Tag: Culture

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1450 and Dream Come True

I must have taken fairy tales and “just so” stories quite seriously as a small child as I have deep faith in process, repetition, and routine. J

Just keep at it. Practice makes perfect. Chop wood and carry water. To be worthy of the opportunities that might present themselves in your life you must live each day moving forward your intentions with your habits.

Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. If you maintain the course of your life by consistently apply skills and focus, you may find even the most esoteric and specific dreams of your childhood becoming a reality.

Just yesterday I was invited to participate in something that I had dreamed of being worthy of being included in since my teenage years. I kept the interests my whole life and now out of the blue I was being recognized. I could not be happier.

I had aspired to be a certain kind of person as one of my childhood dreams and here I was finding that I had indeed become worthy of my own aspirations. All it took was going in the right direction, keeping a consistent interest in learning more, and being present in public with those skills. I am so happy that years of simple regular action and interest had indeed yielded fruit.

Categories
Emotional Work Startups

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Ten years ago when I was struggling in my role as CEO of a startup I’d cofounded, I was introduced to a classic business book called Leadership and Self Deception. I read it in one setting on an airplane. It was that good. Or I was that bad. Probably both.

The research explored how we end up creating and sustaining problems we don’t know we are causing, and how and why people resist helpful solutions. They discovered the clear and surprising way that people begin to evade responsibility without thinking that they are doing so, and therefore end up blaming others or circumstances they, themselves, are helping to create

It’s worth the read even if you are the type who prefers a synopsis. I believe most business books could have been a blog post personally. That’s how strongly I recommend the book.

Self aware leaders enable personal responsibility in themselves and their teams. And yet we all lie to ourselves in our personal and professional lives to evade taking responsibility for who we are and what we want.

It’s easier to evade responsibility. Things happen to us and we let others direct the course of our lives. This is not however a path to effective leadership and it’s a miserable way to become a victim of everyone and everything.

There are many frameworks for overcoming the self deception our ego generates. We are not doomed to self sabotage and evade seeing ourselves clearly.

Leadership and Self Deception is just one option I recommend. The Art of Accomplishment’s VIEW methodology for connected communication is another I found beneficial. Even Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous offer frameworks for overcoming the lies we tell ourselves.

It’s going to be so tempting to bullshit ourselves as the next era of politics unfolds and a whole new generation of technology is adopted with artificial intelligence. Do yourself a favor and tune up on spotting your own bullshit.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1448 and Overhead Lighting

A quibble I have with modern industrial living is the prevalence of overhead lighting. I know we have to tolerate the bright lights in public and institutional spaces for reasons of cost, efficiency and clarity but why on earth have we found it to be acceptable in the home?

I’m grateful our divas bring their significant cultural gravitas to this debate. Bless Mariah Carey for leading the charge on this assault on the senses. I’ll let her not terribly articulate quote from a podcast speak the truth.

”I can’t with the overhead lighting. Why do they do it to us?,” Carey, 55, said. “But overhead lighting I don’t think so honey. Please stop it!…Everywhere I go, shut the lights! I don’t want to see them no more. Overhead lighting, it makes me sick.”

I was delighted to read this synopsis of the overhead lighting hate debate in the Walk Street Journal. They quote a few psychologists and photographers who sum up the debate as diffuse lighting is more relaxing while cool focused lighting is better for concentration.

However it is relatively challenging to do cool focused lighting well. Yes it possible to do overhead track lighting in ways that bring focus and don’t overwhelm your senses. But it’s harder to do right.

You’d probably have to literally light Mariah Carey for a living to do it in a way that’s comfortable for someone with sensory issues. I developed migraines in my thirties and combined with my spectrum level sensitivity to noise, sound, taste and light I don’t need to push my luck. .

Given that us mere mortals without expert lighting design have to live comfortably, I fully stand by my preference for lamps and multiple light sources in my private spaces. It’s just going to be less of a headache. Literally.

If you light from overhead with bright cool tones bulbs so you can see the details I get it. I can’t fathom why I’d want that for anything but cooking, cleaning or sewing.

When the it’s time to relax and interact you are damn right I want a nice warm lamp. Now I’ve got double the lighting. No wonder the topic gives so many of us headaches.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.

Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.

LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.

Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history

I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.

Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.

And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1444 and Intrasexual Competition

Dating discourse seems to have taken over all forms of social media. Maybe it seems louder than usual because it’s cuffing season and with Netflix becoming a Christmas romance movie juggernaut the urge to find a partner is higher in December.

But you have to be wary of the stories and advice that litter Reddit and Twitter. Not everyone doling out advice actually wants you to succeed. Some of them look like they are actively undermining their peers.

The manosphere seems determined to turn young men into fearful controlling oafs while the radfem/femcel/tradwife axis of influencers is a mess of undermining advice stoking the neuroses of young women.

In the battle of the sexes, a favored tactic is sabotage. Evolutionary psychologists would probably say what we are seeing on social media is intrasexual competition run amok

Giving bad advice undermines your sexual competition. And if you sell advice or attention, keeping people coming back for more bad takes while keeping them miserable (and single) is the whole game. The hot takers build attention and clout.

Attention grifters are here to make you engage while turning you into a neurotic mess. So before taking someone’s advice on the other sex, ask “cui bono” because it’s probably not you.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

1443 and Irreducible

Being “spreadsheet brained” has become a shorthand critique for the technocratic mindset that prefers to see with abstractions rather than through immediate physical reality.

I don’t have a full history of the term but it was brought into my lexicon by Ashley Fitzgerald of Doomer Optimism.

A Wojack suffering from an inoperable tumor called spreadsheet brain.

Having spreadsheet brain can be a quality of life problem. If you are particularly numerate you can easily fixate on the negative statistics. We then use those facts to isolate themselves from the each other. It’s a classic case of seeing the price of things and not the value. It can easily become a very smart form of stupid.

I’m more of a whole to parts thinker myself so I’m amused by this meme even though as someone who works with tech startups I’m obviously susceptible to spreadsheet brain issues.

It’s reasonable to have concerns with thinking only in abstract terms. The topology of human experience is complex and yet we have many tools that take the irreducible and cook it down into something concentrated, clear, and altogether too legible. We desire to be seen but perhaps not too closely.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1438 and the Circuit

Cool is as scarce as a resource as our species has ever encountered. We plunder and horde cool like the spice in Dune even though absolutely anyone is capable of becoming cool.

I know you probably want to argue but Julie I’ve never been cool or no one I know is cool. Well I’m sorry but that’s actually a skills issue and you can be a part of culture.

Anyone can become cool by not giving too many fucks about the rules. Notice I didn’t say “no fucks” as obviously there are rules and gatekeepers and all kinds of ways to modulate what I’ll call cultural capital.

It’s not too hard to become a polite participant in the unwritten rules of culture. If you are additive to any of ways we create, propagate and monetize culture you will be welcomed in once you learn to contribute.

Looking for a toehold? One of the ways we decide on who and what is cool is simply by showing up to the various nodes of wealth and power I’ll call the circuit. An artist mutual of mine calls it the city with legs.

If you are curious and want to participate the the circuit roughly encapsulates the vacation and social calendars of our global elite class. And it’s quite public and often reasonable accessible if you are curious enough to research. Read the styles section and you notice the repetition.

It’s a more diverse group than you might think. It’s certainly more open to than when society was run by a hereditary aristocracy. Yet it’s still contained enough that anyone on the circuit jokes it’s the same old thing.

Sometimes folks complain that you never meet anyone new on the circuit and it’s true you encounter the same people over and over again. You will probably see me from time to time. Power likes cool because cool is a powerful determinant of wealth and status.

If you attend the main fashion weeks, the world economic forum, the Met Gala, Art Basel, Formula 1 races, the awards seasons, or the main conferences you have encountered the circuit. If you have met someone who winters or summers somewhere then you have seen the circuit.

Maybe just as a townie but you’ve seen it. Even a cat can look at a king. If you’d like to hop on the circuit be sure to bring something to the table. The thing about culture is we are always looking for new faces. You too can try out being cool just for fun. Break a few rules but maybe ask someone on it which ones they follow to get a feel for it first.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1436 and The Voyage Home

Like many fans of Star Trek, I am not at all ashamed of my affection for one of science fictions greatest franchises. I’m proud to love it.

When I visit San Francisco I like to rewatch the classic original series movie from 1986 “Star Trek: The Voyage Home” which is affectionately known as the whale movie.

Future San Francisco is a beautiful paradise where exceptional young people go to Star Fleet Academy. It’s fully automated luxury communism thanks to the not really military (but definitely feels like it) the United Federation of Planets.

The movie involves getting Spock back from previous escapades that had left him for dead. As they retrieve Spock a crisis is unfolding on earth.

A spacecraft is signaling to Earth alas no one can answer it. It disables everything near it. The Enterprise figure out that it’s whalesong and decide the only way to answer is going back in time to find Humpback whales.

The Reagan era was a strange one for environmentalist. The crew goes back in time to rescue Humpback whales and ends up in San Francisco in the 70s at least vibe wise. It was definitely a pop culture “save the whales” moment.

San Francisco was a mess in the past and everyone finds this to be relatable as a plot point though we all know it can be made a paradise.

We see nuclear vessels in Alameda as the brave future. We have to save our whales to save our future though. This was not a universe where environmentalists make the best villains. Environmentalists are the good guys which is almost sweet.

The Voyage Home is a ridiculous movie with a premise stuck in a bubble of social attitudes that is almost comforting.

Leaving San Francisco myself to voyage home myself makes me laugh at one of comedic bits of the movie. “I don’t know how these people made it out of the 20th century!”

To the skeptics I say a double dumb ass on you! Humans and their colorful metaphors might just might get us to the future after all. And San Francisco will be part of making it.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1434 and Density

There is always a debate in startup life as to how the density of a given ecosystem impacts outcomes. A tight network of well connected communities and individuals helps founders, investors and talent connect.

Before the pandemic it was considered fairly normal to be within a major hub as the common knowledge was that “density” matters. You wanted to be in the action of a scene.

There are great startup cities. New York has an incredible scene. My hometown of Boulder has a great technical core. But as much as cities and companies compete over status the one with longevity is Silicon Valley. Heck it was a debate when that even encompassed San Francisco until Twitter moved in.

Then everyone spread to the four winds during the pandemic. I like to think of this as the era in which Silicon Valley got back to its digital roots. Being extremely online became a behavior that worked well for anyone if you communicated well with words. Being on the right coast was about being in the right online communities. The network state is online.

I’d say that was as pure a return to source culture as there ever was. Different people value signal across different networks and the open web of words has been home to software and hardware developers for generations.

The world that builds companies lives virtually as much as it does in the real world. We like to meet up but we also know it’s the tools that connects us that make the difference.

Every subculture that has emerged with a breakout hit did it through the digital commons we built together. I’ll always appreciate coming to the source culture to replenish but I know the density of the network is at its swiftest when our extremely online communities communicate.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1431 and Faking It

I’ve heard this multiple times across enough demographics in the wider “startup” ecosystem that I’m afraid I’ll have to accept it is happening. People are faking being weird. In some cases they are faking being autistic.

I find this to be an almost laughably unlikely thing to want to imitate. And yet I’ve heard it three times in the last week. The new poser is faking being a neurodivergent weirdo.

We regularly joke that at chaotic.capital a part of our deal sourcing relies on “Julie being professionally weird on the internet.” My pinned tweet from three years ago is a ramble on this ethos as it’s been true for decades. Unique fixations often undergird problem solving.

Being weird, or more specifically autistic, has now taken on a specific connotation of an intelligent but socially strange or oblivious character who sees the world differently. This means you are special somehow and can be forgiven for being a dick (that’s a lie be nice).

It was probably a source of pain for many millennial kids who were awkward the more oblivious you are the less it bothers you. Marching to the beat of your own drum. We’ve got a whole set of social tropes around smart nerds in popular media and most of them were negatively coded.

Despite this history, revenge of the nerds occurred. The power and dominance of technology (and its cousin nerd) culture means the spergy truth telling autist has cachet. We live in a post Sheldon Cooper world. Once something involves capital it collects social capital as well.

I have clearly underestimated how much this affects Zoomer behavior and incentives. Millennials experienced this archetype negatively but in a softer “everyone is special” culture your quirks can lead you to money and prestige. So there is now an incentive to act like a weird asshole to fake being weird and a little socially anxious.

If autism can have stolen valor then we might be in that era. It seems to greatly annoy the actually autistic (a tag on social media used by many poorly socialized entirely normal people) to have the symptoms of autism faked.

Authenticity is actually quite hard to fake and anyone with a decent social radar can usually spot it. Whether all autists have that capacity to read social cues is up for debate. It’s probably why anyone tries to fake being a genuine weirdo.

I’m inclined to say skills issue as the internet has made class, manners, and social cues much more accessible to everyone. And good news being every social class values being chill, real, and passionate. So there is no need to fake anything. Just vibe. Be cool.