I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.
As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.
The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.
If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”
It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.
I am in a challenging spot at the moment with our household mold issue and my attempts to accelerate changes in my care protocol for my autoimmune condition.
When things are challenging physically I find myself in tension. I want to share and be open in my experiment to write every single day. I am afraid that I’m doing nothing but share weakness by doing so.
I don’t want to telegraph only strain, illness, and struggle. Sure things are hard at the moment, but I am more than my current local minima conditions. Things are quite good.
Just because I feel too weak to articulate all the areas of strength doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I just can’t put them front and center right now.
This frustrates and even angers me. Large long term projects and investments are thriving and rather than focus on those I am curling into the fetal position and wishing I could disappear until I’m able to advocate loudly and proudly for my wins.
For as exciting as the last few weeks have been it’s hard to feel like as it’s the dead of winter. I’ve not gone outside in several days as we are in -20 land which probably contributes to fatigue. Thankfully it’s bright and sunny.
I don’t have anything useful to say as being in the middle of multiple health projects is a time suck. Any excess energy goes to work as there really is no way of stopping progress. I wish I could keep up as it’s exciting.
Partially because things are so “out of bounds” I can feel more comfortable prioritizing long term gains and changes. I think I can achieve a health level up and fixing it now prepares me for strain later.
I take this approach on everything now. The short term has been set by decisions in the past and the medium term is highly uncertain. Steer correctly now so future you is set up to succeed.
I enjoy my daily writing as it forces me to put my sensory apparatus to work at summarizing the inputs on my systems for the day. Being a human, my processing is laggy.
I came across this graphic from Hinterland’s Twitter. They created it show compression of the our body’s sensory inputs. A lot hits our mind and very little of it gets to conscious thought.
The human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second. – Britannica “Information Theory”
It seems to me we are not prepared for this moment of unprecedented complexity given the hardware we are working with.
Some of us may have slightly different software so it’s not all hopeless. It just seems like as a species the complexity of our environment relative to our baseline physiology is looking a little iffy.
I have a kind of optimism that we will find a way to meet the moment. Right up until we can’t?
I’m am looking to do whatever upgrades I can to hear the signal in the noise. But maybe a booming voice from the sky is easy to hear than the endless chatter of our world. Or maybe we have to find another way to achieve resonance and hear.
Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.
There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.
But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.
Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.
It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.
And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.
If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.
I felt it was very important to get off the internet and soak in some restorative aesthetics. We are in a shock and awe moment almost anywhere you look from national politics to geopolitical technology competition. And everyone is jangling for narrative.
Extremism exist in some very weird bubbles. I am concerned seeing rationalist singularity cultists. But I’m also concerned about high frequency hedge funders who manipulate markets. We are in a great power competition and I’m sure we all have totally sensible opinions about open source artificial intelligence models. Right?
It’s all very cyperpunk. Manipulation of financial markets is as grey zone a tactic as sniping the telecoms pipeline from Helsinki to Tallinn. And we should be concerned about being competitive. We’ve been snowblind before
It’s a nuisance as neither you nor I have a clear line of view. Some of us maybe have a few months heads up. The lead feels less and less even as I am as much a part of shaping narratives as anyone. I was using DeepSeek in the fall.
When I was in fashion we had this website called “don’t believe the hypebeast” to mog those overly concerned with cool. Don’t get mogged. The same principle applies here. Don’t try to figure it all out.
Go read something with soul, listen to some Bach, and be with your family. Be frosty in the fog and exist in the real while you still can.
The one thing that really unites the American west, but in particular the Rocky Mountain West, is our independent streak. We take our rights seriously.
We don’t like being told what to do by the government. I hope to contribute to this tradition in my own efforts as a citizen. I’m pleased to support a bill that guarantees Montanan’s right to compute.
Sen. Daniel Zolnikov has officially introduced SB 212, the Right To Compute Act, to the #mtleg.
This bill will ensure Montanans’ rights to free expression and property are protected in the 21st century, in addition to helping position Montana as a world-class destination for AI and Data Center investment.
Here’s what it does:
1: Establish the Right to Compute: The legislature makes it clear that privately owning or making use of computational technologies for lawful purposes is protected as an aspect of fundamental rights to free expression and use of property.
2: Create a New Policy Framework: Restrictions on the ability to privately own or use computational resources must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling state interest in public health or safety.
3: Balance Interests: Provides mechanisms for policymakers to address real harms to public health and safety posed by the application of new computational technologies, while also ensuring that regulations do not excessively burden the Right to Compute.
I feel like I’ve been discussing this issue forever but in reality we are in the first innings of how artificial intelligence will change our lives. And it has real possibilities for making many aspects of our very human lives better.
I don’t want this technology (which is again just math) being restricted by the federal government or dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths who can comply with endless regulations. Compute is for the people.
Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.
We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.
A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.
Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?
Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.
If you die in the Matrix you die in real life
We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.
Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.
If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.
When I got started with my daily writing project I knew there would be days when I did not want to write. Today is one of them.
I actually expected “ugh no want to write” days to be more frequent than turned out to be true. I’ve bitched about it 51 times which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.
I knew I’d find a way to force the issue just as I had made other habits a part of my life. You really can make almost anything a habit if you are so inclined. But I rarely have to force habit. I just do the thing till it’s either a habit or it’s clear it’s not for me. They say it’s 21 days but I’d give it more like 100 to be safe.
Things I just do every day include applying facial moisturizer, brushing my teeth, squatting (no not just on the toilet I mean the full body compound exercise), taking my vitamins, Tweeting, playing a stupid pay to play Chinese mobile game, telling my husband I love him and opening up my mobile content management app to write this post.
And yet I am in a real “smh” place today with my attempts to find meaning in any of my habits. I’m disappointed in more than a few things. It’s all very Cthulhu and Antarctic cold vibes for me today. Sure it’s -20 in Montana but it’s very sunny so it’s cheery dread.
Anyways, the interregnum is over, we have a new President who is an old President and everything that is new is old and everything old is new again.
I scared someone really badly today. As I was being locked into the hard shell for my eighth hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy session, I realized I had forgotten my chewing gum.
At 2 atmospheres of pressure it can be a real challenge to keep your ears from getting painfully congested. Even with yawning and blowing oxygen out your nose, it’s like going into an airplane with a sinus trouble. It’s uncomfortable but it can also be dangerous.
Careful. Equalize the pressure in your ears. If you feel your ears stuffy, equalize the pressure in the following ways. 1. Yawn 2. Swallow saliva. 3. Close mouth, pinch the nose, out of breath, blow the nose (all spelling mistakes theirs)
I got a little panicked as I was trying to stop the clinic technician from finishing the sealing process as I wasn’t sure if they could stop it once it was sealed or if I would need a full decompression cycle.
I was texting frantically “I forgot my gum can this be stopped ASAP so I can get it?”
I was tapping the window on the hardshell with a worried look and showing the text. I kept trying to make the font bigger and be clearer. FORGOT GUM OPEN?!
But it was confusing enough that everyone in the room thought something was seriously wrong. Which it would have been without the gum as I can’t do a full hour at 2 atmosphere without the help of the chewing. All the yawning, blowing out through the nose and other techniques aren’t quite enough.
It wasn’t yet an emergency. If it was I would have hit the big red button. But everyone seemed to think it was. After 2-3 minutes of frantic miscommunication it turned out that it was fine to open it up but we’d need to restart the seal and pressurize it again. I got the gum. And look who was on the TV screen.
