Tag: Culture Wars

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Finance Internet Culture

Day 136 and The Ease of Centralization

We are a few days into a news cycle where Elon Musk’s corporate socialism interests and/or environmentalism has pushed the Bitcoin discourse to a fever pitch. I don’t begrudge Elon because it’s hard out there for someone who takes government subsidies and we’ve all got to lean into our economic interests. The renewable energy credit system is a policy choice and my neoliberal friends would argue it’s a good one. It’s also one that currently pay’s Tesla’s bills.

Tesla makes most of its $ from RECs, not cars. Last year, it made $1.58bn from sales of RECs to gas-powered auto companies (which must buy to offset their CO2 emissions). Tesla has never been profitable without REC sales to bolster its auto margins.

That’s about to change. Last week, @Stellantis (i.e. PSA Group + Fiat Chrysler) told @LePoint it’ll meet carbon emission rules this year. That means it won’t need to buy RECs from $TSLA anymore.
Fiat Chrysler accounts for $2.4bn of Tesla REC sales from 2019 to date and 55% of Tesla sales since 2008.

What I think is really interesting is that Elon DOES know a lot about money, in particular the benefits of a centralized trusted player. Which he himself points out since you know PayPal. Centralization has been pretty crucial to fast efficient financialization especially in modernity. Of course that has some downsides as institutional power tends to accrete. Good and bad amirite?

The exciting thing about cryptocurrencies is that they may offer us they same scale as global institutions but without the whole plutocrats and fossilized bureaucracy part. Not that I’m advocating for Ethereum or Consyns.us but they put it well in the below quote.

Whereas our traditional financial system runs on centralized infrastructure that is managed by central authorities, institutions, and intermediaries, decentralized finance is powered by code that is running on a decentralized infrastructure

We’ve got a couple decades of experience in computing on the challenges of decentralized infrastructure. It’s not easy and it has costs. The costs are both significant in time and money but the benefits are significant as well. I personally find the argument that systems which are not centralized are less fragile and it is worth diversification into systems that are less fragile. I often chose convenience and speed but I also put significant effort into having systems that can withstand crisis and disasters as well. Security has always been about trade offs. And cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin, is about making some trade offs in efficiency for the sake of hardening of financial system. I’m philosophically inclined towards this. If I’m trying to solve global warming and getting to Mars I might find this less compelling as I’d rather focus on efficiency. This is also why environmentalists make great villains as they decide on that choice for you. I’m not saying Elon explicitly going for Bond villain but it’s an aesthetic.

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Aesthetics Emotional Work Internet Culture Politics

Day 134 and A Short Guide to Being An Edgelord

As my friend Seyi wisely said; sometimes your life gets chosen for you and sometimes you choose your own life. So try to chose your own life as often and as soon possible before someone else does. This challenge seems especially relevant as the culture wars rage on and regular peons like you and I can become collateral damage.

I’ve known for a while that I wasn’t going to be a fit for institutional settings like big tech corporations or civil service. I struggle to to be anything but myself. I mouth off too much. I’m not very good at kissing the ring. It’s not that I can’t engage in behaviors or manners you’d expect, I merely find it tiring. I’m also saddled with some physical limits. I’ve got the kind of medical conditions that gets a lot of virtue signaling from corporate communications types but isn’t really all that appealing except as a token. So unless I wanted to be miserable in middle management I knew I needed to opt out of the game. And that meant winning on my own terms.

Here is a harsh truth that the panic mongers in the cancel culture debate don’t want to say out loud. You cannot expect to survive a system and certainly not a culture war unless you take sides. Humans are riddled with bias and institutional self preservation is strong. The only side you should take is your own.

But you must accept that choosing your own life has consequences. Living out loud as the full uncensored you may cut off certain opportunities just as it opens new ones. Be aware of this reality and do not complain that you are a victim of circumstances when you have more choice than you realize. I’m not suggesting all areas are open to everyone nor that we shouldn’t fight for legal rights and protections. Merely that we are limited as individuals by the cultures and institutions of our time. Social mores move slowly even when pressed by revolutionaries.

My best advice? If want to be an edgelord. Be a real one. Go full crypto. Middle finger to the law. Fuck the police. Start a newsletter with monetization. Find your tribe. Learn some practical homestead skills.

You want to play corporate ladder? Play by those rules. There are dress codes and “ways things are done” and hierarchical structures you must obey. Get their credentials and be excellent at the values the organization wants.

You cannot straddle both worlds. This didn’t used to be a controversial statement. It wasn’t an affront that you had to put on a suit and say “yes sir” until pretty recently. Sometimes you just have to play the game. Go read the 48 laws of power and get back to me.

Trying to express who you are publicly if it’s not within bounds of the institutional norms might get you fired. Or maybe you take a stand that gets you promoted if you judge what norms can be pushed. Depends on the institution. So know that if you set onto the path of “choosing your own life” the consequences might be a lack of access and options. Or it might open you up to an entirely new world where you work and live with people who like you. But straddling the middle is recipe for emotional misery.

If I were you I’d begin to do the work to walk the path of the life you want now. Before someone else chooses for you.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronicle

Day 132 and Chaos Energy

Humans crave novelty but require stability. I guess this was probably fine when the worst we could do was gossip and club each other on the head. But giving humanity mass scale has been a mixed bag. Our constant dopamine seeking behaviors are piling up negative externalities as any individual can throw chaos energy out into the world with a single Tweet and fuck up the lives of millions. And I don’t even mean the former guy. Anyone can create chaos now.

Just today we’ve got a governor bribing citizens in Ohio to get vaccines with a million dollar lottery, Elon Musk once again choosing violence sending Bitcoin reeling, brain lasers zapping CIA officers more than we thought, and a gas shortage on the East Coast because infrastructure can can be ransomed (though at least that claims to have been fixed before market close). This is forgetting that the Republicans have decided to chose lies and I’m sure a thousand other chaotic things. And is just what is happening in America. I’m not able to even look at what’s happening in Israel.

The chaos energy was strong in 2020 and I think many folks tried to engage in stability seeking as the pandemic unraveled our routines. But our desire for novelty keeps cropping up weird shit and frankly I think you should be making preparations for a lot more future shock. Not because I don’t love chaos but because systemic shocks from all of this means stability is never coming back.

So we’d better get used to chaos. You need to find ways to live and thrive in this future. Because every one of the institutions we thought were reliable are just sliding into our DMs and showing us how the sausage is made. Insert dick pic joke sure but also distrust is fueling the chaos. We are ramping up the amplitude with every cycle.

I personally am living my life with an eye to less reliance on fragile complex systems. This isn’t to say I am against modernity. I’m actually more of a techno-utopian type. But Expanse fans will recognize the churn comes for all of us. I think it’s wise to become more invested in your local community and support what sustainable efforts you can. It’s wise to de-risk yourself from political and currency risks. And hell make sure you’ve got extra water. Because it is chaos energy out there

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 127 and Horizontal Thinking

In the beginning there was the word? I dunno, seems more likely it was the image and then the Levantine religions got around to giving God the word. And thank God too as internet culture couldn’t exist without binary stuff.

But lately it seems like we’ve decided to go all in on horizontal thinking. Now it’s all about images. Gifs, YouTube videos, twitch streams and TikToks giving us cultural understanding not though the written word, but vibes.

The weaving together of aural, visual and emotional planes is an aesthetic that I’m thrilled to see Gen Z adopting en masse. If vibes had a gender, it wouldn’t. But seriously, backing away from the linear is a lot of fun and all of this vibes zeitgeist has been throwing my thinking back to a 1998 pop-science book called “The Alphabet and The Goddess.”

The Alphabet and the Goddess by Leonard Schlain is about humanity’s progression from horizontal to linear thinking. Shlain, a neurosurgeon, argues that that learning written languages, especially alphabetic languages, altered human brain function from holistic thinking to linear thinking. In other words, humanity wasn’t always so limited in processing. That’s a kinda new development.

I can’t say I have any real expertise in different theory’s of the mind like lateralization, but it does seem as if we seek to reduce complex matters such as ethics to simple rules and numerical measures in human systems, this despite us having significant holistic and metaphorical capacity.

If you coded “holistic, simultaneous, synthetic” views as feminine and the masculine as a “linear, sequential, reductionist”, you’re not alone according to Schlain. The scanning of the written word and visual processing of images may be different processes for the mind and for some weird ass reason we gendered them. Even though it’s just a straight up difference in brain processing. Schlain says:

Images approximate reality. The brain simultaneously perceives all parts of the whole integrating the parts synthetically into a gestalt. The majority of images are perceived in an all-at-once manner. Reading words is a different process. When the eye scans distinctive individual letters arranged in a certain linear sequence, a word with meaning emerges.

Basically humanity has been livin’ la vida linear for a few centuries, even though we have been plenty holistic as a species. But maybe with the internet our horizontal image driven thinking is coming back? Which brings me back to vibes. Vibes getting the New Yorker treatment this week.

I learned that vibes have a strong tie to the critical theory crowd. I suspect this pisses off a number of more literalist thinkers that are dedicated to trad aesthetics… I mean, ummm, Burkean economics? Whatever. Maybe the trads and red pillers sense the critical theory backstory?

Gernot Böhme identified “atmosphere” as the basis for a new aesthetics of perception, a kind of over-all feeling that has much in common with vibe. Heidegger had used “mood” to describe the quality of being in the world, and Walter Benjamin had identified “aura” as the feeling inspired by the presence of a unique work of art.

I think I’ve finally found the through line of why the “woke, critical theory, Gen Z, gender fluid crowd” and their vibes upset the “Athens to Jerusalem Western Civilization” crowd. Going from “great works” to “vibes” is going from linear to horizontal. It’s big dick energy being trounced by hot girl summer. The patriarchy is falling to glitter queers. And there is nothing anyone can do about it. And personally I like these vibes.

Categories
Aesthetics Chronicle

Day 116 and Taking Up Space

I take up a lot of space. I spend time on social media because there is so much space you can literally be the President or a celebrity billionaire industrialist and there are still corners of the web you don’t penetrate. There is a lot of room for loudmouths, so much so that even someone like me still has plenty of room. I barely rate on the Elon Musk attention scale. Even when I’m screaming at best I crack into D-list zeitgeist. It’s like the privacy that comes with living in New York City. You can have some notoriety but the web doesn’t care. I like how you can feel alone.

The irony of course is that I think no one is paying attention to me. I think I’m an average Joe nobody that no one ever notices. This despite the fact that I am paid to be an expert in getting attention. No literally I cost a fortune (I’m worth every penny) but I’m somehow convinced I’m invisible personally. I can feel lost in a lonely world where I’m not even sure the people that love me the most can see me. I’m stuck in some lonely portion of my childhood where I felt abandoned so I’m replaying it out now as an adult. It’s not great but I get something from it.

Except this is a fantasy that is not true. I’m not that child anymore and I know how to get attention. I’m not alone. Even when I’m not consciously drawing energy to myself, people do see me. I can simply be myself and be seen. I command attention. It’s who I am.

You always think as a kid you will get some cool superpower like laser eyes or flying but nope you are going to get a super power like public relations or brand marketing. And honestly, when I’m not a self pitying victim I know those to be awesome super powers. You can make money and direct business and politics with those super powers. I just though I’d get something a little more aesthetic you know? It’s dope but also like adult superpowers are a letdown for your inner child.

I just need to remind adult me that I am seen. That even my normal personality not exerting her will force onto the universe is actually still quite visible. I can just exist and I’ll be holding space for myself. And it’s a good space with plenty of room for all of me. And still intimate enough to feel the love around me.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 111 and The Attention Economy

I like media. When I first moved to New York I had big dreams of getting hired to work at Condé Nast. This was almost immediately crushed by the reality that I was of average financial wealth (I moved to the city with about $500 and lived in a women’s SRO), not from a noteworthy family and notoriously poor at respecting authority.

But I was lucky enough to arrive in the media capital of the world just as blogging was turning into a cultural phenomenon. So it turns out I didn’t need to work for some bitchy queens to get a toehold in the industry! I was also wise enough to realize there was absolutely no fucking money in media early on so I watched many of my peers climb the ladder in new media jobs without being a member of the media myself.

I found ways to make money on marketing, branding, e-commerce and new media businesses. It was a lot more lucrative. Consequently I now have a large number of media friends (disclosure time) without any of the cultural baggage of being in media. Unless you count the time I was the first person to livestream fashion week. Which I didn’t technically have credentials to do but it got covered in Women’s Wear Daily.

I’m really grateful I never got suckered into actually being in media as I’d probably be broke, miserable and exhausted. And then if I admitted I was exhausted I’d have a bunch of the older generation of media folks dunking on me for saying that. Which is how I got into a shitposting thread with Glenn Greenwald today. Who I think might actually be in on the joke about grifter click culture.

If you don’t work in media I think you’ve got an inflated sense of their power and independence. It’s actually hard to make any money so you are always living at the whim of executives and editors. Most of them got into the business to tell crucial stories (naive but like good) and are stuck living at the mercy of a business that isn’t that lucrative.

A lot of bad faith arguments get made equating institutional power to individual power, and while it’s true having the power of the New York Times behind you matters, it’s also true that any random blogger like me has more freedom to pursue ideas than a staffer at a newspaper. So I think it’s sort of a reflection of insecurities anytime anyone gets worked up about media power. Especially if you know better as some of the older media folks like Greenwald do. These beat reporter exist in hierarchies with bills. They don’t have the freedom to shitpost like me or Glenn Greenwald. We are wealthy and independent. Beat writers are fighting constant turf wars just to stay employed.

It can also be true that beat reporters have to fight a constant battle for attention and clicks in order to stay employed. This means we get culture warriors and posturing. But both sides of each debate are engaged in a kind of elaborate attention grift. So when Taylor Lorenz or Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi sucker you in with a position on who is most virtuous the answer is whoever pays them. And guess who is paying? You and me. Our attention is getting monetized into all kinds of nifty revenue streams. I know this because that’s how I make my money. So next time you get worked up about the evils of media asking yourself why you are paying attention and who is benefiting.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 109 and Medical Outliers

Watching the frenzy around vaccines has been an emotional experience for me. A lot of people are making assumptions about the private medical decisions of others. I’ve been watching friends “believe science” and discuss bonding over their jabs. And I’ve been watching friends caution that perhaps we should keep an eye on the long term effects of novel therapies and weigh the costs. The most frustrating aspect has been that everyone assumes that I am on their side. That I’m normal enough to have an opinion that is based on political affiliations and not one informed by my status as a medical outlier.

I guarantee you that my feelings on medical procedures are more complex and nuanced than any zeitgeist narrative thanks to being a medical outlier. As I’ve watched worried well and vaccine skeptics look to bond with me (especially those concerned about side effects or long term impacts) I find myself frustrated. It’s not that likely your concerns are mine. The chances that you as a healthy person with maybe a few issues are also a medical outlier in the way I am is unlikely. Like trust me you’d know it. You’d know if you were actually unusual. It doesn’t fucking sneak up on you.

I’m literally outlier. By definition I’m at the fringes. It’s not a surprise when shit goes wrong as weird medical shit tends to let you know. It’s not a vague concern about something that might happen. I’ve got blood work and specialists. I watch my markers like a hawk to see how much we much we push my immune system quarter by quarter.

I want to discuss my decisions for my own safety and what I’ll be doing but it just doesn’t seem, well ironically, safe. Too many people are too polarized and frankly paranoid. Most of you don’t have to worry about the stuff I worry about. It’s just not that likely you are going to experience the kind of autoimmune system cascades that are a real risk for someone like me. It’s a one in a million kind of thing. So equally it’s possible what is very safe for those millions is a risk for me. I wish it weren’t.

So I would ask folks to please take some care with privacy and respect when discussing medical conditions with anyone. Especially if you know they have something complex or long term. Other people’s assumptions about what I can or cannot do makes me feel alone and sad. Don’t let your politics or your fears invade the space of others who may not be so lucky as to have the same choices and opportunities. I promise we really appreciate the empathy and kindness.

Categories
Chronicle Politics

Day 107 and Mountain States

My family made its way to Colorado in the 70s. That makes my brother and I second generation. While we may not have deep roots it’s not arriviste either. This is a concern as roots matter now. Every western state seem to worry about the influx of Californians on their culture. My family participates a bit in this too. Despite me having spent the last 15 years in Manhattan I have plenty of opinions about policy.

So I was fascinated by a series of essays showing what was driving the changing demographics of mountain states and who are actually the California carpetbaggers.

The thesis of the tweet storm by David Neiwart that drew me in was that Tucker Carlson and the recent obsession with replacement theory (in this case Mountain state “natives” are being replaced by liberal Californians but it’s actually code for brown people) was actually ass backwards. It’s the white evangelical population who have been moving from California and resettling in the mountains West. The actual demographic taking space from folks already there isn’t California liberals it’s California conservative!

In Colorado the urban areas of the front range won out over the deep red of the western slopes. Other states in the mountain west may have gone red but we managed to be purple without turning into a California hellscape. So our influx of red have blended with new urban blues for a relatively well governed state.

I do find the entire crisis over those coastal elites coming into the mountain states to be pretty funny. As if the politics of the west were ever really totally homogeneous. Plenty of towns have been liberal and we had Democrats and Republicans representatives. This need to always push narratives of polarization doesn’t do anything for the American people. It’s just more bullshit to entrench for us in our corners.

My politics are traditionally Western states. I’m a small government libertarian and I’m also inclined to let people to do what they want with who they want. Going too much to either side just doesn’t appeal to a lot of mountain state folks. I won’t vote for the Republicans till they drop the fascist populism so while I’m not thrilled by Democrats they have my vote for the moment. Maybe the western states are the moderates we thought were a fantasy all along.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 101 and Closed Ecosystems

The One of the most important novellas in the formation of my technical philosophy was actually written by a science fiction author Neal Stephenson. “In the Beginning there was the Command Line” should be taught in every history of computer science course. Go download it now for free and enjoy 70 pages of riffing on the utopian possibilities of open systems, the accessibility of closed systems and who is the ultimate winners of computing becoming a closed system (surprise it’s Disney).

The premise of the essay is simple. There are two core tensions in how computing has been distributed: open versus closed. The basic manifestations of which philosophy you pick have significant impact on what your users can build but also how accessible your machine or application will be to users. Stephenson focuses on the GUI or graphical user interface, perfected by the closed Apple computer universe, and how it has made computing infinitely more accessible to the masses while also taking away some of the power and flexibility of the original command line interface of prior generations.

In the battle for powerful and hard versus easy but more limited, Americans chose easy and the rise of the GUI began. Dicking around with your computer, let alone your phone, almost isn’t possible without graphical representations of computer programs. Even though said programs are ultimately manipulated several systems down on a command line (you know the “hello world” text interface you might have seen on some NCIS dad cop procedural hacker show) most of us have thoroughly bought into the desktop metaphor of the original Apple GUI. And yes this is old news. This problem of the GUI got won in the eighties. But the basic problem of open versus closed still rages on with us.

The current debate is most vivid on in the financial world with crypto, Bitcoin and decentralized finance as we all yammer on about DAOs and NFTs. But you see it in social media as creators become locked into closed platforms from which export of their content is almost not an option as without distribution and audience access their work means nothing. Creator economy businesses can make money from individual closed platforms but struggle to build businesses as they are too tied to one type of revenue stream. If they are big on say YouTube or TikTok but can’t take their audience elsewhere that’s an issue. Imagine a world where they could take their business with them not be locked into one revenue stream for a platform they cannot change.

What I’ve written here is more like an appetizer course for the philosophy debate and not an argument. I have an opinion in the debate which is that open ecosystems are better for more types of people but I’m also writing this on an iPhone. But I’m writing using WordPress on my own domain rather than choosing a closed platform like Substack. So it’s not exactly a simple binary outcome for anyone ever. Which is all the more reason to go read the novella now.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 95 and Context Collapse

I have reasonably high social intelligence. Yes I’m willing to flex on this. I’m able to suss out the contours of most situations quickly and code switch my language, aesthetic and context cues. Sure as a white woman in America’s vast “upper middle class” many social interactions and norms are designed for my comfort. But I spend time in spaces that are very much designed to exclude like finance. But I rarely feel out of place as I can find some point of intersection that allows me to find purchase with the leader (or norm setter) that sets a group’s context. To say that this is beneficial is an understatement.

I recently came across a piece of writing titled “A Theory of Collision Spaces” written by scientist who goes by the handle Generativist. The intended audience is folks who think probabilistically or at least have a firm grounding in computational thinking but if you have a head for logic you should be fine. The topic is how social media can do often lead to what is called “context collapse” but you might recognize as “people screaming at each other in bad faith in the comments section.”

The premise of context collapses is that online we may theoretically interact with infinite possible audiences. Infinite contexts makes it much harder for us to adjust or code switch such that we can telegraph that we care about the audience to whom we are speaking. It’s not impossible but it’s much harder. This is how one can make a statement that sounds innocuous but will end up pissing off some group that will come down hard on you. If the reaction is bad enough some audiences call it cancel culture.

Because I have a high social intelligence I’m less prone to getting caught in a context collapse situations. A quick scan of a profile and a few sentences of text is generally enough for me to subtly adjust my language and response. Of course, I cannot adjust for how others respond to me but I can respond to how they respond to me.

Think if it as second derivative social signaling. Limiting the possible permutations enables safety driven actions on my part. While I cannot survive an internet mob (no one can) even a tweet that goes reasonably viral is still bounded by social cues. The more adaptive you are at these cues the less likely you are to instigate a context collapse.

A lot of reasonable people have concluded that context collapse and internet mobs make social interactions on the internet too risky. The likelihood of encountering someone who will go splat against your reality and make a fucking thing out of it is none zero.

But I’d argue you have a weighting bias issue for the magnitude of the risk. You are much more likely to build something of worth from being social than you are to become “canceled” and I think this Theory of Collision Spaces essay just might convince even the twitchiest rationalist groupie. Why? Ensemble learning and computer mediated relationships are super powers for humans. Our ability to extend our thinking has two powerful tools in this era. We can learn from others. And our tools like our computers and their application layer act as extensions of our mind. But don’t my word for it. Nothing I can say will remotely compare to the paper as I’m just not as smart as this scientist.

So you get that social media has many opportunities for expanding our mind. So how do we become comfortable with the perceived risk? One point I want to get across here is that assuming all interactions online are bad makes for poor heuristics. So why is it not as risky as you think?

“Social cues mal-adaptively increase the unconditional variance of expressions while minimizing the group-conditioned variance.

Basically social media makes you lean into identity cues. We fight with negative identity opponents and align with positive identity proponents. The only issue? You might be talking to someone like me that code switches. “You cannot easily distinguish between unreliable counterparties, deceptive ones, and whether or not you are wrong.” So you could be talking to someone deliberately fucking with you, someone who legitimately just misunderstand or you yourself might be wrong. How do you know? You don’t really. All this “in group” signaling doesn’t make a ton of difference. It’s just the environment of the internet honing some badly social engineered aspects that are not inherent to the human mind or social behavior.

So go read that piece. Tell me what you think. And then go enjoy being social on the internet! Don’t let being wrong or being polarized scare you. We are still figuring out how being part machine mediated. A few bumps are to be expected