Tag: Culture Wars

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Chronicle Media

Day 29 and Momentum

I haven’t felt so invigorated by the internet in a long time. I’ve had a week of joyful chaotic fun alongside my virtual friends (which during pandemic times includes my IRL friends too). Without the alt right and their mascot President Trump sucking all the air out of the room I’m seeing a lot of relief. The slight diminishing of the existential threat has lead to a lot of what I can only call silly season.

Just about everyone I’ve encountered has been filled with newfound creativity this week. Stonk mania is really only a piece of the goofy energy. To be sure I’ve been riding high on the wave of GameStop and the other meme stocks (though to be clear we actually made money with a well timed bet on volatility and only bought one share of $GME for the fun). But it’s more than that. The giddiness that comes from any kind of upcrash raises spirits in all adjacent fields.

And as I spend a lot of time in financial and social media circles it’s been a hell of a party. Granted most of us are waiting for a hangover to hit but more than a few of us are wondering if we’ve tilted into an entirely new chapter of chaos as the world grapples with the power of loosely organized crowds.

Whatever comes next a momentum is building from the energy. We’ve seen a possibility that chaos can be fun and not destructive. A sorely lacking feeling in the last few years when memetic armies only fought on one side. Now it’s a free for all. And that is potentially a lot more interesting.

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Chronicle Finance Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 28 and Limbic Memory

Today I want to talk about how this past year has set in motion the next hundred years of human imagination. Yes, I think it’s that important.

Mental elasticity is an incredible thing. We humans learn quickly and have a seemingly endless capacity to adapt to impossible things once we’ve wrapped our minds around it. Sadly though, forgetting doesn’t come as naturally to us as learning. Once we’ve seen the impossible happen, we never forget. Instead of storing miracles and crisis in the front of our minds like new knowledge, to be reinterpreted as new and possibly ephemeral, it goes right to our limbic back brain.

The limbic system is set in the deep structure of the brain where it regulates autonomic or endocrine function in response to emotional stimuli. It’s part of our survival response encoding. Which is why trauma is so crucial to evolutionary pressure. Those that survived, generally did because they took an impossible situation seriously. It becomes a part of our reactive unconscious survival instinct. And boy is this going to have consequences for American millennials.

The last year has had its share of impossible things occur. And we’ve gone about our business adapting to things that couldn’t possibly happen before. Early doomers were dismissed on the pandemic, political Cassandras ignored until an insurrection occurred, and now a new kind of financial mania which Stalwart Joe at Bloomberg calls an “upcrash”. He explains the impossible inversion using 1987’s Black Monday 22% drop.

Once people became aware that such a severe crash in so short a time was even possible, the likelihood that it could happen again was never dismissed. The consequences aren’t as big, but in a sense, what we’ve seen in GameStop could be thought of as a Reverse 1987. Upcrash. A gain so fast and rapid, that it might previously have been thought to be impossible.

Why do I include a seemingly jokey memetic internet troll in a list of traumas? Because a positive memory is just as jarring to our limbic memory as a bad thing. We overweight good experiences just as heavily as bad. Once the impossible becomes real our bodies retain the memory.

We’ve now got sense memory for global pandemics, political instability and positive market manias in America. Things we haven’t had for three generations (or more in the case of political instability). And the consequences, most of which remain unknowable, for these visceral impossibilities won’t leave our bodies till we are dead. We are stuck with the paranoia and exuberance of this last year till our grandchildren are in charge.

So we’ve just tossed several intense traumatic evolutionary events onto American millennials that not a single institution can do shit about. And I’ve honestly never been more excited for what our chaotic future might bring.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 27 and The Short Squeeze

The speed at which we’ve transited from insurrectionist attack on the heart of democracy to every man strikes at the heart of corrupt Wall Start has captured my attention. The GameStop squeeze may possibly be the most interesting story of the modern social age. The first wisdom of crowds moment striking at an institution and doing enough damage to get the beast’s attention.

We’ve careened from institutional faith crisis to the next in the long trudge out of the 2010s. And doubled down in 2021. Because it’s fundamentally the same energy. Tearing down the capital to stop the deep state to rallying around GameStop against the man is a straight line. The age of the extremely online is here

Both events have strong kek energy to it. It starts as a joke. Some sophomoric humor on the message boards. It is hilarious and fun how we all cosplay hax0rs blowing up Big Hedge Fund. But it will not be funny joke when a pension fund implodes. Just as it wasn’t funny when we had a kek coup on January 6th. One sounds like a stretch. We could never find ourselves in a place where trolls blow up an essential financial instrument on which millions rely for their futures. But then no one thought a D list celerity pretending to be a businessman could ride a gold escalator into the White House either.

The GameStop happening is just the first instance of memetic market manipulation. Institutionals will get caught without realizing it. Because mimicry online lets idea evolution happen swiftly. The base reference materials quickly get widely diffused and most folks aren’t even aware of the source. Ideas get separated from the original context, for good or ill. Hence Trump and sedition being both serious and a joke. It’s funny till it’s a federal crime. You may not realize you are perpetuating something with source material that is meant to either redpill or push a grift or policy position. Which probably explains why there were so many confused Boomers who couldn’t figure out how they had accidentally committed treason.

I’d be surprised if we bring any politicians to justice in the capital attacks. But I don’t doubt the SEC finds a way to make internet mob pump and dumps illegal. Sure that would require that literally anyone in regulatory oversight roles understood how meme cults perpetuate. We can barely wrap our head around memes electing politicians. Moving markets is too much for the imagination. Except that it’s happening right now it just may threaten the powers that be. Fuck with democracy fine. Fuck with the capital markets. Now you’ve got our attention.

What worries me the most is despite seeing the straight line from danger to democracy to internet mobs throwing themselves at the markets, I am having so much fun watching it all unfold.

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Chronicle Politics Preparedness

Day 19 and The Anticipation

I’ve been hit hard by the sudden (lol) realization of the chattering classes that “it can happen here” both with the discourse surrounding the pandemic and America’s democracy crisis. Clearly anyone who deals in nuance has been concerned about our institutional capacity for sometime. But that realization becoming mainstream freaks me out.

I don’t mind being seen as a bit of a Cassandra. I think about doom precisely because I’m naturally optimistic. If I didn’t look at worst case scenarios I would live in a perpetually Pollyanna-ish state where I exude complete confidence that it’s all for the best. So I’d rather my public persona be one of concern and worry as I think it’s tactically more worrisome if I’m perceived as being overly bullish. Bulls never get the best prices. Please continue to think of me as one of your favorite bears.

So because I’m a bull hiding in bear clothing I really loathe when the zeitgeist tips into fear for everyone. I don’t know if that means I need to dial in my personal meter to greed to take advantage of the fear. Because if everyone is fearful then I need to go against that grain and be a bull. Contrarianism pays the bills right up until the second it fails spectacularly. The thing is I don’t actually believe anyone is fearful. We are talking a mile a minute about the threat to democracy and the rising death tolls but the entire upper class is riding the rising prices to greater and greater wealth. In a sign that I don’t have a particularly diverse social class everyone I know has has very good earning years. Everyone is rushing to invest and brag about their good fortunes. While simultaneously belly aching about how unfair it all is but really there is nothing they can do.

So what can I possibly use to temper my own temperament when it’s not at all clear where the zeitgeist lives? Is it fear? Or is it greed? is it possible that we are just petrified fat cats the entire lot of us? That would probably explain the banner year for gun permits. I quite honestly haven’t the slightest idea how the midterm plays out. All I can do is anticipate the second order effects. So I did a grocery order before inauguration and I looked at numbers for the spread of the nee covid variant. Only time will tell.

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Chronicle Internet Culture

Day 15 and The Wolf You Feed

A perennially popular “just so” story newly reborn as meme is The Two Wolves Inside. Not to be confused with the also excellent three wolves howling at the moon tee-shirt, this parable has a bit more payoff.

You can find endless “graphic design is my passion” variants of the parable from charming Etsy shop hipster versions to deeply weird mashups of Corinthians and Lanape culture. Thanks Art of The Christian Ninja Pastor dude. I’ll pick the firefighters training blog variant as beefy bros that save us from fires seem as good as any to own up to existential food demon metaphors. It’s not the best of the bunch and missed key elements like the wise grandfather telling the boy a story. But it absolutely captures the spirit of heinous layouts and type treatments meant to inspire you to greater things. Which is probably more core to the meme. As from there it reduces itself to further derp.

Why all this lead up? Why am I showing a badly executed meme that isn’t even the full story. Be patient good reader. Bad to the wolves. Well obviously we want to feed the good wolf. But also starving a part of you that isn’t socially acceptable also seems like a real asshole move. Why would you treat yourself so poorly? Or anyone for that matter. It’s like saying to a date “if you can’t handle the worst of me you don’t deserve the best of me” and then wondering why you get treated like a child. Bitch everyone needs to parent their screaming inner child. Blackmailing a potential partner into doing it for you is called codependency.

But I digress. I recognize the need for my own darker impulses. The tendency to swear (makes me relatable), the yawning almost never ending need for love and attention (makes me good at making things people want) and a litany of other bad wolf behaviors all serve a purpose. So maybe feed both wolves but recognize one of them can also kill you. Nurture it but keep it on a leash. Be the alpha of that pack. Oh god it’s been three wolves all along!

The tricky bit here seems to me where we extend out the metaphor to others. We want to be with friends and colleagues that are not fucking over their own wolves. Eating disorder wolves being starved out of fear. Ignored wolves. Misunderstood wolves. God it’s a parade of the kind of bullshit you have to empathize with daily as we grapple with the intrinsic sin and frailty of mankind. To say it makes the workplace a mess is an understatement.

It’s currently on my mind because I want to spend my time with people who are feeding and training their wolves for the best possible outcome for them. Genuine engagement with your faults and talents is a joy. It makes you better. It makes others around you better. And it’s just more fucking fun. People who refuse or are unable to engage with the sum total of their humanity just aren’t as interesting as those who are committed to becoming the best version of themselves. They also don’t tend to win as often, as limiting yourself out of fear is a finite game with only so many options to be seen as a winner. You either win a definite sum or you don’t. Evolution and bigger games and more interesting problems never arrive. I’ll just wholesale quote Alex Danco here.

First, finite games are played for the purpose of winning. Whenever you’re engaging in an activity that’s definite, bounded, and where the game can be completed by mutual agreement of all the players, then that’s a finite game In contrast, infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing to play. You do not “win” infinite games; these are activities like learning, culture, community, or any exploration with no defined set of rules nor any pre-agreed-upon conditions for completion. The point of playing is to bring new players into the game, so they can play too. You never “win”, the play just gets more and more rewarding. “

So ask yourself are going spending your time with people who are balancing out their wolves in a never ending game of joyful interaction? Or are you spending time with folks trying to kill off parts of themselves in order to win a prize that is simple and understandable. It’s not exactly a value judgement. Winning is good. Harmful behaviors towards others is bad. But I hope that we can all agree that a truly great life is a lot more nuanced than a scoreboard and a morality checklist. And yes this is me encouraging us all to spend time with better people who will support that.

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Chronicle

On Being Extremely Online

Many folks find social media to be overwhelming. It’s a constant barrage of sensory inputs. It’s not necessarily the most pleasant unless, like me, you live for large information loads. It provides me an emotional comfort get data points. One of the few things I could do when sick was scroll Twitter and read news (longer form not so much) so I have become as they say “extremely online”

I follow shifts in opinion like a rancher can sense a change in the winds. Being extremely online skews your politics in some ways. I can recite minutia in history and policy. Which makes it harder to form firm opinions. It’s all simply too nuanced to be partisan. Then I speak to family members who are dead sure of their position who can’t answer a basic question about how they decided to hold the opinion. It’s not so much that they are low information voters so much as I’m a saturated voter. If a pollster tried to talk to me they couldn’t place me. Which is how I ended up being the token white conservative that voted for Clinton that Frank Luntz brought to Oprah. So being a saturated voter does have its perks.

This saturation effect isn’t just true for politics. I swim in economic data. I follow petty feuds and undercurrents in venture capital. I have entire magazine mastheads committed to memory. I know what stories writers wrote a decade ago. I probably know CV of some editors better they they know themselves.

This also makes it relatively easy for me to move between different types of communities. Code switching isn’t just for race. Online it can be the difference between getting ratio’d or being promoted. And thanks to the constant scrolling and consumption I can talk just as easily to size proud chronic disease communities as I can the swol bros who insist being jacked is a moral authority. Which I find to be genuinely additive to my life. Diversity of opinion makes you smarter. It makes you kinder.

And holy shit does being in the information flow of diverse communities give you an edge. My favorite thing to do on Twitter is to ask someone to explain a controversy or event and nine times out of ten I get a nuanced thoughtful answer…from the source. Just this week I was feeling overwhelmed trying to parse the Bret Weinstein controversy at Evergreen college. It’s one of the original culture war battles on campus but I’ve never understood it. Media was intense and wedded to their priors. I couldn’t make heads or trails of it. So I asked. And within hours Bret himself took the time to point me towards sources so I could become informed. I still don’t know exactly how I feel about it but I do know if you seek in good faith the internet will provide. If you can find a way to intake more media and don’t let it overwhelm you being extremely online will make your life significantly better. Or it will melt your brain. No guarantees.

Media: In which the venerable conservative George Will loses his shit on the venal craven fuck nuts that are senators Hawley and Cruz. I also reread the interview I mentioned above with Oprah and I have to say I was spot on in my predictions.

Julie Fredrickson being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2016 about the election of Trump.

Food: I was out of pour over coffee so I acquired a latte from Spruce Confections. Ok I’ll also admit I got a ham and cheese croissant too. We then made a trip to Costco and acquired quite a bit of meat and vegetables so I don’t repeat that nonsense too often.