Oh baby baby! So it seems as if, in my infinite wisdom, I did not pay enough attention to the early warning signs from my Whoop biometrics and I did indeed need to worry about the fun and games of a subcutaneous tissue infection.
I swear that this IL-17 inhibitor drives me nuts. Despite its impressive effect on my inflammatory biomarkers, it leaves me very susceptible to skin infections. And I have to be constantly vigilant to the first signs of an issue.
I’ll be fine. I did in fact catch it before it turned into anything serious. Where I am at it’s easily treatable with a short antibiotic course that may formerly be prophylactic. My wound area had not shown any signs of spreading nor was I running a fever or otherwise exhibiting other signs of serious infection.
I just had crappy HRV numbers and high resting heart rate three days in a row and it’s not worth risking it. I threw back some basic antibiotics last night and woke up with a normal heart rate again. My HRV is coming up just a little more slowly. Glad I didn’t wait as this isn’t worth any amount of risk to me.
I comforted myself by working on my beauty blog where I’ve got routines coming along for founding subscribers and a fresh post about Shrinkflation at Sephora and a minimalist men’s routine on sale at Amazon.
Or if you are feeling adventurous for an honestly embarrassingly low fee I’ll put together a custom routine for you from my sample library or go full autistic and decant you the perfect mix of potions and lotions to meet you precise lifestyle and budget. My autistic obsession is your gain. It’s so much for me for and your skin will look amazing.
I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.
A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.
Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go
Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”
Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.
This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.
While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.
It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.
And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.
The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.
Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room
I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.
It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.
I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.
A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.
The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.
And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.
Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.
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.
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!
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.
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!!!!
While I’m not economist, because, well there wasn’t money to pay for graduate school, so I could not dedicate myself to the study of monetary policy. I had to go make money in the markets like a capitalist should.
So I’m aware that my thought experiment is not how any of this works, it’s against free market principles to arrange markets like this, but let’s do a thought experiment about buying back our industrial capacity.
That “industrial process” is a technology that lives in the heads of people and that it was a mistake to let so much “low value” industry be offshored due to the loss of tacit process capital
So what kind of companies would America want to acquire if we were so inclined to pursue a strategy of industrialization? Our biggest success is that we are a highly financialized economy.
So why not use that cash to buy some shit? I know I don’t like planned markets either but for our industrialists let’s say we find a way for America’s markets to buy us back some process knowledge.
Let’s take a stab at what we’d even want in that day. For me my starting point is the top ten Korean chaebols, we take back AMD from Europe (we licensed it anyways) and look to acqui-hire former Nokia Finnish & Baltic system engineers.
Now maybe you want 1 or 2 Indian pharmaceutical generics providers to come to American. And for fun let’s buy the Japanese fastener company YKK. And also buy back the meatpackers. I asked Grok what it would cost and I was honestly pretty pleased by the price tag.
Based on current data (Sep 2025):
Top 10 Korean chaebols (flagship mkt caps): ~$879B
AMD: $261B
Nokia: $26B
Top 2 Indian generics (Sun Pharma, Cipla): $61B
YKK: Private (N/A)
Major meatpackers (JBS, WH Group): $30B
Total: ~$1.26 trillion. Note: Estimates for groups; exact values fluctuates
We would probably need to buy the shareholders and the workers so let’s assume it’s kind of a buyout but you are getting the talent too.
We get the best possible new Americans and we make their shareholders money. Capitalism buys American bonds. Usually. So then I think how much of our GDP would that be?
Current US GDP (2024): ~$29.2 trillion. 2025 projection: ~$29.7T. The $1.26T total is about 4% of annual GDP. Affordability for acquisitions would depend on financing, government subsidies, or private capital, but the economy’s scale makes it feasible in theory
Now I start to get greedy. I want the top 10 best Shenzhen manufacturers and asked for Grok’s best estimate on cost. No facts checked here it’s vibe economics ok?
Based on Sep 2025 data and estimates (public caps in USD; privates approximated via valuations):
Huawei (telecom/electronics): ~$300B (private)
BYD (EVs/batteries): $133B
Luxshare Precision (components): $70B
Mindray (medical devices): $41B
ZTE (telecom equip): $25B
TCL Technology (electronics): $20B
Inovance (automation): $20B
Goertek (acoustics/wearables): $15B
Sunny Optical (optics): $12B
Han’s Laser (laser equip): $6B
Total est. acquisition cost: ~$642B. Feasible under your presumptions, ~2% of US GDP
So just vibe economics here but like how much did we spend on pandemic stimulus?
Total US COVID-19 fiscal stimulus (2020-2021 packages) was about $5.6 trillion, per Tax Policy Center estimates, including spending and tax relief. That’s roughly 19% of current GDP—way more than your 6% shopping list. Feasible in scale, if the will is there!
So again just vibes not how it works but stay with me here to keep the American consumer spending (which I am not saying didn’t work because it did) but we spent 19% of our GDP in stimulus. And we didn’t get better companies or better Americans.
I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.
That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.
If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over itor absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.
This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.
Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.
The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.
I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.
I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.
I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.
I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.
And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.
Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.
I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.
Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?
Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib
Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.
Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.
That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?
Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.
But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.
I am quite jet lagged today so I am unsure if this will be coherent but “it’s practice” so here I am.
I am in the middle of my own biochemical storms as the wider algorithmic storms of the web remain at hurricane strength. My own teapot tempests hardly matter against the gale force nihilism of the raw power games buffeting us all about this online.
The phenomenon KiwiFarms calls “Zoomer sadism” — surreal, absurdist cruelty now endemic to so many online spaces, is not confined to the right alone. The disembodiment and desensitization that define life for so many under 45.
Since I began writing specifically about online nihilism in 2022, the FBI has even created a new domestic extremism category: NVE (nihilist violent extremism). These aren’t fringe concerns — or even new ones, the Internet didn’t invent this particular despair, it only gave it new outlets — they’re central to understanding what’s happening online. Default Blog
Nihilism being algorithmically amplified has given audiences to people who might have otherwise been dismissed as cranks, loons, and agitators in the past.
To have a counter culture meant having a dominant culture to press against. Now we have a thousand splinters and millions of different audiences to that splintering fighting symbolic battles. That they are spilling into real violence isn’t new, surprising or even native to the Internet.
It’s merely that we are being fed into the maw of reinforcement learning and algorithmic preferences until we have nothing left but smoothed archetypes battling tribal signals.
That we see people who takes these symbols to a violent extreme should be the expected outcome of persistent othering by algorithm. Digital cultural scissoring breaks apart the collective “we” of all types affinity from national and ethnic identities to sexual preferences and other more abstract ideologies.
Just remember that if a group kicks out too many people they may find themselves with nothing left but sycophant audiences driven by adaptive code. And while that may sound scary, I agree with Lebowski that nihilists are nothing to be afraid of when you are sure of your own principles. So take stock of what matters to you and feed that back to the algorithms. Despair only wins if you let it.
It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.
I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.
The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.
We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.
Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change. Kenzo: What game? Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse
Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.
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.
I am having a rough week what with my own chronic health challenges and the death of my father over the long weekend. My husband is also brutally ill with the flu. So it’s just generally 2025 on maximum. All brakes and no gas.
So I took a break from reality. to watch the reunion for Season Two of Love is Blind: UK aka the working class multicultural Manchester season as well as test out a South Korean dating show for forever singles or motae-solos in Korean called Better Late Than Single.
Now I’m a middle aged elder millennial who turned over into her forties with ten years of marriage so keep that in my mind. My husband and I met through a mutual friend and now I wonder if we were on the last helicopter out of Saigon.
We worked in the nascent New York startup scene. Over the course of two birthdays, a year apart, for that same friend, we got our act together (ok I did) and began dating.
A few weeks before we got engaged, that same friend showed us this new dating app called Tinder. We laughed at the bare bones profiles as were used to involved questionnaires from OKCupid.
It’s clear that these applications have left a cavernous void in the culture of mating and dating not only in America but across the world. From Raya to AMANDA (a very judgmental Korean dating app) we’ve found all the ways to maximize for the most superficial aspects and signifiers of a person.
Some cultures seem to have taken this to extremes. On rainbow coalition class coded Manchester season of Love is Blind: UK we had Indian posh girls dating down class half Pakistani guys and Albanian girls falling for Lebanese guys. It was a clusterfuck. I won’t spoiler anything but the disposable attitudes clearly came from long habit you associate with dating application culture.
Meanwhile the forever singles have taken the opposite approach. Rather than sweetly autistic singles being helped along as Love on the Spectrum does, social media personalities roast painfully awkwardly awful members of the opposite sex fail to listen to each other. Holding eye contact and grossly insulting someone via misunderstanding was the tone.
If those media pieces show anything it’s the utter lack of tenacity being displayed by everyone involved. Sure, someone willingly going on a reality show is extreme. But the deep desire to be seen and loved goes beyond any culture or awkward social technologies. We’d all do with learning to fight more for love and family.
