Tag: Media

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Media

Day 929 and Right Speak

My day has been a little off as I’m nursing my husband through some surgery. Through frankly he’s recovering so well it’s mostly just keeping him company while I do my regular workday. But I have consumed some good content in the process of keeping him company and making sure ice packs are rotated & medicine is taken.

I watched John Mulaney standup special Baby J which was surprisingly good. My main takeaway was “being liked is a cage” but also you’ve got to watch out for how selfish everyone is in the process of managing their own traumas and addictions.

Mulaney is a fascinating example of someone going from beloved to fuck up as soon as it was clear he was a human and capable of sinning and hurting himself and others.

He got a good dose of being condemned while being shitheel as an addict. Who he really hurt other than himself I can’t say. But he was problematic says many inches of gossip writing and critical reviews. Wrong speak and shame and condemnation is so interesting as a social engagement issue for culture. It’s never really about them. We can all be assholes and unlikable in the process of being hurt and healing our hurts.

I suppose this is why I believe it’s better to never take anything personally and be sure you take care of yourself if you find yourself reacting strongly to a person’s frailty. The ones who love you will forgive you if you need to reorient yourself into doing what’s right for you so long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process. And oftentimes even if you do.

The follow up movie we watched was also about wrong think. But instead of it being about the addiction and selfishness of a celebrity it was about the selfishness of trying to decide what’s right for an entire nation. We watched the Tetris movie.

Which is quite a dramatization of how totalizing even the most glorious of ambitions can be in the hands of hands of normal frail humans. Yes I think wrong think comedians and communists are related and I swear I still think Bari Weiss is kind of an asshole. Most of the comedians asking for forgiveness for wrong think aren’t actually that funny to begin with. Back to Tetris

I found myself inspired by the frustrations that come from human nature & self dealing while glorifying ambitious end goals for social good. The collective good can often be patently false if someone ambitious enough gets perverted. Maybe I’m just being that asshole capitalist but I think nepotism and corruption come in many forms. And it’s easier to spot it in British billionaires and communists bureaucracies. But we’ve got plenty of right speak and “for your own good” pleas right here in America.

It’s inspired me to look harder into how we are perversely seeking control and benefits for large corporations and political parties in our current race to regulate new technologies like crypto and artificial intelligence. If you want a hint as to where I’m worried look no further than Gary Gensler and reinforcement learning for artificial intelligence alignment. And yes I’m making bets to that effect.

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Internet Culture

Day 925 and Spartan Cherry Crush

Our Silicon Valley “men in the arena” are suggesting we should become Greek hopalites and our egirls have become fully realized emoji triggered TikTok forex currency farmer NPCs.

Today being July 14th 2023 is quite a Bastille Day for whatever revolutionary fervor we’ve become caught in as the ancient régime struggles. If you haven’t read the War of Farts in Page Six yet have a look.

Meanwhile in the real world we’ve got a massive heat wave about to bake America, our various heads of state have decided to strengthen a military alliance, and yes all of this is connected.

In other news, I’ve had a bit of a hard week and I’m shutting down a lot of access points so don’t take it personally. The churn is here.

Maybe we’ve just reached the point where the warring info-hazards that are our closed garden social media feeds have decided to make us all literally go insane. I can’t entirely tell as I’m loathe to give up algorithmic level control on any of my feeds and do not use social media that doesn’t offer me a chronological feed of my own choosing.

I watched Idiocracy when it came out and I did not want to believe that it’s always been true we’ve allowed our world to be overrun by our unregulated appetites but PinkyDoll is just a hardworking Québécois hottie who has no time for your bullshit. Yum yum yum! yes yes! Gang gang!

And to tie together my title on all this, while I like Cherry Crush’s work I can’t back the white elf who says no spicy. It’s just too weird. Stay safe out there people and don’t let the brain worms get you.

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Internet Culture

Day 917 and Attention Budget

We act like our attention is a static thing. You have reading habits and social media patterns and your attention is allocated to what makes the most sense for whatever demographic you have settled into for your life choices. But it can always be changed. And maybe your attention choices don’t serve you.

We have fantasies about our independent mindedness, especially in America. But we are all a product of other people’s attentional priorities. What you are focused on is quite often molded especially for you.

It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

Take the principle of this iconic scene from The Devil Wears Prada and apply it to every single area of your life where you made a choice as a consumer, worker, hobbiest, parent or any other identity with a collective meaning.

I’m taking this problem very seriously at the moment as we may be in for a significant attention economy realignment. Big chunks of the social internet appear to be up for grabs as legacy networks like Twitter, Reddit and Stackoverflow go through significant identity alignments issues as competitive pressures from artificial intelligence and increased attention allocation automation. The algorithms are fighting for you.

None of this is bad or good necessarily. Some of it is us fighting to make make some areas more competitive and perhaps other areas will be shown to be unsustainable. And sometimes it’s just management. Don’tk make the mistake of dickriding for someone that is as human as you or I. Stay smart out there and think critically for yourself.

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Homesteading

Day 913 and Offline

The social internet is having a bit of a chaotic moment. I haven’t been able to send Tweets consistently for about a day. And I didn’t miss it that much. It felt a little weird at first as I could load tweets, like them and chat in DMs but it was clear none of my replies were sending.

It’s a holiday weekend so for Twitter’s sake I’m sad to report I had other things to keep me occupied. That’s probably bad news for the platform.

We did a big kitchen clean out. Organized the meals for the upcoming week. Like any weekend lots of chores from laundry to deep conditioning was on the to do list.

The real prize of being offline is being outdoors. The weather was absolutely gorgeous this weekend, practically begging us to spend time on the porch or in the Adirondack chairs we put out by our small pond. The air was so clear today you could see from one end of Gallatin to another.

Two Adirondack chairs on fresh cut grass with a blue sky behind it. Is this what they mean when they say touch grass?

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Internet Culture Media

Day 912 and The End of The Open Internet

Being valuable for your data has always been a bit of weird feeling for individuals. Because you on your own may have experienced quite varied mileage on being remunerated for your skills, contributions and other ineffable qualities.

We value athletes and business executives and the extremely beautiful and the particularly intelligent and getting paid to be any combination of that is bound up in dumb luck and how you compete in an economy with other humans.

Individually we are all quite unique. But the ways in which we are packaged, marketed, sold and controlled by our social, national and family contracts and norms can make it feel like we are put in boxes. Demographics.

Some professions are very refined at saying what facet of a person is worth something to another person responsible for selling, let’s say, designer clothing or commodity groceries or financial services. We call that cost of acquisition.

The adage in my age of the internet was always “if you don’t pay for the product then you are the product.” And that insight has tainted social media from the start. Even if it was a great deal for all the free users of the social website who didn’t mind using something for free because they couldn’t monetize their attributes at that scale. Generally unless you were in a small class of power users social media didn’t make you money and you weren’t that valuable.

And since you were the product being marketed and sold, other people who market and sold other things (advertising if you will) generally found it was in the best interest of a social media business to make sure there was plenty of flavors of you the user (perhaps SKUs or stock keeping units) on hand so if an advertiser wants to buy access to say a late thirties professional woman with a high net worth, she is online and can be shown an advertisement.

It helps to have active users like that readily available so she might be enticed to buy a $5 sparking water laced with drugs and sugar substitutes. Yes I went to Whole Foods today.

So it’s a mystery to me why you would implode the vast and intertwined delicate tapestry of entrenched network effects so that you can instead deliver less access to the network whose major value is keeping specific demographics on a website for extended periods happy and engaged. But I am not Elon Musk.

Elon Musk rate limiting user access to Twitter because “extractive data” rationalizing

As the age of artificial intelligence trained on reams of user data (available via API or application programming interfaces) gets going the owners of the social web are scared they are getting screwed. Reddit shut down access which is a real blow to Google whose best type of search for niche answers has been amending “Reddit” at the end of a query.

If Elon Musk is selling a dopamine drip of content and access then shutting off the tap is a baffling decision. And I’ll admit I got off the internet today because the strain of whatever is actually happening at Twitter (rumor is server issues and back end chaos and unpaid bills) meant none of my tweets would send.

I quite hope this will be better tomorrow as I rather liked the old system of my data and attention for access to the great wide open feeds. And I actually paid $8 for my account. Can’t imagine what everyone else is experiencing.

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Politics

Day 907 and Unaccountable Bureaucrats

We’ve reached a point in America where the consular visa services (for tourism, business & academic visits) as well as the wider immigration services (for people intending to work here, become permanent residents or citizens) have made finding a clear legal path for any type of visa non-viable. The Cato Institute describes it as nearly impossible.

I haven’t been able to get so much as a tourist visa granted in 2 years despite guarantees that I’d be financially and legally liable for the actions of my people. Even when we agree on bringing people in via our refuge system has become an opaque unaccountable path.

Just today the Wall Street Journal reported that we are headed multiple crisis points in health care because there is no way to get into the country legally for nurses. We want nurses.

Our systems feels petty and vindictive to anyone that encounters it including American citizens like me. We treat people who aspire to American life’s like shit. And it appears as if the only paths that work are a system of bribes, fixers, scams, and favors as our immigration systems are opaque and deliberately obscured.

An unaccountable bureaucracy is breeding a system in which only the criminals are rewarded because the only way in is to go around the system.

We have two immigration systems that operate under the same “legal regime” but have totally different administrative regimes and authorities which further confuses the issue.

I can’t believe that I’m the one saying this loudly but a good start to a policy position is simple clear rules based immigration and visa policies that operate with consistently reviewed inputs and yield consistent outputs so both American businesses and its workforce is capable of planning for growth instead.

The doctrine of consular nonreviewability needs to be replaced with a standard of reviews that is clear, legible, and subject to open review so visa applicants and their stakeholders (families, employers, & lawyers) can understand and take action on consistently enforced norms.

Clear judicial review is the basis of any free market economy. This doctrine leaves our economy & families at the mercy of an unquestionable black box capable of life altering irreparable decisions which no one is obligated to explain or even disclose. And it’s not the fault of the consular officers. We are putting folks with little training into situations with unimaginable power (while being tied to confusing criteria which only leads them to cover their ass and reject more people. We can’t have a system of immigration where an unaccountable low level bureaucrat is able to reject an application based on vibes with no recourse.

– A visa for entrepreneurs. Currently we have imperfect workarounds that encourage people to go elsewhere (as it’s now clear the costs are enormous & the timeframes extend into multiple decades) meaning if you want to start a business, even one with funding, there is no clear reviewable path to getting the entrepreneur legal status to run the company in America.

The idea that our economy can’t handle more immigrants. tourists, business or academic travelers from non ESTA countries is simply not based in any reality. We have record low employment and shortages in crucial industries like healthcare which is fueling inflation.

Canada and Australia are letting in 2.5-3x the number of immigrants per capita per year as America. We could easily be smarter and more generous about how we recruit talent instead of encouraging a black market of border crossings for the desperate and ruined.

And we should absolutely be allowing in more visitors for the benefit of our tourism industry as well as our educational and business institutions.

I’ve had people denied entry for family reunions and conference keynotes. Startups now hosts all hands company meet ups in Mexico as they cannot guarantee that their employees can safely get in and out of America. That neither political party wants to address this in a meaningful way is appalling. We are pissing away our lead for partisanship and we can do better.

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Media

Day 905 and Shilling Myself

I should be shilling myself in today’s installment of writing everyday. But I’m a little tired to pull off the full bragging I’d like. One of my favorite financial news and analysis sources, Axios Pro-Rata, featured my little pre-seed fund chaotic.capital with an in-depth look at resiliency technology.

It’s a big deal to me because in-depth trade reporting is where the nuts and bolts of an industry are discussed. Anytime I’ve built something of value it was always the beat reporters who recognized it first.

Women’s Wear Daily was my big break in e-commerce and social media for my first startup Coutorture. Beauty Packaging’s company of the year award was a huge win for my cosmetics brand Stowaway. CoinDesk recognized my work on corporate governance structures and financing coordination. The trades matter more to outcome than glossies in the early days.

I’d like to think the LPs who will appreciate me as an emerging fund manager will find me from Axios Pro-Rata. And I sure would like for them to see my expanded viewpoint on the space right here on my daily essay.

I even had the good luck of preparing my quarterly investor update the day before this article hit everyone’s newsletter inboxes. So I’ve got all the materials ready to go.

Alas I’m wiped from a week of life happening (a death in the family) and the general excitement of the global summer solstice mania that’s gripping all the timelines.

So I don’t want to shill and flak myself right now. I just want to enjoy the feeling of pride that comes from seeing your work recognized with a proof-point all your peers respect. I’ll make sure to copy over the investor letter tomorrow. Stretch out my own little news cycle.

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Internet Culture

Day 897 and Cruft

I’d like to tell you a short story about my email. I don’t really check it anymore. Like at all. I would like to have a functional inbox but it got out of hand. How out of hand you ask?

As of this morning I had more than 500,000 unread emails in my Gmail. Honestly if I worked at Google I’d be a little freaked out by that number. That seems like a lot of emails. How did that happen you might ask? Slowly and then all at once. Like most bankruptcies.

Let’s start at the beginning. I’ve had a Gmail account since 2004. 1GB of free storage for email? It was 100 times what competitors offered. I knew I’d have to transition out of my university email when I graduated so I kept.

I’d say it was the most functional place in my digital life until 2010 or so. I basically never left my inbox, used Gchat constantly with all my friends, and organized my life around it. Gmail served first central hub for my professional digital identity. It was just where I spent my time.

I worked in commerce and media in I thought it wise to subscribe to brands emails so I could really monitor e-commerce for work. Then I started a cosmetics brand during first cohort of direct to consumer brands. Like all startups we used Google Professional services. So I routed it into one easy Gmail view. Don’t do that incidentally. Then long story short I went on medical leave in 2019.

I’d like you to imagine the J curve on what happened next. Because I have an an older account, and one that used to be tightly managed, I didn’t really notice that I’d converted to a high volume inbox. But you can guess what happens when you stop monitoring constantly. Maybe this post should have had a trigger warning.

It seemed manageable when I was a workaholic hustle grinder. But the second the email beast wasn’t being ridden hard it went feral. Half a million emails feral.

There are so many culprits I could point to in the destruction of my inbox. The arms race for extracting value from email was very much on in the middle of the decade, but it’s gone into overdrive during the pandemic years.

If I thought my email was a little messy when I was girlbossing, it’s nothing compared to the what it looks like under the relentless onslaught of professionally optimized direct marketing.

But there are other culprits. You probably have a social tab like me. I get a lot of automated and social media alerts that were easy to check and delete when I lived inside my email.

But there isn’t a social media platform you can imagine that I didn’t have a profile on. And the alerts add up quickly.

LinkedIn is notorious but I’m also a Twitter power user and maintain a ton of Discords. And then there are social platforms you join and forget about. Yes include OnlyFans. Don’t worry that’s recent and has no content. All those sign ups add up quickly if you don’t monitor. Every god damn social service I have strewn across the internet somehow ends up in Gmail.

The good news is I have a friend who is helping me sort it out. She signed me up for Sane Inbox. The number of emails in that half million that looks like it needs attention? About 1,400. So I will start making an attention payment plan on those. But if I didn’t have nearly two decades of data dedicated to Google I’m not sure if I’d want to dig out.

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Media

Day 894 and Helping Yourself Think

I write to help myself think. I didn’t realize just how much better I’d become at thinking through problems in my own life by becoming a more frequent writer but it’s been true.

If anything I thought it was the opposite. I thought if I became a better thinker I’d somehow also become I’d become a better writer. Lol, I had the process reversed. The video I link to below really hammers in the point. This video clip of Larry McEnerney, from the University of Chicago hit my mind like a fucking gong.

If you are writing to help yourself think you produce content along one axis. It’s valuable to you because it’s helping you make sense of the world. My writing helps me think and that’s why I personally find it valuable.

It’s also a totally different skill set to make writing valuable to someone else. You are writing for an audience of yourself generally when you write to help yourself think. Writing so someone else understands it is a is horizontal problem to you writing to make yourself understand.

You may or may not have an audience but if you want one you have to make something valuable. But remember the first step in doing so is providing value to yourself. And much as it is painful to hear what you find valuable isn’t always going to be what others find valuable. And that’s ok because the first customer of your thought process is yourself.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 892 and Synchronicity

Everything feels weird and it’s hard not to notice. Is it a wrinkle in time? Have we torn the fabric of reality? Did some kid in Las Vegas see aliens? Is that the tug of the multiverse on the edge of your consciousness? Maybe it’s a demon. Maybe it’s some x-risk scenario with artificial intelligence.

Our collective narratives about synchronicities have been pouring out on social media. No one is really sure what the fuck is going on and it’s showing up everywhere. Did the physicists at CERN accidentally fuck up space time? Have we been living superimposed on another reality for all of humanity? Can some people see the other reality? Can you? Can I? Did all of human religion have a point about supernatural shit and the Enlightenment was just a cope?

My favorite theory floating is we are only just noticing some anti-gravity experiment gone awry back in the day because commercial artificial intelligence accidentally revealed too many conflicting data points. Despite the state controlled AI’s efforts to keep a lid on shit we just couldn’t keep the aliens, or a breakaway civilization, or the multiverse or the lizard people under wraps and have been preparing for the big reveal for a while. Except no one is paying attention because shit is chaotic and we’ve all got bills.

Alien asked a wojack if he is shocked. Wojack is too busy to contemplate extra terrestrial life.

Did something happen in the 1940s and we managed to keep it under wraps until Sam Altman and company triggered the Vulcans to show up? Sorry I’m overlapping too many pop culture touchstones with too many niche Silicon Valley personalities for just one conspiracy theory.

All I know is even Elon Musk is looking to hire a witch and head of propaganda. But as a chaos magician I only work for my own LPs, founders and my family so he’s got to look elsewhere.

Need a head of propaganda and witchcraft? I need more then cash