Tag: Community

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Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.

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Community Homesteading

Day 839 and Chatty

I occasionally have the ambition to be less of chatty Cathy. I almost cannot help myself in Montana. I keep meeting folks who are into the same stuff as me and then I’ll just end up talking for an hour.

Introverted Julie somehow always finds the homesteader, science fiction, alternative economy, crypto libertarian aesthetic studies semiotics pirate at the party. Sometimes it’s even the same person (hi Frank). I’ve now found not one but two homestead curious folks at a spa. The same spa! (Hi Kylie & Lorraine!)

I’ve got a general philosophy in life that you should be a beacon. We are responsible for our light and maintaining it. But are we not equally responsible for shining it into the darkness?

I’d like to see my broadcasting into the abyss of the internet as being a sort of existential lighthouse. Perhaps my chatty nature is some form of the same ambition. I want my people to find me.

And wouldn’t you know it but I’m always finding people searching for the same things. I have so many pockets of knowledge. And I want to share what I know with you. I want you to share your knowledge with me too. Your world and your experiences will add to mine just as mine adds to yours. Like the Borg but decentralized.

I’ve got a lot of weirdly specific knowledge. You know, Julie Fredrickson shit. And I want the folks who need the light I’ve cultivated to find me. So I will broadcast.

I know how to be in my body even with illness. I know about inflammation and healing from post viral shit. I know about sovereignty and survival and independence. I know a thing or two about being a doomer and an optimist.

I’ve got weirder more specifics knowledge too. Ask me about corporate governance structures and decentralized autonomous organization. Or the most cost effective luxury unbranded retinols. Or what biometrics to track and on what devices.

The point is that I’m here to be a chatty Cathy. And if you’d like to talk just slide into my DMs on Twitter. Or email me. It’s my first name dot last name at gmail. Consider this your bat signal.

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Community Politics

Day 838 and Wanting

I am no longer interested in living by standards I didn’t set for preferences I don’t have.

Me on Twitter 😑

A lot of what Americans took for granted about the world got a hard dose of cynical reality over the last few years. But the upside of the pandemic was the reckoning it forced on all of it. I know I walked away from those years. changed.

I’d begun my own personal journey into the existential abyss earlier as I was faced with personal health crisis before the global one. And I’m glad I had a head start. It isn’t easy making hard choices.

I’ve learned to prioritize what matters to me. I have resource constraints and it has breed in me innovation and fortitude. I’m a whiney cunt about it too. Because I simply don’t see why I need to live my life for someone else’s preferences, especially if I don’t share them. I can chose to prioritize my life and my values. And I’m free to live that way too.

America as an ideal is nobler than our reality. But as a civilizational ideal we’ve set a society where we value the freedom to live as we chose. Maybe you don’t like my choices but if I’m not harming anyone live and let live.

I want to keep civilization. I think it’s good. I want no Hobbesian war of all against all. So let’s find a way to maintain tolerance and live and let live. Weirdos like me aren’t hurting anybody. And neither should you. Authoritarians please find succor elsewhere.

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Culture Homesteading

Day 828 and Unscheduled

One of the things I’ve done to treasure about Montana is easy it is to hang out with people if that’s what you want. Maybe it’s the community we’ve cultivated, or maybe it’s just the people who gravitate to the Rocky Mountains, but it’s just really conducive to normal unscheduled human time together. People just hang out.

Now sure we live in a pretty special weirdo valley with Gallatin. I’m a child of a weirdo mountain town valley. Boulder and Bozeman remain very fundamentally similar attitudes on life even if in Montana you’ve got way more space. People are friendly and people are weird. The tolerance and acceptance is what you’d expect from a high trust culture.

I’ve got trips to big cities ahead of me. I’ll be in New York City in the coming weeks. It only took a half dozen texts to block my calendar for a full 72 hours in Manhattan. There is surprisingly little room for chill hangs. Honestly I was impressed so many people wanted to spend time with me. But also booking out that time is how New York works. The days are scheduled.

I’d prefer a world where it’s simple to say just come on over. We can do that in Montana. Friends come over. We always have house guests. But in a city I can’t afford to just rent out a whole bar or event space so it’s not like I can have a big gathering unless the weather is good enough for the park. So perhaps that’s just the nature of higher competition venues.

But I will say it’s awfully nice to just have amazing people just hang out and be normal with you. Maybe you go for a meal. Maybe you have folks over for a beer. Sometimes people bring their dogs. And it’s just a real nice way to live. Lots of space to be private and plenty of joy to be found in occasionally being a social animal.

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Startups

Day 814 and Odd Hours

I’m a little bit of a work fetishist. I’m into shit like routines and the Protestant work ethic and I avidly participated in hustle culture. But I regret to inform you that most of it is a lie.

So much of your professional life ends up getting wasted to slavish gestures to productivity porn. It’s just not how real life works. But it sure looks sexy when you lay it out like an Instagram reel.

But maybe it’s not always just for show. Maybe there is something you don’t understand about how things do or don’t work. So you accept some social norms to fit in with others and you find their advice on shit like sleep more and get high quality protein is sort of first principles.

You have the basics of being a responsible adult and learning from others while you do it. We have a grand shared culture and some of it is useful and some of it is superstition and sometimes it’s not clear which is which. But shared meaning is how humans organize. Maybe there is value to meetings.

Point my dear whacky zoomer autists is you need to be able to be a functioning member of civilization despite what Covid may have revealed. You have to accommodate other people’s lives even if you don’t like everything. Welcome to the herd.

And honestly you should have to learn to fit in a bit of life that overlaps with real humans. Even though we have total access to our most niche nerd fandoms online, we deal with normies in real life.

But I’ve also come to realize that performance is a game. And you can train yourself to go from zero to halfway decent if you just make an effort. But the real art of it all the tip and tricks and how-to guides comes down to just doing the work and figuring it out. The intangibles make you an expert. That’s the stuff you spend a life refining and it doesn’t ever take a break. It’s why all the super successful people are also kind of fuck ups.

Sometimes the weird is genuine as they have rethought a an assumption about the world and intend to make their vision known in the world. And that’s not done on bankers hours.

I work on Sunday when something happens and the momentum shifts and you know that adding your gravity to the matter could make a difference. And so you go the extra mile for someone else because it’s about us trusting each other to work with reality but also see each other as we are. And most of us are weird and it’s fine and you’ve got to work the way to makes your weird shine.

If you are good at your niche and you apply your knowledge and tell it straight then sometimes you do some magic and it moves your universe. So yeah sometimes you’ve got to keep weird hours to hold space for the possibility.

Categories
Politics

Day 811 and Hierarchy

I came across an interesting bit of reading on the relative stability of hierarchies of violence today. It’s a tidbit on a Substack so epistemic status is that I learned something and I’m thinking a lot about trust as we live through various crisis points in real time on networked media.

The article that starts with prison gangs and the weight of violent action on bosses and gets deep on hierarchical stability and selection pressures. I really do recommend the reading as it gets into Scottish kings, American federal bureaucracy, and military service academies.

I’m working on improving my theory of organizational structure because somehow I am one of the louder “thinks in public” about corporate governance and decentralized autonomous organization. It’s a bit of an accident as I am just very interested in how collectives organize resources at different scales.

Some of investing thesis surrounds a nexus of how we organize decentralized power when centralized powers wish us your in-group to be illegal or killed. It’s a salient question for all of us in an age of institutional failure and I’m keen to learn more about what works in the most adverse situations.

Skarbek might call this market competition for governance, an Italian futurist might say “War is the hygiene of the world”, a musician might say a rolling stone gathers no moss, a survivalist that the quickest stream is the freshest…But the phenomenon remains. the devil reigns in hell… because where else are you going to go

I’m a doomer but only because I’m keen to head off going to hell. I’d like to avoid us having to return to a Hobbesian war of all against all just because we’ve gotten a little tired of liberalism because it allows for out-groups to live and let live. So putting it out there that functional systems can be stable and maybe stability isn’t our only goal.

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Emotional Work

Day 806 and Inputs

I’ve had a very intense month. In the past thirty days I feel like I’ve lived an entire lifetime of emotions.

I had some exciting but modestly controversial press in Vanity Fair about how chaotic the future looks in America. That brought a lot of attention and new LPs in chaotic.capital who want to invest in solutions for living in a rapidly changing future shocked world.

Then we were off to Mexico to celebrate my father’s 80th birthday and I had to grapple with complicated emotions on being present for family and the aspirations I have for a life that doesn’t align with disability.

Within a few days of getting back I had my sense making capacity crash override my brain into a snowblind. I thought I was going a little crazy but no it was because a bank collapsed. Then I heard some dog whistles about euthanizing people like me.

And finally I realized there is no point in doing my own writing in the wake of ChatGPT4 and decided that I’d do it anyways because organic human brewed content from Montana is fun to make.

It’s been an astonishing amount of inputs into my system and I am leaving out a lot of personal life details that I’ll leave folks to guess at. As exhausting as all of the above sounds it only represents a fraction of the work and emotional energy I brought to bear on expanding myself to meet this moment.

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Internet Culture

Day 805 and Legibility

Being inscrutable is a tactical asset in our extremely online age. As more informational influence campaigns are waged, it becomes easier to invade your headspace if you are too predictable.

I’m not saying that being predictable isn’t worthwhile. If you have a firm foundation of philosophy or religion that dictates a stance sometimes you just have to own it. I’m a libertarian and I often walk the line of what I consider to be foundational beliefs in the value of other people’s freedom in relation to mine.

But I also live in reality where the grey of living in a civilization is a lot less clear. Anyone who doesn’t admit to this fundamental tension is untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned.

This of course makes me legible. It is one of the buzzwords in my favorite online spaces. It is the art of how we make ourselves legible to others such that we can see and be seen. I rather like this philosophy overall.

But I am also quite sure that if you give someone an opening to fuck with you they probably will. It’s definitely a risk to be seen. It makes you a target. But it’s also how you become a beacon. So it’s an over under decision on how much you care about other people attacking you is up to you. But if you open about experimenting with life and how little you know it almost always turns out alright.

There is a theory of public relations, much popularized by Steve Bannon and legal discovery, called flood the zone with shit. And sometimes not giving your enemies a sense of who you is because you are always in process of becoming more and bigger and inscrutable and then suddenly you are in the Heart of Darkness.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

So everyone be optimistic and find your people but remember everyone is going to be playing the same game. So I’d definitely recommend you don’t cheat and play the long game.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 759 and All Dressed

Social media has given us so many ways to become fans. We have ever more content thanks the streaming wars. Give content a chance to live everywhere online and it will develop a fanbase beyond its intended audience. The internet gives small shows outsized impact.

I’m a fan of a Canadian comedy called a Letterkenny. It’s about a small town in Canada. It’s got people and their problems. It’s a very funny character study and has fundamentally warm and loving humor. I’ve watched every episode and the spin-off. I’ve taken a lot of solace in the very human nature of the show, particularly during the pandemic years when everyone felt far away from each other.

There is a phenomenon that is particularly prominent online called parasocial relationships. Someone creates art or a personality and it develops a fandom. Over time, the fans, through repeated exposure to a character or show, believe they know them like a friend. It is fun to be in the fandom. Enjoying art is a universal experience. I am a stan for Letterkenny. I’m in a parasocial relationship with the Letterkenny crew and it’s universe.

How deep is it? Well my husband and I recently ordered some Canadian chip flavor called all dressed featured on an episode of Letterkenny. The chip is, as the name suggests, every single type of flavor. It is salt and vinegar, bbq, ketchup (weird but crucial), and sour cream & onion. And it is absolutely delicious. As a Twitter friend said to me, it is the Dr Pepper of chips. It’s not for everyone but it’s spectacular.

All dressed ruffle potato chips

Because it is Sunday, I am taking a medically necessary amount of THC. I’ve had a gummy. And I thought this was a perfect moment to try the Letterkenny chip.

And it was indeed glorious. All dresseds is a chip made for the munchies. It’s got bite and taste and texture and it all rolls up into an experience. It’s a chip worthy of the extra attention of weed focus.

And because I am extremely online I shared my appreciation for it on Twitter.

Now on Letterkenny there is a clique called the Skids. They are the weird kids. They are the hipster ones. They are the nerds. They are small town weed dealers. Asking me to pick a favorite on Letterkenny is like asking me to pick a favorite child. One of the Skids is Roald. He is a loyal friend but his own man. He definitely likes weed. I love Roaldie.

And I’m delighted to learn through my all dressed munchies Tweet, that the actor who plays him, Evan Stern, is following me. He likes the tweet. What a perfect way to enjoy a very specific kind of fandom. A parasocial relationship’s individual manifestation through social media. Now that I’ve made a big deal out of all this I should probably say hi to Evan. It’s going to be weird no matter what but it brought me a lot of joy. It’s good to be a fan.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 743 and Wandering

I took some time to go wandering today. I’ve been in Prague for six days but it’s been such a mess I haven’t actually felt like I’ve been in the city.

I like to get to know cities by walking. If I’ve only been in a cab or an Uber I don’t have a sense of place. I need to walk to feel like I’ve landed in a place. While I love a good resort destination now and again, I find it hard to feel grounded without being able to roam.

I wonder if being raised in a small town affected this at all. I wasn’t really a suburban kid. We had suburbs in my town but you still went to a downtown core where kids would walk from the library to the high school to the pedestrian mall. Walking was entertainment for my teenage years.

Now as an adult I find nothing more liberating than just walking for as long as you can. Being wedded to a destination or a GPS mapped route feels too much like having to do something or be somewhere. But wandering around with no place to be tastes like freedom. You are still in charge of your own life if you can go for a long walk with no purpose.