Tag: Control

Categories
Culture

Day 1918 and Other Lives You Could Have Lived

I was talking with my mother today as I was organizing some logistics for her birthday. Don’t tell her that though as it’s a surprise. Just kidding she knows I’m up to something.

As we talked shared pictures from a recent work trip where she was able to visit our extended family. Her brother lives in Texas after a long military career. It got me thinking about the very different lives it’s possible to live even within one family.

My mother has siblings that she is not related to by blood that are nevertheless our family. Her mother was unable to stay with her father. She married a man I consider my grandfather and gained a large family in the process.

One of my cousins (not by blood but through love) had her children when she was still a teenager. We are roughly same age. She has nearly fully grown children while I will likely never have children. We had very different life trajectories.

She didn’t have an easy time when she was a young mother, but seems to be in a good place now. She is married to a kind man (not to her children’s father though they were married for a time), enjoys watching her son play varsity baseball and football, and lives near her parents. She earned a beautiful life the hard way.

My aunt and uncle are hard working, deeply kind and patriotic people. They supported their daughter every step of the way. Which in the late nineties and early aughts was harder than it looked for a conservative military family in Texas.

I feel lucky my mother got to have such a wonderful brother (and other amazing siblings). My grandmother was an incredible woman. She got remarried at time when single mothers had it even tougher than my cousin did.

I think of the lineage of my mother’s family and wonder which of us made the right choices, which one of us thinks we made the right choices, and how we feel about those choices in the grand scheme of things. Lots of my family believe I made all the right choices. And maybe they are right.

Both my mother and grandmother heavily encouraged my interest in academics and the sciences in particular as they both wanted to pursue scientific careers and were unable to do so. I know I am their pride and joy.

But as I think of my mother’s upcoming birthday I know she won’t get to see her grandchildren playing varsity sports under Friday night lights in Texas with her mother sitting beside her. Her mother, my grandmother, has passed.

There won’t be three grown generations to coincide together because that’s just not how it works any more. And I don’t believe she is disappointed. And I know my grandmother wasn’t either. They wanted this life for me.

And it’s a good life. But I am also glad that my cousin was able to have a good life too. If only it were easier to balance some of the choices. If they were choices at all.

Categories
Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1916 and Freaked Out Group Chats

I have made a little bit of a side hustle out of being at Cassandra. There was a lovely chunk of time in between Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic when people felt as if the weirdness was contained. It was quirky.

It was novel to know people who had decided to make changes in their just-in-time lives because of a climate catastrophe They had experienced it personally because it happened in New York so the media paid slightly more attention.

It lets media, and the readers of said media, indulge in the fantasy that they might actually change their lives by hearing a rational argument from someone like me. Look at tbis nice young woman didn’t have power after a hurricane in the center of civilization in lower Manhattan while Goldman Sachs glowed in the background, continuing to serve capital in the dark.

In fact I did have friends that had to go by foot to their offices while they went for weeks without electricity in other boroughs of Manhattan it was just particularly surreal to live near City Hall, have absolutely no power but still see the glowing lights of techno-capital operating in the aftermath of the crisis. My husband literally got buckets to remove water from the server room of his startup but the banks were fine.

I had a speech on entropy and chaos that was fairly compelling and turned out to be a very correct investment thesis. We might have to get used to more chaos in our lives because of geopolitical, climate and other instabilities that we could not entirely predict.

That meant getting out ahead of the major controllable factors we had at our disposal as individuals and as a nation. I actually meant it as did my husband as if it could happen in Manhattan imagine what it would look like elsewhere.

Having been a prepper before the pandemic gave a little bit of structure to the first months of the pandemic unfurling in which I had the tools to do a dry run and the experience. I got a lot wrong.

And you must remember we really did not know exactly how bad things would be. The things that actually turned out to be quite detrimental to the economy did not turn out to be the ones we thought. Much of the pain of the experience was self-inflicted. Sound familiar?

But we thought we knew more than we did about the situation we were going into. In reality, we had very little predictive capacity on that front because the last time we had had a pandemic of any novelty, the world wasn’t nearly so well connected.

We overcompensated for a lot in our fears and reactions. I suspect that is going to continue being the way we handle networked global crises of any sort.

The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the things that affect our global lives are not actually happening because people look the other way when their economic situation works well for them. It’s a bargain that democracies and authoritarian governments make.

So right now if you work in technology or finance, you’re in a bunch of group chats in which everyone is freaking out. Even though you could make good arguments that we’re the only ones that have a clear view of some of the contours of what we’re about to face it’s quite clear that our visibility is limited.

I don’t know a goddamn thing about Iran or how it’s going to react, but I know more than I ever thought I’d need to about energy markets because nobody in my line of work had much choice over the last three years if they wanted to be ahead of the computing demands we already struggled to meet.

Now this demand may be coming from America companies, but feeding it is a global phenomenon of investment. One that lets all of the worlds capital pile on into a country that has a few domestic issues.

We all saw changed coming the second we had a mass market, large-scale compute-intensive process that enabled artificial intelligence interface that users felt they could meaningful talk to at scale. There’s something amusing to me about that because in Star Trek’s goofiest movie, The Voyage Home, the chief engineer Scotty picks up a mouse and uses it as a speaker phone. Hello he says, “Computer, are you there, computer?” He then proceeds to type in a number of commands when he says, “Ah a keyboard. How quaint.”

I imagined we’d get to this phase of computing ourselves a little faster than we did, but it turns out that we have finally reached the point of knowing how to type in a lot of solutions that could give us steps and instructions to use tools to make transparent aluminum. I mean this metaphorically, not literally, as we actually do know how to make transparent aluminum.

Transparent aluminum is a polycrystalline transparent ceramic made from aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was developed independently and is commercially produced by Surmet Corporation. It’s sapphire and funnily enough we use it in bullet proof glass. Which I’m sure is a great business to be in these days.

So be as freaked out as you want in group chats because all kinds of weird shit is coming down the pipeline. If you work in finance or technology, you probably know that you’ve got about two weeks before some irrevocable decisions start cascading.

None of us have any idea what it looks like but you’re probably not as prepared as Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Nevertheless we’ll have to get through it.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1912 and Informing Ourselves

Some 20 years ago, before I knew I’d have medical troubles of any length, my college job was working for a medical ethicist who was a physician with a grant to study informed consent.

Now, years later, as I have worked my way through institutional resistance to how I may come to be disabled and generally dismissed as a patient, I come to find that much of the skepticism my mother had as a crunchy hippie is now functionally being proved a quarter century on. These uncomfortable trends drives skepticism in even the most informed minds. And most patients can only ever be expert on their symptoms.

This comes at the end of a crisis of communication about the value of public health and personal responsibility in a community. Many people did not feel that they were given adequate consent and no longer trust anything said by doctors. Would most medical professionals agree they had informed consent? I think most argue they were. I agree.

Now of course we’re all desperately trying to prevent harms here and patients more than ever feel that, as they don’t trust what’s coming to them because we’ve not effectively decoupled population-level information from the individual human behind a given case. Is that informed consent? Yeah as best we can do it.

Now how does research play into all this? I also happen to have the misfortune of having working on the early years of on one of the worst medical misinformation spreaders in all of healthcare. I say this lovingly: it is Gwyneth Paltrow.

Now if you root around Twitter, you will find commentary about how the supplements hawked on Goop and the supplements hawked on various right-wing sites are functionally identical. But she got a lot right because she is a rich well connected white woman with money. So again who is informed and to what degree?

Unfortunately some of the things that are sold as treatments or supplements they sell are real and have proven out. We’re working our way through the science on our gut biome, infection and its links to preventable autoimmune diseases, and any number of other previously heretical paths.

But we’ve really not transformed the way we process our information on what we know and what is actually considered best practices. The gap is very wide. Like a chasm. I am way outside the norms because I fucked myself up believing I wouldn’t be a statistic as it mostly worked for most women.

So I live with issues. But do I think that people have a right to experiment with what we think might be snake oil? Absolutely. Everyone calculates their own risk. Heck Sarno is just one giant placebo doctor on letting go.

We know that some of the avenues of exploration will prove to be placebo effect if they work. And we still somewhat trust things that are actually going to cause harm aren’t really making it into the popular press and mass consumption unless there’s some evidence. I sort of believe that to be true.

More people should feel that they have the right, if they have informed themselves over a period of time as patients, to work around the system if they make no progress despite best efforts and years of work.

There’s just a lot to balance on being informed about your conditions and your capacity to manage your own health that is up to you. I think that generally speaking the paternalistic attitude has not produced superior outcomes.

And the quality of care I get as someone who can pay for health care anywhere in the world, it is galling to me that the gap between what we know and how far we can go in practice is so wide.

So let the guy advertise the doggy cancer vaccine because at least it’s teaching people that we have solutions to more than they know. They can judge risk reward and be a little bit strange. Humans are humans.

You get to decide it based on your own understanding of your own life and you get what you get. I was disabled by my own misjudgment of informed consent on treatments recommended by a COO of a major company who paid to have as a perk to her workforce. Egg freezing was an approved elective procedure that everyone was on board with ten years ago.

I was informed. I consented. I got it wrong. Now let me see if I can fix it in my own manner of choosing. And I won’t trust mere authority next time. Neither celebrity nor pharmaceutical company is to be trusted.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Startups Travel

Day 1909 and All The Twinks Standing In The Line For The Bathroom

I am not an early riser, especially not when I’m out late for happy hours and dinners and the like. So I wasn’t planning on being at the 8am opening for the conference I’m attending in D.C amongst all the side programming.

I had a ten thirty talk I was particular excited to listen to as it was most salient to my work in artificial intelligence policy. Well, that was a dumb decision on my part. Not to arrive earlier.

I’ll take full responsibility for being a moron on that front, but I stood amongst a gaggle of gorgeous well dressed, well groomed and bright eyed young men hungry to build the world of the future. What a crowd of young people.

Being a chatty Cathy I asked about vintage Barbour jackets, bulldog ties, pocket squares, the merits of gel versus more advanced soft hold hair products, the declining quality of Moscot eyewear and other important topics to ambitious young men who are looksmaxxing to win the great game.

I didn’t have much else to do as the line was not moving. No one was getting in. Until people left no one was getting off the line. And that included others who had already been in and had their passes. The hottest ticket in town was perhaps a bit over capacity.

Someone rolled out a portable Starlink and we all piled in to tweet, chat, roll calls and (in my case) send tweets, Signal messages, and Slack channel responses. I got told my tweet about the two hour wait wasn’t ideal so I deleted it as I appreciate any attention to me running my mouth as I assume no one ever listens to me. I barely do.

But maybe I’m wrong? Last night checking into Butterworth’s, the woman manning check-in in lit up when I gave my name “I love your Twitter!” So maybe people do notice what I say. I still find that an a funny notion.

That said, it did take the full two hours to get into the giant event hall which made all the rush and planning a laugh. More people left the line and went back to work than stayed at 10am but everyone determined to participate seemed to make the best of it.

I asked if this was normal for a DC event and no one seemed to be from DC. So I didn’t get any good answers. This was an unexpected wrinkle that the venue was full was full up as an enormous crowd circled the block twice.

Since we remainders had decided to make the best of it we got to know each rather. Every man was quite a gentleman as we chatted oblivious to status till we were let in and others let us all know the pecking order. One of the young men I spent my wait, who is I learned later was literally the heir to one of the most important fortunes on the planet. Another was launching containerized autonomous weapons.

But that time of work and waiting was rather like being on an elevator stuck together, we might as well get to know each other. We are all equal before a tough door.

Thankfully we did get into the room before Jamie Dimon spoke. And he was the big boss of the handsome executive crowd.

I titled this “all the twinks standing in line for the bathroom” as yes a lot of handsome queer men were in attendance. But twink is an all purpose gender fluid aesthetic and not reflective of anyone’s sexual preferences.

And the line for the men’s y was a lot longer than the women’s. Ten to one ratios make me think this would be quite the dating scene for the ambitious woman.

But yes there are a lot of very well groomed young men in Washington D.C and everyone wants to build solutions for America. And being beautiful doesn’t hurt. To my single lady have you consider meeting a man in DC? Good odds and I doubt even a fraction of the twinks are gay.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 1903 and Ranting About Bentham

The tyranny of small differences can be the most vicious. I love vendettas in fashion and venture as they are connoisseurs of grievance.

Small communities with insular structures simmer embittered for years. You always know where someone, who is otherwise quite close to you, has committed a venal sin which cannot be forgiven.

But many times these small differences are actually the stuff of the breach. Once crossed you can never return. The opening cannot be closed without a great sacrifice. And these sacrifices are your character.

I am as well versed in the ridiculous schisms of my own affinity groups. As libertarians I’ll go on about the Cato libertarians, I’ll support my an-caps but I I’ll blood feud with the rest.

I feel this way about rationalists and the way they have introduced utilitarianism to Silicon Valley. And I want to be sympathetic here because there are aspects of effective altruism that are perfectly reasonable at first. I like prudent spending and reducing suffering with effective allocation.

But utilitarianism, taken to its end, has issues that anyone who has read Jeremy Bentham has to grapple with. The means do not justify the ends. We are all struggling with the horrors of the problems this creates in a modern society.

I saw the value of the manufactured meme campaign of effective acceleration as it oddly ended up dragging us to the middle. That was the intention and it achieved it. One can have many disagreements in the details.

However I do not think that political actors as far apart as Steve Bannon and MIRI agree on anything philosophically except “we want control over artificial intelligence so the people who are lesser than me can have no say.”

I cannot see how opposing forms of populist control can travel together without fear for character.

Everyone tries to be agreeable right up until coercive violence from Leviathan is required. And I guess some of you don’t think too hard about hard power huh?

I happen to find the request to have so much control over your fellow Americans to be an offensive view.

You think so little of the citizens of your own country when our core constitutional values require us to have so much more responsibility for ourselves?

I do think it is actually a moderate viewpoint that I believe in all of us. I believe in Americans no matter how stupid we can be. Remember that whole being a libertarian thing. I think personal responsibility requires more and Americans have delivered more despite our many failures.

I recognize that my personal stance here is not the final stance, especially as something of an outlier but because we have checks and balances, I know my involved citizenship demands that I declare where I stand.

Which is why the right to compute law that Montana adopted was a largely uncontroversial and popular when it was a bill. Before politics got involved, regular citizens, who were not whipped into a froth or frenzy, could understand that participating in the digital economy is crucial to living in the modern world.

It impacts our first, second, and fourth amendment rights directly because it demands we answer questions about property.

The wider existential issues on artificial intelligence do not get to be more important than our existing jurisprudence nor the opinions of our citizens.

The way we legislate and the value of our system of government, both state and federal, have a part to play. It’s funny the libertarian is making this argument I know, but it is a good revealed values exercise. Don’t get trapped by charlatans who have already declared that the ends justify the means. We both know they don’t.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

Categories
Chronic Disease Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 1901 and Burying Ehrlich

For as much time as I spend kvetching about my own petty problems (and I know that it is a not insubstantial amount of time), I am what my husband calls a macro optimist.

This is somewhat in contrast to him, who is on a day-to-day basis, a micro optimist but doesn’t quite see the long-term horizon as positively as I do.

Different temperaments are a good thing when it comes to balancing outlooks and outcomes. This is arguably why we are a good team and have managed to stay married for a decade.

I look out for the macro level future and optimize for it being successful and he optimizes the day-to-day, making sure that the micro level is successful.

I titled this post “Burying Ehrlich” because Paul Ehrlich passed away at the age of 93 last Friday. You might know him as the co-author of the 1968 best seller Population Bomb.

An entomologist by training, his book jumped to much bigger claims saying Earth faced imminent mass starvation urging governments to reduce population. That has not so far proven to be true. Even now the New York Times obituary said his claims were premature. We just love an impending disaster.

It’s a cruel historical irony that a man who wrote his thesis on butterflies would end up having such an enormous butterfly effect on the number of human beings being born. His neo-Malthusian insights were a huge hit.

And unfortunately we will experience the consequences of his public intellectual adventurism. We will have fewer humans and the famine he predicted never materialized. And now if we have more troubles facing us, we have far fewer humans able to take up the task of finding the solutions we will need.

Maybe if he had been a little bit more of a macro-level optimist, he would have been able to see what I see everyday. Despite daily travails due to my chronic disease, I see the micro-optimism of humans like my husband every single day. While I can’t always be positive every day, I remain positive that together we can find a way to improve on yesterday.

Humans are incredible at finding a way around life’s intractable problems. We produce little innovations, little inventions, little tweaks and little solutions. And they add up.

We are social animals whose evolutionary pressures seem to have yielded a culture of engineering. These little fixes we constantly produce when added up together have made for major improvements.

We even occasionally see extraordinary catalysts that allow us to go much faster with our improvements. We’ve had a number of revolutions, industrial and otherwise. Indeed the last 50 years or so have shown the Malthusian fears of food production to be histrionic in comparison to the progress we’ve made.

We have fed the planet but we will never get back the babies who were not born either because of China’s one-child policy or simple cultural attitude acceptance that one or two children should be enough. In my generation it may end up being more common to not have children at all.

Now it may seem rich that someone who goes in for quite a bit of preparedness should speak against a man who saw the value of taking action in the face of what he saw as long odds.

But next time someone tells you that the end is near and all is lost, remember that Paul didn’t end up being correct in any of his assumptions.

Not because at the time it was so crazy to think we weren’t producing enough food, but because he couldn’t conceive of a world in which we were able to solve our problem.

So I pray as his family buries him that we as a species can remember to bury some of our own alarmism. Our job is to keep on going in the face of long odds, just as every one of our ancestors has done before us.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical Politics

Day 1895 and If Not Us Then Who?

Despite persistent efforts to mitigate the downsides of my various medications, as well as maintaining dedicated wholistic lifestyle routines for my chronic diseases, I am not making adequate progress. I’d go so far as to say today it feels like I am sliding backwards.

But that is partially a function of luteal phase acute migraines and not the full picture on the ground. Yes, it’s true multiple metrics have gotten significantly worse over the 15-month span of my IL-17 inhibitor experiment with Bimselx and I am preparing to make the decision on what to do next. Many biometric markers are much better but the trade-offs are severe. It just feels like I can’t overcome them right now because I feel awful.

Nevertheless it’s important to remain grounded in the here and now. I think part of my trouble may be I am adjusting both to a new time zone and my normal altitude. Maybe I’m overly concerned by data points that will get smoothed out over time but it feels very spik.

Alas there is little room in life for downtime or bad days. Portfolio companies are fundraising, politics is getting uglier by the second, and one key blocker in my life has remained unsolved now for years.

I’ve never experienced a blocker quite so persistent as the American State Department’s handling of visa and immigration work. And yes that includes being disabled and chronically ill. That’s how bad state capacity is right now. My years-long attempt to get visas for family members to come help has not seen an iota of success.

But we keep going. There is much to be done, both practically and at higher levels of abstraction, and I am being whipsawed by hormone migraines over the last 48 hours. It is not an ideal time for weakness in one’s body.

Yesterday the best I could do in terms of writing was some rambling about my irritation with new retail sales cadences at Sephora feeling down market. Not that I necessarily need this space to be filled with decent content but I know that I am not running at even 10% capacity.

We all have to contribute our talents to this moment in time and there are projects that I wish to commit more time and energy to, even though it feels like it may be the death of me. But if not me then who? It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves and I hope more of us rise to the challenge.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1881 and Attemplate

I’ve wandered far from the traditional life paths that might have recognizable to past generations of my kin.

It scares me. Any time I contemplate the change I have already experienced, I imagine how much more change I can expect to see.

How are we supposed to raise children, mentor young leaders or align artificial intelligence with the good, the true and the beautiful when we adult humans have experienced life so far from past ideals?

So I’ve been toying with a portmanteau blending attempt and template to express the idea of “an experimental framework” or “proto-template for living, learning, or skill-building.” I need templates to help me attempt to adapt while retaining my humanity.

We will all be re-skilling, re-learning, and re-engaging with our values and as I try to structure templates that help me walk a life and prototype styles that might work for myself and others.

I hoped to communicate both clarity and flexibility with the choice. We are building good ways of being in a world of rapid change. Templates must change and we must always be attempting to learn and adapt.

I liked that attemplate sounds like a natural word you felt like you may have already encountered. It does a nice job of mirroring the thoughtfulness of contemplate. A template for a new era which will be attempt to build, even if the foundations we thought were firm in the past give way to much broader ways of being.

I played with “attempate” which sounds procedural (almost bureaucratic) as if one would take a sheet of paper with an assigned attempate to fill out and live. Why yes, I took the project management attempate sheet to see if I had natural aptitude for detail work.

“Temptlate” sounded engineered. Maybe it would be suitable name for an internal tool or concept document. We will add that to the family Temptlate and see who bites on it for Saturday plans. It’s cute, playful and almost experimental, but not entirely as serious as the scaffolding one hopes to build upstairs n.

Maybe I’m the only one who feels like I lost decade between Trump Derangement Era through Pandemic Biden Gramsci End of March Institutional Capture.

What I thought was true slammed into things I wished were not. And then we fought years of anarcho-tyranny as the state refused to budge even if you attempted to follow its templates.

So here I am trying to find new ways of being for myself, for the future, and for my present. Maybe it’s entirely selfish. Templates for how to live are the anchors from which we used to build religion and power.

We’ve stripped much of the meat from life and turned past ideals into brands and merchandised them into outfits and starter packs. But it’s worth an attempt don’t you think?