Tag: Culture

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Community Culture Politics

Day 1576 and Fight For The Future

I am saddened by the protective conservative ethos of some of our cathedral elites. I was filled with pride to hear multiple distinguished professor discuss their love of Boulder as emblematic of the kind often town we should all aspire to live in.

Boulder is a truly special town. Alas I have to question why it is that scholars with security and prestige can afford my hometown but their children’s generation couldn’t.

I am deeply saddened by the rising costs of my childhood town. We come back during the pandemic. When starting out my life twenty years ago I left my home as expenses rose.

My family didn’t own property. Regular people moved to other towns. Those who bought early fight to keep things. As they are. So only the wealthy, often conservative socially or economically, but generally institutionally secure elders own the town and no one else.

These preservation minded wealthy, either virtuous liberals or cultural conservatives want to preserve the values that created Boulder. The irony is not lost on me that the futurism of going back benefits the past entirely at the expense of the future.

But what moral or political good could there be in your perfect town and perfect conservation of certain mores if the children moved away.

You live in a garden made by weirdos and hippies and shined it into an expense that their own young cannot participate in it. Hippies and engineers produced a counter culture and turned it into a luxury good they did not uniformly pass down.

Boulder became a luxury good. I grant I could have a small piece of that. But would we flourish? Our elder elites keep their houses and smugly advocate against change to house even their own children. This change that necessary for the future their children will live in. We must be able to build for it.

I miss Boulder but I don’t miss this smug elitism of virtue. We chose to have a life where we could have a house and land and space for our lives and a regulatory climate where we could build the technology that will shape our future. I am sad it wasn’t going to be Boulder. We’ve lost Boulder to the security of the past and it’s expensive maintenance.

Bozeman is now the Boulder of the 90s. And I want to build up its future through the efforts of its industrious citizens and their ambition for building a future.

A forward thinking and growth focused governor introduced a future of building things with tools and technology and owning those benefits together. That the vision I want for Colorado and for Boulder.

Pairing his vision with two aesthetically conservative growth skeptical perspectives helps us realize the large gaps in values. And so I despair for the fact that I can never go home. So I must fight for my future. Which is I suppose what Renegade Futurism is all about.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

I spent my day at a conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Bensen Center for the Study of Western Civilization. It’s my hometown university and while I never studied there I was greatly enriched by its traditions of public and community programming. The land grant universities educated Americans like me even if we never attended them.

I suppose this is silly of me but I didn’t think an academic conference would actually be all that academic. I am used to financial forums and media shined up environments where doing the reading is sadly not a prerequisite. Academics very much do the reading. Or we said at my alma mater “that’s all very well in practice but how about in theory?”

I felt a little silly as the lone person on my panel who actually worked in industry and felt a little more acutely how absolutely unprepared our technical industry is for the task of running our elite institutions. We have on the ground knowledge and they have a very firm grasp of Hegel and Gransci. It’s a tension that has come to a head before.

And yet here our technical elite are gaining power and and a seat at the table and congratulations we’ve finished the long march through the institution. And somehow you still lost. We aren’t any closer to socialism or social justice. You know what happens in the dialect resolution next? Fascism. It’s like why pay the six figures for the degree if you don’t even read. Champagne socialists the lot of them.

But I’m also struck at just how divorced our academics are from the reality on the ground. We had an industrial class that founded private institutions that clashed with our empire elites before. How do you think we ended up with Stanford and the University of Chicago? Why do we continue this dance of institutional ownership?

And yet the cycle continues and we come up with new readings and new interpretations of how things should be optimally done. We have moral traditions and religious traditions and I’m sure this is an exhausting time to consider a new Pope so I’ll go light on my Catholic friends. Protestants just don’t understand. The future has arrived. You just didn’t notice it.

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Culture Travel

Day 1573 and Transit Manners

I’m surprised that the bad manners and poor social graces perpetuated by pandemic isolation continue to plague all forms of public transit.

I am flying from Europe to America today for a conference appearance in Boulder Colorado. This has involved a few smaller regional hops where an hour or so of flight time is spent in the air. Not so bad right? Wrong.

You must plan for an hour on each side of a flight transit to manage border control, passport control, baggage screening and security.

Add in another half an hour for the chaotic free for all that is getting a plane loaded up and your day can disappear quickly as folks cut lines, misunderstand their luggage options and otherwise practice social misanthropy.

It’s as if no one understands any basic conventions of transit anymore and we are collectively refusing notice or to do anything to fix it.

If I am lucky enough to be flying business or first class (the flat lay on a transcontinental flight is a must for my spine) I’ll typically board first. This used to be a huge perk

But now group systems are a mess. Frequent flier status & business class has now become group 2. First boarding is, of course, children and the disabled.

I get how this can be confusing. Once the elderly were onboard, I watched multiple passengers try to line jump me only to get a red light and loud beep. They would shrug and hang back.

Seems the jumping problem is now endemic and the crew has given up managing “gate lice” who try to smuggle themselves in early. We have to shame them now.

If I haven’t managed to board first I’ll find my front of cabin baggage completely used up. The new trend is taking first and business class storage and then going to your seat. I had to get a Tumi moved as someone took up the storage for my entire row.

Even as I was struggling to move other people’s baggage with the annoyed crew, the other travelers ignored our exertions. I’m quite short so getting a roller bag up often requires me climbing on a seat or getting a boost from someone taller than me to get it over the lip of the bin. Thankfully a military man stepped in after ten minutes of failures. Thank you for your service.

Categories
Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.

Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.

CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.  
 

This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.

My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?

Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson
Moderator: Paul Diduch

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1570 and Risen

I feel the change all around me. I feel the change inside me. On Easter one feels the miraculous in big and small ways.

Having traveled a not insignificant portion of the Silk Road from Adriatic to Ionia to the Bosporus this week I feel the changing flows of commerce, empire and faith rather viscerally. It sounds grandiose and yet now else can one explain the gravity of time and place?

Being embodied is our human journey. To overcome it is the stuff of myth, faith and religious belief. Understanding its meaning is glimpsed here and there in the natural world but is mostly beyond our ken.

I do not know what is coming or what I will learn in the process. The glory is in being put on the path. Happy Easter.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.

I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.

“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer

On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.

One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

The elephants eye domes of a hammam

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1565 and Elephant’s Eye

I love bathing cultures of all kinds. It’s the beauty girl in me. I’ve been lucky to have worked in a number of wellness and fitness settings professionally and it’s privileged me to experiences that make one feel deeply human.

The modern Korean spas are dazzling and as enjoyable to me as natural Rocky Mountain hot springs. Baltic and Nordic sauna feels like home. One day I’d like to do a Japanese Onsen.

Being in Istanbul I wanted a chance to experience the Turkish hammams. If I was a bucket list sort of person this would be on it.

In a past life I worked on the Standard Hotels whose Miami property has a local spin on hammam culture. I loved the baths and cisterns with the heated floors.

But I’d not had the pleasure of experiencing the real thing until today.

The elephants eye

The domed architecture with the elephants eye lighting is a wonder of the world. Humanity has been finding ways to incorporate beauty into uplifting our bodily function for all of recorded history.

The cistern

To lay on warmed marble and look up at the light while cocooned in warmth and water is a fine way to be embodied. And for a little aside for a certain set would you believe the name of the hammam? It was qualia. If that isn’t the inverse tugging at me what else could it possibly be.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1564 and Driving Along the Wine Dark Sea

The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.

That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.

My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.

Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.

I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.

Categories
Culture Startups

Day 1561 and Just Don’t Die

I’m noticing a trend among more and more of my social circles of fear, confusion, depression and malaise. Which let’s be frank isn’t at all irrational given (hand waves) all this.

Rapid changes in technology are slamming into geopolitical changes and it is scaring the shit out of all kinds of people. Personal politics aside, many of the institutions, alliances and people we lived with our entire lives are changing.

But the rate of change is exciting! So much of what we took for granted in our youths is simply changing. Maybe (ok definitely) some of it will be worse for parts of it. It’s normal to be afraid of change. But what if we just need to survive the change?

I’ve been in tech my entire life. I was raised in it by my family. My father absolutely loved gadgets and hardware of all kinds and dove headfirst into selling software. I married someone who works in it with me.

I went to work in it by taking my skills in understanding new tools and translating it to an industry that adopted all of it. What an incredible privilege it was.

I worked in fashion and cosmetics so it was a mixed back but many incredible creative talents made and sold clothes that simply wouldn’t have been possible in an earlier more closed era.

The changes my father and I went through feel like slow lumbering industries compared to the rapid iteration of tooling we are seeing now. How we make things is being changed in ways that is almost impossible to keep up with.

I want to survive the Jackpot of change that is upon us. That’s a William Gibson reference. I agree with Bryan Johnson. Just don’t die. Imagine what we will find on the other side.

Categories
Culture

Day 1557 and Care and Maintenance

The first stress test of our brave new order has arrived and the markets are pissed. Millennials will notice it shortly as tariffs are hitting Internet native homoglobo products particularly hard.

Many bills are coming due. And when you’ve let things go for too long it’s hard to maintain your current needs let alone build for new ambitions. America has a lot of debt and it’s time to crash the dollar.

But perhaps we can’t take care of anything in our lives and the currency is just a small part of our issues. The tariff crisis is a symptom of a wider issue of value in our own lives. We don’t treat any of the things in our lives as if they have value.

“Can the average house be maintained by the average person?” sounds like a nonsense question at first blush but I think it’s an important one?” Simon Harris

This is a problem across all areas of our lives. We don’t know how to maintain anything. It’s not just housing. People don’t know how to care for wool, leather or textiles any longer.

Many items in our lives are meant to last with care and maintenance. But these skills aren’t passed down any more. We stopped mending at home and it’s bubbled up from there.