Tag: Capitalism

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1543 and Buffering in the Network

Being that so much of modern work is done online it is a challenge to ever really unplug. I feel as if startups, finance and media have it particularly bad.

I try not to let myself burn out on the dopaminergic waves of the network. But I am a citizens of the internet and just like Molly Millions I’m suffering from the central nervous system stress the Cyperpunk future promised us.

I am however going to attempt a pull back to refocus myself so that I don’t get pulled by the strong currents of the network. A lot of low roads will be traversed between here and wherever we land.

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Finance Startups

Day 1542 and Future Blind

I am confident in my capacity to judge directional trends over time. I’ve been doing it consistently for close to twenty years. I’ve made solid bets that outweigh the wrong calls.

But right now I feel lost. I feel blind to short and medium term outcomes. I don’t know what happens next or in what order.

I’ve got a lot of working theories about how we orient over the next decade or two but I’ve got low confidence on anything nearer.

Perhaps this is because I simply don’t want my near term predictions to be true. They are too depressing and too cynical and too heartless.

An essay from Venkatesh Rao today titled Low Roads to High Places emphasizes why.

If a necessary historical evolution can occur via a low road or a high road, it will almost always happen via the low road.

He notes the law of the low road may simply be a an emergent consequence of thermodynamics. Entropy being what it is the path of least resistance wins.

Or maybe, as Rao suggests, the low road is a corollary to Abraham Thomas’ principle that to call macro-trends correctly you have to have “boundless optimism about technology and bottomless cynicism about humans.”

I’m just not ready to have bottomless cynicism about humans though I have optimism about technology. It’s possible to change our consensus and narrative direction and we do so regularly. Vibe shifts happen once an hour these days

Abraham Thomas has a theory that venture investing is temporal arbitrage. We are front running narrative consensus.

That’s why we look like herd animals eventually no matter how contrarian the bet was at the start.

Because being optimistic about the material changes that technology can bring has been the road to success. But I can’t decide how cynical I am able to be about my fellow humans.

Categories
Finance Media Politics

Day 1539 and Institutional Trust

Continuing their exceptional data visualization work, the Financial Times shows how young Americans are losing trust in our institutions through a series of grim charts powered by Gallop polling. 

Gallop polling in the FT on young American’s trust

What a fun set of polling data on the day we have Tim Walz stomping around saying industry sucks. We have no future and the people who build just absolutely suck isn’t the best vibe from a vice presidential candidate. But it certainly seems to be a mood.

Why would anyone trust a system that proudly rolls out installment loans for food delivery aligned with payday schedules? The internet is making hay with the Klarna DoorDash partnership.

Decent people suggest we must protect the class of people so bad at math they would use this financial product. Well, actually…go a million nuanced credit understanders. Honestly I’ve never carried a credit card balance because I’m too afraid to do so. But some people yolo their consumption.

Abundance means we need to produce things. Which costs money. It’s hard to take say Ezra Klein’s Abundance tour too seriously when we make it impossible to finance housing but we can finance your burrito taxi. That’s not what anyone was hoping for when they gave all this power to our government. No wonder institutional trust is down.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.

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Startups

Day 1534 and Certitude

I’ve been busy with a founder who is running an astonishingly competitive seed round. Let’s just say I’m glad I wrote the first check.

I back founders long before it’s possible to have any certainty. I have accumulated enough signal and taste over twenty years to feel like I know when someone has what it takes to try their hand at a startup. It doesn’t mean it will work but I always believe in their capacity to do the work required.

Proving that out is probably the work of millions of pages of business school papers. No wonder we are complaining about the lack of builders. Wouldn’t it be better if we just put those resources into starting actual businesses instead of theorizing?

I’m a huge fan of always being a bit entrepreneurial. The much maligned “side hustle” that millenials and zoomers maintain out of necessity has its upside.

I like all scales and all kinds of business. Alex and started dating thanks to a swap on an Airbnb rent arbitrage. I’d let someone book dates for my apartment when I was supposed to be out of town. Trip dates change. Alex offered his apartment up if we split the profit. We’ve been in business ever since.

I’m working through a new local business plan we think will have community benefit (both in terms of job creation and service offering). Am I certain it will work?

Actually more certain than you’d expect this small scale that we can boot something up. Startups are much harder to judge than an existing business model with a new offering.

Incidentally if you are in Montana and looking for a medical grade hyperbaric chamber oxygen treatment we should have ours in a month or so.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1533 and the Long View

One of the oddities of America’s tax system is how much it comparatively penalizes those who make a high salary over those who earn by investment gains.

I’m sure some neoliberal could give a polished argument about about marginal tax brackets but we absolutely hose high W2 earners relative to capital.

Maybe Americans aren’t so sophisticated about what this means but it seems folks got the gist of it. Older generations owning the S&P and their home found that to be a better investment than just working for a living.

The message seems to be if you have a salary at least try to be a partner in the company yeah? Thats how bankers, lawyers, and other professionals did it.

This is a very boom boom when it works and gets very ugly when it doesn’t.

I find it odious that we tax high earning labor. It stifles social mobility by keeping wealth out of reach of the professional class. The government decides how their money is invested. That makes it much harder to take the long view. Clearly the generation above us didn’t always do so.

Categories
Finance

Day 1529 and The Detoxing Economy

Do you recall the first time you heard the term detox? If you were a hippie kid I’d bet you grew up with it. If you were a striver maybe it arrived in your email inbox with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

Or if you are a banker, maybe Scott Bessent introduced you to the term just this week. Which tbh I wouldn’t entirely believe as the entire dating pool for the professional upper middle class is obsessed with wellness.

“The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period,”

Scott Bessent at the New York Economic Club March 6th 2025

Hippies and anxious white women usually use detox as a kind of catch all for methods of various efficacy for flushing out unwelcome…toxins. Being specific can make you sound like a loony tune.

Turns the same logic can be applied to economic and fiscal policy. If you get too far into monetary policy and the Federal Reserve you too will sound like a loony tune.

But it’s hard not to be persuaded by those who rightly point out that America has been printing money and that has downstream effects.

Many an empire has fallen for debasing its currency. Something I am sure a man like Bessent understands. It’s not so much a pleasant white girl cleanse but managing through opioid addiction. Which isn’t an encouraging metaphor.

Categories
Politics

Day 1526 and PE Owned Rump State

I’ve been trying to not explicitly discuss politics for a couple weeks as it’s hard to have any sense of consensus reality. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well as reading news. It’s only served to further muddle my mind. I’ve regularly discuss the hostile information environment.

Given the chaotic scene it feels both foolish and necessary to send up signals to others. Venkatesh Rao has me considering cross publishing more of my general rambles to Substack. Especially as other channels become more hostile.

Rao leaves fantastic little notes like the below on whether Americans should prepare for a private equity owned rump state. A thought experiment which feels less far fetched than usual.

Just chagrined bewilderment and embarrassment and private-equity-owned rump state services shambolic-debacling along (ht Bruce Sterling for that turn of phrase). Whimpers over bangs.

As state capacity declines and social cohesion degrades it wouldn’t surprise me if the new institutional powers we trust most are corporations. Imagine Americans in twenty years as scarce but almost mythic progenitors of a corporate governance future.

Sure America may still be a nation state in that future but a United States of corporate charters isn’t all that far off from our original conception. No really check out the Virginia Company.

Categories
Startups

Day 1521 and Reconsidering

I’ve been rereading the work of my internet friends Luke Burgis recently. His hugely influential book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life introduced popular culture to philosopher Rene Girard. 

I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Peter Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the work thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows. 

What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”

I’ve found Luke’s thoughts on topics like existential safety and mimetic collapse to be regularly illuminating and would recommend reading his newsletter.

I am reconsidering some of the mimetics that are driving my life. We’ve had some amazing startup investments. I’ve been able to move policy issues into law. And I do it all with the added weight of chronic health issues.

It brings me joy to help the next generation of founders. It’s as close as I’ve come to a deep desire. I do it believe I love it.

I also have an idea of how it should look. The formality of funds and institutional investors has been the default way things are done in startups. I’ve never been too concerned with prestige but I have some attachments to what it should look like.

The irony being startups and the venture business are all about the big hit. There is no right way of achieving them as playbooks get rewritten every time we have a new technology.

So I wonder why I want things to look any way at all when the ultimate objective is to achieve a type of performance that is already emerging. Am I stuck wanting only because I want to mimic others? It seems possible.

That realization makes me want to let go of any preconceived notions of structure or aesthetic and to simply commit to my own process and how I find outliers.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1520 and Reflexively Negative

When I was younger I would try to demonstrate my cleverness by pointing out problems. Like many precocious youngsters, I was certain that this behavior provided value.

It’s exciting to feel the power that comes with understanding. It is especially intoxicating to students. No one is so fervent as a new convert.

Finding errors in reasoning, gaps in knowledge, poorly laid plans, and lapses in judgement can all be helpful when they are put to use in finding a path to success.

Being able to humbly accept corrections to one’s worldview or understanding when in error is crucial to being able to understand your reality. No one values that more than people who must succeed.

Alas, because finding and correcting misunderstanding is so important, it’s easy to slip into reflexive negativity as your only tactic. You mistake finding errors with being the only valuable contribution. It’s a classic problem with engineers. And unlike the young they rarely outgrow the habit.

Any founder who has had a pitch with a venture capitalist who can only focus on the problems and not the potential, understands why this it is unproductive to rely only on spotting issues. Being right about something being wrong doesn’t build anything.