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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1492 and The Blob in The West

I am unsure how to feel about some of the shock and awe tactics being used in American politics. Well, it’s happening globally but I care more about how it happens here.

Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.

There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.

But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.

Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.

It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.

And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.

If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.

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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1489 and Foggy Frosty

I felt it was very important to get off the internet and soak in some restorative aesthetics. We are in a shock and awe moment almost anywhere you look from national politics to geopolitical technology competition. And everyone is jangling for narrative.

We’ve been a fog of informational war so long we forget we are all subject of multiple intersecting and independent actors who want your attention to be on their issues and their terms. We are living in context collapse hell.

Ans it’s not going to get any better. Many independent minded citizens are arising in these challenging times and they all operate with mindful caution. We have to invent our way out of the most challenging information environment of our lives.

Americans don’t realize we are subject to political and industrial competition and it plays out across social media. Don’t think because you know it is being done that you aren’t heavily affected. America has foreign enemies and quite a few domestic ones.

Extremism exist in some very weird bubbles. I am concerned seeing rationalist singularity cultists. But I’m also concerned about high frequency hedge funders who manipulate markets. We are in a great power competition and I’m sure we all have totally sensible opinions about open source artificial intelligence models. Right?

It’s all very cyperpunk. Manipulation of financial markets is as grey zone a tactic as sniping the telecoms pipeline from Helsinki to Tallinn. And we should be concerned about being competitive. We’ve been snowblind before

It’s a nuisance as neither you nor I have a clear line of view. Some of us maybe have a few months heads up. The lead feels less and less even as I am as much a part of shaping narratives as anyone. I was using DeepSeek in the fall.

When I was in fashion we had this website called “don’t believe the hypebeast” to mog those overly concerned with cool. Don’t get mogged. The same principle applies here. Don’t try to figure it all out.

Go read something with soul, listen to some Bach, and be with your family. Be frosty in the fog and exist in the real while you still can.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1483 and If You Die In The Matrix

Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.

We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.

A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.

Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?

Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.

If you die in the Matrix you die in real life

We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.

Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.

A German math Olympiad transwoman on an H1B visa was killed in a shootout with a border patrol agent in Vermont. A shooting in Nashville involved a full Google document FAQ on a flavor of soyjack I didn’t even know existed and will not type here.

If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Politics

Day 1482 and Freedom, Responsibility and License

A Twitter Mutual who goes my the handle Vivid Void began a discussion about the challenge of having a friendship with someone whose highest value is freedom.

Now in the corner of Twitter where we discuss shared values and personal mutuality, there is an array of anonymous, pseudonymous and real name characters.

Running from how we know what we know

These accounts bring their experiences to the understanding of current civilizational values to life across many mediums beyond Twitter. Our wojack would be the epistemology enjoooyer but most of the memes have a darkness to them.

I happen to prefer the Twitter discourse and felt a pull to VividVoid’s thread on friendship with those who have freedom as the highest value speaks to my own conviction that freedom only exists within a broad set of personal responsibilities.

To think otherwise is to presume you have license which is claim for yourself of presuming a kind of irresponsibility that means you don’t suffer the consideration of others affected by your actions.

I don’t think it’s freedom as a value that is the problem. It’s the lack of realization that to truly maximize freedom, one must attend to many things (health, relationships, self knowledge, work, etc) which temporarily feel constricting – cowtongue

Freedom ultimately means responsibility to the choices you made and the people who are affected by them.

Libertarians in particular should most sincerely believe in the bedrock of responsibility in ensuring freedom.

Without that way shared way of knowing and understanding freedom we have juvenile behavior and culture. Those seeking to defer responsibility to others seem to seek a license for facing no consequences. It’s poison to any political system.

that it’s child-like to think of freedom as a thing you can have, a thing that exists, in the absence of responsibilities – forthwriter

There is no freedom absent responsibility. That’s an expensive view so I understand why people would prefer license to avoid that heavy burden.

I’d wager the biggest complaint of feminism is women who claim the agency of freedom but run to license when overwhelmed by the very real mutual responsibilities that bind us.

That is no less true of men. To claim freedom to act as a man has always meant bearing the responsibility of that power.

When men only wish for the freedoms of power without the responsibilities undergirding your claim to your own freedom it can be maddening.

Both genders wish for less license and much more responsibility in the freedom to build a thriving society of mutuality. And you might ask how to I know this?

It was revealed to me
Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1468 and Going HBOT

I was extremely frustrated with an autoimmune reaction that got out of hand over New Year’s. I don’t care for taking corticosteroids as their side effects are quite severe even if they can be the only option when an immune response refuses to calm down.

To repair the damage, I went to a holistic clinic that offers a range of services like infrared saunas, IV therapies, cryotherapy and hyperbaric chambers.

I’d heard good things about using HBOT therapy for autoimmune responses, particularly ones that are rheumatoid in nature. I’ve done two sessions so far and I have seen a remarkably swift improvement in inflammation and pain.

I’ve got 8 more ahead of me along with some glutathione and vitamin IV drips so I’m hoping to be ship shape soon.

News and Sundries

The Chinese venture ecosystem has funds engaging in some suboptimal behaviors. They are clawing back personal assets, banning them from services and putting founders on no fly lists. Which is needless to say not the best way to encourage innovation.

Mark Zuckerberg is taking a new tack with speech at Meta. The company employing content moderators for what is true is out and enabling Twitter style community notes are in.

Many moons ago Antonio Garcia Martinez warned that Facebook shouldn’t be involved in policing and censoring speech as it would lead down a dark path.

Much To Consider

Is most memetic self help that propagates well online now predatory in nature? A tweet thread to consider for those looking to have emotions or control them.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1461 and 2024 Year in Review Posts

And so my fourth year of writing every single day in public comes to a close. I choose to comb through each post by hand to give a round up. I could employ artificial intelligence to give a synopsis and I have run my writing through several AI models.

Still I find it helpful to do the rote work myself. You can see my 2023 round up here. If you’d like further back here is my 2022 round up. And my first year round up is 2021

I felt as if my writing this year was more variable in length, depth & insight but that’s more feeling than fact. It don’t know if I feel like I did my best work this year.

And yet I still found narrowing it down to 50-60 odd posts to be a challenge. I can’t tell if that means I need a new format, a change of pace, or a change in expectations. Maybe it’s fine to keep going and see what happens. As we head to into 2025 feel free to have a look at my 2024. Let me know if you like what you see.

Emotional Work

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Day 1416 and Lagom

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

Day 1236 and Art of Accomplishment

Day 1197 and Experiencing Excellence

Day 1149 and Time to Get Offline?

Day 1119 and Capacity for Presence

Day 1107 and Happy Birthday to Matt

Subcultures & Cultural Commentary

Day 1448 and LARPing Ourselves to Death

Day 1441 and The Circuit of Power

Day 1431 and Faking Autism for Clout

Day 1410 and Luxury Content After Institutional Failure

Day 1341 and Class Consciousness

Day 1328 and Weebs as Social Elite

Day 1259 and Cooler Than Me

1232 and Millennial Crab Bucket

1176 and Verner Vinge’s Legacy

Day 1121 and Changing Political Alignments in Young Men

Chaos Energy

Day 1427 and Friction in The Systems

Day 1421 and When Crypto Clashes with Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Day 1417 and Pareto Optimal Skincare

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

Day 1386 and Goatse Singularity (safe to click) and Day 1391 Hyper Object Lesson and Day 1387 Singularity Lore

Day 1303 and Toaster Fucker Problem

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Anarcho-Tyranny

Day 1173 and Autism Services

Politics

Day 1425 and Doorknockers & Montana’s Senate Race

Day 1405 and America is Speaking

Day 1403 and Legible Political Opinions

Day 1415 and Sliding off The Board

Day 1422 and Material Conditions

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

Day 1291 and Political Violence

Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in The System

Day 1103 and Don’t Talk Yourself into Regression

Biohacking

Day 1409 and Red Lights

Day 1290 and Covid Experiment with Nicotine

Day 1168 and Inner Monologue & Meditation

Day 1114 and Zoomers Aging Faster

Day 1107 and Polar Vortex

Goods and Services

Day 1388 and Take Good Care

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP

Day 1289 and The Discontinued Pant

Day 1263 and Hoe-flation

Day 1228 and Cotton

Day 1123 and Zombie Media

Day 1118 and Becoming a Distrustful Shopper

Startups

Day 1376 and Q324 Investor Update

Day 1363 and Landfill Apps & 10xing Code

Day 1347 and Economic Paternalism

Day 1320 and Becoming “You-er”

Day 1296 and H1 Investor Update

Day 1251 and Other People’s Labor

Day 1245 and AI Tooling

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Day 1172 and Inference is Up

Day 1145 and Founder Vitality

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1457 and Cultural Values

I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.

A debate over type of work visa called the H-1B kicked off days of horrific anti-Indian racism which then created a bizarre backlash insinuating white Americans of having a culture of under-achievement. All over a broken program that brings in 65,000 workers in a country of 300m.

Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.

The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.

Maybe someone else will remember this but I recall an incident during my childhood when Bill Cosby got canceled (no not for that) over statements suggesting that some portions of poor black American cultural values were not promoting success and achievement.

If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.

I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1454 and The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

I’m so unsure of how the next decade or two will play out. Anyone with a firm degree of certainty on the matter is suspect in my mind.

History is alive and material progress rests on the intelligent coordination of resources. We are in the middle of an explosion of intelligence. Will we rise to the challenge as a species?

I’ve had a wild year. I suspect many others feel similarly. The global year of elections exposed many tensions even as it resolved some questions of who has the power and how it will be used.

I’m more optimistic than I expected to be at the start of the year. We are living inside William Gibson’s Jackpot. As intelligence explodes and my own capacity to coordinate with others improves I am hopeful.

It’s Christmas Eve which puts me in a reflective mood. Changes in human nature are rare. If we change at all, it happens over generations of incorporating cultural change as it is combined with significant changes in technical and material circumstance.

Christ’s birth represents a significant cultural change for humans. From low circumstances arose a new way of living. The mighty see the grace of the meekest among us.

As we meditate on the values our ancestors worked to build into civilization, do we have the capacity to set aside our pride in the face of change? May we humbly seek redemption in the mysteries of time.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1453 and Shopping Malls at Christmas

I partook in the time honored tradition of going to a mall before Christmas. My family was inconsistent in its treatment of the holiday when I was growing up and consumerism was not a value we celebrated.

And yet now I think it’s a wonder America has exported the triumph of the American consumer at its most intense and made Christmas shopping a mentality globally. Consumer debt is a marvelous when it’s priced in American dollars.

Our holidays are now times for displaying status and taste in so much of the world. I think it’s reasonable to say we’ve been post scarcity since the mass commercial fertilizer and it’s all been status signaling since then. We all live materially better lives. Arguments for the impoverishment of our souls are still quite valid.

Yet here I am buying stuff before Christmas. Nothing makes me feel more like a piece of the capital markets like buying consumer electronics at Christmas.

The prices are better only because we’ve been trained into a consistent purchasing pattern. We can predict consumer sentiment and meet those demands partially as a function of training the consumer when to shop. The propaganda of the markets.

So I get to enjoy the overstimulating existential horror that is the wall of televisions ready to be Christmas gifts. The high fidelity color and intense noise is an assault on the senses. No wonder reality is a disappointment. I’ve never seen so crisp a picture. It’s all just a bit too much.