Tag: Culture

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Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 876 and Americana

Americans have a tendency to think of themselves as the cultural norm. The default setting of media and movies and magazines has been the American empire. The world’s taste orbited our empire during nearly all television and cinema. I hear we Americans make our problems everyone else’s problems too.

It’s also a fantasy. Uncle Sam is a marketing gimmick. There is a propaganda machine even if it’s not organized by a sub committee of party loyalists. The vox populi push on our taste and our media industry will show them what is worth mimicking. Marketing works.

So it’s always amusing to see a bit of Americana marketed back to yourself. I saw this street advertisement for what appears to be a sincere sort of western show?

The Bosshoss Electric

I’m consuming an entirely different genre of Americana than someone in Frankfurt. Which I admit I’m not sure I fully understand as I think it’s maybe a sincere musical that has a western sparkly rodeo theme? Again the semiotics on it would require a critical theory degree. Which I guess you could get in the city of Schopenhauer.

Momma don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys. Rodeo seems like a brutal pastime in a country with no social safety net or functioning medical systems. Maybe that’s why it can be romantic here in Germany. Maybe you’d get medical care if you ever came in contact with a bull.

Speaking of semiotics, I’m rewatching Yellowstone while in Frankfurt. Yes it’s amusing that the yuppie woman reclaiming her lost Western upbringing by moving to Montana is watching a soap opera about land barons outside of Bozeman. Simulacrum. Something that replaces reality with it’s representation. I knew Foucault would come in handy.

Dicke Butz authentic American cuisine
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Culture

Day 874 and Steady Hand

All the science fiction I read as a kid has been a great trial run for the current reality. We have synthetic selves, AI chatbots, embedded intelligence, and money run by a consortium of your peers.

That’s not too shabby considering that my favorite utopian science fiction Star Trek depicted San Francisco as a crime ridden dystopia with a vast chasm of financial inequality. Oh wait.

I didn’t expect future shock to be so tiring. I expected a bit more fun and optimism and a little less doom, fascism and reactionaries. But I guess like all humans, we forget that our history is just repetitive series of discovering that power corrupts but human ingenuity prevails at solving the problems we bring in ourselves.

How long that luck holds is now in our hands. I sure hope we don’t fuck it up too much as we fuck around and find out. And if I’m going to survive future shock I need to take care of myself, stay one step ahead and make sure I have a little fun along the way. A steady hand and a calm nervous system is necessary for a chaotic world.

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Community Politics

Day 871 and Collaboration in the Time of Cultural Cholera

Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration.

Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is expensive and there are many competing populations from refugees to globo-homo cosmopolitans

I think only one in five people I’ve encountered appear to be native born German. It’s almost enough to make me feel like I’m in America. Which is to say I see the in-group and out-group competition clearly.

Different expectations for a civic polity can range wildly depending on the goal. We enable everything from humanity wide medical breakthroughs to individual physical health through incentives both individual and collective. And yes because I’m American I notice shit like who pays for parks and recreation. I also notice soda taxes. Choices are all around us and the incentives make it look like no choice at all.

Humans live at varying degrees of abstraction. Our capacity to go from whole to parts, and parts to whole, depends on education, temperament, intellect, emotional capacity and preferences.

And that diversity of views is what makes it so hard for us to infer what “chunk” of reality our fellow humans see. No wonder we struggle with collaboration as a species. Your fellow man is as sensitive to elite semiotics as they are to casual racism.

Where our new living history takes us is going to depend a lot on how we design incentives for collaboration that provides benefits to participants that are transparent. Otherwise I’d be strapping in for more civilizational struggles.

My aspirations include us finding ways to collaborate across much wider destinies with as much freedom for all can be managed. I’m hoping AI and crypto go hand in hand. High trust and no-trust are our only options at this scale. But like any reformation it threatens the current powers and worldviews.

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Emotional Work

Day 870 and Keep on Slipping

They say time flies when you are having fun. Some internal sick sadness combined with external geopolitical confusion, during what I’ve come to call “my sick years,” were in hindsight timeless years.

I am now past the worst of it. Time had no meaning when I was struggling to get diagnosed and treated during those years. Then we collectively ran headlong into the pandemic. Time had been a flat circle for a while and I wasn’t coming or going. My time was out of reach.

But those days of sad, static immobile time have given way to vim, vigor, verve (and fuck it, why not) even vivaciousness. I must be having fun again, as now time is absolutely flying.

I still carry my health challenges with me (ankylosis spondylitis like all inflammatory conditions comes and goes with the reliability of the fey), and the world is just as fucked up as ever.

And yet on the other side of many hard fights, I am happy again. The miseries are my choices and worth the fight. It’s many pleasures are fleeting, often, and luxurious beyond what my former self thought I deserved.

I hope time keeps on slipping like this for a while. The joy of my struggles now makes me eager to take care of myself. I take every day as slow as I can and still they go by so quickly.

Categories
Culture Politics Reading

Day 869 and Novelty

When I was a university student at Chicago we went through a two year core cannon which was mostly meant as a Great Books exercise. I’ve still got a dozen rainbow colored books dubbed the “Western Civilization” readers. I treasure them.

My professor was a scholar named Katy Weintraub. She was the better half of the beloved Professor Karl Weintraub. The classes were famous for good reason. I’ll forever be grateful for having been taught the western cannon by someone as capable as her.

One lesson that has stuck with me is the dangers inherent in the human urge for newness. She brought up the insidious, cumulative effects of novelty nearly every lesson.

History was driven by “newness” and its consequences. Each new historical moment was an opportunity to be reminded how fraught with the peril novel ideas and changing cultural mores could be. Death, war, famine, and conquest lurked behind an original idea.

Every rebellion, reformation, and new republic started with some asshole sharing a bright idea. And it tended to get you killed, even if your particular form of novelty got widely adopted down the road. See Christianity, various flavors of democracy, the printing press, and the Enlightenment to name a few.

The “best” part of modernity appears to be that everyone from yours truly to Donald Trump can constantly float novelty trial balloons from the comfort of their own toilet. Best and worst are doing a Janus double duty of meaning here.

Professor Weintraub might remind us that all forms of novelty are dangerous. New ideas represent change. And change is destabilizing even if we later recognize those changes as positive.

I’m certainly feeling the destabilizing effects of having to be alive during living history these days. I bet you are too. Turns out we don’t live outside of history at all. Maybe I finally understand why novelty represented such a danger in Professor Weintraub’s mind. Change has been, historically speaking, pretty hard on those living through it.

Categories
Startups

Day 868 and Chunks

Amid all the panic about how artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing human work, we are hiding a dirty little secret. Humans are awful at breaking down goals into component parts. Anyone who has tried to use any type of project management software intuits this. Articulating clear, specific and manageable tasks is very hard.

Humans are inference driven, always integrating little bits of context and nuance. If your boss gives you a goal, the best path forward on it will depend on hundreds if not thousands of factors.

What’s your budget? What is your timeline? Who is on your team? Do you dislike someone? Want to impress another person? Is the goal to be fast? Is the goal to be good? Is the goal to be as good as possible as fast as possible with as little budget as possible? Trick question, quit your job if that last one true.

Knowing what we want, knowing the best path to achieving it, and knowing how the pursuit of those goals affect your family, friends, neighbors, enemies and adversaries, creates layers of decisions in a complex matrix of possibilities. This is easy for a machine to do if we’ve given them the right inputs, outputs, and parameters. Alignment isn’t all that easy.

I personally don’t believe most of us know what we want. Beyond a Giradian imitation of what our current culture deems valuable, and thus worthy of admiration, genuine desire is hard to pin down. And that makes it hard to have goals. Goals are required to have specific tasks. Specific preferences on how a task gets achieved narrow it down even further.

If I could simplify down every detail and desire and nuance and preference set and also align them with my wider goals, ambitions, and critical paths to achieving them you know I’d have it all organized on some kanban board. And if the AI can extract that from me and turn all my goals into discrete assignments and task chunks I’d happily go full Culture and let them run my entire life.

Categories
Community Culture Travel

Day 864 and Parks and Recreation

All the shops are closed in Germany on Sunday. This is a basic fact I somehow always forget despite regularly being in Europe. They are serious about their day of rest.

Without the ability to go grocery shopping or otherwise pay for goods or services, Sunday becomes a day for getting your life in order. As long as you planned ahead for it. Which I definitely didn’t. But I made a go of it anyway.

I made myself coffee and did a mobility routine. I took a long bath with epsom salts. I did a load of laundry and set it outside to dry in the sun. I cleaned the bathroom so I could enjoy another bath later in the week. I washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen.

Then I found myself wandering the busy streets past closed shops and bustling parks. While the grocery shops were closed, the playhouses and calisthenics parks were open and absolutely packed.

Frankfurt has public spielhaus or playhouses in the parks for children with activities and equipment. When I walked by I saw teenagers playing basketball and elementary school children painting.

For the adults there are calisthenics stations on the river where you can workout in public any time of the day or night. I’m not much for pull ups I did end up playing around with a thirty minute body weight workout of squats, mountain climbers, pikes, bridges, leg raises, dips, planks and push ups. It just felt like a fun thing to do.

And isn’t that a pleasant thought? That on a sunny spring day it just seems nice to be outside playing. The dream of parks and recreation is alive in Frankfurt.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Finance

Day 863 Abstract The Pain Away

When I was a small child I attended meditation retreats with my parents. Hippies amirite? The particular branch practiced was some variant of Kashmir Shivaism, but I’ve got to imagine it was heavily edited for the consumption of white Boomers.

Who else would take a vacation to sit in silence, chant the Bhagavata Gita at 5am and practice sevā, all while having six year old children? Silicon Valley’s syncretic culture produces some weird hybrids. Seventies counter culture gave us some of the best religious revivals in American history.

If you didn’t catch the word sevā earlier it’s actually going to be the anchor of the post. Sevā as it was explained to me as a child at the ashram is selfless service. It’s work you do without expectation of reward. It is a dedication to others.

Practically it meant that anytime we lived at the ashram everyone contributed some set of work, mostly unskilled labor but not always, in the form of sevā. I did everything from food preparation and dish washing (working a commercial kitchen dishwasher is actually fun) to caring for some donated horses. I had fun summers as a child.

But the point was that everyone participated in some way to the functions of the ashram no matter who you were. And we did have some weird celebrities but that’s not the point. Sevā applied to us all. Though I’m sure glad I never looked too hard at the politics of finances of these ashtrays. Childhood innocence. As a child I just thought it was fun to contribute to the adult world.

But what I remember now is a sense of connection. That no aspect of these retreats was ever abstracted to far from me. The service was meant to bond you to an experience of a world bigger than yourself. And by recognizing that, you’d somehow connect more with others.

I try to remember that now when I am in lonely cities where every aspect of living with others is transaction. A food delivery service whisks you a meal in an hour in a country where you are an outsider without ties, bonds or service beyond the basic civilizational contract of capital markets.

The global cosmopolitan gloss of mobile applications have abstracted service away to the point where we can have an entire day of discourse about a man being sad a house cleaner washed a cast iron skillet but we can’t admit that we all pay for service as it cracks the facade.

We’ve got no sevā because that’s an expectation too great to hear. We can barely manage to pay a fee for service anymore. Imagine if we had to operate without intangibles. We can barely make Uber Eats function with taxes, tips, and services fees. Bless the markets for this freedom and curse it in the same breath.

Fuck the pain away? No, we abstract the pain away. No need to see who contributes anything. You can complain to a faceless chatbot cum customer service artificial intelligence about how some man on a bicycle didn’t deliver your order on time. The service lives below the machine now and has patience for frailty.

And yes I’m writing this because my Korean fried chicken and kimchi order got lost in a side street in Frankfurt for an hour or two.

Don’t worry the corporate entities that intermediated between me, the restaurant and the courier decided in my favor. The customer is always right as long as they have paid the fees to pretend that are lords.

All pain in the above transaction was abstracted away into some governance structure that decided it was worth 25 euro or so. One presumes some public market agreed on the price. I guess I did too. We all did.

Categories
Culture Homesteading

Day 856 and Spring Into Action

It’s been a beautiful week in the Gallatin Valley. Every single morning on my daily constitutional walk I notice new growth. Very suddenly we went from of melting & assessing snow damage to bright and sunny spring green.

The more northern latitudes get a shorter growing season (in fact we will get more snow) but the season is one of magnified intensity as our evenings stretch towards 10pm before the light is gone. And so on this first weekend of May we’ve begun taking action on spring. Hobby farmers spring into action.

Alex slicing open a bag of manure in our back pasture in preparation for tree planting
A man, a hole, and a shovel

My husband and I have no idea what we are doing but with the true spirit of fuck around and find out we began anyway. Our running joke is that Alex is a #ManofAction as there is just simply so much more practically to do when you live on land for which you are ultimately responsible. It’s a lot of fun and very grounding.

And as you might guess the most liberating feeling in the world is being held accountable for yourself and your choices. So even knowing full well you are basically that dog typing on a computer subtitled “I’ve got no ideal what I’m doing” you carry on anyway.

I’ve got no idea what I’m doing Golden Retriever Typing

While I did a few laps around the pasture and helped with a bit of the lighter work my role was mostly to capture the fun and excitement of trying something new. We picked two apple, two plum and one cherry from Starks Brothers to add in after a fall planting of a number of apple trees. We’ve got no idea if any of this is going to take. We’ve read some books but that barely counts.

Our cyberpunk John Deer free of computer parts along with a few stages of planting

Meanwhile inside the homestead I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. I’ve been appropriately assigned gender formative roles as I actually enjoy keeping things attractive and beautiful. The closests need turning over from the wool and layering over to tee-shirts, sundresses, and linens. Alex mostly goes from button downs to tee shirts. Jeans are swapped for cargo shorts. Being a man is simpler.

Winter boots need to be put away and flats, sneakers and sandals brought to the front. Alex had more work gear and footwear as he does more of the outdoors work than I do so shoes are more Alex than me.

Heavy winter oil and moisture rich cosmetics will give way to lighter water creams and ceramides. I don’t change retinols but I may add in more C and lactic acid for turnover in the heat. Alex meanwhile gets away with a basic vitamin C moisturizer and SPF.

I alas have not dealt with getting my hair trimmed in sometime but the reminder that it’s time to cut off dead ends is ultimately a spring time ambition. Hopefully you had the good sense to prune in the winter. My husband is lucky enough to simply buzz his head. Happy spring everyone and may your rituals enjoyable to you.