Tag: Anger

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Culture

Day 1551 and Jokes On Us

April Fool’s Day is just the worst. Practical jokes were much more enjoyable when telling the truth was still a widely accepted social norm. Our moment is one of a thousand falsehoods.

Our commitment to the truth and a shared sense of what separates truth from falsehoods has never felt shakier to me. It’s one strategic lie after another from all our institutions and leaders.

If you are living in our era of lies, half truths, and various flavors of misinformation & disinformation the idea of dedicated a day to falsehoods seems perverse. I don’t want to be on the Internet or a part of discourse on a day when deliberately lying gives you social capital.

Alas this is an ancient human custom in many places. The Indian festival of Holi, medieval Feast of Fools, and the Roman Hilaria are all early spring celebrations of pranks, jokes and foolishness. The prevailing theory dates to France and the change to the Gregorian calendar.

April Fools’ Day back to 16th-century France. In 1564, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar, moving New Year’s Day from late March (around the vernal equinox) to January 1. Those who continued celebrating the old New Year date on April 1 were mocked as “April fools” and became targets of pranks, such as receiving fake gifts or being sent on “fool’s errands.”

– Via Perplexity

I rather imagine that the religious traditions mentioned above all valued truth as a foundational virtue. To know the truth of the world and the truth of your soul are the twin ambitions of human life.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive. Or too rigid. Humans are evolved primates and we play status games that involve deception in the entire primate family. But I’d still prefer that we communicate true information to each other as both a norm and as an aspiration. That’s not a joke.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

Categories
Medical Politics

Day 1544 and Ownership

Americans are big fans of private property; or so our reputation says. But we’ve got a lot of exceptions, rules and regulations how we exercise our rights in that regard.

From zoning laws to bodily sovereignty, restrictions on what you can do with your “stuff” really runs the gamut in America.

I refused to join security clearance service Clear or take part in genetic testing at 23andMe because I simply didn’t trust that my genetic and biometric data wouldn’t end up being sold to a private equity shop in the event of bankruptcy. Which alas is exactly what is happening to 23andMe.

I don’t care for the state having my biometrics but at least it’s possible to advocate medical rights and personal privacy. The TSA and the State Department have me cleared for TSAPre and Trusted Traveler.

I don’t love it but I’ve got some rights that leviathan is meant to abide by. I don’t believe we’ve yet found a way to bind a corporation to a similar term of service. But the cyperpunk future seems more likely to give us less control not more.

Between the law of the low road and our current tendency toward “the idiot plot” in all areas of life it seems like ownership of our bodies and its data is a pipe dream. Hell you can’t even keep a Signal group chat secure anymore as any old idiot (or savvy Machiavellian) can drop in a journalist.

Categories
Finance Media Politics

Day 1539 and Institutional Trust

Continuing their exceptional data visualization work, the Financial Times shows how young Americans are losing trust in our institutions through a series of grim charts powered by Gallop polling. 

Gallop polling in the FT on young American’s trust

What a fun set of polling data on the day we have Tim Walz stomping around saying industry sucks. We have no future and the people who build just absolutely suck isn’t the best vibe from a vice presidential candidate. But it certainly seems to be a mood.

Why would anyone trust a system that proudly rolls out installment loans for food delivery aligned with payday schedules? The internet is making hay with the Klarna DoorDash partnership.

Decent people suggest we must protect the class of people so bad at math they would use this financial product. Well, actually…go a million nuanced credit understanders. Honestly I’ve never carried a credit card balance because I’m too afraid to do so. But some people yolo their consumption.

Abundance means we need to produce things. Which costs money. It’s hard to take say Ezra Klein’s Abundance tour too seriously when we make it impossible to finance housing but we can finance your burrito taxi. That’s not what anyone was hoping for when they gave all this power to our government. No wonder institutional trust is down.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1533 and the Long View

One of the oddities of America’s tax system is how much it comparatively penalizes those who make a high salary over those who earn by investment gains.

I’m sure some neoliberal could give a polished argument about about marginal tax brackets but we absolutely hose high W2 earners relative to capital.

Maybe Americans aren’t so sophisticated about what this means but it seems folks got the gist of it. Older generations owning the S&P and their home found that to be a better investment than just working for a living.

The message seems to be if you have a salary at least try to be a partner in the company yeah? Thats how bankers, lawyers, and other professionals did it.

This is a very boom boom when it works and gets very ugly when it doesn’t.

I find it odious that we tax high earning labor. It stifles social mobility by keeping wealth out of reach of the professional class. The government decides how their money is invested. That makes it much harder to take the long view. Clearly the generation above us didn’t always do so.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

Categories
Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1492 and The Blob in The West

I am unsure how to feel about some of the shock and awe tactics being used in American politics. Well, it’s happening globally but I care more about how it happens here.

Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.

There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.

But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.

Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.

It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.

And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.

If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1483 and If You Die In The Matrix

Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.

We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.

A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.

Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?

Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.

If you die in the Matrix you die in real life

We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.

Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.

A German math Olympiad transwoman on an H1B visa was killed in a shootout with a border patrol agent in Vermont. A shooting in Nashville involved a full Google document FAQ on a flavor of soyjack I didn’t even know existed and will not type here.

If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1457 and Cultural Values

I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.

A debate over type of work visa called the H-1B kicked off days of horrific anti-Indian racism which then created a bizarre backlash insinuating white Americans of having a culture of under-achievement. All over a broken program that brings in 65,000 workers in a country of 300m.

Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.

The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.

Maybe someone else will remember this but I recall an incident during my childhood when Bill Cosby got canceled (no not for that) over statements suggesting that some portions of poor black American cultural values were not promoting success and achievement.

If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.

I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.

Categories
Politics

Day 1446 and Wrapping It Up

I’m running on fumes and would really like to say “fuck it” to both the year and my daily habits but as that’s not an option I’ll kvetch about it instead.

As optimistic as I am about 2025 (I know this isn’t a widely held view), I’ve never felt like I needed a break more than I do now.

Clearly I’m not alone. Germany’s Chancellor Scholz lost a no confidence vote setting the stage for snap elections. Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland stepped down today further weakening Justin Trudeau’s government.

And that’s just today’s news. The world’s institutions are in a state of transition and regular people like me could use just a few weeks to catch our breath.

Remember when we had “two weeks to stop the spread?” Maybe we need that for whatever the heck is going on now. Two weeks to calm your tits?

There are plenty of people screaming for a pause in artificial intelligence but I think they have it all backwards. I’d like a pause in all the politics of the world and press on towards a future where we have more insight into the world. Accelerate the future but please let me have a break from the current moment just for a bit.