Tag: Culture

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Politics Startups

Day 1430 and Realignment

American politics has become center of gravity for culture. I’m not thrilled about this as I have utopian high mindedness in my bones and that never pairs well with the real politic of a nation.

I felt being open to change was a part of my cultural upbringing as an American. Reagan Revolution babies enjoyed Clinton neoliberal growth. Optimism meant being interested in technology.

I have never been satisfied with reality because “we can do better” was both the regional culture of frontier Western civilization but America in particular.

We can imagine better which means we can do better. Somewhere between the neoconservatives forever wars, liberalism’s tolerance of intolerance and the growth of an expensive permanent state bureaucracy we lost some shine.

Losing our can-do spirit to fear and zero sum thinking led to strange institutional outcomes. Watching fear spread over years of pandemic and institutional failures did not help.

I’m not a novel voice in this discourse but most of the startup world and technologists in general had sincere affiliations with American institutional liberalism and even in particular the flavor of Democratic neoliberalism you might have associated with Bloomberg. The Obama administration certainly acted as if we were part of the coalition. The sincerity of that alliance is a question of course.

I don’t know where the realignment lands as we go forward but I hope as many people as possible sincerely embrace wanting more optimism.

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Culture

Day 1429 and a Buy Nothing Black Friday

I am usually a very dedicated Black Friday shopper. Once you’ve worked retail it’s hard to shop full price. Black Friday used to offer good value for many categories but now it’s a free for all of inconveniences and debatable deals.

I have become a distrustful shopper over the ZIRP years which has eroded my usual rituals on retail cadence buying and bargain hunting.As a hippie kid Buy Nothing Day was more a part of my life than Black Friday so perhaps this is simply a return to form.

I however grew up into an adult who budgeted carefully and “buy nothing” is a futile gesture when you only buy on sale. If you had any kind of specific taste it usually required some creativity to afford what you wanted even in the pre-inflationary world.

And here I am without my old budget pressures and I find there is just so little I want or need at the moment. I have the luxury of being able to buy nothing.

Classic only on sale Black Friday purchases like Uniqlo puffer coats or cosmetic sets are now no better priced today than any other day. I already purchased my specific serum’s & moisturizers and cashmere in other sales with similar savings.

Maybe I’ve finally become so prepared that moving off my typical re-ordering rhythm is just asking for trouble. I can get away with simplicity and repeat purchases.

Nothing on the market looks all that interesting. And I’m well stocked on underwear and socks. I guess I’m back to buy nothing day.

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Community Emotional Work

Day 1428 and Thanksgiving

It’s nice to have a record of multiple years of thanks to look back upon. In 2023 I was thankful for the serenity of acceptance. In 2022 I was grateful for regaining optimism. In 2021 I was grateful for the small measure of health I’d gained.

In 2024 I’m still optimistic (albeit cautiously) as I have the similar amounts of health and acceptance keeping me above the waterline of our chaotic reality.

I am thankful the incredible amount of progress I’ve made in my work this year. We’ve done so well with our first fund at chaotic I have little fear that we will continue building it even as the markets remain a challenge.

I’m thankful for our founders who made it possible for me to make a go of investing in weirdos.

I’m thankful for my marriage. Alex and I have made it to our second decade together. I highly recommend marriage if you get the chance.

I’m grateful for so much this year that listing it out seems a bit overwhelming at 8pm at the end of the day.

But if you have the chance to be grateful in writing it’s worth doing. Looking backwards on your gratitude enables you to look forward with optimism.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1426 and Cheap Nails

I am in Los Angeles for Thanksgiving week. I decided to get a pedicure yesterday. My logic was a larger city would provide better quality at better prices than I can get in Montana so I should make time to get it done here rather than at home.

Bozeman, despite being a college town that doubles as mountain resort town, has relatively limited options for cosmetic services at lower price points.

You can get traveling elite Yellowstone Club services quite easily. We’ve got top notch estheticians, massage therapists and even a tier one city dermatology practice.

But if you want a $30 basic pedicure you are shit out of luck. If appreciate the lower end of market price services and the value of regular cheaper grooming this isn’t Bozeman Montana isn’t ideal.

I have a little trouble with my spine so I appreciate being able to pay for help work task that involves so much bending over. I went on Google and Yelp for some shop triangulation. Being on the bougie West side of town meant locating a salon that was well rated but not fancy was a breeze.

What I did not expect to find was that nail salon had moved almost entirely to gel manicures. I don’t necessarily want that kind of long wear of a gel as it is harder on the nail bed and requires a fuss to get it off.

They only had a handful of regular colors as opposed to the giant wall of OPI or Essie. I picked the one basic pink which when applied I fear is best described as baby hooker pink.

It’s somewhere between a baby shower pink and a trashy mid-aughts white girl pastel attempting the era’s iconic milky Essie Ballet Slipper pink. I’d post a picture of my feet but that seems weird. Hopefully no one has cause to look at my feet as I’m a little embarrassed by the color.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1425 and Doorknockers

Yesterday I had one of those Lyft driver experiences where your life changes from what you learned. While driving to the airport, our very chill Zoomer driver explained the different financial incentives he got for ground game political canvassing in the Montana Senate race.

He mostly canvassed for the Sheehy campaign working for two different political action committees. It was a record breaking race for political spending in Montana.

As our driver explained it, Sheehy (the Republican candidate) paid fewer people more ($22/hr) than Tester (The Democratic candidate) with more flexibility and a higher number of hours, but more aggressive requirements (20 doors/hr) for success.

Naturally the young man being ambitious and motivated to earn (he clarified he was an independent politically) he chose being on the Sheehy teams as it rewarded his desire to make money. Though he did pick up some hours for Tester it just wasn’t much.

That’s the difference in the ground game in a nutshell. Ambition from a young man was rewarded and he aligned with those incentives. And the candidate won.

Im certain he was a terrific door knocker. He has the easy social graces of a local. He felt PacWest Missoula than over the divisive to plains kid but still as Montana as they come. He was white boy with face tattoos & piercings in the way of Zoomers.

His whole energy seemed to be aligning to vibes. He told us he came in to run ride shares for the big football game in Bozeman. It was a busy night and he ran out of hours (Uber tops you at 12). He was media savvy. Theo Von had just played Missoula and he was sad to miss it. Kendrick Lamar played on Spotify.

His attitude was so positive. He liked Uber, Lyft and Dashing for the flexibility. He said it didn’t feel like work because you are helping with the daily life of people. Helping others be responsible appealed to him. It’s nice to get someone who shouldn’t be behind the wheel home safely.

He used to make prosthetics but this paid better & was more social. It was fascinating learning how he picked up Uber & Lyft regionally in Montana and decided to run longer shifts for events. His attunement to supply and demand was keen. He seemed determined to maximize his time as it was his preferred lifestyle. He noticed incentives and it moves him.

If he ever see this “Hi Jacob!” It was great ride. Seeing viscerally how Montana’s senate race played out across the waves of rational economic actors living their American lives.

Categories
Politics

Day 1422 and Dialectical Materialism

I am a capitalist. I like markets. I like people having the freedom and individual capacity to choose the course their life will take. We enable that freedom by letting people choose to improve their material conditions.

That might be where the Marxists and I agree. Humans live in a material reality that exists outside of our own condition whose boundaries have significant implications on how we live our lives. I don’t know if I care about the dialect but we are connected and how we change has contradictions.

So how do we include more people in those improvements? How does America continue to do that? I’ve been trying to get my head around what inclusion means in a pluralistic democracy of our size.

Who decides what material conditions matter? Do we agree that we improving our conditions? What are those material conditions? I think making life better does involving improving our material conditions.

I just don’t think we improve those conditions from the top down. I maintain a firm belief in the coordination value of free markets. We make improvements by making our own choices. How do we include more people in making choices where we all benefit?

Some take for granted that diversity improves material circumstances. Certainly empires benefited from breadth and scale in the past. But we’ve seen nationalism and homogeneity work quite well for some endeavors.

I’ve been so fatigued by organizing my life around my identity and not my choices. My choices are obviously enabled and constrained by my identity. I’ve dwelled on gender and disability quite enough.

I’d prefer my conditions be more enabling than constraining which is why I believe so firmly in technology. We enable coordination to individual benefit through building systems that connect each other.

I believe the choices that benefit me can also benefit others just as surely as I believe in the golden rule. Do unto others. Applying that from nation state to neighborhoods to companies and collectives is a process. I’d like more of us to have a say in improving it.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1421 and Culture Clashes

I sit in between half a dozen different community nodes thanks to my interests in open source software, decentralization, crypto, and autonomous systems technology.

This set of interest covers a lot of ground from ecosystem level collaboration in financial organizations like DAOs and to player versus AI agents coordination to peripheral control of drones and machinery.

Many different demographics are attracted to these frontiers for different reasons. Hackers have a very different mentality than mercenary technologists looking for maximum margin.

Open source has traditionally struggled more from a lack of financialization than from an obsession with it. Which seems less true in the crypto era than in previous more academic and defense oriented eras.

There are classic open source business models and anyone with age and experience in startups has some opinions which I leave as an exercise to the reader. They occasionally fail and an open core loses more than they’d like to professional services. I am writing on WordPress.

One strange aspect of what drives these frontier spaces to interact is that depending on how much leverage you find in building a network you may have different incentives than other builders and users. Expanding out to scaled use may drive a lot more value than the resources required. How the surplus gets divided is always contentious.

For some, the most crucial cultural goals is expanding access to automation and ripping away as many of the services and middle men as is feasible.

Decentralized systems make it harder for middle men to maintain monopolies. Thats its own goal for true believers. For others the goal massive financialization that drives network connectivity is the benefit. Self interest driving common goals is perfectly acceptable.

As I watch the current season of hyper self interested memecoin cryptomania engage with the academic utopian open source artificial intelligence community, I am reminded of so many of the classic issues we have in financing and sharing in the spoils of common infrastructure. Who benefits is a question we should all be asking more regularly

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1420 and Stimuli

I am always shocked when people say they read anything I write. This isn’t because I don’t think I’m worth listening to but because I know attention is such a scarce commodity.

It’s so valuable we have entire industries dedicated to grabbing your attention. We don’t need to keep it necessarily we just need you to get distracted.

We downplay how well we know what works by indulging people who think they are immune to such things. Of course marketing on works on fools we sagely nod.

Of course we don’t want you to know how effectively we can move your attention let alone your opinion! You thinks anyone wants you to know propaganda works? Dunk on Jaguars new futura font. Scoff at those bot accounts.

Just know that most of marketing is Cocomelon, slot machines and dopamine hits. You can’t fight that without developing discipline which isn’t an infinite commodity. Most people don’t have much of it and aren’t even encouraged to develop. Good luck out there.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1418 and Winter Wonderland

I’m in a terrific mood. Maybe it is just the hormones cycling up. Maybe the red lights we installed in the bedroom are actually improving my sleep quality. Maybe it’s getting a foot of powdery snow over the weekend.

So much of life seems to boil down to manage my own circadian rhythms even as I plug myself into the hiveminds of my favorite corners of the internet dutifully everyday. And my body likes short days, long nights and the bitter cold.

Certainly success is contributing to my buoyant mode. All of my founders are soaring (which seems statistically rather unlikely given the choppy markets) and the vibes are good. My chaotic.capital clique is thriving.

It’s getting to the point where I think we should host a portfolio dinner or something. Though that would be challenging as we are a distributed group. Alex realized recently that we only met one of our portfolio founders in person before we invested. Can you even imagine that in a pre-pandemic world? Our deal flow comes from the virtual worlds I live in daily.

Being snugly ensconced inside several areas of with macroeconomic tailwinds doesn’t hurt but most of those choices were made two or three years ago so I’m simply directionally correct, well connected, and unafraid to commit once I’ve satisfied my own process. Everyone has a long way to go but it feels wonderful to enjoy their success.

Walking in a winter wonderland.

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Culture

Day 1416 and Lagom

As no cultural heritage must remain uncommercialized, you can find many pop culture best sellers on Swedish “lagom” philosophy.

“Not too little, not too much. Just right”

I’d actually never heard of it until today despite being the daughter of a Swedish American man. I am not one for balance though I actually do live a life of simple routines.

But I did recognize my lcultural upbringing when I stumbled across this piece on why the Nordic countries score so well on happiness scales. Apparently it is less “lagom” balance and more that we have reasonable expectations for life.

Consistent with their Lutheran heritage, the Nordic countries are united in their embrace of curbed aspirations for the best possible life.

This mentality is famously captured in the Law of Jante—a set of commandments believed to capture something essential about the Nordic disposition to personal success:

“You’re not to think you are anything special; you’re not to imagine yourself better than we are; you’re not to think you are good at anything”

I did not think I was anything special as a child. I’d laugh listening to Garrison Keillor describe the Lake Wobegon residents who were all above average. Those jokes landed with Minnesotans because who would be so foolish as to set unrealistic expectations?

I went through most of my life with the presumption that I was totally normal. I liked ketchup didn’t I? I wasn’t out of the ordinary and didn’t think I was especially intelligent or attractive relative to my peers.

As it turns out this was a real lack of self knowledge on my part. But it set me up for happiness. Every win feels fantastic because in my head I’m just a normal girl from a normal family who will achieve normal things.

None of that ended up being true. And I’ve been pleased to find myself actually quite a bit above average. They say expectations are premeditated resentments. And I have precious few of those.

Maybe I have achieved lagom. I’ve got just the right amount of expectations for my life. Set it low and your achievements will always be great.