Tag: Class

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Current ways of knowing are (maybe rightly) under scrutiny. Some of us attempt to source truth by look backwards citing Chesterton’s Fence.

I’ve been skeptical of romanticizing the past as traditional ways of knowing can be bad cultures too. Sick societies are a constant companion of human nature no matter how we long for that Paradise Lost.

Maladaptive cargo cults are everywhere (Silicon Valley has dozens of flavors) and these superstitions ca. reproduce for generations if nutritional gradients are surplus.n

Noble savages are as silly a concept as high minded aristocracy. You probably know a few maladaptive emotionally sick types within your own communities.

Next on Sick Sad World

Remember the long running joke of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert? Truthiness. Emotive truthiness reigns supreme as “news-like” content bubbles in the Internet of AI slop battle out the truth of an issue not with verifiable facts but verifiable feelings. Which one is more maladaptive?

We were subjected to a week’s worth of BBQing content which was digested by the American psyche until we switched to the new cycle of a crazed would-be assassin and his failed attempt to kill former president Trump.

If so much of our society is maladaptive copies of civilizational failures, the best any of us can do is pray we are humble enough to see truth and we willing to adapt our ways to it.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1345 and Class Consciousness

I have written about classism, class anxiety, and class status as part of my interest in how we form group identities. Searching just for the world “class” turns up 504 mentions on this blog.

That seems like a lot but I’d argue that no other identity marker (even race & gender) determines quite so much about your life and trajectory as your class. Yes, even in America. Perhaps especially so in America. If you aren’t read up on the topic I recommend Paul Fussel’s Class: A Guide Through America’s Status System.

Yesterday I happened to be sitting next to a trio of twenty somethings during transit. After glancing at their outfits and listening to their animated discussions, it seemed clear they were either upper class or professional management class. Being both curious and nosy (and having no way out of listening in) I rudely but playfully asked:

Ok I’ve got to ask, are you business school classmates or cosplaying as extras from Industry?

This intrusive question seemed to amuse them and we fell into a long conversation. It turns out they had in fact become friends while getting their MBA from a top European business school. I didn’t inquire into their private family lives obviously but I’d guess that means I was right about both class buckets.

We had a chat about hoe business school was the best decision they could have ever made for their social lives in particular. The class work was fine but it was the friendships that made it worthwhile. Business schools provide an entirely different sort of class experience if catch my drift.

I found it quite pleasant to be in a random IRL social situation where discussion ranged from Biden’s opposition to the US Steel acquisition to the implications of Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay for the professional management class. Usually that requires Twitter or a Bloomberg podcast (they were fans of Odd Lots).

Naturally this begs the question as to how much I am aware of my own class consciousness and how much I do or don’t fit into my own class (having made the journey through multiple classes).

Do people prefer to socialize within their own classes? I found it relaxing to discuss some class coded topics without fear of looking like a privileged asshole.

Which isn’t to say I think of myself primarily in class terms. Last weekend I attended a gathering of friends & internet mutuals with significant class diversity including lower, working, middle and full on class-opt outs. It was there I realized I was the only person I knew who ever publicly discusses cross-class relationships. This despite cross-class relationships being a significant factor in upward mobility.

I assume it’s as normal as any other kind of cross-identity relationship but now I’m not so sure. Do you socialize outside your own class? Do you even think about it? And most amusingly, is it déclassé to discuss one’s class?

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1333 and Tagging Identity Algorithms

I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.

Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.

There are now reality dating shows about being autistic on Netflix so you too can be neurodivergent and accepted into a wider pop culture narrative of being part of normal living. Everyone wants love right?

Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning

I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.

Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.

It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.

Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1332 and Blackpilled

Being engaged in American politicians is a thankless task. I do not at all begrudge people who tune out of our national politics entirely.

After an assassination attempt, a resignation of a sitting president after a public pressure campaign and two political convention I am in no fine mood about the nation.

My assumption is that this mood is being induced deliberately. It’s no wonder I’ve felt a bit unwell over the past two days. The endocrine fatigue we must all be collectively experiencing. Constant cortisol stimulation is no way to live. I was quoted in a piece about the dissident middle last year.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Day 784 and Dissident Fringe

And yet I feel compelled to engage on how we are governed. Being steeped in enlightenment values and the collective history of Western Civilization, I have taken as a given that civic involvement is a higher virtue. The capacity to govern and be governed is a noble pursuit of rational men aspiring to more.

I feel even more compelled to engage as a citizen when legacy institutions like the media are less able to maintain trust. If I’m being shown nothing but Pravda but I know it’s not the truth do I have an obligation to speak up?

Regular people have incredible rights in America. I do not always feel like we treat that privilege with the respect it deserves. We have a say.

Don’t let yourself become blackpilled by duels between bad policy and bad people. Our institutions need reform. We cannot continue on with the projects of civilization unless we find ways to collaborate at great scale. You can’t let yourself get exhausted by this daunting task.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1313 and Ridiculousness

I enjoy noting numbers that represent milestones (100, 1000) for my daily writing habit. But I’m really a sucker for the cool dates. Today is day thirteen hundred and thirteen of writing every single day.

1313 is terrific. It’s an odd number. It’s also a composite number. 1313’s prime factors are 11, 7, and 17 so really a fan favorite set of numbers just on mathematical properties alone.

I asked perplexity for a synopsis on the numerology and enjoyed the very woo woo response. 1 represents new beginnings, leadership and self assertion. 3 represents creativity, self expression and embracing change.

I am sure everyone would like new beginnings that have the confidence to embrace. I’ve got so much going right I can almost tune out the ridiculousness of the moment. Ridiculousness incidentally was a 2011 MTV a clip show of licensed viral internet content that somehow ran for 1428 episodes.

Isn’t it funny what has staying power? Sometimes you’ve just got to keep at the ridiculous things in check and keep at the thing no matter how ridiculous it looks to others.

Maybe you unwind some things and rebalance yourself and keep at it. Or maybe you bring a dead bear cub to Peter Lugers. The world is filled with ridiculousness. Don’t let it stop you. Every day is a new beginning where you can lead yourself through change.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1309 and Decorum

Youth always underestimates the importance of decorum. Holding yourself to the social standards of existing cultural expectations may feel like a bore or even hypocrisy. Worse you may feel helpless if you are from outside a culture and don’t know its rules. But have faith that you can learn other people’s ways and remain yourself

Fish out of water stories are universally popular. I’d urge you to read the TV tropes wiki on the topic as you are likely to recognize dozens of the variations. City mouse, country mouse, Freaky Friday, rags to riches, riches to rags, trapped in another world, and trapped in another time are just the start.

So why do we chafe so much at learning the rules of a situation and treating people the way they wish to be treated? Setting personal standards for behaviors is a strong basis for trust. Demonstrating respect and consideration for others may sound like mere social etiquette but civilization rests on top of it.

Now you may shout “come see the violence inherent in the system” and I’ll happily grant you that much blood has been spilled to build this endeavor we call civilization. I am intensely grateful to have ended up in this age where we have so much capacity for abundance. I’d like to keep it that way.

We have tools for you to learn about the social rules and the games we play as humans. You can just ask an artificial intelligence search engine now to help you learn the rules. It’s such a terrific advantage and I’d urge you to use it as my younger self had to learn many social learns through brutal trial and error. And hey if you still aren’t sure just slide into my DMs. I have some cheat codes I can share.

Categories
Politics

Day 1308 and Policies For Any Political Party

I don’t know why I let myself do this but I got irritated by the American election cycle. I have been libertarian and skeptical of the government well basically always. It was probably only really left flavored during a an Adbusters, Battle of Seattle, my favorite band is Rage Against the Machine teenager phase.

What can I say millennials did not like the government because the global war on terror went as well as every other war on “ideas” we’ve ever fought. We lost the war on poverty and drugs too.

But I do try to retain a kind of pragmatic libertarianism that is a recognition that my preferred politics isn’t always going to be broad consensus and it’s sensible to work opposing viewpoints as we have shared interests in civilization and America.

I am hugely affected by my proximity to international founders who adopted America because of the opportunities we have here that are unmatched elsewhere. Our market capitalism has given truly exceptional talent from places that suffer varying degrees of oligarchic, authoritarian and socialist systems.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to ask American politicians but in particular the Democrats to please consider policy that allows us to remain a place where the best and brightest can rise and thrive. It’s good for all of us

My five basic policy asks are as follows

1) Stop taking aggressive, over broad interpretations of both criminal and civil statutes in regard to crypto. The SEC is trying to kill a nascent industry instead of shape and grow it. There are other first world countries taking different approaches. Japan seems to have adopted healthier ways. I’d like Gensler gone personally as I struggle to see this as anything but petty Wall Street protectionism.

2) Focus antitrust efforts on the industries where consolidation is harming Americans in structural ways like PBMs and agribusiness.

3) Retract the Biden EO on artificial intelligence and take an approach to akin to how we settled the encryption wars in the 90s. We don’t want to strangle a new industry as it is emerging just for the benefit of a few large incumbents and the fears of a few radicalism’s.

4) Stop discussing the ludicrous unrealized capital gains tax. It’s unconstitutional & structurally devastating to novel businesses. Only the rich will be able to afford to own a piece of a startup which will further limit social mobility.

5) We have got to find a way for companies to exit and IPO that isn’t this middle stagnant path of Microsoft’s regulatory capture corporate investment playbook. Markets need liquidity to function and the public deserves the chance to be rewarded.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1304 and Don’t Scare The Hoes

Twitter had a significant exodus of left wing and moderates as Elon Musk took over the platform. The ugly parts of the internet were allowed free rein on the platform and plenty of users didn’t have time for that.

If you had been raised on a tidy internet of moderation this was upsetting and you went back to moderate places. If you’d been raised on the feral internet you don’t really mind. I was raised on the feral internet. I’m twenty years into sharing space with lunatics.

Some people think the feral internet is is entirely male. And don’t get me wrong, user statistics show 4chan, Reddit, Discord and Twitter are mostly men. But there have always been feminine corners of the internet. And they are influential. Tumblr girls, MySpace, and Livejournal had plenty of the dark feminine before we cleaned things up the consumable Instagram age. Before Ballerina Farm we had much rawer Mormon mommy blogging from Utah. Remember Dooce?

Working in fashion beginning in aughts and teens, I had a front row seat to the dark era of Tumblr. I’d seen horrors arise from femcel message boards. Pro-Ana content was left to fester because no one cared when women kept the harms to themselves. Guess what, those girls aren’t all grown up and now they harm the boys too.

OnlyFans findoms predate lonely nerds and Reddit mistresses trawl /marriedredpill/ looking to get laid by insecure rich men coated in fear optimizing around pick up artist tactics.

Women are not the good guys on the internet any more than men are the bad guys. The dark places online are dark for everyone. Welcome to the equality we’ve fostered. Scammers and grifters for all.

Dopamine rushes and control fantasies run rampant among the fearful and no flavor of childhood trauma goes unanswered thanks to the persistent financialization of every human relationship. We call this a low trust society.

So you might think it unfair of me to request, as a woman, that the men do not scare the hoes as we travel the next 100 days to the American election.

A right thinking person might recognize that there is no advantage to be gained in the gender wars. We are all combatants in a conflict that serves none of us and does much to degrade us all.

But young extremely online women are crashing into young extremely online men and the result is bratty cop memes and couch fucking. Cat ladies fighting dweebs is not a good look. Some might call it deliberately demoralizing

The normies, who let’s be honest are mostly women, are scared shitless of the aggressive edge of online discourse. They don’t like any of this shit.

And I don’t think you will like what happens and who ends up in charge of we’ve got a terrified population. So knock it off. Be a man. That’s a gender neutral statement. Our civilization is for adults.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1294 and Like Shit

I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that I’d been breaking down crying at regular intervals since the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.

I’m not a Trump supporter. I am and will remain a small government libertarian and I can’t see that changing short of fundamental shifts in material reality. Which is possible but human nature doesn’t change much.

I feel like absolute shit physically and emotionally about where we are at. The rapid changes that are proceeding in the wake of this violence cannot be undone. We are here.

I feel incredibly stupid saying this which is almost always a sign I should say it.
I’ve been breaking down into tears every couple of hours since the assassination attempt on Trump.
My emotional metabolism isn’t up to the acceleration unless I let myself feel it a

We are in a chaotic time and even I do not feel up to the rate of change. I’m afraid of what will happen no matter the outcome of the election.

I don’t think we should underestimate the trauma of political violence. A fellow citizen died for exercising his fundamental rights. He’s not the first and unlikely to be the last.

I want to feel less impacted emotionally but I can’t just stuff these feelings. I wish I could write more and at length about all of this but I’m simply not there. It’s all too painful.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1272 and GWOT

As an elder millennial fascinated by the mass media I have a lot of mixed feelings on the American government and how it waged the “war on terror.”

It is heavy on my mind with the current news of Julien Assange’s agreement with the American government.

I think a lot about media, and in particular the technology that powers media. An informed population can still act in its own best interests but what we get told affects what we perceive as our best interests. And as we become more informed naturally some skepticism of the intentions of power arise.

Media affects how nation states wage wars. As we’ve evolved from print to television to radio to the internet how we sell the costs of war changed. But there are always populations who pay enough attention to be skeptical.

The open internet was born of that skepticism of government even so much of the technology emerged thanks to America’s heavy investment in defense industries.

Scientists used to have a wide range of politics and it’s not a surprise that defending American interests is a popular idea amongst people who work for the government. But maybe you see things and fight for more accountability along the way.

The GWOT unevenly affected millennials. If you were middle class your kid probably didn’t join up unless being in the service was how you got to being middle class. There was no draft.

Being in Colorado I had exposure to folks who worked for defense contractors as a lot of the private sector had settled around the cluster of talent from Boulder’s science labs down to the Air Force Academy in Fort Collins.

But there has been skepticism in all the branches of government as it became harder to control the narratives. And Americans don’t particularly like the idea of having propaganda even though I’d argue we produce and consumer enormous quantities of it as a nation.

I wish I could be more cogent about any of this. I am regularly shocked by how little people seem to remember how we prosecuted these long wars. We quickly forget.

Don’t be too sure human nature had changed. Don’t be too keen to give the government power because you are afraid. We’ve already seen what they do with it.