Tag: Culture Wars

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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?

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Aesthetics Finance Internet Culture

Day 1880 and the Global Intelligence Crisis Kerfuffle

“It’s not a prediction” he said. It’s just a hypothetical possible reality. I believe we used to call that fiction. A science fiction short story wrapped in a macroeconomic essay written by Citrini Research hit the algorithms like a bomb Markets lapped it up like beasts who’d been lost in a barren desert for weeks. Liquidity!

Remember in 2023 when when Sam Altman said that we’d have superhuman persuasion before we had artificial general intelligence?

Citrini is capable of super human persuasion before AI reached super human general intelligence and it has been strange.

As the market sell off was playing out, a flood of “Contra Citrini” essays emerged immediately from players as varied as Joe Wiesenthal John Loeber, Will Manidis, even proper economists like Alex Imas. The co-author Alap Shah went onto TBPN. Fun fact he was Sheel Mohnot’s roommate in college.

I am unclear if white collar workers are in a frenzy about are doing their existing jobs or if they have even noticed the danger. As a real time update from a fellow investor had us both laughing. An intern couldn’t manage a basic research task. The intern asked them how to get to the Founders Fund’s website.

We may need the bull case for AI, as the bear case for white collar workers acquiring any intelligence in their education process is rather unconvincing.

For some reason “how do I get to the founders fund website” started me singing an old tune sung by Dionne Warwick “Do you know the way to San Jose?”

Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’ve been away so long
I may go wrong and lose my way
Do you know the way to San Jose?
I’m going back to find some peace of mind in San Jose

LA is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star


Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

The song was used in another completely different “science fiction story goes viral”context. Maybe it’s in my mind as automated virology lab unleashing apocalypse, is a AI doomer staple also recently in the discourse.

Do you know the way to San Jose? Or if Helix is available for download.

In an SyFy channel show from 2014 called Helix, which follows an Arctic research station where research on viruses goes horribly wrong. It used the Burt Bacharach & Hal David song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” as an unsettling musical motif and clue to resolving the mystery. Unsettling California music has my ear this week.

In 1968 you could return to San Jose from Los Angeles and start a relatively normal life as one of the stars who never made it. Pumping gas and parking cars. If we get too close to the sun of artificial intelligence success we don’t have a San Jose to run to. You can’t get away there as it’s filled with just the part of technology folks peddling dreams as unrealistic as the ones down in Hollywood.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1876 and Phantom Futures Past

It’s just clear that some people are enabled to bigger, better and faster output thanks to rapidly advancing tools coming from the foundation model companies.

Will Manidis is on hot streak of essay writing (aided by artificial intelligence in the best way) and has produced thought provoking writing at a great clip. I love nothing more than seeing an exited founder feel free to express their views at their fullest. I’ve written about his essays in the past and suggest following him.

Today he wrote about visiting Oman and his reflections on its transition to a modern state by a singular leader choosing a third way way of building rather the binary choices other nations seem to have made between of annihilating the past for the future or total preservation of a way of life that no longer functions.

“I left with an unsettling feeling that I had seen a vision of the future that I wasn’t supposed to see. A country that had gotten extraordinarily wealthy but stayed coherent to its pre-industrial identity—a country that didn’t turn into a museum, didn’t paralyze itself in amber, but became a modern, functioning, wealthy nation that did not feel like it had been strip-mined of itself by the money.

In the West, we really have convinced ourselves there are only two options for our post-economic future. You can be Shenzhen or you can be Athens. … Shenzhen is the city that chose money over place so completely that it deleted itself.

…Athens is the opposite failure, and I say this as someone who is at least Greek enough that I feel like I won’t offend anyone. Athens chose place over money so totally that the city itself is a mausoleum”

A photo from Will’s tweet essay on visiting Oman

I don’t know much about Oman and I make no claims to understanding its politics or histories but I too think about what we lose without a sense of place but am also fascinated by the liminal zones of the hyper future set against a past we are actively forgetting. And no nation is immune from this process.

I do however have two books to recommend if the topic of place, continuity and the future interests you. One is a work of fiction and one a photography compendium whose forward was written by my favorite author.

Photographer Greg Girard’s work documents Asian cities in transition, especially Shanghai and Kowloon, was closely associated with William Gibson, who wrote the foreword to Girard’s book Phantom Shanghai. Gibson is the father of cyperpunk. And I contend that his near future fiction gets quite a bit right about how close the dark past is to almost arrived future. These images were shot in 2007 and yet the outlines of the super cities was already energy

One of Girad’s photographs Phantom Shanghai

The other book is a work of alternative historical fiction in the vein of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle called American War by Omar El Ak. It is premised on an inverted or “reversed” 9/11/War‑on‑Terror in which American bombed a thriving Dubai.

The premise follows a protagonist’ traumatic life as a a radicalized agent of terror preyed on by different foreign influences living in a refuge camp in what was once Georgia.

It rhymes with both Will’s essay and with William Gibson for me. In a review of the book, they quote Faulkner “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And as these examples all show us, cyperpunk was born in Some Dark Holler

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1872 and ‘bout to take my lady to Selfridges

Ahhh how I missed London. I miss it in the same way I miss Hong Kong and even Frankfurt. So many cities are no longer places for Americans. I need nowhere else to go mind you, my edge of the American empire will be flooded soon enough, it’s just that I miss being welcomed.

It’s just I’d gotten used to the freedom of our constitutional rights seemingly applying everywhere. Team America was an ok joke by true sons of the mountain west libertarian in South Park’s Matt and Trey. Now it seems like a drop out attitude of Gen X. I am still on Team America.

The end of the liberal world order, much ballyhooed by the WEF set, has me getting prepared to be seen as the enemy. It is even time to get used to being called fascists. I’m sure Nazi won’t be far off as the Germans must always take everything too far. Ironic no?

I fear if I don’t prepare to be truly sovereign, I may face a day as a refuge in the future if Americans can’t pull off its renaissance. Though I work hard toward that end.

I’ve done what I can to invest in the young entrepreneurs of the new era, and in the great state of Montana in particular, but victory is more article of faith than assured outcome.

The Munich Security Conference is, as it ever was, a flurry of events but now Marco Rubio is singing a love song to our birth continent. As if papering over the past year of slights and jabs is enough but it is the best a neoconservative in disguise can manage.

And so I had a layover in Heathrow and I saw the flavors of what is to come. And somehow that Prada song was on repeat everywhere I went.

London is still for the globalists, even if you are not a member of what William Gibson called the klept. As in kleptocracy. The Jackpot is here.

Reindustrialize they say, but look what happened to British Empire. The sun never sets? The sun barely rises on it now, and we’ve lost them to the unforeseen consequences of the generational contractual breach.

Add in the inflows of the commonwealth deciding the island will always be a destination for the 1% and London is a pricy place.

And so I think should I go to Selfridges as the song says? The Duty Free shops that makes up Heathrow hasn’t made a deal with them but I’ve got all the luxury options and high streeet choices at my disposal.

I was once deep in the world of travel retail and I bet you can guess who owns the biggest player in Heathrow. No not Arnault. It is, as you might expect, a competing regional power who certainly wishes non-doms weren’t facing wealth taxes in London. They are good to do business with incidentally.

And so I hear, over and over again, past seasons hits and remixes and think London might be the virtual world of Malthusian post Jackpot imaginings of the Cyperpunk progenitor. And we shall compete for clout and status in the same ways as always.

[Young Adz:]

Bout to take my lady Selfridges
New drip on the way, uh-huh
Rap nigga still sellin’ bricks
Half a cake on the way, uh-huh
Take a flight, she wanna take a Lyft
Phone the molly man, he’s on the way, uh-huh
I might take her The Shard, I might take her The Ritz
It don’t matter, baby, I’m straight, uh-huh

[RAYE:]
I feel like I’m in Prince’s house
Purple paint all on the walls, uh-huh
Sittin’ down on this fancy couch
And I can’t see straight, I’m a state, uh-huh
Twenty-two, I’m in Paris, baby
Got strippers tits in my face, uh-huh
Pull up in a Bentley, I want Christian, I want Fendi

I want Prada, ah-ah, ah-ah
Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
I already make that paper, I don’t need to chase no clout, wow
I don’t usually pipe up, but I don’t like how you runnin’ your mouth, wow
I already make that paper, I don’t need to chase no clout, wow

I already made that paper and I don’t need to chase no clout so now what?

I’m like George Clooney stuck in the liminal window of Heathrow for a brief moment. I am not of the country (I spent $22 to register myself with their visa mobile app as I sat in a purple corridor trying to input my biometric) so it feels all wrong.

I’m not exactly out of their control until I leave their airspace. But how much longer do any of these Anglophone countries have left?

I’m a dark Swede of dubious stock and many generations of me and mine adjusted to the Weberian Protestant work ethic. I don’t want Prada but I did enjoy working for them as a client.

Categories
Politics

Day 1867 and Rage Against What Exactly

I feel a struggle to continue this writing experiment. I feel a struggle to continue on at all in a public fashion online as the world is refolded and restructured around us.

I am just so tired and I fear an early death as the life and treasure of my generation is squandered on the perpetuation of systems that no longer work. I was texting with my mother about her husband’s third knee surgery (ain’t Medicare great) as enormous protest raged outside my window. I am in the capital of a European nation where this is quite common.

This is the third large demonstration in the space of three weeks for an opposition party that is mostly made up of technocratic stooges trying to hide the sins of wars no one remembers except those who deployed in them. I happen to know people who did deploy in them or I certainly wouldn’t know that the opposition is made up of the siblings, children and social circle of a former dictator.

Every time they protest the roads are blocked and then it gets out of hand. Water canons are set on the fires the protestors set and then tear gas is thrown out and no one can get through the city center. I assume this is some flavor of controlled opposition as America and the EU both support the existing government.

This time there were drones above the entire affair and much of the rally seemed to be music that was a mix of Catholic liturgy and electronic dance music. A famous priest DJ performed in the city over the weekend so maybe it was him. Who knows.

Nothing is weirder than hearing O Fortuna played over riot dispersal water cannons. We don’t have that kind of cinematic drama in American protests. Honestly everyone here seems sick of it. Most of all the hotel staff and the diplomats that live in it.

I watched it unfold from a vestibule with a Ukrainian woman who said she hoped I’d stay safe. I told her I wasn’t worried as I’ve seen this before.

She was understandably more concerned than I was being a refuge in a country that no one would have thought would be more stable than Ukraine a generation ago. Socialists holding off nationalists is not a terribly equilibrium if you can afford it. America can’t but it seems plenty of Europe still can.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 1866 and Never Escaping Veblen Goods

I love a good signaling and status competition. There are so many ways to to signal that at the far reaches of taste you will never fear to tread. Just don’t worry about how other people live.

I’ve worked in luxury fashion and venture capital and they run on the same rules. And it’s all snobbery up and down and it is a mixed bag when it comes to what works in reality.

I’ve known sneakerheads who seamlessly transitioned to private equity because they know in some fundamental way that rising price increases demand in strange markets. But the little signals can give away your whole game and you can’t always assume you are speaking their language.

Many an investor and fashionista has made good use of this basic understanding of a Veblen good. The more expensive it gets, the more it stokes demand. Everyone thinks they can become Hermes or Facebook but if you could well you would have.

This can fuck with actual performance as the thing being performed isn’t necessarily the thing that is getting done in reality. You can show your own displeasure with the pricing scheme by not participating. You can short a thing with a little creative and signaling of your own.

Many decided will continue to play along despite not needing to participate in status games. Outsourcing taste is actually something you can pay for and sometimes you should just get a realistic budget.

Often you really can’t afford to play the game and it’s better to cultivate your own taste and satisfactions in life so you are comfortable taking on the risk load of stepping out of unnecessary competition. You play your own game and win on your own terms.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1861 and Mispricing The Market

I’m sure most of the world will be fixated on various financial corrections in global markets but I spent a chunk of my day dealing with currency changes (that will be 7% of your withdrawal thank you) that reflect nonsense from monetary arbitrages, regulatory graft and foreign exchange transactions so I’m in absolutely no mood.

Then I went to what counts as the diplomat and foreign money mall and got Pizza Hut, frozen yogurt and Korean skincare. I don’t even like Pizza Hut but I was so sick of managing dislocations and figured I’d rather send it back to America. My patriotic consumption for the day.

I don’t know if it’s an urban legend that our military can deploy food franchises in twenty four hours in a conflict zone but we sure seem to figured out emerging markets.

It’s a shame we won’t let some markets emerge and be shaped by pressures. The vape kiosk was doing a brisk business and I was frustrated to see the owner of the favored electric vape was based in Shenzen. What an opportunity lost for American brands.

I’d say half the parking lot was Mercedes and the other half was BYD if that counts for anything. I haven’t seen an abundance of American cars and I think we all know why.

But then my savior was found in a brightly colored kiosk with no customers at all. A swath of Korean skincare brands that proved to be authentic. Blessedly many global K beauty brands have adopted QR codes to manage the misuse.

I am adapt at spotting packaging dupes and frauds thanks to the de minimus years importers of fakes flooded Amazon, eBay and other retailers with third party resellers.

Everything was half off as at their full retail price they were still not moving. I scooped up $30 bucks of masks from brands like Mishha and Some By Mi. My skin was fully irritated by smog, stress, and wider disappointment. The globalization era is in full swing in plenty of markets but everyone gets their cut. If a brand doesn’t command a local market then an enterprising consumer can enjoy a temporary mispricing. Sometimes this mispricing last for far too long.

Incumbents have strange advantages they are loathe to give up. I came out angrier at banks than usual, as angry at central banks as ever, and very pleased that the local consumer base wasn’t yet wise to the benefits of a product that commands a premium elsewhere. I might go get more.

Categories
Internet Culture Travel

Day 1860 and Some Technical Difficulties On The ISP Side Perhaps

I’m not anywhere particularly unusual (a European capital) but all of my end to end encryption applications, most crucially Signal and Twitter are not working.

Nothing will send and I’m not receiving messages now either. Why? Well, I’ve got conspiracy theories but I doubt it’s sinister and I’ll boot up a VPN in the meantime if it persists.

I am nearby several embassies (of the regions you might expect to be dicey including my own) and just uphill of city’s international school so maybe one of them is being a dick.

Or perhaps the Airbnb I am using has an ISP provider that is throttling end to end encryption for some reason. For what reason I couldn’t fathom but I am annoyed. YouTube is streaming in full glory on an enormous television but I can’t text in peace to my loved ones.

So this blog post will have to serve a test post to let folks know that I am fine and anyone who needs to know where I am does which is to be fair a pretty darn small list. I’ll move if the issue persists. I’m a mere 7 kilometers away from the center of the city where the internet was working fine earlier today so I’ve got no idea why I’m having issues now. If I’d known I’d have done my writing earlier. A part of me wonders and worries about what might eventually stop my writing experiment being a communication blackout. Though I never thought I’d have a problem in Europe. That is the stuff of authoritarians right?

I have got unpleasant notions about why a European city and its nearby embassies wouldn’t wish to let people communicate freely and privately on websites with end to end encryption. It’s just amusing they are happy to let me watch Netflix and Youtube. The New York Times has no problem getting through nor my other media applications on my phone.

Having been behind America’s first freedom to compute act, I suppose I’ll let my emotions run a bit wild here as a treat. It seems especially concerning that this sort of informational throttle by big European ISPs seems possible and even likely. That embassies might want to extend a little protection beyond their very high walls seems even more probable. Which is not very nice of them.

It makes my mind go straight to propaganda campaigns and not technical difficulties. In this day and age, we should never take for granted our right to express ourselves via compute freely and privately. Stay frosty and I hope this post makes it to you.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1851 and Sig Sad World

I’ve been rewatching West Wing, or rather doing a full watch through as I don’t think I watched the show after the firing of its showrunner Aaron Sorkin.

It is a hard watch in 2026 as themes like decorum, power, and bipartisanship are always at the forefront of the plot while they babble on about campaign finance reform and something called a budget surplus. Cue the Dowager Countess and “what is a weekend?” meme. The end of history was a fine time to be alive.

It’s like watching a lost world where we still had positive outcomes and expectations from our government even as the same basic players and issues remain the same.

I suppose I’m in mourning for an era I lived through and benefited from and yet will never ever see again. How can I possibly get worked up over cute plots over gun control and prissy liberals insulting heartland conservatives when in 2026 it’s full on Robocop meets Mike Judge Idiocracy.

The best I can do today is make a Daria meets gun memes joke as cover for my grief and sadness. It’s a Sig Sad World out there.

Categories
Uncategorized

Day 1849 and The Great Look Backward

The ChinaTalk Substack has an excellent analysis of the “Net Left” (wang zuo, 网左). A group of young Chinese yearn for the cultural revolution era.

Accordingly to the essay, the “Net Left” traces its earliest roots to a niche group on Weibo between 2011 and 2015 known as the “Franco Left” (fa zuo, 法左).

An American social media user might notice these dates as being concurrent with the stirrings of the Great Awokening whose murky protean identity played out across Tumblr beginning in 2011-2015 as well. Oppressor and oppressed was the narrative for the identity politics which was nouveau chic branding on Marxist capital versus labor.

This simplified narrative attracted a massive influx of young people who were frustrated with their poverty and pressure but struggled to find an answer. Suddenly, the solution was no longer buried in thousands of pages of Deleuzian tomes. Everything was reduced to a single, omnipotent, and evil symbol: “capital.”

Longing for the Cultural Revolution

Even the struggles of Chinese youth sound like American Gen Z’s struggles. American youth were once pushed toward upward class mobility by The Sort.

Now they critique the high costs of that expensive competitive credentialist systems who put them in debt. Youngsters just starting out see its current failure as a mechanism for training and selecting talent and are opting for new solutions.

China has “small-town test-takers” (xiaozhen zuotijia, 小镇做题家) who don’t have the social capital to make the leap. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? In their case it is strongly gendered, which mirrors some red pill and incel culture on the American web.

Just as in America, many Chinese youth blamed capital and its elite power holders. Who needs to read dense critical theory when the warmth of collectivism is easier to understand than the Frankfurt School or Continental Marxist philosophy.

It seems all great powers are experiencing flavors of third worldism where all is “the oppressed ” and those with capital & power are oppressors. And yet Europe, ever the laggard, is trying “almost revolutionary ideas” to make them more like nimble capitalist powers.

The Europeans must be scared of the tractors I saw protesting the Mercosur trade block deal even though ironically German-Italian initiative claim their goals are making “the European Union less susceptible to pressure from trading partners and global powers” after a week of embarrassing news.

They wish to boost economic growth, calling for “an emergency brake” and a revamp of the EU budget to focus resources on making companies more competitive. I wonder who they think will run and staff these firms?

Just as the rest of the world nostalgically looks back for a leap backwards, Europe says “we want to have a fast, dynamic Europe.” Good luck with that based on the protests I saw.

At least Europe, like the Net Left and the Tumblr DSA crowd, are basing some of this on a misty eyes interpretation of a past that once was but was never quite this. The first year of Davos emerged in similar situations

Well, it goes back to 1971, which was actually another year of trans-Atlantic tension. Nixon left the gold standard. The dollar fell. The U.S. imposed tariffs on European imports. And the Europeans were totally blindsided. This German economist, Klaus Schwab, convenes this gathering of politicians and academics and business people in Davos. It gradually grows into this giant business conference that’s also an exercise in virtue signaling.

– Peter Goodman New York Times “Davos Stops Pretending