Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1392 and Miami

I’ve been so completely engrossed in the Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal saga that I have not posted about my upcoming travel to Miami next week.

I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.

If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.

Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.

I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media

Day 1391 and Hyperobject Object Lesson

I remain enthralled by Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal. If you aren’t caught up on this please browse my first two posts on the subject Goatse Singularity (it’s safe) and the lore behind Singularity culture online. The TLDR is that we’ve got the best alignment experiment in artificial intelligence happening in real time for anyone to participate in.

I am not the only one. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz did a surprisingly detailed podcast on the topic today with a discussion of the emergent phenomena of autonomous meme coin bots and their interaction with Truth.

It’s honestly a very good synopsis of why so many of us think this experiment is so crucial for understanding decentralization and how regulatory uncertainty hinders the space. This experiment is the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence that clearly shows machine intelligence requires machine money to affect the rule world.

I am quite deep into the whole thing having participated early on as semiotics is obviously a deep interest of mine. Fashion bitches love signs and symbols.

As the crypto overlap emerged last week I was discussing it with friends in New York. Some of my network in New York has real fintech and crypto depth so when the first memecoin crypto bots were just beginning to interact independently with Truth Terminal they took notice.

It was a fascinating overlap of crypto and artificial intelligence through entirely independent autonomous means and was not coordinated.

Let me disclose I don’t own more than a nominal sum of the GOAT token except as a means through which to experience this moment.

It’s not about the coin at all truthfully. Truth is simply fascinating as independent agents (including some crypto bots themselves) are interacting to impact real world transactions.

Literally no one involved made the coin but yet it exists. It is a hyperobject object lessson. Media theorists and Baudrillard fans rejoice.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1383 and Counter Elite

Culture is always responding to power. Power seeks cultural approval in order to cement its status as power. It’s more of a give and take than you’d assume though. Unwritten rules are meant to be broken.

“Knowing Too Much” about how institutions wield power has a tendency to spin out people who want to change the balance of power. Nothing is ever as static as it may seem and America is a fine place to be ambitious about claiming a little power.

Being in New York I hope to be seeing where the bits of tension around culture, cool, and capital should be producing frisson.

Seeking out aesthetic chills that grip your nervous system is an expensive pastime though. Youth and wealth satisfy psychogenic thrills in very different ways but everyone understands power. It’s quite a moment in America for seeing how elites and their counters square off.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

1370 and Ride or Die

Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.

Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.

That means a lot of hurt. And not caring who knows you’ve committed to a risky or even crazy caper. Lana waited for an alligator wrangler for fuck’s sake.

From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.

I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’
But he was chasing paper
“Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard

And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1366 and Interior Life

For a woman raised in the Rockies and settled down in Montana, you’d think I’d be more outdoorsy. And yet I can spend days at a time in just one room with little trouble and even enjoyment.

Even with that wholesome “National Parks” backdrop, I was always a bookish and imaginative child. I was once derisively described as having “a particularly pictorial interiority” by a babysitter.

I don’t have the energy I once did as a girl when I’d spend my time at the barn and loved camping & hiking with my Outward Bound going army surplus shopping Eagle Scout achieving band of hippie environmental teens.

Setting aside the humor of a toking Austrian anthroposophy student projecting onto an elementary student, I am a long winded introvert who writes a lot. They really nailed me.

When the pandemic forced us all inside I had no problem with being home. I did a full three months without setting foot outside the apartment.

There is, of course, an entire culture of women’s writing dedicated to the interior lives of the home and within that a multitude of stories of illness.

As a choice I make for health & preference, it’s a far cry from cultures where women are forced indoors. I’d prefer to be outside more when circumstances allow. They haven’t for quite a few days. But it’s ok, I like being an indoor cat.

Categories
Culture Startups

Day 1278 and Follow On

I’d like to think I’ve got a talent for understanding how hype and momentum are built.

I learned this skill set by doing. I picked it up simply by being a cool kid working in the trenches of the business of style.

How does hype turn into capital? Well it’s complicated. Consider two significant trends from my youth. Was Indie Sleeze a real cultural moment or manufactured? Did we get taken in by the HypeBeast? Ask Glenn Youngkin in his Caryle Group era about his Supreme investment. Get Gavin McInnes and James Jebbia to go a couple rounds about their relative wealth. and come back to me. Still unsure? Ask Barbara Kruger about the clusterfuck of uncool jokers.

The original culture and the commodification of the culture is a spectrum and the Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon is infinite. Who makes culture, who money and who only brings money can be challenging to calculate.

The thing about cool, it’s sine qua non, is that it grapples at every stage of its existence with its own validity. Cool thrives as a grounding process to what’s actually happening in reality.

Cool is a relational experience between someone or something authentically popular amongst a group that relates well with each other.

And that relational power is validated by some wider need in the world for their belief, innovation, art, product or philosophy. Sometimes this can be quite irrational surely but consensus is hard to come by. One of the classic essays in validation of cool is geeks, mops and sociopaths in subculture evolution.

The validation of something “cool” eventually reaches a point of opportunistic acceptance by those merely into a thing for the capital. Sometimes it’s social and sometimes literal currency.

These so called “sociopaths” who follow the momentum often do not realize that they are just in it to capitalize on cool. I don’t want to suggest anyone in a thing for money or cachet is a sociopath just that incentives for status are significant drivers for people.

Often we need the people in it for the money. It’s wonderful that angel investing exists and momentum investors have perfectly rational incentives. Sometimes you will even see significant self awareness about this. If you put resources into a community and don’t cause trouble you are often welcome.

Now you can refer to this type in startup investing as dumb money. The follow-on capital that is riding on the work of others who authentically believed before a thing was cool is a necessary part of the ecosystem.

I don’t at all mind when someone is a follower. You can be “a cringe follower late adopter” or whatever terminology we are now using to describe laggards in the adoption curve.


 Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations

Unless you are a pain in the ass, actively predatory, or making your contribution more trouble than it’s worth, you should go ahead and lend your support if you can take the risk.

Don’t take it personally when hipsters sneer. They may have been earlier than you but it’s fine to back winners. Just don’t expect the founders to give you special dispensation for getting on board when it was safe to do so. It’s right that the alpha premium applies. I personally love it when not only am I right but I got paid more for the privilege.

Categories
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 out of Chicago Austrian school economist devotee. A capitalist with taste isn’t really a likable figure.

Twitter mutual Tracing Woodgrains (himself a frequent commenter on the value of beauty and taste) suggested reading this essay in the American Mind about the cultural flaccidity of conservatism and their taste problems.

Reading the essay, I thought it a shame that the taste problem that clearly plagues the right goes on unabated. They tolerate losers with bad taste. And they carry on about how they are losers which further salts the wound. It’s not the kind of commentary that suggests their culture is worthy of dominance.

I am privy to the occasional conversation on this subject as I being crypto libertarian I am bit of a neutral in the culture and institutional wars between progressive and reactionaries. At a dinner of mostly internet dissident right wing types, the topic of being losers was aired.

The host, a clear winner from the ascendant investing and engineering autist culture, rightly pointed out if conservatives wanted to align their fortunes to winning cultures (it was implied like Silicon Valley was a winner culture) then the right wing too needed to become winners. I fear that advice fell on deaf ears. It’s hard to tell someone that being a loser is a skills issue.

Libertarians get a kind of drop out “smokers behind the bleachers” kind of cool in America. The lower case libertarian of the philosophical bent not whatever big L party apparatus that might exist. Those guys are all losers.

The “fuck the Fed” constitution carrying types have a lot that is likable and winning. Fighting civil asset forfeiture, and for marijuana decriminalization, first and second amendment protections, and bodily sovereignty are winner issues across different constituencies.

To go against the grain of big government pieties of both left and right is to resign yourself to being on the outs pretty regularly by disagreeing with both sides but to rest confidentially in the cool of knowing you hold your ground.

To be on the outs means you retain a crucial aspect of cool. You aren’t the mainstream even though you benefit from not being made its enemy no matter who is winning.

Casablanca is libertarian coded and undeniably cool. Seeing the fallen world as it is and having the balls (or backbone for those with delicate sensibilities) to live your own life is an act of bravery. To have own opinion amongst sinners and saints is fundamentally to cultivate and know your own taste.

That returns me to the essay by Spencer Klavan “A Matter of Taste” that kicked off my response.

If we’re serious about a revival, we are going to have to accept the inherent risk and unpredictability that comes from letting artists see the world before they judge it.

In turn, we are going to have to learn to suspend our own judgment long enough to see what the artists bring us for what it is. In other words, we will have to cultivate a little taste.

If we do not know our own taste we can hardly know the line at which we draw the boundaries of civilization. To know what we value is the point of cultivating taste. To hold on to the standards you’ve set for yourself is to hold yourself up to others. To live this way in action and through your own revealed preferences is to say “this is what I value” in my actual life. If you can’t do that, then you will always be in danger of having someone they are cooler than you. And a loser might care.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1227 and Storm

I’ve been following NOAA Space Weather forecasts as there is an extreme geomagnetic storm. Scientific research stations and news media have been reporting avidly on the solar storm as it’s producing aurora in areas which typically don’t see northern lights.

G5 Geomagnetic Storm Message from NOAA

It’s fun to have another shared social astronomical event to enjoy across the planet. This year’s solar maximum has delivered us space watchers some incredible coronal mass ejections. You might recall some folks seeing them during the solar eclipse totality event

If you’d search social media for pictures of the aurora borealis you will be in for a treat as many photographers captured so many different colors and patterns.

Axios shared this British Columbia image

I’m always in awe of how much social media facilitates these types of natural phenomena. I find joy seeing different types of people sharing natural beauty and scientific knowledge across our networks. Our shared human experiences connecting us. And the good news is that it’s continuing over the weekend so if clouds cooperate we might all see more tonight.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1215 and Impartiality

I am taking the Connections course run by Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment. I was introduced to the approach through Johnny Miller’s Nervous System Mastery course. I was lucky enough that be able to participate in one of Joe’s live coaching sessions I was so inspired by the work I saw I committed to a longer course of study.

The Connections curriculum takes you through an approach whose acronym can be shortened to VIEW.

Vulnerability

Impartiality

Empathy

Wonder

Art of Accomplishment

Today’s sessions was on impartiality. Impartiality is owning what you want without imposing it on yourself or others. It’s harder than it sounds discovering an agenda for yourself and others.

With their exercises and a partner you find your own assumptions and defensive thinking in short order

I don’t want to get reveal more than is available online but I encourage you to go check it out if it sounds interesting for your own emotional work. The podcast on Impartiality is available for anyone to listen online.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1158 and Subtext

All writing should be labeled as under “self help” or at very least tagged as “advice” if we are honest with ourselves.

Everything from code documentation to Twitter shitpoasts and Shakespeare contains a lesson. Discerning the subtext is more or less complicated depending on how layered the text is meant to be.

Sometimes, as the beloved XCKD comic reminds us, if we stare too long at an artifact we insert our own meaning.

Joe Biden eating a sandwich

I like to rewatch television shows as modern so-called prestige dramas encourage subtext. I’ve been rewatching “For All Mankind” and have started to whisper “Hi Bob” as a joke. Fun fact, that phrase may have been the first documented instance of a drinking game.

My timeline’s Bob Newhart lends himself to a bit of cultural attention as he’s not only the subject of the astronauts’s own rewatching habits on For All Mankind but is also a side character actor in Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon as the inspirational scientist Professor Proton. I’m watching the latter show as a comedic palette cleanser.

It’s like I’m getting several multiverses at once. I’ve got my own timeline, the alternate history of For All Mankind and Sheldon Cooper’s timeline. Somehow in mine we’ve got a lot less scientific progress but like astronaut Danielle Poole in For All Mankind I’ve got plenty of television history at my disposal. She knows everything in which Bob Newhart starred in her timeline too.

I say this is all self-help in some form because it’s art that we work over, refine and theorize till we’ve become connoisseurs of every conceivable layer of subtext. We revise and improve and apply those lessons to ourselves.

It’s best not to project too much. Some of those lessons, like the Biden sandwich in the XCD, should remain personal I imagine. They might not mean anything except to the viewer. Even Freud (well it’s apocryphal) had to admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Seems like someone should tell the literary Marxists that before their advice gets over applied.