Tag: Media

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Emotional Work

Day 1187 and No Joke

I don’t really care for April Fools. I can’t say I live in a time where I’m looking for additional cognitive overhead. And yet I am laughing all the time.

It feels a bit silly but sometimes I’ll just lose my shit laughing. Objectively funny things are happening as non-normalcy continues on. The Normie Restoration is upon us. And it’s just fucking funny.

If it feels impossible to pay attention as responsibilities mount then you already know you will cut back. Close the aperture. The return to living your own life. I’m sure they will enrage lots of people. Which is often the sign of a good joke.

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Media

Day 1186 and Return To Non-Normalcy

I first sensed it when I picked up a copy of the Financial Times going through Heathrow in February. I was behind the news cycle. I read through the pink paper and felt informed.

Normally I wouldn’t be satisfied with just one news source. No matter how much I overweight my personal preferences to business papers I wouldn’t limit myself to just those publications.

But then I realized I had neither the time nor the patience to get up on the nuances of the day. I love the news business and even I felt weary about wading through the firehouse.

If a new hound like me who loves reading reactionaries of all stripes couldn’t do more than scan some financial numbers how did everyone else feel? Not good, not good at all.

The Normie Restoration

We are reaching a fascinating moment in history in which you can be shockingly well informed about almost anything in real time.

Naturally this means we “know” less than we ever did. I can read propaganda from every viewpoint straight from the source straight on Telegram chats. The most informed know they getting just a fraction of the story.

During the Great Dislocation (roughly 2019-2023 though many of us went into much earlier), there was a new openness to seeing beyond institutional consensus. We saw a flourishing of open condemnation of all forms of institutional knowledge and media was at the epicenter of much of that rage.

Many groups did not do well with the newfound power they had found in the hands of shifting alliances and new attention.

My theory is that the lunatic fringes of both the left & right have handled their digital powers poorly. As they did not handle the attention with care we will see a return to mass media preferences as people return to “non-normalcy.” Our trust has been spread too thin and too far and everyone has to tend to their own.

Who, or even what, ends up being the mass media substitute going forward ks not yet settled as the waning days of cable television & national papers will not disappear until the Boomers move on.

We are starting to realize little value is accrued by sourcing news from many sources as more competing narratives spin out to Cray Cray Land. Everyone has become audience captured. And not all audiences are equal. Not all voices are equal either.

People may think I’m insinuating that it’s about control or truth or ideological niche. I want to disabuse you of this notion. Media is about attention. People with different goals want your attention focused on what they think is important.

Anyone with responsibility has an attention limit. People with responsibilities are the people with power. They can’t manage with endless attention conflicts. They can and do resolve these conflicts on their attention all the time.

And many of them are about to resolve that by not paying attention. So you have to ask yourself if you think they are wrong. The new non-normal isn’t very forgiving of distraction.

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Media

Day 1184 and Discourse is Back but Sharded

The era of shared media narratives with simplistic framing and consensus seems gone. The information sphere is now like glass shards with many distinct realities according to Axios.

I think we have many more than twelve realities as class, politics, identity and material concerns overlap. The Internet has allowed all of us to develop esoteric and idiosyncratic knowledge. More types of reality are coming into contact with each other.

Because power laws drive the internet sometimes it seems like everyone is paying attention to the same thing all at once. We get crazily intensified reactions. People go absolutely bonkers over morality plays.

It was impressive to me to see New York Magazine create two intensely viral shared discourse moments in one week with their Dr. Huberman “scandal” and “the equally explosive “Age Gap Marry Rich” essay.

Being curious I looked up the editorial team and found it was journalists I recognized from my time in beauty and fashion. There was recipe for inducing cultural virality discovered by Teen Vogue in leaning into what is loosely call identity lifestyle. You experience culture like fashion or makeup through very specific symbols of interconnected identities. For some reason lifestyle choices makes people really crazy. It seems Lindsay Peoples the editor is a generational talent at evoking response.

The Cut’s new masthead changed from 2022

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1183 and Not Personal

If you aren’t familiar with the term “parasocial” I’d encourage you to dive into the term and its impact on our culture.

Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms.

A parasocial interaction, an exposure that garners interest in a persona,[6] becomes a parasocial relationship after repeated exposure to the media persona causes the media user to develop illusions of intimacy, friendship, and identification.

Wikipedia Parasocial Interactions

Because so little in daily life feels personal or reciprocal as intermediation and automation split us off from past norms of one-to-one relationships, parasociality is on the rise.

You and I are likely to be in some kind of parasociality in this blog post. It’s not a new phenomena having been theorized as far back as 1956, but social media’s ubiquity has now put all of us into varying degrees of parasocial interactions with each other. We have opinions about personas from movie star celebrities to niche Twitter accounts.

We don’t seem to have these parasocial relationships just with humans. There was a an era of corporate brand marketing (that seems to be fading) where we interacted with brands like as friends. I followed all sorts of Twitter accounts for brands that acted like personalities in the golden era of “funny” Twitter.

Yet as more and more people are becoming brands it seems that the old school idea of a brand as a an amorphous corporation is disappearing.

Perhaps it’s because we encouraged the cultivation of personal brands as a professional marketing necessity. Millennials leveraged carefully manufactured profiles to climb the last remaining rungs of the old career ladder.

Naturally this strategy has some drawbacks. During the Great Awokening/Weirding we saw inexperienced humans cope with the ramifications of having a reputation that extended far beyond work, family and community. Now we loosely call it cancel culture though it took years for the term to become less contested.

I’d like to encourage more people to not take things so personally. It’s not bad for be in parasocial relationships. In life we have varying degrees of intimacy and boundaries in even our closest relationships. No one is exactly one person or even persona. Next time you get really upset at someone else’s behavior try to remember it’s not about you. If someone gets upset at you recall that this still applies.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1181 and Up All Night To Get Lucky

I’m in a new and odd pattern of activity recently. I maintain a flow like hyper awareness on my rotation of professional obligations with little sleep for two or three days. Then I break to sleep with as little movement or energy expenditure as I can manage for full day. It seems to be working for me.

I would prefer to call this approach “fits and spurts” or “the lion hunts when it’s hungry” but that sounds more like a behavioral problem than a protocol. Which, given the endemic narrative civil wars against empiricism in the N of 1 gym bros, seems about right aesthetically. Experimenting with your body is your right.

I have made many shitpoasts about this culture after yesterday New York Magazine “are we having unrealistic expectations about the same traumatized dude” essay. I don’t know anyone involved in that particular situation but I take lots of biohacking tips from broken people because I am also broken. Physician heal thyself. Biohacker hack thine own protocol and or behavioral problem.

So any distinction between a protocol and a behavioral problem is perhaps unnecessary except for optics. We can do a wash coating of public relations speak but it’s a virtue to seek to serve your gifts while carrying your sins. I personally advocate for a minimum viable approach to this but omnia vanitas

We do what we can to fix and accept parts of ourselves that we cannot live with and pray we find wisdom as we accept our own hypocrisy and failures. I hope that I do less harm to others and most especially less harm myself. I do not accept any type of coercion I didn’t choose myself. Neither should you. Don’t ride any dicks unless that’s what you like.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 1172 and Inference Ups

Something must have acted as a catalyst on a set of wrongly presumed dormant inputs in my mind yesterday.

A catalyst works by lowering the activation energy required for a chemical reaction to occur, making the process more efficient without being consumed itself

How does a catalyst work PerplexityAI

I delivered a series of schizo-style-poasts so lucid that I turned them easily into an essay on the natural rights basis for the freedom to compute. I barely labored at all to connect the dots. Years of reading, learning and reasoning condensed into form with a few simple connections.

I credit the wide availability of accessible artificial intelligence tools for this magical ease in myself. Programs like PerplexityAI (my preference for asking questions where I need precision in my answer) and ChatGPT (my preference for open ended queries) make it effortless to connect ideas and intuition.

Even a vague input like “story about a town that turns rhinoceros as metaphor for authoritarianism” is enough to get me off to the races with Eugène Ionesco and reopen the intuition library of my mind. This era of easy connections is giving my own inference powers a huge level up.

I can bring up “schizophrenia and capitalism” as a mere footnote and my past reading is immediately available and accessible on my phone with simple cross checks. It’s beyond liberating.

Just a few titles on the topic of schizophrenia in radical poststructuralist scholarship I have in my own library

I can see why it would be disconcerting for powerful institutions and gatekeepers of knowledge that someone like me can go down elaborate scholarship tangents without any guidance.

Sharp readers will enjoy that the examples I use here include Deleuze and Eugène Ionesco. Those who are unfamiliar with why this feels salient and ironic please feel free to go down a few rabbit holes of your own. I’m sure you too will connect the dots as swiftly as I did.

Categories
Finance Media

Day 1157 and Maybe Things Are Good

I remember learning about economic malaise, inflation and oil wars in the seventies at school.

The grand narrative I was raised on was that deregulation led to the go-go eighties as Reagan leaned into free markets as the mood of America changed.

I’ve read a lot of takes in the financial news and on Twitter that suggest we are in a similar period. I tend to land more towards Kyla Scanlan’s position that the Vibecession may be over. And yet we cannot agree on if things are getting any better. We are confused.

So we have this number that no one knows where it’s coming from, yet we are using it to make informed decisions on headline text which informs what is happening in the economy – but also informs how people should feel about what is happening in the economy. No wonder the sentiment is off! No wonder people are confused! It’s hard to understand what’s happening, and that makes all of this so much harder

Kyla Scanlon “Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore” on Epsilon Theory.

I’ve got lots of reason to be optimistic. I see the shock and confusion and culture wars and I still see people who are optimistic.

I’ve taken to joking around about decisions by saying “fuck it, e/acc!” I am extremely online and it’s a contagious cultural meme to root for the future. And so maybe things are getting better.

There is a same shit different day quality to the long now. But I see more and more people committing to build things. Gold rushes are a patten humanity seems to follow at every changing of the generations. Maybe we’ve got reason to think we can come out of this moment better. Or at least work to make it so.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1149 and Human Nature

I am experiencing a waning in my desire to be online. Not because I don’t wish to be in the thick of things, but because I simply don’t have as much I want to contribute when I am myself under stress. And it’s all stress now unless you simply stop caring. And I still care.

It’s human nature to be stressed at the available problems. I’ve got access to all kinds of problems now on my phone. So I am stressed.

I don’t have any reason to be participating in any stress but my own at the moment except that I see a lot of available problems because I am always watching.

I’d rather pay less attention. But paying attention is what pays the bills. Ted Goia says we’ve gone from art to commerce to attention to dopamine

An uncharitable view of people who sell art, commerce and informations or blame Athens, Jerusalem, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley if you must. In that order.

I suppose this view of information technology as unmitigated casinos of sin is true in a world of addicts. I don’t think we are all addicts. Nor do I think anyone who sells something addictive is a drug dealer.

I’m neither an addict nor a dealer but here I am selling and consuming information nevertheless. I’m not a Kardashian but I’m not a Buddha either. Maybe at best I’m Kim Kierkegaard. The sickness into death compels me to poast.

If we are all addicted to the constant influx of other people’s bullshit then I suppose the attention economy has moved to the addiction economy. We are addicted to the dramas of humanity and some of our dramas are more or less real than other.

A screen grab from a friend of the scariest thing in the world. An attention whore.

Except I don’t particularly want to be addicted to anyone’s bullshit right now. I’m not even all that interested in my own. I’m sick of my bullshit. Why should I pay attention to yours? At best I’ll pay attention to the bullshit on Netflix’s Love is Blind. I don’t mind if it’s packaged for sale. I actually prefer it. At least it wraps in an hour.

I’ve got a few basic principles that orient my life. I believe humans can make decisions for themselves. I believe most of us aren’t at all good at it because we are reactive impulsive animals with just the barest capacity for reasons.

But that capacity exists and it has separated us from the animals. We shall remained chained to the consequences of knowledge. I understand the impulse to blame that bitch Eve. But we’ve got the apple of the tree of knowledge so it’s time to accept paradise is lost.

Anyways, good luck surviving the churn and try not to fuck people over. Good faith is all we’ve got. Try to deliver value and not suck more resources than you deliver. Bow to the thermodynamic Gods and climb the Kardashev scale. Or keep up with the Cardassians. Are you sure you know how many lights there are? Better Google it to make sure.

Captain Picard getting Cardassian in the loop reinforcement learning. I mean torture. There are four lights.
Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1144 and Parsifal

I’m just going to ramble this one as the synthesis on it isn’t worth the energy to me tonight. I’ll work on that another day if I get around to it.

My mother’s interpretation of the legend of Parsifal is that we cannot succeed at our quest if we do not ask the right questions. I suspect it has something to do with the innocence of a pure heart asking the right questions but frankly this is a bit beyond my own experience of the Waldorf Steiner system.

Parsifal (or Sir Percival) was a Knight of King Arthur. His story is told by the troubadours of France and Germany, notably Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Parsifal story stands between the past age that looked for secrets of the spirit and the coming age that was going to search for the secrets of matter.

In this engaging retelling of the legend of Parsifal, Charles Kovacs’s critical commentary offers Steiner-Waldorf educators an unrivalled insight into teaching the story of Parsifal and will aid in lesson planning

Parsifal and the Search for The Grail

This feels relevant to me in the context of artificial intelligence making computer programming more accessible. Prompt engineering is simply asking the right question. Enabling more people to specify exactly what they want is terrifying because it might enable more people to ask the right questions and get an answer.

If you depend on people not being able to ask the right questions without your guidance you’d probably oppose it too. I believe that there is a religious aspect to our entire approach to artificial intelligence and we must grapple with it as surely as the Reformation shook the Catholic Church.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1141 and Blind Optimism

The specifics of it aren’t important, the fact of the matter is that it’s been “one thing after another” for me. I bet you know the feeling.

I felt grateful be enjoying a lower friction global homo cosmopolitanism for the night. I need something be smooth brained for a little bit.

I got middle rent generic Mediterranean street food delivered through an intermediated mobile app for dinner. And then I turned on Netflix to settle in for the most middle brow content. There is another season of Love is Blind.

I am a sucker for this show. There is something so optimistic about a blind dating marriage reality show. If you had been doom and gloom for so long imagine opening up all post-pandemic with your shiny therapy emotional journeys.

It strikes me as a pop culture cousin to effective accelerationists. Nothing says accelerate quite like committing. Marriage markets would be very e/acc.

If I have to keep living I may as well do it with the hopeful optimism of someone who throws themselves into their future. All in. I really admire the optimism.