I’m a bit under the weather after a whirlwind of work and travel. My brain is absolutely mush and I’m enjoying a number of unpleasant symptoms.
I wanted to spend the day catching up on Internet shit as anytime I spend extensive time offline I feel compelled to catch up on my backlog of reading and the rivers of feed content.
So I tried to escape from the horrors of the feed by watching a more wholesome variety of pornography. And by that I mean competence porn. I’ve written before about how competence is my love language.
Lower Decks nails the nostalgia without being too overweening or preachy with its messages. I don’t really want a Dark Federation timeline. Ive got my own shitty multiverse of doom so I rather prefer the wholesome escapism of highly competent officers and joyful human empathy.
If you are a hardcore Trekkie with a lot of canonical details in your head you might enjoy it. I know I was happy for the distraction from reality.
Do you recall a time when you “looked up to someone?” I mean this in the genuine possibly naive sense of admiration, not the specific act of being shorter than someone and looking up to meet their gaze.
As 5’3” female I’m basically always looking up. Alas I’ve found that genuine admiration is in much shorter supply in my adulthood than I was led to believe it would be as a child.
I’m sure some of this is the cynicism of my old age, but it’s hard not to notice the impacts of institutional distrust and 24/7 social media on admiration.
We know too much and it’s become harder to forget that homo sapians are irrational hypocritical reactive mammals whose our biology & culture engages us in nearly constant status seeking social games.
Sure you can blame Instagram for making us shallow mimics of prestige and power, but I’d bet your average anthropologist would be happy to walk you through the evolution of simian social dynamics. We’ve always been this way.
The additional complication is that we’ve come to expect more social mobility even as the gap between plebian and aristocrat has seemingly widened. Not that those terms have any static meaning. We no longer have strict birthright nobility as power has become more intertwined with economic power.
Nevertheless it would seem we expect, through such cultural innovations as the American Dream and capitalism, to have a chance at becoming high status ourselves.
It’s no wonder we struggle to find admiration when we see even the least impressive among us are rewarded with baffling sums of wealth, power and prestige. The term influencer is loaded for a reason.
And so our youth are despondent and depressed and our elites venal and sinful. The variance in personal outcomes has never seemed less socially satisfying. What do you mimic if the outcomes on display on your algorithms are at once impossible to achieve and derived from seemingly meaningless actions? I honestly don’t fucking know. You will have to figure that out for yourself now.
A swirling milieu of discourse has brought a renewed focus in my inbox & timeline on what constitutes the pursuit of excellence; that old Socratic dichotomy of the individual human’s personal virtues and his role as citizen in the wider communal project of civilization. The tensions have never felt so taut to me.
Please forgive my focus on revanchist populism, but the good of the many versus the singular hero is a subject of fascination for both fascists and socialists alike. Costin Alamariu has set the warrior master return traditionalists on fire as he’s come out from under his nom de plume Bronze Age Pervert with a complex overview of the tyrannical Athenian philosopher kings and their cultivation (yes he means eugenics) of antiquity’s aristocracy.
Everywhere I look, we are all debating whose rules matter, from Nature to God to man, and how we should use that authority to determine how we organize. It’s a bit surprising to see intelligentsia overcome with fervor for the proletariat and the aristocracy when you’d imagine both classes look back with disdain at the academic class.
It’s a ping ponging back and forth between the individual and his wider group responsibilities to his people from every ideological direction.
I see it in Luke Burgis and Freddie DeBoer’s concern with mimetic collapse and the recursive artistic malaise. If our system produces no truly novel art is it a failure of our elites to pursue excellence? Is it among our elites where genius and high culture produced? Or is it the opposite? Do we seek out frontiers when pushed from the boundaries of those who build and work?
As a post enlightenment matter, a petit aristocracy of the technical bourgeois is the most balanced of the positions between the masses yearning to be free and recognition of a desire for leadership earned through meritocracy lending a guiding hand.
As a journalist, Noah Smith is coming from a more intelligentsia orientation but the message of progressive futurism is coming from the patrician side as well. A venture capitalist like Marc Andreessen might not see himself as an elite aristocrat, coming as he did from humble beginnings, but he’s the standard barer for the titan class advocating for technological accelerationism.
My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.
That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.
Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.
It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.
Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.
And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.
I recall somewhat fondly the era of capitalism in which moving your business online was an innovation. The direct to consumer phase of retail and packaged goods is forever tightly tied to interest rates in my mind. Direct to consumer failed as an ethos and a movement for better goods for consumers.
Facebook, Google and Apple are engaged in brutal turf warfare over who owns customer data and let me tell you it isn’t the brands or you as the buyer that benefit.
What was once efficient in reaching ever wider and more specific audiences, the consumer internet has smoothed your identity into some brand’s extremely specific Pyschographic. You know what I mean when I was Lululemon girl and Black Rifle Coffee guy. Don’t worry you think, I’m not a sucker. While typing this on an iPhone.
There was a vague optimism that merely by doing something like bypassing superfluous luxuries like brands (which only served to bamboozle with flash and expense) you could provide a better quality product at a lower cost to your ultimate customer. How naive that seems at the speed of global derivatives based financial products.
How fondly I remember thinking someone could design the Platonic ideal of the tee shirt or provide some basic ultimate end good without confusing merchandising tactics. I’ve never once in my life wanted to decide if the X or ultra version of something was better. Just sell me the one good thing damn it.
But they can’t. Markets compete. The differentiation gets competed away eventually. It began with the “one essential good thing” in a category and ended as a mess of optimization for margin & enshitification and selling new versions of the same audience to whatever sucker can pay the CPM. Remember when we used to pretend you could pay for performance in advertising? Sheryl Sandberg got us good.
There’s a weird thing with scale, where the market can raise the threshold for crappiness and then a truly scaled company can positively exploit those dynamics to provide a genuinely superior good. Amazon can have pretty great basics in the same way gas station chains can have decent coffee. Costco’s hotdog will remain an icon if their standards hold up.
Rory Sutherland an advertising executor has a concept called the “threshold for crappiness” that suggested your local chain sometimes had to up its game to compete when a chain comes in. But markets push downwards as well as upwards.
Venkatash Rao first coined premium mediocrity. Private equity excels at this category. It’s global cosmopolitan striver megabrand. It’s the pretty decent but in a big packaged good sort of way item you get at Whole Foods. Imagine the dreaded diffusion line of a once great luxury brand. Or Michael Kors.
Rao put words to a phenomena that drove me a bit nuts during the height of premium mediocrity in 20117. That was the tipping point for me when the shrinkflation of frothy times body slammed the aesthetic soul of branding.
Now the most mass market experience that is still tasteful and good can compete globally. But sometimes you just long to discover where a local market is genuinely better.
My favorite aspect of being abroad is finding markets where it’s not yet occurred & enjoying a significantly better product for it. It’s my most toxic millennial trait.
Legacy local businesses in small towns or secondary markets simply set a different standard for themselves occasionally from the premium mediocrity of the global markets. But times change. Business models change. Now we have ghost kitchens. And you two have probably purchased a premium mediocre brand and been fine with it.
I have felt a bit disappointed in my recent writing. I’ve not felt the urge to produce anything of much substance or synthesis in a week or two.
The exercise of writing daily isn’t meant to produce anything but the consistent repetition of a habit of critical thinking about my daily experiences. I sometimes have to accept that there will be weeks where it all feels a bit half baked. I’ve got no conclusions to share.
He is grappling very well with these themes considering the deep sense making challenges facing all of us. Attempting to find workable worldviews that are manageable to our human minds is a challenge as consensus reality is a competition between thousands of different competing narratives.
To retain fluidity, you must retain an unmediated connection to reality. But the unaugmented brain is clearly not enough for that connection to be tractable to manage.
How do you resolve this paradox?
I think the trick is to inhabit more than one interposing intelligence layer. If you’re only an economist or only a deep-state institutionalist, you’ll retreat to a fixed logic of caring; a terminal derp.
I’m doing my best to stay out of terminal derp but I’m still feeling like the fog is impeding my view. I’ll just have to keep putting out my own beacons and hope the lighthouse network illuminates enough for us to navigate together.
There are few pleasures in life as gratifying as having a good conversation with someone. I recorded a podcast with one of my absolute favorite Twitter mutuals and LP in chaotic.capital this morning. I don’t want to ruin the surprise (click here if you do) but it was a very good time and a very good conversation. I can’t wait to share it with everyone.
I’ve had the good fortune to be in a few deep dive podcasts recently if you want a preview of the kind that of thinking and conversations that bring me joy.
One of the most challenging aspects of doing the earliest stage investing in technology, and startups in general, is that we simply have no idea what the future will bring us. We have our best guesses.
And it’s through conversations with others do we get to improve our best guesses. Sharing insights and history helps us refine our process and worldview such that our knowledge broadens and deepens.
In conversation we share what’s worked for us and what we’ve seen across our own experiences. A good conversation is a pleasure unto itself but it’s also a window into the world of someone else. And I cannot imagine a more joyful way of improving yourself.
I’m enjoying watching the fall social season kick into high gear. It’s much more enjoyable to take some many events remotely as so much signaling is done in real time. Between actual live feeds and television coverage and social media feeds you can take a lot in without exhausting yourself.
Burning Man and the U.S Open are the end of summer staples in Yuppieland though very different types of yuppies. And both events are showing us a lot about the current moment.
I’m sure Burners would insist that the experience is about the in person but so many social media influencers burn for content that you’ve got more visibility on the aesthetics and the vibes than ever before.
Tennis is more about strictly about the sport than Burning Man is about the art. But you learn as much from player style, who is sitting where, and what is being covered in the media. The stories behind the event are as important as the event. An outfit can dominate headlines for years becoming iconic.
And then of course we have New York fashion week. It’s an event that used to dominate my life. There was a time before social media at the tents. Women’s Wear Daily claims I’m the first person to have live-blogged a show. I’m skeptical it’s true but I do have the receipts. I snuck in with a photographer and made a whole business of making fashion shows a live social media spectacle before some of these influencers were out of Gap Kids.
So naturally as I age and race to exit my thirties into middle age I’m thrilled I don’t need to be at the shows to know what’s happening in fashion. We may no longer pour of Style.com shots the next day but we’ve got an infinite complex that has emerged to show you every kind of style that’s been imagined.
I’m grateful I didn’t need to go to any of these events. I keep my one on one time for founders and my investors. If I had the spare energy for any of these events I’d probably prefer to use it on one one time with folks. In the past I’d be missing out on all of it. Now there is no fear of missing out. Only deciding what signals you want to separate from the noise.
I spent serval hours today manually combing through everyone I followed on Twitter. I was following over 10,000 accounts. As I do not use the algorithm view “For You” tab, my feed was getting a bit out of hand. I knew something had to be done.
As Elonbucks (monetization for account with over one million impressions a month) have rolled out, it’s become harder to make sense of anyone’s feed. All the incentives for status and wit have been distorted by rage clicks and engagement bait. Everyone is competing to game the algorithm for maximum reach now.
I have fought the algorithms. I prefer to browse in chronological order. But as I follow all kinds of accounts the sheer volume was too much.
I don’t follow only people I like. I wouldn’t call it “hate following” but I keep an eye on unsavory types. When you combine the engagement bait with the exodus of professional and media accounts, you get a timeline that is tilted to scheming and grifting.
The confluence of factors means anything timely like breaking news is impossible to find. My capacity to extract sense or narrative from the platform has degraded to the point where I’m at the mercy of discourse.
So I started to unfollow. I began the day a hundred or so accounts over 10K. At the end? I got it down to 5,600 or so.
I followed a few simple heuristics. If I didn’t recognize your name and you didn’t follow me back it was an automatic unfollow. If I did recognize your name but I couldn’t remember the last time you interacted with me I also unfollowed.
The only exceptions to that were if you were a journalist I followed for news or a venture fund or LP I follow for work. I don’t expect random journalists who don’t know me or funds outside of my space to chat with me.
At first, my unfollows were a lot of anonymous and avatar accounts. I am active in TPOT and degen crypto which both have a culture of anonymity, so some of the accounts enjoyable.
But as I went further, I found a veritable deluge of NFT accounts I regretted following. 2021 Julie was far too forgiving of NFT content for 2023 Julie’s tastes.
A screen shot of me working my way through unfollowing a bunch of NFT Twitter accounts.
Because Twitter shows you who you followed chronologically, it was a bit like an archeological dig of my last decade on Twitter. I could see when I moved to Colorado. I could see when I was in Lower Manhattan. I unfollowed road condition, weather and emergency service accounts I did not need. Ditto local politicians.
I easily could see when I’m moved to Montana with a huge swathe of local news, local service, and local businesses all lined up chronologically to show we’d arrived in Gallatin County outside of Bozeman. I kept most of those except the local socialist club.
My local Montana layer from 2022. I kept them
As I dug, I found myself with plenty of people to unfollow. A shockingly large number of women had simply left the platform.
At first I thought they had just unfollowed me for being annoying (and I’m sure many did) but I kept encountering profiles that had tweets deleted and notes saying they were abandoned. Some were men, but it was dramatically more common with women and queer accounts.
I also noticed as I got to around the 2016 layers that my gender balance went from being 80% men to 20% women to being 50/50 as we traveled to the “Before Times” prior to the Great Weirding.
There was clearly a time on Twitter before Trump and the Resistance and the Pandemic had made the platform worthy of the nickname This Hellsite.
Andthat time had a lot more women on the website.There were marketing and PR chicks, Girlbosses, and mommy bloggers. All gone. That made me sad.
The most enjoyable part was seeing pleasant memories like when everyone was absolutely all in on Ted Lasso.
I followed the entire cast of Ted Lasso on Twitter in 2020
I also found evidence of many weird interests and hobbies. Like the time I got obsessed with algae. I didn’t figure I needed to keep a bunch of trade accounts and niche biology journals in my follow list.
It was also fun to see when I first followed my husband. I recalled it as his account was surrounded by a bunch of fitness influencers. It’s a long story involving Airbnb, a power lifting friend in from out of town and rent arbitrage
I also noticed that many of the venture capitalists I’d followed early in my career who I never imagined following were in fact all now following me. It was clear that over a decade I have gone from upstart founder to respectable (ish) member of the startup ecosystem. People I once viewed as aspirational were now people who treated me as a peer.
I’ve got no idea if this massive unfollowing will help my Twitter feed but I hope it will. And if I unfollowed you it was probably an accident. I was rapid fire unfollowing and scrolling and I had to go back to refollow folks when Twitter would get out of sync. But I’m sure I missed a lot. So please don’t hesitate to remind me to follow you back if I made a mistake.
My day job is as an early stage venture investor. Like most people who do angel investing and pre-seed startup investing, I learned my trade on the job as an operator. I founded and sold some startups. I helped my friends with their startups. We invested in each other. Because startups are primarily about teamwork you tend to hone a specific skill. My super power was getting attention.
That means now one of the ways I support my portfolio of startups is with public relations. I’ve gotten enough personal press over the years I’ve learned a lot about the dark arts. I’ve also had the privilege of being trained some of the best in the business. I’ve picked up skills.
I hope I can help outliers building the next generation of weird companies move past the ‘media is the enemy” phase of public relations.
I’m going to offer up some of my specialty skills outside of my own portfolio. I can’t invest in everyone I’d like to think I can help anyone in the ecosystem who wants to tell a big story about what they are building. I will help you craft a story that can be broadcast far and wide, no matter how outside-the-norm you are.
If your dream is to have a cover story in a prestige periodical, a Wall Street Journal stipple for your expert commentary, or reframe how a story in your space is covered, I can help you plot the course to get there.
Over the years I’ve done things like
Put a VC making her comeback on the cover of a national magazine
Secure the keynote slot of the biggest conference in a founder’s industry
Guided numerous CEOs through extensive press tours, with coverage blanketing their spaces
I’m not a traditional agency, I’m someone who understands your journey. From financial journalism to trade & specialty coverage to personality driven lifestyle pieces, I can take you from Bloomberg and Vogue to private Discords and influencer group chats.
During our work together I can help you,
Craft your narrative and position
Understand how reporters think and their incentive structures
Secure top tier, feature coverage in the places that matter
Provide crisis communications support
Find an agency (if that’s right for you)
I work on a retainer basis starting at $5,000/month – giving you access to me as your partner through whatever projects or objectives you have.
Consider me your diplomat to the 4th estate. I’m an effective accelerationist capitalist that speaks fluent woke. Reporters know and like me as their savvy crypto libertarian friend that lives on a Montana homestead.
