Tag: Control

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 914 and Unsucked Dick

If you have spent time on this blog, you likely have some familiarity with my usage of crude language to get across a wider point. Sometimes being rude or lewd is simply the most effective manner of communicating a difficult truth.

While I have an overused forced metaphor tag given for my tendency to write in overwrought imagery, I’ve only just realized that I have written a trilogy of crude metaphors in service of explaining power as simply as possible. Those crude metaphors include shitposting, dickriding and now unsucked dick.

Without attention-grabbing taboo cursing, these topics can otherwise might seem too complex or academic. If you have read critical theory texts you know what I mean.

Overly formal language is alienating and tends to entrench us in our priors. With that context out of the way, I shall now get into today’s crude metaphor.

An unsucked dick is someone who is willfully giving up their own power to victimhood through refusing to act for what they want. And everyone wants their dick sucked. Metaphorically, at least a little. Those that don’t want power are usually loathe to admit it.

This turn of phrase is NOT intended to be gendered. Unlicked cunt doesn’t work as well for a host of sociopolitical reasons on sexual status and power. Don’t get too worked up about it. See the bigger truth.

You will find unsucked dick when the hard work of getting what someone wants is either is too much effort on their own, or otherwise requiring collective action & leadership on behalf of a group that is in disfavor from those currently in power.

Let me illustrate with a shitpost. Perhaps you too have had to organize a group of activists who would rather squabble and in-fight than win power.

My ambitions are bigger than running the internal politics of dozens of tiny activist groups that can’t see beyond their own unsucked dicks but this isn’t very polite to say.

A dick that is unsucked is the inversion of the dick that is ridden. You may recall that dickriding occurs when a group surrounds it’s most powerful member with praise and flattery. The leader has the sucked dick.

The one whose dick is ridden sucks up (pun intended) a lot of the energy of collective often at the detriment of their followers. The example I used in my previous post is Elon Musk.

You can use tactics like shitposting to attract some of a groups’ energy away from the ridden dick. Shitposting is deliberate act of soliciting a response online. It’s traditionally used as a lower energy way to shape engagement and conversation away from the traditional or current power holders, particularly when you know no other method will break through the noise and narrative.

The collective action problem in the many disenfranchised groups in modern society can often be boiled down to unsucked dicks desperately shitposting as dickriders. They want power but either cannot or will not find ways to gain it.

I don’t strive to organize unsucked dick into powerful constituencies and I’d bet you don’t either. It’s exhausting to control others. Politicians and celebrities have their simps but it’s often a complicated and unstable relationship. Audience capture by your simps tends to turn you into the New York Times or Andrew Tate.

Everyone needs to be responsible for their own dicks (gender neutral I swear) and get on with achieving their bigger goals. If you are not actively getting beyond purity politics and activist in-group fighting you are not serious about winning the thing you claim to want.

If having is evidence of wanting a lot of you simply do not want power. And that’s OK, if that’s actually what you want. Just be damn sure your actions are true to want you want. And if you want something go fucking get it. I’m happy to help.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 910 and The Chessboard

You can feel it. I know you can. The chessboard is being reset. Pieces are being moved. Gambits are unfolding. Absolutely everyone you know is going a little bit nuts.

I would not be surprised if these small informational disruptions will be recognized as part of a global conflict in a hundred years. I hope my heirs recognize that their mother fought as an information resistance fighters in The Great Dislocation Wars. Or World War 3. Just spitballing.

It’s humorous to me to talk in such a grandiose fashion because the reality on the ground is much of life is just a little bit harder and a little bit worse. But we still presume the world is basically still abiding by the same rules as yesterday.

I often forget how much people don’t want to hold power. The current moment shows a strange ambivalence about wielding anything yourself. Anyone with power is bad right? Well, it’s nuanced.

I want to assure you that your instincts in this matter is largely correct. You should distrust anyone that wants power. Be skeptical of the impulse.

Because being in charge sucks. It’s a shitty job. Anyone who has wielded any power from parenting a toddler to being a CEO probably intuitively knows this.

But once you have been given any legitimate form of authority, choosing to ignore that you wield power is a dereliction of duty.

The trouble with all reactionaries is that they assume once they take over, that their experience of power will somehow be different from the current horrors in charge. If they had bothered to crack open their minds while reading Shakespeare (or Thucydides or the Artashastra or literally any Great Book) they would know all men are subjected to the laws of power.

We lie to ourselves about how power functions because it’s very energetically easy to hand over your power to someone else. To be aggrieved is to have power over those you hold in contempt for exercising their power over you. Don’t be tempted by this trap no matter how righteous your cause.

Once you have picked up the mantle of power you must see through. If your people have given you authority you must see it through or hand it off to someone who will.

It’s very hard to own power. You most likely will not enjoy it. And you will be tempted to shunt off your agency. Just remember that you never carry power alone. It is always in concert with those who have consented to give it to you. Good luck on the great chessboard of life.

Categories
Homesteading

Day 909 and Uninterrupted

I’ve got two uninterrupted months in Montana ahead of me. Maybe I mention this as significant because I spent so much time on the road this spring. I’ve also had multiple catastrophic level dislocations professionally and personally in the front half of the year.

Catastrophic dislocation seems to be the new normal for everyone. I hate to consider that I may have some bargaining & denial about my own thesis at chaotic.capital. But I find myself wishing to be wrong about where I see the future heading. Wouldn’t it be better if our modern lives were getting simpler instead of more complex?

I know that’s a childish fantasy. The complexity in our world has brought about so much good. The costs have been high but the benefits were tangible.

And yet here I am hoping to have some uninterrupted time in a quiet corner of the American empire so that I can cultivate my own strengths. I want to reconnect to myself and recovery from the effort, pain, and grief of living. I want to live and work and build without the chaos of history turning back on again. I dislike how much I now believe ignorance to be bliss.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 901 and Self Regulation

I don’t know why I chose violence today, but apparently I dropped a chaos grenade onto my Twitter timeline. I hesitated, in extremely soft language, to ask if anyone has noticed that kids from conservative households seem have more pro-social behavior. I phrased it with a lot of ambiguity as I don’t know how I feel either.

Going to float a very controversial observation but anecdotally in my limited experience:
The children of my conservative friends are better behaved & more individuated & well socialized than the children of my liberal friends.
Anyone have takes on why this is the case?

Naturally when something pulls on a thread of social insecurity it will unravel quickly. I am a very gifted shitposter. I step on these third rails on purpose. I am not an activist for any cause so much as comfortable being uncomfortable. Alas I have already hit Godwin’s Law on the Tweet so for my own nervous system I’m done.

But I have noticed that as cultural pendulums swing, there is a distinct lack of appreciation for tolerance of other people’s constant dysfunction. Where we draw the line as to appropriate social behavior is a hugely contested space online. Much as it has ever been in literature and history. I hear Socrates got the death penalty for perverting the youth.

My point in all this is that we all benefit from having youth understand the world and their place in it. Our toddlers cannot be expected to have the fully formed rationality of a legal scholar.

Sometimes the answer is no because Mom or Dad said so. Not every social boundary is bad for us. A child throwing a tantrum is asking for you the adult to help them find the self regulation that their environment isn’t giving them. And it’s absolutely ok to be authoritative. It’s not the same thing as authoritarian.

The general consensus on the thread seems to be that multi-generational and multicultural spaces for consistent socialization combine well with firm boundaries. Knowing when certain behaviors are appropriate can often be a winning combination for learning to individuate into your own person. Feeling safe to be yourself looks different for everyone.

Now I’d read all of this mouthing off from me with a big heaping spoonful of that fucking libertarian-pirate-hippie-Silicon Valley-born-Rocky-Mountain raised salt. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a very American kind of mutt.

I personally have found it helpful to be as accountable as I can be to myself while holding as much empathy for the experiences of other people as I can. I will disagree with you a lot. I’m ok with that because I have firm boundaries too. So don’t be an NPC ok? Let’s make civilization work together.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 900 and Let It Go

It’s nice to have another milestone day on my journey to write every single day. One hundred more days of writing till the big milestone that seemed unreachable when I began.

I have so much constancy to be proud of as I look at the body of work I created. I gave myself permission to let myself show up every single day and just start doing shit.

It wasn’t always good. I have up and down days of quality, quantity and even basic legibility. But because I have let myself be free I came with a week of bangers.

I am trying to let a lot go at the moment. Family is sick. A few are so ill we fear for their imminent loss. The world is shifting and the sense of change and acceleration towards something is palpable.

So many of us are fearful. But what else can we do but let it go? Wasn’t that the point of Disney’s mash hit? It’s a relatable multi-billion dollar franchise because it’s reflecting the human condition.

There is so little I have control over in my life. But I also have so much agency. If I chose to accept my life, and the choices it offers, I have so many possibilities

The present is here with us with all its many demands. Don’t borrow trouble from the future. Live your life prepared to let go of what you cannot change with as much responsibility and agency as you can for what is up to you.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 897 and Cruft

I’d like to tell you a short story about my email. I don’t really check it anymore. Like at all. I would like to have a functional inbox but it got out of hand. How out of hand you ask?

As of this morning I had more than 500,000 unread emails in my Gmail. Honestly if I worked at Google I’d be a little freaked out by that number. That seems like a lot of emails. How did that happen you might ask? Slowly and then all at once. Like most bankruptcies.

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004. 1GB of free storage for email? It was 100 times what competitors offered. I knew I’d have to transition out of my university email when I graduated so I kept.

I’d say it was the most functional place in my digital life until 2010 or so. I basically never left my inbox, used Gchat constantly with all my friends, and organized my life around it. Gmail served first central hub for my professional digital identity. It was just where I spent my time.

I worked in commerce and media in I thought it wise to subscribe to brands emails so I could really monitor e-commerce for work. Then I started a cosmetics brand during first cohort of direct to consumer brands. Like all startups we used Google Professional services. So I routed it into one easy Gmail view. Don’t do that incidentally. Then long story short I went on medical leave in 2019.

I’d like you to imagine the J curve on what happened next. Because I have an an older account, and one that used to be tightly managed, I didn’t really notice that I’d converted to a high volume inbox. But you can guess what happens when you stop monitoring constantly. Maybe this post should have had a trigger warning.

It seemed manageable when I was a workaholic hustle grinder. But the second the email beast wasn’t being ridden hard it went feral. Half a million emails feral.

There are so many culprits I could point to in the destruction of my inbox. The arms race for extracting value from email was very much on in the middle of the decade, but it’s gone into overdrive during the pandemic years.

If I thought my email was a little messy when I was girlbossing, it’s nothing compared to the what it looks like under the relentless onslaught of professionally optimized direct marketing.

But there are other culprits. You probably have a social tab like me. I get a lot of automated and social media alerts that were easy to check and delete when I lived inside my email.

But there isn’t a social media platform you can imagine that I didn’t have a profile on. And the alerts add up quickly.

LinkedIn is notorious but I’m also a Twitter power user and maintain a ton of Discords. And then there are social platforms you join and forget about. Yes include OnlyFans. Don’t worry that’s recent and has no content. All those sign ups add up quickly if you don’t monitor. Every god damn social service I have strewn across the internet somehow ends up in Gmail.

The good news is I have a friend who is helping me sort it out. She signed me up for Sane Inbox. The number of emails in that half million that looks like it needs attention? About 1,400. So I will start making an attention payment plan on those. But if I didn’t have nearly two decades of data dedicated to Google I’m not sure if I’d want to dig out.

Categories
Culture

Day 895 and Stop Being An NPC

I’ve got a theory that main character energy only bothers you if you are not the main character of your own life.

Which you might not be. Most of us are running around on programming we didn’t write, blithely unaware that we have accepted being a non-playable character in our own lives. We are acting like NPCs even though we aren’t. Fuck.

You don’t have to be an NPC. Life is actually shared consensus reality even if it has rules just like a game. The first step in making sure you aren’t an NPC is treating other humans like they are real people. Yes, cue the record scratch.

This is actually hard. It requires empathy. But it is very simple. It is just the golden rule. When you treat other humans as real players of the game of life, you will find quickly that they treat you as one too.

You need to be emotionally present with another person. It requires a couple minutes of empathy at most. I’d wager it’s like masturbation for men, you could pull it off in a minute flat if you had to.

But so few of us are bothering to show up for other people in any meaningful way anymore.

One of my favorite Twitter vibecamp folks, Critter, made the observation that it’s so rare to meet someone with agency on dating apps that it can cause some whiplash when you engage with “a live one” if you will excuse the pun.

I find this sad because it’s true. It’s rare to encounter people who are present in their own lives. People go through the motions of their lives because it’s the normal way to live. It just doesn’t have to be your reality if you don’t want it to be.

And it’s not an easy change to make for most of us. It’s actually confusing for internet natives to be reminded that there are people on the other end of the algorithm because so many of us simply aren’t acting like full humans anymore.

We are just running social programming and hoping it gets us the rewards we were promised. Gamification and financialization and other forms of nudging spreadsheet brain send us hustling for dopamine hits.

So how do you tell if someone isn’t just playing to their cultural programming script? Or framed another way, how do you stop acting like an NPC in your own life? And how do you find out if someone else is also looking to engage with you as a human with agency?

The biggest clue someone has agency is that they discuss their feelings and emotional reactions to you the person in front of them

They don’t cloak it in ideas & theory or art without connecting it to how it makes them feel in relation to you & your relationship with them

Julie Fredrickson on Empathy & Agency

I can’t believe I’m quoting myself but I summed it up reasonably well on Twitter in response to a mutual asking myself and Critter how you know if someone isn’t an NPC.

You show up in that moment with them and do not run any social scripts on them. You treat them like you’d like them to treat you.

You don’t try to control them with mirroring or other social techniques. If you are serious about being intimately in a moment with another person won’t use any technique. You will just be. It actually is vibes.

You will show up and ask them how they feel and will react honestly to their feelings. And yes sometimes those emotions may be unpalatable (anger, sadness, jealousy) but it’s the first crucial step in building trust with another person. And that’s how you stop being an NPC. Good luck!

Categories
Politics

Day 890 and Millennial Heads of State

America is being strangled by a gerontocracy as our Boomer and Silent Generation leaders resolutely refuse to get the fuck out of the way. I guess they can’t really enjoy life with their grandkids since so many of us failed to reproduce. Did mass social acceptance of divorce have consequences? Who can say! Meanwhile Saudi Arabia and North Korea are being run by millennials.

It was brought to my attention today that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is 37 years old. And while I probably realized he was in his thirties I really don’t think I’d clocked that it meant anything till today.

Isn’t it astonishing that this geriatric millennial convinced his daddy (who is a fucking King I might add) to step aside and let him run the empire?

Meanwhile in America, Hunter and Don Jr are maiming themselves with cocaine and dating Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife respectively. MBS on the other hand killed a Washington Post journalist and got away with it. The only thing American failsons have managed to kill is some Yellowstone wolves. Succession not looking so glamorous now is it?

Not that you should kill journalists obviously (the fourth estate is important for social trust) but is killing your offspring’s future ethically more sound? I don’t think so. A suicidal youth reflects poorly on the nation. Especially when those “youth” are like in their forties and fifties. It’s fucking embarrassing.

And yet the American gerontocracy sure seems to be in favor of letting their youth slowly suicide themselves. I get it, their kids suck, and they don’t want to risk even an iota of their housing wealth. And they are still butthurt their Greatest Generation parents didn’t respect their failures in Vietnam. The Soviet Union collapsing was a win though so there is that!

Categories
Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 871 and Collaboration in the Time of Cultural Cholera

Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration.

Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is expensive and there are many competing populations from refugees to globo-homo cosmopolitans

I think only one in five people I’ve encountered appear to be native born German. It’s almost enough to make me feel like I’m in America. Which is to say I see the in-group and out-group competition clearly.

Different expectations for a civic polity can range wildly depending on the goal. We enable everything from humanity wide medical breakthroughs to individual physical health through incentives both individual and collective. And yes because I’m American I notice shit like who pays for parks and recreation. I also notice soda taxes. Choices are all around us and the incentives make it look like no choice at all.

Humans live at varying degrees of abstraction. Our capacity to go from whole to parts, and parts to whole, depends on education, temperament, intellect, emotional capacity and preferences.

And that diversity of views is what makes it so hard for us to infer what “chunk” of reality our fellow humans see. No wonder we struggle with collaboration as a species. Your fellow man is as sensitive to elite semiotics as they are to casual racism.

Where our new living history takes us is going to depend a lot on how we design incentives for collaboration that provides benefits to participants that are transparent. Otherwise I’d be strapping in for more civilizational struggles.

My aspirations include us finding ways to collaborate across much wider destinies with as much freedom for all can be managed. I’m hoping AI and crypto go hand in hand. High trust and no-trust are our only options at this scale. But like any reformation it threatens the current powers and worldviews.