Tag: Community

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1397 and the Jungle

I’m in Miami for the week to attend a gathering. October is as fine a time as any to visit what is otherwise a very humid and hot climate. I’d prefer midwinter but I’ll manage with late fall.

I went to eat lunch at a friend’s home. Even with fans and very breezy weather I could still feel the humidity doing battle with my body. Ancient trees covered in moss kept off the sun as best as they could.

Welcome to the jungle

And still even a little bit of movement is enough to trigger sweating in such a climate. Which just leads to itching and inflammation so I’m being careful to not get myself into much trouble. I’ve got my hats and sunglasses and sunscreen and I move slowly.

I understand why the whole town has a hospitality aesthetic that the done up in whites. Anything to keep the sun from overheating you and let the breezes flow.

Whites on white in our room

If you are in Miami let Alex or myself know. We have a conference that you may be attending as well so we’d love to overlap. I’ve proud some amusing outfits and all kinds of cosmetics I hope I have time to apply and enjoy.

Velvets, pinks, and prints for the adventurousness
Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1394 and Wiped

I’ve had a great year. I’m having a great month. I had a great week. I’m absolutely obsessed with my portfolio and the founders in it. Every new opportunity makes me feel better about the future.

And I’m so tired from processing all of that that it’s little wonder my body is grinding out hours of REM sleep a night.

I’m in the middle of a tight circle of artificial intelligence memetics thinkers which has been enthralling. Machine minds needing machine money has been such a pat truism that when a genuine breakthrough shows up it’s easy to focus on the wrong thing. It’s not about memecoins. I almost feel as if I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life.

In the middle of this virtual drama I am trying to remain focused on human concerns. Repairing boots. Doing chores. Preparing for a gathering in Miami next week.

Somewhere in the middle of this work gets done, an election is will be decided and I’m just wiped.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

We call catchy songs “ear worms” but instead of calling catchy ideas “brain worms” we went with Richard Dawkins’s coinage “meme” and I think that’s a pity. Normies find it simple to grasp the term brain work while meme remains coldly academic.

According to this synopsis from Perplexity, Dawkins proposed memes as the cultural parallel to genes, acting as self-replicating units that spread ideas, behaviors, or styles from person to person within a culture.

Thankfully, the extremely online regularly use the term “brain worms” to describe people infected by any number of ideas ranging from the political to the aesthetic. They aren’t good or bad ideas necessarily. I’d include Trump Derangement Syndrome, girls with septum piercings, the uptick in jhanna meditation as flavors of memes that infect different types of minds.

I’m sure I’m infected with at least half a dozen brain worms (hopefully the memetic variety unlike RFK Jr) despite good informational immunity. There are benefits in having hippie parents and media literacy but the occasional infection is inevitable.

Our minds, our bodies, our computers and our networks can get infected with parasitic diseases and carry viral loads. From Covid to e/acc to the Goatse Singularity (safe to click) we’ve had a lot of novel pathogens recently and some of them are even good things.

Programmers and early Internet citizens have probably have more exposure to the modern theory of memetics than most.

Dawkin’s original coinage, while still a helpful theory, has been surpassed by the colloquial understanding of meme as popular cultural detritus that spreads online.

Given Internet network density, smart phone ubiquity, and algorithmic driven feeds, we’ve never been able to spread memes more readily. The topic is particularly interesting where it intersects with artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. Make something worth sharing and it has value.

Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash has a neuro-linguistic virus derived from Sumerian mythology where natural language programs the human mind like we now program computers. It gets used in nefarious ways.

This of course makes you wonder if it’s so easy to make people share ideas how hard is it to make people forget them? There is no anti-memetics division right?

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

I wonder if my brain worms have made me memory hole anything recently. Given that we have an election coming up seems worth considering.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 1363 and Landfill Apps

Building good software is a topic on which many of my friends and colleagues have extremely strong opinions.

Anything built by humans can become a craft with skilled artisans and building software doesn’t escape this. While there are 27 million software developers in the world and 4.4 million of them are in American, if you pressed the startup community most would agree the number of good software developers is much lower.

I came of age in the blogging era, where we got writing like Joel on Software. I learned to build thanks to other builders sharing their craft and discussing it on forums & personal sites. I had access to the insights of builders like DHH and Alex Payne. Their commitment to publishing accessibility helped onboard millions of normies like me.

In some ways, startups and the software giants of FAANG are a victim of our own success. We onboarded the world to our efficiency.

And now with AI coding software (incidentally trained by Stack Overflow data & GitHub repositories built by my community) we are experiencing a Cambrian explosion level of coding access.

And it’s not Zapier hacks or snide remarks about Rust anymore. Anyone who can think critically about a product feature can build it with clear thinking and natural language.

I recommend “In The Beginning There Was The Command Line” by Neal Stephenson so often because every time we have an abstraction leap that allows more access we move further away from the power of craft.

And that is an unmitigated good in many ways as more people get the benefits of these tools.

But we are also going to get a slot of shit churned out because of that. Soychotic called them landfill apps when Marques Brownlee or MKBDH launched a $12 a month app for phone wallpapers. The app enraged Twitter.

If history is any indication the growth curve in app building is just getting started. Much awful nonsense will be built and sold, but imagine how it enables those with taste and opinions to make new solutions to our problems.

Ironic a critic of software like MKNDH should play such a role in reminding us of just how hard it is to make something good. Making money though can have a much lower bar.

Categories
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
Culture Preparedness

1355 and Critical Desalination Point

Being under the weather over the weekend, I’m watching comfort content. I like science fiction and big splashy science disaster porn.

I finally watched the 2019 Chinese “Wandering Earth” based on a short story by Liu Cixin

It was nice to see a big budget Chinese film with some modest Warrior Wolf diplomacy but it was mostly interesting because of the immense engineering projects and the scope of the thing.

I loved Roland Emmerich movies as a young woman. Splashy big budget movies that turned on goofy science jargon like “we’ve hit a critical desalination point!”

Dennis Quaid is an Everyman scientist

Remember a time when NOAA scientists could be heroes? Yeah it didn’t work that great. Trust the science. Alas we don’t have the same respect for government scientists in the era before Covid. I wonder what it would take to save the world.

Categories
Media

Day 1350 and Dumb and Angry

“They want you dumb and angry”

Riling up the people (the proletariat if you are nasty) is a time honored method of keeping us under control. Socrates did it. The Roman emperors did it. The New York Times and the Walk Street Journal do it.

Not getting all caught up in being stupid and reactive is a huge responsibility. And not everyone wants to hand “the people” the type of responsibility that staying free entails.

Freedom at scale requires some surrendering of responsibility to others. We outsource what we can’t possibly know to people we trust. It’s clear some of us have forgotten how to trust. And who can blame us. Institutions rise and fall. Priests, Lords and Kings fell to the people.

We then promptly built up new ways to assign authority. For a while we trusted academics, reporters and politicians. Perhaps a few celebrities and billionaire entrepreneurs retain some authority now. I honestly don’t know. The lone man with his own opinion can scarcely compete.

I’m not sure if there was ever a time when an individual could have a “good bead” on reality. The mythos of the American post World War 2 GI Bill educated mass media literate Baby Boomers sure thought they had a grasp on reality. Being directionally correct about Vietnam and Nixon helped I’m sure.

That’s the fantasy I miss most from my childhood. I read “Manufacturing Consent,” Howard Zinn and AdBusters. I thought it was possible to see around the machine. Maybe and I are both Noam Chomsky kind of simple minded. At least now I’m only certain that I’m part of the machine. Perhaps there was never any separation from it.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1349 and Worry Not

Through Robin Hanson’s link round up today I came across a review of a book by Joyce Beresen “Warriors and Worriers” that has a novel thesis on how different sexes cooperate and compete.

Human males form cooperative groups that compete against out-groups, while human females exclude other females in their quest to find mates, female family members to invest in their children, and keep their own hearts ticking. In the process, Benenson turns upside down the familiar wisdom that women are more sociable than men and that men are more competitive than women.

The Survival of the Sexes: Warriors and Worriers

The reviewer Tove K of Wood from Eden suggests that Bereson’s work shows that worry and fear may be playing a part in our current fertility crisis for women.

If women worry more about competing for resources than men because their social competitions are zero sum (versus men who must be more cooperative for group defense) than I can see how if you get to fear being a driver of inferiority. If you are struggling with poverty or resource constraint you might be living in fear. It’s hard to imagine that there are infinite games. Maybe too many of us can’t see beyond limited zero sum “us versus them” resources competitions.

In that theme, Bryan Caplan wonders if only fear (and shame) can sway the highly impulsive as they are not as able to see cause and effect.

When I grew up young women experienced rather pervasive fear and shame on becoming pregnant. Now we see more women convinced to pull back from the risk of children entirely.

What I can’t quite square in these theories is how much actual resource constraints play into this versus the subjective differences in resources we see in our social groups. Is it all a comparison game?

You may be doing objectively better than any of your ancestors but still feel inadequate next to a lavish Instagram feed of an influencer. If you don’t think you can live up to the high standards of parenting required in American life maybe you’d worry yourself into a smaller family.

Or as many are choosing you’d worry yourself into no children at all. Last week the Surgeon General said Americans were in a crisis of parental stress. Who wants that? I’d say that women should worry less but if our biology says “only the paranoid survive” the future of humanity will take more than just our evolutionary instincts. We need to want to live.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

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?