Tag: Forced Metaphor

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1833 and Noriega 2 Maduro Boogaloo

We’ve had a couple of market trading days to adjust to the new world order being “absolutely no order” and it mostly seems fine. American can capture cartel leaders/heads of state that she dislikes. Weird but so far fine.

The only metaphors are crude puns (see what I did there) and Marco Rubio does every job memes. From the Golden Era of Iran-Contra to Manuel Noriega, it’s never been a better time to have an opinion on the Monroe Doctrine or a LatAm portfolio. Did you know Ollie North married his former secretary this summer? Fun!

I myself have none of this knowledge so the best I can do is imitate Mickey Rooney’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s character saying, “Donroe Doctrine.” Not very funny I know.

Yellow face being racist, perverting the Monroe Doctrine into a pan-Asian accent inflected Capote character is definitely cancel worthy but if you can’t imagine it I’m sure generative AI would oblige.

What’s worse is that my stupid inner monologue mimicry made me I wonder if Xi Jinping has enough of an accent when speaking English for Donroe Doctrine to be amusing. Americans never know these things. Neither does Reddit

Being profoundly American, this is all upsetting except where it is amusing, because the chaos era is firmly here and it’s hard to make any predictions, first derivative included.

That the world is chaos is now such common knowledge that it’s the stuff of moderate Substack consensus intellectuals.

I used to do more victory laps about how my own investment thesis is predicated on increasing chaos. Now I’m just reminded of how much I didn’t want to be right about my own thesis when I started.

Hopefully that hasn’t affected my capacity to stay ahead of the game. The numbers look good but the final score remains to be seen.Because as they say, “hate the game, not the player.” I’m playing to win.

As if we don’t win at making better technologies that stabilize our world then we all lose. I am a progressive when it comes to investing in new technologies that improve material conditions.

We won’t look at Uncle Yud as fondly as Uncle Ted when it’s time for eulogies. We will conclude that Chesterton’s Fence included a bit too much in the enclosure even if strong fences make for good neighbors.

Being a reluctant conservative makes it worse that I love being first. I am a hipster in an era without use for hipsters except the knowledge of what is about to make money. Hipsters are a useless bunch except as fashion editors or as capital stewards.

I happen to own the domain chaotic.capital. You’d think this would be proof positive of being a progenitor or originator of this investment thesis, but it’s such a common sense worldview now it’s about as useful as an NFT after the 2022 crashes.

I have bragging rights and my own metrics page inside AngelList. Which isn’t nearly as much fun as I expected it to be. It’s not bad having some financial flexibility from making good calls, but my primary problems remain health not talent so it’s less enjoyable than I presumed. Thankfully that means I will continue at it based on my own pace and instincts. Good luck out there!

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Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

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Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1819 and So You’re Safe Enough To Celebrate With Rest

I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. What traditions my family had were mostly oriented around the night before Christmas and not Christmas Day itself.

We’d have a Christmas Eve dinner, our one item per person gift exchange, and most excitingly staying up for midnight mass with my mother

Christmas Day meant Christmas stockings and a jumble of different half heartedly attempted Christmas wishes and lots of long distance calls. Much less fun from a child’s perspective than gifts and late night ceremony.

So here I am on Christmas Eve all prepared for tomorrow’s day of stillness and rest. And I am exhausted. My body has sensed it’s safe to collapse into the kind of sickness that only comes after cortisol washes away on the tides of adrenaline going out to sea.

I’ve got not plans. My worship has never required a church. My prayers are between myself and my maker. I’ll be sick and happily collapsed into my own quiet reflection. May peace be with you.

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Preparedness

Day 1813 and Prepper Mindset Holiday Grocery Shopping

Before the pandemic turned preparedness into a global obsession, being a “prepper” wasn’t seen in a very positive light. We’ve really lightened up the idea of thinking ahead.

Now everyone preps. Americans love shopping so this isn’t a surprise. Who doesn’t love avoiding hard work when you could be buying shit instead?

Being a quirky gearhead or having a momma bear mindset is maybe a bit cringe but everyone saw the upheaval of a global pandemic first hand.

Even if we didn’t experience the pandemics consequences evenly. It’s hard to ignore reality. Sometimes you should have a little extra on hand.

The last few days before a major holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas is always a crazy time to be shopping from this perspective. Christmas especially is one of the few times you really experience the full force of the entire world trying to be prepared for everyone wanting to buy at the same time. And we still can’t quite get it right.

I went grocery shopping today and the crowds of people, even with a week to go before Christmas were astonishing. Even independent of weather events, the traffic jams and throngs of shoppers felt intense.

When everyone needs to get ahead of a day off it’s clear our system is capacity constrained. And we all know the date is coming a year ahead of time. Imagine what happens when you don’t have notice of something?

Most people don’t have the luxury to do much to harden themselves against the cruel nature of life. I on the other hand can buy prosciutto and almonds without a care in the world. A very merry and very prepper Christmas indeed when eating cured meats and calorie dense nuts.

We’d all better get used to being lost in the crowd of the polycrisis. It’s full time political and economic instability, weather volatility and varied consequences of our current material conditions. Bring an extra bag and get in line right?

Maybe if we all put more energy into thinking about what we do next, we can better focus on meeting our collective demand a bit better. Coordination problems are hard. They are a challenge when trying to plan to buy a ham let alone GPUs or transformers.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1812 and Highlander Political Power Sharing

There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?

There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.

Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia

This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.

These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.

Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.

We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.

Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.

The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.

I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.

Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?

But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.

Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.

Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.

Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.

Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.

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Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1808 and The Secret Sauce is Strongmen

Without getting into too much detail about my travel schedule I will say I’ve visited a few places with a lot of construction this year.

I’m talking about cranes on every corner level construction. If I did a full rotation as if I were Michael Bay getting an action shot, I’d see a half dozen cranes putting up major construction projects.

In some European cities (not the western ones) I saw entire neighborhoods being rebuilt from old multi-family buildings to massive mixed used developments. Cute streets and courtyards be damned, the millenial families want Instagram housing from Tallinn to Tirana.

Their elders are confused but new families need new condominiums. Let’s just hope they remembered to plan for water, power, and other infrastructure needs like new roadways. I’ll admit I’m skeptical in many cases. Maybe it’s good that they are just building willy nilly as it’s not like we get infrastructure investment without the pressure of new families demanding it.

Americans don’t see this amount of construction regularly and it is both inspiring and also a mess of pollution from debris to noise. It’s pretty miserable if you happen to enjoy walking. It is also miserable to live with.

It almost makes me sympathetic to the whines of older residents who want their homes to be worth more and use the chaos of new developments as a cudgel to stop new housing from being built.

There was a time in New York City when I first arrived there when it felt like new buildings went up all the time. You’d complain about jackhammers, trucks, and the ugly protective sidewalk sheds that are meant for safety.

I even knew a venture capitalist who left his job to make a classier sidewalk shed as the damn things almost never come down in a city under constant improvement.

I went through ULURP or Uniform Land Use Review Process hundreds of times in just a few years as an appointee in the community board system.

All anyone can do is complain about the lack of new building and construction. And who can manage to overcome the slog to build let alone turn a profit. American processes for building are more “cranky man tells at clouds” local meeting hell than Robert Moses.

Maybe the YIMBYs (I myself am a yes in my backyard sort) are barking up the wrong true with red tape reform efforts. The strongmen cut the Gordian knot of land reform by simply not giving a shit about process.

The Zoomers are ready to rage for radicalism with their reactionary political entertainment industry. It’s unclear to me if those types would remember to incorporate waste water treatment in their plans. It’s not hard to go from bullshitting to being covered in shit. So that’s worth considering too before we get too excited about a new round of futurism.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1805 and Dark Leisure, Time Violence & Outputting Value

Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The Mythical Man–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.

The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.

I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.

Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.

If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways without getting fired, in this new artificial intelligence roll out we see another type of value capture mismatch between input labor and firm.

We are seeing what Fabian Steltzer calls Dark leisure. Others call it shadow user innovation.

Innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management doesn’t get counted and workers are reticent to be transparent.

the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org

so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”

Fabian Steltzer

Anthropic released a study on the supposed stigma attached to using artificial intelligence at work. Humans are already reacting to artificial intelligence as if it were an existential threat.

Except it’s been generally existentially freeing up to this point. Anyone who has used commercial large language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?

Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agents than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.

The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!

We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.

We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual has a theory of consciousness systems they believe makes this is a form of time violence.

Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity

The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence

– Idea Nexus Ventures

We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising, so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage as long as you can. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.

I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up, but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.