Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1738 and On The Far Side

It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.

It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.

Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.

We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.

Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder

In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.

He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.

The Far Side Computer Calendae

Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.

Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.

Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.

Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.

There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.

Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.

My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.

She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.

My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.

I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.

I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.

My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1735 and Choice Matters with Our Networks

There are many benefits to a networked world but there are many destabilizing aspects to opening up the world to all of us. I’ve been slogging through Vladislav Zubok “Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union” which refutes the widely held belief that the collapse was inevitable.

He argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, aimed at modernizing and democratizing the Soviet Union destabilized the country.

Now as an American I might see that in a somewhat positive light but imagine America being broken up and you can see why it’s worth studying. It is worth understanding that with scale and access, a networked system has risks that we have not previously encountered in a political or economic system.

The last time we experienced a modern collapse at large scale, we had a fraction of the networked infrastructure that we do now.

Artificial intelligence becoming the current bugaboo belies just how little the general public really understands the nuts and bolts of our information rich world.

The complexity of how it operates obfuscates how easy it is to tilt the cart and upset fragile hierarchies and understandings.

I wish I could persuade more people to this viewpoint. The strange bedfellows of professional misunderstanders are constantly infighting with murky agendas of state and corporate preferences.

We are all useful idiots to someone. An alliance between orthodox Christians and a rationalist sex cult is the sort of “only in America” marriage of convenience that fights for very particular reasons.

The technocrats having lost the battle with modern complexity (and along with it the Mandate of Heaven) are in the process of playing whackamole with uprisings of paranoia that is a pox across every type of community. And that sucks as sometimes the paranoids are actually right. We just are never quite sure when.

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
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1718 and The Abyss Stares Back

The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.

We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.

The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.

I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.

Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.

Someone acquired a new piebald

Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.

The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.

I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.

I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.

What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.

Die unendliche Geschichte – 1979 Michael Ende

Categories
Politics

Day 1712 and Rome Didn’t Collapse In A Day

This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.

Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.

But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.

I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.

The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.

It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?
Categories
Culture

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

The Fourth Turning has become something like accepted elite discourse canon for generational analysis and grand theories of history.

William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory is probably familiar to you but I’ll cite it for my own edification.

The Strauss–Howe generational theory, devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generationcycle in American history and Western history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–25 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate (mood) exists.

Neil Howe Generational Theory

I go in for this “generational horoscope” theory. But I go in for lots of other “deterministic and unfalsifiable” things too so weight that in your assessment. I’m a woman who has a deep respect for woo even though I do generally consider myself a rationalist. And like all rationalists I’m hypocritically predisposed to biasing own qualia. Nevertheless I believe the hard laws are physics not culture.

So it was with interest that I was this theory of elder millenials cross my feed. The oldest of the last generation to live without the internet may prove a further data point for The Fourth Turning fans.


My guess is that the most interesting political figures of the next 20 years will come from this cohort— 1981-1987.
-not digitally native, but digitally fluent.
-came of age during or just after September 11th.
-Started adulthood just before or during the Great Recession.
-the final bridge to the 20th century, but young enough to be grounded in the 21st.Katherine Boyle of a16z on Twitter

American dynamism is a patriotic posture of older Silicon Valley culture. And this group of proudly rationalist and engineering minded types is extremely frustrated with being made the enemy by the government. Obama era technocracy represented what looks like a detente between the Boomers and the millennials.

If we are in the middle of a generational changeover between Boomers and millennials it would seem as if the elder children might inherent. But you don’t see a lot of folks who remember a world before the internet. I think there is something in this narrative that will prove important as the moods shift.

Categories
Culture Politics Reading

Day 869 and Novelty

When I was a university student at Chicago we went through a two year core cannon which was mostly meant as a Great Books exercise. I’ve still got a dozen rainbow colored books dubbed the “Western Civilization” readers. I treasure them.

My professor was a scholar named Katy Weintraub. She was the better half of the beloved Professor Karl Weintraub. The classes were famous for good reason. I’ll forever be grateful for having been taught the western cannon by someone as capable as her.

One lesson that has stuck with me is the dangers inherent in the human urge for newness. She brought up the insidious, cumulative effects of novelty nearly every lesson.

History was driven by “newness” and its consequences. Each new historical moment was an opportunity to be reminded how fraught with the peril novel ideas and changing cultural mores could be. Death, war, famine, and conquest lurked behind an original idea.

Every rebellion, reformation, and new republic started with some asshole sharing a bright idea. And it tended to get you killed, even if your particular form of novelty got widely adopted down the road. See Christianity, various flavors of democracy, the printing press, and the Enlightenment to name a few.

The “best” part of modernity appears to be that everyone from yours truly to Donald Trump can constantly float novelty trial balloons from the comfort of their own toilet. Best and worst are doing a Janus double duty of meaning here.

Professor Weintraub might remind us that all forms of novelty are dangerous. New ideas represent change. And change is destabilizing even if we later recognize those changes as positive.

I’m certainly feeling the destabilizing effects of having to be alive during living history these days. I bet you are too. Turns out we don’t live outside of history at all. Maybe I finally understand why novelty represented such a danger in Professor Weintraub’s mind. Change has been, historically speaking, pretty hard on those living through it.