Tag: Media

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.

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Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

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Politics

Day 1526 and PE Owned Rump State

I’ve been trying to not explicitly discuss politics for a couple weeks as it’s hard to have any sense of consensus reality. I spend a lot of time on Twitter as well as reading news. It’s only served to further muddle my mind. I’ve regularly discuss the hostile information environment.

Given the chaotic scene it feels both foolish and necessary to send up signals to others. Venkatesh Rao has me considering cross publishing more of my general rambles to Substack. Especially as other channels become more hostile.

Rao leaves fantastic little notes like the below on whether Americans should prepare for a private equity owned rump state. A thought experiment which feels less far fetched than usual.

Just chagrined bewilderment and embarrassment and private-equity-owned rump state services shambolic-debacling along (ht Bruce Sterling for that turn of phrase). Whimpers over bangs.

As state capacity declines and social cohesion degrades it wouldn’t surprise me if the new institutional powers we trust most are corporations. Imagine Americans in twenty years as scarce but almost mythic progenitors of a corporate governance future.

Sure America may still be a nation state in that future but a United States of corporate charters isn’t all that far off from our original conception. No really check out the Virginia Company.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1514 and Informational Ravine

I hate to add fears that we will face a “dead internet” but increasingly we lack shared context in our online spaces. As context collapses so too does culture. Bad behavior proliferates.

Without shared values we cannot find purchase on the informational ravine of the open web. Competing narratives and interests buffet your mind as you try to sense-make your way into a firmer grip. It’s easy to slip and find yourself unsure of what is up or down.

The vibes are bad. People have entirely different interpretations when presented with something as innocuous as an email asking “what did you get done this week?” If you discuss a particularly contested space it quickly becomes a hostile information environment. Many retreat.

If you are tempted to argue with me about whether that action is in fact innocuous you have to wonder how far apart you and I are from each other as we try to climb through the great ravine to the other side.

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Media Politics

Day 1512 and Thumbs Down

It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.

Icicles

As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.

Reading

The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe

Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.

Theodor W. Adorno giving a thumbs down

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Chronic Disease Media

Day 1509 and Wrapping My Arms Around The Problem

I am seeing some progress in my various home and health projects. I’ve been doing my best to remain optimistic even though I was not feeling well and the sheer amount of changes required was intimidating. But I’m seeing low progress.

An industrial hygienist is coming to do an arm test tomorrow on our basement as well as the rest of the house to confirm the extent of our mold problems. Our hope is that it’s contained to the bathroom in the basement.

If we have to do a bathroom remediation that presents an opportunity to do some renovations. While exciting that is also introducing more risk. But you can’t waste a crisis right?

Stuff I Read

The Agent Problem

CoinDesk reporting on the Libra scandal in Argentina

Politico: Voters Were Right About The Economy

Epsilon Theory “It Was Never Going to Be Me”

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1508 and Dorymaxxing

I am pushing myself to continue with the daily writing habit even as I am on a rollercoaster of health and home challenges that have put me well on the back foot.

I want to rage against the symptoms, the system that can’t solve anything, and even my own body for being tricky. But that won’t fix anything. I’m need to give the new protocols the space to work.

So it’s one foot in front of the other. Whatever is happening out there in the real world I just need to put one foot in front of the other. Or if you prefer a meme. Just keep swimming Dory.

Just keep swimming

I’m doing my best not to get it get me down. I’m afraid of the setbacks. I am afraid of the length of recovery and the potential for things to be worse. But I’ll Dorymaxx. It’s all I’ve got in me

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1507 and Apocalypse Narcissism

I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.

As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.

The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.

If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”

It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.

Categories
Culture Media

Day 1505 and Warping Reality

We are all avoiding reality to some measure. Be grateful that our egos can cushion the horrors of the world at all. I’m unsure how removed one can be from reality anymore but as an American I’ll probably one of the last to find out.

Rationalist and all-around Twitter in-group personality Aella went on a podcast called “whatever” which I’d wrongly believed was a marketing funnel for OnlyFans creators.

It turns out the host is some sort of debater Christian and this is a popular podcast for feeling better about the state of the gender wars. In some of the ensuing debate Kim Ono (I’ve lost the link) said something very insightful.

The whole business model is warping reality to comfort the fearful

Whether it is dim men dunking on sex workers, panicked liberal women on MSNBC, or Fox Blondes screaming at Boomers, our entire media environment is about making sure you can’t see what’s real while simultaneously pandering that your fear is justified. Nervous systems be damned!

I find reality to be plenty terrifying but I try to avoid needing my own version of reality to cope with it. Not to say I don’t have my own biases and priors (and I’ve written about them at left) but the world is such a jumble at the moment I very much need to confidently act in the face of warped realities.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1502 and Always Something

When we first moved to Montana we did a pretty thorough home inspection. My husband flew in a friend who is residential contractor.

We didn’t need much remediation work. A bit of radon and we installed a state of the art water filtering system but otherwise everything from foundations to soil quality were looking good. But you can never be too sure things stay that way.

We’ve done some repairs and installations over the past two years and it would appear somewhere in there we must have had some water damage. We ran some mold tests and the reports are not good.

As we’d done so much testing before moving in we’d not done thorough assessment. It hadn’t seemed necessary. But as part of the new year’s rigorous “get a grip on autoimmune” push we did an ERMI test (done via dust collection) through an independent lab EnviroBiomics.

The Environmental Relative Moldiness Index (ERMI) test is a DNA-based method developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess indoor mold contamination by analyzing settled dust in homes.

It uses mold-specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction (MSqPCR) to identify and quantify 36 mold species, which are divided into two categories: Group 1 (associated with water-damaged homes) and Group 2 (common indoor molds not linked to water damage).

The ERMI score is calculated by subtracting the log-transformed sum of Group 2 molds from Group 1 molds, providing a single numerical value to indicate the relative moldiness of a house.

Welp. Seems like we may have some water damage somewhere. We’ve got some theories from the last two years.

ERMI Score 18.3:
Places this bedroom in the higher range of mold contamination. Typically, an ERMI above 5 is already considered higher than average. A score of 18.3 signals a strong likelihood of hidden moisture issues or longstanding mold growth.

We also ran a HERTSMI-2 test on which we scored 20. That test is a bit more salient for my autoimmune conditions. And its results were not encouraging. Running that through ChatGPT’s new Deep Research.

This test is used to gauge risk for mold-sensitive or chronically ill individuals. A value over 15 strongly suggests that the environment may be unsafe for those with mold-related illnesses or sensitivities. Re-occupancy should be delayed until remediation and follow-up testing confirm substantially reduced mold levels.

We have to do remediation of some sort though we think it’s limited to the basement. But I’ll be staying upstairs for a while if this conclusion is sound. It’s always something.

Conclusion: The contamination is significant and poses a tangible health risk. Addressing it thoroughly is crucial, particularly given your household’s health concerns.