Tag: Culture Wars

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Culture Internet Culture

1348 and Boy Who Cried Racism

I was blessedly off the internet for a portion of last week so I didn’t experience the controversy first hand but racist engagement bait has officially become a growth strategy in startup-land.

A anonymous Twitter shit poaster handle Vittorio (who was an affiliate for a payments company called Warp) decided to post white supremacist content to his main account.

He has since deleted his account but not without some of the most heinous bigotry I’ve seen being put on display across Twitter. Be warned the follow screenshot below is offensive and upsetting.

Not so long ago being called a racist was a serious accusation which stained one’s entire life both personally and professionally.

It seems as if sometime between the Great Awokening and our Current Moment the once potent charge of racism has lost some its meaning. As identity politics and critical theory became mainstream more and more people, movements, industries and actions were labeled as “racist” in turn diminishing the potency of the term.

It’s the parable of the boy who cried wolf writ large across the very discriminatory Internet. We are experiencing the aftermath of years of “The Boy Who Cried Racism” and predictable it’s quite ugly.

The term has lost its power and actual racists are no longer afraid of the big bad wolf or anyone warning of its approach.

As being called a racist became a commonplace “insult” across social media more people decided maybe it wasn’t so bad to be labeled as one. Being called racist now even has shock value that can be leveraged.

It’s happened to other terms like sexist, homophobic, and fascist. We no longer fear the terms, like we no longer fear warnings of the wolf. But racists are dangerous. So are fascists and sexists.

Created using DALL-E-3 with prompt “make me an imagine of a boy based on the parable “the boy who cried wolf” but he is crying “racism”

I believe we now have so much blatant racism on social timelines as we’ve decided to label everything racist.

Perhaps it’s time to make it rude to label everything racist so we can once again heed the warnings when real racism rears its ugly head.

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1333 and Tagging Identity Algorithms

I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.

Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.

There are now reality dating shows about being autistic on Netflix so you too can be neurodivergent and accepted into a wider pop culture narrative of being part of normal living. Everyone wants love right?

Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning

I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.

Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.

It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.

Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.

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Community Culture

Day 1329 and Monkey See Monkey Do

I finally finished listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Peter Thiel. I prefer reading and writing but I put it on at 1.5 speed while exercising and eventually powered through

I usually prefer peace and quiet when I workout, but I thought it would be nice to catch up on popular culture. It’s something others enjoy so why not engage in some mimicry. And it did inspire some of yesterday’s writing if only tangentially.

I’m lucky enough to be internet friends with the peerless Luke Burgis. His hugely successful book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life introduced popular culture to philosopher Rene Girard.

I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the topic thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows.

What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”

Why do you want the things that you want? Well to get back to the Rogan/Thiel podcast, humans are still “monkey see, monkey do” when taking action and pursuing a desire. Mimicry is a powerful explanatory principle for human nature.

Not knowing who or what to emulate is surely a source of anxiety in our current moment. What constitutes the good and the true seems especially unclear in our long now modernity. Which way western man? As social animals we look to each other. If you want to give others something worth mirroring you have that power. Equally who you choose to emulate impacts others. Choose wisely.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1328 and Weebs as New Social Elites

Yesterday, Occulus and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, posted a picture of him doing Nyan Neko Sugar Girl cosplay to his Twitter account. It’s a Fanime from 2010.

DragonCon enjoyers

On the heels of a sympathetic long form essay in Tablet Magazine that went viral, Palmer posting friendly cat girl jokes on main was clarion call to the one demographic that really matters in America right now. Nerds are the entry into the elite class.

Every flavor of nerd is flexing their might. Autistic weebs are claiming their power in the American elite class. And our politicians ans generals should be thrilled. It’s not not a moment too soon to put the engineers in on the great game

Showing off your niche knowledge is a favored elite game. Millenials & Zoomers understand their reality is being built upon arcane information and have gone for the deep cuts to keep up.

While on Tablet I came across their coverage of the Democratic National Convention where bizarre communist fervor from identities as inscrutable as Zoomer Hoxhaists are on display. Enver Hoxha being the infamous (and possibly crazy) communist dictator of Albania and not a good guy. But clearly some idiotic online intellectual has to treat history as if it were finding a cool band.

So if you subscribe to hidden knowledge as social capital then it’s time to read up on Gaetano Mosca and the Italian school of elitism. For discourse watchers, they were notable anti-fascist thinkers.

If you made it through the marathon Joe Rogan episode interviewing Peter Thiel you might have caught the memes about Chimp Empire. Well turns out that’s topical and an approachable angle.

every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled

The current elite class of interests has looked beyond our military industrial complex to to Silicon Valley. They have known for sometime if you want to beat the communists (or the fascists or the oligarchy) then partnering with the new nerd elite is now your move.

Don’t worry Douglas MacArthur was a red blooded American military man and a weeb. Autists long a good track record in defense innovation.

If you want an eye to the future then learn the ways of the weeb. Drone warfare and embodied habits? Take it a step further WinterMute. Your transgendered simulated intelligence running that drone was trained on green text and it’s time you learn to speak like a native of the hive mind.

Rise up cat girls! Now is the hour of the weeb. Do it for America. Do it for capitalism. Do it so we get some sick Mecha suits from Uncle Sam.

Categories
Politics

Day 1326 and So Dumb

Election season in American is just so very dumb. I don’t have the energy to even go on a rant about it though I will try.

We’ve got patently ridiculous economic policies coming from both political parties. Price controls and 60% tariffs are not the stuff of booming dynamism and I don’t care what else you are selling if those are my choices.

There is almost no point in attempting explanations of the absurdity of one party or the other as chances are good someone will scream at you if you decide to engage.

Which is a shame as I don’t think we should be tolerating this level of incompetence from our public servants and we should all be asking a lot more questions of politicians.

Moderates and centrists are just about done engaging in the public sphere at all now. There is little profit in expressing an opinion. If you pick a workable corner of the cozy web maybe you can find peace but the public internet is a mess of inanities and cognitive dissonance. Only idiots like me who don’t mind expressing an opinion are still screaming into the abyss of Twitter.

I’d love to be partisan and go in on a political team sometimes just to tune out screeching filter bubbles but I don’t think I’m ready to sacrifice my dignity for peace of mind or tactical advantage.

I also don’t think either party would have me. I’m too much of a capitalist for the Democrats and too much of a liberal for Republicans. Being against populism doesn’t make you popular. And it is just all so dumb.

Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

The older you are the more you begin to accept the way things “are” in the world. We’ve come to accept layers of professionalism between us and the real work of the world as we go about pursuing our own comparative advantage.

Surely someone is handling the bits we are not as this is an advanced civilization right? I fucking wish.

I don’t wish to disparage our expert managerial class but we are all human. The experts are just operating from past biases and some of them haven’t been updated in quite a while. The people in charge might even be quite wrong.

Sometimes things are much easier than you imagine. I remember being asked when fundraising for a cosmetics business about the relative challenge of sourcing manufacturing.

The bias ten years ago was that there must be exclusive manufacturers who make the nice things they sell at department store. Turns out any idiot who can underwrite a purchase order to buy anything they like for an astonishing array of things.

Now maybe you think ok but not all businesses are like this right many businesses have regulatory challenges and someone responsible must be in charge of all of that.

Surprise those are regular people too. And most of them have LinkedIn profiles now. Everything from the bureaucracy at the Department of Energy to the local zoning board is one like now

I spent a few years on a community board that oversaw liquor licenses in lower Manhattan right after Trump was elected as I wanted to be a more active participant in my own democracy.

Turns out a lot of life goes on at the local level and the levers of democracy go through having your papers in order. American life has a lot of paperwork. If you wanted to serve alcohol at your establishment you went through me and a couple other normal citizens at the liquor board

Most businesses spent small fortunes on laws to manage the paperwork of doing business. It was expensive and time consuming and I looked at a lot of Michelin caliber restaurant business plans.

I did everything I could to make sure a license got through. Most of the board had a similar attitude. We’d redo applications on live at a meeting sometimes which made them go for hours. But generally the goal was to get permits approved and have there be no issues that could trip the business up.

I felt I had a civic obligation to be more involved in helping people just do things. You can get through the paperwork.

I want Zoomers to do their best to convince the older people living in the past to help us update our priors. You can just do things.

You can find a laboratory for a formula or a factory for parts. You can find the regulators and local people on board and convince them of the soundness of your plans. You can just do things. Even if someone says something is hard you can probably do it. Even impossible things might have a chance if you just keep working the problems.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1317 and The Circus Came To Town

I am hunkering down for a Friday evening at home. Batten down the hatches, secure the chickens in their coop, turn on the security system and lock the doors kiddos because the circus is here.

Former President Donald Trump is hosting a rally in Bozeman Montana tonight and I would like to keep my distance from the circus. There are naturally rallies, counter rallies and protests to go along with the main event.

We don’t live in the town of Bozeman thankfully but comfortably far enough into rural county land that we shouldn’t be bothered.

Nevertheless when something big comes to town, and it’s harder to imagine something bigger than a political rally, it can get in the way of basic routines like grocery shopping or picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy.

I was doing a few errands over the lunch hour and traffic was crawling as trucks decked out in flags paraded through town. It was actually quite festive even if it slowed everything down.

Trump is speaking at 8pm and already by noon the rumor on local chats and news websites was that the indoor arena was nearly full with early arrivals.

There is a portion of 19th street where local farmers sell fruit and vegetables on the side of the road. Today it was packed with booths selling Trump paraphernalia instead of cherries or sweet corn. I

think the most astonishing flag I saw was “Cum-Allah Harris” but it was otherwise your usual MAGA fair with lots of signs for local Republican candidates as well.

Slow traffic and roadside flag sales

I didn’t get any close up pictures as I was trying to avoid the scene but I did a little bit of looking as I drove by. I’m hoping it brings good business to restaurants, bars and motels though in truth August is already so popular a time to be in Bozeman we don’t really have much capacity.

I’m safely back home long before anything has kicked off and I indeed to keep it that way. Don’t invite trouble and trouble won’t find you. But I look forward to hearing stories from friends and neighbors. Maybe I’ll watch the livestream.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

I’ve been engaging in more of American political discourse online as we head into the main campaign season. That’s probably a mistake.

American is no country for old libertarians. Or in my case middle aged small “l” libertarians who aren’t keen on more government involvement in anything. Cyperpunk is became daily life and the crypto-libertarian instincts some of us were raised into make us distrust this particular flavor.

But I’m in a pretty decent mood all things considered. Perhaps the typical depressive lassitude of the sunny season is being mitigated by the climate controlled extremely online nature of the networked era. Madness without breaking a sweat.

My people are not much for sunnier climes and our popular culture representations have more than a touch of summer madness. Better to keep us indoors when the mercury climbs.

And yet the madness seeps in to the virtual worlds of media. August is full of ugly surprises.Which brings me to the rat fucking.

As I said, I’m watching American politics. It’s definitely Knives Out season and as my friend Jon Stokes points out the semiotics are ugly. Now that we have the Vice Presidency match up set as Ohio Senator JD Vance versus Minnesota Governor Tim Walz we can run cultural scripts. It’s already ugly, sexualized and bullying.

meme warfare b/c it codes Vance as the self-loathing, repressed kinkster who hasn’t yet come out to a loving ally dad who’ll embrace him & pass the torch to him

This is ratfucking season and the Democrats are on top of their game. Politico has a short history of ratfucking which anyone interested in political campaigns would do well to read.

Roger Stone has been with us doing dirty tricks for so long sometimes we forget that both sides are up to it and have been since before Nixon.

Like my goodness how things don’t repeat but rhyme in twisted new ways. We’ve got a Kennedy with a car crash crash and carcasses in the news.

It’s wild that the same people are still around and involved and somehow not dead. You shouldn’t get to do the “Summer of 68” twice in my opinion. And absolutely nobody wants a repeat of the 70s. Can you imagine cultural stagflation? Actually maybe I can

Maybe we are doing reinforcement learning in a simulation of some sort and we actually are in a gradient descent of madness being smeared across an event horizon of frenzied power dreams of an artificial American swampland simulation that ran too long. It’s all awfully crisp.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1309 and Decorum

Youth always underestimates the importance of decorum. Holding yourself to the social standards of existing cultural expectations may feel like a bore or even hypocrisy. Worse you may feel helpless if you are from outside a culture and don’t know its rules. But have faith that you can learn other people’s ways and remain yourself

Fish out of water stories are universally popular. I’d urge you to read the TV tropes wiki on the topic as you are likely to recognize dozens of the variations. City mouse, country mouse, Freaky Friday, rags to riches, riches to rags, trapped in another world, and trapped in another time are just the start.

So why do we chafe so much at learning the rules of a situation and treating people the way they wish to be treated? Setting personal standards for behaviors is a strong basis for trust. Demonstrating respect and consideration for others may sound like mere social etiquette but civilization rests on top of it.

Now you may shout “come see the violence inherent in the system” and I’ll happily grant you that much blood has been spilled to build this endeavor we call civilization. I am intensely grateful to have ended up in this age where we have so much capacity for abundance. I’d like to keep it that way.

We have tools for you to learn about the social rules and the games we play as humans. You can just ask an artificial intelligence search engine now to help you learn the rules. It’s such a terrific advantage and I’d urge you to use it as my younger self had to learn many social learns through brutal trial and error. And hey if you still aren’t sure just slide into my DMs. I have some cheat codes I can share.

Categories
Politics

Day 1308 and Policies For Any Political Party

I don’t know why I let myself do this but I got irritated by the American election cycle. I have been libertarian and skeptical of the government well basically always. It was probably only really left flavored during a an Adbusters, Battle of Seattle, my favorite band is Rage Against the Machine teenager phase.

What can I say millennials did not like the government because the global war on terror went as well as every other war on “ideas” we’ve ever fought. We lost the war on poverty and drugs too.

But I do try to retain a kind of pragmatic libertarianism that is a recognition that my preferred politics isn’t always going to be broad consensus and it’s sensible to work opposing viewpoints as we have shared interests in civilization and America.

I am hugely affected by my proximity to international founders who adopted America because of the opportunities we have here that are unmatched elsewhere. Our market capitalism has given truly exceptional talent from places that suffer varying degrees of oligarchic, authoritarian and socialist systems.

It’s with this in mind that I’d like to ask American politicians but in particular the Democrats to please consider policy that allows us to remain a place where the best and brightest can rise and thrive. It’s good for all of us

My five basic policy asks are as follows

1) Stop taking aggressive, over broad interpretations of both criminal and civil statutes in regard to crypto. The SEC is trying to kill a nascent industry instead of shape and grow it. There are other first world countries taking different approaches. Japan seems to have adopted healthier ways. I’d like Gensler gone personally as I struggle to see this as anything but petty Wall Street protectionism.

2) Focus antitrust efforts on the industries where consolidation is harming Americans in structural ways like PBMs and agribusiness.

3) Retract the Biden EO on artificial intelligence and take an approach to akin to how we settled the encryption wars in the 90s. We don’t want to strangle a new industry as it is emerging just for the benefit of a few large incumbents and the fears of a few radicalism’s.

4) Stop discussing the ludicrous unrealized capital gains tax. It’s unconstitutional & structurally devastating to novel businesses. Only the rich will be able to afford to own a piece of a startup which will further limit social mobility.

5) We have got to find a way for companies to exit and IPO that isn’t this middle stagnant path of Microsoft’s regulatory capture corporate investment playbook. Markets need liquidity to function and the public deserves the chance to be rewarded.