The Zoomers have so little institutional memory. They don’t remember the first Trump administration. Imagine having no memory of the pitched battles of institution versus ego. I envy them.
The Zoomers I talk to seem to have some memory of a good boom year but then their memories are strongly colored by the many traumas of the panic. Persistent online worlds with a global shutdown didn’t do right by them.
Now that we are back to the chaos of a Trump presidency I have no fond simulated idea of nostalgia for Trump for myself.
In 2016 our politics broke my assessment of what was possible and I did not like where the chaos would lead. I definitely could not predicted how much my own position on issues would change though. I still don’t know the best path but I have ironically opened my eyes to the scale of the issue. They used to call that being “woke” but like the term a lot has changed.
I’d love to go on a long rant about the new tariffs America intends to impose, but a big winter storm is approaching and being prepared for that is likely the more important task.
Yes I am aware a much bigger looming economic storm on the horizon. I’ve been a “doomer” a while so I’ve come to gripes with that many years ago.
That would be true except we have a giant solar array that provides enough electricity for heating, lighting, our bitcoin mining (whose heat exhaust exchange warms our barn where we keep the hydroponic greens)
Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.
There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.
But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.
Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.
It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.
And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.
If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.
What I think is most useful to remember about media narratives is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Coined by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame it helps remind experts to not expect expertise from normal people.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Most of the commentary you will see on any given topic of media interest will be a fog of war mismash of competing narratives and ambitions.
Just remember that it’s wise to be wary of any certainty when it comes to what’s going on. What we know changes on what we know and it’s odd how easily we forget that.
It was a busy week. I felt physically well through most of it, but yesterday and today I am struggling. I’m in bed with a migraine that I think I accidentally kicked off by enjoying a quiet walk on sunny snowpack.
Amusing that people think we don’t get enough sun for solar power
While I prefer to have illness strike on a weekend, I feel irritated that I often get my personal time used up by health issues. I very much prioritize using my good hours for work.
Which on that note, I’d love for folks to check out a bill in Montana to secure a right to compute. What started as an idea has now officially been introduced into the legislative process. It’s a big victory to have this under consideration.
The paper of record just doesn’t know what to make of a political constituency that it has been determined to view as a billionaire bad boys club. And so after almost a decade of hostility between media and Silicon Valley, it is clear the vibe shift has come in the house style at the New York Times as it is dedicating a lot of ink to “Tech Right” and how it views the world.
The editors appear to sense the shift of power. And with new beats come new talent. The Grey Lady has hired an opinion columnist James Pogue who actually does reporting with these elusive new right and tech right figures.
Old timer readers might appreciate that this new talent shares a name with a past technology columnist. Pogue. David Pogue reviewed gadgetsfrom 2000 to 2013.
Despite being millennial, James Pogue is an old school reporter. His popularity derives from his deep reporting. He picks up the phone and talks to people. He shows up to events and reports on what he sees. He does it with verve and style but lets his subjects speak for themselves.
If you enjoy learning how the media sausage gets made Isaac Simpson has an interview with James Pogue on his newfound status, his reporting style and how he ended up at the center of the political and cultural moment.
It is here I do full disclosure myself and say I’ve been interviewed by himtwice and we have social relationship that includes being on a very similar professional and social circuit. Because he actually goes to report on things in person we’ve seen a lot of each other over the years. A reporter grows with their beat.
If you are interested in what establishment media has to say about this new power base of new right, tech right and a rising counter cultural elite and prefer your news to be deeply reported then make yourself familiar with James Pogue and his work.
He has a nuanced understanding of the personalities, always his homework, and incredible access to his sources. I guess this is what happens when you ask questions and then let your subjects speak for themselves. If anyone has the secret to the media rebuilding its trust with readers my money is on James Pogue.
Twitter has become an unmonitored Wild West of content. This is mostly good for those of us looking to understand the world “as it is” and not as we wish it to be, but requires a certain cognitive security not everyone is prepared to engage in. What was once kept to the dark corners of 4Chan splutters up.
We witness more violence than we did during its “trust and safety” years. Thanks to algorithmic chaos quite a bit of gore, pornography and death will regularly hit main feeds.
A friend of mine (whose line of work would put her in a position to know) has a theory that Zoomers will cross into physical world violence more easily than past generations. We have long debated as to why and how it will manifest but it’s already begun.
Being raised in digital always- online mobile environments means their reality is more malleable. And yes the internet is real life. We live, we love, we hate, we play and we work online. But what of violence? Are we prepared for that crossover?
Digital life has given them an immense sense of freedom to act without consequences because the virtual world is still sequestered from some consequences. And unlike millennials, whose sense of The Real and the Matrix, was anchored by a physical consensus reality, I’m not convinced this will be true for all Zoomers.
If you die in the Matrix you die in real life
We have already seen the maturation of bringing Internet identities to our regular life physical world. Violence has always been there lurking, but it is now bursting forth and I believe it will only become more prevalent.
Today I read news stories of two separate incidents of violence that I can only read as Zoomer Internet Identity Violence. Be warned they are both upsetting and confusing for non-internet natives.
If you die in the real world perhaps you live on in the Matrix of the infinite internet. But this is not an end that we should wish for our civilization or for our Zoomers. Be prepared to see more of this.
When I got started with my daily writing project I knew there would be days when I did not want to write. Today is one of them.
I actually expected “ugh no want to write” days to be more frequent than turned out to be true. I’ve bitched about it 51 times which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things.
I knew I’d find a way to force the issue just as I had made other habits a part of my life. You really can make almost anything a habit if you are so inclined. But I rarely have to force habit. I just do the thing till it’s either a habit or it’s clear it’s not for me. They say it’s 21 days but I’d give it more like 100 to be safe.
Things I just do every day include applying facial moisturizer, brushing my teeth, squatting (no not just on the toilet I mean the full body compound exercise), taking my vitamins, Tweeting, playing a stupid pay to play Chinese mobile game, telling my husband I love him and opening up my mobile content management app to write this post.
And yet I am in a real “smh” place today with my attempts to find meaning in any of my habits. I’m disappointed in more than a few things. It’s all very Cthulhu and Antarctic cold vibes for me today. Sure it’s -20 in Montana but it’s very sunny so it’s cheery dread.
Anyways, the interregnum is over, we have a new President who is an old President and everything that is new is old and everything old is new again.
It would be helpful for most media readers to understand the history of the news business and its relationship to war and finance.
For all the standards and ethics and best practices we expect from professional newsrooms (and they do have conduct standards), the history of media isn’t a clean narrative America went to war thanks to Yellow Journalism in the Spanish American War. If you think the Pulitzer is a badge of merit wait till you learn its history and financing.
You have probably lived through multiple media scandals. Millennials remember the neoconservative “weapons of mass destruction” story thanks to notably terrible editorial decision at the New York Times.
When someone says you are in a media bubble or on an information island, recall that these systems made up of people with varied interests, ambitions and aims.
I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.
Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.
The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.
If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.
I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.
