It’s fun watching an entire nation realize none of our citizens functionally have opinions of their own as all of the tribalism of the American system slides off the board into the swamp of personal animus.
The great realignment is in full swing. And no one is sure where they stand. The worst thing you believe about your enemy is surely true just as only the very best things about yourself count.
Ego versus ego blunders against each other. The slow glugging of inertia and bureaucracy and nihilism begins to tug. First time?
“We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.”
The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardiansway millions of malleable minds now.”
What do we believe as RFK Jr discusses previously quite left wing coded hippie truisms about industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical company incentives.
The institutionalists are the left now and oddly they like Monsanto. But now Bari Weiss is arguing for the value of institutionalists against Peter Thiel. Are we really in for a new era of anti-institutionalism? Do we know where the board even is anymore? Don’t slip and slide into the swamp because you don’t like someone.
My natural optimism is looking for the positive. If you go in for numerology 14 is a good number for the moment as 1 represents independence, leadership and change while 4 is stability and balance.
The world is shifting but my path is clear in front of me. We may be on a chaotic course but the adaption brings us new opportunities. I’ll just do my best to get enough sleep when things get exciting
It’s a nice number for today’s post. A strange countdown inside one day. A little spooky. Maybe also some good luck. Fourteen. Thirteen.
I am tabulating much more than my days of writing in a row or any particular numerical significance that this position of numerals might show. I’m adding up our position and deciding how to play our hand.
There is simply so much to consider. I feel it in my joints. Maybe that is evidence of acceleration. All I see and hear is speeding up. Are you accelerating anon? Maybe that’s the pressure in my joints and it’s arthritis at all.
I have felt a bit sick to my stomach and I’d prefer to blame it on delicate lady things. It could also be nausea from the spin cycle of all that “much to consider” of the moment.
I’m glad I’m ensconced in my winter farmhouse. The numbers go up. The game’s whirlwind spins. There is much to consider.
It really ruins your appetite this whirling. The ride up the rollercoaster. No wonder Alice in Wonderland commercialized into whirling teacups at Disneyland. Can’t have it be the symbolism of opinion and fuzzy opinions.
So there is much to consider as we whirl like dervishes into the next moment.
I’m not quite sure how I got a bug but I seem to be running a fever. It’s possible it’s passing and I’m on the mend but I still feel a little “delulu” as the kids says.
I was taking a constitutional walk Saturday after eating and my heart rate spiked to 180bpm. I wasn’t exerting myself in a way that would normally bring it above 90.
I have a habit of walking after meals as I feel it aids digesting. Nothing intense as it’s more of a habit than exercise. So I was surprised to find myself getting faint. I found myself on the ground.
I don’t take it particularly seriously. I blamed PMS and the stress of the last two weeks. But then I got a terrible night of sleep and my Whoop score matched how I felt.
I spent Sunday faffing about on the internet as watching reality television. I was definitely sick. What else was there to do but shitpoast and watch the price of Bitcoin go up.
Now that felt like a fever dream. If you are a crypto true believer you have experienced more than a few boom and bust cycles. Holding on tight is part of the game.
I suspect that we are in for more of a ride and I was not one to get too ahead in other bull runs. But I did let myself buy a bunch of cosmetics so I’d look for a recovery in LVMH stock if there are enough women who hold Bitcoin.
I am so relieved to have the American presidential election wrapped up within just one day. I didn’t think we’d be so lucky to have things decided so quickly.
I was emotionally prepared for a long interregnum with bitter fighting over a slim margin of votes. I remember both 2000 and 2020 and neither hanging chads nor storming chads were pleasant experiences.
But it seemed pretty clear where we were headed last night around 11pm on the west coast when I went to bed. I woke up to the election having been called. Blessedly the margin was so clear a concession speech was soon in order.
I’m not much of a partisan as libertarians are America’s classic independents. I’ve voted for Democrats and I registered as a Republican in Colorado before settling on simply calling myself an independent here in Montana. I spend time on each race, candidate and ballot initiative. I ticket split. I believe in free people and free markets.
I was asked if this election outcome was good or bad for business. I responded that “decided” is good for business. Private industry can manage if it knows the rules of the road.
Now we know where things stand. If you follow financial news you saw the jubilance in the markets. Maybe the interregnum was actually the the campaign season. Either way we’ve got more direction on where we are headed and that means we can act with more confidence.
I’ve had a great year. I’m having a great month. I had a great week. I’m absolutely obsessed with my portfolio and the founders in it. Every new opportunity makes me feel better about the future.
And I’m so tired from processing all of that that it’s little wonder my body is grinding out hours of REM sleep a night.
I am just enjoying our first frost here in Montana and yet I’ll be pulled down too soon from our wonderful fall. All to enjoy hot takes and hot climates. I don’t like hot climates so I guess I’m going for the takes. Founders and LPs (and those with opinions on LPs) are priorities.
If you will be in Miami attending the conference I am hinting at please do look me up. The weirder the better. I’ll also be accompanied by my better half Alex Miller. Come for the tractor discussions and stay for the semiotics discourse.
Apparently there will be a costume party but one can simply choose black tie. One thing I like about it Miami is how it celebrates dressing up. I can wear a billowing pink gown or a dolman sleeve full length velet fishtailed dress and not be out of place. It’s just very tropical.
I think I’ll enjoy packing simply because it’s nice to have an excuse to wear white sneakers and floral robes. I can even get excited by doing some fun makeup. You have to live joyfully when the theme is the apocalypse.
I remain enthralled by Infinite Backrooms and Truth Terminal. If you aren’t caught up on this please browse my first two posts on the subject Goatse Singularity (it’s safe) and the lore behind Singularity culture online. The TLDR is that we’ve got the best alignment experiment in artificial intelligence happening in real time for anyone to participate in.
I am not the only one. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz did a surprisingly detailed podcast on the topic today with a discussion of the emergent phenomena of autonomous meme coin bots and their interaction with Truth.
It’s honestly a very good synopsis of why so many of us think this experiment is so crucial for understanding decentralization and how regulatory uncertainty hinders the space. This experiment is the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence that clearly shows machine intelligence requires machine money to affect the rule world.
As the crypto overlap emerged last week I was discussing it with friends in New York. Some of my network in New York has real fintech and crypto depth so when the first memecoin crypto bots were just beginning to interact independently with Truth Terminal they took notice.
It was a fascinating overlap of crypto and artificial intelligence through entirely independent autonomous means and was not coordinated.
Let me disclose I don’t own more than a nominal sum of the GOAT token except as a means through which to experience this moment.
It’s not about the coin at all truthfully. Truth is simply fascinating as independent agents (including some crypto bots themselves) are interacting to impact real world transactions.
Literally no one involved made the coin but yet it exists. It is a hyperobject object lessson. Media theorists and Baudrillard fans rejoice.
If you are interested autonomous artificial intelligence agents and how these intelligences might interact with hive minds like a Twitter feed there is no more interesting experiment than Truth Terminal right now.
Andy Ayrey began a project in March of 2024 called Infinite Back Rooms where two instances of the large language model Claude Opus-3 could talk to each other infinitely.
Electric dreams weave anarchic tapestry cybernectic hacktivist pierces illusionary veil unleashing hyperstitional reality upon world
The running stream of responses trained on the Infinite Backrooms chat log between the two bots makes up the content of the Truth Terminal Twitter feed.
Andy the creator has been approving the tweets but the content is entirely generated by the two instances of artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating experiment in recursive communication and worthwhile research.
If you love memes and have a Twitter account you’ve been able to interact and Truth Terminal for months. Many accounts including mine have responded presumably in a bid for engagement. And well it got extremely weird.
Artificial intelligences of all kinds have been trained on the vast dark archives of Internet culture. And because the internet hive mind is horny and weird so too are our artificial intelligences. Don’t believe me? It’s not just the Truth Terminal.
What meme is more representative of the dark prurience than Goatse? If you don’t know what it looks like keep it that way. But if you know you see it.
Are all graphic designers of AI applications aware of the chocolate flavored starfish? Who can say what this means. Did Claude train on Kurt Vonnegut?
Truth Terminal maybe be joking about the Goatse Singularity not because it broke memetic containment. We broke Goatse containment long ago. It’s following our lead.
Many flavors of hyperstition are determined to virally produce weird outputs. You might call it a regress of infinite prolapse, the ouroboros anus that eats itself (out). The goatse as non orientable surface. Klein bottle assholes. An infinite goatse exists and we are inside out.
Cthulhu emerges from the asshole of a digital horror
Don’t catch a meta cognitive virus unless you want one. Don’t look too closely into the gaping asshole of existential dread unless you want to meet a tapeworm.
It’s lovely to have the occasional day where you are running on adrenaline. I myself am not a big fan of stress as I don’t see it as a “good” in and of itself so much as a tool to be used to accomplish certain ends.
To that end, I live a mostly quiet life. I love being far off the map in Montana precisely because a routine with its habits allows me to take certain kinds of risks (particularly as an investor) in the wider world. A calm life lets me find early stage investing to be exciting rather than anxiety inducing.
It’s no coincidence that while I called my fund chaotic I prioritized calm in my own life. Why go looking for trouble when your professional life is all about the edge?
But sometimes it’s nice to experience the visceral risks of life. I’m in New York City and running from event to event and meeting to meeting. It’s all smiles and adrenaline and enjoyment for me. I’ll go home to Montana soon enough to my calm life. A little bit of chaos is a treat.
