You know I am old as I just don’t consume or create short form video content. Every new trend that filters to me on Twitter or on my reader feeds presents as sadness to me. I don’t fully understand them and probably never will.
I left Williamsburg in 2010 for Manhattan’s Chinatown as even the south side past the JMZ had become too expensive. The loft I shared above Future Perfect on North 8th and Berry was getting expensive on just the other side of the Great Recession. It was a loud place to live and a lot of fun but I needed a lease with my name on it and prime Williamsburg wasn’t it in 2012.
I wasn’t in a position by 2012 to buy an apartment but neither did I have any debt. So I’m sure that made me better off than the Zoomers coveting my life just before New York would go ZIRP. Not making a fortune wasn’t too bad when you could still enjoy a lot of hipster consumer choices.
You can’t blame the Zoomers for feeling like today’s economic volatility and social fragmentation makes our “before times” life look relatively utopian.
I’ve previously enjoyed when my own past lifestyles are the subject of nostalgia rehashes on social media. Now I think worried as no one should be too obsessed with the past. Especially not the young.
The temptations to build an investing case around a historical parallel cannot be avoided. Americans love their booms and busts. And we love grand television dramas about them.
Julian Fellowes is the stage name of a conservative British peer, actor and dude who gets BAFTA award for making television about aristocratic families familiar to adapt and Americans bailing them out.
Then he went on to make a period drama about righteous industrialists in America called the Gilded Age which isn’t as iconic as as it’s not as personal since obviously a British peer won’t understand American mores.
It’s just a little weird to think that we’ve already made the Silicon Valley drama about the last boom and bust moment and it didn’t get written by a British conservative peer but by a Gen Xer Mike Judge.
Maybe in another generation on Netflix we will get a sweeping historical drama about a polycule group house in San Francisco as the next Downton Abbey.
My immune system must be reacting to something, be it travel and environmental factors or perhaps a bug I caught, so I’m in bed and trying to keep my body happy. That means catching up on a few Love is Blind seasons.
As the American seasons get worse and worse, the international editions offer up clues as to the politics and tensions that producers feel the need to offer up to international Netflix audiences.
The United Kingdom had a Manchester season that was more commentary on the failures of the working class and the country’s immigration systems than it did romance. It almost hurt to watch.
France’s most recent cast was more pan-Asian colonial tensions at the forefront (with an Algerian or two) than featuring any continental or regional ties. The Italian season reflects a more United Colors of Benetton than Georgia Meloni’s. European franchise spin offs feature more immigration more than America.
While everyone is talking about Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers today, I wonder if Hollywood will drive new cultural directions or if the data driven Netflix will produce endless remixes of subgroups and niches so no matter your identity you too will have an avatar on a spinoff of a reality show. Love may be blind but the watching data sure isn’t.
Lest you think it is all fan service and showcasing different immigrant groups being absorbed into the wider national identities of their former colonial governments, you do see the occasional fusion of sanded off styles meant to appeal across strange niches.
I love watching the style of the country doing offs as it is both globo-homo any and everywhere while still targeting very identity driven and place specific people.
Some make no sense. Who doesn’t love seeing a bizarre fashion choice like a Prada bolo ties at a French wedding? Unless you are an Italian getting married to a Texan girl at Marfa, it’s odd to pick 2020’s most viral celebrity accessory to get married in France on a 2025 reality show.
Sure still see some aesthetic choices you expect for both local and global reasons. Like the Italian party planner with the Gucci bee broach. That seems culturally appropriate with a cast that was variably actually Italian despite their their aesthetics
Long burgundy blazers and Gothic Bulgarian girls could work in any country this year. That’s simply globally appealing in the now in any country. Warner Brothers should be taking note.
I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.
Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.
But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.
I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.
Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.
One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.
Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.
She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.
It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.
This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.
Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.
Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.
The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.
I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.
There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.
If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.
The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.
These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.
I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.
The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.
I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.
I have spent a lot of time in various states of concern, sadness and frustration this year. Which is too bad, as so many incredible things have happened to me. We passed a right to compute law. Valar Atomics took “accelerate” way more seriously than most.
It’s hard to balance knowing the future won’t be anything like the past, but still having to make decisions made on that being the only data you’ve got. Engaging in governance and investing in energy seem like sensible ways of approach a strange future. Organizing energy is civilization 101 stuff.
I can predict a world with increasing chaos but how it will affect demand for things like energy, compute and decentralization are directional bets. You know it’s coming but how and when? And the downsides are hard to consider. Nobody ever thinks the entropy will apply to them but it’s already begun.
Every time future shock gets me I’m surprised I’m managing an imitation of Cayce Pollard at all. I’m practically a poster child for “sensible takes about various concerning challenges” as I get asked about various eccentric revealed preferences.
The Fourth Turning is coming about and we aren’t ready. I use short hand like the Churn, elite overproduction, The Sort and other minor terminologies and schools of thought to signal to others. I understand this to be my best way available way signal. But who knows as the humans retreat from shared networks it won’t stay that way.
The center does not hold. It is not holding. We are just not adapting to the changes in reality quickly enough.
If you get too close of a look at the basics of what’s necessary to survive a world where the trust is breaking down it’s hard to look at.
It doesn’t feel like we are going quickly enough adapting to a world where the state can’t perform its old functions and smaller entities like businesses and families need to maintain a heightened awareness of the larger context.
The joke has always been “don’t invent the torment nexus” but we seem to always invent the torment nexus if it will have a good return on capital. And we need to take this outcome quite seriously.
I’m starting to think the more optimistic you are about the future, the more cooked you think we are. I didn’t expect this.
The Doomers have a coherent worldview. It’s simple to imagine involving losing your humanity to machines. This is at least legible and a call to our common humanity. Change is scary and bad and we don’t know how any of this is going to go. So why not be cautious?
The optimists are all excited about different things though. And that opens us to a lot of attack paths. And yes I’m calling myself an optimist though I have a lot of downside scenarios on my radar.
Some of the outcomes that you might find dystopian are the utopian outcomes for someone else. Think Caliphates or Communist surveillance states.
The complexity of our reality is so far beyond the grasp of your average person it seems cruel. And we sympathize with the struggle to adapt because it appeals to our common humanity.
It’s no wonder America has had so many revivalist movements. We have changed so much in our 250 year history, we are always rediscovering the value of faith. What else do you have when the future is uncertain? If we are cooked anyways we may as well all take Pascal’s Wager?
It’s a hard time for knowing things. Making a show about epistemic confusion is the subtle uncanny meta game that is playing out living in a networked world.
It’s a completely different context than the daily world most of humanity lives in. Most of us live in some version of the past and act confused about why the world we remember so clearly isn’t here anymore. It’s hard to feel the moment.
So you try to live in the real world. You feel the weather and the geomagnetic storm rocks your body and uncanny sight of the dancing auroras would make anyone believe that we are small parts of creation. I watched the aurora in awe.
The universe was dancing with geomagnetic stormsReds and greens that feel not entirely of this world.
What grasp do we have of a material real as individuals that is also existing as part of a world. Do some of us make up more of a network? It is unclear how much of a public commons we can have on the open web. It’s a reorganization of the civics of our life. The things you wonder about under eerie glow.
Many have imagined an internet primarily accessed by bots and agents and not humans. There are many different interests at play when you consider what would change The regulators look to sooth public opinion that has been inflamed by a multimillion dollar public square information campaign technology that doesn’t even exist yet.
There are many players. The existing corporate interests have investments and their relationship to open open source models can occasionally be tense. We should we want to enable an ecosystem of compatibility. Still walled gardens are built.
It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.
I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.
2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.
And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.
Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.
And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.
It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.
However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.
We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.
