Tag: Elite

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Emotional Work Politics

Day 1770 and Making Suffering Worthwhile

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.

I froze eggs and embryos with my husband thinking that some day we’d have the money, health and stability to have children.

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.

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Politics

Day 1769 and Not So Nice on Election Day

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.

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Politics

Day 1763 and Baumol’s Cost Disease Accelerationism

Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.

This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.

Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune

So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.

About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance

Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.

For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.

How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez

Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.

There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.

And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.

As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.

So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.

Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.

We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.

So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.

I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.

The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.

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Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

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.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

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.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

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.

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Aesthetics Medical

Day 1751 and On Brand with Protestant Renunciations and Wound Care

I really misjudged my healing time on the testosterone pellets even though I pretty much always assume a worst case scenario for myself. I’m not really hurting but I am pretty bruised which is typical for me.

We may have some room for improvement technique with it so I am encouraged if the is as bad as it gets. I am not seeing any benefits from it yet and ugly bruising and a bit of an opening on an incision isn’t so bad.

A lot will depend on how well I recover and how much the hormone actually helps when I’m not healing. I’m also in the luteal horrors phase where my hormones are most ridiculous so I’m curious to see the curve.

The best part of this remains that I have a world class treatment for skin wounds on hand. Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy’s best research has been in wound management from burns to slow healing diabetics. So if I have to nurse a wound doing it with oxygen at pressure is actually pretty baller.

And to make it even more on theme, I spent most of my time in there writing out a column on skincare and the Great Male Renunciation of Appearances as part of my beauty shopping column and excuse to write about the secret history of appearance and its power.

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Aesthetics

Day 1750 and The Protestant Work Ethic and Masculine Beauty

I am booting up the more practical aspects of writing to provide value, as opposed to the writing I do here, which is to provide a thinking space for myself, and if I’m lucky occasionally my notes will help someone else.

Setting out to provide utility to others is a much higher bar as I’d want the content to meet my own expectations for value. I don’t have necessarily have expectations for utility here even if it provides it more than I’d expect.

I am enjoying preparing posts with research, and the next post teaches a little about the Protestant Reformation and The Enlightenment’s role in the great “Male Renunciation” of appearance.

Afew short centuries upended thousands of years of cultural norms that showcased the importance of masculine beauty and taste and replaced it with a drab mind first Cartesian split.

If I’m going to put together historical context, I figure it has to help the reader feel freed enough to experiment with their own world and consider that they can regain lost or hidden knowledge that was once foundational. In this case how masculinity communicated power, status and taste through appearance.

If you are aspiring to better yourself, to pursue an aristocracy of the soul, we will start with mastering the basic ingredients you will encounter in a drugstore and how they might build into reclaiming your appearance. We will go from there to Pareto-optimal options for building a habit that helps age well and look its best.

So I am having a bit of fun thinking about appearances. Anything anyone of us can do to free up another human to choose a life that is better for them is worth the time.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1747 and Hyper Autistic Protestant Work Ethic Beauty Blog

I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.

Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.

It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.

I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.

Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”

To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.

Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.

I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.

And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.

So naturally I’d like to do more to share that knowledge as I realize it is maybe much rarer than I realized.

I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1744 and A Yenta For Your Perfect Look

I am considering doing more writing, but instead of it being an exercise in creating more, I am interested in writing about how to consume well, so meet Nice Packaging, a beauty shopping column with a b side about the business of keeping up appearances.

Background on why I want to do this is below, but if you want to be a part of it getting started, I’m going to offer “founding members” for it live 1:1 time with me to craft your perfect routine. Details here

Background

I get a fair amount of joy out of being the person in my social group who everyone goes to for advice on what to buy in the areas where I am most expert. I sort of wish it just could be just category (cosmetics would probably top the list ) but I’ve developed a wide range of interests as I’ve cultivated my tastes over the years so I’m just as likely to be asked what supplements I take for my biohacking as I am to be asked for skincare and cosmetic recommendations.

Chronic disease offers very transparent revealed preferences as I do what works best for my health. A a long career in the style industry means I’ve learned a lot and how to apply it as looking good is often a side effect of feeling good.

I have been in wellness my whole career as it’s not just a matter of having clean clear skin and long hair (though I mostly do) but having been inside the corporate sanctums of everywhere from Goop to Equinox. I learned a lot sourcing for my own makeup brand and I’ve applied the depth of knowledge I have in cosmeceuticals to my own healing as naturally we humans pay more for beauty than we do for health. The cosmetics industry is often light years ahead of standard medical practice.

Other topics I will play with may be more esoteric. I oddly well informed on preparedness thanks to our Montana off grid lifestyle. I’m regularly asked about stocking pharmaceuticals and first kits as those wellness worlds overlap with chronic disease, biohacking and family preparedness. Wellness goes hand in hand with fighting for your own life.

I still travel a great deal so I’ve got travel and packing optimization stories and preferences for days. Having once owned a cosmetics brand that specialized in on-the-go makeup, I can tell you now to pack what you need to look good for any scenario from surviving O’Hare with your family to packing black tie makeup that fits through London Heathrow’s quart bag nightmare.

And finally as an avid reader in the go-to gal for science fiction and reading lists which isn’t as likely to go with the rest but I’m shockingly well read in the genre. And no I don’t mean romantasy. I read hard sci-fi from cyperpunk to space opera. Thinking about what will be popular in the future means living on the cutting edge taste of the right now.

I’ll maintain my daily blog here as this is me time or me space or whatever you might like to call it. I enjoy having the space to ramble about continental philosophy, internet cultural subgroups and their fascinating ecosystems, my own emotional work and becoming version of myself that makes me happy and healthiest.

So I’ll be considering what all this looks like, editorial cadences and how I will integrate which portions of those varied interests into what is most likely going to be a style blog.

Get Started with Me

I can also use your help in getting this off the ground, so I’m offering something special – if you join as a “Founding Member” for the first year (for $300), I’ll spend an hour with you, coming up with your perfect skincare or cosmetics routine, and even send you some products to get started with. And btw, this can be just as helpful for men as for women.

One of my greatest pleasures is putting together cosmetic routines for my friends to test and trial to get you exactly what works for them. I’ve done this for billionaires and working class dollar store shoppers so I promise you I know the market.

I typically do an intake session with you with a questionnaire and some one-one time where we yap about your look, your hopes for them and your ambitions. Then I go over all of your preferences, allergies and issues. With that in mind I create a month or so of samples total for us to experiment with.

I’ll prepare your routine from either my personal brand library of travel sizes (which is enormous) or I decant into sample containers creams, serums, lotions and lotions into one perfect routine. Don’t worry I’m a germaphobe autist.

My goal is to make a routine that matches your skin & hair, and bodily needs perfectly with hour preferences. Things like daily simplicity or complete looksmaxxing, your budget from drugstore to luxury, your comfort level with different kinds of return on investment from Pareto optimization to no routine is too much. And then you test it out and we refine it together. I’m like a yenta for your grooming.

Sign Up Here

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Aesthetics Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1741 and Land Acknowledgment

I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.

The TLDR is that Joel Berry the Babylon Bee guy took a swipe at philosopher Nick Land because Tucker Carlson interviewed an unknown tulpa like white conspiracy theorist who butchered (in his own admission) Landian theory.

A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.

All of this was enormously funny to anyone who actually reads Nick Land. Which includes myself and his current publisher Passage Press.

Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go

Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”

Yes I did the homework.

Land is obtuse and most enjoyable to the schizophrenic extremely online types due to his association with the CCRU or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.

This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.

Excitingly the rest of us were treated to a two and a half hour debate between Nick Land and Alexander Dugin hosted by Auron MacIntyre that has such tidbits as the Anglo-Protestant Whigs being a unique people who by encountering capitalism and the invisible hand at a crucial historical juncture obtained a paleo-liberal Christianity.

While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.

It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.

And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.

The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.

Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room

I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.

It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.

The Neo-Jungle of the open network is an implacable force with inscrutable intentions.

I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.

A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.

The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.

And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.

Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1737 and The Life You Save Might Be Your Own

I don’t know if high schools still teach Flannery O’Connor. I’m not entirely clear if we even teach American literature to college students anymore if I’m honest.

Reading literature for enjoyment seems to have been reduced to mostly pornography, but I suppose that’s what they said about D. H. Lawrence a hundred years ago so maybe I shouldn’t judge.

Why else would we read fiction if not for the vitality? And what goes from fiction to literature is a reflection of its time.

What it means to be alive, and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions, can feel pornographic if the subject is genuinely exposed. I’m not so sure the explicit and the erotic are any worse a subject than the base and the broken.

That is my awkward segue into the stroke of good luck which introduced me to French existentialism and Southern Gothic literature in the same year as a teenager.

Reading Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor roughly contemporaneously stood me in relatively good stead throughout the years as to assessing how little we deserve grace in this truly absurd world. Great horrors in a Christian world are hard tests of faith.

As an aside, it’s funny how we ask about her racism and but I doubt an American would have a nuanced view of pied-noir authors in the French pantheon, but I’m not here to decolonize anyone. Have a hazelnut.

Human frailty is my point, and we justify a lot under that sad reality, even as it’s simply true we are all committing a litany of sin by existing.

Literature explores the quiet horrors that we are damaged people in a broken world. That is why we read literature in the first place.

If not for our search for our humanity, we may as well be consuming information via a machine synopsis of a bloated airport book. Thank goodness information pornography is rapidly becoming ever more déclassé than reading romantasy. Malcolm Gladwell may struggle with that one.

I think it’s fine to explore the vitality of human choice and our pragmatic darkness in the safety of fiction. Reality is often much darker. We could all stand to live our lives a little more, even if we are afraid of the shadows our actions cast.

And as part of that effort the first thing I’d drop is spending time on reading book length business explainers. Replace it with short fiction and the life you save may be your own.