Tag: Capitalism

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Chronicle Politics

Day 48 and Rush

My high school years had some ups and downs, which is how I ended up in Manhattan as an 18 year old, making up credits from the year I dropped out. I had an interest in news, so I talked my way into a job at a talk radio station 77WABC.

I’d take the 1 train down from 116th St to Penn Station and l, without even going outside, went up into one of the Penn Plaza towers where I screened calls for the block of radio programs that took the afternoon and evening hours. Some of the programs were pretty shoddy “left wing white guy vs right wing white guy” and announcing for New Jersey Devils hockey games.

But the marquee talent was Rush Limbaugh.

In the back of the rabbit warren of sales team cubicles and behind the other recording studios for B-list talent (which at the time included Sean Hannity), Rush had his own recording studio. And yes, the golden microphone was real. It stunk of smoke. His producer had somehow struck a deal with building management to allow him to smoke his cigars when the rest of the station had to plod down to 34th street for a cigarette.

The funny part of him having his own private recording studio is that Rush had already moved to Florida. Sure he recorded at the station, but even at the time he was enough of a star that he maintained multiple private studios. Such was the power of the EIB Network. Dittoheads had made Rush a fortune even before 9/11 and the rise of the neoconservatives. I can still recite the ditties. I can hear Rush recording his commercials. The way he would say Ruth Chris Steaks will stay with me till I die.

I have complex feelings about having spent time in talk radio. I didn’t stay long, I saw the money wasn’t particularly good in media and I decided a college degree was worth pursuing. Conservative chit chat hadn’t yet fully diverged from the overall skepticism of mainstream media into its own behemoth yet. 6 o’clock news on broadcast probably still mattered. Facebook hadn’t been invented. People got their hard news from real television and the side opinions of grumpy white men hadn’t fully turned to grievance culture yet. Sean Hannity was still partners with Alan Colmes.

Seeing what Rush Limbaugh wrought on America has been hard. I don’t doubt that without him January 6th wouldn’t have happened. Trump might not have been president.

But without Rush and my experience in talk radio maybe I wouldn’t have studied economics. Maybe I wouldn’t have pursued business. I might have stayed a comfortable Silicon Valley liberal. But spending my afternoon talking to the weirdos that call into talk radio was an experience I value. I had come from crunchy hippie comfortable white upper class towns like Palo Alto and Boulder. I hadn’t ever considered the kind of politics that bred Republicans and subsequently Tea Party reactionaries and eventually Trumpist alt righters. A lot of ground got covered in the years.

I doubt Rush (or Sean) would have liked where my politics landed. Libertarians are frowned on in “real” conservative circles. Probably worse than the kind of pleasantly socialist left wing politics I had when I arrived.

I hope no one takes any of this as affirmation or justification or even acceptance of what talk radio culture birthed. I’m not even sure how to feel about Rush Limbaugh’s passing. Not that we were close, heck I doubt he knew my name. I was a teenager doing shit work and I spent much more time on other programs. But I still had to take the afternoon off as social media rushed to rejoice in his death. Even knowing the scope of his legacy I just couldn’t take it. My life path might have looked very different without encountering the EIB Network.

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Chronic Disease Finance Internet Culture

Day 46 & Time Value

My day went entirely off the rails around 5pm. A doctor with a very particular specialty that my current general practitioner wants me to see didn’t have any availability until mid April. I took the first available appointment and said I will take literally any cancellation you have. Well they had a cancellation for tomorrow at 11:20am and it’s now been 18 minutes since their email was sent as I was, ironically, in another doctor’s appointment (my therapist).

Upon getting out of my appointment, my husband (who is on my healthcare email since being sick in America is basically a part time job) immediately tells me to check my email as he checks how far the drive to Denver will be and if he can drive me as I frantically check calendars. We email another commitment we had saying sorry we have to cancel for a crucial medical appointment. We discuss if this drive is feasible as he has a 10am. Decide that it will be fine. Approximately 23 minutes since the email was sent have elapsed. We email to say yes.

They email back thirty minutes later telling me that someone else took the appointment. I literally scream. I tell them to again let me know if any other cancellations I will take anything available I am a 35 minute drive away.

Meanwhile I get an email from some global consulting firm asking me if I would talk to them about direct to consumer cosmetics companies for $500 an hour. I initially say yes sure why not. And then I see their questions.

Can you discuss the following: Key drivers to expand digital outreach?

I scratch my head. I mean I guess. Key drivers to what? For what purpose. Digital outreach to whom to achieve what ends? This sounds like management consulting drivel. So I look at the next question.

Can you discuss the following: Strategies to effectively utilize online+offline channels?

At this point I lose it. Utilize what channels for what ends! I’m an entrepreneur for fuck’s sake. We either deal in complete pie in the sky or incredibly detailed absolutes. We do not faff about discussing utilizing channels for …strategies. I email the recruiter saying these questions are better suited to a management consultant and I can’t be helpful. Sure $500 is a lot for an hour of my time but an hour of my sanity?

Meanwhile one of my absolute favorite human beings, who is also an investor, has emailed me to ask for help with an opportunity a founder I introduced him to has on the table. I tell him my entire afternoon is available to run the numbers and I’ll pull out my previous actuals for a similar situation so we can figure out a way to help her score this win.

This is all an elaborate way of saying that the time value of your life doesn’t have an easy dollar value attached to it. If it’s your health? Literally will cancel everything to get to a doctor. So will your spouse. Your friends will understand if you prioritize the doctor. If it’s relationships that matter to you then you will go out of your way to help someone succeed. But $500 to bullshit someone? I guess I’d take a pass on that.

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Chronicle Media Politics

Silicon Valley Isn’t Modern and That’s Why It’s Good

My favorite genre of essay is elites discovering the system is fucked. The latest to catch my eye is ostensibly about a mother for whom the medical system failed her child and who then like Alice in Wonderland has to completely reset her expectations of reality. It’s a spectacular piece of writing in Tablet Mag by Alana Newhouse that weighs in on many topics near to my heart like modernism, Marxism and the aesthetics of the future. It’s helpful to understand the context from which she writes which is conservative Jewish American which is an uneasy set of political priors in our current moment (she hints at biological essentialism and the benefits of religious community order which are to put it mostly just not my jam). But this gives her a firm base for the cultural critique of both socialism and the individualism of which I’m a proponent.

She references back to an excellent piece in The Verge about the flatness of millennial Silicon Valley consumption. It’s a significant and widespread aesthetic of ease and consumption we’ve all experienced. Some of us even like frictionless capitalism as she lays it out.

I also think she’s dead wrong about about both it’s causes and it’s main perpetrators. She blames Silicon Valley for the great flattening. Lays at its feet the horrors of socialism and capitalism alike with a hearty dose of Soviet aesthetics as its anchor.

But that’s just not the historically accurate view of Silicon Valley. I like to think I have some authority on the subject at hand for a multitude of reasons. If anything I am emblematic of her thesis. I’m someone who has fallen through the medical system by being spat out of the ringer of hustle culture. I also chose this fate willingly.

And it was not the aesthetics of Silicon Valley, late stage capitalism or libertarians who set my fate in motion. Or even American Calvinists (again I would know ask me how set theory and Russels paradox made me a born again Calvinist). It was the fucking boomer hippies.

Hear me out. I know this as I was born in Fremont (Palo Alto’s poorer sister) to a family of hippies who immigrated to Silicon Valley because they were devoted to the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog. Information wants to be free and all that early optimism. They get woo. They were Age of Aquarius believers. They weren’t remotely modernists or Marxists. Hippies may be have pretended to be collectivists but in the end they were all about the pursuit of selfish enlightenment.

So I guess she gets the communitarian roots of it quite right. She simply missed the inherent radicalism of its early adherents. And I suppose it’s easy to forget this as most of the successful adherents became quite wealthy and became the anchor tenants of NIMBY towns like Boulder and Big Fork. They became the things they never wanted.

In other words Silicon Valley hippies became the Boomers their millennial and Gen X children know and hate. I honestly feel terrible saying this as my parents are the light of my life and I owe everything to them. My mother in particular hates being called a Boomer. As it’s come to represent an inversion of their core beliefs. It’s not really fair to be honest. They are better people than the term flattening could ever suggest.

Nevertheless it is true that Stewart Brand’s legacy is a complex one. The network society didn’t at all emerge into the utopia they envisioned. I believe it haunts them. It’s the great shame of their generation that their legacy on the turning of the cultural wheel would do so much to harm the very people they built it for: their children. And it wasn’t at all their intention.

Silicon Valley people are radical. But they actually believe quite a bit in hierarchy. They just believe it is earned. Founders wouldn’t be worshipped as messianic figures if this weren’t our culture. We wouldn’t have significant and elaborate sets of cultural capital signifiers if we believed in communists aesthetics of equality. Just because the outcome appears brutal doesn’t make it brutalist. Bertolt Brecht would be appalled to be compared to the radicalism of Silicon Valley’s meritocracy. It’s probably helpful to remember that Jacobin revolutionaries are not the same as those who exalt in the unique power of individualism.

But it’s a common historical fallacy Americans try to evoke as we become more and more uncomfortable with just how close our worshiping of liberties can overlap with the nationalist strongman of fascists of yore.

But the difference is the network state of Silicon Valley is a philosophy of freedom. It’s deeply retrograde in some aspects. It exalts the possibility of excellence for all that chose the system. That’s why America has been the country of immigrants in modern imagination. Being an American was a choice. So was Silicon Valley. The network is a choice. No one is born jacked in. Eventually you make a choice to be a part of it. The question I have is why do so many of us think we are victims of the choices we made?