Tag: Geopolitics

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Culture Media Politics

Day 932 and Schisms

Most of my social circle is caught up in various internecine dramas. This is really saying something as I have a lot of people in a lot of different demographics across every continent except Antarctica. Which is a pity as I’d love a friend down there.

I am convinced that everyone is losing their fucking minds because we are in the middle of what I believe will end up being recognized as an information war. Maybe one day we persecute memetic crimes against humanity at The Hague.

I realize this sounds modestly hysterical but really you probably don’t appreciate how much your opinions are being courted to different interests groups. It’s not even particularly menacing. We want others to see our humanity and we leverage every tool we have from Twitter to the New York Times.

And it’s important that we fight these wars. You are probably right about a lot of things and I am wrong about them. It’s important that you and I provide participation and consensus to the rest of society so we can come to some form of agreement. If you think something should change own up to it.

I genuinely think it’s a mistake for anyone to pull away from these obligations to society and by extension political and social opinion. I have watched Silicon Valley pull back from participation in its own self advocacy in the wake of the American media coming down so hard on it. I think this is a mistake.

I believe that the technology industry and startups in particular owe it to ourselves and to the rest of the world to remain engaged. I promise it’s not that hard to speak to the media or the general public. If you are a founder or someone participating in this community and need help just send me a DM on Twitter. Consider me a diplomat to the fourth estate.

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Media

Day 929 and Right Speak

My day has been a little off as I’m nursing my husband through some surgery. Through frankly he’s recovering so well it’s mostly just keeping him company while I do my regular workday. But I have consumed some good content in the process of keeping him company and making sure ice packs are rotated & medicine is taken.

I watched John Mulaney standup special Baby J which was surprisingly good. My main takeaway was “being liked is a cage” but also you’ve got to watch out for how selfish everyone is in the process of managing their own traumas and addictions.

Mulaney is a fascinating example of someone going from beloved to fuck up as soon as it was clear he was a human and capable of sinning and hurting himself and others.

He got a good dose of being condemned while being shitheel as an addict. Who he really hurt other than himself I can’t say. But he was problematic says many inches of gossip writing and critical reviews. Wrong speak and shame and condemnation is so interesting as a social engagement issue for culture. It’s never really about them. We can all be assholes and unlikable in the process of being hurt and healing our hurts.

I suppose this is why I believe it’s better to never take anything personally and be sure you take care of yourself if you find yourself reacting strongly to a person’s frailty. The ones who love you will forgive you if you need to reorient yourself into doing what’s right for you so long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process. And oftentimes even if you do.

The follow up movie we watched was also about wrong think. But instead of it being about the addiction and selfishness of a celebrity it was about the selfishness of trying to decide what’s right for an entire nation. We watched the Tetris movie.

Which is quite a dramatization of how totalizing even the most glorious of ambitions can be in the hands of hands of normal frail humans. Yes I think wrong think comedians and communists are related and I swear I still think Bari Weiss is kind of an asshole. Most of the comedians asking for forgiveness for wrong think aren’t actually that funny to begin with. Back to Tetris

I found myself inspired by the frustrations that come from human nature & self dealing while glorifying ambitious end goals for social good. The collective good can often be patently false if someone ambitious enough gets perverted. Maybe I’m just being that asshole capitalist but I think nepotism and corruption come in many forms. And it’s easier to spot it in British billionaires and communists bureaucracies. But we’ve got plenty of right speak and “for your own good” pleas right here in America.

It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.

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Politics

Day 922 and Inconveniencing Americans

I’m enjoying a tiny moment of schadenfreude as I hear more stories of Americans being inconvenienced by our systemically fucked federal bureaucracies.

Every time a reasonable person encounters a petty injustice in the renewal of their passport I see hope. Because our immigration, visa, State department sundry consular services are so fucked. Like if you haven’t experienced the cruelty with which Uncle Sam treats it’s least favored citizens consider your luck. Well you must have a lot going for you.

And I’m grateful for your faith in American systems. We need to aspire to treat everyone as well as we have treated our most favored citizens. Our most privileged are an aspiration for us all. The American dream is working towards allowing a fragile peace of mutual freedom.

But you’ve got to remember that in big enough groups everyone is fighting to preserve their status. And that always comes at a cost. And until that cost occurs to more people with power we tend to let it slide. So I hope we inconvenience more Americans soon so we can get back to the business if welcoming the world to our aspirational ideals.

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Culture

Day 915 and Independence Day

The 4th of July is one of my favorite holidays. I’m proud to be an American. I am a patriot. I genuinely believe in the aspirational ideals of the United States of America.

I’m fully aware of the many millions of ways in which we’ve not lived up to founding ideals across the centuries. But I’ll be damned if I let the worst of us take away the aspirational ideals for the rest of us. The freedom to live up to our higher selves rests in each one of us. And fuck anyone who tells you otherwise.

I like to watch Roland Emmerich’s classic disaster porn cinematic masterpiece Independence Day every July 4th. The speech Bill Pullman delivers as humanity unites to fight the invading hordes of alien locusts is as inspiring a bit of cinema as I can imagine.

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. “Mankind.” That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom… Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution… but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: “We will not go quietly into the night!” We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

Independence Day

Now we don’t seem to be any nearer to humanity uniting behind an American plan for much of anything but I think to think one day we Americans might contribute to something as grandly aspirational as uniting our species. We can barely unite fifty states but we’ve not given up yet. And I personally intend to be here to keep fighting for our ideals. Happy 4th of July.

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Politics

Day 907 and Unaccountable Bureaucrats

We’ve reached a point in America where the consular visa services (for tourism, business & academic visits) as well as the wider immigration services (for people intending to work here, become permanent residents or citizens) have made finding a clear legal path for any type of visa non-viable. The Cato Institute describes it as nearly impossible.

I haven’t been able to get so much as a tourist visa granted in 2 years despite guarantees that I’d be financially and legally liable for the actions of my people. Even when we agree on bringing people in via our refuge system has become an opaque unaccountable path.

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that we are headed multiple crisis points in health care because there is no way to get into the country legally for nurses. We want nurses.

Our systems feels petty and vindictive to anyone that encounters it including American citizens like me. We treat people who aspire to American life’s like shit. And it appears as if the only paths that work are a system of bribes, fixers, scams, and favors as our immigration systems are opaque and deliberately obscured.

An unaccountable bureaucracy is breeding a system in which only the criminals are rewarded because the only way in is to go around the system.

We have two immigration systems that operate under the same “legal regime” but have totally different administrative regimes and authorities which further confuses the issue.

I can’t believe that I’m the one saying this loudly but a good start to a policy position is simple clear rules based immigration and visa policies that operate with consistently reviewed inputs and yield consistent outputs so both American businesses and its workforce is capable of planning for growth instead.

The doctrine of consular nonreviewability needs to be replaced with a standard of reviews that is clear, legible, and subject to open review so visa applicants and their stakeholders (families, employers, & lawyers) can understand and take action on consistently enforced norms.

Clear judicial review is the basis of any free market economy. This doctrine leaves our economy & families at the mercy of an unquestionable black box capable of life altering irreparable decisions which no one is obligated to explain or even disclose. And it’s not the fault of the consular officers. We are putting folks with little training into situations with unimaginable power (while being tied to confusing criteria which only leads them to cover their ass and reject more people. We can’t have a system of immigration where an unaccountable low level bureaucrat is able to reject an application based on vibes with no recourse.

– A visa for entrepreneurs. Currently we have imperfect workarounds that encourage people to go elsewhere (as it’s now clear the costs are enormous & the timeframes extend into multiple decades) meaning if you want to start a business, even one with funding, there is no clear reviewable path to getting the entrepreneur legal status to run the company in America.

The idea that our economy can’t handle more immigrants. tourists, business or academic travelers from non ESTA countries is simply not based in any reality. We have record low employment and shortages in crucial industries like healthcare which is fueling inflation.

Canada and Australia are letting in 2.5-3x the number of immigrants per capita per year as America. We could easily be smarter and more generous about how we recruit talent instead of encouraging a black market of border crossings for the desperate and ruined.

And we should absolutely be allowing in more visitors for the benefit of our tourism industry as well as our educational and business institutions.

I’ve had people denied entry for family reunions and conference keynotes. Startups now hosts all hands company meet ups in Mexico as they cannot guarantee that their employees can safely get in and out of America. That neither political party wants to address this in a meaningful way is appalling. We are pissing away our lead for partisanship and we can do better.

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Finance Startups

Day 906 and Resilience Tech

I enjoyed a little moment in the sun yesterday when Axios’ Pro Rata featured my pre-seed venture fund chaotic.capital as part of a deep dive on resiliency technology investing. Or if you prefer disaster tech. It was a proud moment for me.

Because I’ve been trained to never miss an opportunity for reasserting who you are and what you stand for I thought I’d publish a portion of the market insights section of my investor letter for the fund. If you want to see the bets, the behind the scenes (hands on is an understatement), and the founders we back I’d welcome accredited investors to see if we’d make sense for you. Slide into my DMs or for the time conserving decisive HNI hop onto AngelList and apply to be an LP in 2 minutes flat.

What is Chaotic Capital?

In an era of institutional distrust, social change, and global instability, we invest in ideas that adapt humanity to our new chaotic era. What does that mean? We like things that help small groups have the impact of big groups and big groups have the agility of small groups. Enabling resilience in the face of unexpected & rapid change is our lodestar.

I publish an investor letter every quarter and you can always visit jfredrickson.com, where I write every single day about whatever I’m thinking about. You are also welcome to DM me on Twitter @AlmostMedia or text me on Signal. My email is julie at chaotic dot capital.

Market Insights on Q223

The rise of cryptography, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence are overlaid onto a geopolitical reality of resource competition in an increasingly multi-polar world. To use an entirely different metaphor, chaos is a ladder that we are here to climb.

Our thesis at chaotic.capital centered on identifying, investing in, and supporting companies that adapt our lives, businesses & systems to the opportunities and challenges that chaos brings. We call it resilience technology.

We believe these companies will generate outsized returns over the next decade as individuals, companies, and societies look to become more flexible, independent, and sustainable. But it’s bigger than that.  

Most builders remain deeply skeptical of Noble Lies, “for your own good” safetyism, regulatory capture, oligopoly control, and the centralized nation state control as the most effective methodology of innovation for a dynamic pluralistic human future. We are having cultural and financial reformations at a frightening speed. It’s beyond future shock now. 

Twitter critics can stroke their chin with practiced skepticism, but if you believe in American Dynamism as I do, you know that our history has shown that it is resilient, flexible, brilliant individuals coming together which defeats the totalitarian and slays the no-win scenario. You have to enable the brilliant weirdos and trust them to solve problems.

Like Captain Kirk once said to Spock, we must make the best guesses we can.

Spock: Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so… I will make a guess.

James T. Kirk: A guess? You, Spock? That’s extraordinary.

Spock: [to McCoy] I don’t think he understands.

Leonard McCoy: No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.

Spock: Then you’re saying… it is a compliment?

Leonard McCoy: It is.

Spock: Ah. Then I will try to make the best guess I can.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

My best guess? As your chosen doomer-optimist, crypto-libertarian. American-patriot, dynamic futurist, pre-seed emerging fund manager, who has plenty of facts but still has the responsibility of making decisions without full information? Tools for everyone wins the future.

It will take all of us coordinating in freedom to defeat Moloch from sacrificing more of us. Uncle Screwtape wants our egos to believe we can deliver safety and control, we know it is a lie. The Ring of Power tempts us to consider “why not me? Don’t I deserve this power?”

Choose your franchise my fellow nerds and chosen ones; because you know the crown is heavy, the ring perverts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So what do we do? We band together. And we enable more of us to join our merry band of future builders.

To balance out centralizing forces, institutional preservation and “we had no choice” moralizing malfeasance, we must give the people tools to build because sometimes our best guesses are demonstrably better than other people’s “facts”

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 904 and War Dogging on Mobile

I was busy working for most of the day on an investor update for chaotic.capital. It’s really dope and I’d love to have any prospective LPs read it to see how we are navigating the moment. Chaotic is my humble pre-seed fund for weirdos building shit to survive the current planet wide disjunction. The general sense of history restarting from its fuck Fukuyama slumber is a clear and there is stuff to build.

When I do deep work I try to give myself some space between me and information feeds. But I find it hard to entirely shut for more than a few hours. I monitor many threads across many interest groups with vastly different interests. I flow it back to me and my investments.

As I sit comfortably in my Montana home on the edge of the American empire, I obviously can’t help but worry I’m a Cassandra doomed to know horrible truths. But this becoming a bit of a hobby for all of us isn’t it? We all watch nervously as history unfolds with little influence on the broader strokes.

My fear is that we’ve all become armchair war dogs cheering on whatever professional grade propaganda works for the current moment. And we must be careful not to let ourselves be controlled by that chaos nor amuse that we know what is happening.

I firmly believe in having a locus of control and acting within it. Today I wrote up the current state of all the vibes I’ve seen and synthesized in my market status report. I then named the bets I’ve taken with our capital. I explained why I think have the greatest chance at resilience in a world that is more and more chaotic by the hour. And then I showed the work on how I found the deals and made connections for my portfolio that was unique to me.

After I’d wrapped it up and got my operating partner Alex to be sure all the operational work was settled I opened up my feeds. It was Swan Lake time. The head of mercenary organization Wagner Group was maybe, or maybe not, declaring a coup against the Russian Defense Minister. Who knows what’s going on! Certainly not me.

Cue the rampant speculations. My Telegrams are going wild. Signal is on fire. I am scrolling through sick jokes and CIA theories and extremely funny memes. Everyone is rushing to exert influence and partisan narratives on top of what looks like a Tom Clancy novel. And even he’d agree this week was a bit on the nose with the submarines and the Soviet comebacks. So let’s all remember the world is complex and we know so very little so let’s keep taking responsibility for the moves we can make and helping others do the same.

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Politics

Day 890 and Millennial Heads of State

America is being strangled by a gerontocracy as our Boomer and Silent Generation leaders resolutely refuse to get the fuck out of the way. I guess they can’t really enjoy life with their grandkids since so many of us failed to reproduce. Did mass social acceptance of divorce have consequences? Who can say! Meanwhile Saudi Arabia and North Korea are being run by millennials.

It was brought to my attention today that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is 37 years old. And while I probably realized he was in his thirties I really don’t think I’d clocked that it meant anything till today.

Isn’t it astonishing that this geriatric millennial convinced his daddy (who is a fucking King I might add) to step aside and let him run the empire?

Meanwhile in America, Hunter and Don Jr are maiming themselves with cocaine and dating Gavin Newsom’s ex-wife respectively. MBS on the other hand killed a Washington Post journalist and got away with it. The only thing American failsons have managed to kill is some Yellowstone wolves. Succession not looking so glamorous now is it?

Not that you should kill journalists obviously (the fourth estate is important for social trust) but is killing your offspring’s future ethically more sound? I don’t think so. A suicidal youth reflects poorly on the nation. Especially when those “youth” are like in their forties and fifties. It’s fucking embarrassing.

And yet the American gerontocracy sure seems to be in favor of letting their youth slowly suicide themselves. I get it, their kids suck, and they don’t want to risk even an iota of their housing wealth. And they are still butthurt their Greatest Generation parents didn’t respect their failures in Vietnam. The Soviet Union collapsing was a win though so there is that!

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Medical Preparedness Travel

Day 884 and Who Hurts First

I spend time in Europe for professional reasons. Some of my founders are unable to reach the United States as our visa program has become untenable. So I spend time in places founders can reach me. Trade crossed all borders.

Just in the last two, I’ve had Nigerian, Indian, Albanian, and Russian Jewish founders years find themselves unable to secure visas to visit America, not even for professional conferences or tourism. It is much worse with HB1 or O1 visas. You may not think this problem doesn’t affect you, or may even benefit you, but can I assure you one day it will affect you negatively. American industry was built by immigrants.

At first I thought I could simply work around America’s travel restrictions. Capitalism will overcome the inequalities our states have wrongly thrown up to divide us.

But I am learning that climate change and failures in sustainable energy policy is making it much harder to travel with a disability or chronic medical condition. Heat is a strain some bodies can’t take. And mine is one of those bodies. Migraine sufferers are too. So are the elderly. It’s quite common.

Last year I briefly did that American thing where we pretend we the Mediterranean lifestyle is aspirational by spending two weeks on the Ioan Sea. Utter disaster. I am not calling White Lotus a liar, but I couldn’t possibly imagine how hell could be worse than a heatwave in Sicily in July.

Watching the Germans treat air conditioning use like some sort of criminal shameful behavior was a vivid reminder that society always chooses who we hurt first. A policy that is for the common good may find uncommon hurt delivered to those we didn’t consider. It’s not deliberate but it may as well be.

If you paid attention during the pandemic you probably learned a lot about how we treat the sick and weak. Now imagine yourself as an one of them. It’s almost enough to make you consider becoming a reader of Rawls.

The end result for me is that I don’t believe I’ll be traveling to Europe except in the winters going forward. I can’t risk the lost days of productivity to something stupid like a default hotel setting for 72 degrees. I feel a bit robbed by this. Grief even that even late May is too risky to be on the road.

It’s a small thing to have your travel be restricted in a world of bigger sorrows, but the feeling of having your opportunities narrowed hurts. I’m sad because a utilitarian neoliberal wonk decided that most people would be perfectly comfortable with slightly warmer rooms. The finance teams at the hotels agreed. It’s not so bad. It doesn’t bother them. I wonder what other decisions won’t bother them. And whether they will hurt me unintentionally.

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 883 and Ride the Edge

If you aren’t comfortably with the current standards of living on average, I’d consider shoring up your resources now. As our planetary resource situation doesn’t appear to be getting better.

As more first world countries come to terms with slowing growth (perhaps even degrowth), resource scarcity is going to affect daily life in uncomfortable and visible ways we can’t smooth over with shrinkflation. If you aren’t prepared to live life on a harder setting, you should begin as soon as you are able to prepare for that reality.

I’d like to think about this problem with a bit of distance. What if we have a coercive state and social consensus for something you’d consider a personal preference or choice, but civil society views as as deviant? You will need to find ways to look like you are conforming even if in private, you are not. So how do you do so?

You may find it helpful to not stick out. In that situation there are two ways to survive an attack. Being protected and in the middle of the herd. Or be as far away from the herd as you can be.

Anyone on the edges of the herd of social consensus, but still within the second or third standard deviation from the norm may get hurt. Forced metaphor of the brutal blue curve but you get what I mean. Better to be a true outlier, as the secondary standard deviation will be forced by a brutal bell curve to fit in better.

If we add in artificial intelligence to the equation, we’ve got even more effective tools for monitoring and surveillance of out-group behavior and even easier mechanisms to deploy social shaming force at scale to insure social adherence. The panopticon is us. An army of Karens armed with the probability you will deviate waiting to pounce.

See for instance a social shaming quote tweet campaign. Now imagine it’s state sponsored propaganda but organized, through the seemingly spontaneous egregores of populism, add a dash of rule by authoritarianism and you’ve got yourself quite a problem. The wisdom of crowds can look like mania.

I got a small taste of being shamed yesterday by my neighbors in a Frankfurt Airbnb. Air conditioning use is frowned on in Germany now for both social reasons and also failing energy policy. Shutting down the nuclear power was a bad idea.

I’ve been suffering from an autoimmune issue, exacerbated by allergies and pollen, so I’ve used the air conditioning on 80 degree days. This was enough to get my neighbors to complain to me twice. I attempted to comply by going to a hotel but quickly found that no hotel would let me turn the thermostat below 72 degrees.

I decided to brave the noisy neighbors and run the air conditioning at the Airbnb in the end, but I didn’t appreciate having to lay our personal health problems to justify a private decision. Now extrapolate this out to genuinely serious situations. The disability issues are often an early lens into wider social attitudes on freedom, choice, value and worth.

You have to decide now if you want to hide in the middle of the herd. Can you pass? Are you able to fit in or do you have some deviance in your life? If you aren’t sure you can pull off average, you must ride the edges. Be as far outside the herd as you can. Maybe on the edge you can find a pack that will defend you.