Tag: Chaotic

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1483 and If You Die In The Matrix

Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.

We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.

A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.

Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?

Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.

If you die in the Matrix you die in real life

We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.

Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.

A German math Olympiad transwoman on an H1B visa was killed in a shootout with a border patrol agent in Vermont. A shooting in Nashville involved a full Google document FAQ on a flavor of soyjack I didn’t even know existed and will not type here.

If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1480 and Here We Go

I’m recovering today from transcontinental travel. My body is reconciling itself with my soul after moving through the liminal spaces of German airports through the threshold of Chicago’s regional transit on to my home in Montana.

Travel always feels otherworldly to me and it’s not just the amazement of being above the clouds. The dreamscape surreality of time changing is disorienting to me. Time shifts ambiguously on long journeys which lends an added dimension of unease that comes with the change of place.

It doesn’t help that I’m already feeling the end of the political interregnum in America especially strongly. We may have vibe shifted but it’s unclear what comes next.

It seems appropriate to be uneasy. Everything as a Joker-esque “and here we go” craziness aesthetic to it. Memecoins and the Village People and algorithmic inflections makes the topology of the now impossible to map.

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Community Preparedness

Day 1469 and Prayers and Hope

My in-laws live on the west side of Los Angeles as well as one of my portfolio founders, significant extended family and many dear friends including one of my closest and best friends. I am afraid for all them as the fires in Pacific Palisades has rapidly spread.

Please pray for the city of Los Angeles and her people as these fires rage. A dry year with little rain and unpredictable Santa Ana winds have led to a precarious situation.

Officials warned of devastating losses as the main blaze raced through the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The fast-moving fire spread across nearly 3,000 acres and was still 0% contained early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department –WSJ

A professional colleague known well to the venture community Mark Suster is quoted in this WSJ piece as he and his family were evacuated. I fear many more may be in his position. I pray their homes are not lost.

I have an especially strong emotional reaction to these types of rapid urban firestorms after living through Boulder’s Marshall Fire two years ago. Over three thousand homes were lost. It was devastating to my hometown and it is still rebuilding three years later.

I advocate for preparedness as both an individual and a community. I have lots of posts and media on the top if you are interested. When these tragedies strike, show up for your neighbors and your family by preparing so that when the worst happens you can be at your best for people.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1461 and 2024 Year in Review Posts

And so my fourth year of writing every single day in public comes to a close. I choose to comb through each post by hand to give a round up. I could employ artificial intelligence to give a synopsis and I have run my writing through several AI models.

Still I find it helpful to do the rote work myself. You can see my 2023 round up here. If you’d like further back here is my 2022 round up. And my first year round up is 2021

I felt as if my writing this year was more variable in length, depth & insight but that’s more feeling than fact. It don’t know if I feel like I did my best work this year.

And yet I still found narrowing it down to 50-60 odd posts to be a challenge. I can’t tell if that means I need a new format, a change of pace, or a change in expectations. Maybe it’s fine to keep going and see what happens. As we head to into 2025 feel free to have a look at my 2024. Let me know if you like what you see.

Emotional Work

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Day 1416 and Lagom

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

Day 1236 and Art of Accomplishment

Day 1197 and Experiencing Excellence

Day 1149 and Time to Get Offline?

Day 1119 and Capacity for Presence

Day 1107 and Happy Birthday to Matt

Subcultures & Cultural Commentary

Day 1448 and LARPing Ourselves to Death

Day 1441 and The Circuit of Power

Day 1431 and Faking Autism for Clout

Day 1410 and Luxury Content After Institutional Failure

Day 1341 and Class Consciousness

Day 1328 and Weebs as Social Elite

Day 1259 and Cooler Than Me

1232 and Millennial Crab Bucket

1176 and Verner Vinge’s Legacy

Day 1121 and Changing Political Alignments in Young Men

Chaos Energy

Day 1427 and Friction in The Systems

Day 1421 and When Crypto Clashes with Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Day 1417 and Pareto Optimal Skincare

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

Day 1386 and Goatse Singularity (safe to click) and Day 1391 Hyper Object Lesson and Day 1387 Singularity Lore

Day 1303 and Toaster Fucker Problem

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Anarcho-Tyranny

Day 1173 and Autism Services

Politics

Day 1425 and Doorknockers & Montana’s Senate Race

Day 1405 and America is Speaking

Day 1403 and Legible Political Opinions

Day 1415 and Sliding off The Board

Day 1422 and Material Conditions

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

Day 1291 and Political Violence

Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in The System

Day 1103 and Don’t Talk Yourself into Regression

Biohacking

Day 1409 and Red Lights

Day 1290 and Covid Experiment with Nicotine

Day 1168 and Inner Monologue & Meditation

Day 1114 and Zoomers Aging Faster

Day 1107 and Polar Vortex

Goods and Services

Day 1388 and Take Good Care

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP

Day 1289 and The Discontinued Pant

Day 1263 and Hoe-flation

Day 1228 and Cotton

Day 1123 and Zombie Media

Day 1118 and Becoming a Distrustful Shopper

Startups

Day 1376 and Q324 Investor Update

Day 1363 and Landfill Apps & 10xing Code

Day 1347 and Economic Paternalism

Day 1320 and Becoming “You-er”

Day 1296 and H1 Investor Update

Day 1251 and Other People’s Labor

Day 1245 and AI Tooling

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Day 1172 and Inference is Up

Day 1145 and Founder Vitality

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 1460 and Review Process

I began my review of my “round up” for the year post today. I was going post by post dredging memories and taking notes by hand. I’m embarrassed to say it took me almost 7 weeks of post scrolling to realize I was going through 2023 and not 2024.

Now you might argue that I’m tired as it’s been a long year, but just how crazy do things got to be when time is so punctuated with “happenings” that it’s genuinely hard to remember even the most shocking of events?

How is it that wars, elections, and major technological breakthroughs are just the daily happenings? Can it be that this much travel is required to do business? How long have we been living through this acceleration in politics and technology?

I want the narrative through lines of life to be more comprehensible. It is however clear that we are in a roiling period of chaos and even as I may remain ahead of some aspects I’ll always experience a trend multiple times.

Things that were huge this year were trends last year and were mere subcultures the year before that. Such is how information propagates in a networked world. I’m not even fully saturated on my own thesis.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1453 and Shopping Malls at Christmas

I partook in the time honored tradition of going to a mall before Christmas. My family was inconsistent in its treatment of the holiday when I was growing up and consumerism was not a value we celebrated.

And yet now I think it’s a wonder America has exported the triumph of the American consumer at its most intense and made Christmas shopping a mentality globally. Consumer debt is a marvelous when it’s priced in American dollars.

Our holidays are now times for displaying status and taste in so much of the world. I think it’s reasonable to say we’ve been post scarcity since the mass commercial fertilizer and it’s all been status signaling since then. We all live materially better lives. Arguments for the impoverishment of our souls are still quite valid.

Yet here I am buying stuff before Christmas. Nothing makes me feel more like a piece of the capital markets like buying consumer electronics at Christmas.

The prices are better only because we’ve been trained into a consistent purchasing pattern. We can predict consumer sentiment and meet those demands partially as a function of training the consumer when to shop. The propaganda of the markets.

So I get to enjoy the overstimulating existential horror that is the wall of televisions ready to be Christmas gifts. The high fidelity color and intense noise is an assault on the senses. No wonder reality is a disappointment. I’ve never seen so crisp a picture. It’s all just a bit too much.

Categories
Emotional Work Media Medical

Day 1441 and Fever

I woke up at 4am with my racing heart. I looked at my Whoop biometrics and my resting heart rate was abnormally high. I’m talking 110bpm at the peak of my REM cycle. I obviously has a nightmare.

I figured that nothing could be that scary so I took my temperature. Sure enough I was running a light fever.

The last few days have been a particularly gruesome one the internet. Rapid change, institutional distrust, and chaos have led us to blood. And instead of sorrow it’s all cheers and memes.

I hope it passes quickly. Both my own fever and the one gripping the timelines. I feel in need of some time off from the world. It’s been an intense year. I pray for more introspection through advent.

Categories
Internet Culture Medical

Day 1439 and Landshark’s Prophecy

I don’t like to write too much about developing news especially when it is an emotional topic like murder. The assassination of United Health Care insurance group CEO Brian Thompson last week was horrific. Today’s news that the manhunt found a person of interest Luigi Mangione is exploding into chaotic narratives.

The fog that surrounds violence leads to reactivity and it’s very easy to get things wrong. And the narratives surrounding this young man are both surprising and yet easily spun to cater to a number of simple biases.

One of those biases that I suspect will be warped across the news cycles is so easy to believe it’s making me suspicious.

The young man has easily accessible social media accounts some of which were still up when the news broke. I followed him on Twitter myself to see. What I found made me a little suspicious.

A centrist Penn shredded HuberBro Thiel tweeting TPOT moots futurism policy aesthetic gearporn guy adding maximum anarchy into the system as the UHC murderer does not feel right.

@almostmedia

His GoodReads account shows a man who read a lot of health optimizations literature including quite a bit on back pain and psychedelics. His follows on Twitter were almost uncomfortably midwit thoughtfluencer types but hardly any outside the Overton window.

The Twitter profile of the suspect.

Frankly if I wanted to make make a narrative about disgruntled dangers of TechBro philosophy I’d be trying to steer this conversation into an Uncle Ted speed run to reinforce hostility towards these ideas. It’s easy to see the dark side of the agency discourse & “just do things” set of values if someone kills.

If I found medical system skepticism and Silicon Valley threatening to my interests I’d be latching onto this story as fast as I could to explain why it’s dangerous craziness and the world view should be pitchforked.

There are also very already easy narrative explanations for how an attractive man with an elite institution set of credentials could have snapped. The suspect is so normie in background and so bleak in worldview and he had back surgery and took shrooms. An iconic tweet from Landshark about ayahuasca seems prescient

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1437 and Back at the Ranch

I marvel every time I fly. My life rests on miracles and small issues like repair delays and malfunctioning climate systems can make the miracle feel too much like magic and not enough like good process.

I’m happy to be home in Montana after a couple weeks on the road. Financial markets are happy with certainty. So business is looking good and optimism is emerging in all sorts of corners.

And yet we are in the worst Cyperpunk moment of my life. I think about other uniquely connected moments and it’s got nothing on this.

The chaos has never been so visceral and implacable and it’s coming so fast. We’ve got extrajudicial killings of healthcare executives by gray man gearheads. South Korea declared martial law briefly. Syrian rebels are toppling Assad while America and Iran are otherwise engaged. And Trump isn’t even back in office.

I expect turbulence to continue. Both when I’m flying and in the wider environment. I feel as prepared as it’s possible to be with edge positions across the board and some distance from the center of the empire. I’m glad I’m back home.