Tag: Fear

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1447 and LARPing To Death

Do you know what LARP means? If so, do you remember when you first heard the term? Think back and recall the context of your first exposure to the term. I’ll give you a couple hints for history.

Maybe LARP was used to describe playing a tabletop game like Dungeons and Dragons. Perhaps you went to a Renaissance Fair and encountered the melees put on by Society for Creative Anachronism. If you remember Dagohir you are a real OG & also old.

LARP stands for live action role-playing. It originally involved fancy dress, maintaining character and strict but fantastical rule sets. Its not much different from what children call “make believe” except it’s done by adults who presumably understand the difference between fantasy and reality.

It’s likely if you are younger and extremely online, your first encounter with LARPing was less “gamers dressed up with swords” and more “anon pretending to be some type of identity” on a social media platform. Like based and woke, LARP is a term that has had a lot of semantic drift.

Increasingly it feels as if some of us aren’t sure what is shared consensus reality and what is fantasy anymore. We used to call that “crazy” but it’s so prevalent one has to wonder if whole categories of otherwise sane people have gone nuts. People become convinced of fantasy they have made in their identities and are acting out on them.

Even the FBI is concerned about the blurred lines between fantasy and reality in LARPing. In 2023 they discussed the potential threat of violent extremism emerging from LARPing

Violent extremists will extensively engage in confirmation bias prior to the implementation of their plan. However, in this context, it becomes confirmation violence, or the use of targeted violence to impose social and political beliefs onto others and, therefore, change their behavior — in a grandiose sense, perhaps even the course of history

I personally can’t think of a more chilling term than confirmation violence in the wake of the public reaction to the assassination of United Health Care insurance CEO Brian Thompson. We are now LARPing ourselves to death. A bit too “if you die in the Matrix you die in real life” vibes if you ask me.

Think about how we went from digital mobs to physical riots to the dangerous new trend of assassination as cancellation. Vaguely defined members of today’s outgroup are no longer merely targets of online criticism but actually targets of stochastic terrorism. This is leaderless, decentralized violence. No one person held up a hand to start it, and no one person can easily stop it.

Balaji on Decentralized Violence

As centralized authorities are going through significant challenges to their authority we are probably in for a lot more LARPing to death. I’d be prepared to see a lot more violence emerging from LARPers convinced of their own story’s moral superiority.

And I’d be careful about buying into anyone’s story as we adjust. If all the world is a stage but the characters have real weapon’s we are in for a world of hurt.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1444 and Intrasexual Competition

Dating discourse seems to have taken over all forms of social media. Maybe it seems louder than usual because it’s cuffing season and with Netflix becoming a Christmas romance movie juggernaut the urge to find a partner is higher in December.

But you have to be wary of the stories and advice that litter Reddit and Twitter. Not everyone doling out advice actually wants you to succeed. Some of them look like they are actively undermining their peers.

The manosphere seems determined to turn young men into fearful controlling oafs while the radfem/femcel/tradwife axis of influencers is a mess of undermining advice stoking the neuroses of young women.

In the battle of the sexes, a favored tactic is sabotage. Evolutionary psychologists would probably say what we are seeing on social media is intrasexual competition run amok

Giving bad advice undermines your sexual competition. And if you sell advice or attention, keeping people coming back for more bad takes while keeping them miserable (and single) is the whole game. The hot takers build attention and clout.

Attention grifters are here to make you engage while turning you into a neurotic mess. So before taking someone’s advice on the other sex, ask “cui bono” because it’s probably not you.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

1443 and Irreducible

Being “spreadsheet brained” has become a shorthand critique for the technocratic mindset that prefers to see with abstractions rather than through immediate physical reality.

I don’t have a full history of the term but it was brought into my lexicon by Ashley Fitzgerald of Doomer Optimism.

A Wojack suffering from an inoperable tumor called spreadsheet brain.

Having spreadsheet brain can be a quality of life problem. If you are particularly numerate you can easily fixate on the negative statistics. We then use those facts to isolate themselves from the each other. It’s a classic case of seeing the price of things and not the value. It can easily become a very smart form of stupid.

I’m more of a whole to parts thinker myself so I’m amused by this meme even though as someone who works with tech startups I’m obviously susceptible to spreadsheet brain issues.

It’s reasonable to have concerns with thinking only in abstract terms. The topology of human experience is complex and yet we have many tools that take the irreducible and cook it down into something concentrated, clear, and altogether too legible. We desire to be seen but perhaps not too closely.

Categories
Emotional Work Media Medical

Day 1441 and Fever

I woke up at 4am with my racing heart. I looked at my Whoop biometrics and my resting heart rate was abnormally high. I’m talking 110bpm at the peak of my REM cycle. I obviously has a nightmare.

I figured that nothing could be that scary so I took my temperature. Sure enough I was running a light fever.

The last few days have been a particularly gruesome one the internet. Rapid change, institutional distrust, and chaos have led us to blood. And instead of sorrow it’s all cheers and memes.

I hope it passes quickly. Both my own fever and the one gripping the timelines. I feel in need of some time off from the world. It’s been an intense year. I pray for more introspection through advent.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Medical

Day 1440 and The Pain We Won’t Name

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.

Categories
Internet Culture Medical

Day 1439 and Landshark’s Prophecy

I don’t like to write too much about developing news especially when it is an emotional topic like murder. The assassination of United Health Care insurance group CEO Brian Thompson last week was horrific. Today’s news that the manhunt found a person of interest Luigi Mangione is exploding into chaotic narratives.

The fog that surrounds violence leads to reactivity and it’s very easy to get things wrong. And the narratives surrounding this young man are both surprising and yet easily spun to cater to a number of simple biases.

One of those biases that I suspect will be warped across the news cycles is so easy to believe it’s making me suspicious.

The young man has easily accessible social media accounts some of which were still up when the news broke. I followed him on Twitter myself to see. What I found made me a little suspicious.

A centrist Penn shredded HuberBro Thiel tweeting TPOT moots futurism policy aesthetic gearporn guy adding maximum anarchy into the system as the UHC murderer does not feel right.

@almostmedia

His GoodReads account shows a man who read a lot of health optimizations literature including quite a bit on back pain and psychedelics. His follows on Twitter were almost uncomfortably midwit thoughtfluencer types but hardly any outside the Overton window.

The Twitter profile of the suspect.

Frankly if I wanted to make make a narrative about disgruntled dangers of TechBro philosophy I’d be trying to steer this conversation into an Uncle Ted speed run to reinforce hostility towards these ideas. It’s easy to see the dark side of the agency discourse & “just do things” set of values if someone kills.

If I found medical system skepticism and Silicon Valley threatening to my interests I’d be latching onto this story as fast as I could to explain why it’s dangerous craziness and the world view should be pitchforked.

There are also very already easy narrative explanations for how an attractive man with an elite institution set of credentials could have snapped. The suspect is so normie in background and so bleak in worldview and he had back surgery and took shrooms. An iconic tweet from Landshark about ayahuasca seems prescient

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1437 and Back at the Ranch

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.

The chaos has never been so visceral and implacable and it’s coming so fast. We’ve got extrajudicial killings of healthcare executives by gray man gearheads. South Korea declared martial law briefly. Syrian rebels are toppling Assad while America and Iran are otherwise engaged. And Trump isn’t even back in office.

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.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1435 and Tsunami Warning

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.

The earthquake occurred at 10:44 a.m., 45 miles southwest of Eureka. The proximity to the coast created an immediate tsunami threat which led to the alert on my phone at 10:51.

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.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1423 and Reading The Riot Act

One of my friends recently fed the entirety of my daily writing experiment into Google’s NotebookLM podcast generator.

We both like to tinker with new artificial intelligence features and I have got a large training set with lots of tagging.

The synopsis it kicked out of two chatting AI hosts makes it sound like I have written a New York Times bestseller on the cultural and emotional adaption in the Great Weirdening.

The smoothing function of compression makes me sound way smarter than I think my daily output might suggest. The aggregate quantity has a quality all its own.

So naturally instead of sharing those wins with you I’ll show the emotional underbelly. He asked it to generate my blind spots and boy did the AI read me the riot act.

Beware the AI knows you better than you know yourself

I don’t know if I am blind to these as I see them as faults. I can easily go down rabbit holes and overextend myself. I worry about my physical capacity constantly. That’s why it’s such a clear theme in my writing.

I definitely recommend this as an exercise if you have enough personal content to feed into the generator. Seeing clearly into your blind spots gives you a chance see around the corners of your own life. It’s not quite the same thing as therapy but maybe just as useful.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1420 and Stimuli

I am always shocked when people say they read anything I write. This isn’t because I don’t think I’m worth listening to but because I know attention is such a scarce commodity.

It’s so valuable we have entire industries dedicated to grabbing your attention. We don’t need to keep it necessarily we just need you to get distracted.

We downplay how well we know what works by indulging people who think they are immune to such things. Of course marketing on works on fools we sagely nod.

Of course we don’t want you to know how effectively we can move your attention let alone your opinion! You thinks anyone wants you to know propaganda works? Dunk on Jaguars new futura font. Scoff at those bot accounts.

Just know that most of marketing is Cocomelon, slot machines and dopamine hits. You can’t fight that without developing discipline which isn’t an infinite commodity. Most people don’t have much of it and aren’t even encouraged to develop. Good luck out there.