Watching institutional powers and public figures goes through the Kübler-Ross grief cycle as they grapple with technical and political change sucks. People are all over the place.
Institutional distrust from the public has America and Europe at odds just as our geopolitical position relative to China is most precarious. And yet this strange new world cannot possibly be coming. Having spent the last year in denial Germans have moved into anger.
Imagine what bargaining will look like as power shifts over the next few years. I’ve seen the depression stage already in technology as the shift in intelligence and computing washes over us.
I’ve come to acceptance only because I’ve got a head start. I didn’t look terribly sane at the time and now I am sitting pretty. Taking action while we grieve the loss of the world we knew is the human condition. If you can accept change is inevitable you might even start to enjoy the process.
I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.
As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.
The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.
If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”
It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.
I felt it was very important to get off the internet and soak in some restorative aesthetics. We are in a shock and awe moment almost anywhere you look from national politics to geopolitical technology competition. And everyone is jangling for narrative.
Extremism exist in some very weird bubbles. I am concerned seeing rationalist singularity cultists. But I’m also concerned about high frequency hedge funders who manipulate markets. We are in a great power competition and I’m sure we all have totally sensible opinions about open source artificial intelligence models. Right?
It’s all very cyperpunk. Manipulation of financial markets is as grey zone a tactic as sniping the telecoms pipeline from Helsinki to Tallinn. And we should be concerned about being competitive. We’ve been snowblind before
It’s a nuisance as neither you nor I have a clear line of view. Some of us maybe have a few months heads up. The lead feels less and less even as I am as much a part of shaping narratives as anyone. I was using DeepSeek in the fall.
When I was in fashion we had this website called “don’t believe the hypebeast” to mog those overly concerned with cool. Don’t get mogged. The same principle applies here. Don’t try to figure it all out.
Go read something with soul, listen to some Bach, and be with your family. Be frosty in the fog and exist in the real while you still can.
Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.
We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.
A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.
Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?
Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.
If you die in the Matrix you die in real life
We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.
Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.
If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.
My in-laws live on the west side of Los Angeles as well as one of my portfolio founders, significant extended family and many dear friends including one of my closest and best friends. I am afraid for all them as the fires in Pacific Palisades has rapidly spread.
Officials warned of devastating losses as the main blaze raced through the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. The fast-moving fire spread across nearly 3,000 acres and was still 0% contained early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department –WSJ
A professional colleague known well to the venture community Mark Suster is quoted in this WSJ piece as he and his family were evacuated. I fear many more may be in his position. I pray their homes are not lost.
I have an especially strong emotional reaction to these types of rapid urban firestorms after living through Boulder’s Marshall Fire two years ago. Over three thousand homes were lost. It was devastating to my hometown and it is still rebuilding three years later.
I advocate for preparedness as both an individual and a community. I have lots of posts and media on the top if you are interested. When these tragedies strike, show up for your neighbors and your family by preparing so that when the worst happens you can be at your best for people.
I began my review of my “round up” for the year post today. I was going post by post dredging memories and taking notes by hand. I’m embarrassed to say it took me almost 7 weeks of post scrolling to realize I was going through 2023 and not 2024.
Now you might argue that I’m tired as it’s been a long year, but just how crazy do things got to be when time is so punctuated with “happenings” that it’s genuinely hard to remember even the most shocking of events?
How is it that wars, elections, and major technological breakthroughs are just the daily happenings? Can it be that this much travel is required to do business? How long have we been living through this acceleration in politics and technology?
I want the narrative through lines of life to be more comprehensible. It is however clear that we are in a roiling period of chaos and even as I may remain ahead of some aspects I’ll always experience a trend multiple times.
Things that were huge this year were trends last year and were mere subcultures the year before that. Such is how information propagates in a networked world. I’m not even fully saturated on my own thesis.
Americans are in pain. Literally and emotionally. How that happened isn’t my focus. We are in the middle of a national conversation about the failures of institutional medicine and its relationship to our government. We are treading in deep water and it’s best not to get swept away.
There are many communities that have emerged on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, GoodReads and elsewhere dedicated to the many paths available to go about fixing the problems in your life. There millions of strong communities of interests, hobbies, courses, and network knowledge that can enable you.
One of those communities is called TPOT. What is TPOT, who is in TPOT, what are its values and what does it believe are all involved and sometimes contentious questions. Being illegible is a big thing.
We mostly agree it stands for “this particular corner of Twitter” which is a loose network of nodes of people interested in applying knowledge they learn across our networked multimedia to their real life.
The experimental “you can just do things” attitude is a big tent. You see DIY projects, tutorials, reading lists, artificial intelligence and coding discussions, fitness and biohacking experiments, nutrition and cooking, meditation and nervous system research, pain management, psychology and emotional wellness and much more. You also see more far out woo woo topics like psychedelics, evolutionary psychology, and many flavors of rationalism and epistemology.
One of the most qualified voices to speak on TPOT might be Brook Bowman of Vibe Camp. In my understanding of her interpretation, TPOT is a memetic virus and once you touch it you are in the topology of TPOT for good.
tpot is this crazy memetic virus where the term itself means so little and is so contagious that you kind of become part of it just by hearing about it
Brooke
This is protective and makes it resilient. The network is bigger than any node and this is a good thing
So TPOT is best understood as a network composed of many interoperable nodes of interests and many layers of engagement. A memetic complex that you become part of on contact. If you read my blog it’s likely have many clear lines to TPOT.
If you like fitness, coding, rationalism, nutrition, or even home improvement well congratulations you are one or two nodes away from “just do things” as a life philosophy yourself and might be a member of TPOT yourself if you talk about it on Twitter.
And this is now some very dangerous semiotic territory as we cope with the gaping wound that is American health and murder. And I am concerned the narratives are going to be heavily fought over territory.
Because it’s easy to dislike a techbro right now. It’s pretty easy to dismiss the group. I can see it now. “Are your friends into this weird sounding acronym TPOT? Have you heard someone say “you can just do things?” If so you need to alert the authorities!”
Of course this sounds funny and histrionic. It’s totally normal to take responsibility for what you can in your life and try out ways of improving your life somewhat.
Everyone is dealing with pain (chronic or otherwise). Being an adult is a set of emotional challenges to manage and most of us do so by making the shocking decision to take action and do something. That doesn’t mean this world is is dangerous. It certainly doesn’t mean murder. It means doing something in your day life like lifting some weights, shipping some code, checking your biometric data, and trying to be a friend to lessen the pain most of us are in.
I marvel every time I fly. My life rests on miracles and small issues like repair delays and malfunctioning climate systems can make the miracle feel too much like magic and not enough like good process.
I’m happy to be home in Montana after a couple weeks on the road. Financial markets are happy with certainty. So business is looking good and optimism is emerging in all sorts of corners.
And yet we are in the worst Cyperpunk moment of my life. I think about other uniquely connected moments and it’s got nothing on this.
I expect turbulence to continue. Both when I’m flying and in the wider environment. I feel as prepared as it’s possible to be with edge positions across the board and some distance from the center of the empire. I’m glad I’m back home.
I was preparing to head out for a lunch meeting when I got a blaring alert on my phone. I’d been putting on cosmetics in the bathroom while my phone charged in the other room. Initially I thought it was an amber alert.
The National Weather Service has issued a tsunami warning. A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters. Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coastal waters until local officials say it safe to return.
My blaring alarm was not for a personal family tragedy but a warning for the entire Bay Area. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake had been registered offshore.
Naturally Twitter lit up almost instantly as a number of older established users remain in the area. When San Francisco has weather or news it tends to dominate the instant chronological feed.
Thankfully organizations like the U.S Geological Survey and other relevant public service accounts spread information quickly.
I could feel my cortisol spike as one after another meetings canceled and texts came in from friends in the city (and those who knew I was in town) checking up on each other. We quickly learned it was a large earthquake and its proximity to the coast automatically meant a tsunami warning.
We are staying in a hilly neighborhood so it was easy to calculate we were 100 feet above sea level. It seemed we us an hour till any expected wave was due in San Francisco at 12:10.
An hour of warning seemed like a lot for filling up tubs with water and doing a few frantic preparations like washing socks in case we were looking at a disaster. We wondered if SFO might be impacted given how low lying it is relative to other neighborhoods.
A friend headed over as the park was high ground so we figured why not watch if something happens and catch up together.
As Twitter churned it was mentioned in some coverage that “this was a strike-slip fault, as opposed to a subduction fault, so it’s less likely to cause tsunamis.”
As other areas closer to the epicenter did not see waves, we soon got the automated cancellation of the warning. 12:10 cane and went without a disaster. The cortisol wave I was riding crashed. Everyday there is some new chaotic thing that gets integrated into one’s world as just another day. Yesterday it was corporate assassinations. Today it was tsunamis. Hopefully tomorrow will be calmer.
We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.
