Tag: Fear

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1794 and What We Expect From The Wives

I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.

Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.

But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.

I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.

Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.

One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.

Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.

She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.

This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.

Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.

The video I was served after LevelsIO’s retweet of a video clip of Nicole Shanahan was certainly further down a worldview. But it was also a more positive view of the role of women could be if the Karen was not viewed as a villain but as a hero of social norms.

Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.

The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.

I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1791 and Hack, Hack, Cough Cough

One of the oddest post pandemic norms we’ve come to accept are the hacking coughing fits we pretend are normal parts of public transit.

By public transit I don’t just mean just subways or busses. I’m sure they suffer from this issue as well.

But rather our most expensive version of public transportation, air travel, is riddled with passengers clearly infected with one variant or another of a respiratory illness.

Now I get it. It’s not cheap to fly. A cold coming on won’t stop you from going as you paid a lot to travel. Everyone is on the road trying to make their way to family, friends and community. It is hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to get from here to there.

So as you stand in long boarding lines where people queue seemingly at random in groups 1 through infinity, you see various flavors of sneaks, cheats and idiots bottlenecking the mess.

And then you hear the coughing, hacking, sniffing, sneezing and other variants of ignoring the body’s strain.

I am prone to skin infections rather than respiratory ones or this trend would worry me more. I generally don’t mask unless I’m stuck in tight quarters. Sometimes I wish I had. Dealing with Chicago and the sweating, panting, running, struggling human masses, I feel I should have.

You still see depending( on the city, its demographics and its politics, a range of mask wearing. The elderly are often masked. I see frequent flyers wrapped up tight in the good N95. There is quite a lot of masking and I think it’s a good thing.

Maybe these maskers know something. They must be used to persistent cold and flu season and understand some folks who don’t care about their impact on others. Masking must work well enough to be worth the hassle for some.

I hate to bring up the old awful politics of the COVID era, but we should have learned a thing or two from Asian nations who politely mask themselves when ill to benefit their fellow citizens.

Wouldn’t that be an impressive thing to see? Americans caring about each other’s welfare. If I have a cold, it will be because I was too stupid to mask up. But if I get a cold I promise I’ll mask up to avoid passing it on.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1789 and Is Our Children Learning

“But I’m not a math person!”

Did you ever use that excuse as a kid? I know I did. Alas my mother did not tolerate my lame attempts to leverage available excuses like being a girl.

She still teaches from a core belief that if mastery comes from practice anyone can develop competency with effort and repetition. She will not entertain discussions of inherent talent even if it’s true. That’s no excuse.

I practiced till I was a math person. I’d level up into a new subject area and fail all over again. I repeated that process till I graduated university with a lot of mathematics under my belt.

Whether or not American children are learning remains a hot topic. A infamous Bushism “is our children learning” comes from a misquoted line in a 1990 speech by George W. Bush, who actually said, “rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?”. And well, we are asking the question both then and now.

Moontower’s Kris Abdelmessih’s financial newsletter has an excellent essay on how Americans are grappling with the upsetting realization that our children cannot read or write. His essay on the topic of mastery and competence is worth a few minutes of your time.

And while we’ve been complaining about our educational system my whole life, it certainly looks as if the now adult graduates are innumerate and illiterate.

And that is embarrassing for all of us. The more we dig into the why’s and how’s of it, the more likely we reveal to ourselves that we have our own shortcomings with literacy and numeracy.

Buckling down and developing competency is a hard thing to do when we are young and capable. Doing it as a tired middle aged adult is even worse. But if we want to ask questions about whether any of us are learned, we have to accept that maybe none of us were educated well in the first place.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1785 and Adversarial Openness

There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.

If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.

The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.

These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.

I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.

The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.

I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 1782 and Sweeping Rolls and Unrunnable Rapids

Navigating the rifts and eddies in the river of human scale time takes more skill and endurance than I fear I have.

Even if I assume that Earth time still running on any sort of human scale (which I don’t believe to be true), I find myself wondering if it’s better to head for the riverbank for a moment. Like Lewis and Clark, I only dimly understand where this river will let out.

I once paddled lightly, easily, even joyfully with the currents of my time. When I capsized, to continue with kayaking metaphors, I would simply snap myself back upright with a sweep or C-to-C Roll roll and carry on downstream spluttering wet and bursting with laughter.

Kayaking the Zeitgeist River was a fine past time for the quick witted and able shouldered amongst us. One could build an entire career by correctly the judging the river of time. And what fun it was to carry along with friends as time did most of the work.

But ever more frequently, I search for the eddies to pull myself out of the stream to stop for a while. Tired and hurting, I look for a refuge to catch my breath and slow my heart. As the timeline rages on without me, through crashing white water and its drowning currents, I wonder if I should even be alone on these waters at all.

Simply staying upright is now a bare minimum of a concern. A hip snap and good instincts does little when the course never ends and the rapids unexpectedly turn from a fun day of Class III rapids to Unrunnable class VI without so much as a posted sign. There are no maps or forecasts to be had. Your gear might be whatever you brought onto the water in entirely different conditions.

There be dragons here? Hardly so dramatic a metaphor applies from naval history pertains to river ways. But it’s no less dangerous for its lack of vista. Unseen rocks, snapped branches and water logged organic materials rise and decay into froth and burble. Lurking like so many unseen estuarine creatures swimming inland.

I already feel as if the tattered veil which separates our shared reality with whatever exists beyond is far too fragile. That any one of us can choose to run the rapids of passing time serves to remind me of how fraught the pastime of participating in history can be.

A small kayak with one intrepid soul can be righted quickly. But an endless run of rapids designed to sink any who choose to run it? The public experience of our shared time should not be such a battle. We all want to see where we are going don’t we?

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1780 and Being Cooked

I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.

The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?

The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.

Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.

The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.

It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?

Categories
Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1778 and Uncanny Hyperborean Aurora

It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.

It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.

So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.

The universe was dancing with geomagnetic storms
Reds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.

What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.

Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.

Stars, pines and the northern lights
Categories
Aesthetics Homesteading

Day 1777 and Spacing Out

Yesterday a severe geomagnetic storm hit Earth. I had been following its trajectory for a few days I think space weather is a fascinating topic.

Last year I was in Europe during a G5 event which is considered an extreme storm. It proved to be as unsettling as it was beautiful. Also migraine inducing. Just half an hour in the sun and I felt completely awful.

Naturally I wanted to tear the effects. I went out for a late afternoon stroll just as the storm first began to hit and I found myself in a rage over “this and that” as my vision flickered with red and green.

I thought I was so mad I was seeing red but I suspect the more logical explanation was that space weather affects us here on earth.


G4 (Severe) storm levels reached on 12 November at 0120 UTC (8:20pm EST)! Geomagnetic storm conditions are anticipated to continue into the night. Stay informed at spaceweather.gov for the latest. The included aurora images are of the aurora shining over northeastern Colorado.

I thought I was getting the auras that occasionally accompany a migraine for many people but now I’m not so sure. I rarely get visual disturbances in my migraines. Still our bodies run on electrical signals too. And I went outside just as the planet was getting hammered at the full severe G4 limit.

Alas after sunset I don’t take any particularly good pictures of the auroras that painted the skies though many others posted pictures from Montana.

I was focused on health needs from hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy to a stint in our 180F Finnish cedar sauna. The glory of nature’s night is best experienced without a phone and ideally sweating out the day. No need to try to capture a picture of the moment. I was in the moment

Later, as I went outside freshly oxygenated, sweated out and showered, most of the sky had cloud cover.

The night was uncannily still. We usually have a lot of nocturnal noises as we have a whole ecosystem of creatures on our property and out into the mountain range above us, but I didn’t hear a peep. The animals must feel the space weather as deeply as we do.

Thankfully today dawned (with me having had a poor night sleep as expected) with all our homestead creatures out and about on the pond from duck to muskrat. More solar activity is expected so keep an eye on the NOAA forecast.

A pair of MilFred Muskrats with one of our ducks photobombing in the background
Categories
Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1774 and Haywire Hell Handbaskets

It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.

I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.

2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.

And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.

Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.

And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.

And yet, I’m still unwilling to consider the centralized approach. We’d be eaten faster just like whales fished into oblivion by mistakes in the Soviet math.

It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.

However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.

We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1773 and Post-Rats in An Irrational World

Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.

Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?

That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.

Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.

Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.

We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.

Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.

I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.

Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.

I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.

Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.

I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.