Tag: Information Overload

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Politics

Day 801 and Not Today

It’s been a rocky few days watching the crisis unfolding around Silicon Valley Bank and what would happen to its depositors. We’ve received our answer.

After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.

So that’s been a wild and scary ride and I guess we are kicking the can down the road. But I wasn’t emotionally prepared for a contagion on Monday.

Categories
Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 800 and Small Potatoes

It’s nice when a round number crops up in my daily journey of writing every single day. It’s even better when it’s colliding with the wider narratives of humans. If you aren’t paying attention to the news, Silicon Valley bank had a run on Thursday and was taken over by FDIC on Friday. Now the powers that be decide our fates. On day 800 we wait to see if anything has changed about capitalism.

I’m small potatoes so I’m scrambling for survival as much as anyone. But I’ve got a reasonably good head on me and I’ve seen this movie before. Literally. I watched Margin Call a dozen times this year. My family also went bankrupt in the 2001 crash and I was working in startup land during the 2008 crash. So this isn’t exactly my first ride on the roller coaster. I still get sick to my stomach though.

I think we are all about to have a significant conversation in America about trust and who is looking out for whom. I have my theories on how it plays out and over what time horizon. Very few of those scenarios and involves actually letting the american economy implode. But some heads will need to roll it’s just going to depend on the fates.

I really don’t feel like writing through some of this as it’s both personally traumatic because I’m a human being but also because I don’t know where this lands any more than you do. A lot depends on who blinks and who we want to scapegoat and how much we want to tolerate the unpleasant realities of who matters most. Not to be dramatic but every empire rests on a pile of skulls. It’s the degree to which this is literally true that changes over the years.

Categories
Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 799 and Black Friday

I suppose it’s now quite clear why I felt like I was driving through a snowblind yesterday. For someone who spent the year telling everyone to watch Margin Call you’d think I’d be pretty prepared for the inevitability of pricing affecting risk.

I am, of course, discussing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We’d discussed in our household scenario planning around what would happen if we saw banks forced to compete on better interest rates. Perhaps the same old story of mis-pricing your risk would play out. Discussions of contingency planning and multiple accounts and insurance policies both personal and professional. I really didn’t expect for any of the emergency use cases to manifest as to even contemplate it is simply too horrifying.

But horrible things happen every day and I am skeptical of my capacity to judge my own need for a comfort in a situation in which there is none to be found. I do however believe that in the wake of the Great Recession we’ve come to believe that money always gets bailed out. And why would Janet Yellen (of all people) hang out the singular shining star industry that keeps the lights on in the hollowed out shell of post-industrial American capitalism.

That said humans have been known to do spitefully stupid things that hurt themselves so long as it also hurts someone they dislike. Cut off your nose to spite your face. I don’t know if the drive for vengeance is strong enough for some populist reactionary spill over. I’d want to at least offer up a scapegoat and I’ll be curious to see who has this fate.

This seems like the crumbles to me. The logic of the Jankening is that we cannot always predict the downstream effects because this is a complex system. All I know is that to let a large chunk of the wider technology ecosystem fail would be catastrophic.

However, we have now effectively put in the minds of a new generation that banks do stupidly silly things occasionally (Lmao) and you have to be careful who you trust with risk. Everyone is running to the big banks and that will have its own consequences. I am curious to see what the downstream consequences will be.

Be careful who you trust, use some common sense and don’t be overly sure of the value of powerful people telling you want to think. They might not have your best interest at heart.

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 782 and Vanity Fair

I am extremely proud of being a subject in Jame’s Pogue’s new Vanity Fair piece. It is about managed decline, the death of state capacity, and whispers of a post state world. I’d say it’s a bombshell except I think there are some very sober people discussing how life in a chaotic world filled with distrust might work out. Spoiler alert, not great.

“Preppers, techies, hippies, and yuppies are converging on the American West, the safest place to “exit” a society gone haywire.”

The Dissident Fringe

I worry that the next frontier in American cultural battles will be figuring out how to stay out of our versions of “the troubles.” And I don’t like the sound of that.

I think you may find yourself agreeing with me. I don’t want a culture war and I certainly don’t want it to turn into a hot war. Apparently that makes anyone who agrees with the above premise a dissident fringe. Didn’t realize it was controversial to enjoy civilization. But I am in fact comfortable saying I don’t want any kind of war.

But I’m not sure everyone feels that way. So in a show of our seriousness we’ve decamped to the imagined demilitarized zone of the Rockies. I don’t want any chaos but I am literally betting the house on us having a bumpy ride maintaining course in America as we deal with long delayed issues from infrastructure, education, logistics and supply chains to capital markets and trade. I intend to capitalize on this uncertainty. You can do so with me if you’d like as an LP in chaotic capital.

If you are curious about how it might play out, in this nearly 9,000 word opus, every angle of how to survive in the American West in the near future is captured in empathetic detail by Pogue. It’s almost like reading William Gibson in how it shows a present that feels a bit off. Cyberpunk right before the Jackpot, but make it from a gonzo Hunter S Thompson type. I appreciate it on purely aesthetic grounds. You should read it.

But practically how do we all muddle through a greyzone war that has no agreed upon values, including whether the enlightenment & liberalism are worthwhile?

As we fight it out as a nation, most of us are just going to continue living our lives as crashing stare capacity and war over institutional norms gets in the way of raising a family and doing business. And it’s this scenario—a muddling, unhappy, middle course—that most people in this sphere tend to predict is coming. It’s not fun but it’s not the end of the world.

It is my personal belief that we are struggling to find any alignment because regardless of your personal politics, religion, or even overriding philosophy, your actual physical body is just fucking done with this bullshit. I mean it literally. We feel it in our bodies.

Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long.”

Julie Fredrickson – Vanity Fair March 2023

We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’”

It’s too much stress on the system and something is going to have to change.

If you read the piece you will see just how much trust is lost amongst all parties that make up the American experiment. The cherry on top is that our nation state distrusts our foes & but they also distrust us the citizens and their desire for more freedom. It’s a messy battle for meaning and power.

And as Americans we’ve had the exorbitant burden of the dollar being the global currency. What happens when we no longer trust any actors on the global stage? Distrust our fellow citizens, distrust our currencies, distrust our institutions, distrust our enemies? It sure gets hard to run an economy without trust.

We need to build new systems we can trust or our bodies and minds will give out. Simple as.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. Ifyou want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 727 and Low Recovery Scores

I am chuckling at how excited my former self was for a productive holiday season. I was just overcome by enthusiasm for getting ahead over the break. I was so sure the relaxation would lead to creativity and connection. Pride comes before a fall I guess. But according to my Whoop & Apple Watch, my heart rate variability has been significantly worse than usual.

Maybe it was the extreme weather. Montana had a temperature swing of 95 degrees over the last week. Perhaps I’ve simply been overdoing it with cortisol and overstimulation, as I’ve had an exciting couple of days online.

I’ve wrote up a product road maps for Twitter’s messaging service and gone viral for therapy poasting. Those two activities are tied together. You can guess who the audience was for each of those and enjoy a chuckle.

I’ve got at least one post I’d like to get done before I wrap up year two of writing every single day. I think it’s important to do a year end “best of” overview. But that will require focus and time to get right. But I won’t be doing it today. Today I will listen to my body and let it recover. 2022 was by all measures a hell of a year. I look back on it and see a huge level up in my personal life across multiple dimensions. So if my body wants a little extra recovery time it earned it.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 702 and Fight or Flight

Being extremely online is physically quite taxing these days. We’ve got these amazing dopamine casinos that are constantly rolling out the exact animal attention our novelty wired brains crave.

And absolutely the entire world of causes is out there competing for your attention. Everything from sugar water to white nationalism is being sold on social media. And we are just click clicking away not even being concerned about how we are getting radicalized into redder or blacker pills. We are riding all kinds of unhygienic dick and I fear we’ve got some kind of STD that affects common sense.

And while I just made up an entire disease for comedic effect, I do think being steeped in a reactionary culture is bad for our bodies. We can’t always be in fight or flight. We cannot constantly pump the stress hormones. Too much cortisol is at the root of a thousand different inflammatory diseases. And trust me you don’t want one of those. It’s quite literally a pain.

Information warfare is being waged and your eyeballs are boots on the ground. And just like every other grunt in any other Great War, the powers that be think you are expendable.

And you’ve got to ask yourself if you think it’s worth dying for some other man’s culture war. Has he done something heroic for your life? Given you anything? Or is it just all a story being sold to you and from which, sadly, you profit little.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 685 and Brainworms

I am very good at media. It’s a passion as well as one of my few hobbies that has stood the test of time. If I wanted a regular job I think I’d enjoy for more than a couple year stint I’d probably pick publicist. I say this add context to the topic I plan to discuss.

Because I’m so experienced (and also naturally talented) at the attention disciplines, I can spend time consuming information that isn’t mentally or emotionally hygienic for the average person. I have outstanding informational immunity. I stare into the abyss so others don’t have to. I monitor it all, from extremist groups to the most normie mainstream media. I have always made my living by intaking and organizing information.

Unlike your drunk uncle or wired Gen Z nephew, I can withstand information environments designed to “pill” you and hijack your dopamine responses without ill effect. Frankly I’m disappointed I’m not a literal William Gibson character as I certainly feel like Cayce Pollard existentially.

So I hope you take me seriously when I say I think it is time for all of us to pull back from extended raw regular Twitter consumption for a little bit. It has become an info-hazard rapidly and almost accidentally as its new management attempts to reinvigorate features and drive cost cutting (some of which I support). I don’t know if it is going to collapse or get reinvented but Twitter as it is right now is unstable.

The degradation of features and rules of engagement is happening too quickly and unpredictably for me to surf continuously like I have in the past. Context collapse is pervasive. There are gaping holes in informational hierarchies from experiments to both nerf and boost accounts through verification chaos. Responses from trusted accounts don’t make it to my alerts. I used to browse on reverse chronological non-algorithm view but it appears so broken in my feed it’s unclear how or why things are being surfaced.

And these concerns barely scratch the surface. Twitter’s immune responses to competing agendas, trolling and chaos agents are broken as the duct tape and physical labor of its team has been slashed. Raging information infections that typically remain contained to their ecosystems are spreading to main feeds. You cannot control your information environment when it is collapsing all around you.

You are going to get brain worms if you are not careful. If even a twenty year professional with exposure to the darkest corners of content (from 4chan to Gawker to groypers) no longer feels safe in this information war zone than you might want to consider restricting your own consumption for your own mental and emotional safety. I’ve decided to cut down on browsing until the platform stabilizes. I’m rebooting my email inbox and newsfeeds. I am choosing to open news apps directly rather than waiting for my networks to surface news. I just don’t feel safe drinking from the raw feed on Twitter right now.

In other words, if it’s not safe for me then it is definitively not safe for you.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 677 and Bad Moon Rising

I got woken up at around 430am this morning by my husband. Now he typically wakes up earlier than me but rarely does he rise before 5am. He got out of bed and I heard one of our doors opening. A few minutes later he was back in bed and I drifted back to sleep.

It turns out he was getting up to see if the lunar eclipse was visible. Much of Southwest Montana got blanketed in a significant snowstorm, so alas cloud cover prevented him from glimpsing the eclipse with the naked eye. The blood moon was hidden behind a white out.

The eclipse was soon forgotten in the excitement of the storm. The snow was so powder fine we immediately suited up to do the adult version of playing outside. We had our first opportunity to hook up the snow blower attachment to our tractor to plow out our very long drive away. I took dozens of videos and Alex absolutely wrecked me by blowing a bunch of snow at me. We captured the comedy on the security camera and it made for a good laugh.

But the day unraveled almost immediately. The blood moon began to feel a bit like a bad moon rising. News of crypto exchange FTX getting “acquired” by Binance after 48 hours of sniping between CZ and Sam Bankman Fried. It’s a complicated story but it basically amounts to a bank run. Crypto was having a JP Morgan moment that appeared to have been manifested as some kind of grudge match on Twitter. The financial markets largely seemed like they didn’t care.

But crypto isn’t even the big story of the day. It’s Election Day in America where the midterms have been hyped up into an existential crisis. Which seems like a stupid thing to do when you are bound to lose just based on past election history (the party is in power tends to lose the midterms) but whatever everything in American life is existential now.

I’ve been on a doomer beat for sometime. Not that I think everything is necessarily getting worse but rather a series of macro level trends are headed in the wrong direction. I’d like to continue to live a nice life. I see the bad moon rising. And I made a set of life choices to get my family to Montana. I’ve got a serious of predictions about what it might take to thrive in harder times. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little bit smug about having beat the rush. So stay strapped out there my friends.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 660 and When Extremely Online Goes Terminal

I committed one of the cardinal sins of the extremely online yesterday. So much discourse was happening I overwhelmed myself. Just like an endless stream of stuff was hitting my hind brain and like an idiot I just kept drinking from the firehose of engagement. I stayed up till 1am.

I’m typically careful about how much central nervous system stress I’m willing to tolerate. It’s a hazard of the job when being visibly online and searching for investments is mostly virtual. Purposely consuming a significant amount of bad news or scrolling the deep cuts of the dark corners of the message boards is meant to be done in small doses. I have no need to push my endocrine system into permanent fight or flight. No one does. It’s very counterproductive.

Going into a sympathetic nervous response is a part of life though. Some stress is good. I have an entire routine for soothing an overstimulated vagus nerve. I take adaptogens. I meditate. I live in Montana with plenty of open spaces and fresh air. I am skilled in discerning agitprop from all corners of the information wars. When I dive into the dopamine river I do so responsibly with the right tools. Don’t try this at home kids.

But that doesn’t mean I’m immune from drowning in the dopamine drip. I just have a good chance of pulling myself out before it’s too late. Around 9pm or so it became clear that even after a quiet dinner, some CBD and THC gummies, and relaxing television with my husband that I was in fact still very much in sympathetic response.

I panicked a little bit as hour after hour passed and I continued to be reactive. I’d started a negative flywheel. I took an Ativan fully expecting the steroid of the mind to knock me out. It did not. And so giving in to all my worst impulses stayed on Twitter. Fuck it if the good rare drugs weren’t doing it. I said “let ‘er rip!” I had recently finished the Bear.

Today I undid the damage. I slept until my body decided it was time to wake up. I followed my supplement routine carefully. For the TMI readers I had about a dozen orgasms. I slept some more. I stretched and took a walk. I took a long leisurely shower with every possibly form of exfoliating and conditioning I could imagine. And now at the end of the day I think I might have pushed my case of terminally online back to a place of merely extremely online. Let that be a lesson to everyone.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 652 and Startled Awake

There are few things more disorienting than waking up without realizing where, or even when, you’ve fallen asleep.

The first few moments of regaining consciousness are the stuff of genuine terror. As your senses do their best to bring their data to your brain, there are a few agonizingly slow beats where you genuinely have no idea what the fuck is going on.

I imagine this phenomenon is where our vocabulary of phrases like “startled awake” get their origin. Perhaps you weren’t awoken by anything surprising, or particularly startling, but the small gap in processing between sense and mind is such a chasm in that singular moment that it all feels startling.

I had lay down to wait for a Midol to kick in to ease my first day of menstruation cramps at around 1:30pm. I remember asking my husband if he could find a heating blanket. I don’t remember much past that except a few hazy details of wrapping my entire lower torso with a heating blanket.

I had not turned off any lights. Nor had I thought to put on a sleeping mask. I thought I was simply waiting for the sweet relief of caffeine, Tylenol and diuretics. I had even told my girlfriend Ellie who had been expecting me to come up upstairs to hang out that I just needed a quick lie down. Turns out the lie part was true. It was not quick however. Which is some fun wordplay.

When I regained consciousness I had no sense of how much time had passed. As I fumbled about for my cell phone I swear I felt my neurons firing off rapidly in an attempt to gain data points for my poor addled mind to do some damned interpreting.

I was wrapped in something hot with a cord. Did that mean I wasn’t in my own bed? I didn’t generally sleep with anything electronic. I briefly panicked as I felt trapped in what was previously providing my body with comfort. I’d forgotten about the electric heating blanket, leaving the cord with no other function but to panic my hind brain with a fear of being strangled.

As all my lights were on, the various lamps were washing out any indication of the hour. I could hear noises above me so perhaps someone was awake. Did that mean it was the afternoon? What was with all the stomping above. It felt like it must be day.

I simply wasn’t getting enough orientation information from my initial position and I couldn’t seem to find my phone. I doubt more than a second or two has passed as I went through my startled awake process.

As I attempted to make sense of all these inputs I finally realized that I had passed out on top of my phone and I’d let it slip under my pillow. It was a bit past 3pm. I texted Ellie to let her know I’d accidentally passed out. The brief pumping of adrenaline and cortisol was easing back. I was at home in bed quite safe and a bit overly warm. But I certainly felt a new appreciation for the limits and frailty of my human mind.