idle chit chat to the press. Don’t make jokes about opponents. Stick to the point you wish to make and do not give any additional detail or color. Don’t get nervous or get rushed. Stick to what you planned to say. If you are a normie who just needs to survive a media encounter unscathed do not fuck around. Leave the advanced moves to the professionals

Think of it like talking to a cop. They are not your friend either. You don’t give up any additional information to law enforcement and you know you shouldn’t be talking to them without a lawyer. If I had my way, no one would talk to the press without a publicist on hand but we haven’t quite reached the stage where that’s a legal right (maybe it should be).

If you are being interviewed you may encounter questions you didn’t think of beforehand. That’s OK. Don’t panic. Recall your main point. Journalists anchor stories with what is called a “lede” which is the first thing mentioned a story. If you give an interview where you repeat your main point over and over again the journalist will intuit that this should be their lede. Or at least you increase your chances that your main point will become the entry point of the story. You will get your point heard.

You may notice skilled communicators always circle back to their original point. No matter what story or anecdote they tell they always get back to the one key thing that need you to grasp. I don’t care if the key point is “chocolate and peanut butter is the best combination” but if you are telling a reporter how you think caramel is also tasty and you actually quite like marshmallows and graham crackers with melted chocolate, I need you to come back to the punchline “but none of them compare to chocolate and peanut butter”

If you don’t get back to your main point you may find yourself reading a headline that says committed Chocolate & Peanut Butter Advocate admits that caramel may be just as good with chocolate. You can imagine how this turn turns out right? “How can we ever trust this agenda if they willingly offer up that other alternatives are equally tasty? Why do they insist on this combination for us when they know others are equally delicious”

Sure, this sound ridiculous but think of how many policy discussions are derailed when an academic innocently offers up that other points of view have merit but ultimately do not support their core conclusion. The doubt factory sets in and simple conclusions are clouded. Present your information clearly and as conclusively as possible.

Coming up soon, how to know who you should be talking to in the press.

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Chronicle Media

Talking To Press for Normies Part 2: Who To Talk To

Gone are the days when normies could be assured they would never have occasion to talk to the press. Social media gives us all the opportunity (and I don’t mean this positively) to grab the attention of the media. So how do you handle yourself, as a normie, when it’s your turn in the spotlight? This advice is not meant for folks who need to improve their media training skills but for normies who have no professional reason to interact with press. Plenty of great public relations content covers how to talk to the media for business people, civil servants and law enforcement with obligations or incentives for public relations.

To start at the beginning check out part 1, what to say. Today I’ll cover who to say it to. With future installments I’ll discuss when to say it and specific tactics on how not to fuck yourselves in the process.

So you may intuit why in what to say the key takeaway is to repeat your core point and not deviate with any color or commentary. Many of us know that words can get mangled when someone retells it. Telephone is a children’s game for a reason.

But who you talk to can be just as crucial as what you say to them.

First, stay as local as you can. National press, particularly television or big publications like the New York Times, can give you life changing exposure. But I mean it when I say life changing. Being in the spotlight can up end your reality. So be careful of that monkey’s paw. A local reporter is closer to your community. They have a better grasp on why an issue may be controversial and require a lighter touch. They appreciate that their subjects live in their community meaning they have less incentive to sensationalize or portray two sides to an issue as mortal enemies. Note that this isn’t necessarily true for how the subjects see themselves (few issues divide quite so well as the provincial or personal) but reporters have to remain in the good graces of their beat (the topics they are assigned by their editor) in a way that occasional subjects do not.

Next, be honest about what medium will serve your message best. If you are particularly articulate with the written word go to a print publication or online daily. If you are photogenic and confident you can deliver you message concisely in short (30 seconds or less) bursts then you can consider an invitation to be on a local television program. If you are good at conversations (this is the most risky as it is the least controlled) a radio or podcast program can offer more range. It is a rare person that can deliver information equally well in any medium. The old adage “they have a face for radio” has more truth to it than we care to admit to ourselves. Be brutally honest and pick a medium accordingly. Again this assumes that you are the center of a story and have a choice (and the first choice for most folks is not talking at all so all this advice assumes that you are past that moment and need to speak for yourself.)

Finally, if possible, pick a reporter or personality that is similar to you. We are kinder and more empathetic towards those we see ourselves in. I know this sucks for women and minorities of all kinds. But if you can find even the slimmest of ties or commonalities between you and the media covering you highlight it helps create a sympathetic connection. Both played the same sport? Love the same team? Have a passion for the same tv show? Research that shit ahead of time. I guarantee that the reporter will have done the same. Establishing a rapport is crucial.

So decide what you will say (concise and repeated) to an audience that will be empathetic to you (local, in a medium that flatters you, with someone who can relate). Next installment I’ll go over when to say what you have to say.