Tag: Attention

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Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1785 and Adversarial Openness

There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.

If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.

The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.

These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.

I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.

The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.

I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 1782 and Sweeping Rolls and Unrunnable Rapids

Navigating the rifts and eddies in the river of human scale time takes more skill and endurance than I fear I have.

Even if I assume that Earth time still running on any sort of human scale (which I don’t believe to be true), I find myself wondering if it’s better to head for the riverbank for a moment. Like Lewis and Clark, I only dimly understand where this river will let out.

I once paddled lightly, easily, even joyfully with the currents of my time. When I capsized, to continue with kayaking metaphors, I would simply snap myself back upright with a sweep or C-to-C Roll roll and carry on downstream spluttering wet and bursting with laughter.

Kayaking the Zeitgeist River was a fine past time for the quick witted and able shouldered amongst us. One could build an entire career by correctly the judging the river of time. And what fun it was to carry along with friends as time did most of the work.

But ever more frequently, I search for the eddies to pull myself out of the stream to stop for a while. Tired and hurting, I look for a refuge to catch my breath and slow my heart. As the timeline rages on without me, through crashing white water and its drowning currents, I wonder if I should even be alone on these waters at all.

Simply staying upright is now a bare minimum of a concern. A hip snap and good instincts does little when the course never ends and the rapids unexpectedly turn from a fun day of Class III rapids to Unrunnable class VI without so much as a posted sign. There are no maps or forecasts to be had. Your gear might be whatever you brought onto the water in entirely different conditions.

There be dragons here? Hardly so dramatic a metaphor applies from naval history pertains to river ways. But it’s no less dangerous for its lack of vista. Unseen rocks, snapped branches and water logged organic materials rise and decay into froth and burble. Lurking like so many unseen estuarine creatures swimming inland.

I already feel as if the tattered veil which separates our shared reality with whatever exists beyond is far too fragile. That any one of us can choose to run the rapids of passing time serves to remind me of how fraught the pastime of participating in history can be.

A small kayak with one intrepid soul can be righted quickly. But an endless run of rapids designed to sink any who choose to run it? The public experience of our shared time should not be such a battle. We all want to see where we are going don’t we?

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1780 and Being Cooked

I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.

The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?

The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.

Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.

The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.

It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?

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Community Culture Politics

Day 1776 and Remembering the Specifics

A little quirk of my personal record keeping that day seventeen sixty six of writing coincides with Armistice Day and in America now Veterans Day.

A lot to be said for how Americans always make it about themselves. World War I because an entirely new scale of war that did not exist when we fought the Red Coats for self governance.

And that has a lot of foreign interventionism in it. But we won that war so the assist from the French isn’t seen as pesky meddling. Imagine how the British press must have covered that at the time.

It’s still hard not to think about how different Americans post colonial future could have gone. We stabilized into a democracy and went in meddled in other people’s wars.

I don’t know why it never occurs to most Americans now people meddle in our problems with the intent of making us an easier target. One man’s nation is another nation’s propaganda target. Americans get targeted too.

The soft grey war is much harder to see when the wars we are taught to remember get lumped into one holiday honoring all veterans.

Wars aren’t specific anymore for us and this is a bad thing. My generation got the “global war on terror” and we learned our lessons in ways far too abstract for most and concrete in ways.

That disproportionately affected regular people rather than the wealthy inner core. Hard to consider how that plays into other nations calculations. Just seems like remembering the specifics of a conflict might be helpful to staying a thriving nation.

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Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1774 and Haywire Hell Handbaskets

It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.

I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.

2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.

And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.

Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.

And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.

And yet, I’m still unwilling to consider the centralized approach. We’d be eaten faster just like whales fished into oblivion by mistakes in the Soviet math.

It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.

However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.

We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1773 and Post-Rats in An Irrational World

Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.

Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?

That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.

Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.

Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.

We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.

Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.

I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.

Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.

I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.

Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.

I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture Reading

Day 1772 and No Signal

The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.

As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!

The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.

MAWP!

Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.

Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.

This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.

Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.

Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.

If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.

MAWP!

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1771 and Virtuous Cycles for Wise Readers

It’s hard to say that there is a best part of living in Montana. If you like mountains, seasons and being outdoors it is hard to beat. One thing I particularly enjoy is how often people will come to our state either as tourists or for retreats with their companies and coworkers.

Alex and I drove down to Paradise Valley today to meet up with the founders of one of our favorite products. Having a company meetup in Yellowstone’s off season is a smart choice and as Montana citizens we love it when folks come to visit and center themselves and their work here.

A villain’s lair in Paradise Valley or a cozy lodge for discerning visitors to Yellowstone?

Daniel and Tristan have made one of our all time favorite and most used set of reading applications. The first is called Readwise. It’s hard to fully describe the product except to say that it makes you a better reader through your own highlights and notes.

I came into the application with more than a decade of highlights from my Kindle and found myself deepening my experience with all of my prior reading. It’s one of the best research tools a heavy reader can purchase and I was a very happy customer.

They didn’t stop there though. To make things even better, they launched a reader product which further cemented a virtuous reading. My highlighting, annotating and review cycle is now integrated with my reading and note taking across all my different content formats and sources.

Majestic vistas help us all feel wonder and spark creativity through nature’s beauty

Taking a few hours to drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in America and catching up with talented and passionate founders is an incredible way to spend a few hours.

The passion and care that Tristan, Dan and their team have brought to making reading an even better experience brings me so much joy. As a power user of their apps, and a voracious reader of all forms of written content from books to Twitter threads, I appreciate the incredible feat of product management they have pulled off. Making reading better is no easy task.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1760 and Optionality or Commitment Issues

As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.

I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.

Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.

Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”

Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.

We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.

So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?

Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.

But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.

An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.