Tag: Forced Metaphor

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Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

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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 Internet Culture

Day 1734 and Oink Oink Slop Slop Piggie Piggie

It’s seems a tad unfair to use our porcine friends as comic stands in whenever we wish to mock trough consumers of remixed refuse. Pigs are intelligent animals whose biological closeness to human may allow us to use their organs in a pinch. We insult ourselves when we insult pigs.

And yet every time some new form of processed artificial intelligence content drops, we call it slop. Sooie!

Neither pigs nor humans deserve that kind of diet, even if we are both omnivores willing to consume just about anything. Staying alive sometimes requires a bit less discretion in diet.

Presumably so does staying spiritually healthy as well. If there is no Mozart to be had, I’ll take Moby. If there is no Melville then we take a pithy viral tweet. Where is the event horizon of art?

Michael Pollen called it the omnivores dilemma in our food system. When it comes to our art, it doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma. More creation and more tools for creativity are a social good but when it becomes regurgitation and re-ingestion does it not seem liable to make us soul sick?

And yet the industrialization of food has inspired the industrialization of all forms of content. Scale has indeed become the standard way we’ve come to feed our bodies and mind. It was Gut with Gutenberg but where are the limits? Do we even know?

Facebook and OpenAI both released new content creation tools this week that were widely derided as slop factories in my circles.

Of course, I spend my time on the written web amongst producers of the tools that produce the slop. We think we know better and can use these tools wisely. We know what’s in it, or at least we have the know how that programs the machines extrude it. Some of us have some sense of the original material but precious few.

The engineers who built the Doritos factory probably enjoy a cheesy corn chip too even if they can afford aged cheddar thanks to pay which came with popularity of their creation. Imagine how a medieval peasant would have felt encountering that much extreme nacho cheesiness.

The intelligentsia of the written web like Substack, Twitter and Reddit (admittedly that being an intelligentsia is a funny conceit) presumes the unwashed TikTok, Reels and Shorts masses have no taste and will consume anything and without end.

Video? How gauche! But isn’t it just so funny when our elders can’t tell the video of the lady breaking the bridge with a rock isn’t real. Ha ha! Stupid oldsters. We don’t realize soon we won’t be able to tell either. Walter Benjamin knew it was coming. He aura farmed too.

My brother told me recently that our grandmother worked in a hotdog factory and refused to eat processed meat for the rest of her life. I also won’t eat hot dogs or sausages so maybe the sense memory runs deep.

I admit that I feel the same way about encased meats as I do about short form video content. No amount of condiments or “answering to a higher authority” will entice me into consuming the stuff. ConAgra owns Hebrew National now and they answer to the stock market not God.

Even if there are artisanal varietals of processed meats (and processed content), I struggle with the ease with which it bypasses my satiety filters. We have peptides for overconsumption of food but not yet overconsumption of dopamine.

It’s fine if we crave whole meats and whole books. Or at least a long form essay. Something can be created with the finest ingredients carefully sourced and prepared by caring hands. And yet we know man cannot live on tweets and sausage alone. Pigs probably shouldn’t either. Sooie!!!!

Categories
Homesteading Politics Reading

Day 1733 and Classism’s Comeback

The American Dream is one of those rare myths that shapes itself to the moment.

Anyone can make it here evolved to “owning your own home” and even stretched to sending all of our children to college. I’m just not so sure it can expand to fit the world of perpetual voyeurism of the networked world. A chicken in every pot just isn’t good enough anymore.

Our inalienable rights matched reasonably well to “making it” as an ideal given European feudalism and religious wars. Class held back the basics of self determination and fear stifled worship. Setting sail before America was birthed deserved quite a bit of credit.

And of course more yearned to be a part of the dream. The homestead act giving anyone the chance to stake their claim on western land could be understood in a fit of manifest destiny even if it turned out the land was occupied. Making it meant making it your own. Property rights are as American as Apple pie.

You can see how our human wants remained boundless even centuries ago. America was ready and able to deliver it. We weren’t comparing ourselves to Kings or Kardashians.

It’s hard to say where we are now. We stack ourselves against each each instead of against ourselves. We aren’t yearning for our natural rights. Inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have turned to desire.

The American Dream means desirable outcomes and social status items like Ivy League degrees, large homes in beautiful places and access to the finest surgeons and latest medical advancements.

I’m not one to talk as I sit looking out over the mountains, having used the latest and great medical advancements and also prepare to relax into some of medicines oldest and truest forms of healing.

The networked world has created endless opportunities for us all and many of them are quite a bit easier than tilling the frozen prairies of the Dakotas but it’s oh so hard to turn away from the addictions of envy and desire.

It’s my theory that we will see a return to hierarchy and classism as it becomes clearer that the temperance movement has barely begun when it tackled gin and tobacco.

Focusing feels impossible to so many of us so even if you could acquire a home or the best medical care can you manage the bureaucracy. Reading bedtime stories to your children is a privilege says the headlines of the latest academic papers. Food systems have given us abundance so great we are killing ourselves.

So what happens next? If you cannot focus on a goal of your own why not simply take one from someone else? If you can’t manage the paperwork or the reading why not outsource it to an artificial intelligence?

And then you realize all of these things are not really what you want. What you want is to be better than someone else. Was that always the American dream? Or is that the human condition holding you back? The freedom to pursue liberty is still your inalienable right. Unless you can figure out what that means to you someone else can always make you feel small.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1731 and Death, Taxes and Everything In Between

The only certain things in life are death and taxes. Death only happening once seems like the sort of thing that shouldn’t be taxed. Everything in-between is taxed? Or maybe it’s the ultimate tax. We disperse back into the system.

Taxes are not necessarily monetary (try saying that five times fast), rather we are always paying with something to stay alive.

To live amongst each other we pay bigger and bigger prices for the privilege of that life. Sometimes we wonder what is left of ourselves as we integrate further and further into civilization. Others times you wonder what you are getting back.

Taxes are what we pay to live amongst each other. You might ask what taxes did we pay on the Savanah or the steppe? You hunted to be in the tribe. To be honored by the tribe. To get laid by your bride. You gathered and cooked so you would not be hooked or hawked.

I’ll stop with the wordplay but you get the idea. It’s not just civilization that has a cost. It’s the whole damn enchilada. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. TANSTAAFL.

Money for nothing? Thats the stuff of MTV music videos and marketing campaigns for Zoomers building nuclear reactors.

Humans adore fantasies of getting more for less. What a steal! But who are we stealing from? We know everyone ultimately pays. There are costs for everything in life.

Those damnable laws of thermodynamics seem impossible to get around. And we humans don’t have a clue about which systems we are nested within. Isolated systems? Pfft. We can only wish. At least within a tribe you knew the exchange rates. Within the planet or the galas or the universe who can say. Nobody wants to hear about the light cone.

Entropy feels as if it’s always increasing no matter how much energy we put back in. If entropy is measure of energy dispersal and we bring as much chaos as we do organization, really who is to say where and when we pay our energy tax for existence.

And so we pay the taxes when we must. Even if only in death. Even if it’s at the heat death of the universe that we find point of maximum entropy that still theoretically exists.

Can we out run it? Unclear. Thump thump. Big bang disperse. Thump thump. Condense. Expand. Contract. Expand. Contract.

Never horde what you have if paying a small price makes your civilization larger. If paying a price makes everything you have smaller, make a better civilization. In death you should feel the price you paid was worth it. If not well you can always blame the kids.

Categories
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1730 and Steering The Titanic of Adult Habits When Icebergs Are Ahead

We are all us humans on the good ship Lollipop. I mean this as a stand in for Mother Gaia/Terra/Earth. We are all in this together right? Wrong? Who knows.

I happen to be on the America decks, so even if I can see the sea is perilous the orchestra is still playing. Maybe I’m rearranging the deck chairs. Is there anything that can be done to steer myself away from collision other than seeking a life raft?

It’s a kludgy metaphor but I am personally trying to move around several of my own ingrained adult habits with the hopes that I can change the direction of life for smoother sailing.

It’s hard to retrain your body after years of pain, compensating biomechanics and environmental factors beyond one’s control.

I’m putting on my life vest and trying to steer myself well so that I save myself and maybe in doing so save others.

If anyone has physical therapy videos they recommend I am working to retrain muscles that are compensating for my thoracic ankylosis. I also intend to go in person to physical therapy if possible.

And onto other topics less bleak than avoiding disasters, both personal and political, as you can indeed do more than you imagine to steer your own life here is some inspiration.

I enjoyed reading this piece on the rise of the online schizo and how to protect yourself as someone who is burdened with a strong case of apophenia. Worth a browse if you are concerned about your cognitive security online as no one wants to catch a Babylonian death cult meme virus.

Audrey Horne has a new substack called Secret Ballot where my friends and mutuals make some appearances and it includes a good calendar of social events in D.C if that’s your thing.

If you are following AI and eschatology (and really who isn’t these days) you may have heard about the Peter Thiel anti-christ lectures. I’d love to brag about being invited but I didn’t have the chance attend what with death and illness. However this two part interview with Thiel at the Hudson Institute covers the basics.

I spend a lot of time on artificial intelligence policy thanks to my advocacy on Montana’s right to compute law as well general interest in enabling more people to maintain the level of control and access they seem appropriate for their own lives. The right to repair movement is the seed for a wider right to compute movement.

On that note Alex is building automation into the sauna being built and has put the code up on GitHub if you are into that sort of thing. You have a right to build things and own them and no one is forcing you to buy convenience if you would prefer to keep your data on your own servers. Even if it’s the data for your air conditioning or your sauna.

We’re building a sauna and I don’t like anything at home connected to the cloud, so I’m building my own fully local controller
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, even has RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1707 and Putting Some GPU To Work

I try to give my own slight biological grey matter processing power a run every day through this writing habit.

I try to move my own body with walking, weight lifting and other condition so it can stay a somewhat workable machine. Tuning my body requires more work than tuning my mind as my brain rarely gives me issues but my tissues are always in some stage of revolt.

I have other assets behind my mind and my body. I’ve purchased a car. Precisely once and I have looked into buying others and shied away. My home doesn’t need to do work beyond housing me and my “disposable and durable” goods which range from a tractor other home appliances. A few of them do produce things for us like keeping our land and our laying hens.

We’ve got a gorgeous solar grid that generates electricity we can barely use. It goes into Bitcoin mining and stacking and running utilities but I’ll admit in a little lax about putting my our existing compute to work.

I’ll admit this is pretty stupid as we invest in crypto, we invest in hardware and energy, and we have invested in compute and inference networks. So why am I not doing more for passive yield on this?

Humans have been working as inference machines since we decided to keep records with something beyond the digits on our hands and the foot of our feudal lord.

Counting and abstractions being necessary for all sorts of engineering feats from cathedrals to graphical processing units. And now we have inference tokens just waiting to be brought down in cost as we bring networks online. So I am setting up my compute to be a part of those networks because sometimes it’s good to focus on little resource allocation problems to take your mind off tbh fe.

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1706 and Leaving It In The Past

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1699 and CQ Do You Read Me? K Go Ahead

Putting the right frequencies into the universe isn’t just woo-woo witchy girl nonsense. The general call “CQ” is for anyone listening.

The transmission is a broadcast for anyone who can read. I like to think of social media like blogging as a much more expansive and elaborate form of the tradition.

Transmitting the letters CQ on a particular radiofrequency means that the transmission is a broadcast or “General Call” to anyone listening, and when the operator sends “K” or says “Go Ahead” it is an invitation for any licensed radio station listening on that frequency to respond. 

-(CQ) Call

Humans may have evolved for much smaller scale socialization but we enter a networked world several centuries ago. The CQ sign was established protocal in 1884 according to the Practical Telegraphist.

Living with a network consciousness has been called the seventh sense. Joshua Cooper Ramo wrote a book about power and survival in an entered future in 2016 with this premise. That sense now applies across wars, commerce and aesthetics.

The urge to diversify and reach out across different networks and communities is being applied across many new closed garden internet nodes which are competing for attention and information share.

I am considering what it means to build in a world where anyone can surface almost any information at any time. The will and desire to do something in the network is its own limiting factor. But leveraging the possibilities of you find the right niche can open a lot of possibilities. So when someone issues a general call go ahead. Answer!

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1696 and Unk-Unks

Older millennials from families that watched the news may remember the infamous Donald Rumsfeld quote about unknown unknowns.

I’ll include the full quote from the Secretary of Defense about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. Donald Rumsfeld

Much hay was made over how ridiculous this sounded at the time. It was the title of an Errol Morris documentary. Naturally the origins of this phrase are more complicated than a soundbite from a politician.

“Unk-Unks” was a term regularly used by defense contractors. Wikipedia sources it back to 1969 in a Fortune article about Lockheed. “For Lockheed, Everything’s Coming Up Unk-Unks“

I find it to be a pretty useful framework. I have to imagine the Lockheed folks are irked that their clever coinage has come to be associated decades later with Rumsfeld and the Neo-conservative boondoggle of the war on terror.

I feel as if I’m in a persistent state of unknown unknowns these days. It’s not a new feeling either. I know what I don’t know and how vast a space is contained therein.

I know precious little and find that I know less as I get older (maturity being a helpful tutor in that manner). Which admittedly sucks.

Being uncertain of what I don’t know is just the natural state of being. Yet I’m regularly trying to add more to the small set of known knowns in my life. I hate not knowing how to have less pain and poor health in my life.

The experimentation I do on my body is part of my attempts to shave off a few more of unk-unks by trying to add more knowledge. And I just wish I could feel even a little bit physically better. But that seems to be in the unknown unknowns these days.