Tag: Elite

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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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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.

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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.

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Media Politics

Day 1415 and Sliding Off The Board

It’s fun watching an entire nation realize none of our citizens functionally have opinions of their own as all of the tribalism of the American system slides off the board into the swamp of personal animus.

– @almostmedia

The great realignment is in full swing. And no one is sure where they stand. The worst thing you believe about your enemy is surely true just as only the very best things about yourself count.

Ego versus ego blunders against each other. The slow glugging of inertia and bureaucracy and nihilism begins to tug. First time?

It’d worth reading Riva Tez’s essay “no matter who wins you lose”

“We are so much worse off than the Athenians during their similar stages of decline. Thucydides once wrote, “The Athenians, who were the most democratic of all the Greeks, were also the most prone to make mistakes, for they were always in a hurry to decide, and were swayed by the emotions of the moment.”

The political satire of the poets in Athenian theaters heavily influenced the city’s political decisions, just as TikTok and the Guardiansway millions of malleable minds now.”

What do we believe as RFK Jr discusses previously quite left wing coded hippie truisms about industrial agriculture and pharmaceutical company incentives.

The institutionalists are the left now and oddly they like Monsanto. But now Bari Weiss is arguing for the value of institutionalists against Peter Thiel. Are we really in for a new era of anti-institutionalism? Do we know where the board even is anymore? Don’t slip and slide into the swamp because you don’t like someone.

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Culture

Day 1399 and Mimetic Competition

Opting into someone else’s personal metrics is a misery. When you dump a group of powerful or influential groups with adjacent but not aligned values you find status competition with in-group and inter-group.

I find this to be a little bit of a breach of decorum. People who pursue different goals don’t want other people’s rules applied to them.

So you find fearful politeness if you are unsure of inter-group norms. Everyone is interesting but not everyone has the same incentive sets or motivation.

The harder it is to feel safe within your in-group the less openness you will have with outsiders. Finding a way to ease the competitions for status only improves relationships between the allied groups. Find what you value and value the people who share those values.

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Introverts don’t do well with social overstimulation. Any time I attend a gathering where the majority demographic is nerdy, weird, and autistic I find myself feeling the collective vibes of the overstimulated. And it’s not always good vibes for many of them.

I am doing everything I can to take care of myself, be kind to others and still be gently socializing. But it’s not easy.

I’m exhausted from the effort, even with my attempts to practice productive habits like nervous system exercises and getting adequate sleep. No amount of supplements can fend off a collective sense of fear.

I always notice what a rude demographic we introverts can be in these circumstances. Everyone is doing their best to be present and do delicate dances of parasociality where you know each other from the internet but do not wish to intrude or interrupt someone doing business.

In the cases where you are socializing with friends in real life and the rest of a group “knows of” but doesn’t know actually someone you find yourself surrounded by defensive social postures. Plus-ones with little contribute make it even worse.

And I’m not even going to touch the social dynamics of status. Insecurity seems to run rampant in all human groups, but nerds who have known social precariousness are the worst offenders in these situations.

Fear over one’s place within a group that has a wide variance in status can be intense. I don’t like seeing anyone feel left out. I like to be welcoming to everyone I encounter. Even when I’m an overstimulated introvert.

It’s especially important to me to be nice when it’s a group where the capital that provides status (social, literal) rises to celebrity or billionaire.

It can feel paralyzing to interact with anyone who has some degree of status if you don’t want to make someone uncomfortable. The awareness of social graces isn’t always enough.

It’s just as likely that someone will put on airs and over estimate their status as they are to offend the actually important guests.

I dislike watching people police their own social status but it’s even worse when someone polices the status of their friends. It creates cliques and ostracism in the best cases. Cutting off access can help when someone is just an overstimulated introvert but in practice makes the entire environment more fearful.

These social fears can really gum up the works when it’s nerds concerned over their own place within an event let alone in society.

I feel pity in the most awkward of cases but it’s really born of sadness. Cool is a bit like grace. We do little to deserve its bounty, grasping at it only shows our hubris and it doesn’t work in any case. I wonder if that’s a heretical opinion.

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Community Culture

Day 1384 and Long Lunch

No offense to Stephen Sondheim’s Company, but I think ladies who lunch have been unfairly maligned culturally.

We are so quick to dismiss socializing as some superficial ritual. But social bonds are the way we maintain our civilization.

If you can make time to enjoy a long lunch with pleasant and diverting company, you possess a degree of richness that has little to do with personal wealth. It’s a richness of spirit.

Everything can acquire the social capital required to have a little lunch with friends. Being present and kind to one’s dining companions is a joy to be cherished.

Cherish those that would take time to share their company (and a meal) with you. Whether it’s a swanky restaurant, at someone’s home, or on at the office. Take a long lunch with someone who interests you.

The ladies who lunch understand the value of these social bonds to their community. Elaine Stritch would drink to that. And so should you and I.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1383 and Counter Elite

Culture is always responding to power. Power seeks cultural approval in order to cement its status as power. It’s more of a give and take than you’d assume though. Unwritten rules are meant to be broken.

“Knowing Too Much” about how institutions wield power has a tendency to spin out people who want to change the balance of power. Nothing is ever as static as it may seem and America is a fine place to be ambitious about claiming a little power.

Being in New York I hope to be seeing where the bits of tension around culture, cool, and capital should be producing frisson.

Seeking out aesthetic chills that grip your nervous system is an expensive pastime though. Youth and wealth satisfy psychogenic thrills in very different ways but everyone understands power. It’s quite a moment in America for seeing how elites and their counters square off.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 1369 and California SB-1047 Vetoed

Last night I received a push alert and then a flurry of excited text messages and phone calls. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the controversial SB-1047 artificial intelligence bill.

Gavin Newsom vetoes California’s contentious AI “safety” bill SB-1047

Twitter lit up with joyful streams of relief and praise for this decision. Everyone from politicians, economists, researchers, academic luminaries, open source collectives, founders and venture capitalists.

It was a bad bill that lacked the necessary clarity and focus to even begin the task of regulating the nascent field of artificial intelligence.

We can and will do better in finding regulatory frameworks for safety and competitiveness but this bill wasn’t it. It was especially concerning as they say so goes California so goes the world.

I have been banging on about the #FreedomToCompute and math’s crucial role in our constitutional right to free speech in America. This must be considered in all future attempts at regulation in America.

Math and computing power are as essential as speech. In today’s world, they ARE speech. We may speak in natural language, but the way we extend ourselves, build things, and grow as a species is through our tools. Computation is a tool.

These tools are extensions of the human mind. Consider that the first computers were just regular humans counting. We may have started with our fingers and toes as our first tools. And it wasn’t quick progress as the evolution from the abacus to modern computing took us nearly 4,000 years.

We’ve made an astonishing amount of progress in the last hundred years. We’ve gone from thousands of computations per second in the 1940s to 200 quadrillion calculations per second with modern super computers.

Consumer devices are better too. The computer I’m using to write this post has more power than the computers we used to send man to the moon. It’s 100,000 times faster with seven million times more memory.

Alas, as tools get more powerful the powerful get nervous. This isn’t the first bad artificial intelligence bill we’ve seen. We have Europe to thank for that. And it likely won’t be the last.

But defeating SB-1047 is a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation not only in California but across the world as the entire compute space came together to make its voice heard. And Gavin Newsom listened.

We should celebrate this rare consensus as we look towards better policy in our future.

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Culture

Day 1360 and Strange Days

Maybe it’s always been “strange days indeed” and it’s naivety to think otherwise. You’d think the children of American hippies and yuppies would be some of the most cynical people alive and I’m regularly shocked by the sincerity of normies.

And so while my hippie mother made sure I got all of the John Lennon, even the later years, I can’t say nobody told me they’d be days like these. I pretty much came into this skeptical of authority because America’s baby Boom liberals won the culture war.

A lot of propaganda has been slung for and against Uncle Sam. And we let people talk. Mostly. Media filtered a lot for us and now the internet has broken what little trust we had after Nixon. Not as if everyone remembers how we got here.

Americans barely handle the responsibility of our open information environments any better than your average culture. We let it mostly flow. And now it’s all strange days. If you pay attention it’s hard not to feel like it’s all falling apart at the seams. But maybe that’s normal.