A little quirk of my personal record keeping that day seventeen sixty six of writing coincides with Armistice Day and in America now Veterans Day.
A lot to be said for how Americans always make it about themselves. World War I because an entirely new scale of war that did not exist when we fought the Red Coats for self governance.
And that has a lot of foreign interventionism in it. But we won that war so the assist from the French isn’t seen as pesky meddling. Imagine how the British press must have covered that at the time.
It’s still hard not to think about how different Americans post colonial future could have gone. We stabilized into a democracy and went in meddled in other people’s wars.
I don’t know why it never occurs to most Americans now people meddle in our problems with the intent of making us an easier target. One man’s nation is another nation’s propaganda target. Americans get targeted too.
The soft grey war is much harder to see when the wars we are taught to remember get lumped into one holiday honoring all veterans.
Wars aren’t specific anymore for us and this is a bad thing. My generation got the “global war on terror” and we learned our lessons in ways far too abstract for most and concrete in ways.
That disproportionately affected regular people rather than the wealthy inner core. Hard to consider how that plays into other nations calculations. Just seems like remembering the specifics of a conflict might be helpful to staying a thriving nation.
It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.
I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.
2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.
And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.
Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.
And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.
It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.
However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.
We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.
Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.
Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?
That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.
Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.
Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.
We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.
Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.
I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.
Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.
I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.
Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.
I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.
A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.
That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.
The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.
The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.
I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.
My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.
So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.
I don’t know what it is about election day in America, but it has ceased to be a joyful, exciting day for me. I wonder about the lost version of me who ever felt positively about elections.
Now it’s a day of dread and worry. And not even having day 69 in the post’s title can make an old internet native like me chuckle. Nothing about democracy in America feels nice. I have no idea if it ever will again. And I swear I am not a cynical person, just a very tired one.
The civics education I got as a child taught me to see Election Day as a momentous moment in time where the will of the people is heard and considered and eventually enacted.
And in my heart of hearts, I can’t really let go of that, no matter how much reality shows me otherwise. I’m not sure if will is even the right word for a collection of such a diverse array of individuals that make up the American population. What could we possibly will as an entity?
And certainly I understand that America is not literally structured in ways meant to showcase the preferences of the plurality of the people. I understand this to be a good thing even. We balance a lot in a republic and never did it terribly well.
Somehow we always persevered. And so you presume that America will keep on persevering because what else is there to do?
And now, in this very plastic, protean in-between time, all feels far too malleable. Boundaries that I never thought could be crossed have been crossed repeatedly. The fourth turning is upon us and my generation is woefully behind. The changing of the guards isn’t going well and the choices only seem to get worse.
And so to sooth my own soul, day in and day out, have something to say about the times I live in. All seventeen hundred and sixty nine of them. Even as nothing really seems to get better, I try to get better. I do what I can because I can do more than most, and even that is just never, ever enough. I take on more responsibilities because who is there if not me? If not us?
And so, all day, I have been dreading the results of a mayoral election in a city I no longer live in, in a state that was never my home, safely in the comforts of a county that isn’t having an election outside of a city which is having an election which will affect me though I have no say in it. It’s a bizarre state of affairs.
I’ll be impacted by a mayoral election in a city that I deliberately chose to live outside of because we wanted to be beyond its reaches so we could live as we like. Which is a fantasy as the mayor of Bozeman obviously has a significant impact on the residents of Gallatin County.
And I’ll have to wait to see if a candidate for mayor, who has one of the worst possible plans for housing growth that I’ve ever seen, succeeds in taking the town further in a direction that sunk my own hometown two states down the mountain range.
And there is nothing I can do about it, because I chose to live outside of the city limits so that I wouldn’t be affected by those very politicians whose decisions will obviously have a knock on effect to everyone around them.
There is no winning in a networked world where our interconnection increasingly feels like a Chinese finger trap. The more you pull away the tighter its grip.
Because of course I will be affected. If Bozeman can’t build more housing because no one can afford to do so thanks to bizarre water allocation scheme the entire valley will suffer.
And all this because we wanted to live somewhere we could chose to build as we like on our own land and keep a few chickens. Another reminder that there is no other choice if America falls prey to the many maladies that collapse republics. Whatever comes next will be faced head on by all of us.
I’m at home with a freaky red light mask that could absolutely pass for a horror movie prop. My husband is sealed up in a hyperbaric chamber with two atmospheres of pressure and oxygen pumped in through a mask.
It may be Halloween but neither of those activities are horror movie material even though you could easily imagine them featuring as props in a serial killer series or Final Destination.
And yet these are things we are doing for health and wellness. One man’s horror movie is another man’s idea of a good night off and you can really tell we are tired childless adults that this is our idea of winding down on a Friday night.
The childless part wasn’t entirely a choice but we picked lives of professional intensity a long time ago so Friday night spent in self care is a sign that we’ve earned some respite.
Millenial success stories involve long hours. Millennials being all hallowed out on All Hallows’ Eve shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, given the current state of American politics.
I’ve never liked Halloween much as if I want to dress up I don’t need social permission and I really don’t care for parties or socializing. I got all partied out in my twenties when I had to do a ton of it for professional reasons. I know it sounds glamorous but nightlife is work.
I had a tequila client and I had a hotel with the hottest nightclub in the New York City. I somehow managed to have both Patron and Le Bain as a client in my advertising agency era, and while loved both clients it did mean eventually all I can associate with nightlife is work. When I had a night off I stayed at home and read science fiction with a face mask.
Which means some things never change. There is no suburban holiday with children to dress up and take out. And I barely have recollections of doing any of that as a child. It’s no surprise this holiday has no hold on me
I don’t know why I have no fond memories of it but I don’t. I have almost no memories of Halloween. The precious few years in which we lived in suburbs, where I had both parents and I was young enough to go trick or treating barely register. And I don’t feel sad about it
I am much sadder about the kind of world we fought to succeed in as adults. I am happy to be home and with the horror movie treatments to heal the ravages of the real world that have been enacted on both of our bodies.
The long hours over decades, the multiple Covid infections my husband suffered, my own autoimmune issues and the realities of aging are not horrors but they are real. And I acutely am aware that Halloween is pretend.
And nobody should have to pretend that they aren’t hollowed out when they are. That is a fairy tale for children and for the people who still are. Neither category include me. It’s perfectly fine to be tired on a Friday.
If I’m going to put on a mask tonight it damn well better have health benefits. Here is to red light therapy and collagen masks. May they heal what ails you on all hollows eve. You can face the dead and your demons tomorrow.
I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.
Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.
So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.
No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.
As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.
Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.
And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.
The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.
Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.
Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.
Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia
I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.
Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.
I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.
I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.
When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.
Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.
I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.
Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.
I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.
High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.
There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.
He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.
Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.
The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.
Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.
The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.
I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.
We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.
The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.
It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.
I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.
The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.
We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change. Kenzo: What game? Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse
Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.
