Tag: Culture Wars

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Aesthetics

Day 1007 and Half A Decade Past Premium Mediocrity

I recall somewhat fondly the era of capitalism in which moving your business online was an innovation. The direct to consumer phase of retail and packaged goods is forever tightly tied to interest rates in my mind. Direct to consumer failed as an ethos and a movement for better goods for consumers.

Facebook, Google and Apple are engaged in brutal turf warfare over who owns customer data and let me tell you it isn’t the brands or you as the buyer that benefit.

What was once efficient in reaching ever wider and more specific audiences, the consumer internet has smoothed your identity into some brand’s extremely specific Pyschographic. You know what I mean when I was Lululemon girl and Black Rifle Coffee guy. Don’t worry you think, I’m not a sucker. While typing this on an iPhone.

There was a vague optimism that merely by doing something like bypassing superfluous luxuries like brands (which only served to bamboozle with flash and expense) you could provide a better quality product at a lower cost to your ultimate customer. How naive that seems at the speed of global derivatives based financial products.

How fondly I remember thinking someone could design the Platonic ideal of the tee shirt or provide some basic ultimate end good without confusing merchandising tactics. I’ve never once in my life wanted to decide if the X or ultra version of something was better. Just sell me the one good thing damn it.

But they can’t. Markets compete. The differentiation gets competed away eventually. It began with the “one essential good thing” in a category and ended as a mess of optimization for margin & enshitification and selling new versions of the same audience to whatever sucker can pay the CPM. Remember when we used to pretend you could pay for performance in advertising? Sheryl Sandberg got us good.

There’s a weird thing with scale, where the market can raise the threshold for crappiness and then a truly scaled company can positively exploit those dynamics to provide a genuinely superior good. Amazon can have pretty great basics in the same way gas station chains can have decent coffee. Costco’s hotdog will remain an icon if their standards hold up.

Rory Sutherland an advertising executor has a concept called the “threshold for crappiness” that suggested your local chain sometimes had to up its game to compete when a chain comes in. But markets push downwards as well as upwards.

Venkatash Rao first coined premium mediocrity. Private equity excels at this category. It’s global cosmopolitan striver megabrand. It’s the pretty decent but in a big packaged good sort of way item you get at Whole Foods. Imagine the dreaded diffusion line of a once great luxury brand. Or Michael Kors.

Rao put words to a phenomena that drove me a bit nuts during the height of premium mediocrity in 20117. That was the tipping point for me when the shrinkflation of frothy times body slammed the aesthetic soul of branding.

Now the most mass market experience that is still tasteful and good can compete globally. But sometimes you just long to discover where a local market is genuinely better.

My favorite aspect of being abroad is finding markets where it’s not yet occurred & enjoying a significantly better product for it. It’s my most toxic millennial trait.

Legacy local businesses in small towns or secondary markets simply set a different standard for themselves occasionally from the premium mediocrity of the global markets. But times change. Business models change. Now we have ghost kitchens. And you two have probably purchased a premium mediocre brand and been fine with it.

Categories
Travel

Day 1004 and the Muses

I’m such a homebody that I sometimes thinks the joys of travel are lost on me. But then I go shopping and I remember that markets are muses. What sells tells you something about a place.

Now you may think crass commercialism is more of a vice than a virtue. But I think it’s wise to hear what works. A market can tell you about what’s popular. Being an American is a niche experience but we’ve got a bigger footprint than our mere population would suggest.

But also the spoils of capitalism have priorities that are about the efficiency of the market. And you see it in every large city of any density or wealth. The layers for consumption of good and services have a logic to them that defies too much local concern. The algorithms have trust and safety teams but scale takes you pretty far. And every city at a certain size needs market logics.

It’s just important to remember each market has a local gem. There are great performers that outclass by wide orders of magnitude. It’s usually some combination of what appeals locally but is also legible to the larger global cosmopolitan skill sets.

Many of the food wars are just city tastes fighting country tastes. Some situations are more market based and transactional. Sometimes that is even good. I’m personally delighted that I can show up to a city and get food delivered. There is always orange soda brand in every market. And you can always get French fries.

Categories
Culture

Day 997 and Brain Fog

I have felt a bit disappointed in my recent writing. I’ve not felt the urge to produce anything of much substance or synthesis in a week or two.

The exercise of writing daily isn’t meant to produce anything but the consistent repetition of a habit of critical thinking about my daily experiences. I sometimes have to accept that there will be weeks where it all feels a bit half baked. I’ve got no conclusions to share.

I am not the only one experiencing a lack of clarity. Confident assurances read as naive at best or manipulative at worst. No one is certain of anything at the moment. The widening gyre has our best struggling with conviction.

I have been following Venkatash Rao’s working theory on the breakdown of world narratability in his series on Protocal Narratives. If you are not a Ribbonfarm reader I’d encourage you to begin.

He is grappling very well with these themes considering the deep sense making challenges facing all of us. Attempting to find workable worldviews that are manageable to our human minds is a challenge as consensus reality is a competition between thousands of different competing narratives.

To retain fluidity, you must retain an unmediated connection to reality. But the unaugmented brain is clearly not enough for that connection to be tractable to manage.


How do you resolve this paradox?


I think the trick is to inhabit more than one interposing intelligence layer. If you’re only an economist or only a deep-state institutionalist, you’ll retreat to a fixed logic of caring; a terminal derp.

Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows

I’m doing my best to stay out of terminal derp but I’m still feeling like the fog is impeding my view. I’ll just have to keep putting out my own beacons and hope the lighthouse network illuminates enough for us to navigate together.

Categories
Medical

Day 985 and Know So Little

Every time I have have cause to interact with any medical speciality I find myself blown away by just how little we know.

I’ve been going back to doctors to understand what my options are for living with an autoimmune condition and having children. And the truth is we just don’t know much.

I made a life altering decision several years ago by letting a medical decision be framed to me like a consumer product. We opted to freeze eggs and embryos and it turned our entire lives inside out. It triggered an autoimmune response in me that I’ll live with forever.

Somehow in the intervening half decade years we’ve learned precious little about women’s health and fertility. And we are advocating for somehow knowing even less.

Because that’s what we’ve done by letting the government into our health decisions. Don’t kid yourself into thinking when we involve government and bureaucrats we somehow improve our knowledge and safety. At it’s most friendly, when the government shows up it’s about ass covering. At it’s most hostile it’s about control.

We argue about ethics, safety and life as if we even have a shared ideal of any of those concepts. Whose life? My life? My unknown children? I’m not convinced we ever cared about women’s health as an independent variable. We treat fertility as a sideshow and hormones as some variable over which we pretend to have control. And yet every time I try to assess my own risks I find out that we known just about nothing. There are no good answers. And it’s all poorly understood risks.

Categories
Medical

Day 982 and Not Small Men

I’ve been working on getting a deeper understanding of my hormone profile and where I can better support my cycle.

I’ve been surprised by just how little we seem to know about women’s health and the baselines that are considered ideal. Between the battles over health education in school (abstinence only) and the eagerness with which we put my millennial generation on birth control as teenagers, we’ve got both an under-informed and potentially over medicated population. Which wasn’t the case for our mother’s generation who went on birth control much later in life if at all.

A tweet from last week

I’ve had my fair share of fucked up fertility experiences and yet I’ve only just in the last few years learned to understand how my follicular phase impacts me so differently from my luteal phase. If you don’t know what that means either well it’s probably time.

The phases a woman’s cycle

I generally feel most energetic, pain free, and happy during my follicular phase. Despite knowing this I couldn’t tell you what an ideal FSH hormone level would be. I don’t know what balance of estrogen I should have at any given phase. I have no clue what my LH should be during my luteal stage either.

It strikes me that these levels should be taught along with implications for what it means and how to work with them just as we know our ideal blood pressure rage and resting heart rates. It’s some of the most crucial and basic self knowledge about our bodies.

When I think of how many other crucial biometrics I’ve got memorized (I track my SED rate and CRP quarterly for inflammation) it seems odd that something so crucial as one’s hormones wouldn’t be known, tracked and improved. I watch my heart rate variability like my recovery depends on it because it does. So do most serious biohackers.

Knowing more about own health is part of being a responsible adult. And I’m sad that we do so little to educate women on basic rhythms. I can’t tell if it’s a lack of interest from women or a dismissal from the medical profession. Women aren’t just small men.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 980 and I Am Beff Jezos

Humans are horny for hierarchy. We are eager to give our power away as a species. Please will someone else just be responsible for making our decisions for us? Can someone point me to the person in charge? “Take me to your leader!”

If someone seems smarter, richer, more capable, more aggressive, heck even if they have better taste than us, they become an instant candidate for us delegating our authority over to them. My most popular blog post ever was about dickriding. Yes it was about Elon Musk’s fans.

I’ll be the first to say that people who court you to gain power should be viewed as suspect. But someone who has power is not themselves always suspect by default. I know it’s a fine distinction. But people fall into positions of authority simply by going out and being competent. Competence is a fast route to power.

Sure being competent has a lot of downsides. Suddenly you’ve got power you maybe didn’t want. We have an incentive shunt power off to someone else as it generally sucks to be in charge. It’s energetically expensive to be responsible. Just ask one of your friends with a toddler.

Sometimes we have to wield power because it’s our job to take care of our corner of the universe. Again ask someone with a toddler. We are in charge of sustaining some portion of the grand experiment called life. Even if it’s just our own families. Even if it’s just yourself.

So why am I titling this post “I am Beff Jezos?” Right now online there is a movement gaining recognition for encouraging people to have agency and build for the future. It’s a movement that wants you to own your own power. And to help others get more power of their own.

One of the anonymous posters associated with it calls himself Based Beff Jezos as a play on Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon and the meme “based” as in Lil B’s “based means being yourself.” It’s a silly joke.

The movement itself identifies as e/acc which is a shorthand for effective accelerationism. It encourages people to do more, build more, take charge of their own corner of the world and make the future arrive sooner. The tagline? Accelerate.

It’s principles are simple. The future will arrive and we should build like it’s coming. Slowing things down, or even worse, going backwards, is not a solution to our problems. We can only go forward. If you’d prefer a driving metaphor, we should accelerate into the curve. Slowing down just spins out the car. Civilization is the car.

So what, you want to just uplift humanity, build AI and populate the universe with the maximum diversity and quantity of life?

e/acc

The movement is more of a meme space than anything else. It is decentralized. I’ve not met anyone that runs it though I’ve spoken to many vocal supporters. And I’ve chatted with folks that are at the nexus of of its online presence. Everyone is positive and friendly. Most of them are anonymous. I’m not even of sure if some of the accounts are singular or plural. Which is pretty cool. It doesn’t have a president or a CEO or even a founder who owns anything with any amount of authority. It could be one dude or multiple dudes gender non specific.

It’s just a bunch of people who make stuff. It’s popular amongst engineers but it’s an ethos that to anyone who can make something. Even this blog post counts. I am e/acc as much as anyone.

Naturally if no one is in charge it’s a bit threatening. If there is no hierarchy how do we control it? If no one is in charge then what will we do if someone under their banner does something bad?

Such is the beauty of an idea. A meme can’t really be owned. A decentralized group of goofballs on the internet can’t really be snuffed out for bad think. Maybe a few nodes go down. They literally cannot kill all of us.

I Am Spartacus

The messages does seem to be resonating. I know being hopeful has improved my mood. A decent number of people who make shit want the future to come a little faster. They want more people with more ownership of the building process.

More complexity and more abundance is appealing even if it seems impossible to achieve. Don’t worry, just build for your corner of the world. Put power and responsibility in as many hands as possible. We can build it together.

You too can have a toddler and own the joy of being responsible for your corner of the universe. It’s dangerous for sure. Folks will tell you for your own good you need to have a hierarchy and someone responsible for the power.

But guess what? It can be you. And sure heads will get bonked. Crying will ensue. Remember I said ask someone with a toddler? What if you are the competent and in charge parent? Shit right?

We’ve got to go forward. I am Beff Jezos. You too are Beff Jezos. And they can’t stop us all from arriving at the future. Go ahead and accelerate into the curve.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 977 and Insecurities

A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait.

Topics like “body counts” and the relative degrees of acceptable promiscuity in women (as little as possible) is everywhere. We are main charactering single women for sleeping in on Sundays. Hot takes on how women are failing men is everywhere.

The insecurity is palpable. The lust for control is high. How many people you’ve had sex with and how it affects marriage and family formation has been a contentious topic in culture wars in America for sometime. For a private matter between partners, it’s shocking how much it’s become fodder for social media grist.

Presenting scorn to women for being without significant others and children strike me as callus. Fertility is one of the most sensitive possible areas for anyone. I know it has been for me. You never know why someone is childless.

I wouldn’t recommend diving into gender bait topics if you aren’t already aware of the discourse and it’s champions. This variant appears to have gained momentum with a YouTube celebrity boxer feud.

It’s now percolated out to every engagement farmer looking to grow their outrage crops. And it looks like business is booming. Sadly, lonely people are desperately searching for control and reassurance and gender bait gives it to them.

It feels as if we are repeating the same slut shaming I saw as a teenage girl but on some new variant of reactionary steroids.

If you are looking for ways to judge, shame and coerce others into behaving in a way that provides you comfort without their consent please consider that the problem might be you. It’s your insecurities speaking when you apply sweeping generalization to an individual you may not even know.

Once you are secure in your value and worth it’s a lot easier to get what you want from others simply by having boundaries and standards. There is no need to rain judgement on others. You wouldn’t want them doing it to you. Apply the golden rule and nurture empathy. The security you will find will last longer than any temporary control you may find through shame or judgement.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 973 and Reinforcement

I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about who gets to decide the boundaries of society.

Automation of civic and cultural life has been happening at the speed of capitalism. It’s about to happen at the speed of artificial intelligence’s processing power.

At least during most of techno-capitalism, corporations and governments were still run by humans. You could blame an executive or elected official. What happens when more decisions are snapped into reality by a numerical boundary?

High frequency traders have found many an arbitrage they whittled into nothingness. Who will get whittled away when the machines decide how society should run?

We got a taste of the horrors of treating people like statistics instead of humans during the first Biden era crime bill with mandatory minimum sentencing. And here we are rushing to find new ways to nudge consensus back to hard lines and institutionalization.

I don’t know how we handle virtue in a world without grace. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue seems prescient. Forgiveness in the face of horrific reality has been the hallmark of humanity’s most enduring religions. But then again so has swift punishment and inscrutable cruelty. Humans are quite a species.

I am, like many others, concerned about reinforcement learning in machine learning and artificial intelligence. How and where we set the boundaries of the machines that determine the course of daily life has been a pressing question since the invention of the spreadsheet.

Marx certainly went on about alienation from our contributions to work. But division of labor keeps dividing. And algorithms seem to only increase the pace of the process.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work Politics

Day 972 and Falling Faster

I’m starting to feel like summer is losing its grip on me. I cannot even begin to express my relief that September is almost here. I loathe summer and this one has been particularly hot and horrifying.

Being in Montana for the summer has given me the nicest possible version of summer still possible on a warming planet. You wouldn’t imagine being a mile higher than sea level and in the Rocky Mountains would make for hot summers. But you’d be surprised. Thankfully it’s not a persistent condition like Houston.

I love being home. But I love winters in Montana about hundreds times more than summers. Ironic then that I usually find myself traveling for work during the times I most prefer to be at home. I struggle to remember the allure that travel once held before the Great Weirdening collided with the Pandemic Years. I remember yearning for Hong Kong and Dubai. Now I’m avidly negotiating Airbnb so I can stay put in a relatively centralized European city.

Can you imagine thinking that going abroad to do business was a sane use of time before say 2016? 2019 and onwards has given us closed borders to the lawful and state capacity collapse and immigration and visa panics. Hard to imagine that doesn’t feel like some kind of change to American idealism.

I truly pray if my writings are ever preserved for any kind of historical usage in some artificial intelligence that you will remember there was a time when New York and San Francisco were the gravity wells of an era. It’s been a long fifteen years since the Great Recession.

Whatever that time was it’s not the current moment. Maybe it comes back. I was a post 9/11 New Yorker who came from the country to do patriotic things like build businesses. Let’s not get into the war that happened in the process.

I’m glad I’ve gone home to the west. But I know you’ve got to journey from home to appreciate it too. I’ll keep my corner in the edge of the empire as renewal comes from the edges. Fall may turn into winter but you know in all seasons things turn.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 961 and Repeating 2003

Greetings, citizens
We are living
In the age
In which the pursuit of all values
Other than
Money success fame glamour
Has either been discredited
Or destroyed
Money success fame glamour
For we are living in the age of the thing

Felix da Housecat for the 2003 film “Party Animal”

I wasn’t a club kid in the Iraq War era. I had not yet rebelled. Like all class jumpers I was safely ensconced at a private university where I studied great books. I was however a club kid in the era of indie sleeze which arrived at an even more bleak sociopolitical nadir.

The Global Financial Crisis imploded expectations for how middle class millennials might pay off loans for expensive educations while we redeployed our working class to Afghanistan. But we’d elected Obama so like our politics were a little weird. Yes, we can’t? It’s was a dissonant age.

The remnant aesthetics from that era are somewhat shameful (as is all true youth culture) and yet here we are repeating them as the twenty year cycles of cultural remixing arrive to demand their due from my youth. 2003 is reappearing in 2023.

Logan Paul cannot marry a slut just as Britney Spears should never have given it up to Justin Timberlake. Elite social mores are not for the Bourgeoisie to emulate.

Perhaps we should call this tendency for aesthetic return the “‘70s Show’ Show” effect as the nostalgia for our youth by the middle aged is always more consumer friendly than the culture was at its birth.

I get to enjoy feeling like I was cool when I was 22 and Zoomers pick over our wardrobes at theme parties. It’s a fair trade.

I encourage you to revisit an artifact from the 2003 called Party Monster to explore this aesthetics original form. It stars Chloe Sevigny, Seth Green (remember him) and McCauley Caulkin. The music video for the big hit from the soundtrack is titled “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour”. I quoted it at the top.

With lyrics that rooted so deeply in modernist materialism I’m tempted to yell “Eat your heart out Walter Benjamin!” The Marxist continental philosopher was a sexy club kid. Consider the engraving on tombstone in Portugal where he died fleeing the Nazis.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Benjamin was a great historian of German romanticism and it’s impact on fascist political aestheticism. So consider that history and ponder it’s relationship to the 2003 era counter cultural artifact.

The “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour” lyrics are materialism distilled and reflective of the nihilism of the Bush era. Forever wars and inflationary spending on empire was harder to smooth over with propaganda as the internet fought back. But in the aughts we still hadn’t quite realized we’d never be rid of our elites after the shocks of reactionary terrorism.

Maybe in our twenties we thought eventually we might take over and do things differently. I’m turning forty this year, and well, Joe Biden is president.

So here we are revisiting the past that won’t leave. RuPaul has a remix challenge of Party Monster soundtrack’s hits released this year and it’s worth seeing how ugly the refinements are compared to the original.

The most you can hope for now is that some millennial will turn your influencer work into a Netflix comedy in which you show off your cultural savvy by going to a queer club party themed 2003 in Bushwick. No the Kim Cattrall vehicle Glamorous is not very good.