Tag: Media

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Culture Politics

Day 1025 and Petit Aristocracy

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.

The Marxists are just as loud. We’ve got authoritarian leaning proletarian sympathizers assessing a Marxist history of “progressive” American Wilsonian industrial fascism. And yes you will believe its philosophical impact on German National socialist ideology.

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?

Noah Smith weighed in on the extropian enthusiasm of our technical class for acceleration. The bourgeoise middle class of mercantilism has evolved to engineering and information technology to drive resource allocation.

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.

I’ll fully admit to a personal bias for techno-optimism and effective accelerationism. But it could simply be self serving. Venkatash Rao thinks this mass discourse on individual versus collective responsibility is simply a whole new cope for an entangled world in disequilibrium.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1011 and The Same Timezone

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.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1007 and Half A Decade Past Premium Mediocrity

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.

Categories
Culture

Day 997 and Brain Fog

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.

I am not the only one experiencing a lack of clarity. Confident assurances read as naive at best or manipulative at worst. No one is certain of anything at the moment. The widening gyre has our best struggling with conviction.

I have been following Venkatash Rao’s working theory on the breakdown of world narratability in his series on Protocal Narratives. If you are not a Ribbonfarm reader I’d encourage you to begin.

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.

Fluid Fogs and Fixed Flows

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.

Categories
Chronicle Media

Day 994 and Good Conversation

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.

I was recently a guest of Frazer Rice’s podcast Wealth Actually to discuss how the venture asset class has changed over the course of the last fifteen years. I was also a guest of Stewart Alsop III on his podcast Crazy Wisdom where we discussed the complexity spectrum of bringing our present into our future.

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.

That doesn’t mean we are flying blind. Like Captain Kirk, I trust some people’s best guesses a lot more than other people’s facts. But the harsh truth is that we are all doing our best with heuristics and humility.

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.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 979 and Signal Season

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.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 978 and Unfollowing

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.

And that 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.

Categories
Startups

Day 970 and Be Your Publicist

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. 

I’m well known for my doomer optimism, YIMBY advocacy for the Montana Miracle housing reform, my digital futurism and, somewhat weirdly, my years in luxury fashion & brands.

Want to dive right into a conversation about a problem you’re having?

Book time with me on Intro and we can solve it

Ready work with me?

Email me at julie.fredrickson@gmail.com

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 961 and Repeating 2003

Greetings, citizens
We are living
In the age
In which the pursuit of all values
Other than
Money success fame glamour
Has either been discredited
Or destroyed
Money success fame glamour
For we are living in the age of the thing

Felix da Housecat for the 2003 film “Party Animal”

I wasn’t a club kid in the Iraq War era. I had not yet rebelled. Like all class jumpers I was safely ensconced at a private university where I studied great books. I was however a club kid in the era of indie sleeze which arrived at an even more bleak sociopolitical nadir.

The Global Financial Crisis imploded expectations for how middle class millennials might pay off loans for expensive educations while we redeployed our working class to Afghanistan. But we’d elected Obama so like our politics were a little weird. Yes, we can’t? It’s was a dissonant age.

The remnant aesthetics from that era are somewhat shameful (as is all true youth culture) and yet here we are repeating them as the twenty year cycles of cultural remixing arrive to demand their due from my youth. 2003 is reappearing in 2023.

Logan Paul cannot marry a slut just as Britney Spears should never have given it up to Justin Timberlake. Elite social mores are not for the Bourgeoisie to emulate.

Perhaps we should call this tendency for aesthetic return the “‘70s Show’ Show” effect as the nostalgia for our youth by the middle aged is always more consumer friendly than the culture was at its birth.

I get to enjoy feeling like I was cool when I was 22 and Zoomers pick over our wardrobes at theme parties. It’s a fair trade.

I encourage you to revisit an artifact from the 2003 called Party Monster to explore this aesthetics original form. It stars Chloe Sevigny, Seth Green (remember him) and McCauley Caulkin. The music video for the big hit from the soundtrack is titled “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour”. I quoted it at the top.

With lyrics that rooted so deeply in modernist materialism I’m tempted to yell “Eat your heart out Walter Benjamin!” The Marxist continental philosopher was a sexy club kid. Consider the engraving on tombstone in Portugal where he died fleeing the Nazis.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism

Theses on the Philosophy of History

Benjamin was a great historian of German romanticism and it’s impact on fascist political aestheticism. So consider that history and ponder it’s relationship to the 2003 era counter cultural artifact.

The “Money, Success, Fame, Glamour” lyrics are materialism distilled and reflective of the nihilism of the Bush era. Forever wars and inflationary spending on empire was harder to smooth over with propaganda as the internet fought back. But in the aughts we still hadn’t quite realized we’d never be rid of our elites after the shocks of reactionary terrorism.

Maybe in our twenties we thought eventually we might take over and do things differently. I’m turning forty this year, and well, Joe Biden is president.

So here we are revisiting the past that won’t leave. RuPaul has a remix challenge of Party Monster soundtrack’s hits released this year and it’s worth seeing how ugly the refinements are compared to the original.

The most you can hope for now is that some millennial will turn your influencer work into a Netflix comedy in which you show off your cultural savvy by going to a queer club party themed 2003 in Bushwick. No the Kim Cattrall vehicle Glamorous is not very good.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 956 and A Mood

It’s clearly the deep dog days of summer as I’m in a bit of a mood. I’ve got all kinds of things on my mind and yet it’s slow going executing on anything. The doldrums has certainly gripped me. And yet I take hope.

This corner of Twitter is going through a paroxysmal fit of whether it’s rational to be embracing pro-social behavior. Without having to cite all my sources we had Jane Goodall being packaged into a deceleration meme about removing a billion or so people.

And a guy named Roko was shocked that people might hope the golden rule is a universal ideal. And so a few of us jumped into a metaphorical blender for the good of the species.

So I think my entire mood when staring down the barrel of the future is “what’s it going to cost me in my soul?”

At this stage of the simulation I have to ask
What color are the pills, and how many people are dying?

The cost of knowing it’s not just about us is slamming into the hard reality that you can’t do a damn thing about other people. And so we have to ask if we preserve what we have or do we leap into the great unknown. I don’t know anyone who is in the mood for much safety at the moment. There doesn’t seem like much to be had.