Tag: Class

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1991 and At A Wellness Retreat

Does anyone else remember when a congressman was off the grid for a few days and his staffers claimed was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” when in reality he was on vacation with his mistress? That story fell apart rather quickly, but remains my shorthand for silly excuse.

I may need to update to reflect Politico’s reporting as this is a funnier flimsy excuse from the White House as to why communication between Anthropic and the administration has been hit or miss during the Fable release and export control saga

Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said. 

A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.”

I don’t, as a generally rule, take what public relations professionals say at face value without knowing them personally as their job is to protect the principle.

I might trust an individual publicist but when in doubt verify before you truest. This is true for both Anthropic and the current administration so all parties are now annoyed and suspicious.

Ironically I am enjoying some time on wellness activities this Sunday myself. I wouldn’t call it a retreat but I did take a swim and read Europe AI 2031 under an umbrella. So let’s call that as close as I will come to being on a wellness retreat at a point of crisis in the AI race.

Categories
Finance Politics Startups

Day 1983 and Socialism is Bad

There is a lot of chatter as to the eventual ownership makeup of the frontier artificial intelligence labs and their economic surplus. One question that came up this weekend is whether equity in the companies should be owned in some portion at the nation state level. I am opposed to this for a host of reasons that I’ll try to get down in whatever garbled form.

I do not own a stake in any of the frontier labs other than owning ETFs that own Magnificent 7 exposure who own portions of the labs. I do invest in compute, nuclear energy and cryptography. I believe AI will change a lot about how we do business, my revealed preferences show I live remotely in Montana, I have a tendency toward emergency planning and Plan B scenarios. As a disclosure of my priors.

There are lots of competing interests in this and the self interests from the labs does no any favors. Especially after months, nay years, of overwhelmingly hyperbole about changing labor dynamics, the potential for mass layoffs due to automation as well as obfuscation and excuses about the reason for layoffs in existing companies. And that’s before we get the singularity which is a religious orientation toward making super intelligence that is Godlike in its framing.

I hate this entire conversation on nationalization and socialism. Part of it is that state actors desiring ownership of private companies reeks of the “you didn’t build that” malapropisms from Barack Obama’s presidency in which he attempted to articulate that America’s enormous wealth is built on generational compacts that no one individual could ever own outright. It triggers socialists and capitalists both.

We all contributed in our own ways to the shared infrastructure, institutions, education, cultural norms and the pluralism embedded in our governance systems that enabled the American Dream.

Unless you are a deep partisan, you understand Obama was trying to articulate that none of us made America alone. But the framing from liberals (and populists of all stripes) automatically make this conversation concerning.

Economics is complicated, central planning has a hell of a body count and your average American can only gesture towards the invisible hand and the benefits of self interested commerce. It’s easy to sell us bad policy from envy and fear.

So I must ask why are we acting like we have suddenly won a national level economic boom with clear winners whose spoils must be distributed by the nation state before we’ve even managed to understand how it will be used, at what level an AI model is a commodity and where the benefits will accrue?

Self interested pluralism with a system of checks and balances at the national federal level coupled with states exercising their own interests has been the bedrock of our national success. Changing this has not gone well for us as a nation nor do we have better examples in other nations.

Sure America has had a few twists and turns. The last time we made an attempt at a New Deal post Great Depression worked only thanks to a global world war industrial mobilization in which we won the war and all our other competitors were decimated on bombed our continents across massive geographical boundaries.

And that boom has been largely spent by the children of the generation that fought this war and their children are looking at a pretty significant bill. So why do labs suddenly want to “compensate” Americans and our collective contributions to the models?

And why are politicians taking this bait when we have so little insight into whether we should funnel cash into them in order to own them in trust for some nebulous future?

I have a few reasons in no particular order that I put on Twitter as to why I am opposed to this format of American state equity being the means through which we compensate the people who theoretically trained these models with our output on the wider open web and its content.

1) We don’t know who the winners will be or where the benefits will diffuse (as in post liquidity the current winners might not be the eventual winners) so compensation for model training when the eventual benefits disperse elsewhere isn’t ideal. Why aren’t taxes at state & federal level aren’t adequate enough here should be answered before we make moves

2) Existing IP law doesn’t account well for culture which is a shared co-creative process (i recommend Susan Scafidi of fashion law institute “who owns culture” ) so compensation is already not easy to track back

3) A state entity w the monopoly on violence can do a lot of damage on the margin by not fully understanding who created what and where it is applied especially in non deterministic systems

4) Much of what the models were trained on was open source licensing including the company where my own family made money Stack Overflow. We got paid sure, but none of this would exist without the effort of its users who contributed on those open license terms. But clearly the final value of the content created & company’s value itself were harvested much further down the line in enterprise contracts for coding models. It was not in the management of an open source license community product created by users or managed by engineers, so who should have been paid? The users who wanted their content to be open sourced? The volunteer moderators? The full time employees? The shareholders of the company, the buyer of the company or the users of that data set at Claude or Cursor or OpenAI? Or is it Americans that never even heard of SO? Where does value accrue over time versus point in time? It’s not an easy question to answer is it?

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1982 and Gate Keeping Is Back

One of my most disappointing life lessons remains the value of gatekeeping. Sometimes the fences do indeed make good neighbors and Chesterton may have had a point.

My ambition coming out of school was to be in media, more specifically I wanted to be a fashion editor. A job a million girls would kill for right? No, I am not falling for the nostalgia dross of the Devil Wears Prada sequel.

A not uncommon response to growing up in a mountain town or remote place, is the desire to is escape to bigger places. Media used to be the portal to the stories about the wider world. You found new worlds in books, magazines, movies, television and eventually the internet. Many of us want to reach broader culture of the world.

Alas I was immediately confronted with the reality that those jobs were glamorous and thus badly paid. I couldn’t afford a job at Vogue nor did they want me so I made websites instead. I became a fashion editor after my own fashion.

Like so many millennials, I had naive expectation that if we could simply open up the gates keeping regular people out of these rarified closed worlds we’d not only bring more beauty to regular people but the beauty of regular people would also improve culture.

Yeah, that’s not how social media turned out is it? I still feel some guilt over how much the “here comes everybody” age of social media degraded many of the spaces I aspired to be inside.

And I am witnessing a new wave of closed spaces and gatekeeping emerge in order to nourish the cultivation of culture that gets crushed under the weight of algorithmic speed and microsecond trend cycles.

The rise of the group chat is an immune response to a world without any sort of borders or checkpoints for quality control except the pricing mechanism. Why cultivate taste if we can cultivate cost? If we haven’t figured out a taste barrier a price one will have to do.

I am personally opposed to price being the barrier function to culture, but if no one is willing to enforce standards in any other manner I am not shocked that we will go further inside perceived safe spaces in order to avoid the harsh glare & garish expectations of mass market access at all hours to all people.

I am trying to remain committed to being accessible to others by remaining online but even I gate-keep myself now with little litmus tests and hurdles to keep from being flooded by asks and audiences. The private world of access cycles will come and go and for now the fences have gone back up.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1978 and In And Out of Reality

The “circuit” of conferences, events, parties and social goings on can make you feel like a consummate insider or give you social anxiety. For some of us, a given circuit is an exercise in social overwhelm, and for others it can be highlight of their calendars. It takes all kinds.

The “circuit” is a part of life for every industry. For some it’s a bit more glamorous; oh yes I’m off to such and such fashion week for cruise. And for others it’s much more pedestrian. A cash bar with drink tickets in a Courtyard by Marriott surely does the trick for state level budget professionals.

At a certain point, you realize there is always another room and a better party and a circuit inside the circuit and you get rid of the highs and lows of the experience and simply learn to live with the iron law of the circuit and schedule life around various aspects where real life and circuit life intersect. Everyone is on some part of the circuit.

Many places are aggressively part of the circuit. My hometown of Boulder lobbied hard to take on Sundance from Park City. I was just in Deer Valley above Park City for a new crew of energy policy folks. Swapping Hollywood schmoozing for nuclear energy seems like a wise move though I don’t know how Boulder will handle an event of that size.

Meanwhile, I learned that Athens is booting up a new technology conference that I just missed. Right before summer high season is an excellent time to bring folks down to the Mediterranean before jumping off to private islands and yachts.

I wonder about other mainstays on the circuit sometimes. Austin won’t host SXSW forever one imagines. But where should it go and should it split up? March will never be the same.

Burning Man is changing, maybe forever, and even storied camps are selling their vehicles. It’s a great week on the circuit and that time will surely be coveted. If I were Wyoming, I’d been keen to extend folks out from the Federal Reserve contingent within the western region but one doubts Nevada coordination with Wyoming is a top priority amongst old party hippies and economic enthusiasts, but you better believe the overlap includes a few folks.

Not that the circuit is a geographically constrained issue for most people on the most serious aspect of the circuit. And if it is you probably fly private or have excellent transit logistics. Bouncing from Fashion Week to Word Economic Forum isn’t a huge stretch if that’s your world.

I’m thinking about the circuit because I was on a chunk of business that was circuit related most of the spring. There was a brief pause in international traffic as the Iran situation worked itself out but everyone seems to be back to normal travel again.

The friction of coming in and out of reality is surreal. The circuit is not exactly part of normal reality as if you only participate in a few events it is the unreality of your calendar which makes it so special. If you live entirely outside of reality, it’s not quite so special.

I myself always find reality special but the dip in and out of unreality is jarring. I find one foot in each is hard to manage. I’m in unreality at the end of the circuit. And I need to reach again for reality even on vacation in unreality land.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1967 and Up In The Air Boss Don’t Care

Will you spare a prayer for the pitiable management class as they fly back and forth on their jets from capital to capital in the hopes of securing any kind of policy that remains in place long enough to do planning? No, I didn’t imagine you would. But maybe you should.

I’m not in anyone’s C-suite and I’d be surprised if I ever am. Being the CEO of even a small privately held company isn’t a great deal of fun. The burden of a fiduciary duty can clash with your instincts as a human.

Working with founders who have these obligations is largely an exercise in providing psychological safety so they can see the truth their hearts don’t want their eyes to see.

But I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t had to shoulder the burden of stewarding resources responsibly and profitably to be sympathetic. People who leverage collective resources to build something that is more than the sum of its parts may only think only of their part.

Still I’d hope anyone who is a parent has experienced the basics of it. Someone relies on you for their needs. Imagine it’s not just your immediate family but workers, investors and customers all demanding that their needs be met.

This isn’t meant to be mere apologetics aside, I feel bad for the technology executives who were told to show up in Washington D.C today for a last minute executive order from the president on artificial intelligence. Only hours before they were told actually it’s off sorry. The ones who could make it had already made the trip for a ceremony in which they were meant to smile and nod in obeisance to Leviathan as personified in America’s executive branch.

Either the president didn’t like how the executive order had turned out (something about staying in the lead ahead of China) or not enough of the fanciest executives could show up.

After flying to China last week to bow and nod, they needed to be whisked off back to another capital to bow and nod some more. And then oops sorry it’s canceled. As if they didn’t have other places to be. Heck one of the places they were meant to be was in Utah for a summit on providing the energy necessary to power this next step in America’s technological ambitions.

Instead it’s just all pissing and moaning and horrors from the peanut gallery about how much our bosses don’t care about us. As if the bosses didn’t report to some other big boss. They report to their board. The board reports to their shareholders.

And all of us in the shareholder class (which is most older Americans, a decent chunk of middle aged ones and anyone with social security) are all waiting on the approval of the state, who may or may not give any of us the clarity necessary to know what comes next. Better hold on tight and keep gassed up. Shame for most of us it’s not a jet. Still I’m happy with my Subaru.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.

Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.

How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.

You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.

Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.

Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.

His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.

Some of Tufte’s self published tomes

The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.

He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.

The Design of Everyday Things second book cover

Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function

You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:

Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.

Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.

A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.

Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.

Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.

Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.

With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.

I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1958 and Skymall Kities

My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.

Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.

I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.

But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.

I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.

My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed the bit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.

Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.

In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.

And so now my husband sings the tune of SkyMall Kitties and he sometimes can’t get it out of his head.

Maybe that is my own submission to the “thing I think about too much” essay franchise. It’s my own personal Negroni season or Supreme’s clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1957 and Closet Rummage

I am not up for the nostalgia festival around The Devil Wears Prada. It’s funny to have been in the fashion industry as the world of high gloss fashion magazines was rising in the public eye. It was ironically just as the business of publishing was about to be upended by technological change.

I never did take a job at Condé Nast, though I have some great stories. But I have enjoyed the largess of being inside a fashion brand with a closet. Nothing can fix a day like changing your look without spending a dime. Just “shop” the closet!

If a fashion closet doesn’t appeal to you, imagine a beauty closet. I was on the public relations gifting list for MAC during several of its glory years. I still treasure the packaging. Once I had my own beauty brand, I was swimming in samples that were far less polished but no less enjoyable.

So today that was the happy memory on my mind as I pulled together samples for a friend from my own beauty closet. who is about to go on tour for their work.

Finding just the right colors, chemicals and packaging for her needs was such a joy. I still love the hunt for just the right item that will work. From blazers to retinols, the closet contains fixes to almost all style problems. The bigger problems in life never have a quick fix so it’s worth treasuring the joy of the closet rummage.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1952 and Chapter House Complete Children’s Libary

One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.

She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.

Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.

Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.

There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.

Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.

My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.

Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.

So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.

Chapter House’s Children’s Literature

They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.

Chapter House is a new publishing imprint created to serve the unmet needs of homeschool families and everyday parents.

We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.

We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage

I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.

Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1949 and Swimming in the Contextless Sea Beyond The Dock At The End of History

There is a popular theory that Zoomers and Alphas are struggling with temporal context in culture because their consumption of culture is decoupled from the context in which it was made and consumed. It’s all one long scroll without the punctuations of reality.

The general theory goes that post internet generations see niche algorithm-driven content rather than say cultural or historical touchstones. Past touchstones might have unified past generational experiences.

I don’t know if unified experienced are all good. Sure all of the Boomers have heard the Beatles but all millennial woman recall tabloid headlines about Britney Spears getting fat. The water we swim in can be hard for us fish to spot.

If the younger generations have a problem, it’s being far too unified in their experience of their global position. The pandemic was a surprisingly effective reboot of expectations for all of us. But the older you were the easier it was to contextualize the impact of the pandemic across your entire life.

We all ran a dress rehearsal for collective responsibility at global scale And depending on your personality, you were funneled into perspectives you preferred.

So you saw us either shoulder or shirk responsibility. Not that other generations haven’t had to do some version of this, but being able to see it at networked global scale seems to have done something to the capacity to see the future.

You swim in a sea of history and at any point you can get out of the water. But you jumped off the dock is at the end of history so you can see how getting out might be a problem.

McWorld triumphed over Jihad right? But that is content for a paid Substack where Fukuyama and Zizek both still write. It must have been more convincing in hardcover.