Tag: Community

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Aesthetics Community Politics

Day 1482 and Freedom, Responsibility and License

A Twitter Mutual who goes my the handle Vivid Void began a discussion about the challenge of having a friendship with someone whose highest value is freedom.

Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.

Running from how we know what we know

These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.

I happen to prefer the Twitter discourse and felt a pull to VividVoid’s thread on friendship with those who have freedom as the highest value speaks to my own conviction that freedom only exists within a broad set of personal responsibilities.

To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.

I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue

Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.

Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.

Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.

that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter

There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.

I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.

That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.

When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.

Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?

It was revealed to me
Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical Uncategorized

Day 1476 and Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough

I’m thrilled to see that the very week I began my hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy that we’ve had multiple experiments and data come in.

Bryan Johnson helped answer a few questions in my set up so I was delighted to see he himself was just wrapping up a major experiment with HBOT.

Step into my hyperbaric chamber courtesy of Bryan Johnson’s Twitter

Earlier in the week Harvard professor David Sinclair tweeted a thread on with links to the newest scientific literature on treatment. Stuff with names like Activation of SIRT1 by hyperbaric oxygenation promotes recovery of motor dysfunction in spinal cord injury rats

Esssays

A lovely meditation on what happens when you write 11,000 blog posts. In this case startup blogging. I’m written an order of magnitude less so hopefully I can avoid some of the negative consequences and enjoy the lessons.

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Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.

Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.

LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.

Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history

I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.

Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.

And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Medical

Day 1440 and The Pain We Won’t Name

Americans are in pain. Literally and emotionally. How that happened isn’t my focus. We are in the middle of a national conversation about the failures of institutional medicine and its relationship to our government. We are treading in deep water and it’s best not to get swept away.

There are many communities that have emerged on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GoodReads and elsewhere dedicated to the many paths available to go about fixing the problems in your life. There millions of strong communities of interests, hobbies, courses, and network knowledge that can enable you.

One of those communities is called TPOT. What is TPOT, who is in TPOT, what are its values and what does it believe are all involved and sometimes contentious questions. Being illegible is a big thing.

We mostly agree it stands for “this particular corner of Twitter” which is a loose network of nodes of people interested in applying knowledge they learn across our networked multimedia to their real life.

The experimental “you can just do things” attitude is a big tent. You see DIY projects, tutorials, reading lists, artificial intelligence and coding discussions, fitness and biohacking experiments, nutrition and cooking, meditation and nervous system research, pain management, psychology and emotional wellness and much more. You also see more far out woo woo topics like psychedelics, evolutionary psychology, and many flavors of rationalism and epistemology.

One of the most qualified voices to speak on TPOT might be Brook Bowman of Vibe Camp. In my understanding of her interpretation, TPOT is a memetic virus and once you touch it you are in the topology of TPOT for good.

tpot is this crazy memetic virus where the term itself means so little and is so contagious that you kind of become part of it just by hearing about it

Brooke

This is protective and makes it resilient. The network is bigger than any node and this is a good thing

So TPOT is best understood as a network composed of many interoperable nodes of interests and many layers of engagement. A memetic complex that you become part of on contact. If you read my blog it’s likely have many clear lines to TPOT.

If you like fitness, coding, rationalism, nutrition, or even home improvement well congratulations you are one or two nodes away from “just do things” as a life philosophy yourself and might be a member of TPOT yourself if you talk about it on Twitter.

And this is now some very dangerous semiotic territory as we cope with the gaping wound that is American health and murder. And I am concerned the narratives are going to be heavily fought over territory.

Because it’s easy to dislike a techbro right now. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the group. I can see it now. “Are your friends into this weird sounding acronym TPOT? Have you heard someone say “you can just do things?” If so you need to alert the authorities!”

Of course this sounds funny and histrionic. It’s totally normal to take responsibility for what you can in your life and try out ways of improving your life somewhat.

Everyone is dealing with pain (chronic or otherwise). Being an adult is a set of emotional challenges to manage and most of us do so by making the shocking decision to take action and do something. That doesn’t mean this world is is dangerous. It certainly doesn’t mean murder. It means doing something in your day life like lifting some weights, shipping some code, checking your biometric data, and trying to be a friend to lessen the pain most of us are in.

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Community Culture

Day 1438 and the Circuit

Cool is as scarce as a resource as our species has ever encountered. We plunder and horde cool like the spice in Dune even though absolutely anyone is capable of becoming cool.

I know you probably want to argue but Julie I’ve never been cool or no one I know is cool. Well I’m sorry but that’s actually a skills issue and you can be a part of culture.

Anyone can become cool by not giving too many fucks about the rules. Notice I didn’t say “no fucks” as obviously there are rules and gatekeepers and all kinds of ways to modulate what I’ll call cultural capital.

It’s not too hard to become a polite participant in the unwritten rules of culture. If you are additive to any of ways we create, propagate and monetize culture you will be welcomed in once you learn to contribute.

Looking for a toehold? One of the ways we decide on who and what is cool is simply by showing up to the various nodes of wealth and power I’ll call the circuit. An artist mutual of mine calls it the city with legs.

If you are curious and want to participate the the circuit roughly encapsulates the vacation and social calendars of our global elite class. And it’s quite public and often reasonable accessible if you are curious enough to research. Read the styles section and you notice the repetition.

It’s a more diverse group than you might think. It’s certainly more open to than when society was run by a hereditary aristocracy. Yet it’s still contained enough that anyone on the circuit jokes it’s the same old thing.

Sometimes folks complain that you never meet anyone new on the circuit and it’s true you encounter the same people over and over again. You will probably see me from time to time. Power likes cool because cool is a powerful determinant of wealth and status.

If you attend the main fashion weeks, the world economic forum, the Met Gala, Art Basel, Formula 1 races, the awards seasons, or the main conferences you have encountered the circuit. If you have met someone who winters or summers somewhere then you have seen the circuit.

Maybe just as a townie but you’ve seen it. Even a cat can look at a king. If you’d like to hop on the circuit be sure to bring something to the table. The thing about culture is we are always looking for new faces. You too can try out being cool just for fun. Break a few rules but maybe ask someone on it which ones they follow to get a feel for it first.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1436 and The Voyage Home

Like many fans of Star Trek, I am not at all ashamed of my affection for one of science fictions greatest franchises. I’m proud to love it.

When I visit San Francisco I like to rewatch the classic original series movie from 1986 “Star Trek: The Voyage Home” which is affectionately known as the whale movie.

Future San Francisco is a beautiful paradise where exceptional young people go to Star Fleet Academy. It’s fully automated luxury communism thanks to the not really military (but definitely feels like it) the United Federation of Planets.

The movie involves getting Spock back from previous escapades that had left him for dead. As they retrieve Spock a crisis is unfolding on earth.

A spacecraft is signaling to Earth alas no one can answer it. It disables everything near it. The Enterprise figure out that it’s whalesong and decide the only way to answer is going back in time to find Humpback whales.

The Reagan era was a strange one for environmentalist. The crew goes back in time to rescue Humpback whales and ends up in San Francisco in the 70s at least vibe wise. It was definitely a pop culture “save the whales” moment.

San Francisco was a mess in the past and everyone finds this to be relatable as a plot point though we all know it can be made a paradise.

We see nuclear vessels in Alameda as the brave future. We have to save our whales to save our future though. This was not a universe where environmentalists make the best villains. Environmentalists are the good guys which is almost sweet.

The Voyage Home is a ridiculous movie with a premise stuck in a bubble of social attitudes that is almost comforting.

Leaving San Francisco myself to voyage home myself makes me laugh at one of comedic bits of the movie. “I don’t know how these people made it out of the 20th century!”

To the skeptics I say a double dumb ass on you! Humans and their colorful metaphors might just might get us to the future after all. And San Francisco will be part of making it.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1435 and Tsunami Warning

I was preparing to head out for a lunch meeting when I got a blaring alert on my phone. I’d been putting on cosmetics in the bathroom while my phone charged in the other room. Initially I thought it was an amber alert.

The National Weather Service has issued a tsunami warning. A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coastal waters until local officials say it safe to return.

My blaring alarm was not for a personal family tragedy but a warning for the entire Bay Area. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake had been registered offshore.

The earthquake occurred at 10:44 a.m., 45 miles southwest of Eureka. The proximity to the coast created an immediate tsunami threat which led to the alert on my phone at 10:51.

Naturally Twitter lit up almost instantly as a number of older established users remain in the area. When San Francisco has weather or news it tends to dominate the instant chronological feed.

Thankfully organizations like the U.S Geological Survey and other relevant public service accounts spread information quickly.

I could feel my cortisol spike as one after another meetings canceled and texts came in from friends in the city (and those who knew I was in town) checking up on each other. We quickly learned it was a large earthquake and its proximity to the coast automatically meant a tsunami warning.

We are staying in a hilly neighborhood so it was easy to calculate we were 100 feet above sea level. It seemed we us an hour till any expected wave was due in San Francisco at 12:10.

An hour of warning seemed like a lot for filling up tubs with water and doing a few frantic preparations like washing socks in case we were looking at a disaster. We wondered if SFO might be impacted given how low lying it is relative to other neighborhoods.

A friend headed over as the park was high ground so we figured why not watch if something happens and catch up together.

As Twitter churned it was mentioned in some coverage that “this was a strike-slip fault, as opposed to a subduction fault, so it’s less likely to cause tsunamis.”

As other areas closer to the epicenter did not see waves, we soon got the automated cancellation of the warning. 12:10 cane and went without a disaster. The cortisol wave I was riding crashed. Everyday there is some new chaotic thing that gets integrated into one’s world as just another day. Yesterday it was corporate assassinations. Today it was tsunamis. Hopefully tomorrow will be calmer.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1434 and Density

There is always a debate in startup life as to how the density of a given ecosystem impacts outcomes. A tight network of well connected communities and individuals helps founders, investors and talent connect.

Before the pandemic it was considered fairly normal to be within a major hub as the common knowledge was that “density” matters. You wanted to be in the action of a scene.

There are great startup cities. New York has an incredible scene. My hometown of Boulder has a great technical core. But as much as cities and companies compete over status the one with longevity is Silicon Valley. Heck it was a debate when that even encompassed San Francisco until Twitter moved in.

Then everyone spread to the four winds during the pandemic. I like to think of this as the era in which Silicon Valley got back to its digital roots. Being extremely online became a behavior that worked well for anyone if you communicated well with words. Being on the right coast was about being in the right online communities. The network state is online.

I’d say that was as pure a return to source culture as there ever was. Different people value signal across different networks and the open web of words has been home to software and hardware developers for generations.

The world that builds companies lives virtually as much as it does in the real world. We like to meet up but we also know it’s the tools that connects us that make the difference.

Every subculture that has emerged with a breakout hit did it through the digital commons we built together. I’ll always appreciate coming to the source culture to replenish but I know the density of the network is at its swiftest when our extremely online communities communicate.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1431 and Faking It

I’ve heard this multiple times across enough demographics in the wider “startup” ecosystem that I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it is happening. People are faking being weird. In some cases they are faking being autistic.

I find this to be an almost laughably unlikely thing to want to imitate. And yet I’ve heard it three times in the last week. The new poser is faking being a neurodivergent weirdo.

We regularly joke that at chaotic.capital a part of our deal sourcing relies on “Julie being professionally weird on the internet.” My pinned tweet from three years ago is a ramble on this ethos as it’s been true for decades. Unique fixations often undergird problem solving.

Being weird, or more specifically autistic, has now taken on a specific connotation of an intelligent but socially strange or oblivious character who sees the world differently. This means you are special somehow and can be forgiven for being a dick (that’s a lie be nice).

It was probably a source of pain for many millennial kids who were awkward the more oblivious you are the less it bothers you. Marching to the beat of your own drum. We’ve got a whole set of social tropes around smart nerds in popular media and most of them were negatively coded.

Despite this history, revenge of the nerds occurred. The power and dominance of technology (and its cousin nerd) culture means the spergy truth telling autist has cachet. We live in a post Sheldon Cooper world. Once something involves capital it collects social capital as well.

I have clearly underestimated how much this affects Zoomer behavior and incentives. Millennials experienced this archetype negatively but in a softer “everyone is special” culture your quirks can lead you to money and prestige. So there is now an incentive to act like a weird asshole to fake being weird and a little socially anxious.

If autism can have stolen valor then we might be in that era. It seems to greatly annoy the actually autistic (a tag on social media used by many poorly socialized entirely normal people) to have the symptoms of autism faked.

Authenticity is actually quite hard to fake and anyone with a decent social radar can usually spot it. Whether all autists have that capacity to read social cues is up for debate. It’s probably why anyone tries to fake being a genuine weirdo.

I’m inclined to say skills issue as the internet has made class, manners, and social cues much more accessible to everyone. And good news being every social class values being chill, real, and passionate. So there is no need to fake anything. Just vibe. Be cool.