Tag: Capitalism

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Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

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Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1698 and Capitalize On My Pain

We often talk about solving “pain points” when doing product development and market fit work for startups. We have popular metaphors in this vein. Start a company that sells painkillers not vitamins is so ubiquitous a piece of advice I can’t even locate its original source.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I personally apply this motto to the pain I’ve experienced in my own life. I’ve had personal pain points (travel and miniatures cosmetics sounded small but the market proved itself out) and now I am working on a medical spa concept as a side project in our barn in Montana.

The two growth areas in America, and soon I imagine the world, is artificial intelligence and healthcare for aging populations. I’ve been particularly interested in complex chronic diseases and the holistic approach required to treat them as I myself suffer from one.

If I experience a problem my instinct is to solve it for everyone. So I figure if the data coming from Jackson Hole is to be believed I should find a way to integrate what I know well (technology and complex disease management) and use that experience help our elders age with less pain. Literally painkillers perhaps in some cases.

I found this listicle in some dreck of an SEO bot optimized website so apologies to any original bloggers but it’s a decent list of how to think through why we like this metaphor. Skip if you just want my human written personal content. I’m just experimenting with including extra content from AI for my own recording keeping.

The Reality Test: Do users actively seek solutions, or do you need to educate them?


• The Money Test: Does budget appear instantly, or do they “need to think about it”?


• The Urgency Test: Do they want it this month, or is it “maybe next quarter”?


• The Solution Test: Are they actively looking for alternatives?


• The Decision Test: Do deals close in 1-2 calls?


• The Value Test: Can they quantify the cost of the problem?


• The Team Test: Does the whole team being sold on it want it?

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1682 and Hipster European Vacation Activated

If there is one complaint Americans have about Europe (and no this isn’t about air conditioning) it is their insistence on playing the worst kind of nightclub music absolutely everywhere.

You are getting your morning espresso and it’s trashy club music. You go eat at a normal neighborhood spot for a quiet dinner and you can feel the beat drop as they place your first course. Domenico Modugno isn’t on any Italian menus these days.

If you are by a hotel pool you better be ready to enjoy some Kylie Minogue nostalgia-core. Which I actually enjoy but I’ve been honest about maintaining my own nostalgia for Hotel Costes delivered by noise canceling headphones. It’s trashy but so is blasting up-temp remixes when I stare at the sea.

The more tourism because contentious in Europe, the worse the problem seems to get. It’s the belief of most proprietors that more local guests and tourists alike prefer this kind of cacophony. When you ask them about turning things down or towing on a playlist better suited to cuisine it can be hit or miss.

Especially if you are the sort to seek out the foodie destinations of a town. Nothing is quite the let down of eating a Michelin quality meal with a backing track of bad house music.

I am sure some tourists have furthered these stereotypes (I’m looking at you Britain). But assure you, Americans do not prefer this especially if your tourism is made up of the first wave of cultural hipster.

Once you go high margin (again apologies to the Europoor tourist) you do bave a very different customer base and they hate this shit We can tolerate your aversion to ice but not an aura assault.

If you have cultural touchstones in your own musical history, we’d much prefer that over dinner.

Authenticity is all anyone will have left in any smoothed over algorithmically perfected middle ground. And guess what it’s not Swedish House Mafia and no one wants Miami or Ibiza to be everywhere. Tallinn and Tirana have their own vibe.

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.

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Culture

Day 1678 and Fiat Prestige and the Inflationary Pressures of Credentialism

America has been rejecting practical workforce training like apprenticeships for over a century. Our military nudged the enlisted into skills but it was access to university education that helped Americans climb the social ladder.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 or as you probably know, the “the GI Bill” was so successful that by 1947, WWII veterans accounted for 50% of college enrollments.

Social mobility matters a lot to the mythos of America so it doesn’t surprise me that practical skills were not nearly so attractive once we made prestigious colleges more accessible.

When millennials were children the 1992 Higher Education Reauthorization Act (HEA92) made college loans available to all families, regardless of financial need.

And the trend in spending on education and the cost if higher education has been up and to the right ever since. Over the 59-year period from 1963 to 2022, college tuition increased nearly 300% when adjusted for inflation.

Educationdata.org

The effects of the cultural experiment in social mobility some call The Sort where children with good test scores were shuffled into universities and into the managerial class is driving spend and anxiety.

From Max Weber’s Bureaucratic Society of group status competition to Randy Collin’s work in the 70s on the rise of credentialism in the workplace, it seems as if modern industry drove a deep mimetic desire for prestigious university educations to stay ahead socially.

Having skills was not as important as being seen as having the right credentials. The old joke that Harvard launders the rich kids with the smart kids so no one knows who is who doesn’t seem so funny snore.

Last week a picture went viral of a table of Harvard and Stanford graduates in Silicon Valley (mostly Asian students) was all angst as their credentials mean something to them but not necessarily to employers or founders. So what is the point?

The data shows college education spending consistently outpaces inflation. But is it doomed to keep going up and up even if we are getting less from it? Walter Kirn had a turn of phrase in a tweet today I found apt. We have a problem with fiat prestige in America.

Power flows in the country — human, social & intellectual power flows — look bad for the legacy brokerages & gate keepers. Their services are of declining value, their cartel-like arrangements are dissolving & their ability to maintain their own mystique through circular credentialing & prize-giving — the issuance of what one might call “fiat prestige” — is failing. It’s unclear to me what moves they have left

Inflated currency destroys value. Our Federal Reserve worries about being over a 2% inflation rate and yet we let it happen. So why aren’t we more concerned with fiat prestige and its credentialist inflationary pressures? Our system of social credibility is under significant pressure and if I were Harvard I’d be terrified of going fully Zimbabwe on my social capital.

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Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

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Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

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Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1668 and Rounding The Corner

I really feel the weight of month of July today as I am just now getting the sense I am making a recovery. I did not have post surgical wound care for an abscess on my list of “to do’s” for the month but here I am.

Nor did I expect to work through a pathology report on my own while cobbling together the best blend of infection coverage through a globe spanning set of physicians and sub specialties.

I didn’t know what a sub dermal panniculitis was or how to treat an infection where that was a proximate side effect. But I learned and I managed my care to a much better result. I had real consequences from disinterested burned out doctor and I had to step up.

Frankly I’ve spent more time on artificial intelligence projects doing differential diagnostics on myself than I ever conceived was possible. I owner my own data and inputs and I could make inferences while corroborating it with physicians who are more interested in my care.

I am a slow healer and there is a high cost associated with immune suppression biologic drugs for chronic autoimmune conditions. I have no choice but to be active in my own care and tools as simple as a deep search on Perplexity take you so far.

There is a high cost to healthcare in America and it’s not getting any better. That I can now reliably use any number of commercial AIs to break down lab and pathology reports is a huge boon to all of humanity. Real miracles are happening because someone used AI to double check blood work and symptoms.

Healthcare gets rationed by price or by time and we’ve never really known an abundance of trained doctors in my lifetime. But we might have an abundance of intelligence about healthcare in our lifetime.

Part of put quandary with care in America is regulatory capture by organizations like the American Medical Association and others of its ilk. Of course they prioritize what works best for keeping their continued privileged position on care.

I lost a lot of time this month to health but I gained more than I realized. We are seeing changes in a system that has only ever known scarcity. And we know it’s not good enough.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1666 and Disability Rolls

It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.

Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.

I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.

But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.

I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.

Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.

Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.

We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.

Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.