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Culture

Day 1259 and Cooler Than Me

I was once (devastatingly) told by an ex-boyfriend that the song he associated with me was Mike Posner’s Cooler Than Me. He felt I cared too much about taste. This wasn’t an unfair assessment as I was working in fashion at the time and maintained all the intellectual pretensions of being a antiquity obsessed fresh […]

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Startups

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Over the last decade I’ve gone deeper into a set of values that guide my relationship to what we should be building and for whom. Consensus and alignment will be the twin sisters of our shared reality. We achieve consensus through open networked & decentralized systems of governance and value. A trustless system reaches consensus […]

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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 […]

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Aesthetics Emotional Work Uncategorized

1156 and On and Off

I don’t have anything to say right now. I had an offline day in which I stayed in the moment and reflected. Sometimes it’s simply a choice to be in the problems of a given moment. You could just not fixate. The frictions of any given day are a choice. If you choose to experience […]

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Emotional Work

Day 1124 and Go Within and Look Out

I am considering doing a pullback from social media for a few weeks. I must hone my instruments. Don’t worry, I’ll still write daily and you can message me on Twitter or send me an email. I don’t like where my attention is being pulled and I need some time to reorient myself so I […]

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Emotional Work Travel

Day 1026 and Failure Modes

I’m not sure my current traveling is yielding the success I’d hoped. A bumpy road of geopolitical chaos, physical stress and emotional work has made my time in Tallinn harder than anticipated. I don’t want to call the trip a failure as I doubt anyone is paying enough attention but me to notice. I didn’t […]

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Culture Politics

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

A swirling milieu of discourse has brought a renewed focus in my inbox & timeline on what constitutes the pursuit of excellence; that old Socratic dichotomy of the individual human’s personal virtues and his role as citizen in the wider communal project of civilization. The tensions have never felt so taut to me. Please forgive […]

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1015 and Selfish

I think we are entering a selfish age. High trust societies are built from cooperation. When we get more through coordination than we do from conflict we have an incentive build more. Simple supply and demand can teach us a lot about improving the bargain of trusting each other. Coordination suffers when trust goes down. […]

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Culture Preparedness

Day 986 and Risky Business

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we see risk the past few years. What is an acceptable risk? What are the boundaries of risk perception and how much variability is there between two people? How much of those tolerances are innate versus cultural? Can you consent to risks you don’t understand? Philosophers […]

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 977 and Insecurities

A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait. Topics like “body counts” and the relative degrees of acceptable promiscuity in women (as little as possible) is everywhere. We are main charactering single women for sleeping […]