Tag: Chaotic

Categories
Startups

Day 846 and Serendipity

Last night I arrived in Austin for my favorite annual cryptocurrency event called Consensus. If you are participating please consider coming to my interactive town hall on Thursday at 1:30pm where we have an hour of panel & audience discourse on the future of trust & community.

I am excited for this panel as I feel like I’m ready to own my experience as a professional community builder. It’s been a job in the social media era for a bit. But it’s only recently that we’ve realized the ecosystem of builders is tightly knit together by a tapestry of overlapping passions and competencies. It’s lots of different kinds of nerds.

We arrived earlier than expected which enabled us to go to an event with Jon Stokes (I was slightly more excited to see his wife Christina but Jon knows I adore him too). While we had lots of folks discussing heady issues like the network state, it is most joyful for me to discuss the more human aspects of life in a community. Who was looking after the kids and which one of our neighbors is housesitting. Practical daily living things felt like the natural connection of humans beings working together.

From there we went to a dinner with one of our most cherished real ones Ben Huh. The man knows food so I was thrilled to be feeling healthy enough to stay out and enjoy a meal with a table of deeply weird unabashedly themselves people. When we did introductions the question was “what is something you are obsessed with right now?”

The answers were wide ranging. High temperature cooking, textile pattern making, reality dating shows on Netflix (not for the record me but I am also obsessed), showing up as you are, sewing the perfect custom dress shirt, raising goats, riding tractors, reading science fiction mind bender The Three Body Problem, and mastering nervous system regulation (this one is me).

I felt like everyone I saw that night was one of my fellow travelers. The serendipity of overlapping passions and curiosity showed me so many ways I connect with diverse humans. I encountered politics as disparate as reactionary fascist and shitlib standard as everyone comes to grip with a future that feels as yet unwritten. There is a lot of serendipity on the frontier. It’s nice to be reminded that the future is built together.

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 844 and Blooming

Spring is in the air. Not in Montana so much as it’s still mud season, but metaphorically. Life is blooming and blossoming all around me after what feels like a lifetime of winter. Everyone in my orbit is flourishing and optimistic about how they are choosing to live their own lives. Which is wild as I’m friends with a lot of doomers.

The cost of an exceptional springtime was quite high. The flourishing is happening amongst those in my ecosystem who addressed their suffering head on in deep dark winters of soul and body. Between the pandemic and the financial calamities in the following polycrisis, people had it rough.

I’m not saying any of that is over so much as I’m seeing people reconcile that life is just going to be bumpy for the foreseeable future. Maybe it was always this bumpy. I gather that Americans are the ones experiencing the most dissonance on a changing world because we had it pretty good for a long while.

But it’s a choice to come to terms with a fallen world. Both in the Christian sense and in the wider “shit is crazy” sense. We still need to be housed and fed and educated and kept safe. Especially if times bad. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs still applies. But if you take care of your own needs you can blossom even in hard times. Maybe even especially. Spring follows winters.

Categories
Startups

Day 840 and Do You Believe in Magic?

The glory of writing every single day is you start to build m records of your own life. You notice how much your own personal cultural history is syncretic. I’ll always be a fan of blogging because it’s got chronology at its heart. Sometimes it’s good to see how we evolved over time.

Having a written record is hard and often dangerous. You own a lot of work in progress that doesn’t necessarily reflect where you landed. And internet opposition research is fantastic at catching you in a former evolution. We call it getting cancelled. But if you get it right you have the receipts.

But if you are an honest broker of your bets you will admit when you get better and more complete information. The real magic of startups is that markets are often excellent teachers of how we are just dead wrong. And if we listen to what we are told we can adjust. And as the old saying goes the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. The reverse is true too.

Consensus reality is a bit magical. I called our fund chaotic because the process of getting people to align is magical but it’s chaotic as fuck. It’s studied but experimental. It relies on rules and the temerity to break them. It’s chaos magic. I wanted people to see a bit of the woo woo in our fund name every day. Technology and magic are just separated by layers of abstraction. Go read Charles Stross.

So I was overcome with delight when I saw Geoff Lewis discuss how startups are magical. An all time delightful addition to the genre of how does venture capital and startup growth even work? Fred Wilson blogged so Geoff Lewis could vlog. And he did it with verve while discussing Dungeons and Dragons stats. Also he’s team maxed charisma like me so I am inclined to like him.

The fun part is that he and I don’t really overlap except on Twitter. We’ve never discussed any of this. But our syncretic workflows had overlapped. It felt like a small ecosystem knitting moment. An alignment of metaphors and aesthetics. It made me feel damned optimistic and yes I do believe in magic. And I hope you do too.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 831 and Apocalypse Meow

I’m starting to enjoy the AI doomers. It’s a relief to have someone else be calling chicken little. It’s usual my job to be a Cassandra but for once I am not aligned with an apocalypse. I don’t think we can stop the future from arriving. And I am a fuck around and find out type. It’s just my nature. I think we need to build for optimistic futures. But that doesn’t mean bad shit won’t happen even if we halt all progress. I wish.

When people say “apocalypse” you get the sense that it’s a one time event for most people. That bad things happen all at once and life is in an instant forever changer. Looks like it does in the movies. But I’m not sure the future changes like a bankruptcy. Slowly and then all at once. I think the future is what we make of it and it takes an enormous effort to make things better.

Maybe your people already survived an apocalypse. Maybe your ancestors wiped someone else out. Who knows what apocalypses your people lived through that others didn’t. I’m an American.

I bet if you could talk to your great grandmother you might find that real life is complex and she lived through hell. So why would you assume you’d even know if you were in an apocalypse right this moment.

To assume we can make things better is an ambition humanity shares. It’s kind of a wild leap into the unknown own and yet we have to do it all the time. Maybe it’s not the end of the world.

But what I do know is humanity comes from a long line of survivors and we often figure shit out and leave behind history. And even if this time we don’t well I’m sure some bit of humanity survives in one form or another.

Maybe I’ll be better adapted to this future. Maybe I’ll be dead. Either way I’m ready to get on with living my life even if the apocalypse is right meow.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 829 and Parasocial

As you may have seen in past posts, I am a fan of reality television. I believe it shows us a lot about popular culture and the human dramas that resonate this us.

There is something about being let into someone else’s life that is perhaps too titillating to resist. If you watch you will begin to empathize. And as we are social animals we will want to engage. We project some of our own things onto other lives that we see only dimly through the filters of editing and Instagram accounts.

I’ve been watching Love is Blind with a group chat. To say that the messages are spicy is an understatement. We are all engaged in the high human drama of dealing with your bullshit, finding a life with someone, and seeing your boundaries with a partner. Basically it’s trauma porn. You are seeing people’s open emotional wounds. But it’s also edited to make you feel that way. And we want to look because we might learn something about ourselves.

So the last weeks I’ve spent a bunch of time having opinions about Kwame and Chelsea and Micah and Paul. I care about what happens. And not just because someone’s mom is a stripper. It’s no wonder I’ve developed a parasocial relationship with television characters.

I’ve started to care about them because I see myself in them. But it’s messier and weirder so it’s safer. Surely we are better. And yet we see ourselves in them. It’s empathizing with humanity. And quite honestly I think more of you should watch these shows. It’s good to recognize the breadth of human love as revealed in all trashy glory that is reality dating shows. Honestly it’s fucking art.

Categories
Culture Homesteading

Day 828 and Unscheduled

One of the things I’ve done to treasure about Montana is easy it is to hang out with people if that’s what you want. Maybe it’s the community we’ve cultivated, or maybe it’s just the people who gravitate to the Rocky Mountains, but it’s just really conducive to normal unscheduled human time together. People just hang out.

Now sure we live in a pretty special weirdo valley with Gallatin. I’m a child of a weirdo mountain town valley. Boulder and Bozeman remain very fundamentally similar attitudes on life even if in Montana you’ve got way more space. People are friendly and people are weird. The tolerance and acceptance is what you’d expect from a high trust culture.

I’ve got trips to big cities ahead of me. I’ll be in New York City in the coming weeks. It only took a half dozen texts to block my calendar for a full 72 hours in Manhattan. There is surprisingly little room for chill hangs. Honestly I was impressed so many people wanted to spend time with me. But also booking out that time is how New York works. The days are scheduled.

I’d prefer a world where it’s simple to say just come on over. We can do that in Montana. Friends come over. We always have house guests. But in a city I can’t afford to just rent out a whole bar or event space so it’s not like I can have a big gathering unless the weather is good enough for the park. So perhaps that’s just the nature of higher competition venues.

But I will say it’s awfully nice to just have amazing people just hang out and be normal with you. Maybe you go for a meal. Maybe you have folks over for a beer. Sometimes people bring their dogs. And it’s just a real nice way to live. Lots of space to be private and plenty of joy to be found in occasionally being a social animal.

Categories
Startups

Day 826 and Alignment

I think there is this persistent fantasy in startup life that people will always agree with your bets. We forget the discord of every hype cycle but it’s not always clear who is winning and what outcome is certain. Only hindsight is 20/20.

You do get occasional moments of vindication but it’s rare that they ever clearly overlap with a trend or a moment that everyone is paying attention. Media hype cycles and innovation hype cycles are not the same thing. Trust me I’m a pretty good publicist for a hobby.

Your deals aren’t always going to get attention though and a lot of founders want to keep things quiet so you can’t always talk your commitments.

This is a problem that investing has in common with fashion. I earned my stripes making shit cool for money. It’s actually hard. I call it the The Thursday Styles. The problem with tend forecasting is knowing what’s going to be trendy is a temporal bet as well as a cultural adoption one.

It’s a thing happening over time that is unevenly distributed. I learned that from William Gibson. Some of us live in the future but you can’t be too far out because then it’s just you speculating. You got to be right on the thing and on the timing to make any money.

It’s honestly way harder than it looks and anyone who is any good at taking a bet on what the future looks like has to take some variant of this bet. It’s probably why Dune is such a canonical text for nerds. He predicts the future dimly and is also a messiah time lord? Sign me up that sounds like venture capital to me. The sheer hubris of this comparison is honestly nauseating.

Like fuck all the way off you ain’t Maud’Dib. You’ve got to be very skeptical about the charismatic pull of a messiah my friends. That said I bet you’d believe me if I told you I was a Bene Geserit right? Anyways. My point is you don’t always get it right and you don’t usually get to take credit till the end. And mercenaries can co-opt anything. Your shit might hit the skids.

But sometimes one of your deals looks hot and everyone is paying attention and you get to feel like you were cool. You spotted the band. You saw the runway show. The media is hyped about it at the same time and your friends noticed on Twitter. It’s a nice feeling. And yes I invested in the Chroma seed round. I think Jeff and Anton are cool.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 825 and Papered

A bunch of stuff that has been in the works for me for a while all got papered in the last couple of days. If you read any of my zen poasting (misspelled for internet reasons) you’ve probably gleaned that I’ve had a lot going on. Stuff got resolved on time horizons as long as lifetimes and as short as a narrative cycle.

I’d like to celebrate some of the papering (two deals I worked particularly hard for over a long time horizon) and I’m sure I will do so at some point but everything is going by fast and I’m just so drained from the dance. I suppose it’s how you really know if you are living. It’s a lot to live through everyone’s ego death drives and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t take a huge toll on me. I don’t yet know how to pay these costs in anyway but energy yet but I’m learning. If I put hard costs on it motherfuckers wouldn’t like the bill.

I’m modestly less sympathetic to everyone else’s bullshit as someone in my extended family passed away (not getting into it as it’s not my loss) and that invariably makes every other problem look inconsequential. Who care about your feelings and your ego and your petty obsessions in the face of death. But also maybe you should care about them even more? Not my call to be honest.

I’m not really able to mourn with them directly but I feel the energy of the loss reverberating for my loved one. And I wish I didn’t want to discuss it at all but I do. Somehow death is the lowest drama aspect of my week. Actual death.

So if everyone else can tone the energy down a little I’d appreciate it. I will absolutely make sure shit is inked, wired, soothed, smoothed and otherwise handled. It will all get papered. Whether it gets celebrated or mourned is a matter of personal discretion and I’m all out of fucks as to what you chose. Just gimme a beat or two to breath. This isn’t what you’d call a nine to five job.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 809 and Powerful

I’ve been through the gauntlet over the last month. And despite the nauseating rollercoaster of it all, I feel powerful. I am happy that I’ve drawn upon who I am and the boundaries required. It’s been liberating in a professional capacity but I can also see how my personal life got bigger and better as well.

The future is looking as uncertain as a Paul Atreides without the spice. I cannot see how it resolves. I see only hard choices and responsibilities both individual and collective. And I feel ready to hold my ground on what I contribute. But I will be holding others to theirs as well.

We’ve got a long ways to go. Many people do not wish to see things as they are. Issues both material and social are gripping America and by extension the world as the dollar hegemony comes into question over powerful institutional distrust. The power that comes in holding your gaze on what it could all mean and not turning to panic in fear is immense. I am not turning away.

I hold the knowledge that I can do everything right and still fail. I have faced the no win scenario. The Kobeyashi Maru of it all is that sometimes we lose. And we will feel it. And those feelings matter. But then we shoulder the burden and do what needs to be done. The only one who can save you is yourself. And I chose to see the power in the hard choices.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 808 and Left Eye

I’m literally sick to my stomach. I’ve got a twitch in my left eye. We’ve got dozens of competing factions in a massive narrative war online gunning for total social collapse and I’ve got multiple actual real live friends I care about deeply who think that THIS IS IT. Lemmings off a cliff would not be too far off as a metaphor.

There are multiple state, corporate, private entities working on a narrative collapse. Every single one of us needs to push back and say no. My only advice is to simply ignore them if you have already done basic preparations for your own life. If you haven’t it’s probably too late to do much more than treat this like a snowstorm.

Maybe Trump gets arrested. Maybe the money printer goes brrr. But you should assess your own risks as a responsible adult. Get out cash, buy some bottled water and get groceries for the week and keep calm. If it is indeed times for guns and butter the price of Bitcoin won’t matter.

I know I committed to a daily discipline of writing and I am doing it but I want to get off the internet and sleep for a thousand years. I’ll never get any work done or maintain my health and sanity if I don’t. So I am writing this and going to go about my life. You should too. And please nobody flee to El Salvador. I’ll write again tomorrow but if I’m quiet it’s because I am refusing to add any more fuel to this narrative fire.