Tag: Libertarian

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Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.

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Community Politics

Day 838 and Wanting

I am no longer interested in living by standards I didn’t set for preferences I don’t have.

Me on Twitter 😑

A lot of what Americans took for granted about the world got a hard dose of cynical reality over the last few years. But the upside of the pandemic was the reckoning it forced on all of it. I know I walked away from those years. changed.

I’d begun my own personal journey into the existential abyss earlier as I was faced with personal health crisis before the global one. And I’m glad I had a head start. It isn’t easy making hard choices.

I’ve learned to prioritize what matters to me. I have resource constraints and it has breed in me innovation and fortitude. I’m a whiney cunt about it too. Because I simply don’t see why I need to live my life for someone else’s preferences, especially if I don’t share them. I can chose to prioritize my life and my values. And I’m free to live that way too.

America as an ideal is nobler than our reality. But as a civilizational ideal we’ve set a society where we value the freedom to live as we chose. Maybe you don’t like my choices but if I’m not harming anyone live and let live.

I want to keep civilization. I think it’s good. I want no Hobbesian war of all against all. So let’s find a way to maintain tolerance and live and let live. Weirdos like me aren’t hurting anybody. And neither should you. Authoritarians please find succor elsewhere.

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Internet Culture

Day 805 and Legibility

Being inscrutable is a tactical asset in our extremely online age. As more informational influence campaigns are waged, it becomes easier to invade your headspace if you are too predictable.

I’m not saying that being predictable isn’t worthwhile. If you have a firm foundation of philosophy or religion that dictates a stance sometimes you just have to own it. I’m a libertarian and I often walk the line of what I consider to be foundational beliefs in the value of other people’s freedom in relation to mine.

But I also live in reality where the grey of living in a civilization is a lot less clear. Anyone who doesn’t admit to this fundamental tension is untrustworthy as far as I’m concerned.

This of course makes me legible. It is one of the buzzwords in my favorite online spaces. It is the art of how we make ourselves legible to others such that we can see and be seen. I rather like this philosophy overall.

But I am also quite sure that if you give someone an opening to fuck with you they probably will. It’s definitely a risk to be seen. It makes you a target. But it’s also how you become a beacon. So it’s an over under decision on how much you care about other people attacking you is up to you. But if you open about experimenting with life and how little you know it almost always turns out alright.

There is a theory of public relations, much popularized by Steve Bannon and legal discovery, called flood the zone with shit. And sometimes not giving your enemies a sense of who you is because you are always in process of becoming more and bigger and inscrutable and then suddenly you are in the Heart of Darkness.

It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

So everyone be optimistic and find your people but remember everyone is going to be playing the same game. So I’d definitely recommend you don’t cheat and play the long game.

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Culture

Day 797 and Women’s Day

I remember a gentler more optimistic time when I received a “holiday” like International Women’s Day with some amount of positivity. I’ll grant it was mostly as an excuse for marketing and public relations but it didn’t offend me. Now in the harsh reactionary landscape of 2023 I fucking loathe it.

There was a time when I discussed issues like equity and inclusion and felt proud to ask for more space for women in the many male dominated spaces where I spent my time. I like startups, economics, math, science fiction and libertarianism so you could say I’m used to be one of the few women. And I never felt like I didn’t belong.

That is until I started taking up space. Once you’ve asked to be treated as not just one of the boys but as the leader of the pack you start to notice the snarls. Still I didn’t mind. Being top dog is always going to involve some fights. Let’s just say I’m glad women were allowed into the back door of the startup economy by handling Ecommerce. I didn’t mind having to earn my way in by playing in girly spaces like shopping. The money spends.

But I didn’t have to fight any men to do it. I found a way in on my own terms even though I might have preferred something a little less clearly marked as “for girls!” Because I’ve come to believe that no one wants a more diverse world. Diversifying industries that felt safe to men like startups was fought tooth and nail because who wants to give up ground that they fought hard to gain. I’m sure the men all bleed for their positions and nobody wants more competition. I get it.

It’s all a bit of polite fiction because the reality is power is always earned (or taken) and if you think life is a zero sum game you might believe me gaining power is your loss. I don’t believe in zero sum so I’m a little more “win win” but I get it. I see your pain.

So it’s with that dose of realism that I’ll ask you to pardon me if I am skeptical of the value of some corporate holiday to celebrate women’s contributions to the world. We are half the fucking planet. Of course we contributed to the fucking outcome! I don’t need a damn day for that.

Just because men kept women in the house (or cave or whatever) for a couple thousand years doesn’t mean we didn’t build this world too. We bore your children and made your food and kept the hearth.

We gave your dumb asses advice and kept you civilized because that’s what you asked from us. And yet somehow in modernity, men resented women for civilization even though you sure seem like you love the power and wealth that came with civilizing.

The new masculinity Internet influencers say it’s so emasculating to stop being brutes. It’s these women and their demands for respect and inclusion that is so burdensome. Fuck feminized society they howl. Return to tradition! Ok, so which one is it buddy? You want to be a warrior but you also like wearing those Gucci loafers too.

So yeah fuck all the way off. In fact, let’s get grosser. Suck my blood cunt. No one is buying me off with a holiday. It’s tacky. Like buying flowers for your wife after you did something bad. Just own up to it and fuck the flowers. Be a man.

So that’s my message on International Women’s Day. Be a man. It’s what everyone wanted right? Oh and suck my bloody cunt. Let’s stop with the special holidays and get on with building the world together. You know, like we used to do.

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Homesteading Politics

Day 784 and Endocrine

In case you haven’t heard, everyone is bracing for apocalypse. Well, that’s just the headline to get your attention. Everyone is watching the decline in American state capacity as we struggle with distrust across all forms of institutional power.

It’s really challenging to discuss this subject as it is unpleasant to look bad things happening straight in the eye. But if you have read some history, maybe own a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you’ve probably got theories. But I understand that it’s hard to look at worst case scenarios. Your life may still look normal. But know that for millions of people the consensus is that shit sucks.

I’m not placing any moral or ethical judgements on the wide variety of kooks & characters that have traditionally espoused the various flavors of doom. I don’t particularly care for my compatriots in doom included in the Vanity Fair piece. They don’t like me either. I will self identify as degenerate libertarian who is skeptical of governmental and corporate power.

I’ve been called a Bolshevik by the Christian right and a crypto fascist by the DSA so I’ll assume your average rational mind will recognize that perhaps that the common cause of an America in decline is a bigger fight than tribal affiliations. If you cannot retain a calm mind in your analysis I hope I can convince you that this is a problem.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “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. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Dissident Fringe

We are all overreacting to everything because we’ve come out of the stress of three years of a pandemic that has overlapped with such an incredible array of natural, industrial and political disasters anyone would be edgy. Oh and remember how we had 4 years of Trump? We are acting nuts because stress made us more reactive.

Some argue the great weirding goes back much further but the point is that we are all victims of a long now of persistent anxiety, exhaustion and adrenaline. I don’t know if we can even hear each other trying to grapple with problems in good faith because we are just so tired from being driven nuts by all this.

Imagine a future where this kind of endocrine draining stress simply never relents. And that’s the future I’m earning you about. Everything gets a little harder and less reliable. You trust everyone a little less. It’s harder to eat healthy and maintain healthy habits. It’s harder to trust mainstay civic services like schools, police, and the postal service. The roads are worse and infrastructure is crumbling and do I really need to tell you? Use your imagination

Decline is hard on the body and you need to be planning on how to manage disruptions if only so you can keep at the business of raising your family, going to work and trying to have a life.

If your ambitions outstrips these goals and you’d like to make money on the realignment of the world you will need to do more, build more, investment more. So I’d probably do some basic resilience work so you can maintain focus. If you want to make money trying to solve for the many customers all looking for solutions to all the shit that is going wrong you might want to stabilize your life with basic preparedness.

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. If you want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP

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Homesteading Politics Preparedness Uncategorized

Day 783 and The Alliance

Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for me. A splashy wandering “state of culture in America” piece in a glossy cultural firmament like Vanity Fair is the ultimate validation of one’s thesis. I am taking a little bit of a bow on it. I’ve been on about this chaotic future and here are my receipts.

And it’s potentially a good thing that so many people are seeing the alignment that a muddy middle ground of chaos means “the rest of us” have to get on with building whatever the chaotic future looks like. We’ve got families, jobs, and health problems. Life goes on even during times of contested authority. Honestly it’s usually where fortunes are made.

Because it’s a surprisingly large cultural alliance. It has a key truly America things in common. That thing? It’s the most American a shared value as I can imagine. We believe the frontier can be tamed and that civilization is a good thing. Americans have always had a pragmatic streak to them thanks to our Protestant work ethic fetish.

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

The Dissident Fringe

Because look, nobody asked for a million stupid cultural schisms and endless battles over basic human rights and who shares in the spoils of civilization. Just find a damn common ground. Because right now we’ve got problems to fix. Nobody is sharing in anything unless we build shit. Building shit is the beginning of shared prosperity.

If we cannot align on that fact, then yes of course we are going to continue fighting in the grey zone politics of civilizational values. Because you know what progressives have going for them? A shared legal framework on which to resolve disputes is always better than vigilance. Everyone should want that. Sorry accelerationists.

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.

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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.

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Politics Preparedness

Day 779 and Future Shock

It feels like a lot of people are finally catching up to what a shit show institutional distrust has wrought on American society. Nobody trusts anyone and everyone is going tribal. The level of panic is feeling palpable across media narratives and we are being offered a choice to either get worked up or get on with our lives.

I will admit I feel a little bit smug on this point as I’ve been prattling on about doomer shit forever. But I also got off my ass and moved to Montana and starting picking up some skills so I could continue to feel like my life had some measure of resilience to it. I ain’t getting all worked up about the end of the world because I can’t live in perpetual anxiety.

Maybe it’s because my parents are hippies that it’s not a big stretch for me to imagine what happens when cultural conventions break down. The post war generation had a whole other set of traumas around social change. And a lot of splinter subcultures emerged from how they were specifically betrayed by all major institutions as well.

So I am reluctant to say this is new. Decline is a long slow managed process and new revolutions turn up all the time to solve our problems. I believe in human ingenuity.

But I do think we’ve sped up the pace of culture as we ramped up new technology as each new instance of connectivity has somehow also wrought alienation and anxiety. It’s hardly surprising that half of the internet is in a complete panic over what rules of the game changed.

What can I say except that it’s so satisfying to lie to yourself about how you benefit each time a cheat code is revealed. Perhaps just enjoy the power and get on with it. I don’t know what to tell you to do but find a way to make peace with it. Because otherwise you will be preyed upon. There are thousands of kinds of power and I suggest you find yours.

But I am genuinely concerned that we are headed to a further and faster and new types crisis of meaning as new rules get introduced, and every actor that desires to hold power will be running to capture it.

And I do mean everyone. It’s not that your tribe is good and the other tribe is bad, rather it’s hard for humans to trust each other with too much power. Independence is a very heavy burden and it’s insulting when you won’t carry your share. We’ve been negotiating the boundaries of it since Socrates got poisoned for corrupting the youth of Athens. And we still don’t have a good answer to what constitutes human excellence.

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 764 and Natalism

There are a number of cultural streams in American life that have all aligned around being natalist. You want your country to have babies because it’s good for the economy. And presumably also good for national security.

This fairly basic insight means everyone from techno-libertarians to Catholic homesteaders believes that Americans should be having more babies. It is not just the Quiver-full types having six babies anymore, so are our wealthiest aristocratic titans of industry.

But this alliance is missing some crucial basics. Like for instance the fundamental civilization level things we need to do to make it desirable and affordable to have children. It’s expensive to be pregnant, it’s expensive to raise children, it’s expensive all around to be parents. I spent $40,000 on IVF and it ruined my health. If I counted lost wages and being forced to sell my startup I’m the total costs is seven figures.

I don’t know if you’ve looked at just the costs around having a baby but it will shock you every time you turn a new corner in the fertility space. I learned today you will spend between $100,000 to $200,000 to hire a surrogate. It’s a person’s salary and a lot of medical care so sure that seems right but damn.

I guess I am interested in the math of Natalism to see if I could afford it. I am one of those “tech elites” that thinks we have to have children to drive the innovation of tomorrow. Our future is based on an optimistic hope that maybe we can push for a better future. Humanity won’t continue without children.

But I don’t have a body that is all that healthy without medical intervention. I live a normal life now and can work full time again because I take some exceptional medicine.

But it’s not medicinal regime that can be combined with pregnancy. So if I want to carry a child I have to go off what amounts to life saving medicine. Without it I’d be on bed rest. You can imagine the math I’m doing in my head? Do I want to pour another million into having a family?

So what’s a girl like me to do? Surrogacy right? But I’ve got 10 eggs and 2 embryos so assuming a third of them make it, that’s nearly half a million dollars in surrogacy fees. To get three kids. That’s a heavy price tag on the future. If more of them take it gets even wilder.

Now ok sure I’d rather we encourage a world where younger healthy folks do things naturally but don’t we want everyone going at maximum effort for a better tomorrow? Shouldn’t we want technology to solve this? Where are my artificial wombs at?

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Internet Culture

Day 716 and Slightly Embarrassed

I spent my entire day on Twitter. I’m not embarrassed by that to be clear. It felt like a vacation day. And even though I live in a majestic mountain paradise, I will spend my time off inside looking at my phone.

Yes it was absolutely gorgeous day in Montana. I marveled at the playful pinks of the sunrise over the mountains in our backyard while drinking coffee. And then I got back in bed and on my phone. And you better believe I fucking doomacrolled.

I just gorged myself on cheap attention calories. Gimme that dopamine drip. I did not even try to modulate my consumption pattern or prevent myself from going into fight or flight. It was goblin mode. I’m still not embarrassed.

But Twitter is a fucking mess. Watching people go tribal on Elon Musk is worse than people going tribal on the president somehow. Maybe because it feels more personal to me? Don’t get me wrong Trump felt existential, but Elon Musk is personal.

And it’s fucking embarrassing watching people react to him and his decision making. Here it is my industry’s moment in the spotlight. The technology industry showing itself as a keeper of common goods and open discourse right? Absolutely fucking not. We’ve shat the bed. Old management was incompetent sure. But new management is not an improvement.

I went into Twitter being purchased by Elon Musk modestly optimistic. He’s our guy right? He’s one of us. He likes startups and capital and technology. He reads the same science fiction as me. We’ve got friends in common. This is what it’s like to be a fan of the home team right?

Well fuck me sideways it has been going poorly. The site is pretty broken but I’m over that. It’s just the constant mayhem. Dave Kellog termed it adhocracy. Some random bullshit happens and the whole website has to lurch around conspiracy theories and rationalization.

It has frankly not been a fine showing for techno-libertarians. Not sure about showing up for a monarch executive now that you’ve seen your civil rights up for terms-of-service revisions by fiat huh? I’ve always thought the neo-monarchists to be dickriders but that’s a sentence that’s only comprehensible to the terminally online. And yes I should go outside and touch snow. I’ll do that now.