Tag: Chaotic

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 1782 and Sweeping Rolls and Unrunnable Rapids

Navigating the rifts and eddies in the river of human scale time takes more skill and endurance than I fear I have.

Even if I assume that Earth time still running on any sort of human scale (which I don’t believe to be true), I find myself wondering if it’s better to head for the riverbank for a moment. Like Lewis and Clark, I only dimly understand where this river will let out.

I once paddled lightly, easily, even joyfully with the currents of my time. When I capsized, to continue with kayaking metaphors, I would simply snap myself back upright with a sweep or C-to-C Roll roll and carry on downstream spluttering wet and bursting with laughter.

Kayaking the Zeitgeist River was a fine past time for the quick witted and able shouldered amongst us. One could build an entire career by correctly the judging the river of time. And what fun it was to carry along with friends as time did most of the work.

But ever more frequently, I search for the eddies to pull myself out of the stream to stop for a while. Tired and hurting, I look for a refuge to catch my breath and slow my heart. As the timeline rages on without me, through crashing white water and its drowning currents, I wonder if I should even be alone on these waters at all.

Simply staying upright is now a bare minimum of a concern. A hip snap and good instincts does little when the course never ends and the rapids unexpectedly turn from a fun day of Class III rapids to Unrunnable class VI without so much as a posted sign. There are no maps or forecasts to be had. Your gear might be whatever you brought onto the water in entirely different conditions.

There be dragons here? Hardly so dramatic a metaphor applies from naval history pertains to river ways. But it’s no less dangerous for its lack of vista. Unseen rocks, snapped branches and water logged organic materials rise and decay into froth and burble. Lurking like so many unseen estuarine creatures swimming inland.

I already feel as if the tattered veil which separates our shared reality with whatever exists beyond is far too fragile. That any one of us can choose to run the rapids of passing time serves to remind me of how fraught the pastime of participating in history can be.

A small kayak with one intrepid soul can be righted quickly. But an endless run of rapids designed to sink any who choose to run it? The public experience of our shared time should not be such a battle. We all want to see where we are going don’t we?

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1781 and Paradise Lost in The Torment Nexus

The center does not hold. It is not holding. We are just not adapting to the changes in reality quickly enough.

If you get too close of a look at the basics of what’s necessary to survive a world where the trust is breaking down it’s hard to look at.

It doesn’t feel like we are going quickly enough adapting to a world where the state can’t perform its old functions and smaller entities like businesses and families need to maintain a heightened awareness of the larger context.

The joke has always been “don’t invent the torment nexus” but we seem to always invent the torment nexus if it will have a good return on capital. And we need to take this outcome quite seriously.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1780 and Being Cooked

I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.

The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?

The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.

Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.

The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.

It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1778 and Uncanny Hyperborean Aurora

It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.

It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.

So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.

The universe was dancing with geomagnetic storms
Reds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.

What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.

Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.

Stars, pines and the northern lights
Categories
Finance Startups

Day 1775 and It Is A Lot Easier To Just Be First

I often wonder how it is that venture capital remains so male-dominated when most of the work is the same skill set as a fashion editor or a style writer.

Sure, you occasionally see a man with good taste, and the twinks and gays are obviously the best of breed in both venture and fashion. But the game is basically the same. And yet fashion is dominated by women and venture as an esoteric sub-asset of private equity is very much not.

Let’s compare. Venture is a small, tight-knit group of people, who run on backchannels and gossip, and absolutely everything is determined by being the first person to land the next hot thing.

Now there is an avant garde who sets trends which then get validated with market success. In venture these are the earliest angel investors. In fashion, it’s the indie publishers who slog through the upstarts and pick who to champion.

The angel investor hopes their deal will go to later stage investors just as the trendsetting editor hopes their designer pick makes it to Vogue. Picking the next “it” thing and riding the wave to fortune is the goal for editor and designer, just as it is for investor and founder.

I personally think my skills are validated just as much being the person to get Mansur Gavriel added to the right boutiques as I am being the first check into Valar Atomics.

I took my bag to a breakfast at a boutique investment bank (you know the one with the summer camp) and happened to be meeting with an investor who loved the bag so much that the founder of their luxury ecommerce investment picked up the bag to stock immediately. Well over a decade later, I still carry that bag almost everyday and so do millions of other women.

Now ask yourself if this next story sounds pretty similar. I sent a direct message on Twitter to a young founder who seemed interesting. He had a quickness to his thought I respected as well as humility that set him apart.

Alas I didn’t like the company he was working on at the time and I didn’t like that he wasn’t its CEO. Sounds like “the food was bad & the portions are so small” sort complaint right? Well, I just thought he was so good he should be the lead in whatever he did next.

The young man had partnered with an experienced elder (which was probably wise for that industry) but the founder was clearly the dynamo in that situation. I told the founder that straight up. He had earned complete candor from me.

We began talking about what he really wanted to build. His intensity was awe inspiring. And his vision was just so crazy that I knew I had to back him. Many phone calls and strategy sessions later I wrote a check. It would take less time than I’d dared dream for others to see what I saw first.

Two years and change later, that young man is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics which just raised 130 million dollars to make small modular nuclear reactors. Isaiah Taylor may have been a diamond in the rough when we first met, but I knew he’d sparkle in any setting.

To see him now as the jewel in the crowns of many much larger funds and backed by much more impressive and capable people than me feels amazing. I’ll always have the satisfaction of being the first to know he was going to be the next big thing.

And that’s not so very different from helping select the hottest hand bag of the last decade. Like Jeremy Irons’ character in finance classic Margin Call, I know the value of being first.

There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.

Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”

If Isaiah’s work is successful, it will be an awful lot bigger than the hottest handbag. It will materially change the conditions of fueling our lives.

And while I am pretty smart, I knew enough to act first. Because it was a hell of a lot easier to just be first. And if I’m lucky, I’ll carry my bag and own equity in Valar for a long time to come. Read the full story in Bloomberg with a gift link.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1774 and Haywire Hell Handbaskets

It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.

I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.

2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.

And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.

Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.

And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.

And yet, I’m still unwilling to consider the centralized approach. We’d be eaten faster just like whales fished into oblivion by mistakes in the Soviet math.

It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.

However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.

We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1773 and Post-Rats in An Irrational World

Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.

Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?

That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.

Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.

Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.

We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.

Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.

I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.

Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.

I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.

Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.

I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.

Categories
Politics

Day 1769 and Not So Nice on Election Day

I don’t know what it is about election day in America, but it has ceased to be a joyful, exciting day for me. I wonder about the lost version of me who ever felt positively about elections.

Now it’s a day of dread and worry. And not even having day 69 in the post’s title can make an old internet native like me chuckle. Nothing about democracy in America feels nice. I have no idea if it ever will again. And I swear I am not a cynical person, just a very tired one.

The civics education I got as a child taught me to see Election Day as a momentous moment in time where the will of the people is heard and considered and eventually enacted.

And in my heart of hearts, I can’t really let go of that, no matter how much reality shows me otherwise. I’m not sure if will is even the right word for a collection of such a diverse array of individuals that make up the American population. What could we possibly will as an entity?

And certainly I understand that America is not literally structured in ways meant to showcase the preferences of the plurality of the people. I understand this to be a good thing even. We balance a lot in a republic and never did it terribly well.

Somehow we always persevered. And so you presume that America will keep on persevering because what else is there to do?

And now, in this very plastic, protean in-between time, all feels far too malleable. Boundaries that I never thought could be crossed have been crossed repeatedly. The fourth turning is upon us and my generation is woefully behind. The changing of the guards isn’t going well and the choices only seem to get worse.

And so to sooth my own soul, day in and day out, have something to say about the times I live in. All seventeen hundred and sixty nine of them. Even as nothing really seems to get better, I try to get better. I do what I can because I can do more than most, and even that is just never, ever enough. I take on more responsibilities because who is there if not me? If not us?

And so, all day, I have been dreading the results of a mayoral election in a city I no longer live in, in a state that was never my home, safely in the comforts of a county that isn’t having an election outside of a city which is having an election which will affect me though I have no say in it. It’s a bizarre state of affairs.

I’ll be impacted by a mayoral election in a city that I deliberately chose to live outside of because we wanted to be beyond its reaches so we could live as we like. Which is a fantasy as the mayor of Bozeman obviously has a significant impact on the residents of Gallatin County.

And I’ll have to wait to see if a candidate for mayor, who has one of the worst possible plans for housing growth that I’ve ever seen, succeeds in taking the town further in a direction that sunk my own hometown two states down the mountain range.

And there is nothing I can do about it, because I chose to live outside of the city limits so that I wouldn’t be affected by those very politicians whose decisions will obviously have a knock on effect to everyone around them.

There is no winning in a networked world where our interconnection increasingly feels like a Chinese finger trap. The more you pull away the tighter its grip.

Because of course I will be affected. If Bozeman can’t build more housing because no one can afford to do so thanks to bizarre water allocation scheme the entire valley will suffer.

And all this because we wanted to live somewhere we could chose to build as we like on our own land and keep a few chickens. Another reminder that there is no other choice if America falls prey to the many maladies that collapse republics. Whatever comes next will be faced head on by all of us.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1762 and New Nodal Points

I suspect that if I am any good at seeing the future it’s because I enjoy touching the present so much.

I think it’s a fools errand to professionalize “the spark” of active players meeting and exchanging information. Not to say that working at your game is wrong. You should work at it. But know what game you are playing.

I’m experiencing a kind of multi-modal view of my own focus and how it can be turned into more time touching reality. I know it sounds silly but the verbiage of the moment is enabling in strange ways.

I don’t always like consensus. I need to experience the consensus myself before I’ll join up. But I love to be first. I love being your first fan. I love being first to a new trend, narrative or aesthetic. I want to see a thing first.

To engage with others in this market place of ideas and trade in our knowledge for our own priorities, is for me, the stuff of life. I love a market. What is the mood of now so I can find others who might understand the possibilities of tomorrow. Every angle counts

I do think it’s all up for grabs future at the moment. I am leaning into some personal weirdness partially for my own happiness but partially because I think maybe this strange node of “people who want to communicate that they value beauty” to the world will be a vector for finding interesting people working on what is going to explode next.

Put out a little value for people with your own skills and maybe that is the node through which you have the opportunity to see what they see and in return you both learn more together.

I am trusting when everything goes up in “the churn” I enjoy picking up new skills. I am enjoying turning myself in a new direction. I think it might actually get me to my original goals. To invest in founders building their weird chaotic nodes of next should be.

Categories
Aesthetics Medical

Day 1751 and On Brand with Protestant Renunciations and Wound Care

I really misjudged my healing time on the testosterone pellets even though I pretty much always assume a worst case scenario for myself. I’m not really hurting but I am pretty bruised which is typical for me.

We may have some room for improvement technique with it so I am encouraged if the is as bad as it gets. I am not seeing any benefits from it yet and ugly bruising and a bit of an opening on an incision isn’t so bad.

A lot will depend on how well I recover and how much the hormone actually helps when I’m not healing. I’m also in the luteal horrors phase where my hormones are most ridiculous so I’m curious to see the curve.

The best part of this remains that I have a world class treatment for skin wounds on hand. Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy’s best research has been in wound management from burns to slow healing diabetics. So if I have to nurse a wound doing it with oxygen at pressure is actually pretty baller.

And to make it even more on theme, I spent most of my time in there writing out a column on skincare and the Great Male Renunciation of Appearances as part of my beauty shopping column and excuse to write about the secret history of appearance and its power.