After seeing my sadly in the recovery scores from my Whoop I felt a bit of a cortisol mitigation effort was in effect. In other words, I took a little spa day.
When I was younger and living in Chinatown above an acupuncture and massage joint that specialized in pressure point work. Going once a week probably saved my life. It was affordable and close and good.
It was always packed with the working class of the area. The prison complex wasn’t too far away, we had a precinct two blocks down, and the court buildings system is an enormous warren of humans. A lot of very intense people in tough, sometimes very physical situations.
So by comparison my body was easy work for a man who worked on hurt cops and stressed out prosecutors. White girl problems are easy.
So I’ve done a run of sauna and cold work. I’ve had a massage. I have stretched and done breath work and moved around to feel things reset their flow.
I should really remember that heat, cold, oxygen, movement and pressure really do solve most problems. Don’t forget to eat and drink.
The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.
I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.
I’m in my Worf era
I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.
I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.
But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.
So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.
I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.
Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.
I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.
It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. Much as I’d enjoy going on a sidequest exploring ethnographies of man and his use of tools, I have an agenda. My honor has been impinged.
At a gathering of eccentrics in Wyoming, myself & a friend engaged in an hour long discourse with our audience on the use of artificial intelligence and how one might practically understand these tools. The talk was more linear algebra than immanentizing the eschaton.
Our explicitly stated goal was to understand the technology stack and its capabilities so the audience could decide for themselves how to use or leverage this tool. The blurb I wrote introducing the topic.
Concerned that artificial intelligence will be a panopticon of horror? Afraid of nerds immanentizing the eschaton? Jon and Julie have your back. Artificial intelligence is neither God nor imminent utopia but merely tools built by the hand of man. A practical discussion of how you can use these new compute tools to concretely impact the work & insight you need in your everyday life. Come prepared with questions, projects, and ideas as it will be interactive.
Our focus was on how these tools are built, what they can do and what they cannot do, and a firm stance that mathematics and compute are not imbued with divinity or demons but reflections of what we bring to them.
Indeed, we have never had more freedom than we do now to shape the weights and biases of these topological models. Our words on the public internet carry weight thanks to availability of fast compute and open source models. Our bigger issue is maintaining the capacity to supply energy and grid capacity. The real problems are human and social, much as we may wish to scapegoat a piece of code.
We were not suggesting a world ending chaos nor were we endorsing its use. We were discussing it as a piece of software and what it could do.
In a surprise to both myself and my co-speaker, the keynote of the evening spent a significant portion of his talk discussing how foolish, misguided and demonic we both were. Now the event has Chatham House rules for outside content or do I’d go into more detail.
However inside the event, the speaker could have done us the courtesy of saying our names when he made the suggestion that we are working towards evil ends.
He did not ask how we related to his positions and how we’d defend our word. At no point did he name us or address us. He merely cast aspersions.
Frankly I had no idea why he thought we were avatars for some kind of suicide squad as I doubt the gentleman is aware of MIRI or the myriad internal fights inside Silicon Valley. It was however insinuated to be true that we are the bad guys. It’s what we do.
I find this to be a cowardly position. If one holds such strong views that one would call two humans with honest intentions demonic at least say our names. We were in the audience listening intently.
So I will protest. In a past era, I feel that these heavy accusations would have been grounds for demanding satisfaction.
I am of the belief that the only way we manage the effects of adopting any new technology that impacts our culture is rigorously debating the merits from engineering to impact.
We are not asking you to trust us. We are instructing you in how to master this tool if you so desire and if it brings value to your life. We share many of the same concerns.
Alas (thankfully?) you are not summoning any demons that were not previously installed on the operating system of your soul. The shadow of humanity can be seen quite clearly in how we engage with the artifacts we call artificial intelligence.
I will continue to insist that insulting our positions without naming us or calling us to account in public is grandstanding. It was clear we were the targets of the criticism. It is poor form.
I’m an American so our manners may be different than others, but we do have them. So put some respect on our names when you say them in your real life subtweet.
We’ve asked to discuss it with him further through our host but he has declined. I frankly am delighted to find that I’ve had such an impact that I cannot even be named when raging against that machine.
One hopes a parlay possible. But it sounds like he would prefer to avoid us. This is of course fair on his part. I am however prepared to defend my positions. We all must be prepared to defend our actions in this age of change.
Yesterday we enjoyed the uncomfortable tension of a cease fire announcement in the Israeli-Iranian conflict that America had just entered that no one was sure was real.
Sure the president had said so inside the heaven ban built to purpose social network Truth Social, but we had no basis for belief in that without hearing from Iran or Israel.
Newspapers sent out alerts that resolved into “unconfirmed” once you hit the landing page. Thanks guys but maybe cool your jets on the alerts?
I read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine when it came out in 2007 with a mix of skepticism and head nodding. Her thesis was that disasters are used to push through unpopular market reforms. I remain skeptical of presenting neoliberalism as exclusively disaster capitalism.
I alas myself lack the crucial qualification for being a fan of Klein’s work as I am not a socialist. I like the market reforms and doubt chaos is the only vehicle through which they can be passed. At this point in our history, chaos is leading us more towards statist solutions
Nevertheless I remain skeptical of the narratives from state power no matter what solution the state is pushing. I like a market based solution as much as the next bourgeois pig, but I’m no fan of the state overriding its people or its businesses.
The problem we have now isn’t just Shock Doctrine or disaster capitalism driving outcomes. It was mostly disaster authoritarianism in my opinion.
The reason it is so unsettling to have no source of reliable information or institutional trust in our information is because we are now living in the age of Slop Doctrine. You can take it if you like Naomi.
It’s impossible to sort out what reality is winning even when it’s coming from a head of state. A million competing narratives from untold decentralized sources of information now compete to confused and unsettle us. The psy-ops aren’t even run by humans anymore.
I’d love for us to collapse that state of uncertainty that comes from multiple entangled competing realities into consensus reality.
Alas when I searched for quantum reality collapse terminology all I found was a LiDAR imaging company for architectural documentation. Their website doesn’t suggest much of anything invoking quantum states except insofar as one hopes that by using their imaging your buildings won’t do so.
And so we are left swimming in the slop doctrine confusion in which old ways of validating information are entirely useless to us. Slop Doctrine is here and it sucks.
I am coming off multiple days of in-person interactions. It has been nice to go from Costco to committees to backyard bbq.
I am tired. I intend to rest and alas because I am doing things in the moment I have had too few moments for even a brief rest. It has been a good time.
My HRV and my RHR are way down and way up respectively. I need that to reverse so I’ll sleep it off.
“Being extremely online is bad for you” has become a kind of common knowledge position the era of smart phone ubiquity. Every knows that everyone knows it’s bad for you.
It’s clear I do a lot of scrolling. I have an entire category here dedicated to internet culture. I am blessedly only addicted to Twitter. I refuse to download TikTok and I gave up Instagram years ago. I even tried to restart using Instagram and failed within the week.
Something about Instagram’s current culture makes me feel bad and as much as it has topics I personally (love like fashion) I can’t get past the icky feeling that it’s numbing my visual palette. It’s so bad I can’t even be a creator on it.
I like to have fun on the internet. I enjoy interactions, bon mots, hot takes, and niche interests. Instagram doesn’t feel like a great game of chance as Twitter can so why bother? Twitter is the best circus in town.
I know that when you star into the abyss it stars back at you. I am not immune to propaganda. Anyone with enough experience in the media business is acutely aware of how easy it is to influence the human mind.
But if I’m going to crack dick jokes in between scouting for venture deals and tracking financial and geopolitical news I am doing it on Twitter. Though if Bloomberg ever opened up its terminal to the unwashed we can circle our chub reveal futures contracts there instead. If you don’t know what that’s in reference to and have a delicate constitution don’t click ok?
I had a preventative care appointment at the doctor today and I came away from the experience wondering why I bothered.
I felt like a fool for checking on something before it had become a problem. It was merely a concern and no answers could be found without a substantial escalation in investment and time. Which I chose not to dod.
I will still get a bill whether it’s 90 seconds or 90 minutes which I do understand. But does it have to be so “escalate to maximum” or “just ignore it” as the poles of preventative care? Can’t it be more of a spectrum of options? And because “fuck you that’s why” I have no more certainty on the problem than when I started.
And that’s not how I want to experience the care and maintenance of anything under my care in my life let alone my body. Our house, our relationships, our business, our car, heck our chickens deserve better than “don’t know why you bother” care. I bother because I care.
We have a home maintenance sheet excel, a seasonal rotation system for disaster supplies, and an inventory management system for key household goods.
Yeah, we are that kind of family. My husband has opinions on label makers. I have strong opinions on sweater brushes and leather are.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Sure that’s a very Mary Poppins kind of approach to life but I think it’s a worthy one. I want to live a life where I am responsible to my own life.
Being disagreeable has a lot going for it. It’s frowned on when women do it even though it is usually coded as a feminine trait. Traditionalists say they want agreeable wives and iconoclast lords.
Despite this call to the past, it’s not hard to argue that this amenable feminine and chaotic masculine is itself a bit subversive. Fractious independent goddesses and agreeable brotherhoods are archetypes too.
I am fearful in this moment that we have less patience for disagreements among humanity just as our capacity for loyalty and reciprocity dims with atomization.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease has a bit of a “both sides of the bus” meme quality to it. Attention can build you up and tear you apart.
The eye of American’s elite class has many competing stories about which ideas must be celebrated, which are taboo and which are too dangerous to be discussed. And that’s just the last couple of days of essays at the New Yorker.
Being a mere node in a large but influential network I transmit as much as I receive. I intake and reroute information as part of my own synthesis process and I appreciate that it benefits me and others. But it also does damage and today was a rough start to June by any measure.
Any utopian dreams of a human noosphere of higher collective intelligence must reflect upon quotidian horrors showing our baser impulses daily and summer is war season for good logistical reasons.
Ukraine appears to have blow up a number of Russian fighter jets with drones smuggled in with trucks. Let’s recall the below image from last year. Ukrainian Netrunners vaping while flying FPV drones stepped up their game hardcore today.
Ukrainian FPV drone operator smoking a vape circa summer of 2024
believe this is the first ever direct attack on any nation’s nuclear triad in history, and it succeeded – @antroyn
Aesthetically, because it’s going to be a high volatility volume time on Wall Street, I am enjoying to see this Twitter account picking beautiful brutalism and “80s cocaine design aesthetics” out of the ether.
If one is to survive a summer of netrunners and volatility, this look will appeal to the sorts who want hyper focus, class & glass. While no one would recommend uppers, it’s clearly part of the overall vibe of managing nervous system input for anyone looking to do violence.
I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.
The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.
I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.
Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.
It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.
