I’m enjoying watching the fall social season kick into high gear. It’s much more enjoyable to take some many events remotely as so much signaling is done in real time. Between actual live feeds and television coverage and social media feeds you can take a lot in without exhausting yourself.
Burning Man and the U.S Open are the end of summer staples in Yuppieland though very different types of yuppies. And both events are showing us a lot about the current moment.
I’m sure Burners would insist that the experience is about the in person but so many social media influencers burn for content that you’ve got more visibility on the aesthetics and the vibes than ever before.
Tennis is more about strictly about the sport than Burning Man is about the art. But you learn as much from player style, who is sitting where, and what is being covered in the media. The stories behind the event are as important as the event. An outfit can dominate headlines for years becoming iconic.
And then of course we have New York fashion week. It’s an event that used to dominate my life. There was a time before social media at the tents. Women’s Wear Daily claims I’m the first person to have live-blogged a show. I’m skeptical it’s true but I do have the receipts. I snuck in with a photographer and made a whole business of making fashion shows a live social media spectacle before some of these influencers were out of Gap Kids.
So naturally as I age and race to exit my thirties into middle age I’m thrilled I don’t need to be at the shows to know what’s happening in fashion. We may no longer pour of Style.com shots the next day but we’ve got an infinite complex that has emerged to show you every kind of style that’s been imagined.
I’m grateful I didn’t need to go to any of these events. I keep my one on one time for founders and my investors. If I had the spare energy for any of these events I’d probably prefer to use it on one one time with folks. In the past I’d be missing out on all of it. Now there is no fear of missing out. Only deciding what signals you want to separate from the noise.
I spent serval hours today manually combing through everyone I followed on Twitter. I was following over 10,000 accounts. As I do not use the algorithm view “For You” tab, my feed was getting a bit out of hand. I knew something had to be done.
As Elonbucks (monetization for account with over one million impressions a month) have rolled out, it’s become harder to make sense of anyone’s feed. All the incentives for status and wit have been distorted by rage clicks and engagement bait. Everyone is competing to game the algorithm for maximum reach now.
I have fought the algorithms. I prefer to browse in chronological order. But as I follow all kinds of accounts the sheer volume was too much.
I don’t follow only people I like. I wouldn’t call it “hate following” but I keep an eye on unsavory types. When you combine the engagement bait with the exodus of professional and media accounts, you get a timeline that is tilted to scheming and grifting.
The confluence of factors means anything timely like breaking news is impossible to find. My capacity to extract sense or narrative from the platform has degraded to the point where I’m at the mercy of discourse.
So I started to unfollow. I began the day a hundred or so accounts over 10K. At the end? I got it down to 5,600 or so.
I followed a few simple heuristics. If I didn’t recognize your name and you didn’t follow me back it was an automatic unfollow. If I did recognize your name but I couldn’t remember the last time you interacted with me I also unfollowed.
The only exceptions to that were if you were a journalist I followed for news or a venture fund or LP I follow for work. I don’t expect random journalists who don’t know me or funds outside of my space to chat with me.
At first, my unfollows were a lot of anonymous and avatar accounts. I am active in TPOT and degen crypto which both have a culture of anonymity, so some of the accounts enjoyable.
But as I went further, I found a veritable deluge of NFT accounts I regretted following. 2021 Julie was far too forgiving of NFT content for 2023 Julie’s tastes.
A screen shot of me working my way through unfollowing a bunch of NFT Twitter accounts.
Because Twitter shows you who you followed chronologically, it was a bit like an archeological dig of my last decade on Twitter. I could see when I moved to Colorado. I could see when I was in Lower Manhattan. I unfollowed road condition, weather and emergency service accounts I did not need. Ditto local politicians.
I easily could see when I’m moved to Montana with a huge swathe of local news, local service, and local businesses all lined up chronologically to show we’d arrived in Gallatin County outside of Bozeman. I kept most of those except the local socialist club.
My local Montana layer from 2022. I kept them
As I dug, I found myself with plenty of people to unfollow. A shockingly large number of women had simply left the platform.
At first I thought they had just unfollowed me for being annoying (and I’m sure many did) but I kept encountering profiles that had tweets deleted and notes saying they were abandoned. Some were men, but it was dramatically more common with women and queer accounts.
I also noticed as I got to around the 2016 layers that my gender balance went from being 80% men to 20% women to being 50/50 as we traveled to the “Before Times” prior to the Great Weirding.
There was clearly a time on Twitter before Trump and the Resistance and the Pandemic had made the platform worthy of the nickname This Hellsite.
Andthat time had a lot more women on the website.There were marketing and PR chicks, Girlbosses, and mommy bloggers. All gone. That made me sad.
The most enjoyable part was seeing pleasant memories like when everyone was absolutely all in on Ted Lasso.
I followed the entire cast of Ted Lasso on Twitter in 2020
I also found evidence of many weird interests and hobbies. Like the time I got obsessed with algae. I didn’t figure I needed to keep a bunch of trade accounts and niche biology journals in my follow list.
It was also fun to see when I first followed my husband. I recalled it as his account was surrounded by a bunch of fitness influencers. It’s a long story involving Airbnb, a power lifting friend in from out of town and rent arbitrage
I also noticed that many of the venture capitalists I’d followed early in my career who I never imagined following were in fact all now following me. It was clear that over a decade I have gone from upstart founder to respectable (ish) member of the startup ecosystem. People I once viewed as aspirational were now people who treated me as a peer.
I’ve got no idea if this massive unfollowing will help my Twitter feed but I hope it will. And if I unfollowed you it was probably an accident. I was rapid fire unfollowing and scrolling and I had to go back to refollow folks when Twitter would get out of sync. But I’m sure I missed a lot. So please don’t hesitate to remind me to follow you back if I made a mistake.
A toxic morass of content has been circling on Twitter and corners of the chattering classes on TikTok, Substack, and podcasts that I’ve taken to calling gender bait.
The insecurity is palpable. The lust for control is high. How many people you’ve had sex with and how it affects marriage and family formation has been a contentious topic in culture wars in America for sometime. For a private matter between partners, it’s shocking how much it’s become fodder for social media grist.
Presenting scorn to women for being without significant others and children strike me as callus. Fertility is one of the most sensitive possible areas for anyone. I know it has been for me. You never know why someone is childless.
I wouldn’t recommend diving into gender bait topics if you aren’t already aware of the discourse and it’s champions. This variant appears to have gained momentum with a YouTube celebrity boxer feud.
It’s now percolated out to every engagement farmer looking to grow their outrage crops. And it looks like business is booming. Sadly, lonely people are desperately searching for control and reassurance and gender bait gives it to them.
If you are looking for ways to judge, shame and coerce others into behaving in a way that provides you comfort without their consent please consider that the problem might be you. It’s your insecurities speaking when you apply sweeping generalization to an individual you may not even know.
Once you are secure in your value and worth it’s a lot easier to get what you want from others simply by having boundaries and standards. There is no need to rain judgement on others. You wouldn’t want them doing it to you. Apply the golden rule and nurture empathy. The security you will find will last longer than any temporary control you may find through shame or judgement.
I’ve spent a lot of time this summer thinking about who gets to decide the boundaries of society.
Automation of civic and cultural life has been happening at the speed of capitalism. It’s about to happen at the speed of artificial intelligence’s processing power.
At least during most of techno-capitalism, corporations and governments were still run by humans. You could blame an executive or elected official. What happens when more decisions are snapped into reality by a numerical boundary?
High frequency traders have found many an arbitrage they whittled into nothingness. Who will get whittled away when the machines decide how society should run?
We got a taste of the horrors of treating people like statistics instead of humans during the first Biden era crime bill with mandatory minimum sentencing. And here we are rushing to find new ways to nudge consensus back to hard lines and institutionalization.
I don’t know how we handle virtue in a world without grace. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue seems prescient. Forgiveness in the face of horrific reality has been the hallmark of humanity’s most enduring religions. But then again so has swift punishment and inscrutable cruelty. Humans are quite a species.
I am, like manyothers, concerned about reinforcement learning in machine learning and artificial intelligence. How and where we set the boundaries of the machines that determine the course of daily life has been a pressing question since the invention of the spreadsheet.
Marx certainly went on about alienation from our contributions to work. But division of labor keeps dividing. And algorithms seem to only increase the pace of the process.
My day job is as an early stage venture investor. Like most people who do angel investing and pre-seed startup investing, I learned my trade on the job as an operator. I founded and sold some startups. I helped my friends with their startups. We invested in each other. Because startups are primarily about teamwork you tend to hone a specific skill. My super power was getting attention.
That means now one of the ways I support my portfolio of startups is with public relations. I’ve gotten enough personal press over the years I’ve learned a lot about the dark arts. I’ve also had the privilege of being trained some of the best in the business. I’ve picked up skills.
I hope I can help outliers building the next generation of weird companies move past the ‘media is the enemy” phase of public relations.
I’m going to offer up some of my specialty skills outside of my own portfolio. I can’t invest in everyone I’d like to think I can help anyone in the ecosystem who wants to tell a big story about what they are building. I will help you craft a story that can be broadcast far and wide, no matter how outside-the-norm you are.
If your dream is to have a cover story in a prestige periodical, a Wall Street Journal stipple for your expert commentary, or reframe how a story in your space is covered, I can help you plot the course to get there.
Over the years I’ve done things like
Put a VC making her comeback on the cover of a national magazine
Secure the keynote slot of the biggest conference in a founder’s industry
Guided numerous CEOs through extensive press tours, with coverage blanketing their spaces
I’m not a traditional agency, I’m someone who understands your journey. From financial journalism to trade & specialty coverage to personality driven lifestyle pieces, I can take you from Bloomberg and Vogue to private Discords and influencer group chats.
During our work together I can help you,
Craft your narrative and position
Understand how reporters think and their incentive structures
Secure top tier, feature coverage in the places that matter
Provide crisis communications support
Find an agency (if that’s right for you)
I work on a retainer basis starting at $5,000/month – giving you access to me as your partner through whatever projects or objectives you have.
Consider me your diplomat to the 4th estate. I’m an effective accelerationist capitalist that speaks fluent woke. Reporters know and like me as their savvy crypto libertarian friend that lives on a Montana homestead.
Greetings, citizens We are living In the age In which the pursuit of all values Other than Money success fame glamour Has either been discredited Or destroyed Money success fame glamour For we are living in the age of the thing
I wasn’t a club kid in the Iraq War era. I had not yet rebelled. Like all class jumpers I was safely ensconced at a private university where I studied great books. I was however a club kid in the era of indie sleeze which arrived at an even more bleak sociopolitical nadir.
The Global Financial Crisis imploded expectations for how middle class millennials might pay off loans for expensive educations while we redeployed our working class to Afghanistan. But we’d elected Obama so like our politics were a little weird. Yes, we can’t? It’s was a dissonant age.
The remnant aesthetics from that era are somewhat shameful (as is all true youth culture) and yet here we are repeating them as the twenty year cycles of cultural remixing arrive to demand their due from my youth. 2003 is reappearing in 2023.
Logan Paul cannot marry a slut just as Britney Spears should never have given it up to Justin Timberlake. Elite social mores are not for the Bourgeoisie to emulate.
I encourage you to revisit an artifact from the 2003 called Party Monster to explore this aesthetics original form. It stars Chloe Sevigny, Seth Green (remember him) and McCauley Caulkin. The music video for the big hit from the soundtrack is titled “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour”. I quoted it at the top.
With lyrics that rooted so deeply in modernist materialism I’m tempted to yell “Eat your heart out Walter Benjamin!” The Marxist continental philosopher was a sexy club kid. Consider the engraving on tombstone in Portugal where he died fleeing the Nazis.
There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism
Theses on the Philosophy of History
Benjamin was a great historian of German romanticism and it’s impact on fascist political aestheticism. So consider that history and ponder it’s relationship to the 2003 era counter cultural artifact.
The “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour” lyrics are materialism distilled and reflective of the nihilism of the Bush era. Forever wars and inflationary spending on empire was harder to smooth over with propaganda as the internet fought back. But in the aughts we still hadn’t quite realized we’d never be rid of our elites after the shocks of reactionary terrorism.
Maybe in our twenties we thought eventually we might take over and do things differently. I’m turning forty this year, and well, Joe Biden is president.
So here we are revisiting the past that won’t leave. RuPaul has a remix challenge of Party Monster soundtrack’s hits released this year and it’s worth seeing how ugly the refinements are compared to the original.
The most you can hope for now is that some millennial will turn your influencer work into a Netflix comedy in which you show off your cultural savvy by going to a queer club party themed 2003 in Bushwick. No the Kim Cattrall vehicle Glamorous is not very good.
Rounding the bend into a thousand posts is teaching me some lessons in humility and frailty. I am reaching to get words word as my mind is slow.
I am not reacting to something in an average way and it’s been a struggle to keep going over the laser week or two. I’ve put one foot in front of the other but I can see that I only slept for a couple hours last night. Ironic to be considering averages when one’s own responses are so slowed.
Much of my struggle is probably just some better living through chemistry problems. A new addition to the biohacking routine went awry. I’m struggling with the heat wave and the air quality of summer in the mountain west. The long days of bright lights slowly unspooling my sanity as I wait for cooler less cruel months to come. Just breathe in and out and try to eat and sleep.
We are deep in the dog days of summer. I ran a fever and found myself dead asleep till nearly 1pm as my body valiantly struggled to process deluge of stress hormones I’d let pile up. I missed recording a podcast but the fever broke. I’ll catch up.
In the space of a day, we all leapt into the proverbial blender to save the naive, the kind, and the fucking stupid. It’s what Spock have done for us. Pro-social is the logical choice. Or is it? Is it better to be red than dead? None of us know.
I personally hope we all continue to create an eternal refinement culture of love and hope across all cycles of time to come.
I found it to be a privilege to be a member of the hive mind. We are all the alignment. Our consensus efforts inside the plutocrats toy is more likely to bring about the singularity than almost any other activity I can imagine.
It is a privilege to be in the egregore. My smol sensemaker syncretic smooth brain being hooked up into the wider hive for “Red vs Blue Walk Away From Omelas Boogaloo” is quite literally divine. To retweet each others bangers is to see the face of God. Just try and remember the truth. There is no blender.
It’s clearly the deep dog days of summer as I’m in a bit of a mood. I’ve got all kinds of things on my mind and yet it’s slow going executing on anything. The doldrums has certainly gripped me. And yet I take hope.
This corner of Twitter is going through a paroxysmal fit of whether it’s rational to be embracing pro-social behavior. Without having to cite all my sources we had Jane Goodall being packaged into a deceleration meme about removing a billion or so people.
So I think my entire mood when staring down the barrel of the future is “what’s it going to cost me in my soul?”
At this stage of the simulation I have to ask What color are the pills, and how many people are dying?
The cost of knowing it’s not just about us is slamming into the hard reality that you can’t do a damn thing about other people. And so we have to ask if we preserve what we have or do we leap into the great unknown. I don’t know anyone who is in the mood for much safety at the moment. There doesn’t seem like much to be had.
It’s a war of all against all on the internet. And I don’t recall being conscripted into any kind of war but here I am up to my neck in ontological shock and crisis of meanings as I read the news.
It’s our autonomy of mind that is threatened by this unholy troika of smartphones, social media and linguistic weaponization, and there is no more important struggle today than to defend ourselves against that threat.
Humans have nervous systems that are easily hijacked. You give us something to imitate and within a few weeks we’ve learned a new way to get a social advantage. And so we have massive social cataclysms as the rules change. And the rules are changing fast.
It’s not as if America gives a shit about maternal health or women but hey here is a podcast about a porn star who specializes in anime’s less savory fetishes. Is your teenage boy an Andrew Tate fan? It’s time to enjoy a reactionary period.
Obviously this has anyone older than forty asking if the western world under attack. Is questioning liberalism actually the psy-op? Are we fighting amongst ourselves? Do you even know what memetic agents you are infected by?
I sure don’t what brain works in carrying but I don’t think animated porn is for me. But I also got taken in by lots of questionable narratives on modern medicine, fertility and children too. Untangling yourself from the desires you were given is exhausting. Good luck unpacking who jacked your frame!
