Tag: Community

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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
Reading Startups

Day 1771 and Virtuous Cycles for Wise Readers

It’s hard to say that there is a best part of living in Montana. If you like mountains, seasons and being outdoors it is hard to beat. One thing I particularly enjoy is how often people will come to our state either as tourists or for retreats with their companies and coworkers.

Alex and I drove down to Paradise Valley today to meet up with the founders of one of our favorite products. Having a company meetup in Yellowstone’s off season is a smart choice and as Montana citizens we love it when folks come to visit and center themselves and their work here.

A villain’s lair in Paradise Valley or a cozy lodge for discerning visitors to Yellowstone?

Daniel and Tristan have made one of our all time favorite and most used set of reading applications. The first is called Readwise. It’s hard to fully describe the product except to say that it makes you a better reader through your own highlights and notes.

I came into the application with more than a decade of highlights from my Kindle and found myself deepening my experience with all of my prior reading. It’s one of the best research tools a heavy reader can purchase and I was a very happy customer.

They didn’t stop there though. To make things even better, they launched a reader product which further cemented a virtuous reading. My highlighting, annotating and review cycle is now integrated with my reading and note taking across all my different content formats and sources.

Majestic vistas help us all feel wonder and spark creativity through nature’s beauty

Taking a few hours to drive through some of the most beautiful countryside in America and catching up with talented and passionate founders is an incredible way to spend a few hours.

The passion and care that Tristan, Dan and their team have brought to making reading an even better experience brings me so much joy. As a power user of their apps, and a voracious reader of all forms of written content from books to Twitter threads, I appreciate the incredible feat of product management they have pulled off. Making reading better is no easy task.

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1770 and Making Suffering Worthwhile

A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.

I froze eggs and embryos with my husband thinking that some day we’d have the money, health and stability to have children.

That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.

The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.

The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.

I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.

My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.

So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.

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
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1760 and Optionality or Commitment Issues

As I sat inside our hyperbaric chamber for my 26th sessions of oxygen therapy, my mind was on commitment. I like a routine and a plan and being locked in on my follow through.

I don’t recall when I was introduced to the concept of optionality, but it wasn’t something I recall being raised with. Despite being raised by hippies and yuppies,who themselves struggled with commitment, I never doubted that loyalty and stick-to-it-ness were crucial personal values. I don’t like to quit.

Maybe somewhere in my 20s though it became clear that many of the people I dealt with in “the big city” always had their eye on their next move.

Maybe it was campaigns like the World Economic Forum’s infamous “You will own nothing and be happy!”

Trends slowly put the meta structure of optionality as a construct into my mind. And it wasn’t too foreign to me.

We moved a lot as a child, and I never felt like I could get too used to anything because change was such a regular part of my life. I could reconcile being committed to always changing as the balance.

So the idea of always trying to add in additional optionality struck me as a little bit funny. Why would I always be looking for the door, or looking for my next move, or the next upward opportunity, when so much of what I longed for as a child was a basic sense of stability in my own home life?

Now, of course, the idea of optionality is baked into almost everything we do. Owning things is expensive, and financial challenges made the sharing of resources and assets like homes and cars seem perfectly natural to a millennial who had barely gotten by in the Great Recession.

But now, as I watch reality television like Love is Blind, a dating show designed to result in commitment, we see so much fear.

An inability to choose a path or to consider changing the path you are on to be with another seems to plague participants the further they take the franchise. Optionality is one thing but we’ve stumbled into a world where commitment is a foreign language.

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.

I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.

When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.

Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.

I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.

Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1736 and Putting Good Things Back Into The System

I had a few appointments in town today including two doctor appointments. I like to have my husband with me when the medical system is involved just in case I need a backup or level headed second opinion.

Afterwards we were able to catch a late lunch (nearly happy hour) at one of Bozeman’s trendy no seed oil spots. It being an odd hour for dining we could hear the conversations at the bar as the place was mostly empty.

A virgin Huckleberry margarita

There were two couples, one Boomer pair and the other geriatric millennials, who as it turned out both celebrating their anniversaries this weekend. The out of town Boomers had come for a Yellowstone and Tetons visit while the younger couple turned out to be local farmers in the valley and were excited to learn the tourists had something in common with them.

The Boomers had also run a farm in Florida but retired and sold it as it is apparently nigh impossible to grow oranges for juice in Florida anymore. The conversation had turned to everyone’s frustrations with the tariffs and the pressures it put on their work.

No one could remain competitive as cost inputs kept going up. Finding labor for smaller farms was getting more expensive and harder to secure. And land developers increasingly competed to acquire land piece by piece from older larger family farms who struggled to compete. We were full on eavesdropping at this point.

The husband in the young farmer pair was dressed just like Alex. He could have been Alex for how closely their styles matched. When he left for the bathroom, his wife said to the older couple how hard it has been recently.

Land he’d worked for years on a lease had just recently been sold to developers at an enormous markup. They understood the demand for housing but how could anyone continue to farm and make a living?

Between tariffs, labor costs and ravenous unmet demand for housing that could only be financed by large scale real estate developers the era of the family farm felt over. Only the big dogs could afford the costs and regulatory overhead.

We were finishing up our meal as we nodded along. Alex said to me “ok I know we don’t do this very often but I think we should pick up the meal for the younger couple.” Being on the verge of tearing up myself I couldn’t have agreed more.

I waved over the waitress and asked if this was possible. She seemed a little surprised “the whole meal?!” But it wasn’t a crazy amount. It was about $100. We sneakily paid our tab and theirs as quickly as we could. We didn’t want to make a thing of it. We just wanted to make their day a little better.

We got up and said to both couples that we couldn’t help overhearing it was both their anniversary weekends coming up and we wanted to wish them many more happy years together.

We thanked them both for keeping America fed and tried to casually saunter out before anyone noticed what we’d done. Hopefully this added a little cheer to their day. In a system as big and opaque and impersonal as America it can feel like there is nothing any of us can do.

So when you can do something even if it’s a small thing like picking up a meal we should do so. America is an idea but we are also a people and we stick together even if our elites make stupid decisions.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1735 and Choice Matters with Our Networks

There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.

He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.

Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.

The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.

Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.

The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.

I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.

We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.

The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 1716 and Algorithmic Nihilism

I am quite jet lagged today so I am unsure if this will be coherent but “it’s practice” so here I am.

I am in the middle of my own biochemical storms as the wider algorithmic storms of the web remain at hurricane strength. My own teapot tempests hardly matter against the gale force nihilism of the raw power games buffeting us all about this online.

I suggest reading Katherine Dee’s post on online political subcultures if you are feeling confused about the infighting and schismatic nature of networked political culture on social media.

The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, is not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45.

Since I began writing specifically about online nihilism in 2022, the FBI has even created a new domestic extremism category: NVE (nihilist violent extremism). These aren’t fringe concerns — or even new ones, the Internet didn’t invent this particular despair, it only gave it new outlets — they’re central to understanding what’s happening online. Default Blog

Nihilism being algorithmically amplified has given audiences to people who might have otherwise been dismissed as cranks, loons, and agitators in the past.

To have a counter culture meant having a dominant culture to press against. Now we have a thousand splinters and millions of different audiences to that splintering fighting symbolic battles. That they are spilling into real violence isn’t new, surprising or even native to the Internet.

It’s merely that we are being fed into the maw of reinforcement learning and algorithmic preferences until we have nothing left but smoothed archetypes battling tribal signals.

That we see people who takes these symbols to a violent extreme should be the expected outcome of persistent othering by algorithm. Digital cultural scissoring breaks apart the collective “we” of all types affinity from national and ethnic identities to sexual preferences and other more abstract ideologies.

Just remember that if a group kicks out too many people they may find themselves with nothing left but sycophant audiences driven by adaptive code. And while that may sound scary, I agree with Lebowski that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of when you are sure of your own principles. So take stock of what matters to you and feed that back to the algorithms. Despair only wins if you let it.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?