Tag: Capitalism

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Community Media

Day 1281 and Independence Day

On day 915, which was last year’s 4th of July I wrote about the aspirational America as an idea. It involved blowing shit up. It seems like each Independence Day I find a way to praise Roland Emmerich’s fine science fiction film.

I haven’t watched it yet today but hopefully I’ll at least put on a few clips to enjoy fighter pilots, aliens, inspirational Presidential speeches and fireworks.

The backdrop of drama in the media about Joe Biden is in some ways an ideal way to recall the fractious American community. A continent held together not by ethnicity or religion but by entirely abstract ideals is going to constantly tested.

The theory of print capitalism posits that capital sprung from the solidarity of nationalism presented for the first time in mass media. The common cause of one’s countryman makes it easier to levy for taxes for conflict.

We are far beyond print in our media now. It’s almost cheap to call out media climate “totalizing” an it undersells the experience. Social media makes the experience of Americanness so fluid it ranges from aesthetic choice to the anarcho-tyranny of ailing power.

And yet we try to do better as the general temperament of the nations. America is a place where the founding mythos is that anyone from anywhere can become one of us.

The nationalism of belonging in America has nothing to do with meeting a check box of criteria. Though we are trying to make it more so with bureaucracy. The ideal is that free country sets the condition so anyone succeed. Liberty is a hard fought thing. You can celebrate it in a manner that’s pleasing here. Namely fireworks.

Happy 4th of July everyone. I’m as committed to the American project. The frontier is in our souls and we search it out together in freedom.

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Culture Startups

Day 1278 and Follow On

I’d like to think I’ve got a talent for understanding how hype and momentum are built.

I learned this skill set by doing. I picked it up simply by being a cool kid working in the trenches of the business of style.

How does hype turn into capital? Well it’s complicated. Consider two significant trends from my youth. Was Indie Sleeze a real cultural moment or manufactured? Did we get taken in by the HypeBeast? Ask Glenn Youngkin in his Caryle Group era about his Supreme investment. Get Gavin McInnes and James Jebbia to go a couple rounds about their relative wealth. and come back to me. Still unsure? Ask Barbara Kruger about the clusterfuck of uncool jokers.

The original culture and the commodification of the culture is a spectrum and the Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon is infinite. Who makes culture, who money and who only brings money can be challenging to calculate.

The thing about cool, it’s sine qua non, is that it grapples at every stage of its existence with its own validity. Cool thrives as a grounding process to what’s actually happening in reality.

Cool is a relational experience between someone or something authentically popular amongst a group that relates well with each other.

And that relational power is validated by some wider need in the world for their belief, innovation, art, product or philosophy. Sometimes this can be quite irrational surely but consensus is hard to come by. One of the classic essays in validation of cool is geeks, mops and sociopaths in subculture evolution.

The validation of something “cool” eventually reaches a point of opportunistic acceptance by those merely into a thing for the capital. Sometimes it’s social and sometimes literal currency.

These so called “sociopaths” who follow the momentum often do not realize that they are just in it to capitalize on cool. I don’t want to suggest anyone in a thing for money or cachet is a sociopath just that incentives for status are significant drivers for people.

Often we need the people in it for the money. It’s wonderful that angel investing exists and momentum investors have perfectly rational incentives. Sometimes you will even see significant self awareness about this. If you put resources into a community and don’t cause trouble you are often welcome.

Now you can refer to this type in startup investing as dumb money. The follow-on capital that is riding on the work of others who authentically believed before a thing was cool is a necessary part of the ecosystem.

I don’t at all mind when someone is a follower. You can be “a cringe follower late adopter” or whatever terminology we are now using to describe laggards in the adoption curve.


 Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations

Unless you are a pain in the ass, actively predatory, or making your contribution more trouble than it’s worth, you should go ahead and lend your support if you can take the risk.

Don’t take it personally when hipsters sneer. They may have been earlier than you but it’s fine to back winners. Just don’t expect the founders to give you special dispensation for getting on board when it was safe to do so. It’s right that the alpha premium applies. I personally love it when not only am I right but I got paid more for the privilege.

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Community Politics

Day 1277 and Don’t Lose Your Head

Everyone has their entertainment and mine is makes me a little bit of a stereotype. I hate podcasts but do most of my chores while listening to Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast.

I was catching up today with an interview with equities analyst Tom Lee. My attention got caught and stuck on his description of Bitcoin.

“Yes, Bitcoin is unlike other asset classes because there is a cooperative value. You know, the people who contribute to the network benefit from it. And that’s different than any other asset class.”

From Odd Lots: Why Tom Lee Thinks We Could See S&P 15,000 by 2030, Jun 24, 2024

Now I don’t think this is unique to Bitcoin. Cooperative value can be found in everything from nationalist politics to luxury handbag resale pricing. But I do this it’s important to have cooperative values be baked into a network for it accrue value.

We’ve traditionally mitigated concerns about market cooperation through clear property rights and legal protections. We’d backed up those claims with things as abstract as a monarch. We’ve evolved to it to the slightly more concrete full faith of the United States and Byzantine bodies of securities law. Fiduciary duty and all that.

But as we become less inclined to trust that the buck does in fact stop “anywhere” we are looking for ways to mitigate that risk. How to operate in a world without trust? You develop trustless protocols. Humans have plenty of intuitions about trust and many these intuitions struggle without a clear person with authority to act.

So I ask if we are heading into a “headless” age?

As distrust in institutional power struggles we are seeking out new ways to continue the business of life and civilization even if a high trust society is in question.

We’ve got networks like Bitcoin that work without a head. We have new corporate structures like decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs) that can operate strictly based on cooperative rules, and indeed now entire memetic cultures (like e/-cc) which hold power while being headless.

Lest you think this is some frontier tech idea that doesn’t apply to you we’ve headless content moderation systems & headless retail platforms. Huge swathes of financial tech is living above the API.

You could even argue that we’ve got headless political parties as the Democrats and Republicans both struggle with defacto heads nobody particular trusts. I don’t know if we can live in a headless democracy. Deciding who is a citizen is a very different matter than deciding who is a shareholder.

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Community

Day 1273 and Context Window

The fracturing of the social web has made it harder to connect person to person.

The enjoyment of sharing a platform or a protocol with other humans is undermined as grifters and opportunists bang against artificial intelligence slop and algorithmic manipulation. It’s just not as fun to be online in that atmosphere.

I happen to like putting a little more of humanity out here on the edges of the great social media seas. I am not everyone’s cup of tea but at least you know what flavor I am.

Perhaps humans need longer context windows just as much as our artificial intelligence. I’ll allow Google’s Keyword blog on DeepMind’s longer context window to explain.

Context windows are important because they help AI models recall information during a session. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name in the middle of a conversation a few minutes after they’ve said it, or sprinted across a room to grab a notebook to jot down a phone number you were just given? Remembering things in the flow of a conversation can be tricky for AI models, too — you might have had an experience where a chatbot “forgot” information after a few turns. That’s where long context windows can help.

What is a long context window?

Part of my affection for “blogging” whether it’s on my own WordPress powered website or Twitter (remember when we called it a microblogging service?) is that it gives the chance to establish a large context window for me.

You can definitely make predictions about me based on what I’ve shared. If I am as complex as million token window (which is what Google’s Gemini can now handle) I would honestly be surprised. So go ahead and augment any conversations you have with me with the wider context of Julie. It’s my goal that it allows us to connect better.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1272 and GWOT

As an elder millennial fascinated by the mass media I have a lot of mixed feelings on the American government and how it waged the “war on terror.”

It is heavy on my mind with the current news of Julien Assange’s agreement with the American government.

I think a lot about media, and in particular the technology that powers media. An informed population can still act in its own best interests but what we get told affects what we perceive as our best interests. And as we become more informed naturally some skepticism of the intentions of power arise.

Media affects how nation states wage wars. As we’ve evolved from print to television to radio to the internet how we sell the costs of war changed. But there are always populations who pay enough attention to be skeptical.

The open internet was born of that skepticism of government even so much of the technology emerged thanks to America’s heavy investment in defense industries.

Scientists used to have a wide range of politics and it’s not a surprise that defending American interests is a popular idea amongst people who work for the government. But maybe you see things and fight for more accountability along the way.

The GWOT unevenly affected millennials. If you were middle class your kid probably didn’t join up unless being in the service was how you got to being middle class. There was no draft.

Being in Colorado I had exposure to folks who worked for defense contractors as a lot of the private sector had settled around the cluster of talent from Boulder’s science labs down to the Air Force Academy in Fort Collins.

But there has been skepticism in all the branches of government as it became harder to control the narratives. And Americans don’t particularly like the idea of having propaganda even though I’d argue we produce and consumer enormous quantities of it as a nation.

I wish I could be more cogent about any of this. I am regularly shocked by how little people seem to remember how we prosecuted these long wars. We quickly forget.

Don’t be too sure human nature had changed. Don’t be too keen to give the government power because you are afraid. We’ve already seen what they do with it.

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Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1261 and the Jackpot

Dedicated roamers of the internet are people who like to notice things. Cyperpunk aesthetics made it romantic to experience global abstractions even as the reality of the power of oligarch, state and corporation blended into murky dystopian reality.

I said recently on this photo that we’ve got to stop hyperstitioning William Gibson. We keep finding ourselves further into the future. Just look at these anonymous accounts (so you can enjoy being a participant in the propaganda) joking about a drone operator in Ukraine.

We have netrunners. They’re autistic Ukrainian drone operators and their ice baths are niccy rushes

It’s hard to remember that real people exist on the other side of the abstractions. And yet here we are about to be those real people facing history. And it does seem like the time for taking action is now.

Venkatash Rao wrote an essay “many shoes are dropping” that gave me the kind of frisson of living in future, but as Gibson famously says, a bit unevenly. Across all narrative and technical arcs and and inside geopolitical realities we are starting to see the change.

In this I can’t help but see Gibson’s Jackpot. The elements that Rao calls out are multiple significant elections (not the least of which is the final installment of Biden vs Trump), the capital and nation state power consensus he calls “after Westphalia” and the intertwined fates of artificial intelligence and crypto.

A lot can change in a world where every form of power is being tested. I’ve written about this Jackpot energy before.

The fictional “jackpot” described in the novels is an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century

The Jackpot Trilogy.

I myself think it a privilege to even be a bit player in this moment in time. That I can allocate resources in any way feels high leverage in a way I didn’t anticipate experiencing.

We are the adults in the room. It may not be mich but we have agency. I feel good about putting my focus on crypto, AI and nuclear energy. Like Rao I can tie together past thoughts across a wide corpus by writing here every day and make decisions based on what has emerged.

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Startups

Day 1257 and Other People’s Labor

I am laying prone in bed hopped up on DayQuil and the good codeine cough medication. I have Covid and apparently this bout will be no picnic.

Being sick can feel vulnerable. I imagine to most eyes I am economically and socially unproductive in this condition. I am not able to labor.

When I am sick I am grateful I get to be capital. I feel capitalism should appeal anyone with a disability (as I do) simply because comparative advantage allows us to exist without being at of the mercy of the state. Illness being disabling doesn’t mean low productivity.

My ability to be capital relies on the comparative advantage of specializing in startup kinda of startups. Practically it means I got to play a part in helping further the labor of others looking build a company.

Today was a big day on that front for me. One of my investments (humble brag I was their first commitment) Squads announced their Series A today.

They have come a long way since when I wrote about them on day 301 to where they are today on day 1257. A lot happened between fall of 2021 and Summer 2024. Now they are the market leading multi-sig wallet on Solana thanks to their Squads protocol.

They began with a vision of DAO tooling and ended up simply dominating code Solana primitives. They are doing the work of developing smart account technology and products that make it easier for businesses and individuals to securely manage and own digital assets. And they continue to make crucial tooling like Fuse.

For all the mania of meme coins and tokens, we can forget it’s real companies making real infrastructure.

These things have to be built for grander vision to exist in crypto and Squads has clearly been the team to do it. They have worked relentlessly shipping tools people want to use and build with.

When first met their CEO Stepan in Twitter DMs I had the privilege of seeing their early days upfront. There was never a moment that they were not listening to the market and adapting. I spent much of the summer of 2021 on DAOs because of their influence.

Everyone on the team practically wanted to do the work of building out what was needed for us to transact and govern in a trustless environment as individuals and as groups. I was inspired by their commitment to execution.

I am just a small part of their journey. But being able to provide the kind of specialized capital that could understand what they wanted to build from the start is a huge source of pride for me. Without early stage oddity investors like me it would take just a little longer for the entrepreneurs like Stepan, Deni and Sean to get to market. And the market deserves a company like Squads. Their hard labor built something of value.

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Startups

Day 1255 and Venture Nurture

I sometimes wonder why venture capital hasn’t coded more feminine. The cynic in me say because it makes money and money accords status. Where there is status there are men competing for it. Which is a good thing in my book.

I just happen to find the kind of investing I do to be so feminine in character. I’d never really thought of my gender when I got into startups simply because I was a founder with a problem and technology solved it for me. I was a nerd about a few very specific things and the market agreed with me.

But now as the wider world has forced me reconsider gender and how my identity gets used by others in how I do business. And I do see that I approach my investing in traditionally feminine terms. I wasn’t that kind of founder. But I am that kind of investor. 

I nurture. I love finding a weirdo working on something in a weird corner of the internet. Nothing makes me happier than telegraphing out that I am weird and getting back other weirdos. I like to listen. I like to learn. I don’t mind unpolished or outlandish or even absolutely crazy. My best deals all started in DMs

Nerds aren’t a polished people. They may lack all kinds of social graces. They will often not care about anything but the thing they are obsessing over. And I happen to find this to be a good thing.

Not everyone agrees that we should work with their lack of graces. Ruxandra Teslo discussed how weird nerds are being pushed from institutions like academia.

Weird Nerds are being driven out of academia by the so-called Failed Corporatist phenotype”

Ruxandra Teslo

I am just absolutely here for the weird nerds. They are my tribe and I see it as part of my path to help bring more of them up behind me. To nurture is a feminine virtue. I am happy to bring it to my founders. They should all feel safe coming to me because they know that I am one of them and my goal is to see them thrive.

Categories
Startups

Day 1254 and Zipppp

I hadn’t expected to have a busy day. I’m really not enjoying having Covid. It’s an inconvenience and it sucks.

But suddenly I was getting all good news from all sides. A startup with a round. Another founder preparing to go out for an enviable raise with exceptional traction. An SPV for a round everyone wants in on. A colleague who had been thinking of taking action on a thesis is going to run an experiment. It’s just all very much my investments and my ecosystem thriving.

I felt like I was in William Gibson’s Jackpot. Incredible things are happening across so many industries and the world is an absolutely chaotic mess. It’s nothing but wars, gerontocracy and resource constraints out there. But here we are working.

Chaos pulls acceleration out of us because we must solve the problems in front of us. War and geopolitical turmoil and climate change require us to shoulder more.

We have real engineering challenges in compute, nuclear, decentralized systems, artificial intelligence and open source to solve to get to meaningful breakthroughs.

The problems are not easy. But our tools are getting better and the compounding effect of this renaissance in intelligence is that we might be able to build for bigger things.

Doomerism wants to focus on how bad things are. And I am the last person to disabuse you of a realistic model of what we are up against. I live off grid in Montana, I own crypto and I like my freedoms.

Humans are resourceful. Given ingenuity and incentive incredible talent has the will to say that I will take on this piece of the future for all of us.

It’s such a privilege to be woven into the ecosystem that is getting us through the Jackpot. And dare I say maybe the application of our ingenuity gets a better result and we can improve on Gibson.

The fictional “jackpot” described in the novels is an “androgenic, systemic, multiplex” cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century

The Jackpot Trilogy.

Maybe we can improve on these numbers. We’ve got the doomer version in our imaginations so now we can find a solution. Life, as Jeff Goldblum reminds us in Jurassic Park, finds a way.

Categories
Startups

Day 1246 and Slightly Disappointed

I am a bit tired so this could all be jet lag speaking but I’m feeling slightly disappointed. While I’ve found great inspiration in the work of my peers, I see the failures and venality too.

I am at Consensus and I’m unsure if I feel like we’ve got enough people building the future I want to see. I fear for the unraveling of the old powers and what the transition looks like. It seems like a lot of people will be voting for a convicted felon for commander in chief.

And yet there is hope. The conference coincides with the annual Coincenter dinner which is an industry wide non profit effort to work towards policy goals for decentralized computing like Bitcoin & Ethereum and the wider cryptocurrency.

Our mission is to defend the rights of individuals to build and use free and open cryptocurrency networks: the right to write and publish code – to read and to run it. The right to assemble into peer-to-peer networks. And the right to do all this privately.

Erik Vorhees delivered an incredible moving keynote address and I found myself with tears in my eyes as I considered the long history of fighting to become your own master. We separated church and state. We are fighting to separate money and state. I feel these philosophical lineages across my entire life.

And so I am slightly disappointed at this point. But I’ll try to sleep and it will pass.